Was Cortez wrong in killing Aztec's?

The Aztecs were the American equivalent of ISIS

Genociding anyone is wrong. You don't punish an entire population.

The Spaniards were far more intolerant actually and far more damaging to the people in the Americas than the Aztecs ever could be.

The Spanish are the United States, drone striking ISIS from above with some civilian casualties.

The Aztecs are ISIS. Sacrificing people in gruesome ways for their religion.

Was it necessary to use violence to stop the sacrifice? In other words: couldn't it been done differently?
Next: was this really the reason the Spaniards killed the Aztecs or was it afterward rationalization of the deeds?
Also: was the almost complete erasure of the culture necessary?

Define "wrong".

If Cortez didn't do it someone else would. Perhaps Cortez was less vicious than the average conquistador. He was a rebel who defied the governor, had a qt native gf and allied with the Tlaxcalans. His regime was autocratic but no different from anywhere else in the world or before the Spanish arrived and there was not much he could do about that without being overthrown.

Except the Aztecs didn't go around murdering and enslaving half the continent like the Spaniards. And the human sacrifice thing was practiced by the enemies of the Aztecs too. Also I don't see how it's that bad compared to the things happening in Europe at the time.

subtle

>conquering another empire
It's not 'right', but it's basically just doing what everyone else did, including the Aztecs.

>mass-killing of civilian populations, enslavement of survivors, book burning, near-complete eradication of native culture
That's the real problem. Generally when empires conquered other civilizations, they might adopt the conquered civilization's culture, or reduce the native culture's status, maybe adopt some parts of it while creating a new culture, while the native population was usually incorporated into a new order that might be an improvement or decline from the past (usually a mix of both), but wouldn't wipe them out. Civilizations weren't just wiped out; they might subjugated or transformed, but it was generally a gradual and incomplete thing. Look at any culture conquered by Muslims for example and you'll find pre-Islamic culture everywhere. The Romans conquered and raped Judah, to some extent even tried to demolish its culture, and ended yet up converting to a Jewish sect. What happened in the Americas was unique, only really comparable with the likes of the early Mongols. Native customs might have continued at a lower level of society, and in some areas the Spanish adopted native institutions if they could be used to exploit the native population (like the Inca mit'a, a labour tax turned into virtual chattel slavery by the Spanish), but the Andean and Mesoamerican high civilizations which had developed over the previous two or three thousand years were pretty much wiped out. It's not that the Spanish were especially evil or anything, in fact with the likes of the New Laws they were clearly interested in native well-being, but the conquistadors themselves were just your usual band of opportunistic scum, akin to the Huns or Mongols.

>but it was a different time, you can't judge them by modern different standards
The conquistadors utterly disgusted their contemporaries, including the Spanish crown.

No

yes they did

they got their supply of humans for sacrificing from neighbouring kingdoms

Cortez leveraged this gain manpower against the aztec

killing bourgeois leaders is never wrong

erasing an entire continent's culture and history by razing their cities and burning their books is

this user is more eloquent than me

Why do people get so upset about what happened to the natives? It's obviously and undoubtedly tragic, but that's what happens to conquered peoples, it's happened throughout history. What do people expect? Everybody place nice?

I also have suspicions that people nowadays are playing down the fact that there were many varying degrees of civility throughout the different native peoples. Many were straight up savage

The Aztecs were not in South America, or the Caribbean or lower Central America. They only stook to Mesoamerica, and even then they were not the only conquerors in that area. The Purepecha, to the west, the Kiche in the Southeest and Pipil further east all were in the process of subjucating many people. The Spaniards by contrast were like a plague literally and figuretively across much the entire continent. Those who joined the Spaniards practiced human sacrifice as well. The reason they all ganged up on the Aztecs were to get a piece of the pie and hopefully be liberated from the heavy tribute the Aztecs imposed on their conquered cities. Ironically siding with the Spaniards, they found themselves paying them tribute and forcing a change in their religion and much of the high culture was torn apart. Leaving only fragments of the precolumbian civilization which survived by small communities. Those who were more isolated got lucky and preserved their culture longer like the Lacandon and Wixarika. Others like the Mapuche had to hold them off, and managed to keep their independence for some time.

