In 1550, Ferdinand and Isabella’s grandson, King Charles V, summoned
two prominent scholars to the country’s main university at Valladolid for a far-reaching debate about his foreign policy. The bloodshed in the Americas worried the king. Was it right to continue expanding Spain’s empire at such a cost in human lives?
On one side of the debate at Valladolid was a Dominican monk named
Bartolomé de las Casas. As a child in 1493, las Casas had attended the
victory parade in Seville that greeted Christopher Columbus after his
discovery of the Americas. In 1502, las Casas moved to America with
several relatives, part of the initial wave of Spanish settlement. In the New
World, las Casas was appalled by the cruelty of the Spanish conquistadors that he witnessed firsthand. In front of the king, las Casas pleaded for a more humane Spanish policy in the Americas.
On the other side of the debate was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573), a humanist scholar who believed that the Spanish had a duty to
“Christianize” the American Indians by whatever means necessary. To
Sepúlveda, native tribes like the Aztecs were barbarians who practiced
human sacrifice and cannibalism. Not only did the Spanish have a right to
subjugate the natives, Sepúlveda said they had a positive obligation to
spread Western civilization. “The perfect should command and rule over the imperfect,” he wrote in 1547, citing Aristotle to defend what he called the “just war” against the Indians.
Within two generations, the Spanish had destroyed the great Aztec and Inca empires. The king was sympathetic to the pleadings of las Casas, but it was too late. For better or worse, the European colonization of the Americas was under way.
Spain in the New World
A “Viking” was an “entrepreneurial” king on the warpath, on the vík. He was in search of tribute and prestige.
"Better for you to bestride steed, draw sword, fell a host. Your brothers have fine halls and better lands than you. You should go vík-ing. Let men feel your blade."
Altogether, the use of the Old Testament in the Senchas Már and other texts provided Irish lawyers with a firm middle ground in which to stand between the Christian present and traditions inherited from the past of their own land. Polygamy, for instance, was forbidden in the Christian churches, although it continued to be practiced throughout Ireland. Yet polygamy was taken for granted in the Old Testament. Who was to tell which law was the better?
From Hadrian’s Wall to the Atlantic coast of Morocco and the Horn of Africa, the idea of Rome had shrunk to ever smaller dimensions. Rome and its history were no longer central to the imagination of the inhabitants of the former periphery of the empire. A sense of the Roman past was replaced by a different past – the past of the Old Testament. This past was brought close through the Holy Scriptures. It described, vividly and appositely, the turbulent warrior kingdom of ancient Israel. It was a past better suited to the stormy present than were memories of imperial Rome.
In the polytheist world of the cities, the proud temples depended on wealthy donors, who might, at any moment, go bankrupt – as happened to many pagan shrines in the course of the crisis of the third century. In a period of financial recession, the Christian communities, with their habits of regular giving by small persons, were better equipped to weather the storm of political insecurity and inflation than were the grandees who supported polytheist worship.
The Godfather’e mafya engeli
Mafya ise bu filmin çekilmesini istemediğini açıkça belli ediyordu. Los Angeles polisi yapımcı Al Ruddy takip edildiğini söyledi. Ruddy yardımcısı Bettye McCartt'la arabaları değiştirdi. McCartt bir gece evi önünde silah sesleri duyduğunu söyledi. Ruddy'nin değiş tokuş ettikleri arabası kurşunlanmış, "filmi bırak” diye bir not yazılmıştı. Paramount'un kardeş şirket Gulf&Western bomba ihbarı yüzünden iki kez tahliye edildi.
Sayfa 130 - Vadi Yayınları
Fransız ve İtalyan filmleri toptan yasaklıydı. Hollywood filmleri ise ancak annemin ağzından “çocuklar seyredebilir” fetvası çıkarsa uygun sayılırdı. Bu sınıfa giren filmler, Laurel Hardy'ler, bolca Abbott ve Costello, Betty Grable, Gene Kelly, Loretta Young filmleri; Clifton Webb’ in, Claudette Colbert'in ve Jennifer Jones'un (Bernadette'in Ezgisi uygun, Kanlı Aşk yasaklıydı) oynadığı sürüsüne bereket müzikal ve aile komedisi ve tercihen yalnızca Jon Hall ve Sabu'nun oynadığı (zira Maria Montez annemin onayından geçemiyordu) Walt Disney fantazileri, Binbir Gece Masalları filmleri, savaş filmleri ve bazı Western'lerdi.
Sayfa 60 - Metis YayınlarıKitabı okudu
What is remarkable, and crucial, about the preSocratic background is that it anticipates all the appeals made by later Western thinkers to the need to rethink our relationship to animals in a way that does better justice to animals. Even more remarkable is the fact that later critics of anthropocentrism sometimes mistakenly assume that they themselves were the first to conceive of animals as our kin.
Sayfa 52 - EPIC AND PRE-SOCRATIC THOUGHTKitabı okudu
"But there is yet a further difference between those two old empires. While in the Islamic Empire there was no privileged nation, and power was made subservient to the propagation of an idea regarded by its torchbearers as the sublime religious truth, the idea underlying the Roman Empire was conquest of power and the exploitation of other
The modern world, for better or worse, springs from Europe. This western outpost of the great Eurasian land mass gave birth to the Enlightenment.
Sayfa 92Kitabı okudu
