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—Luther [64]
Proponents such as Powell, [7] Mignolo [66] and Roca Barea [12] allege that the Spanish Black Legend prevails in most of Europe, especially Protestant nations and France, and the Americas. There is, however, no significant trace of it in the Muslim world or Turkey despite the almost seven centuries of sustained warfare in which Spain and the Islamic world were engaged. Historian Walter Mignolo has argued that the Black Legend was closely tied to ideologies of race, both in the way that it used the Moorish history of Spain to depict Spaniards as racially tainted, and in the way that the treatment of Africans and Native Americans during Spanish colonial projects came to symbolize their moral character. [67]
The first Puritan settlers were deeply hostile to Spain, seeing themselves as the Protestant advance guard that would free the Indians from Spanish oppression and cruelty. Prominent among these Puritan authors was Cotton Mather, who translated the Bible into Spanish for distribution among the Indians of New Spain. [68] After its independence, the United States soon became a territorial rival of Spain in America, both on the border with New Spain, and in Florida, the Mississippi or in New Orleans, a port that the Americans wanted to export their products from. The enlightened and liberal ideas that had entered the United States in the eighteenth century, joined their sympathies for the new republics emerging to the south, increasing anti-Spanish sentiment. [69] This hostility reached its zenith during the Spanish-American War, when the propaganda machine of Hearst and Pulitzer, used by their newspaper empires, had an enormous influence on public opinion in their country. The hispanophobic speeches heard in Congress during the conflict were so insulting that they led to massive protests in Spain. [70]
The tensions in Hispanic America between the upper classes of creoles and peninsulares , that is, the Spaniards from the Iberian Peninsula, predate the independence of the Latin American countries. It was a confrontation for the right to control and exploit the riches of the American lands and peoples and that, in general, did not affect the lower classes. Around 1800, the ideas of the Enlightenment, with its anticlericalism, its skepticism to authorities, and its support by Masonic lodges, had been enthusiastically embraced among American intellectuals. According to Powell, these ideas were mixed with the black legend, that is, with the identification of Spain as a "horrible example" of obscurantism and backwardness, as an enemy of modernity. [71] Indeed, he claims that the American wars of independence were to some degree civil wars, with the rebels led by minorities of Creoles.
With this background, Powell argues that the rebels were able to use the black legend as a propaganda weapon against the metropolis. Countless manifestos and proclamations were published quoting and praising Las Casas, poems and hymns describing the depraved nature of the "Spaniards", letters and pamphlets designed to advance the patriotic cause. [72] One of the first was the Peruvian Juan Pablo Vizcardo y Guzmán in his Carta dirigida a los españoles americanos por uno de sus compatriotas, accusing the metropolis of the serious exploitation suffered, summarizing the situation as «ingratitude, injustice, servitude and desolation». Another example is one of the great heroes of American independence, Simón Bolívar, an admirer of Las Casas, whose texts he would use profusely, blamed the Spanish for all the sins committed in America (by Creoles and non-Creoles) in the last 200 years, making the Creoles the victims, the "colonized". He would also be one of the first to appeal for the theft of American wealth and claim its return. [73]
This anti-Spanish mentality was maintained during the 19th century and part of the 20th among the liberal elites, who considered "de-Hispanization" the solution to national problems. [74] The historian Powell affirms that as a consequence of denigrating Spanish culture, it has been possible to denigrate their own, of which the first is a part, both in their own eyes and in foreign eyes. In addition, the fact would have produced a certain lack of roots among the American peoples, by rejecting part of their own. [75]
