The Aztecs and Palestinians: The paralells Between How Colonists and Conqistadors Treated Them

 Revisiting history is how we understand the present and keep alive the memories of the mistakes of the past. Those memories are our precious heritage that encourages us to become better people. 

Today, I am reading about the Spanish colonists' conquering of the Aztecs. What an eye-opening tale with equal doses of human greed and innocence, but it is not fictional! We, humanity, did it to ourselves. We are the victims and perpetrators. 

It does not matter to us which category we belonged to if we lived in that era because, on both sides, there were people like us who wanted to live in peace and people like us who wanted to conquer the world's riches. 

 It begins to matter when we put the past against the present and introspect. Then we realise that we are the perpetrators, or we are the ones who must feel the survivor’s guilt and act upon it before it is too late. Or we will go down in history as one of the cruellest people to ever inhabit Earth. 

How the Aztecs Were Decimated 

 In 1519, Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, and his team set foot on the coast of Mexico after a few previous expeditions from Spain and the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the American continents. This was more than a decade before Fransisco Pizarro’s notorious and bloody subduing of the indigenous Incas in Peru. 

 The Aztec king Moctezuma welcomed Cortés genially. Yet, the colonists captured him and made him a prisoner. They shot guns to create fear in the people who were witnessing that weapon in action for the first time. According to the famous Florentine Codex, written by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, the Spanish asked King Moctezuma to show them his riches. 

The priest wrote that the people were stunned with fear. The king took the Spaniards to where the country’s wealth was stored. The Spaniards were eyeing gold more than anything else. All the golden ornaments thus seized were set on fire to detach the precious metal. The city’s storehouse and the king’s personal storehouse, they looted it all. 

Once the native people were subdued entirely, the Spaniards put the natives into slavery and bonded labour- the ‘encomienda’. Each indigenous individual was assigned to a Spaniard to whom he had to give tribute and free labour. These slaves had one more task, to abandon one’s ancestors’ faith and convert to Christianity. 

Bernardino de Sahagún wrote about the whole land being depleted of its original people. The Spaniards also brought smallpox to the native people, and they died in thousands contracting the disease. Such were the travails of slavery and disease that Sahagún felt the native people were going extinct. They went almost extinct, too. 

Sahagún compared this to the Old Testament curse of Jeremiah against the people of Judea and Jerusalem. Another Dominican priest, De las Casas, who arrived on the shores of Hispaniola, a Spanish colony, in 1502, describes this slave system more vividly. He was shocked by the cruelty of the Spaniards towards the indigenous people and was the first reformer of the Spanish colony system. In 1542, he also published a book, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, documenting the atrocities carried out by the colonists upon the natives. De las Casas noted that in Nicaragua, the colonists stole whatever scarce food resources the natives had, leaving them to starve, took over their land, and made them their slaves who had to work night and day for them. 

 De las Casas' account of the terrifying torture of the king of the New Granada (Columbia now) reveals human cruelty has no bounds. The king, Bogota, was strapped to an iron pole, and his foot’s soles burnt to make him give them a room full of gold. Bogota died a slow and agonising death. 

Does any of this remind you of Palestine? The stolen water, land and resources taken away from the Palestinians, the cheap labour that Israel buys from them, the way Israel targets the leaders of Palestine, the way it terrorises them. Palestine tried to fight terror with terror, in the end. They put away the placards and slogans, the slings and stones which were the maximum degree of violence that they earlier believed in, and took up missiles and guns, and we are witnessing what came of it. 

 Faith, Humanity, and Conquest: The Palestine Question 

 De las Casas and Bernardino de Sahagún were the benign part of Christianity. They took care of as many natives as they could who had contracted smallpox. They opened schools to bring education to the indigenous people. They did what they thought was humane and right. On the doorstep of death, at the age of about 80, Sahagún even wrote to the Spanish King asking him if he had read the book. He would have hoped the book would instil a little kindness in the King’s heart towards the natives. 

 The monstrous conquistadors were Christians, too. So, it is not about faith. On the opposite side, or rather, trampled under the conquerors’ feet, were the indigenous people. Between these two extremes were just ordinary humans who wanted to survive, mediate, peacefully coexist, and avoid bloodshed. Such people existed on both sides. They were instrumental in finding peace in the end, though after much bloodletting and near destruction of the victimised. 

 Mine and your ancestors could have belonged to one of the above three categories. That ancestry should weigh heavily on us unless it is the legacy of peacemaking. The clue to ending violence rests in the third category of people: the mediators and peacemakers. Where are they? One can only hope that on the sidelines of the Israel-Palestine conflict, peacemakers are working relentlessly to end the war. The Aztecs did not stand a chance in history. Will Palestinians? 

 References 

The Florentine Codex by Bernardino de Sahagún 

A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by De las Casas