To genocide or not to genocide?

[Birdjaguar]

Gold and riches were pretty strong motivators to cleanse Mexico of any Aztec impediments to Cortes getting them.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

There's a pretty sizeable gap between stopping an element, or even a number of elements of a culture, and eradicating it completely. The institution of human sacrifice was a pretty central component of Mesoamerican cultures, sure, but it was not the entire culture. The culture of the United States was for a time pretty well bound up with the institution of slavery, and Nazi Germany had racial segregation and extermination as a fundamental law of its society. Yet the abandonment of those practices, even after two long and bloody wars, hardly led to the "genocide" of Southern or German culture.

As for what constitutes "barbaric" practices, that obviously depends on your moral standards. Sitting here in the 21st century I can safely declare that I find human sacrifice appalling, but I also find what the Spanish replaced the Aztecs with pretty deplorable too. One cruel, exploitative empire replaced another. Naturally, I am all for the end of practices I find abhorrent, but I'm not sure what me saying that adds to anyone's understanding of the history, or ethics in general: I haven't really got anything to offer beyond stop doing bad things, but don't just do something else bad in their place.

I'm also unconvinced that you can really view them as two different stories. The end of human sacrifice came about as part of a series of bloody, plundering conquests by the Spanish that ended with them instituting encomienda. One system replaced the other. Actions do not exist in a vacuum, and I find it unhelpful to weigh up things like "stopped human sacrifice" on the one hand against "subjected the same people to forced labour" on the other.

So, do you really think that the indians were not forced to labour under the aztec regime? We had this discussion some months ago iirc. The encomienda system was designed as a pretty humanitarian and for the time progressive way to reeducate the indians and convert them to Christianity ultimately turning them into full Spanish citizens. It totally forbade the encomenderos of mistreating the indians in any way. However it was rarely applied if ever, since the encomenderos, who were no others but the empowered conquistadores themselves, opposed the encomienda system and even rebelled against it in some bloddy uprisings, preferring to keep the original indian structures of servitude that gave them the right of life and death over his indian serfs.

 

[Ferocitus]

That's an interesting concept -

Just to add some Australian flavour to this thread...

There is still a lot of mystery, controversy and misdirection surrounding the
forced administration of Depo-Provera on Australian Aboriginal women and girls.
Many of the young women did not speak English and didn't know they were
being effectively sterilized when it was administered.

 

[Uberfrog]

So, do you really think that the indians were not forced to labour under the aztec regime? We had this discussion some months ago iirc. The encomienda system was designed as a pretty humanitarian and for the time progressive way to reeducate the indians and convert them to Christianity ultimately turning them into full Spanish citizens. It totally forbade the encomenderos of mistreating the indians in any way. However it was rarely applied if ever, since the encomenderos, who were no others but the empowered conquistadores themselves, opposed the encomienda system and even rebelled against it in some bloddy uprisings, preferring to keep the original indian structures of servitude that gave them the right of life and death over his indian serfs.

Of course many were forced to labour under the Mexica. My point is that you cannot call it an ethical victory if that is only ended by the next wave of conquerors coming along and essentially enslaving the Mexica themselves. I'm not justifying the excesses and cruelty of the Aztecs, I'm just saying that I think the Spanish conquest of Mexico is hardly an example of a supposedly justified genocide, as suggested by the OP. I maintain that there can never be such a thing.

Thank you, though, for the interesting point about encomienda and its design in theory. But I think any ethical judgments should rest on the system in practice, however misapplied it may be.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

There are indeed some possible configurations broadly defined as "culture" that are sufficiently bad to be worth destroying, if it's only the culture being destroyed.

I'm not aware of any actual historical examples of this in practice, aside from a group of people just gradually acting differently over time. If you could wave a wand in the 1400's and make Aztec not die in droves to disease and act like 1980s Americans, it's pretty easy to make a case that doing so would be ethical.

Killing people en masse on the justification that other people are killing en masse not so much.

As an aside, Spanish were filth anyway in this time period. They had no such "justification" with Inca, and acted overtly in bad faith (even worse than Mexico). None of the colonial empires were free of blame, but when compared against Portugal & France Spain really does look especially bad.

