As a partial antidote to the NYT's "1619 Project" (which attempts to portray everything exceptional about America as a product of slavery, in order to de-legitimize America as a whole), The Federalist has published an article called "
The 1519 Project: How Early Spanish Explorers Took Down A Mass-Murdering Indigenous Cult."
The Aztecs brutal system depended on a steady supply of prisoners of war and human children collected from the empire’s subjects as “taxes.” The scale of the murder one could find in just a single outlying Aztec city was astounding. Abbot relays, “they witnessed the most appalling indications of the horrid atrocities of pagan idolatry. They found, piled in order, as they judged, one hundred thousand skulls of human victims who had been offered in sacrifice to their gods.”...
Cortez ended the grotesque practice of human sacrifice and, according to Abbott, “treated the vanquished natives with great courtesy and kindness.”
Cortez was no saint. He lusted after women, gold, and adventure—so much he missed his first chance at battle due to injuries sustained after falling from a great height trying to sneak into the bedroom of a villager’s daughter. As Abbott concedes, his “love of plunder was a latent motive omnipotent in his soul, and he saw undreamed of wealth lavishly spread before him.”
Cortez will never satisfy a 21st century standard of human rights, and many not even be an exemplary leader. Nor did he set out to liberate anyone. Yet, regardless of his motives in Mexico, the outcome must be conceded: Cortez toppled a mass-murdering cult with the assistance of the oppressed.
Chesterton wrote of this moral conflict in
The Everlasting Man.
[T]here are the remains of civilizations in Mexico and South America and other places, some of them apparently so high in civilization as to have reached the most refined forms of devil-worship.
Now it is very right to rebuke our own race or religion for falling short of our own standards and ideals.... There is a very real sense in which the Christian is worse than the heathen, the Spaniard worse than the Red Indian, or even the Roman potentially worse than the Carthaginian. But there is only one sense in which he is worse; and that is not in being positively worse. The Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better.
I wonder how well that idea will hold up to the examination it's being put to today.
3 comments:
Cortez had Indian allies, who would have not allied themselves with the Spanish unless they had a strong dislike for the Aztecs.
Battle of Tenochtitlan,
Aztecs fled the city as the Spanish forces continued to attack the city even after the surrender, slaughtering thousands of the remaining population and looting the city.[8] As this practice was generally not done in European warfare, it suggests that Cortes’s Indian allies had more power over him than he suggested.....
It is well accepted that Cortes’s Indian allies, which may have numbered as many as 200,000, were responsible for his success, though their aid was virtually unacknowledged and they derived little benefit. As there were several major allied groups, no one in particular was able to take power, and the person who benefited was Cortes.
Interesting that our friend AOC has Cortes as a surname. Hija del Conquistador?
(daughter of the conqueror)
Cortes was a pretty stand-up guy, an effective and charismatic leader with fervent allies even among the natives, but his contemporaries and successors included some real slugs. The leadership in Cuba were a lot of venal, mean-spirited incompetents who were as ready to stab Cortes in the back as to exterminate the native population, though they weren't above criticizing Cortes for his cruelty, either. The crown mostly thought pretty well of Cortes but never quite trusted him not to set up a competing empire, so it was always sending over audencias and viceroys to rein him in, few of whom measured up to his standards of honor. Especially when he had to be absent in South America or Spain, hey treated the natives and the Cortes-affiliated conquerors alike with cruelty and disdain. Cortes would slaughter natives without mercy when he felt he had to, and he'd take any gold that wasn't nailed down fast enough, but some of his successors robbed the Mexicans blind and murdered them almost at random, or even in a deliberate attempt to foment rebellion so they could take slaves as part of a pacification program. The Church kept sending people out who were supposed to ameliorate conditions. Some of them were heroic in their attempts, while others joined the rob-them-blind-and-murder them culture.
Cortes made many allies who thought he must be an improvement over the Aztecs, which was true enough as far as it went, but the result was almost equally catastrophic for all of the New Spain cultures before many years had passed. Not that the result would have been any better for the Europeans if the Aztecs had been in a position to get the upper hand. Those were cruel, bloodthirsty times. I'm not convinced our time would be materially different if we felt equally at risk. The urge to enslave each other is never buried as deep as we'd like to think. We just stop thinking about it quite as much as soon as we all have enough to eat for a while.
Chesterton's opinion will not be tested, because it will not be noticed. The educated people in the media no longer have that knowledge, they only have knowledge in service of the Party.
The Spanish largely won through disease, over time. Even if they had fought no battles and plundered no cities, the result would likely have been similar.
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