Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Governments† burn libraries.

Don't create central points of vulnerability to coercion. That multiplies the effectiveness of coercive force. Create decentralized systems. Git, not GitHub. Bitcoin, not Citibank. Email, not Gmail — although we still need to free email from DNS.

Never forget how the Spanish Inquisition — the origin, in the West, of these sorts of degraded "laws" against "criminal content" — treated the Jewish people and the keepers of the quipu. Reaching back further, remember how Qin Shi Huang treated the Mohists, infinitely his superiors in every respect.

People will say it's justified because the Catalan separatists are fascists, terrorists, pedophiles, or whatever. It's not justified. The rulers of al-Andalus were no angels either, but their abuses were nothing compared to the genocidal nightmares the Inquisition concealed with its censorship.

Today we are building the systems we will live in tomorrow. Do you want a future of a thousand Inquisitions or a thousand Miltons and a thousand Humboldts? Do you want Jefferson's future or Stalin's? A new Dark Age or a new Enlightenment? Will a thousand schools of thought contend, or will the people of the world suffer a sanitized environment devoid of "degenerate art" and "bourgeois ideals"? Will they remember what really happened, teasing the truth out of biased accounts written from many points of view, or will they only be able to read history as written by the victors, the version whose "correct ideology" earns it the censor's imprimatur?

It depends on how vulnerable our systems make human rights, and in particular the right to knowledge.

As a hacker, you decide what tomorrow's books are made of. Will they be printed on celluloid, which goes up like gunpowder with a spark? Or will they be etched in bright sheets of stainless steel?

Because governments burn libraries.

But cypherpunks write code.

† That's "states" to you Brits.

[edited extensively]

> The rulers of el-Andalus were no angels either, but their abuses were nothing compared to the censorship-protected horrors of the Inquisition.

That's not true. The Almohads, unlike the almoravids, forced christian and jews to convert, under threat of death.

The Spanish Inquisition did all that and much worse. How much Moorish blood remains in the people of Spain today? How many conversos did the Inquisitors burn at the stake, generations after their ancestors converted, on the strength of rumormongering by jealous neighbors? The Christian and Jewish traditions — clerics, holy books, writing systems, and all — survived centuries of Muslim rule. What today survives of the records of the Inka? Where are the Maya codices today? And the Inka and the Maya fared much better than the Caribs and the Quilmes.

Bartolomé de las Casas relates stories of cruelty beyond belief, inhuman monstrosities beyond imagining, atrocities whose publication he delayed for more than thirty years, finally publishing pseudonymously. How many such true accounts have been forgotten because they were denied the Inquisitor's imprimatur? But the Aztecs' human sacrifices to the sun god, used to justify the bringing of "civilization" to the "savages", remain notorious today.

> How much Moorish blood remains in the people of Spain today?

There wasn't much to start with, since the moorish conquest didn't displace the people but "incentivized"(ahem...) people to convert.

> How many conversos did the Inquisitors burn at the stake, generations after their ancestors converted, on the strength of rumormongering by jealous neighbors?

It's hard to know, but I've seen stimates around 3k-5k. Germanic wytchhunts probably had a much higher number of victims. The Inquisition was a pretty bureacratic institution, and it had proper trials with defence lawyers, questioning of witnesses, etc... Inquisitor [Alonso de Salazar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alonso_de_Salazar_Fr%C3%ADas) for example, saved probably thousands of people by setting high standards in Inquisition trials.

Yes, it was VERY BAD and TERRIBLE, I'm not condoning it, but it wasn't the worse that humanity has seen. By far.

The Inquisition certainly wasn't the worst thing the humans have done, no. I didn't mean to suggest it was. Its infamous crimes need no exaggeration to earn their prominent place in the pathetic catalog of human vileness, though at times that has been no obstacle to those motivated more by hate for Catholicism than by wisdom, compassion, or personal integrity. But the bare truth is heinous enough.

