Daniel Jupp

I’m currently reading Conquistadors by Michael Wood. I’ve liked Wood for years as a TV historian. He has a real enthusiasm and warmth, and he always quotes extensively from primary sources. He comes across as a very amiable guy who loves history and he combines a nice descriptive ability with an unfussy, clear narration that’s even more evident in his writing than his presenting. He’s both eloquent and never pompous.

For all these reasons he doesn’t really push an agenda purposely, and I would never call him woke. That said, Conquistadors really shows how deeply engrained a self-hating narrative in the West is now. It sort of makes it worse that he’s so nice and is no fanatic.

Because it’s amazing the differences in how the Spanish and the Aztecs and Incas are presented. He’s unflinching in talking about the cruelties, rapes, slave taking and greed of the conquistadors, their use of torture and the odd combination of reckless courage, boundless self-belief, personal fortitude and amoral cunning that let small numbers of men achieve astonishing feats of conquest (Pizarro had just 120 men when he entered the Incan Empire, with a population of between 5 and 10 million, and overthrew it).

But the human sacrifice of the native cultures is really glossed over. The scale of Aztec sacrifice isn’t really discussed, and it was vast. The sick cruelty of it isn’t commented on either. Sacrifices to Tlaloc for instance were often children, and the standard practice was sustained torture for days before final sacrifice. Even the considerably less bloodthirsty Inca practiced regular child sacrifice, favouring ‘unblemished’ ten year olds. Woods mentions this in a single line with no judgement and no offering of Spanish commentary on it (every Spanish cruelty is judged and has an Indian comment on it).

The most neutral language is used around the Meso-American pervasiveness of ritual torture and human sacrifice and child sacrifice, and it’s far exceeded by comment on the splendid spectacle of daily life, the wonders of large city states and road systems, and the ‘nobility’ and refinement of things like Aztec poetry or courtly language. Human sacrifice is basically cast as a standard Bronze Age practice that require no additional comment and doesn’t deserve moral response, whilst Spanish cruelty does.

With this framing, the destruction of these civilisations is of course tragic, and frequently described as such. But that’s only possible to believe if you’d really have preferred it if human sacrifice lasted longer in the world. For all the savagery that the conquistadores were capable of (attacking and enslaving unarmed opponents for instance, torturing innocents for news of where gold could be found) they didn’t have a society actually built on every level on making torture and mass murder the most sacred activities possible. The conquistadores would happily burn a native ruler alive to send a message….which is foul. But when they do that it’s not buried in a longer section on the beauties of Spanish literature and dance. And it’s not compared, as it probably should be, with Aztec priests skinning children to make them weep and scream because the gods favour such sounds.

There’s only one bit where direct comparison comes, and that’s when the obsession with death in Aztec imagery, all those skinless and flayed images, all those gods of the underworld and death and war depicted in horrific fashion, is excused with a ‘it’s amazing the things you can learn to take for granted, like a tortured man on a cross’. Only there is a difference surely, in a depiction of suffering where the suffering is not the thing being celebrated, but the endurance of it on behalf of all humanity, compared with detailed depictions of human sacrifice that ARE the thing being celebrated?

It’s amazing how deep western self-loathing now goes, where we will pretend that human sacrifice and ritual torture on an industrial scale were excusable and even beautiful in a melancholy way solely because they came from non-European cultures.

The uncomfortable truth for modern ears is that all the brutality of the conquest was brief and it was better for humanity in the long run for the last civilisations still practicing human sacrifice to fall. The Aztecs managed to industrialise death to an extent that the slave trade did not equal and that would only be rivalled by technologically advanced dictatorships in the 20th century. Courtly manners and poetry don’t compensate for that any more than the music of Wagner excuses Nazi death camps.

19th century historians tended to be both more eloquent and more accurate than anyone writing today, although today of course they would be dismissed as supremacists simply because they were honest about cultures like the Aztecs. Well, maybe cultural supremacism was, on the whole, accurate, and far more accurate than this suffocating guilt combined with a frankly embarrassing soppy sentimentality about every culture that wasn’t white.

Tim adds:

Right you are Daniel! Also, slavery was ubiquitous in the New World; the Spanish did not introduce it, nor did any other European power. It could be argued that the Indians practice of it encouraged the Spanish and other Europeans to take up the practice (which also was ubiquitous in Africa at the time.)

There is a reason why these major native states fell so easily to the invading Europeans; they were despised by all their vassals because they were, well, just evil. Most of the non-Aztecs joined Cortes enthusiastically because he offered them a way out of their bondage for the first time. They preferred Spanish control to being forced to send their children to horrible ritual deaths.

Ditto in Peru. The Incans were not as bad as the Aztecs but they were brutal and ruthless.

Yes, the Spaniards did some bad things, but imagine being alone with all those potentially hostile people around them. One major misstep and they were toast! So they got carried away sometimes (and that was not usually officially approved, at least where Columbus was concerned. He was put on trial for a massacre and other malfeasance and acquitted based on the evidence. He just had a hard time controlling the men he was forced to employ.)

This is so typical of our modern era - everything from the West sucks and everything from "native" peoples was just great. They never explain whey the West was so successful and why all sorts of native peoples were desperate to come here. Why were Chinese and Japanese immigrating to America in the 1840's if it sucked so bad?

I would also point out that the Aztecs and Mayans were not even aware of the Incans, nor of the Mound Builders in the American Midwest. They did no exploring, little trade outside of their regions (Mexico or South America) and they really didn't impose a "Pax Aztec" or "Pax Mayan" in the region. They didn't explore, or make trade agreements, nor do any of the things that make a great civilization. they didn't do that because they were despots and had to struggle to hold power in their regions while being brutal. These were ruthless city states out only for their own wealth and immediate power. The subjects were just that - commodities to be wrung dry. When push came to shove nobody defended them. It was so different when Rome fell. Rome was brutal and selfish too but it offered things you couldn't get outside of Rome, which is why all the barbarians invaded it - to get a piece of the pie.There were people willing to fight for Rome. Nobody but the Aztecs or Mayans or Incans fought for those nations.

But we won't hear that from modern people. Now it's always how bad we were and how good anyone from anywhere else was.

It's the truly Big Lie.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:57 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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