Cultural relativism, the belief that all cultures are equal is one of the most pernicious lies that it was ever forced upon us. Western civilization has led to the thriving of the planet like unseen, ever before. I’m glad the Aztecs were annihilated. Sweet justice.
We aren’t talking about modern times here-cultural relativism didn’t exist as a term or even a concept. It does not even apply to those times-the political and cultural goings-on were not the same as now-nobody’s culture was even considered-only taking other people’s stuff by military conquest, getting some slaves, territory and turning a nice profit by exploiting the natural resources and shipping them over to Europe to sell, etc, etc-religious conversion was just another tool to do that-apples and oranges.
Western civilization, Asian civilization, etc was not above genocide for fun and profit back then-especially the Spaniards-they’d already been torturing and killing anyone who rebelled in Spain since they became part of the Roman Empire over 1000 years before.
The Aztecs weren’t all annihilated, either-the smart ones converted, Cortez’s mistress founded a convent, and many people went back to where they came from in the 1st place a few hundred years before-to the American SW and their Apache cousins-they share DNA and the same language group...
When I was in Mexico in the late 1950s, there were 1/2 million Aztec language Nahuatl speakers who probably did not speak Spanish.