Cortez and the Aztecs
by Rod D. Martin
August 13, 2017
While I'm thinking about it, today is the 496th anniversary of Hernan Cortez's liberation of Mexico from the Aztecs.
Yes, I know you're all going to question the term "liberation". But you shouldn't. You've been told that Cortez and his couple hundred European oppressors overwhelmed an ancient and magnificent culture with super-advanced technology, and that this is one of the central crimes of human history.
That's garbage.
In reality, Cortez and his men (with his only-very-slightly advanced technology, certainly not advanced enough to overcome hundreds of thousands of armed opponents) formed the leadership for an uprising of millions -- 200,000 of whom joined Cortez's army -- desperate to throw off the utterly evil Aztecs, who ruled central Mexico for barely more than a century after brutally subjugating everyone else.
Modern "progressives" gloss over the Aztec's Nazi-level evil, and laugh about "minor" sins like their human sacrifice ("ha ha, better not be a virgin!").
But let's consider that for a second. The Aztecs got rolling around the time someone in leadership decided that the Sun would no longer come up each morning unless they sacrificed large numbers of people to their gods. Oh, and that nearly all of the sacrificed people had to be non-Aztecs.
That got the conquest spree rolling. And once the Aztecs had all their neighbors under their thumb, they harvested them like wheat. In addition to the every-single-day slaughters, just for the dedication of their Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), the Aztecs sacrificed over 80,000 people in just four days.
That was just five years before Columbus, just one generation before Cortez.
Say what you will about the Spanish: they were a medieval people at the end of the Middle Ages, but they did a remarkable job of creating a vast and advanced civilization across the world in a short time despite their limitations. Moreover, when disease wiped out 90% of the New World's population -- not Spain's fault, any more than the Black Death killing 1/3 of Europe was China's fault -- they struggled with what was genuinely a post-apocalyptic landscape. They weren't perfect, but they get a ludicrously bad rap today.
And rarely was that better exemplified than by Hernan Cortez, and his liberation of Mesoamerica. Destroying the Aztec Empire was as great a service to humanity as defeating the Nazis. And contra the propaganda that passes for "history" now, it was indeed service. No one alive, then or now, would have blamed Cortez and his couple hundred men for looking the other way and moving on: indeed, modern leftists would cheer, even if the Aztecs were still performing human sacrifices right this instant.
It was their culture, after all. And who are we to judge someone else's culture?
So long as it isn't Christian, of course.
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Dr. Jack Wheeler's book on this is fantastic. Buy it now. And for more on both the book and Cortez's liberation of Mexico, read this 2013 piece from Jack Kelly.