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#my guy John II was genuinely a harsh even cruel man
momo-de-avis · 2 years
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I am eternally amazed at how sensitive the portuguese are at the subject of colonialism. The idea that we practised some sort of soft colonialism is so ingrained in our minds people will be fighting for their lives to defend this idea (which, btw, is still a remnant of Salazar's propaganda). Brazil's colonialism is such a hyper sensitive topic you can see the vein popping on the neck of the average Zé when someone even lightly mentions accountability. I dead ass remember my 7th grade teacher telling our class that Brazil's colonialism consisted of "jesuit priests playing music, which enticed the natives" and that was it (flutes too, to be precise, for some fucking reason) and everyone has just blindly believed this and refused to accept the actual horrible history we're a part of. Portuguese people will be fighting for their lives on technicalities. Say "The portuguese invented the slave trade" and Salvador over there will jump from under the table to explain that akshually african people were the ones to sell their own people as slaves!!! And askhually, slavery goes back for centuries!! You know what they mean, you know what needs to be discussed here, but my boy Salvador is on a mission. He doesn't even care that he's regurgitating fascist propaganda that was entirely built on ahistorical facts that specifically sought to promote colonialism and imperialism as a progressive idea, no, none of that matters. It matters that we are miserable people who will perpetually long for the past, look back on something utterly atrocious and willingly ignore the brutality of it, because we cannot come to terms with the fact that today we live in a country that's ripe with corruption, unlivable wages and high cost of living; we cannot come to terms with the fact that we did all this colonialism just to be a poor fucking country that's being exploited by digital nomads; in fact, we just cannot tolerate the idea that we're just a summer resort for americans and brits and have absolutely no economical relevance in the world, not even cultural, but hey, cultural meaning can be invented. So we look back, we wail and cry and look back at these centuries when we pillaged, enslaved and destroyed because at least we meant something, because we once divided the world in two with Spain, that's how big our balls were once, and because once people knew who we were, they our name beyond the one football player. We purposefully disregard the horrid shit. We coast through life without ever, ever acknowledging it ever existed. We're taught in school colonialism was soft core at best, tell some bullshit about some priests with flutes and be done with it, and then when someone finally confronts us for our history, on god, we'll be fighting with everything we have to prove to you that our colonialism was just fine, and we, white men of the 16th century, showed these countries the meaning of civilisation! Orgulhosamente sós, am i right bitches
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