*stuck

No, indians deserved it

Veeky Forums was the Veeky Forums equivalent of isis

>but that's what happens to conquered peoples, it's happened throughout history
That's wrong though, see . Conquered populations were rarely subjected to the same degree of violence and exploitation that native Americans were (except maybe under the likes of the Mongols and other steppe invaders), nor were entire civilizations just wiped off the face of the Earth. History's never nice, but it's rarely as awful as what you have in the early Spanish Americas.

The Spanish weren't uniquely brutal, other civilized cultures like the Romans, the Turks or the Chinese could be equally bad. But in conquering the Americas the conquistadors were given a unique opportunity to exact that brutality without consequence, while earlier empire's needed to limit their cruelty to some extent in order maintain order, economic prosperity and ideological legitimacy. Many other cultures would have been just as bad in the Americas if not worse, but that hardly makes the conquistadors any better.

That's interesting. So to what degree do plagues/diseases play into this? I always see clickbait shit talking about how 99% of natives were killed and it's usually implied to be as a result from europeans directly.

So if contact between the two civilizations is inevitable, and the spread of disease is largely unintentional (I'm aware there were specific incidents of intentional usage), how "wrong" were conquistadors and colonists and can they be truly blamed for "genocide"?

Read 1491 and 1493 my man. Local library should have them.

Hi OP here sorry for the confusion this was late at night. I asked if the Aztec's were mighty and I would kill them too as they are a threat to the conquest of Mexico.

Is Mann legit?
I've heard that Jared Diamond is a meme, for example

colonizers and the gov'ts that replaced them explicitly tried to exterminate all natives

setting aside that it might have not been unintentional that disease was spread (especially w the Spanish, as they piled the victims of small pox into the cities aqueducts), Europeans typically had plans to eliminate native populations systematically by relocation, starvation, or murder.

so, they were wrong in the fullest sense of the word. they set out to fully erase a people from the face of the earth with some of the most disturbing methods ever committed. and what's worse is a lot of it continued until very recently... (some places it's still happening)

we even had our own concentration camps up here in canada called "residential schools".

I´ve only heard positive reactions about it here on his.
You can always ask r historians if you are not sure.

The aztecs were assholes and the other tribes hated them. Cortez would have gotten owned if it wasn't for the tribes that helped him.

Nice propaganda, you forgot the part where they have to hold the sacrificial victim down by the neck to prevent them from struggling, or the dismembered limbs of sacrificial children that the priest would be eating.

The Aztec """religion""" was an abomination to civilized peoples and the Spanish were right to destroy it

You're painting with a broad brush there, leaf.

In certain areas there was deliberate genocide, but in most areas they just used the natives as slave labor, who then died due to overworking and disease. They did this until they ran out, and then started importing Africans, which was how that form of slavery began. They certainly weren't kind, but deliberately trying to kill off your entire work force is just a silly accusation.

they would if they could

The Aztecs were douchebags. They went around kidnapping people so they could brutally murder them for their insane religion. They got a taste of their own medicine.

While it's obvious that the initial amerindian deaths caused by the spread of diseases by europeans wasn't really their fault, as they wouldn't have known how much more vulnerable the natives were to euro diseases, how long did it actually take them to figure it out?
I don't really know anything about this subject so this is only a guess that could be complete bullshit for all I know, but I can't imagine it would've taken them that long.

Once they did know, it gets a lot harder to justify further exploration and expansion, I think. If you know the population of the places you're expanding into are much more susceptible to the diseases you'll bring than you are, you can't really claim that moving there is a completely innocent act just so long as you're peaceful or at least not excessively cruel.

The Spaniards were burning people at the stake and flogging themselves at the same time out of the fear of darkness, user.

While the Aztecs were ripping people's hearts out for the sun.