Yeah, you can’t get much more trollish than this:
One of the greatest triumphs in the history of western civilization, by one of history’s greatest men https://t.co/XO4eYAp4UB
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) August 14, 2023
But is he right? No, but it is a bit of a useful antidote to some of the nonsense we have been hearing for a while about Native Americans. For a long time, it is fair to say Native Americans were stereotyped as nothing but savages. This wasn’t true and it motivated a lot of pretty evil behavior, so the pendulum swung the other way, so people would pretend that they were in fact angels, deeply in touch with the land and peaceful, and other nonsense. Now, it seems the pendulum is finding its way more toward a ‘middle’ of recognizing that the Native Americans were simply human. This meant they were not peaceful, but typically no more warlike than other races. Some were very sophisticated, some were not, some were good but, occasionally, some were downright evil.
And the Spanish of that era were kind of the worst people to come to run into them. Before the conquistadors, there was the Reconquista of Spain, where native Spaniards fought their own war against foreign invaders in the form of the Moors and, yes, there was a racial component to their war, trying to drive out their dark-skinned enemies. We don’t say this to say that the cause was wholly unjust, but it was one that bigots glommed onto. The same Spanish regime, for instance, told every Jew in their country to leave. And in an act of bad irony, they became what they were previously rebelling against, when they invaded the native territories of others in America.
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But, as we said, Native Americans could be as evil as any other group and, holy crap, the Aztecs of that era were evil. For instance, there is a story the Aztecs told of one skirmish between the Aztecs and another tribe. It started when they offered to have a local princess from another tribe marry into their tribe. This is normally a way that alliances are made but the Aztecs had other ideas. Instead of anything you would normally call a marriage, they sacrificed her to the god of fertility. Then, when the bride’s father came to the village to celebrate the marriage, he found one of their priests dancing with his daughter’s skin on his body. This of course led to war and for the Aztecs to be driven from their home, which somehow didn’t teach them to cut that kind of crap out. The story is captured pretty well early on in this documentary series:
According to a website called ‘Aztecs at Mexicolore,’ this story is a ‘combination of legend and history.’ Even if the story was wholly made up, they told each other this story as an example of good conduct and it was not exactly out of character considering the scale of human sacrifice we saw in the Aztec Empire.
And of course, it is fair to point out that the Aztecs believed as a matter of faith that if they didn’t carry out these sacrifices the world would literally end. But this author still blames them for lacking the sense to see this as cultish nonsense. Indeed, part of the reason why the Aztecs fell so quickly was because they were killing so many people from other tribes, that the other tribes were completely sick of their rule and chose to side with the Spanish.
But the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend, and the precedent that Cortes set there was repeated throughout America and indeed the world. The Aztecs largely had it coming. The rest of the tribes didn’t.
In any case, both Walsh and the person he quoted, Steve Cortes, got reactions:
School doesn’t teach about this.
— Carolina. (@realCarola2Hope) August 14, 2023
Bet he could awnser "what is a women"
— TJay (@xx1tjx) August 14, 2023
Honest question. How do we really know who the good guys were in this conflict? My whole life I thought the USA were always the good guys. I now know that that’s not always true. History is written by the victors and all that🤷🏻♂️
— Hoger (@jiujitsyou) August 14, 2023
We think he is at least partially joking but we think it is a bit like Iran versus Iraq back in the day: You wish somehow they could both lose.
Honest question -why is this one of the greatest triumphs? “It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?” -Norm MacDonald
— Petr Klima’s Helmet (@PetrKlimaHelmet) August 14, 2023
Aztec supremacists couldn't handle diversity, and lost. Europeans brought new food and music.
— Alexander Croft (@alex_crofter) August 14, 2023
— Julian (@Beastie_Mode) August 14, 2023
Before people get all uppity on this, consider that the majority of Mexicans today are descended from the Spanish. Your people felt the wrath of the empire, but you are also the result of those that committed the acts.
— Jay (@Jay71757634) August 14, 2023
Maybe the most incredible military achievement of all time. The Aztecs were brutal heathens who forced their subjugated tribes to give up their children for human sacrifice. They sacrificed some 250,O00 people per year. They were also cannibals.
— ANUBIS OF THE DEEP (@Anonymousman62) August 14, 2023
He could not have done it without alliances with the subjugated tribes who hated the Aztecs.
— 🐊Ron2024 (@voterondumpdon) August 14, 2023
500 men and smallpox..
— John the Alchemist (@johnlopez2nd) August 14, 2023
True, European diseases also contributed. Further, Montezuma was slow to respond to the threat posed by the Spaniards because of the weird coincidence that Cortes appeared right when Quetzalcoatl was supposed to return from the East according to the Mayans and matched the general description of the god in appearance. It’s an overworn cliché to call something ‘the perfect storm,’ but it really is the best metaphor for what happened there. Again, the Aztec empire was evil and taking them down was good, but Cortes was not a good man, and bad things flowed from what he did, there. History doesn't always divide up neatly into good guys versus bad guys. Sometimes it is bad guys versus worse guys.
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