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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

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This is true. People imagine the Spanish conquistadors destroying the Aztec empire, but really it was something like 700 Spaniards + 100,000 pissed off Aztec-neighbors who destroyed it. The Spaniards, as far as I know, tried to actually stop the raping and pillaging of Tenochtitlan but didn't have much luck in that regard.

People call anything and everything "Nazi" in this day and age, but in this case it might be somewhat of a relevant comparison. We're not talking about the Na'vi here: the Aztec were some brutally cruel people.

For example, it was a common practice for the Aztecs to engage in ritualistic wars against their smaller neighbors specifically to abduct captives for use in human sacrifice.

Not to whatabout anybody, but a comparison of murder rates by the Aztecs to the murders of supposed witches by the Franciscan and, particularly, Dominican Inquisitions does not show Europeans in a favorable light. But at least Europeans tortured their victims first. I think the Aztecs preferred to feed and drug them, instead.

Still, if I were looking to pre-contact America for life lessons, I would look at some more northerly tribes, first. But we don't know as much about what they thought.

Your comparison is factually incorrect.

The documented death rate of the inquisitions is on the order of 4500 people over 400 years [1]. That’s a rate of 11 people per year.

Aztec sacrifice estimates are on the scale of 20,000 to 250,000 per year. [2]

In actual fact, the Aztecs are in a far worse light than the Dominicans and Franciscans. The Nazi comparison is valid. There’s no society on earth that would end innocent life on that scale for another 500 years.

[1]: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/39443/what-was-t...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...

You are perhaps unfamiliar with the quote translated, "Kill them all. God will know his own."

The Albigensians alone numbered more than 4500.

So if Hitler liked apples you wouldn't eat any?

IMHO people / cultures / civilizations aren't all bad or all good, there's always something to learn about them.

If they are not all bad or good are they all the same ( that is to say composed of equal number and value of good and bad parts) that seems unlikely to be the case and would need some theory other than just answering yes so I suppose we will say no.

If people / cultures / civilizations vary in the level of goodness and badness in them then it follows that there should be a distribution of societies that are significantly more good than bad, societies that are average, and societies that are significantly more bad than good.

If a society is significantly more bad than good it can be true that you could still find something good in them but it becomes questionable if it is worth an individual to study the society to extract this good part from all the bad.

Thus I would conclude that it might not be really worthwhile to learn anything from the Aztecs.

It might be worth noting that the Aztecs demonstrated that if you cannot defend yourself against warlike peoples then lousy become their subjects. This is a lesson of enduring importance.

The Aztecs had a neighboring state to the north east I think. Who were not as violent or warlike as the Aztecs. Every time the Aztecs went to war against them they got rekt.

One historian I read said if Cortez had shown up 50-100 years later they probably would have ended up facing those those guys first instead of the Aztecs and had a really bad time.

> If they are not all bad or good are they all the same ( that is to say composed of equal number and value of good and bad parts) that seems unlikely to be the case and would need some theory other than just answering yes so I suppose we will say no.

Good and bad are time and culture specific. In 50 years, many things that we do everyday now will be "bad" and many things that we see as "bad" will be "good."

This is why the phrase “on the right side of history” is so stupid. It is literally impossible to know what is and is not on the right side of history until it actually is history.

And even then... history takes a long time.

There are no sides to history, winners write it.

I probably wouldn't be too interested in taking advice from Hitler about how to find happiness

I'm curious if the creative cruelty of mexican cartels is directly related to that period of Aztec nation.

Chances are you come from a culture that did more or less the same.

I assume you mean some culture your ancestors belonged to in the past few hundred thousand years was more or less the same.

I meant far closer to the present than "past few hundred thousand years" but yes, that's why I used the past tense "did" rather than the present tense "does."

Slavery? Genocide? Plunder? Rape? Religious violence? Slaughter of peoples they considered inferior? The "civilized" Christian cultures of the time did everything the Aztecs did, minus the human sacrifice.

There's something many people find uniquely, particularly offensive about using the machinery of war to perform human sacrifice as its own end (and not as the means to some variety of conquest or resource extraction), and there aren't many cultures that have actually historically engaged in that sort of thing.

They weren't performing human sacrifice as its own end, they were performing literal human sacrifice to honor their God... which is essentially what the Crusades were, an act of figurative ritual human sacrifice to honor the Christian God.

One is just more alien to Western culture than the other, so it seems more viscerally evil, and their means differ but their nature is the same.

That’s not at all what the crusades were.

The crusades were armies raised in response to the Muslim invasions of Christian countries. Motivations varied between religious (defense of the Christians being oppressed) to political (I want a kingdom to rule over) [1].

[1]: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/7915/are-there-a...

This is a wild misunderstanding of what the Crusades actually were.

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