“With Charles VIII’s siege of Naples, not one scourge but two entered Italy. Before 1494, Syphilis probably did not exist in Europe; returnees from Columbus’ first voyage from America, who had contracted the disease in America, very likely introduced the disease to Spain. Spanish mercenaries at the siege of Naples (1494-5) suffered an epidemic that almost certainly syphilis , whence it spread throughout the continent. As the plague spread, the French called it ‘Neapolitan disease’, while Neapolitans preferred to call it ‘the French disease’.” —Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States – AD 990-1992 , 1992, p. 77 “A number of scholars have commented on how diseases ‘becomes adjectival’ since the late 1980s when Susan Sontag first highlighted how epidemics become a proxy for social disorder when metaphors are applied to them and ‘the horror of the disease is imposed on other things’. More recently, in a book that examined the legacies of plague in literature, theory and film,
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51