To all my freeper brothers and sisters...
None of the cannibal/murder judeo/Christian value relativism is relevant to the study of Maya/Aztec/mezo-american history.
I’m Hispanic and a Catholic.
The European migration to North America resulted in the murder and unnecessary deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings.
That number is at least 100x the number of deaths the mezo-american societies were even capable of inflicting upon each other.
Please do your own research, and come to your own conclusions as to the morality of colonial Christians compared to native Americans.
The fact that Aztecs murdered one another, does nothing to excuse European Christians murdering native Americans by the tens of millions.
Please understand, it’s okay to kill in defense of your own life when threatened.
It’s not okay to horrifically, savagely, and systematically murder hundreds of millions of humans, because they don’t have the same value system you have.
I’m proud to have significant native American ancestry, AND proud to have European ancestry.
Please don’t look back at this ancient history, and choose sides.
The only winners of that period in history were the survivors.
Thanks for reading.
I’ll step off my soapbox now.
Maybe Mexico should bring this up with Spain. Stop putting the blame on us. Better yet ask Spain for a few billion every year.
No one is ‘’native’’ to the North American Continent. The ‘’natives’’ came from the steppes of Central Asia.
Cannibals bad. Conquistadors heroes. Stopping the aztec and Mayans was justified.
The tribes in the Americas were not united. The European settlers were. The cultures were fundamentally different and incompatible, quite apart from actual warfare.
Even among the less warlike, more agrarian tribal cultures, the lack of understanding about crop rotation apparently doomed them. Advanced localized civilizations, such as in Ohio (Cahokia), were long dead by the time the European settlers arrived, replaced by much more primitive ones.
I do not extol murder of anyone by anyone, in particular not the murder of children in ritual sacrifice.
But the descendants of the Europeans have devolved to that level now in the form of abortion - so I think this decadent culture is entering its last stages as well.
P.S.
Not all European enclaves were the same, any more than all American tribes were the same. The Anglo settlers were far less involved in the kind of butchery you chronicle than the Spanish and related. I share with many others the sense of ironic wonder that so many of the descendants of American Tribes claim Spanish with pride, and reject English, considering that fact.
The Romans destroyed Carthage. Carthage sacrificed children to Molech there. It was one of the things that horrified the Romans.
The Aztecs had an absolutely evil religious philosophy undergirding their society and all inhabitants were saturated in that philosophy from the least to the greatest of them. It needed to be destroyed!
Western diseases killed tens of millions, not Cortez and the like. Not even sure where you get hundreds of millions.
Why? How is someone proud of something they have no control over? I am proud of the the things I have done and the people I have helped. But I do not boast of those things, and certainly not of things I can not take credit for.
I'd like to know where you got your "facts".
There were not that many people here.
The Americas had only started being populated 10-15,000 years ago.
The vast majority of Native deaths were attributible to Old World diseases they had no immunity to, and no, the diseases weren't introduced on purpose.
It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that germ theory of disease was accepted.
I think you are overstating the deaths of indigenous American peoples caused deliberately by Europeans.
If Europeans & Amerinds had met and thrown rose petals at each other the death rate wouldn’t have changed much. The prime killer was European disease and the lack of immunity that Amerinds had for it. I have read its estimated that 80%-90% of the Massachusetts coastal tribes that were available to meet the Pilgrims were dead by the time the Pilgrims got there. This was due to a few interactions with fur traders & probably Basque Cod fishermen who had a small pox infected crewman. There were no great battles or massive acts of forced religious conversion to cause these casualties probably nothing much more then a handshake & a sneeze. When Pizarro showed up at the Inca doorstep the Inca had not only undergone a brutal civil war between rival factions but had suffered the effects of a devastating plague - believed again to be smallpox. Probably picked up from the odd shipwrecked Spaniard or two. A more modern example is the devastation done to the native Hawaiian population by common European respiratory diseases some say it was “the common cold”.
In the early 1700’s, the Cheyenne took the Black Hills from the Kiowa.
In 1776 the Lakota Sioux defeated the Cheyenne in war and took the Black Hills from them.
About 100 years later the US did the same to the Sioux.
Why does the first conquest confer legitimate title and the second doesn’t?
And we must remember that the Spanish Inquisition was alive and active during this period and for centuries afterwards. I don’t know, which would you prefer, having your heart cut out or being burned alive? I suspect the former if I had a choice.
Recent research suggests that the Indians of the americas mostly died of diseases from Europe Africa and the Middle east that were brought over by the europeans. The diseases typically went ahead of the Europeans so the Indians would be dead before the Europeans even arrived in the area.
Two recent eye opening books on the subject will change the way you see the world. One is 1493 which deals with the new world after columus arrived. The other is 1491 which discusses pre columbian America. Both books are written by Charles Mann. He basically summarizes all the archaeological and anthropological work of the last 40 years.