But is he right? No, but it is a bit of a useful antidote to some of the nonsense we have been hearing for a while about Native Americans. For a long time, it is fair to say Native Americans were stereotyped as nothing but savages. This wasn’t true and it motivated a lot of pretty evil behavior, so the pendulum swung the other way, so people would pretend that they were in fact angels, deeply in touch with the land and peaceful, and other nonsense. Now, it seems the pendulum is finding its way more toward a ‘middle’ of recognizing that the Native Americans were simply human. This meant they were not peaceful, but typically no more warlike than other races. Some were very sophisticated, some were not, some were good but, occasionally, some were downright evil.
And the Spanish of that era were kind of the worst people to come to run into them. Before the conquistadors, there was the Reconquista of Spain, where native Spaniards fought their own war against foreign invaders in the form of the Moors and, yes, there was a racial component to their war, trying to drive out their dark-skinned enemies. We don’t say this to say that the cause was wholly unjust, but it was one that bigots glommed onto. The same Spanish regime, for instance, told every Jew in their country to leave. And in an act of bad irony, they became what they were previously rebelling against, when they invaded the native territories of others in America.
But, as we said, Native Americans could be as evil as any other group and, holy crap, the Aztecs of that era were evil. For instance, there is a story the Aztecs told of one skirmish between the Aztecs and another tribe. It started when they offered to have a local princess from another tribe marry into their tribe. This is normally a way that alliances are made but the Aztecs had other ideas. Instead of anything you would normally call a marriage, they sacrificed her to the god of fertility. Then, when the bride’s father came to the village to celebrate the marriage, he found one of their priests dancing with his daughter’s skin on his body. This of course led to war and for the Aztecs to be driven from their home, which somehow didn’t teach them to cut that kind of crap out. The story is captured pretty well early on in this documentary series:
