I've been slowed down by the lovely muscle relaxants the doc prescribed for my pulled back muscles, which he warned "might make you slightly drowsy." Ha. Make me fall asleep sitting up, is more like it. But while I've been dozing, others are paying attention. Today Sarah Hoyt described a fascinating parallel to current events... in the 17th century Spanish occupation of Portugal. (Me: What? The Spanish occupied Portugal? Nobody told me about this!)
She writes:
The funny thing — stop me when this sounds familiar — that Spain would probably have won the battle, long term, almost certainly, if they’d come in and governed with Portuguese best interests at heart, and let the cultures and families merge.
Portugal didn’t even have a very strong sense of national identity at the time, and noble families had property in both families.
But they came in set on “reducing” the Portuguese. It involves a program of destroying the statues of the conquered people, and the stories of their heroes. It involves giving away prized possessions that brought in wealth (in Portugal’s case various colonies given away in the dowry of Spanish princesses) for the glory of the invaders. It involves forbidding the mother-tongue and replacing it with the invaders’s speech (A-men and A-women!) and it involves in general making the invaded country feel its humiliation, in the hopes of making it want to die.
Remind you of anything? Yeah, me too. And she predicts Americans will react to the current regime as badly as the Portuguese did to this ham-handed attempt to flatten them.
My prediction is a crash of internationalism, a revival of a love of nationality and each nation’s character and heroes, and a glorious upraised middle finger to those who’d be global masters, Winnie the Xi and the UN included, and possibly with petards.
Click through and read the whole thing: Reducing An Occupied Country
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