Before the French Revolutionary Red Terror, the Spanish inquisition, which killed a dozen or so people every year, was the standard evil example of repression, and Queen Bloody Mary, who murdered a couple of hundred and caused a thousand or so to flee, the classic tyrant.
That’s probably attributed to the parochialism of Bretons of the era—they couldn’t know about the Yangzhou massacre in China where 800,000 people were slaughtered, and the Massacre of the Latins in the 12th century in Constantinople wouldn’t stick in their minds.
But I’m sure they remembered St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in the 16th century—and in Central Europe “Vlad Tepes the Impaler” who killed tens of thousands people was known too.
Today, however, Prince Sihanouk, however, who murdered twelve thousand, many of them in ways colorful, dramatic, and extraordinary, is however sainted for his extraordinary peacefulness and tolerance
Oh, please, sainting monsters has a long tradition, a tradition atleast as old as Theodosius “The Great”, proclaimed the Great, and revered by the Orthodox Church, because of how greatly he butchered thousands of pagans back in the 4th century AD.
Oh, please, sainting monsters has a long tradition, a tradition atleast as old as Theodosius “The Great”, proclaimed the Great, and revered by the Orthodox Church, because of how greatly he butchered thousands of pagans back in the 4th century AD.
I’m not sure what exact atrocities attributed to Theodosius you have in mind with this comment (there were certainly many). However, it is significant that after the most notable of his atrocities—the massacres following the suppression of the rebellion in Thessalonica—Theodosius was openly rebuked by Ambrose, the bishop of Milan and the foremost intellectual authority of the church at the time, and was forced to repent publicly. The incident was left as a permanent stain on his record, and even in Christian traditions that recognize him as a saint, the event is recognized as a reminder that great and saintly men can be fallible to the point of committing horrible sins. (Also, the title “Great” for a select few rulers has traditionally referred to the extraordinary magnitude of their historical impact much more than to the general righteousness of their character and deeds.)
In my opinion, this perspective compares rather favorably with the 20th century custom of utter idealization of ideological movements and leaders. (This includes the still ongoing idealization of the predecessors of the current U.S. regime, especially those from the New Deal/WW2 era, but also the later ones.)
(I’m not pointing this out in order to side myself against you in the ongoing discussion, but because it does seem to me that this trend of, for lack of a less ugly term, ideologically motivated idealization of political gangsters and swindlers really has reached extraordinary levels in recent history.)
Before the French Revolutionary Red Terror, the Spanish inquisition, which killed a dozen or so people every year, was the standard evil example of repression, and Queen Bloody Mary, who murdered a couple of hundred and caused a thousand or so to flee, the classic tyrant.
That’s probably attributed to the parochialism of Bretons of the era—they couldn’t know about the Yangzhou massacre in China where 800,000 people were slaughtered, and the Massacre of the Latins in the 12th century in Constantinople wouldn’t stick in their minds.
Those incidents were war, not repression. You need to compare twelfth century repression with twentieth century repression, and twelfth century war with twentieth century war.
Modern repression is enormously more violent than ancient repression. Modern wars are larger and bloodier than ancient wars. Incidents where the populace of a vanquished city were massacred may be less common in modern wars, but if so this may be because we can accomplish the same effect more efficiently by such means as were employed at Dresden and Hiroshima. If you flatten a city before you take it, this discourages resistance more effectively than slaughtering a city that stubbornly resisted for an unreasonably long time.
Oh, please, sainting monsters has a long tradition, a tradition atleast as old as Theodosius “The Great”, proclaimed the Great, and revered by the Orthodox Church, because of how greatly he butchered thousands of pagans back in the 4th century AD
You recall the crimes of the revered Theodosius, but overlook the crimes of the revered Che Guevara. Seems to me that modern times has a larger supply of revered bloody monsters.
Don’t strawman me, I don’t appreciate it. It’s you who seemed to argue that we only revere monsters nowadays. I on the other hand argued that we’ve always been revering monsters. Nowadays some people revere monsters like Che Guevara, other people revere monsters like Ronald Reagan, etc, etc...
“Bloody Mary” wasn’t called a tyrant because of the horribleness of her actions, she was called a tyrant because she persecuted the Protestants and the Protestants ended up winning the United Kingdom—in short she ended up on the losing side of history. It’s politics, not morality, that determined her legacy.
If you want to determine whether the violence level has been increasing or decreasing, one good measure is to compare religious persecutions of the past, with political persecutions of the twentieth century. There is no comparison. Political persecutions were enormously bloodier, and the political persecutors were generally admired in their time, whereas their religious equivalents were condemned in their time.
