Triggers

Sometimes it can be fun to detect some of the triggers currently at the disposal of the crazies in our culture.

‘Visigothic Spain’ is an anachronism, just like ‘Iron Age Scotland’. It’s perfectly normal and I would argue, legit, for historians to use modern labels for geographical zones so that their readers know what areas they are referring to. (One ought not need to remind everyone that culturally and politically a good deal has undoubtedly changed.)

Today I was I was reading about the early Jōmon culture in the far East (from c14,500 BC) and the book in question liberally makes use of terms like Japan and Korea. No need for anyone to spontaneously combust over that...right?

Yet it seems that when it comes to Spain, any attempt to use this designation to refer to the pre-modern situation breaks open a hornets’ nest of haters.

Some of the trolling that I have been treated to on Threads lately appears to reveal that Visigothic Spain now enjoys a similar status to the pre-twentieth century Jewish presence in the Middle East e.g. it’s something that the Islamists would rather you didn’t know about.

In this way, Al Andalus, or the Moorish period on the peninsula, can either be taken as Edenic and indigenous (like 'Palestine') or as a kind of gallant anti-colonial reaction to the Romans, rather than say, an imperialist project (a Caliphate no less) which duly made second class citizens of Christian and Jew alike.

‘Spain’ in this worldview is thus that tiny territorial remnant in the north which then came and stole the lands below from Allah. That cities like Toledo, Segovia, Cordoba and Mérida had a monotheistic history going back several centuries before Arabic became the official language, is seemingly a major inconvenience for the Jihadist narrative today.