I brought it up because the centuries-long intellectual blight that resulted from it is a salient example of the corrupt fruits of the poisoned tree of state censorship, a tree whose root in European history is that very Inquisition.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397905 for a slightly longer disquisition on that theme.

What's the Spanish Inquisition got to do with this? Are they in your reply because of the word "Spanish", as in "the union between the people of Arragon, Castille and the very same Catalunya, who (re)conquered the Iberian peninsula?"

> governments burn libraries

Not really.

> Catalan separatists are ... pedophiles

Is there really anyone who said so? Or are we a bit hyperbolical today?

If you're going to try and call someone out, you have to be held to the same regard.

Regarding the libraries comment, it happens plenty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_libraries#Hu...

GP may be a bit verbose and dramatic, but the parallels between the Inquisition (a form of censorship) and current events happening in the same geographical location seem to be quite appropriate. He also brings up China besides Spain, so maybe you read too much into the country-specific reference with regards to the original topic.

I think it's a valid warning. All humans equally deserve knowledge, and as long as we have centralized systems then some humans will attempt to censor others. Simple as that.

He brings in the Spanish Inquisition because it seems to portray the Catalans at the right side of history.

> Regarding the libraries comment, it happens plenty

Plenty? It happens, yes, but it is not just governments: individuals organize book burnings, authors too: Vergilius wanted to burn his Aeneis. Meanwhile, the RC church had another tool (the Index), and almost no government burns libraries. I think even the Nazis didn't, and certainly the government of my country isn't burning them. I can see one right across the street, and while it's ugly, it's not on fire.

The comment above mine is all hyperbole and whataboutism, probably meant to provoke.

I'm not condoning the approach of the Spanish government to github, BTW. All of their governments seem to shoot into a reflex when the unity is at stake, from the Second Republic up to Sánchez.

If we are talking about electronic libraries, the governments burn plenty of these all the time.

That's stretching the original remark quite a bit, but then also "cypherpunks" are guilty of that.

I explained why I mentioned the Inquisition in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21401525. "Portraying the Catalans at the right side of history" is not the reason I brought it up, nor could anyone plausibly believe that was the reason. Furthermore, I called the Catalan separatists "nationalist clowns" in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402190 and predicted that their success would bring "dark days" to Catalunya. Both of these comments were posted before yours. Your attempts at amateur psychology are laughably incompetent. I suggest you engage with the substance of what I wrote instead of seeking the flimsiest excuses for dismissing it by insulting me.

There is a thoroughly-substantiated and fairly comprehensive list of library burnings at the link in the comment above yours that you have apparently failed to read. Nearly every single one of them was committed by a government; one of the few exceptions was committed by Nazis.

The argument you are using here could as easily, and as falsely, prove that heart attacks do not kill people; it reads like a satire of illogical reasoning from anecdotes. "My heart attack didn't kill any people. There's a person right across the street from me, and while she's ugly, she's not dying of a heart attack." Still, about one out of five humans eventually die of a heart attack, and when libraries are burned, nearly always a government is the culprit.

Moreover, the entire reason we are discussing governments burning libraries is an attack by the current Spanish government on GitHub, an electronic library that is one of the greatest libraries humanity has ever created; among its endless collections of worthless trivia, it contains comprehensive repositories of mathematical, algorithmic, electronic, chemical, and physics knowledge, amounting to a substantial fraction of what humankind can be said to know.

This attack perhaps does not amount to a burning of a library, only a bookshelf within it — and a failed burning at that, since evidently the information has been preserved intact and remains available. But it takes a particularly extreme kind of arrogant foolishness to interpret that situation as demonstrating the nonexistence of the menace rather than its omnipresence.

In short, your vicious comment is simultaneously intentionally insulting, diametrically opposed to well-documented objective facts that you knew or should have known (which is to say, it is a lie), and very poorly reasoned. You should not have posted it.

Aaaand the black legend strikes again.

