Reconquista

The Spanish and Portuguese retook Iberia in the middle ages will westerns be able to retake the west today? Will we even try?


Mecha’s reconquista.

is that a chart of hispanic population in the US? lol

[quote]bluey wrote:
The Spanish and Portuguese retook Iberia in the middle ages will westerns be able to retake the west today? Will we even try?

[/quote]

I am not sure who the “westerns” or “we” you speak of in your original post, but if you are inferring that the Mexicans are going to conquer the western United States, you are dilusional. Might I remind you that during the Bush’s first term Vicente Fox offered the state of Chihuahua to be controlled by the US government, to control the insane drug trafficking. Mexicans are unfortunately very indifferent to corruption and they are highly unorganized as a culture. I speak spanish and have been to mexico many times, I like the Mexican people, but they are not going to take over the western us. Once you get outside of LA and Phoenix, they have little influence.

In regards to Europe and the western world

Medieval Iberia was just an historical precedent

[quote]bluey wrote:
In regards to Europe and the western world

Medieval Iberia was just an historical precedent
[/quote]

Since I’m precisely of Iberian descent (all my grandparents where Iberian – one side Portuguese, the other Spanish), I’m pretty familiar with the History of the Iberian Peninsula.

So let me see if I understand where you’re going with that comment:

The “Portuguese and Spanish” you are talking about basically were a very mixed group of people – actually, a mixture of several ethnicities in pre-medieval Europe: Celtic, Latin and German – that only had one thing in common: they were Catholic Christians, and wanted to retake the Iberian peninsula – which was taken over by Arab Muslims in the latter part of the 1st millennium – to Catholic control. Their source of motivation – and funding – was indeed the Catholic Church.

So I guess what you are arguing is that there is a parallel with the current situation in the core of Europe – UK, France, Germany and Benelux – that you believe is slowly being invaded by the same Arab Muslims. Is that where you’re going with your comment? Well, first problem is: the Catholic Church is no longer what it was then. Thank God for that. So we don’t have an obvious source of both money and motivation to get rid of all the EViL Arabs.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t something we need to fix – badly. Having lived in The Netherlands for several years, and been to Paris more times than I can remember (or I want to remember], I saw the seriousness of the cultural clash. There is no doubt, in my mind, that the large North-African Arab Muslim population currently has no intention of integrating with their host countries, which creates tremendous cultural clashes – far beyond what you have ever seen in the US.

Problem is, nobody has had the balls to go all the way in terms of what needs to be done to end the cultural clashes… And no, what needs to be done is not “taking it back” by force – i.e., just sending all the Arab Muslims home, or, worse, killing them (which is what my Iberian ancestors did). There are International Conventions against that, and I don’t believe it would be wise – for many reasons, including Europe’s dependence on Arab Oil and Natural Gas – to break them.

Basically, we just don’t do stuff that way anymore. Like Thomas Jefferson once said:

"
I am certainly not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
"

The solution to that problem is making integration not one of the options, but the only option. When in Rome, by Roman, period – you can still be Muslim, but you have to abide by the moral and ethical principles of your host country: things like non-violence, tolerance, respect for women, learning the local language and not discriminating against people outside your own community…

If you don’t like that stuff, there is a plethora of Muslim countries where you can live in.

And don’t even think about sending even a dime of the money you make “back home”. It stays in your host country or within the EU, period. When I was in The Netherlands, I got pretty riled up with Moroccans sending most of their income back “home” to buy a house, escaping taxes and over-inflating the housing market in Morocco, leaving no other choice to other Moroccans but to also leave their country in order to afford a house – and draining the Dutch economy to a point that I doubt it will ever recover…

Fortunately, over here in the US, we don’t really have much of a cultural clash. Especially since most of the Southwestern US already has a very Hispanic cultural underpinning. There is, however, also the economic problem – and it pisses me off tremendously seeing banks and services like Western Union actually making it easier for Central and South Americans help destroy the economy of both their home countries and our own by sending money “home”.

The fact that they don’t realize that “home” should be the US now is the part we should be the most scared about. “Home” should be the country you work and live in – not the one you’re accidentally were born in and decided to abandon. If you want to call a country home, have the balls to live there. If you leave, it’s no longer your “home”.

That’s why I believe that the whole “Guest Worker” program is not only stupid, it’s irresponsible. Instead, let’s make getting a Green Card a rational and speedy process for hard working people that want to call this country their home – rather than the stupid, slow, random process that it is now. Heck, let’s even give them American Citizenship – after all, once you have American Citizenship, you will be paying taxes to the IRS for the rest of your life, and that will remind you of where home is.

Sorry for the rant – this is an area very close to my heart.

[quote]hspder wrote:

So I guess what you are arguing is that there is a parallel with the current situation in the core of Europe – UK, France, Germany and Benelux – that you believe is slowly being invaded by the same Arab Muslims. Is that where you’re going with your comment?

[/quote]

Yes

[quote]hspder wrote:

Well, first problem is???.

[/quote]

Oh there are plenty of problems but dealing with these problems is preferable to ceasing to exist.