Someone who executed two hundred religious heretics does deserve the title Bloody Mary.
You say she only got the title for being a Catholic. Well then, who is is the protestant King or Queen of England who better deserves the title?
You say the Spanish inquisition was demonized merely because it was Catholic. Well then, what protestant inquisition executed a dozen or so heretics a year for a few centuries?
The fact is that Bloody Mary and the Spanish Inquisition were pretty much as bad as it got, and that is why they have the bad name that they do have. But modern leftists who only murder a few thousand or so get sainted, because the usual thing a few hundred thousand.
If you want to determine whether the violence level has been increasing or decreasing, one good measure is to compare religious persecutions of the past, with political persecutions of the twentieth century.
Hmm… It’d be an interesting project to calculate P(Violence) (the likelihood a person will have significant violence inflicted on them) for various time periods, and also the equivalent P(Violence|Activity) for various activities (religious disagreement, disagreement with your nation’s war, proclaiming the ruler of your nation to be a nincompoop, etc).
You say she only got the title for being a Catholic.
Not quite, I said she got it for persecuting the Protestants while the Protestants ended up winning. If she had been a Catholic but not persecuted them, she’d not have gotten the title, same way she wouldn’t have gotten it if she had slaughtered them wholesale and they ended up losing.
Evidence for the above claim: That the slaughter of St.Bartholemew’s day didn’t bestow a similar title to Charles of France—the Catholics in France defeated the Protestants afterall. So no “bloody” title for Charles of France.
Well then, who is is the protestant King or Queen of England who better deserves the title?
Charles I of England conducted war against his own nation—he was so bad a king that he got himself beheaded. But he’s now a saint of the Anglican church.
You say the Spanish inquisition was demonized merely because it was Catholic
I didn’t say that either.
Political persecutions were enormously bloodier, and the political persecutors were generally admired in their time, whereas their religious equivalents were condemned in their time.
The destruction of the Cathars had Arnaud Amalric brag to the Pope “Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.”.
Where was the condemnation for that? The monk got made archbishop.
P(Violence) is a lot easier to calculate than P(Violence|Activity) for various activities. It also gets into definitional issues (is being born to a certain racial group an activity?).
But P(Violence) has definitely gone down. That’s a major part of Pinker’s point and is pretty uncontroversial. However, there have been specific spikes. For example, the introduction of efficient fire arms and longbows made casualty rates go up during the Hundred Years War. Similarly, right before World War I, there were about 1.8 billion people worldwide. About 17 million people died in the war so that’s about 1% of the world’s population. In contrast, the population around 1800 was around 1 billion. But in the various Napoleonic wars around 4 million people died. So if one compares specific wars one does get some jumps.
If however one looks at the overall number of violent deaths even from just 1700 to 2000 one sees a general decline. The last sixty years have been especially peaceful by this metric, but that’s partially just due to the population boom.
If one wants a real contrast, note that of early homo sapiens skeletons, about 5-10% show signs of violent death.(I’ve seen this statement before but don’t unfortunately have a source on hand for it.) That’s almost full order of magnitude more than the general violent death rate at the worst times in modern history.
Well then, who is is the protestant King or Queen of England who better deserves the title?
Charles I of England conducted war against his own nation—he was so bad a king that he got himself beheaded. But he’s now a saint of the Anglican church.
Charles I was, like Louis, and Tsar Nicolas, a good King. Reform is dangerous, not repression. Tsar Nicholas suffered revolution and execution because under him the state swerved left, and Charles I suffered revolution and execution because under him the state swerved Whig. Charles I’s position was libertarian: That a good King is a King whose subject’s lives and property are their own.
The destruction of the Cathars had Arnaud Amalric brag to the Pope “Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.”.
It is probably not true that he reported that to the Pope. It is true that he wiped out a town of thousands of people, possibly twenty thousand people. It is probably true that he said of the people in the town “kill them all, God will know his own”, or words to that effect if not those exact words.
This however, occurred in a holy war, against armed resisting people, not a peacetime persecution, therefore needs to be compared with modern political civil wars and revolutions, not modern political repressions. Similarly for the Saint. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
For religious repressions, the best you have got is the Spanish Inquisition and Bloody Mary, which is by modern standards, nothing. When a modern leftist regime kills on that scale, you think them liberal democrats.
Let us compare repression of heretics under Queen Elizabeth, with repression of conservatives today: Every play by Shakespeare expressed a worldview that was Roman Catholic, pagan, or atheist/materialist. No Hollywood movies express a worldview that is politically incorrect
Charles I was, like Louis, and Tsar Nicolas, a good King
Ah, Tsar Nicolas, the guy who involved his country in the nonsensical World War I, and thus caused 3.3 millions of his people to die needless deaths. The seeming pattern I observe is that you like certain rulers just because you happen to hate the people that deposed them.
