To be fair- they all were and are like that, back then and now. It just that the industrialization dividend created a cultural power asymmetry which made those nightmares a permanently one sided affair for a while.
Why do we need "to be fair" about who we celebrate? I don't understand why anyone is arguing the point that we shouldn't celebrate people who did awful things.
They also weren't all the same. Not everyone goes around enslaving people and using their life to seek riches and fame. I don't think anyone complains about historical figures who, flaws and all, fought for higher ideals like personal liberty.
Because they were all horrible people? The atctecs were the russians of south america- a grueling empire, that had it won the run to steam ships first would have invaded africa and europe, to build human sacrifice pyramids?
They are just characters, surfing the waves of technological change and resulting cultural power asymmetries. They are surprisingly irrelevant and replaceable. But they are the representatives of cultural deficiencies, propelled onwards by geography and circumstances into moments of clarity, where one party is thrown into a "catchup" race at all costs to prevent the other from overtaking it now or later.
I don't know that Columbus was genocidal. He was a slaver, rapist, murderer, gold digger and all-round motherfucker for sure, so much so that the Spanish monarchy sent an envoy to arrest him, bring him back to Spain to be tried, and threw him in jail I think for a couple years. Aside from gold and spices sent from him back to the Spanish monarchs after his first arrival, he also sent back slaves and the queen was, presumably, utterly disgusted. But as far as I know, his exploits did not amount to "genocidal". I'm less certain about this than my other points, though.
Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.
Cortez only had about 500 soldiers. He didn't even had the permission of the Spanish crown, it was a private enterprise. How did he conquered a city of warriors with a population of 300K ?
The Aztecs were tyrants that had abused their neighboring states for decades. Cortez built alliances with Tlaxalans and other tribes. There were battles, a small pox epidemic and a lot of blood. But Cortez was overall a great diplomat that took all the cities under Aztec control one by one until only Tenochtitlan remained.
> Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.
Well that's what you get when you go about enslaving and committing genocide against your neighbours for centuries prior. Cortes didn't even have to try - all the neighbouring nations eagerly joined the Spanish to wipe out the Aztecs. Even after that, the Aztecs weren't wiped out - they were just converted hard to Christianity and assimilated into Spanish society, even though they even had their own divisions in the armed forces. They eventually culturally assimilated the rest of the meso-Americans and gave us what Mexican culture is today.
Now what happened to the Maya is a tragedy. Books burnt, people enslaved and relegated to the lowest rung even today.
The Maya suffered for sure, but they survived in numbers that exceed all of native American population in the US, for example, and kept their language. Others had it much worse.
Calling Cortes genocidal is also quite farfetched, considering that he conquered the Aztec territory, despite being vastly outnumbered, because every native tribe and settlement they found on the way banded together to overthrow the Aztec.
I wouldn't call the Aztecs genocidal either, despite the ritual sacrifices, brutal treatment of other peoples, and everybody in mesoamerica who came to know them hating them so much that they preferred the uncertain fate of joining the white bearded men from the east.
Yeah I think the light use of the word genocide doesn't make justice for the instance where there was actual genocide, which is when you murder people with the explicit intent of destroying a nation/culture/group.
The approach of colonizers from the west in the new world was broadly genocidal though. Like, "we want to live here, so go on git." Killing buffalo to literally starve natives, for example. Allowing natives in occupied lands to be only slaves or dead, for example. Even if it doesn't 100% fit whatever hard definition you're using, it approximates it pretty goddamn well.
def genocidal: relating to or involving the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Pedantic to say that Columbus subjugating entire people groups with mass murder doesn't qualify here. The manpower skew was huge, so how exactly did they subjugate the Tainos without genocide? 7M tainos died when all was said and done.
I don't question that what the Spanish accomplished was a massacre. I just question whether that can be attributed to Columbus himself. He did 3 trips to the Americas, none of which lasted very long:
You don't have to personally perpetrate or even succeed to be genocidal right? If your intention is "drive out the natives and eradicate them because they're pests unless enslaved" that's genocidal.
