I think it's also worth keeping in mind that Cortez and those who got off his ships would've been rightly disturbed by the scale of human sacrifice and savagery displayed by the Aztecs. That doesn't justify enslavement, certainly, but their mindset would've been one of fear and defense and that's totally understandable to me.
And, a generation later, their domination of the area firmly established and plainly evident, what then was their mindset? Was it their "fear" and "defensiveness" that led them to continue wholesale rape and slaughter across Central America?
The Europeans did not remotely come close to killing Central and South Americans at the rate they killed themselves, moreover, the term 'rape' is not a useful pejorative, as there were no real natural resources of value that were removed from that area that would have affected the ability of the aboriginals to live.
Gold was removed in vast quantities, but has only a commercial value to those who have ascribed to it such arbitrary value. Otherwise it's just a pretty rock.
Of course - the masses who died from imported disease notwithstanding.
Well ... among the relatively small number of Europeans there around about that time, there probably was rape, which is bad; though you do realize that you're making this point in an article that is literally about the total, systematic and full cultural integration of mass slavery, mass murder, mass infanticide etc. by one group of aboriginals of their immediate aboriginal neighbours, on a scale approaching modern holocaust?
In fact, given > 100 000 skulls in 'one find', and we know this behaviour was common in the region over time, and that certainly not all skulls were preserved ... we're talking easily into the millions of murders, putting this 'on par' with the holocaust. Added the fact this was hundreds of years ago with a smaller population base than modern Europe, in relative terms, this cultural mass murder surpasses the holocaust in relative terms. And done on the basis of 'religion' to boot ...
No, I think you've lost the plot of this subthread. I'm not making a comparative argument about which civilization is better. I'm saying that Cortes didn't rescue Central America so much as perpetrate a genocide on it. We're talking about a movie, for what it's worth.
No, we're talking about historical (i.e. real) Cortez, which is evident from your very own reference to his 'rape' which has nothing to do with the film 'Apocalypto'.
The reference to 'rape' I interpreted metaphorically, and you indicated you meant it literally - which I don't think applies given the historical facts of Aztecs, Cortez et. al. in real history ... whereas one could arguably use the 'rape' in the metaphorical sense and it would in fact apply within reason, at least as a creative description.
Also, nobody has suggested Cortez was a great dude, rather, that he wasn't part of a 'death cult' that pulled the beating hearts out of hundreds of thousands of slaves, women, and children, and inserted straws for the gods to drink blood, skinned them alive and wore their skin for good luck etc. ... which is altogether another level of crazy. It requires a hefty dose of moral equivalence to even try to equate regular colonization/conquest, which is the most common type of geopolitical activity in history by far, with the 'death cult' Aztec stuff, which doesn't really seem to have any real historical parallel.
You see the cliff your argument is falling off of, right? "The most common type of geopolitical activity in history by far". My argument doesn't require me to somehow justify human sacrifice, but yours has taken you to the brink of rationalizing the genocide perpetrated by Cortés.
Being enslaved and raped is bad, but not quite as bad as being enslaved, raped, and also being used as a source of meat.
I think it was one of Neal Stephenson's characters who observed that it really brought into perspective what assholes the Aztecs were when you consider that bringing in the Spanish Inquisition was actually an improvement, vis-a-vis the cruelty of the dominant religion.
The Inquisitors tortured their victims, true enough, but they didn't eat them.
In addition to the 'not even comparable' level of atrocity, the scale of the direct victims of the Inquisition also paled in comparison to the full and complete systematic mass murder of the Aztec rituals.
At very least the eradication of the craziest death cult in history was a bonus for everyone.
No, they did not. Illness and plague wiped out most of South and Central America.
Wars of conquest did not kill remotely as many in comparison.
Moreover, were the Aztecs to have a land boundary to Spain, and were they able to defeat them, the Aztecs would have had no problem slicing up Spaniards and eating their beating hearts for dinner as well.