Charles I’s position was libertarian:
“To raise revenue without reconvening Parliament, Charles first resurrected an all-but-forgotten law called the Distraint of Knighthood, promulgated in 1279, which required anyone who earned £40 or more each year to present himself at the King’s coronation to join the royal army as a knight. Later, Charles reintroduced obsolete feudal taxes such as purveyance, wardship, and forest laws”
I don’t think that’s the libertarian position. Excessive taxation seems to be one of the chief complaints against him.
When a modern leftist regime kills on that scale, you think them liberal democrats.
Modern “leftist” regimes that I consider liberal democratic ones have abolished the death penalty, and they don’t kill, period—my examples of liberal democracies would be countries like Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands; not Cuba or Venezuela.
Let us compare repression of heretics under Queen Elizabeth, with repression of conservatives today:
First of all, your selectively chosen comparisons become tiresome.
Second, you’d have to identify what you mean by “conservatives”. Does Bush Jr count as a conservative? If yes, then conservatives nowadays can become Presidents of America, and Catholics back then couldn’t become prime ministers.
Every play by Shakespeare expressed a worldview that was Roman Catholic, pagan, or atheist/materialist. No Hollywood movies express a worldview that is politically incorrect
Do you mean things like “Aaron is an atheist, and he’s the most evil person that ever walked on earth” (Titus Andronicus), or “Joan of Arc is a catholic, and she’s an evil witch justly executed” (Henry VI, Part 1)
Shakespeare was notoriously politically restricted in what he could display. My favourite example is Macbeth where he had to portray Macbeth as a cowardly murderer, and the previous king as a good one, just because the current lineage of kings was believed to descend from the slain king. That’s extreme historical revisionism: In actual reality Macbeth had led an open revolt against king Duncan—Duncan died in battle. Macbeth was considered a good and generous king—“Marianus Scotus tells how the king made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1050, where, Marianus says, he gave money to the poor as if it were seed.”
“Unlike later writers, no near contemporary source remarks on Macbeth as a tyrant. The Duan Albanach, which survives in a form dating to the reign of Malcolm III, calls him “Mac Bethad the renowned”. The Prophecy of Berchán, a verse history which purports to be a prophecy, describes him as “the generous king of Fortriu”″
But according to Shakespeare, Macbeth must be a villainous murderous tyrant, and Jeanne D’arc must be a witch. Because that’s what the political reality of his time demanded.
Say what you will about Hollywood, but they’ve not portrayed Gandhi as a bloodthirsty serial killer yet, nor have they portrayed Stalin or Che Guevara as heroes either. Shakespeare did do the equivalent thereof.
I’d be careful with this line of reasoning—complaining about lack of political correctness could be a matter of attempting to push “political correctness” further or signaling continued relevance.
People have different standards for offense—sam0345 may be upset that there aren’t more conservative worldviews in Hollywood while leftists may be upset that there aren’t more progressive worldviews in Hollywood. To the Left there are lots of movies that express worldviews that are politically incorrect to them. To sam0345 maybe all the movies in Hollywood are too politically correct. What fact is actually under debate here?
That’s probably attributed to the parochialism of Bretons of the era—they couldn’t know about the Yangzhou massacre in China where 800,000 people were slaughtered, and the Massacre of the Latins in the 12th century in Constantinople wouldn’t stick in their minds.
But I’m sure they remembered St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in the 16th century—and in Central Europe “Vlad Tepes the Impaler” who killed tens of thousands people was known too.
Oh, please, sainting monsters has a long tradition, a tradition atleast as old as Theodosius “The Great”, proclaimed the Great, and revered by the Orthodox Church, because of how greatly he butchered thousands of pagans back in the 4th century AD.
This comment of yours has got me thinking:
I’m not sure what exact atrocities attributed to Theodosius you have in mind with this comment (there were certainly many). However, it is significant that after the most notable of his atrocities—the massacres following the suppression of the rebellion in Thessalonica—Theodosius was openly rebuked by Ambrose, the bishop of Milan and the foremost intellectual authority of the church at the time, and was forced to repent publicly. The incident was left as a permanent stain on his record, and even in Christian traditions that recognize him as a saint, the event is recognized as a reminder that great and saintly men can be fallible to the point of committing horrible sins. (Also, the title “Great” for a select few rulers has traditionally referred to the extraordinary magnitude of their historical impact much more than to the general righteousness of their character and deeds.)
