Blaming colonialism, Genocide or not?, Modern biased portrayals.
Wandering through Wikipedia in an attempt to get a glimpse of Mesoamerican culture (when I'm tired of everything else I sometimes like to dig into various mythology) I couldn't omit the article about
Spanish colonization of the Americas. We've all heard of it's atrocities, but as usually facts like to surprise.
[Columbus on his glorious voyage of 1492] was first greeted by the Arawak people of the Bahamas. They were kind and curious people who brought them food, water and gifts. Columbus later wrote in his log: ....They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. In the year of 1495, Columbus and his sailors rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women and children. Out of those fifteen hundred, they picked five hundred of the best specimens and out of those five hundred, two hundred died en route.
I've also heard a story (I believe it was in my history textbook and in an article about game theory) about Cortés burning his ships. After some violent episodes of the Spanish conquest, Aztecs could either surrender their gold or try to defend in a bloody fight. It could have been worth fighting till Cortés backed off, but he burned his fleet to erase that hope – making it clear he couldn't return, he prevented a confrontation that both sides knew would end in a Pyrrhic victory at best. Or at least that's the version that glorifies Cortés the most.
Actually he scuttled the ships to prevent a mutiny of his men, who, still loyal to the authorities Cortés betrayed, conspired to escape.
Ok, the most famous conquistadors were greedy assholes, but could it be argued they were guilty of a crime against humanity, a genocide? The issue is controversial mainly because of the most stated goal of colonialism – bringing Christianity to the world. Thousands of armed men were brought to America, always in the name of “the only true God”. The most recent loud attempt to absolve the conquistadors may be Mel Gibson's 2006 film
Apocalypto. I can summarize it in two words: running & escaping (I can't believe a movie depicting Mesoamerica, artistically well done,
actually, and with nice attention to details of Mayan culture, could be
that boring; reviews were favorable, so maybe I just don't like action films). The protagonist was running pretty much all the movie, trying to escape the evil, bloody, corrupted Mayas. The ending scene shows him panting (seriously, all the movie), while Spanish ships can be seen on the horizon. Imagine the drama. The opening quote: “
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within”, makes the message obvious.
I'll disregard the questions of whether Mayans shared the Aztecs' affinity for human sacrifices and slavery as portrayed by Gibson (see
for heavy criticism). Suggesting that all Mesoamerican cultures could/should have been destroyed because they weren't civilized is simply disgusting. There were great empires (Aztecs, Mayans and Incas) and countless smaller groups that can't be generalized over. Most of them peaceful to Spaniards at first contact, I believe. They had one of the largest cities in the world, good knowledge of astronomy, developed literature. Duh, it took 300 years to eradicate all of them. They just had no metal.
But well, history isn't that simple, and from what I see the Conquista doesn't differ much from usual European warfare of that time, with many sides bringing destruction and Spaniards bringing slaves. What literally decimated indigenous Americans was epidemic diseases, there's no doubt among scholars that Spanish forces weren't large enough to cause that much. Of course we can argue that there would be no collapse if not for the destruction, destabilization and displacement brought by conquistadors, but calling it genocide is a quite a stretch to me. It's just war and slavery.
Nonetheless I think it should be noted that we still have a heavy bias. Every single work of culture that I've seen in my childhood, if it incorporated elements of Mesoamerican folklore, focused on the scary side of Aztecs. Indeed Aztecs sacrificed horrible numbers, though personally I don't see much of a difference between that and colonialist slavery. Mayans also practiced human sacrifices, but disputably in much lower numbers and not throughout all their history. It is also disputed whether they used slaves (it seems most work on pyramids was done by free citizens; we know pyramids were built layer by layer, new generations building on top of older versions). But even if. There is so much more, and to me it seems all shamefully omitted, even more so if you compare it with the use of other civilizations' wonders in popular culture.
