The thing about Don Quixote is that he tilts at windmills - tilts in the archaic sense of ‘charge at with a lance,’ because it’s the story of a guy who read so much chivalric romance that he lost his mind and started larping as a knight-errant. He was, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, chivalrybrained.

The thing about Don Quixote is, sometimes people take it as this story of whimsical and bravely misguided individualism or ‘being yourself’ or whatever, and they’re wrong. If it took place in the modern day, Don Quixote would absolutely be the story of a trust fund kid who blew his inheritance being a gacha whale until his internet got cut off so now he wanders around insisting that people refer to him as ‘Gudako.’

But the real thing about Don Quixote is that it was published in the early 1600s, and the thing about the 1600s is that Europe was one big tire fire. This is because 1600s Europe was still organized around feudalism (or ‘vassalage and manorialism’ if ya nasty), which assumed that land (and the peasants attached to it) were the only source of wealth. And that had worked just fine (well, ‘just fine,’ it was still feudalism) for a long time, because Europe had been a relative backwater with little in the way of urbanization or large-scale trade.

That was no longer true for Europe in the 1600s. The combination of urban development, technological advances, and brutal Spanish colonialism meant that land was no longer the sole source of wealth. Sudden there was a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners, and another new class of downwardly-mobile gentry who simply couldn’t compete in this new fast-paced economy. Cervantes saw this process with his own eyes.

One of the symbols of this new age was the windmill, a complicated piece of engineering that was expensive to build but would then produce profits indefinitely - in other words, a windmill was capital.

We're not in England. We're in Spain.

And the thing with Spain in 1600 is it displays a distinct LACK of capital, despite the ludicrous amounts of money concentrated in the hands of the very very few. Ironically, Spain's brutal colonialism drained all the silver of Peru to NOT build windmills. The Hapsburgs and the aristocracy spent it all on pointless constant warfare, art and architecture which looked great and did fuck-all, and the consumption of imported goods. They invested nothing on production (except wool! they did invest in that for a while; too bad the sheep trampled the fields at every migration and ruined Castille's grain production, forcing everyone to import their staple food), nothing on infrastructure, left agriculture primitive if not ruined, fully abandoned local industry, and ended up horribly indebted. The Empire where the sun never sets strangled itself with all this wealth, for which millions of people had been summarily murdered or slowly worked to death in the silver mines of Potosí. And it did not convert that wealth to capital. Its creditors did, though.

The thing with Spain in 1600 is that it didn't have a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners. (At best it had a few rich merchants in Seville and Cadiz, who made tons of money by selling to a market that was obliged to buy from them, and they didn't need to be business-savvy, just connected enough to secure the position.) It didn't have landowners finding new and efficient ways to exploit their land and the people who worked it. And it didn't have highborn nobles threatened by the upward mobility of their social inferiors.

Because the thing with Spain in 1600 is that there was no upward mobility. Only downward. This is where the picaresque novel was born (Don Quixote wouldn't exist without it), and the picaresque protagonist is a little guy who tries and tries to rise from the gutter, but the world won't let him. The game is fixed. He can cheat all he wants, the system will always cheat more.

The thing with Spain in 1600 is that it's not just rogues who fail to make it, it's everyone. Everyone tries to make a buck, and everyone fails. Everyone gets poorer and hungrier and more desperate. The population dwindles. (Exceptions: the upper echelons of the aristocracy in whose hands the silver directly flows, the aforementioned merchants who sell goods to Spanish America, a handful of artisans like silversmiths and painters who nevertheless remain precarious like all artists ever, various officials who enjoy big salaries and bribes, and of course, as always, the Church.)

Spain did have a class of downwardly-mobile gentry, because land started concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer owners: the upper nobility and the Church. So everyone else, from self-governing peasants to moderately landed gentry, found themselves with less or with nothing. But Don Quixote was not one of the moderately landed gentry. Don Quixote was lower than that: he was a hidalgo, a knight of the battlefield.

Hidalgos had little or no land, no money, and no access to all that silver. All they had was a tax exemption (a useless privilege when you earn nothing that can be taxed anyway) and the right to bear arms, which they often couldn't afford. But here's the thing with hidalgos, they weren't impoverished because they were competing with capital. They were impoverished because they never had any wealth to begin with, and the last time their military services were needed and rewarded was back in the Reconquista. The Hapsburg wars were waged on credit, and no one made a fortune out of them (certainly not Cervantes!) except Spain's creditors.

Like so many others in Spain in 1600, hidalgos were poor already, and failed to move upward, and as food prices did exactly that, they went hungry. Spanish literature, from picaresque novels to Don Quixote, makes fun of hidalgos, portraying them as conceited and comically minor nobles who remain poor because they're too proud to work like normal people. And while that's a stock character, a caricature, there was definitely some truth behind it, and there were plenty of hidalgos with this worldview in real life.

So who is Don Quixote's nemesis? Capital? Industry? Windmills? Nah. A good answer would be honest work for honest pay. That's what the literary hidalgos dreaded most of all: they imagined quests and duels and fields of honour because they couldn't imagine getting a job. Another good answer is Hapsburg Spain itself, the empire where the sun never sets and pretty much everyone's the worse for it, including the overwhelming majority of Spaniards. I have a more poetic answer, though.

