In order to comprehend the Spanish conquest and takeover of the southern half of the Americas it could be helpful to consider the key role that violence has played throughout human history. There have always been wars and conflict and, pacifist that I am, I am resigned to accepting the likelihood that violence is always going to be part of the human story. Violence appears to have always been the preferred method of transaction in our undertakings. Really, peace and diplomacy have only come to flourish in recent times, and likely because never in our history has war become such a dangerous and utterly pyrrhic undertaking. On the grander scale, anyway.
Still, ISIS chops off heads and NATO forces drop bombs on ISIS. North Korea tests a nuclear weapon and everyone wants to negotiate while anxiously wringing their hands because we all know that the fallout from invading North Korea would be exponentially deadlier than not taking military action.
"Ah, the simple lives of heroes; the twisted lives of saints," as Leonard Cohen wrote in "Priests." During the Spanish conquest of Latin America it was very simple to live like a hero: ride around on your charger slaying dragons and anyone else who got in your way. That was the very simple message that brainwashed the young Spanish men of the sixteenth century. Might makes right. Keep your sword sharp and use it on anyone who pisses you off. What could be simpler? And it has been a time-tested formula. This is exactly how disputes were settled since before our ancestors emerged out of Africa.
With violence, you don't have to dialogue. You can just set in, kill and destroy, then collect the booty afterward. None of this sissy-sissy kindness and mercy and treating others with courtesy. No, just go out there and chop off a few heads, enslave the surviving men and rape their wives. Cover it with a nice shiny patina of a very false Christianity and there you have it, instant conquest and so the Spanish empire came to thrive. Of course, the Aztecs were no more virtuous themselves, with their institutionalized practice of human sacrifice and their own history of wholesale slaughter and enslavement of neighbouring tribes and nations.
That is the way things have always been done. Violence perpetuating yet more violence across the ages until neither humankind nor the earth can sustain it any longer and we are all suddenly teetering over a chasm of unprecedented wholesale destruction.
Violence in the takeover of the New World, in the takeover of anywhere at any time in our sad, tragic and ugly history, has always been inevitable. It can't really be said that no one knew better. Simply they didn't care to because violence was the way that things had always been done. When Christianity lost its spiritual authority and became a quasi-political force, no one even thought of going the way of Christ. Martyrdom was back then, or it was inflicted from outside. But to eschew violence altogether and to take the blows and abuse instead of dishing them out? Like Jesus? Like his Holy Apostles?
Between the two parties, the Spanish and the Aztecs, even if the Aztecs were the more brutal with their practice of human sacrifice, it is this blogger's opinion that the Spanish still carry the greater burden of guilt. They not only forcibly took over and robbed and slaughtered and disempowered the native people of Latin America, but claiming to be Christians, boasting of being Christ and his Holy Church's representatives, they ignored completely the most essential commands of divine and Christian love by making themselves even more reprehensible and bloodthirsty than the very people they were presuming to civilize and win over to the Holy Catholic Faith.
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