At the same time, on the beginning of the 19th century, a school of liberal historians appeared in Spain and France who began to speak of the Spanish decline, considering the Inquisition responsible for this economic and cultural decline and for all the ills that afflicted the country. Other European historians would take up the subject later, maintaining this position in some authors until today. The reasoning stated that the expulsion of the Jews and the persecution of the converts would have led to the impoverishment and decline of Spain, in addition to the destruction of the middle class. [76] In 1867 Joaquín Costa had also raised the issue of Spanish decline. Both he and Lucas Mallada wondered if the fact was due to the Spanish character. He was joined by French and Italian sociologists, anthropologists and criminologists, who spoke more of "degeneration" than decadence, and later other Spaniards such as Rafael Salillas or Ángel Pulido. Pompeu Gener blamed Spanish decadence on religious intolerance and Juan Valera on Spanish pride. These ideas passed into literature with the Generation of '98, in texts by Pío Baroja, Azorín and Antonio Machado: «[Castilla...] a piece of the planet crossed by the wandering shadow of Caín»; reaching in some extremes to masochism and the inferiority complex. Joseph Pérez relates this rejection of one part of his own history (the expulsion of the Jews, the Inquisition, the conquest of America) and the idealization of another (Al-Andalus) with similar movements in Portugal and France. [77]
Also, after the Unification of Italy, many Italian historians tended to narrate in a negative way the time when part of the Italian peninsula had formed a dynastic union with Spain. In particular, Gabriele Pepe denounced what in his eyes had been the plunder and corruption of southern Italy "under the Spanish". [78] This view only began to change in the last third of the 20th century, thanks to a series of congresses and authors such as Rosario Villari and Elena Fasano Guarini. [79] The works of Alessandro Manzoni [80] [81] [82] [83] and Giuseppe Verdi [84] also propagated anti-Spanish propaganda on Italian literature.
The period of Spanish rule in the Philippines is often presented negatively in the present day.[ citation needed ] Although the Philippine Islands were occupied by both Spain and the United States and the Empire of Japan, only the Spaniards were considered as the oppressors who kept the society in feudal backwardness, along with the development of a servile mentality and the cause of the ignorance through religious fanaticism, while the Americans were portrayed as liberators of the nation in the process of building a national identity against the interference of other powers (the Spanish Catholics and the Islamic sultanates), who, with their defects, were able to bring Modernization in the Islands with its liberal policies.[ citation needed ] A lot of investigators mention that United States Military Government of the Philippine Islands has an important role in the construction of anti-Spanish propaganda on Philippines' education. [85] The anti-Spanish propaganda has endured in historiography to this day, since scholars used to copy from the same standard books that have distorted the images of the Philippines with such tropes of the black legend. [86] That being the case, it has been denounced that "official" historiography in the Philippines, from the nationalist and liberal school, has lacked objectivity by assuming long-repeated misconceptions regarding the early modern history of the Philippines. [86]
According to Phillip Powell, the leading historians of the United States in the 19th century, Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, and John Lothrop Motley, would also write History tinged with the black legend, texts that remain important in later American historiography. [87] An example of this is The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898 , important source of Philippine history for non-Spanish speakers that has been criticized by modern historians, notably Glòria Cano, for deliberately distorting the original Spanish documents to portray the Captaincy General of the Philippines in a negative light. [88] [89] In addition, after the United States Occupation of the Philippines, the Schurman Commission was carried out, with the purpose of preparing the conditions for the government of the Philippine islands, and in which the Philippine upper class of the Principalía and the Ilustrado intellectuals participated. Thus, Jacob Schurman built and shaped a discourse that emphasized a negative view of the Philippine Republic (while declaring that the Filipinos are not ready for independence) and outlined an obscurantist image of the Spanish regime, for which they appealed typical dichotomies between modernity vs. tradition, where the Spanish regime represented an apparent medieval and reactionary backwardness, while the US administration presented itself as liberal and progressive.[ citation needed ]