> People will say it's justified because the Catalan separatists are fascists, terrorists, pedophiles, or whatever. It's not justified. The rulers of al-Andalus were no angels either, but their abuses were nothing compared to the genocidal nightmares the Inquisition concealed with its censorship.

Genocidal nightmares? I get that you are attempting to be poetic but do inform yourself about the historicity of your claims:

> The Inquisition was originally welcomed to bring order to Europe because states saw an attack on the state’s faith as an attack on the state as well.

> The Inquisition technically had jurisdiction only over those professing to be Christians.

> The courts of the Inquisition were extremely fair compared to their secular counterparts at the time.

> The Inquisition was responsible for less than 100 witch-hunt deaths, and was the first judicial body to denounce the trials in Europe.

> Though torture was commonly used in all the courts of Europe at the time, the Inquisition used torture very infrequently.

> During the 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition, between 3,000-5,000 people were sentenced to death (about 1 per month).

> The Church executed no one.

https://strangenotions.com/spanish-inquisition/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revision_of_the_Inq...

I'm confident that no one with an agenda to spin had any part whatsoever in contributing to the two links you give.

Fair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

> he Spanish Inquisition is often cited in popular literature and history as an example of religious intolerance and repression. Some historians have come to conclude that many of the charges levied against the Inquisition are exaggerated, and are a result of the Black Legend produced by political and religious enemies of Spain, especially England.

Please, feel free to point me to any unbiased source.

While I appreciate your compliment about my prose, it is no less factual for being "poetic". The Inquisition was established as a genocidal institution against the Jewish and Muslim populace of Iberia, many of whom fled, and was later extended to serve the mission of obliterating the native religions and cultures of the New World; the price of this dominion, for Spain and later Italy, was the intellectual degradation and descent from greatness into mediocrity, as learning could only flourish outside the Catholic world. The burning of the Mayan codices and of the khipu were fruits of the Inquisition, losses of learning whose depths we will never fathom.

For every Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, a thousand monks prudently refrained from exploring controversial issues, and a hundred thousand loyal Catholics remained fettered in an intellectual darkness so profound they could not even see their chains.

The cost of the Inquisition is not to be measured only in the smoking corpses of scholars and Jewish and Muslim people, or even those falsely accused of practicing Judaism, but in the lost memory of entire civilizations, and in the books that were never written. It is to be weighed by the end of Galileo's scientific career, in Descartes' cowardly refusal to publish his greatest work until after his death, and in his inability to learn from the criticisms that ensued. It is evident in the near absence of Iberian and Italian philosophers from the birth of physics, chemistry, and the calculus; even Lagrange left Italy in the end.

That today we fly through the air like birds; that we live in artificial mountains of glued-together stone; that we walk on the moon; that we use precious steel where our great-grandparents used wood; that only one in thirty children die before reaching adulthood, instead of one in five, as through all human history; that we routinely cure cancer; that I am writing you this note in letters of lightning playing over the surface of tiny stones from the other side of the world — these miracles are all thanks to the fact that the Inquisition did not reach England, or Prussia, or the Low Countries, except briefly. These miracles are thanks to the noble fruits of free inquiry.

Yo do write very well! Is not an empty compliment.

About your comments, I can point to some excerpts in the Inquisition wikipedia article:

> The Inquisition was established as a genocidal institution against the Jewish and Muslim populace of Iberia,

"The Inquisition was originally intended primarily to identify heretics among those who converted from Judaism and Islam to Catholicism"

There was no genocidal intention, its a nuance but important. It wasn't established to "find every Muslim and put it on a stake".

> For every Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, a thousand monks prudently refrained from exploring controversial issues, and a hundred thousand loyal Catholics remained fettered in an intellectual darkness so profound they could not even see their chains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Censorship

"The censorship of books was actually very ineffective, and prohibited books circulated in Spain without significant problems. The Spanish Inquisition never persecuted scientists, and relatively few scientific books were placed on the Index. On the other hand, Spain was a state with more political freedom than in other absolute monarchies in the 16th to 18th centuries."

