Here I would like to write a bit about the Black Legend, or "la leyenda negra" that the Spanish traditionally invoke whenever they feel subjected to criticism for the atrocities they committed during the Inquisition and the Conquest of Mexico and Peru. Many in both Mama Espana and in her offspring cultures of Latin America tend to invoke, whenever these things are mentioned, "La leyenda negra!" In the sixteenth century, it is believed, other countries such as England, France and the Netherlands, were assumed to have an irrational and all-consuming hatred and envy towards the Spanish. So, they invented and crafted lies and exaggerations only to discredit Spain. This argument tends to get raised even to this very day.
I have read a little bit about the Black Legend. I can understand that any nation accused of the kinds of barbarities that Spain is alleged to have committed against both its own people as well as the natives of Latin America would tend to feel a little bit defensive. Really, thousands burned at the stake in Spain, and almost as many in Mexico, not to mention the thousands, millions of Aztecs and others systematically slaughtered or killed from imported epidemics and the survivors raped and enslaved. To have to live down that kind of reputation! What a cross to bear!
England and France both had their share of strategic and diplomatic rivalries with Spain. However, the other player in perpetrating the myth of the Black Legend, the Netherlands, was actually overrun and occupied by the Spanish and they would especially have a legitimate stake in wanting to expose the atrocities.
I do not, personally, believe the myth of "La Leyenda Negra." Yes, other countries were every bit as brutal and barbaric in their practices during war and peacetime as Spain. England alone has had a lot to answer for, for the genocides committed against the aboriginal peoples of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and also South Africa, where the Dutch were also pretty bad, if not even worse than the English.
Here is where I tend to part company with Spain. In the eponymously named countries we have and are still witnessing extensive public programs of truth and reconciliation. Much has been confessed and admitted of atrocities on both sides, but particularly of the occupying colonial powers against the indigenous peoples of the lands they were colonizing. This has been, so far, an imperfect process, and not everyone is happy, but it is better than nothing and this is likely to continue for generations to come.
So far there has been no indication of Spain participating in such a process, nor of her offspring governments and societies in the various countries where Spanish is the official language. To this day, the Black Legend is likely being invoked as a form of denial, an abnegation of responsibility. To me it doesn't really matter whether only thirty-seven people were burned at the stake in Mexico or thirty-seven hundred. The fact that violence, poverty, corruption and social inequality continue to this day there and in so many other Latin American countries is in itself the most damning circumstantial evidence that these nations have been traumatized and that the Spanish Crown and its lackeys were very able and adept victimizers.
I have already written in these pages that Spain, following eight centuries of foreign occupation by the Moors, was going to feel very much like a victim. Just as some of the Jews, when they settled in Israel after the Shoah, became themselves victimizers against the Palestinian Arabs, so had the Spanish carried their stigma as historical victims to the New World where they savagely acted out their grief and rage on the hapless indigenous peoples and African slaves. Yes, greed for gold and resources and their zeal to spread Spanish and Catholic civilization were the main motivators but I cannot help but suspect that underneath it all they were really themselves traumatized and hurt children viciously acting out their own injury and outrage on vulnerable others. Ironic, given that the Moors had been far gentler in their treatment of the Spanish Catholics than the Spanish Catholics have been of the peoples of Mexico and Central and South America.
Impunity creates a very short memory. Had the Germans not accepted full responsibility for causing the Second World War as well as their horrendous genocide against European Jewry, as well as against other vulnerable human targets, who knows what kind of condition Germany and the German people would be in today. Yes, the younger generations have put the Holocaust behind them and are getting on with things. But I also cannot help but wonder if the current strength and prosperity of the German nation and its liberal and social-democratic institutions is at least partly attributable to the fact that they owned up, confessed, repented and made reparations for what they did. (full disclosure here, half my DNA is German)
Time will tell if something similar might happen in Spain, concerning the Basque region or in various Latin American countries concerning the historic trauma the ruling (and Spanish) classes have visited upon their most vulnerable people. I suspect that the Black Legend is going to go on being used as a smoke screen, just as I believe that a succession of men and women of integrity on both Hispanic sides of the Atlantic are going to refuse to accept this historic lie and will rise up and demand that the truth be told.
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