 

[innonimatu]

I'm actually happy to see so much care here about whether wars for "moral causes" are justified!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I'm actually happy to see so much care here about whether wars for "moral causes" are justified!

I've never considered that "civilizing the natives" (ie. forcibly converting them to your own religion) is a just reason for war.

I'd like to see a return to the expectation that if you declare war, you have to actually lead the army yourself. Henry V didn't sit back while others fought and died for him. He put himself at risk, as well.

How many modern leaders would be willing to put themselves at risk, as one of the conditions of going to war?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ Casualty rate/ability to specifically target a leader + modern communication make for an incomparable situation in terms of leaders being at risk. I admit I'm not sure in Henry V's case whether he was literally part of front line combat vs just leading troops; these are different things.

I'm actually happy to see so much care here about whether wars for "moral causes" are justified!

Remember, morality is necessarily subjective. When you prosecute war, you're doing it on the basis that your values are worth more than their values (or the attacker just doesn't care about justification and has the means to take stuff).

So mostly there's something someone wants to accomplish, and they'll make up the excuses they need to feel better about the requisite actions. It's amazing how often these justifications crop up in scenarios where the attack has a high chance of success, but not in otherwise nigh-identical scenarios where either:

- The same justification applies but there's less to gain
- The target would be far more costly to attack

So how are you defining justification? If you mean "make up a good enough excuse that you can procure the resources to get what you want without too many negative consequences to the nation declaring or its ruler", then justifying war is doable.

If you mean coming up with a commonly accepted application of reasoning such that you're generating more utility than you're destroying by engaging in war, I'm not sure history has a clear example. You have to make too many assumptions about "what would have happened if there wasn't war".

 

[Traitorfish]

I've previously argued that genocide is a constitute function of and requirement for the modern state, and I haven't yet encountered a compelling reason to change my mind.

Also, re: human sacrifice, if we're going to reduce every culture to its weirdo aristocratic cults, then there isn't a complex society on the planet that doesn't come away looking profoundly barbarous. The Mexica actually come across quiet well, because their barbarism was mostly practiced by the elite against their elite; sacrifice was never realistically a professional hazard for a peasant or artisan.

The genocide of the Aztec population was mostly because of disease. The elimination of their culture was a feature of the Spanish culture of the time. Spanish (European?) greed for gold assured there would be no cultural co-existence.

I'd be wary of leaning to hard on disease. Genetically, the Mexica are mostly still there. A lot of them died, but Spanish migration in the sixteenth century didn't resemble that of the white settler colonies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was never more than a steady trickle. Natives remained a majority into the eighteenth century, and Native or mestizo people are the majority to this day. The change was, as you indicate, cultural, but the role of disease in cultural change is much more complex than "whoops, everyone's dead". The most profound impact of disease, in cultural terms, is the way it disrupts traditions and social structures, making a people uniquely vulnerable to a project of cultural assimilation which was, by he nation-building standards of the nineteenth century, really pretty pissweak.

Looking back it is pretty easy to say that we wish we knew more about the Aztecs, how they lived and their achievements as a dominant culture of their day; and it would have been nice to have a remnant of that culture intact. Likewise with the Maya and Inca. But like the buffalo, that which stands in the way of greed and god get ground into dust.

I mean, six million people today speak a Mayan language, and over eight million speak a Quecha language. That puts them on a level with a lot of smaller European languages, like Danish or Albanian, and well ahead of Welsh or Romansh. It represents a higher absolute number of speakers than existed during the "Golden Age" of either civilisation. These people didn't go anywhere, Europeans just decided that they didn't count anymore, because they didn't hold any power.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'd be wary of leaning to hard on disease. Genetically, the Mexica are mostly still there. A lot of them died, but Spanish migration in the sixteenth century didn't resemble that of the white settler colonies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was never more than a steady trickle. Natives remained a majority into the eighteenth century, and Native or mestizo people are the majority to this day. The change was, as you indicate, cultural, but the role of disease in cultural change is much more complex than "whoops, everyone's dead". The most profound impact of disease, in cultural terms, is the way it disrupts traditions and social structures, making a people uniquely vulnerable to a project of cultural assimilation which was, by he nation-building standards of the nineteenth century, really pretty pissweak.

