how do you discover a country that is already inhabited?
Most in those countries would probably wish they were never discovered
When Magellan first encountered Guam 500 years ago he initially was going to call it the Island of Sails but later referred to it as the Island of Thieves. Suffice it to say not all first contacts went well.
Yet the Spanish became the greatest thieves of all on lands they âdiscoveredâ. Between the Catholics killing them if they did not change their religious beliefs disease brought with the invaders and the Portugese mercanaries stealing on behalf of the Spaniards the people were doomed.
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Read some Aztec history
Are you saying that since the Aztecs had no issues with slaughtering their neighbors it was OK for the Spanish to do the same?
Rather than read Aztec history I suggest taking an ethics class.
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Iâm saying the Aztecs were so insensibly cruel that the situation actually improved when the Spaniards showed up and raped the place. Youâd know that if you spent any time educating yourself about indigenous history. Not exactly uncommon knowledge or a matter of debate.
So the Spaniards were BAD colonizer, while all the others colonizers at the time came with good will and the gift of freedom??
I must have read the âwrongâ history books.
Of 102 passengers on the Mayflower only 51 were still alive a year later. Did that discourage others from fleeing their old countrymen back in England & Europe to go live out in the wilderness? Nope. The majority that stayed behind must of been some obnoxious dudes for colonizers to risk such odds to escape. I guess some things never change?
Not only America was colonized and not all colonizer were Pilgrims, or run away from religious prosecution. The majority were looking for riches, which they could take without consequences.
BTW; More people are fleeing their home country today than ever before, but there are few places where they can just take over land and kill, or enslave, the natives population.
Maybe a lesson to be learned here? Our ancestors who fled Europe/England didnât flee to be assimilated by the natives but to make a new version of Europe/England after forcing the natives to assimilate. In the tourist areas & Metros of Paris I noticed French wasnât the primary language spoken & those with traditional French physical characteristics were in the minority. NYC isnât much different. I donât care, none of my business, Spanish is the primary language in my household in the US but just sayingâŚ
Trying to say whether the Spaniards or the Aztecs made better rulers is an interesting question.
The Aztecs ritually murdered thousand of captured enemies every year, far more than the mere 32,000 âhereticsâ the Spanish ritually murdered in the Inquisition back home. The Aztecs get bragging rights, but you canât say the Spaniards didnât try.
By their own admission, in two generations the Spanish exterminated the entire populace of Indians from the Caribbean Islands by disease, overwork, and starvation. 300K people? 3 mil? Weâll never know.
The Spanish never wasted valuable slaves in ritual killing, as the Aztecs did. But five million African slaves were imported to the Caribbean, a large fraction by the Spanish. Why so many? They had an unfortunate habit of dying on the job. Think of them as a human sacrifice to the almighty Buck (or Doubloon).
The Spaniardâs ally in the conquest of the New World was disease. 80-90% of the Aztecs were wiped out by smallpox, typhoid, etc., brought by the Spaniards. Modern comparison: imagine every man, woman and child dying in the USA, outside of Texas, in a single generation.
Before the Conquista, the barbaric Aztecs had a blood-drenched civilization with books, architecture, mathematics, and a thriving population. After the Conquista, the population had crashed, the mathematics were forgotten, the architecture dismantled. The Spanish burned nearly all of the Aztec books. But the winners wrote their own afterwards, so no big loss, I suppose.
Afterwards, the Spanish took over and set up what they had in Spain. A medieval feudal system of lords on top, and peons on the bottom.
Aztecs, SpanishâŚBoth sides were bastards. But then you could say that about most of history.
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Itâs interesting that while the Spanish colonized the Philippines for nearly four hundred years, very little of Spanish culture actually stuck to it. The national language isnât Spanish, itâs Tagalog. The Philippine legal and governmental systems are based on those of America, even though the Philippines were an American colony/commonwealth for only half a century.
Whatever the Spanish were selling, in a cultural sense, the Filipinos werenât buying.
But then the Spanish government was as bad at administering its colonies as it was ruling Spain. In the 1500s the Spanish were the top dogs of Europe. By 1600 they were on the way out. By 1700, they were has-beens. One reason: the Curse of Aztec GoldâŚ
All that Aztec gold shipped to Spain caused rampant European inflation. This and other foolishness led to Spain being bankruptâbankrupt!ânot 30 years after Cortes looted Mexico.
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The Aztecs had no written language. They did not have books.
As far as the rest, there are a number of primary sources to the habits of the Aztecs and debating who was worse is silly.
By the way, the Aztecs at times burned their own books. The Spanish also burned their own books. Another case of parallel douchebaggery.
I agree.
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While the trend in recent times is to refer to the Codices as books, collections of pictograms are not books in the traditional sense, or really in any sense. None of the possible pre-Hispanic Codices bear any resemblance to a book. Priests who interviewed Aztecs and asked the question were told no, they are just pictures.
Why itâs controversial to say that a society with no written language didnât have books is beyond me. There are a number of examples of pictographic as opposed to alphabetic writing systems (Like the Mayans) and the Aztec pictographs bear no relation to them.
The point of looking at the past from different point of view from what we were taught as school children is to have a better understanding.
From Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy - By Susan Neiman
Since I do not think an intrinsic property of evil can be defined, I am, rather, concerned with tracing what evil does to us. If designating something as evil is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world, itâs that effect, more than the cause, which I want to examine. It should follow that I have even less intention of solving the problem of evil than I do of defining evil itself. My interest is, rather, to explore what changes in our understanding of the problem of evil reveal about changes in our understanding of ourselves, and of our place in the world. (kl 244)
From here:
Good grief man, give it up.
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There are good people on both sides? 
The Catholic priests burned and destroyed the writings. Itâs on record as they themselves made a point of documenting the destruction. Very little is left and, itâs called The Madrid Codex
In North America, Iâm pretty sure the situation was the same.
" Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs, was the writing system of the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica and is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered. "
Now there are also other ways to âwriteâ that were used in the Americas:
This one is in the museum at Machu Pichu.
The Mayans had a pictograph based written language as I said earlier in the thread. The Aztecs did not. The knotted cords are mathematics.
The Codices that remain are due to the efforts of Catholic priests so itâs disingenuous to state that they destroyed them.