> Was Spanish colonization “evil?”
It's hard to look at the on-the-ground details and come to any other conclusion.
It's hard to look at the on-the-ground details and come to any other conclusion.
Executions in Spain, Portugal, and Italy combined are estimated to have been 1000 in total. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt#Execution_statistic...
But it was not actually a good excuse. Burning those books was still wrong. Even people around him understood how wrong it was. We do not have to view colonialism from the stratosphere, we can judge the actions individually down at the ground.
We know why he wanted to focus on other things than the things he was actually personally responsible for, but what's your motive? Got a project of your own to defend?
Were we wrong to destroy half of Europe to stop Germany too? Really trilled to know future generation will talk about us as the bad guys because we destroyed German art and books as we stopped a literal mass genocide.
Didn't intervene? You act like it was an act of charity. We didn't "intervene" until the germans declare war on us.
> And then look at tens of thousand of people being mass murdered by a genocidal civilization and complain that Spain intervened because...
Spain "intervened"? The genocidal civilization was Spain, not the aztecs. The aztecs didn't wipe themselves out. The spanish did.
> Were we wrong to destroy half of Europe to stop Germany too?
Who is we? Who destroyed half of europe to stop germany?
> Really trilled to know future generation will talk about us as the bad guys because we destroyed German art and books as we stopped a literal mass genocide.
Did we wipe out the germans? Did we wipe out the german language, culture, history, etc? Are you really equating what we did to germany to what the spaniards did to the aztecs?
Yes, that was mistake and the lesson that should be learned.
> The genocidal civilization was Spain, not the aztecs.
This is complete revisionism, Spain laid war on the Aztecs supported even by other indians, it wasn't a voluntary biological warfare. The Aztecs killed tens of thousands of people per year.
> Who is we? Who destroyed half of europe to stop germany?
The allies. Are Allied bombings considered a contentious subject now?
> Did we wipe out the germans? Did we wipe out the german language, culture, history, etc?
Spaniards did not "wipe out" indian people, the Aztec civilization went the way of every conquered civilization. Did Arabs wipe out Egyptian language, culture, history, etc or did it dwindle in importance over the centuries as a new civilization took over the other?
When meeting Europeans, 90% of the Americans would catch some European disease and die. This was widely seen as the will of god(s) by both sides. Often the disease spread faster than the Europeans, so when they got to an area most people were already dead.
The following conquest is seen as barbaric and unjust by us modern people. But for the people of the time, it was just how the world worked. The Aztecs would have been overjoyed to conquer Spain the same way.