#notmedieval

This is Ms. Codex 1656, advice about reform in Portugal, including concerns about the Inquisition, addressed to Prince Joseph and written in the second half of the 18th c. by Luiz da Cunha, a Portuguese ambassador.

At Going Medieval, we are loath to wade in on the whole Trump thing, as it is best not to dignify sentient dumpster fires with a response. 

This guy though - this fucking guy - whilst attempting to draw attention away from that one time he got caught bragging about sexually assaulting women, (it is assumed that he’s done it plenty of times whilst not being caught), declared that the current state of the world  ‘...is like medieval times, we haven’t seen anything like this - the carnage all over the world’.

Presuming that Trump is not referring to Medieval Times - that fake jousting restaurant - this sort of idiocy is squarely in the Going Medieval wheelhouse, and we are forced to respond.

Using ‘medieval’ as a pejorative in this instance is profoundly lazy and dangerous, because it allows people to distance themselves from the horrors of the world as it currently exists whilst also throwing an entire millennium under the bus.  The terrible things that this bloviating comb-over is referring to are happening squarely in and as a result of modern, and indeed neo-liberal, political instability. 

In the medieval period there were not roving gangs of ultra-religious Muslims killing those that the perceived to be not devout enough. (Do keep in mind that according to the  U.S. National Counter-terrorism Center the victims of between 82 and 97% of religiously motivated terror attacks are Muslim.)  In the medieval period, in fact, the Islamic world was experiencing what was referred to as The Islamic Golden Age, a period of extreme stability that was characterised by prodigious development in the arts, sciences, and economic development. This was not a time of barbarous cultural self-immolation.

If, in fact, the literal-embodiment-of-rape-culture-who-is-somehow-a-legitimate-presidential-candidate was instead referring to the world being in a state of war, or in the midst of violent conflict as ‘medieval’, I would urge him to check the numbers.  

Did wars happen during the medieval period?  Well it was a thousand year or so stretch of time, so, yeah.  Wars did not happen with any greater frequency during this time period, however, and they in no way carried the death toll that modern war does.  If you compare the death tolls of various wars, you will see the Mongol Conquests as a comparatively bloody conflict, but they took place over a period of about 120 years, and still are dwarfed by the death tolls of WWII, which managed to kill about five million more people despite only lasting six years. How, then, is medieval military conflict more barbaric than those wars which take place in the modern era? In fact, take a look at that death toll list one more time.  Of the 28 most deadly wars, all but five take place in the modern era.  The whole-sale slaughter of people in wars is, therefore, not a medieval phenomenon, but a modern one.

This guy - this walking example of white male privilege - in fact gives the game away in his own moronic comment.  Something cannot simultaneously be ‘medieval’ and something which we have never seen.  If something hasn’t been seen before it is a modern construct, not medieval.

When people refer to things they find unpleasant as ‘medieval’ it allows them to keep the horror at arm’s length without responding to the ways that our society now has created them.  It gives us as inhabitants of the modern period a way of saying that we and our decisions are not responsible for or engaged in these practices. 

Modern people do and are doing terrible things.  Humanity is not engaged in a linear march away from barbarism. 

To call terrible things medieval is to deny that humans now are capable of unimaginable horror.