Before anyone wastes their time, this is the same start of the other bad faith argument that the enslavement of Africans was for their own good and they were better off being slaves than being in Africa.

This is an alt history story idea I've had rattling around in my head for years. It starts off in 1492 with a dejected Columbus complaining about Isabella and Ferdinand not seeing his vision.

Jump cut 300 years later to 1776, when Europeans first learn about the New World - when an Aztec galley lands in Cornwall.

> How so?

Just speaking personally I have a pretty dim view of genocide and slavery.

Yes, that's probably the excuse that got the guy off the hook for burning the entire written history of those civilizations.

But it was not actually a good excuse. Burning those books was still wrong. Even people around him understood how wrong it was. We do not have to view colonialism from the stratosphere, we can judge the actions individually down at the ground.

We know why he wanted to focus on other things than the things he was actually personally responsible for, but what's your motive? Got a project of your own to defend?

Witch hunts in Europe and, to lesser extent, in colonized parts of America weren't that different.

Really crazy how we are taught from an early age the horrors of the holocaust and other genocides, and aboutour moral superiority compared to those that didn't intervene back then... "Never again. If this this happened today we know better to stop it"... And then look at tens of thousand of people being mass murdered by a genocidal civilization and complain that Spain intervened because... a priests burned books (something that I absolutely do not condone of course)?

Were we wrong to destroy half of Europe to stop Germany too? Really trilled to know future generation will talk about us as the bad guys because we destroyed German art and books as we stopped a literal mass genocide.

You're right, but I think too that the Europeans happily took the deaths as an opportunity and justified it.

Possibly, although I think the Aztecs specifically was likely doomed from the start because they were a very young society and a brutal military conqueror and everybody they dealt with hated them, but you never can know. However the Aztecs were far from the only significant America Native society or civilization. There were many others, especially to the South, that we know were far more stable societies and governments producing more advanced goods and had high levels of trade amongst each other. South America was essentially in their own bronze age at the time and their gold and precious metal work was beyond what anybody in Europe was able to replicate at the time.

If Europeans hadn't made it to North America, it's likely that nobody would have invented vaccines or the internet by now. European history would have been unrecognizably different.

How specifically do you think the average Spaniard benefited by the crown building a colony? Do you think the crown then went and splurged on their farmers, reducing their taxes or something? Because no, that didn't happen.

The benefits for this was entirely with the aristocracy and wealthy, not with the average Spaniards.

The wrongs of religion throughout history are typically exaggerated in modern times and the Spanish Inquisition is one of the best examples of this. It lasted more than 350 years and during this 350 years a very high-end estimate of executions is 5000. So the death toll from it ranges probably from one person every ~3 months to one person every month. [1]

So for some comparison, 2-5x more people die in the US of lightning strikes each year than died during the Spanish Inquisition per year. Obviously any death is undesirable, but describing it as a horrific mass-murder is hyperbolic. It was rather more a mass public shaming campaign like the Chinese Struggle Sessions, but many orders of magnitude smaller in scale.

For that matter even the Mayans were likely sacrificing people on a far larger scale. We lack exact numbers but know that they did group sacrifice, often of children, and that this was regularly done when building new structures, or for hopes of a good crop season and the like. And I think the thing that makes human sacrifice particularly primitive in its nature is that obviously doesn't work. Whether you killed a dozen kids or not has no bearings on how your crops grow. And so they would have to, over centuries, continue to reject the evidence before their eyes.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_toll...

> had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain,

Well it varied, but such behaviour was not strictly unique to Spain in those days. Being a Catholic in England wasn't terribly exciting either.

Then you have the witch hunts across must of Europe which resulted in probably well over 10x times more people being murdered in Germany alone compared to the inquisition and they weren't really a thing in Spain.

In a way the Spanish Inquisition was quite similar to the NKVD or the Gestapo/etc. since the persecutions were usually intended to impose ideological/social conformity (or inherently racist in how it targeted even perfectly honest Jewish or Muslims converts) rather than "ritualistic".

Of course Christian Spain is interesting in the sense that it turned from one of the most of tolerant societies in Europe to the one of the most intolerant ones in a couple of centuries.

e.g. during the Almohad invasions you had Christians, Jewish and even moderate Muslims fleeing to the Christian kingdoms which generally were much more tolerant at the time.

> Can you see how this absurd double standard may come across as racist?

That's not particularly new in Europe though. e.g. the Greeks and Romans found Carthaginian mass child sacrifices extremely abhorrent yet at the same time didn't see much of an issue with "exposing" unwanted infants. Treating violence due to economic/utilitarian/political reasons differently that doing it for ritual/religious reasons was is still pretty ingrained into western culture.

> The Spanish state (crown, army, church) had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain, where the most brutal and sadistic thugs were politically elevated.

That is one hell of a gloss over of the the previous 500-600 years before the Inquisition and massively over-simplifies what happened. There wasn't really a Spanish state either, certainly not as we would understand it today.

You guys remind me of the old joke:

A Mexican goes to Spain, accosts the first Spaniard he sees, and lays into him: “I demand an apology, sir - your ancestors pillaged my country!”

The Spaniard blinks. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Your ancestors did that. Mine stayed home.”

I wasn't calling the descendants of the Mayans out for anything. I was specifically talking about the culture. Which is synonymous with the people in the upper class, which did ritual sacrifices of peasants.

the term Spaniards however targets the average people. Which are precisely farmers.

I do not see any double standard whatsoever, and frankly: you're brainwashed if you do.

Just to be explicit, you are now calling Jewish people "the most unhinged and narcissistic people" who have "perpetrated that endless abuse [of denouncing the Holocaust and Naziism] upon the German [..] people"?