In my opinion, this perspective compares rather favorably with the 20th century custom of utter idealization of ideological movements and leaders. (This includes the still ongoing idealization of the predecessors of the current U.S. regime, especially those from the New Deal/WW2 era, but also the later ones.)
(I’m not pointing this out in order to side myself against you in the ongoing discussion, but because it does seem to me that this trend of, for lack of a less ugly term, ideologically motivated idealization of political gangsters and swindlers really has reached extraordinary levels in recent history.)
Those incidents were war, not repression. You need to compare twelfth century repression with twentieth century repression, and twelfth century war with twentieth century war.
Modern repression is enormously more violent than ancient repression. Modern wars are larger and bloodier than ancient wars. Incidents where the populace of a vanquished city were massacred may be less common in modern wars, but if so this may be because we can accomplish the same effect more efficiently by such means as were employed at Dresden and Hiroshima. If you flatten a city before you take it, this discourages resistance more effectively than slaughtering a city that stubbornly resisted for an unreasonably long time.
You recall the crimes of the revered Theodosius, but overlook the crimes of the revered Che Guevara. Seems to me that modern times has a larger supply of revered bloody monsters.
Don’t strawman me, I don’t appreciate it. It’s you who seemed to argue that we only revere monsters nowadays. I on the other hand argued that we’ve always been revering monsters. Nowadays some people revere monsters like Che Guevara, other people revere monsters like Ronald Reagan, etc, etc...
“Bloody Mary” wasn’t called a tyrant because of the horribleness of her actions, she was called a tyrant because she persecuted the Protestants and the Protestants ended up winning the United Kingdom—in short she ended up on the losing side of history. It’s politics, not morality, that determined her legacy.
If you want to determine whether the violence level has been increasing or decreasing, one good measure is to compare religious persecutions of the past, with political persecutions of the twentieth century. There is no comparison. Political persecutions were enormously bloodier, and the political persecutors were generally admired in their time, whereas their religious equivalents were condemned in their time.
Someone who executed two hundred religious heretics does deserve the title Bloody Mary.
You say she only got the title for being a Catholic. Well then, who is is the protestant King or Queen of England who better deserves the title?
You say the Spanish inquisition was demonized merely because it was Catholic. Well then, what protestant inquisition executed a dozen or so heretics a year for a few centuries?
The fact is that Bloody Mary and the Spanish Inquisition were pretty much as bad as it got, and that is why they have the bad name that they do have. But modern leftists who only murder a few thousand or so get sainted, because the usual thing a few hundred thousand.
Hmm… It’d be an interesting project to calculate P(Violence) (the likelihood a person will have significant violence inflicted on them) for various time periods, and also the equivalent P(Violence|Activity) for various activities (religious disagreement, disagreement with your nation’s war, proclaiming the ruler of your nation to be a nincompoop, etc).
Not quite, I said she got it for persecuting the Protestants while the Protestants ended up winning. If she had been a Catholic but not persecuted them, she’d not have gotten the title, same way she wouldn’t have gotten it if she had slaughtered them wholesale and they ended up losing.
Evidence for the above claim: That the slaughter of St.Bartholemew’s day didn’t bestow a similar title to Charles of France—the Catholics in France defeated the Protestants afterall. So no “bloody” title for Charles of France.
Charles I of England conducted war against his own nation—he was so bad a king that he got himself beheaded. But he’s now a saint of the Anglican church.
I didn’t say that either.
The destruction of the Cathars had Arnaud Amalric brag to the Pope “Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.”.
Where was the condemnation for that? The monk got made archbishop.
P(Violence) is a lot easier to calculate than P(Violence|Activity) for various activities. It also gets into definitional issues (is being born to a certain racial group an activity?).
But P(Violence) has definitely gone down. That’s a major part of Pinker’s point and is pretty uncontroversial. However, there have been specific spikes. For example, the introduction of efficient fire arms and longbows made casualty rates go up during the Hundred Years War. Similarly, right before World War I, there were about 1.8 billion people worldwide. About 17 million people died in the war so that’s about 1% of the world’s population. In contrast, the population around 1800 was around 1 billion. But in the various Napoleonic wars around 4 million people died. So if one compares specific wars one does get some jumps.
If however one looks at the overall number of violent deaths even from just 1700 to 2000 one sees a general decline. The last sixty years have been especially peaceful by this metric, but that’s partially just due to the population boom.
If one wants a real contrast, note that of early homo sapiens skeletons, about 5-10% show signs of violent death.(I’ve seen this statement before but don’t unfortunately have a source on hand for it.) That’s almost full order of magnitude more than the general violent death rate at the worst times in modern history.