Thus, the Americans in the Philippines developed a narrative with they belittled Spain, following the traditional lines of the Black Legend, as a feudal, exploitative and oppressive power, while also praising the Hispanic legacy in the Filipino (on a more social than political level), especially their conversion of "savages" to Christianity, but at the cost of underestimating Filipino customs (many of Hispanic origin by Catholic tradition, which the Americans considered a mistake for the Spanish to seek to achieve cultural syncretism with the barbaric and pagan). [90] American works such as The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, by Blair and Robertson, or The Americans in the Philippines, by James LeRoy, have been accused of having presented a caricatural image of Spanish history in the islands, as well as giving an erroneous image of the Catholic Church and its power as opposed to any possibility of social reforms in the Philippines. [91] [92] The US administration invoked negative views of Spanish colonialism to legitimize its occupation of the islands during the next decades, as a benevolent, modern and democratic colonization against a tyrannical and backward malevolent colonizer who had not been able to develop a national identity to the Filipinos. [93]
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Historians disagree on whether the Black Legend exists as a genuine factor in current discourse around Spain and its history. In recent years a group of historians including Alfredo Alvar, Ricardo García Cárcel and Lourdes Mateo Bretos have argued that the Black Legend does not currently exist beyond Spanish society's own perception of how the world views Spain's legacy. [94] According to Carmen Iglesias, the Black Legend consists of negative traits which the Spanish people see in themselves and is shaped by political propaganda. [95]
The view of the group around García Cárcel is echoed by Benjamin Keen, writing in 1969. He argues that the concept of the Black Legend cannot be considered valid, given that the negative depiction of Spanish behavior in the Americas was largely accurate. He further claims that whether a concerted campaign of anti-Spanish propaganda based on imperial rivalry ever existed is at least open to question. [96]
Henry Kamen argues that the Black Legend existed during the 16th century but has disappeared in contemporary perceptions of Spain. However, other authors, like Elvira Roca Barea, Tony Horowitz and Philip Wayne Powell, have argued that it still affects the manner in which Spain is perceived, and that it is brought up strategically during diplomatic conflicts of interest as well as in popular culture to draw attention away from the negative actions of other nations. Historian John Tate Lanning argued that the most detrimental impact of the Black Legend was to reduce the Spanish colonization of the Americas (and the resulting culture that emerged) to "three centuries of theocracy, obscurantism, and barbarism." [97] In 2006, Tony Horowitz argued in The New York Times that the Spanish Black Legend affected current U.S. immigration policy. [98]
The Venezuelan case has been studied by Gilberto Ramón Quintero Lugo in his book «La Leyenda Negra y su influjo en la historiografía venezolana de la Independencia» (April 2004). [99]
In her 2016 book exploring “empire-phobia” as a recurring sociopolitical phenomenon in human history, Elvira Roca Barea argues that the unique persistence of the Spanish Black Legend beyond the end of the Spanish Empire is tied to a continued anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic sentiment in traditionally Protestant European countries:
If we deprive Europe of its hispanophobia and anti-Catholicism, its modern history becomes incomprehensible. [100]
José Luis Villacañas, in his 2019 response to Roca Barea, labels her work as "populist national-Catholic propaganda" and accuses her of minimising Spanish atrocities in the Americas along with those of the Inquisition. He argues that, for all intents and purposes, the Black Legend has no meaning outside the context of 17th century propaganda, although he recognises that certain negative stereotypes of Spain may have persisted during the Franco regime. [13]
García Cárcel criticises Roca Barea's position as adding to a long tradition of Spanish society's insecurities about how other countries perceive it. On the other hand, he also criticizes Villacañas's discourse as being heavily ideological in the opposite direction and systematically indulging in presentism. García Cárcel calls for an analysis of Spain's history that renounces both “narcissism and masochism” in favor of nuanced awareness of its “lights and shadows”. [101]
Other proponents of the continuity theory include musicologist Judith Etzion [102] and Roberto Fernandez Retamar, [103] and Samuel Amago who, in his essay "Why Spaniards Make Good Bad Guys" analyzes the persistence of the legend in contemporary European cinema. [104]
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Otherwise routine criticism [in the 15th and 16th centuries] increasingly took the form of identifying Spaniards, not with Christianity, but with Judaism and Islam.
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