On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 3:35 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes but how much education do you actually need to swing a sword and get > whatever rudimentary amount of military tactics you'd need in those days, > much before the series of 17th - 19th century wars that built a corps of > professional soldiers whose officers treated war as a science to be studied, > all the way from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Crusades onwards ..
If they were a better educated lot, they could even have declared independence and broken away from Spain and Portugal and formed a United State of South America on a democratic model, but they didn't. There are always new possibilities that education opens up. > > And as for the just world hypothesis, it believes in the ingrained belief > system of humans that'd react negatively to crimes, oppression etc. In the > conquistadores' case, the focus was on earning money, and on forcibly > converting various Indian tribes to Christianity. Cruelties and oppression > if any were simply means to one of two ends .. you earn more money to fill > your and your government's pockets, and you perform what was seen as (and > declared by the pope as) your sacred duty to make Christians out of poor > benighted pagans, saving them from eternal flames by torturing a guy here, > executing a guy there .. Again, there's no shortage of delicious ironies: The Spanish monarch grew tired of the increasing feudal power of the pig farmers and sent in a firebrand priest to denounce their wicked ways. Though it did help the Indians, it was really to keep the land rights with the monarch; so the conquistador could enjoy the rights for a generation or two, but it would revert back to the king who would hold it for the Indians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas
