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Comment by 0x8BADF00D | Hacker News Reader

It is not politically correct to state the reasons for this. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Maya_cultur...

Unfortunately, some cultures have this as a part of their history. They need to be taught a different path.

Edit: In my other comment I was flagged, so I want to make sure I'm not misunderstood. I am not making a moral judgement here of any kind. I'm just trying to say, there are cultures out there that have no history of the Judeo-Christian faith, until much later when it was imposed by colonialists. I think this is a net benefit, because their cultural history before was to kill someone when it started raining or some other natural event.

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this is an extremely bad take.

This is one of the dumbest comments I’ve seen on this site. It’s been 500 years. 500 years ago, the catholic church was burning people at the stake for heresy and vlad tepes was impaling peasants.

I’ve spent a lot of time living with the Maya people in Guatemala. I was raised Irish catholic and they’re more catholic than my family is for sure.

The Maya human sacrifices were probably even longer ago than that.

Also, what do the Maya and Aztec atrocities have to do with Cuba and the Caribbean? The Taíno who inhabited Cuba were an Arawakan people — as far as we know totally unrelated to the Aztec and the Maya, who lived 1500 km away. This is like saying that the Lithuanians were a brutal culture because the Romans (about the same distance away) sacrificed Christians to the lions.

Yep, the Aztec might have been brutal, but its hardly like the Spanish were any less so, and for similar religion fueled reasons even.

The Spanish were, as far as we can tell, dramatically more brutal.

Not at all [1][2][3]. Why do you think the surrounding tributary city-states allied with the Spanish? Though human sacrifice was common in Mesoamerica at the time, under the Aztecs it took place at an unprecedented scale.

I'm curious, though, about why you'd make such an implausible claim without backing it up with any evidence.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/feeding-gods-hundred...

[2] https://www.history.com/news/aztec-human-sacrifice-religion

[3] https://www.ancient.eu/Aztec_Sacrifice/

Than the Aztecs who used human skulls as construction material?

You mean like https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/wamba-ossuary ?

Yes, by orders of magnitude. The Aztecs sacrificed thousands of people; the Spanish sacrificed millions.

> the Spanish sacrificed millions.

Source?

Why not trillions?

While it's true they killed a lot, like most empires 5 centuries ago, they weren't as bad as the others.

Hernan Cortes defeated the whole Aztek Empire with 600 men. How? Easy, he had multiple tribes helping him because almost everyone of them wanted the azteks gone. That means they waged war against natives and they won. It has nothing to do with sacrifices.

From a total population of around 45 million, around 95% of them died smallpox and other deadly viruses.

Cortes even married an indigenous woman and had children with her just as a lot of other conquistadores did. The Catholic Kings legalized and promoted mixed marriages almost 500 years before it was legal in the US. That's why from Argetina to Mexico you can find millions of natives, millions of mixed people and millions of europeans.

The Spanish would have been quickly squashed all the way to the sea were it not for essentially every other native group allying with them against the Aztecs because of the brutal treatment they suffered since the rise of the Aztecs.

Once the Spanish had a foothold, European diseases did most of the killing.

Hernan Cortes had around 600 men. They had no chance against an empire like the Aztec. Fortunately for him other tribes wanted to see the tyrannical Aztecs gone.

Some people think he arrived there with laser rifles and nuclear bombs to wipe out and entire empire.

The propaganda around this is strong I guess.

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