Don Quixote's nemesis is the mountain that eats men: the silver mines of Potosí, in today's Bolivia, where millions died for the glory of Spain, only for Spain to go bankrupt, and its own population to get impoverished. Potosí, from where a river of silver flowed through Spain, without enriching it, immediately passed to its creditors in the Low Countries, England, France, etc, and then these creditors turned it into capital, and thus were able to build modern Europe. Potosí, the mountain that ate 8 million people in 3 centuries, just so that Europe could get the funds to murder hundreds of millions more through colonialism and imperialism of unprecedented scale. Potosí, which made Spain's ruling class think they can afford all these wars (spoiler: they couldn't), and didn't spare a thought on how people could live. And the people lived badly.

If Don Quixote could tilt at that, how beautiful it would be! Still completely pointless (you can't deal with systemic problems by tilting at them, as the book eloquently shows), but how beautiful.

…And perhaps Sancho could take advantage of the hubbab and steal an ingot for himself. Poor sod deserves it.

I remember when there was this LiveJournal community where you could just ask about anything you needed for your novel - medicine, professions, vehicles, how things function in country X - and people who knew something about that would answer.

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

Like:

‘You’ve always been like a brother to me but I’ve realised you only come to me when you want something’

‘My surrogate parental figure just sees me as another student/employee/lackey’

‘I raised you like my own child but you don’t even remember who I am’

even in the pdf released by the israeli government, compiled by journalist laura adkins, you can see most were arrested as minors and charges include "throwing stones" and "support for terrorism" and "threatened area security." Vox reports: "Since 1967, Israel has issued over 1,000 military orders that criminalize a range of activities in Palestinians’ daily lives, including waving political symbols like flags, being in certain areas without permits, and any kind of speech that can fit into a loosely defined charge of “incitement.” Citing decades of evidence, the Amnesty report outlined an “intentional Israeli policy to detain individuals, including prisoners of conscience, solely for the non-violent exercise of their right to freedom of expression and association, and punish them for their views.”

however, under israel's administrative detention even the more serious charges are held under "secret evidence" that israel does not allow many defendants nor their lawyers to access (when it allows them access to lawyers). in order to convict israel then holds trials in military courts without adequate representation, forces children who can't read hebrew to sign off on documents they don't understand and has a ~99% conviction rate. it extracts confessions under duress including torture of minors, withholds adequate treatment from injured detainees, often uses threats of arresting family members (particularly parents) to coerce confessions from children, without mentioning the habitual illegal use of punitive measures such as solitary confinement for years on end.

it is a separate legal system designed to strip palestinians of due process. israel is one of very few countries in the world to routinely charge minors and non-violent political prisoners in military courts. anyone remotely familiar with incarceration and remotely familiar with practices of administrative detention in the middle east knows exactly what kind of legal procedure this is, so this comment fully relies on the willful ignorance of outsiders. in layman terms, this is called a kangaroo court. here's a handy graphic that illustrates it:

and to help you visualize this on the ground, there is no shortage of images of how israeli occupation soldiers have treated palestinian children (on their own land, in their own supposed territory) across the years:

of course the argument goes "these children were terrorists" and so on and so forth but this 2015 report from amnesty highlights exactly how specious these accusations of "stabbing" and "attempted murder" can be under israeli occupation:

we've also seen the case of ahmed erakat, who was accused of trying to drive a car into a checkpoint and executed on the spot when forensic examination revealed otherwise. similarly, the case of israa jaabis who was accused of trying to detonate a bomb at an israeli checkpoint, while her family maintains that israeli forces firing indiscriminately at her car after an airbag malfunction caused a cooking gas tank to explode, leaving her disfigured after israeli soldiers left her to burn on the ground.

however, whether or not they charged or convicted actually doesn't matter. israel has no right nor authority to imprison or detain palestinians outside the occupied west bank under international humanitarian law. but it is israel's own high court of justice that gives it the legal pretext to do so under claims of security threat, which amnesty international and multiple other human rights groups have repeatedly found in violation of international humanitarian law. through legal loopholes such as expanding the territory and language of what constitutes "military zones" israeli soldiers in the west bank are given free reign to terrorize the population and simultaneously protect their illegal settlement expansion. there is some leeway for appeal that provides a veneer of legitimacy to this process, but it is overwhelmingly a fascist and unlawful system.

as many have pointed out, allowing real due process to palestinians who are accused of attacking occupation soldiers would then have to confront the legality of the occupation itself, which palestinians have the right to resist by any means necessary under international law (and under which soldiers and armed settlers are a credible and justified target.)

israel instead awards legal impunity to such armed settlers & soldiers in these settlements who provoke and kill palestinians constantly while palestinian prisoners are charged under an apartheid law, rendering all accusations, charges and convictions as null and void as convictions under syrian or north korean courts, for example.

finally, i leave you with this anecdote, which sums up just about everything illustrated above:

but it breaks my heart when i have to share them from people in gaza, who are using their five minutes of internet connection, their 25% of battery charge collected from a macguyvered car battery, emotionally exhausted, thirsty and hungry, sleeping in schools that have turned into refugee shelters and still making the time to say "please, i am human too, i am still alive, please fight for me" in english to appeal to the only people who have the power to help

i shared a tweet from a jjk artist in gaza i follow about a bts photocard being found in the middle of the rubble. even the love of anime and kpop and sports is no longer just a hobby, but an appeal to humanity. what was once a source of joy is now proof of life.

the worst part is that you won't find this content in arabic. palestinians don't post like this in arabic. but when they translate themselves, they recognize that they must humanize themselves first. it's an unspoken understanding of dehumanization, one that has dictated a whole region's understanding of the value of human life. in arabic they speak with dignity, with anger, with sorrow. in english, they appeal for their existence.