Posted on 08/22/2019 7:27:19 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
* Search and Destroy *
Yeah they were so altruistic :)
Listen I don’t give a sh.t. really. that they slaughtered the South Americans.
But to present them as saviors is REALLY a stretch.
They went for $$ and killed anyone that didn’t help them find it. And a whole lot of other people too.
Mel Gibson said that his movie “Apocalypto” was mild by comparison to the reality. No one was skinned alive in it, no children murdered, etc.
To the KNISH ping list. Well worth reading.
The Aztec cult of human sacrifice lives on in the glitterati of today.
From what I understand Cortez was a butcher.
Pucker factor meter was no doubt pegged for the Spaniards
Another beautiful and harmonious way of life, an unequaled culture, prestigious and enterprising. And the horrible Catholic Church sends its minions over there to wipe it from the face of the Earth!
Cortez was a piker compared to Pizzaro.
The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico by Bernal Diaz, a review. From the review:
The Diaz account is the best history book that I have read. It has all the advantage of a first person account and reads like a well written adventure novel.
The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico by Bernal Diaz del Castillo is the only extant first person account of the campaign under the command of Hernando Cortez from 1519 to 1520. The campaign resulted in the discovery and conquest of the Aztec civilization in Mexico.
Cortez himself wrote five long letters to Carlos V in Spain. Parts of them are included in this edition to help explain the narrative. But Cortez' letters were essentially reports of a Conquistador commander seeking favor, and explaining his actions, which were mostly extralegal.
The entire Conquest was a massive verification of the adage that “It is easier to obtain forgiveness than permission.”
Bernal Diaz' account is a first person narrative of the entire campaign, with the amazing detail of a foot soldier who is vitally interested in food, women, weapons, and gold. He includes accounts of two separate expeditions before Cortez.
Bernal Diaz made extensive remarks on the use of firearms in his narrative. The initial numbers were tiny, but contributed significantly to the success of the conquest. Of the initial 400 to 500 men under the command of Cortez, there were 16 with horses, 13 with individual guns, four small cannon, “some brass guns” (more cannon), and 32 crossbowmen. The 13 personal guns were almost certainly arquebuses, the first really practical personal gun, with early matchlocks. Diaz mentions “much powder and ball”.
In the end. Cortez’ invasion, unwittingly, brought a far worse fate. For what ultimately defeated the Aztecs (and allowed Cortez to finally capture Tenochtitlan), was the plague of European diseases that the Spaniards unknowingly brought. And it spared no one among his allies. It is estimated that, in the end, 90% of the American Indian population of the New World (NINETY - you read that right) was wiped out by these diseases.
This is why, incidentally, when the English colonists arrived in numbers on the East Coast, they found comparatively few Indian tribes where stories of a few earlier expeditions talked of thriving cultures - the plagues brought by those initial explorers had, within a couple of decades, wiped them out.
BFL
Painting by Spanaird who was on-the-scene .
Painting by Aztecs on side of Temple, early 1500s.
American academia says the same about Columbus. I think they're full of crap myself.
Ah, a little Leyenda Negra for breakfast. Curiously enough, the major take-over activity of the Spanish seems to have been marrying the Indians after they had been Christianized, as you can see from the large mixed race population of Latin America. This was not true of the English population or their heirs, who managed to either kill or drive out almost all of the indigenous population from the areas where they settled. In the 18th century British colonists from Georgia and South Carolina wiped out the peaceful Franciscan Indian missions of Florida and Georgia, killing or enslaving thousands of Indians. The British settlers were angry at the Spanish because escaped slaves could gain their freedom if they crossed the border into Spanish Florida.
p
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