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Comment by zasdffaa | Hacker News Reader

Oh give over. Norse gods are european, and with greek, roman and egyption gods, we've had thousands of years awareness & contact with those cultures.

> who were considered inferior by the europeans who "conquered" them

Anyone who wasn't a catholic was probably considered subhuman by the truly appalling conquistadors

> indios are supposed to be stupid and ignorant

news to me.

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> Oh give over. Norse gods are european, and with greek, roman and egyption gods, we've had thousands of years awareness & contact with those cultures.

Ah, eurocentrism. It's forgivable since you were likely educated this way since birth, but it comes off as hideously insensitive to other cultures.

>but it comes off as hideously insensitive to other cultures.

more ignorant than insensitive. it's not that they aren't showing concern because they don't like and feel it is inferior, it is just unknown in totatlity to them. is being unaware of something's existence being insensitive to it, or have others become hypersensitive?

Right. I'm a brit - now that should make it clearer - I'm not on that continent. If you were, yes, I can see your point, there should by my argument be more exposure therefore uderstanding.

And there was no education about aztecs, I just read a lot, ditto for the norse and greek gosds. Might have got a tiny bit about the romans but any of their legends were picked up very much outside of school. We weren't educated in any of that, just immersed, shall we say.

> truly appalling conquistadors

Do you consider killing thousands of people for human sacrifice appalling?

Aztecs weren't charming in this regard and by that probably sowed the seeds of their own defeat by pushing other tribes to support the invading spaniards, but the conquistadors went in for full on genocide, totally deliberately.

Nonsense. The conquistadors were indeed appalling in many ways, but no they did not go for full on genocide. The diseases that came with them killed off possibly 90% of the New World population regardless of what they did or didn't do. They were slavers for a time and even that was fought against quite vigorously by a surprising number of other Europeans (read for example about Bartolomé de las Casas). Much of the modern narrative mixes up an essentially unstoppable and non-deliberate mass die-off from European diseases with genocide. The two things were not the same even if the conquistadors also did often butcher native populations in specific contexts. As for the Aztecs, they truly were barbarous to their subjects. Their culture, for all its sophistication and many fascinating aspects, was based on an enormous amount of ritual and practical violence across many areas. There's no white washing this for PC reasons if you read even a moderate amount of literature about their empire. Even the Spanish didn't practice the ritual slaughter of over 20,000 people in just a few days simply for the sake of a religious festival. The Aztecs did indeed do this at times.

Well, read this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples...>. It's not very long. Genocide is discussed, depending on defintions of it. Some say genocide, some say it wasn't.

I've heard the claim of 100,000 killed in 3 das by the aztecs which has been put down to exaggeration by the invaders to justify their brutality towards aztecs, do you have a reliable link to the 20,000 figure?

> white washing this for PC reasons if you read even a moderate amount of literature

I have, and any whitewashing is your assumption of me, not my view (I mean, literally read my comment that you replied to). They were bloodthirsty (flower wars etc), but the spanish catholics were far worse in my view.

The conquistadors were not set on carrying out genocide, and did not carry out genocide. They were just vastly more advanced than the nations they encountered and consequently were able to conquer many of them.

> we've had thousands of years awareness & contact with those cultures.

Who is "We" here? Because I would easily bet this is not the case for most of the population in the world

> Anyone who wasn't a catholic was probably considered subhuman by the truly appalling conquistadors

Thanks God for the superior and enlightened British colonizers,you can see the different policies in current native populations in the US compared to the Spanish-ravaged south.

> news to me.

Spoken like one who has not spent 1 min with people with Native-American ancestors.

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