They did sow the seeds for the corruption that is endemic in all of Latin America.
Bribery is expected.
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miscegenation | - noun
the interbreeding of people considered to be of different racial types.
The destruction of the Mayan codices was unforgivable, though. It was the triumph of ignorance over history.
There is a lot of good information in the article, but when I read about the superior behavior of the Spaniards vs British North America, I have to ask: Where did it lead? Why is British North America prosperous while the rest of the Americas are so depressed?
If as Winston Churchill once said, “History is written by the victors.”, then we are in trouble. The left through the press and Hollywood has been writing and distorting the history accepted as truth by most since the beginning of the cold war.
I believe there is a theory that between the Vikings visit and the Pilgrims arriving, the north american continent was devastated by a plague that may have wiped out as much as 90% of the indigenous population. There are records from European visitors that describe city like areas with cultivated parks, etc.
It may explain why the Viking and earlier records describe a formidable force to contend with, while by the time the Pilgrims got here, the Indians were a pushover.
And if that is actually true, it’s possible that the Vikings brought that plague with them. Just a thought.
So Cortes and Pizarro who wiped out the Aztecs and Incas hailed from England. Who knew?!
The mass killing was by microbes, and the propagation did not depend on infected blankets or similar, just normal human-human transmission.
Never mind that — the narrative uber alles.
Interesting.
All I hear is that Americans set out to destroy the indians. I never hear about the Spanish.
Explain that to the Maya!
Fascinating read! Thanks for posting!
Also look at the religious practices of the Indigenous people. The pyramids flowed red with the blood of human sacrifices.
It’s great looking back at Indigenous people groups as peaceful, and living in a balance with nature, but that is far from the truth.
Genocide was practiced by the Indians and their conquers alike. It all had to do with local means of power and subjugation be it by the Indians (the were brutal in the extreme) or the Spanish.
This is nothing new and has been the history of he world.
PS
English, Dutch and Portuguese slavers did not run through the jungle and veld looking for slaves. The went to ports on West Africa and bought them from black men that had enslaved other tribes for sale. I worked out of Escravos in Nigeria in my oil field days. The translation of Escrovos into English is slave.
The slave trade was betwween white men and black men. It is that simple.
Although the Spanish did not specifically intend to exterminate the native peoples, their conquests, European diseases and slavery did take a heavy toll. Go to Latin America today and you will find many people of mixed African ancestry because the Spanish and Portuguese imported more African slaves to the New World than the English ever did. The “Indians” could not survive the harsh slavery they were subjected to; thus the import of African slaves. The importation of disease was not a one-way street- the Europeans caught syphilis from the Indians.