Charles I was, like Louis, and Tsar Nicolas, a good King. Reform is dangerous, not repression. Tsar Nicholas suffered revolution and execution because under him the state swerved left, and Charles I suffered revolution and execution because under him the state swerved Whig. Charles I’s position was libertarian: That a good King is a King whose subject’s lives and property are their own.
It is probably not true that he reported that to the Pope. It is true that he wiped out a town of thousands of people, possibly twenty thousand people. It is probably true that he said of the people in the town “kill them all, God will know his own”, or words to that effect if not those exact words.
This however, occurred in a holy war, against armed resisting people, not a peacetime persecution, therefore needs to be compared with modern political civil wars and revolutions, not modern political repressions. Similarly for the Saint. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
For religious repressions, the best you have got is the Spanish Inquisition and Bloody Mary, which is by modern standards, nothing. When a modern leftist regime kills on that scale, you think them liberal democrats.
Let us compare repression of heretics under Queen Elizabeth, with repression of conservatives today: Every play by Shakespeare expressed a worldview that was Roman Catholic, pagan, or atheist/materialist. No Hollywood movies express a worldview that is politically incorrect
Ah, Tsar Nicolas, the guy who involved his country in the nonsensical World War I, and thus caused 3.3 millions of his people to die needless deaths. The seeming pattern I observe is that you like certain rulers just because you happen to hate the people that deposed them.
“To raise revenue without reconvening Parliament, Charles first resurrected an all-but-forgotten law called the Distraint of Knighthood, promulgated in 1279, which required anyone who earned £40 or more each year to present himself at the King’s coronation to join the royal army as a knight. Later, Charles reintroduced obsolete feudal taxes such as purveyance, wardship, and forest laws”
I don’t think that’s the libertarian position. Excessive taxation seems to be one of the chief complaints against him.
Modern “leftist” regimes that I consider liberal democratic ones have abolished the death penalty, and they don’t kill, period—my examples of liberal democracies would be countries like Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands; not Cuba or Venezuela.
First of all, your selectively chosen comparisons become tiresome.
Second, you’d have to identify what you mean by “conservatives”. Does Bush Jr count as a conservative? If yes, then conservatives nowadays can become Presidents of America, and Catholics back then couldn’t become prime ministers.
Do you mean things like “Aaron is an atheist, and he’s the most evil person that ever walked on earth” (Titus Andronicus), or “Joan of Arc is a catholic, and she’s an evil witch justly executed” (Henry VI, Part 1)
Shakespeare was notoriously politically restricted in what he could display. My favourite example is Macbeth where he had to portray Macbeth as a cowardly murderer, and the previous king as a good one, just because the current lineage of kings was believed to descend from the slain king. That’s extreme historical revisionism: In actual reality Macbeth had led an open revolt against king Duncan—Duncan died in battle. Macbeth was considered a good and generous king—“Marianus Scotus tells how the king made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1050, where, Marianus says, he gave money to the poor as if it were seed.”
“Unlike later writers, no near contemporary source remarks on Macbeth as a tyrant. The Duan Albanach, which survives in a form dating to the reign of Malcolm III, calls him “Mac Bethad the renowned”. The Prophecy of Berchán, a verse history which purports to be a prophecy, describes him as “the generous king of Fortriu”″
But according to Shakespeare, Macbeth must be a villainous murderous tyrant, and Jeanne D’arc must be a witch. Because that’s what the political reality of his time demanded.
Say what you will about Hollywood, but they’ve not portrayed Gandhi as a bloodthirsty serial killer yet, nor have they portrayed Stalin or Che Guevara as heroes either. Shakespeare did do the equivalent thereof.
I haven’t seen it, but judging from the trailer and Wikipedia entry, The Motorcycle Diaries portrays Guevara positively.
It isn’t a Hollywood movie (the production companies are British and Argentine), but it was distributed by a division of Universal Studios.
It’s about Guevara as a young man, before he became a revolutionary.
That’s a pretty bold claim.
Especially since the political correctness people routinely complain about Hollywood movies.
I’d be careful with this line of reasoning—complaining about lack of political correctness could be a matter of attempting to push “political correctness” further or signaling continued relevance.
People have different standards for offense—sam0345 may be upset that there aren’t more conservative worldviews in Hollywood while leftists may be upset that there aren’t more progressive worldviews in Hollywood. To the Left there are lots of movies that express worldviews that are politically incorrect to them. To sam0345 maybe all the movies in Hollywood are too politically correct. What fact is actually under debate here?