"Despite the repeated publication of the Indexes and a large bureaucracy of censors, the activities of the Inquisition did not impede the development of Spanish literature's "Siglo de Oro", although almost all of its major authors crossed paths with the Holy Office at one point or another."

> The cost of the Inquisition is not to be measured only in the smoking corpses of Jewish and Muslim people, or even those falsely accused of practicing Judaism, but in the lost memory of entire civilizations, and in the books that were never written.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_toll...

"evertheless, some authors consider that the toll may have been higher, keeping in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel for the tribunals of Toledo and Valencia, respectively, and estimate between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed" [...] "In either case, this is significantly lower than the number of people executed exclusively for witchcraft in other parts of Europe during about the same time span as the Spanish Inquisition (estimated at c. 40,000–60,000)."

Indeed, the witch-panic exists everywhere and at every time, though sometimes it is weaker and sometimes stronger, and the words used vary. Today in Nigeria and in Evangelical Christian churches there is still persecution of "witches" and "cultists", while in mainstream America instead the word used is "hackers". But in England the witch-panic did not dissuade Newton from publishing his works on natural philosophy, as it had Descartes during his lifetime; and in Leipzig and Hanover the witch-panic did not dissuade Leibniz. Spinoza, whose Jewish family had fled the Inquisition, published many of the fundamental works of rationalism; had his family remained in Spain, only with great luck would he have escaped the auto-da-fé, and today we could not debate his ideas.

How many potential Spinozas did we lose to the Inquisition because they had the misfortune of being born in Spain instead of in the Low Countries?

England and Holland were certainly guilty of atrocities, at home and in their colonies abroad, but the indigenous peoples of many of their colonies retained their cultures. The Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee survives today, and possibly it inspired the revival of democracy in Europe. Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, and Buddhism survive in India today, as does knowledge of Vedic, Pali, and Sanskrit, despite centuries of English enslavement and exploitation. Contrast this with the fate of the cultural legacies of the Inka, the Maya, the Caribs, and the Quilmes.

Genocide does not require extermination. Cultural obliteration and mass expulsion — the explicit intent of the Inquisition, and to a very great extent achieved throughout Iberia and the Spanish colonies in America — are equally genocidal.

So, I say, do not accept censorship. It is a poisonous remedy, and it kills what is most precious in human culture before it begins to cure the illness for which it was prescribed.

>> The Church executed no one.

From the Wikipedia article you mention:

>A number of procedures and protections restricted the torture of the accused, although much torture could be inflicted, and capital punishment was executed by secular authorities due to the clerical prohibition on shedding blood.

"We didn't execute anyone! We just decided who would be executed!"

Hyperbolic much?

> Jefferson's future or Stalin's

You know, there is an awful lot of space between the two, the entire globe doesn't need to adopt US mores on everything or is inevitably an oppressive dictatorship shipping folks off to the Siberian gulag. That kind of black and white expression of the "correct ideology" helps no one.

FWIW I happen to have a fair amount of sympathy for the Catalan separatists in light of the draconian Spanish response to a group seeking self-determination. Hopefully Spain can first achieve less anachronistic law on secession, as I generally think what the locals want is what matters most. They should have opportunity to vote for independence -- or remain part of Spain.

Indeed, nor are US mores even the optimum, particularly the slavery of Monticello; the spectrum of possibilities is much wider than I suggested, including both dystopias far worse than GULAG and states of global eudaemonia unimaginable today. But approximations of both Jefferson's visions and Stalin's are among the possibilities, and where we end up depends entirely on which direction we go. So my top-level comment was not, I think, hyperbolic; it was understated, but only because I cannot imagine what will happen in the future any more than others can.

I have no sympathy for the Catalan separatists; I think they are a bunch of nationalist clowns. I think dark days will come to Catalunya if they succeed in their secessionist mission. But I think that is a far less important issue than preserving the intellectual heritage of humanity, rather than subjugating the noble pursuit of reason and freedom to the depraved animalistic contest of dominance that these "laws" serve.

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