I wish I could say, Juan and Ilhuitl, that human beings have become more peaceful in the last five hundred years, but this sadly is not the case. You notice the great advantage that having gunpowder, cannons and muskets has given you and your fellow Spanish, Juan, making it all the easier for you to win the conquest of the Mexica, which you are going to win, will be a colony of Spain for three hundred years until there is a revolution and Nueva Espana becomes the nation Mexico. Weapons technology is not going to stop here, but will go further, way further. Guns and bullets that operate with accurate, lethal and lightning speed will eventually be invented, along with things called missiles and bombs that can be dropped from airplanes on cities, or fired across the great oceans of the world to destroy countries farther away than the Mexica are from Spain. With our developing weapons technologies bigger and deadlier wars are going to be fought and waged. In the last century alone we have seen the two hugest and deadliest conflicts ever, known as the First World War and the Second World War, which occurred one hundred years ago and seventy-five years ago, respectively. The First World War was fought in Europe, chiefly between Germany, France, Britain and the United States, that huge country just north of Mexico and south of here that will become the dominant global power. Five million people were killed. In the Second World War that followed, involving many more nations and a much greater part of the world, they say that more than seventy million were killed. This was also the first time that nuclear weapons were invented and used, twice in Japan, the easternmost country of Asia, killing two hundred thousand people in a matter of days. I will tell you this much about the nuclear, or atomic bombs: they are still the most deadly, by far the most lethal form of weapon ever known to humankind. Those things called atoms? Those most minute and fundamental particles of all matter? The energy from the atoms will be harnessed and channelled for this kind of destructive potential. Right now, as many as eight, possibly ten nations have these weapons, and you can imagine the global climate of fear and terror that has arisen.
Both of you have grown up on warfare. Ilhuitl, your people, the Mexica, have fought and waged battle for hundreds of years to get to where you now are, at least where you were five hundred years ago, and even now, your rulers do battle with your neighbours to keep them submissive and in line and to supply your gods with an endless buffet of human sacrifices. Juan, Spain is always and has always been at war with her neighbours and with herself and now you are carrying this bloody and violent legacy to the Mexica where violence is meeting violence. Without the terror of nuclear weapons of mass destruction to help keep everyone in line, war is easy and cheap. Instead of negotiating, instead of seeking terms of peace and coexistence, and of perhaps even becoming friends with your enemies you choose instead to kill, burn at the stake or sacrifice to hungry gods.
You do not even see how this has affected you, but I can see it. You are both children of violence and this has made you in turn, fearful and violent and fearful again. And you are going to pass on this toxic legacy to your descendants, the Mexican people. Juan, your companions are going to rape and enslave the Mexica women, the few who survive the slaughter and the epidemic diseases you are destroying them with, and under a pretence of marriage where you won't be simply abandoning them, they will bear your bastard children and your bastard children are going to carry the stigma of conquest, rape and enslavement and this collective trauma is going to more than anything else define the character of the Mexican people, and of other peoples who will be arising in your other lands of conquest, all while Mama Espana goes on raping and plundering Latin America for its gold and other forms of wealth to fatten her coffers and finance her wars.
Juan, as much as I am coming to like you, almost to love you during this short time, I am sad to say that you are beyond redemption. Like the other Spanish people, you will go on in your thoughtless arrogance, lack of compassion for others and chronic religious hypocrisy and only because you have never, since kicking out the Muslims, known what it is like to be a subject people. Rather than learn valuable lessons of humility from your humiliation, you and your fellow Spaniards have opted instead to roam the world like brutal soldiers of fortune, without sympathy for those who are not like you, carrying along with your other diseases a very degraded form of the most beautiful religion that has ever visited our world. The Mexicans, and the other descendants of your depredations, will live lives of humiliation, but they will also grow into a people known for their kindness and generosity and their sheer celebration of life, while still acting out the legacy of violence and social inequality and injustice that will for a long time to come be their tragic inheritance from Mama Espana.
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