Thread by @PeterGelderloos

#OtD in 1209, the Albigensian Crusade kicked off with the massacre of Béziers, in which Catholic troops slaughtered 10-20,000 Cathars, Waldensians, Jews, and Catholics who had refused to abandon them.
The commander Amalric ordered, "Kill them all; God will know his own."
THREAD!

This episode tells us so much about the early roots of whiteness, the modern state, and the patriarchal renaissance.
Many of the earliest crusades took place in what would become Europe against heretical Christians, Muslims, and pagan lower classes who had thrown off Christianity

(like the earlier Wendish Crusade). They were a proactive, strategic campaign by the Vatican and local aristocrats to revive the dream of the Roman state on a foundation of ideological unity. State formation and centralized Christianity went hand in hand.

Kings and the military

aristocracy who distrusted the Church and didn't care much for theology fully embraced the Crusades as the perfect vehicle for restoring state power. Through the Albigensian Crusade, the French monarch was able to assert his control over Languedoc, for example.

These wars allowed the growing aristocracy to conquer more lands and submit a terrorized populace to a less favorable balance of power, eventually opening the way for absolutist serfdom and the appropriation of the commons.

They also expanded and hardened a mercenary class

who were the core nucleus of the future white race. Over about five hundred years, a broad social caste was almost continuously utilized to murder and mutiliate the enemies of Church and State.

These fully dehumanized warriors, ranging from rich to poor, were bonded by their immersion in trauma and their strategic allegiance to centralized power.

The absolute cruelty that would be unleashed on the Americas, Africa, Asia, & Australia was cultivated through centuries of attempted political-ideological centralization in Europe.

To be clear, this was not the first time in world history such a murderous warrior class existed

but it is a distinct phenomenon related to state formation that is not universal throughout human history.

The massacre of Catholics alongside Cathars and Jews also broadcast a key feature of incipient whiteness:

those who stand beside the Other until the bitter end will also become the Other, and will be annihilated. (Being Christian, "a believer", was a forerunner to being white.)

This warfare also intensified an exlusively male sphere of power in society, spreading the techniques of a patriarchal rebirth that would eventually break the widespread gender freedoms that flourished after the collapse of Rome.

The targets of the earlier wars on heresy were disproportionately men, as the Church only wanted to recognize men as the protagonists of history. However, later phases of the war (the Witch Burnings) disproportionately targeted women

(or underscored the gender noncomformity of male victims). This reflects the realization of a growing but desperate State that these witches played a vital role in preserving and spreading the culture and memory of resistance it had been unable to crush.

Many witches were also the widows or family members of peasants killed in uprisings a generation earlier. They were the survivors, the veterans, the carriers of memory.

We can learn several important lessons for struggles today from this history.
*Historical memory is one of the most vital elements of any struggle or movement that wishes to survive through time.
*That memory tells us that the current system was born out of the utmost brutality.

*This system only engages in dialogue on a field of ashes and blood. First it imposes its world through annihilating force, then it integrates the survivors through dialogue
*It is impossible to understand capitalism & the State without centering colonialism/creation of whiteness

*Though capitalism today can be analyzed as a machine that runs according to its own logic, the foundation & raw materials for capitalism were created through proactive interventions by states pursuing an expansive imaginary.
We can identify continuing such interventions today.