Yes but how much education do you actually need to swing a sword and get
whatever rudimentary amount of military tactics you'd need in those days, much
before the series of 17th - 19th century wars that built a corps of
professional soldiers whose officers treated war as a science to be studied,
all the way from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Crusades onwards ..
And as for the just world hypothesis, it believes in the ingrained belief
system of humans that'd react negatively to crimes, oppression etc. In the
conquistadores' case, the focus was on earning money, and on forcibly
converting various Indian tribes to Christianity. Cruelties and oppression if
any were simply means to one of two ends .. you earn more money to fill your
and your government's pockets, and you perform what was seen as (and declared
by the pope as) your sacred duty to make Christians out of poor benighted
pagans, saving them from eternal flames by torturing a guy here, executing a
guy there ..
srs
-----Original Message-----
From: silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus....@lists.hserus.net
[mailto:silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus....@lists.hserus.net] On Behalf Of Srini
RamaKrishnan
Sent: 24 February 2012 19:57
To: silklist@lists.hserus.net
Subject: Re: [silk] aqvavit
On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 12:49 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian <sur...@hserus.net>
wrote:
> Cheeni found that ironic :). And for every such empire builder type
> who died poor, there's no shortage of his peers who started out poor
> but died filthy rich. I wish we could say this was about natural
> justice coming home to roost after all that oppression ..
Indeed, this isn't about natural justice, that's why we have the just world
hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
Illiterate pig-farmers were the norm (Pizarro) and law school dropouts were the
exception (Hernán Cortés), you can't expect much else from that bunch.