It's good to be wary of claiming it's the sole factor. At the same time, it's hard to picture history even looking kind of similar in the Western Hemisphere if it wasn't a major factor. If it was like Africa and the Europeans needed centuries later technology to avoid dying to it instead there's absolutely no way colonialism in the western hemisphere takes root in any way similar to how it did in history. What I wonder about is how such a theoretical western hemisphere would perform in the long term compared to our historical version, Africa, and Europe. It's nearly impossible to predict though. All it would take is one nation adopting weapons like Japan did for a while and running roughshod over a huge area uncontested to throw a wrench in any viable predictions, and there's more ways to skew it than that.

 

[bhavv]

so you'd sacrifice humans to end human sacrifice?

If there were no more humans, then there would be no more human related problems.

(Popular thinking guy meme that typically goes with such comments before anyone wrongly mistakes it for something else).

Also two things that I think are worth 'culturally genociding' are female genital mutilation and child marriage.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Also two things that I think are worth genociding are female genital mutilation and child marriage.

What about Stupidity?

 

[bhavv]

What about Stupidity?

Whoa, whoa there, Mr. Ableist genocider.

Does my post edit make the context of what you quoted clearer now?

 

[Broken_Erika]

Whoa, whoa there, Mr. Ableist genocider.

Does my post edit make the context of what you quoted clearer now?

Pffffft! I don't like context. Stupid people need to go. Foamy be with you!

 

[Birdjaguar]

I've previously argued that genocide is a constitute function of and requirement for the modern state, and I haven't yet encountered a compelling reason to change my mind.

Also, re: human sacrifice, if we're going to reduce every culture to its weirdo aristocratic cults, then there isn't a complex society on the planet that doesn't come away looking profoundly barbarous. The Mexica actually come across quiet well, because their barbarism was mostly practiced by the elite against their elite; sacrifice was never realistically a professional hazard for a peasant or artisan.


I'd be wary of leaning to hard on disease. Genetically, the Mexica are mostly still there. A lot of them died, but Spanish migration in the sixteenth century didn't resemble that of the white settler colonies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was never more than a steady trickle. Natives remained a majority into the eighteenth century, and Native or mestizo people are the majority to this day. The change was, as you indicate, cultural, but the role of disease in cultural change is much more complex than "whoops, everyone's dead". The most profound impact of disease, in cultural terms, is the way it disrupts traditions and social structures, making a people uniquely vulnerable to a project of cultural assimilation which was, by he nation-building standards of the nineteenth century, really pretty pissweak.


I mean, six million people today speak a Mayan language, and over eight million speak a Quecha language. That puts them on a level with a lot of smaller European languages, like Danish or Albanian, and well ahead of Welsh or Romansh. It represents a higher absolute number of speakers than existed during the "Golden Age" of either civilisation. These people didn't go anywhere, Europeans just decided that they didn't count anymore, because they didn't hold any power.

Sure many of the Mexica, Maya and Incans survived, but many many more died of disease. Now, I admit that it wasn't deliberate genocide by the Spanish (a la as was seen in parts of the American west) but the population reduction was pretty staggering.

 

[Kyriakos]

For a culture (Aztec) which had gods that flay their own body (and obviously have little issue doing it to humans), fight alien monsters, and call for ceremonial human sacrifice, it did go away somewhat quietly

There is also the german type, eg Herero (or the Belgium type), where the core point is mere lack of interest about the natives remaining alive.

 

[Dachs]

I'd like to see a return to the expectation that if you declare war, you have to actually lead the army yourself. Henry V didn't sit back while others fought and died for him. He put himself at risk, as well.

How many modern leaders would be willing to put themselves at risk, as one of the conditions of going to war?

Why do you think there hasn't been a nuclear war yet?

 

[Ryika]

I'd like to see a return to the expectation that if you declare war, you have to actually lead the army yourself. Henry V didn't sit back while others fought and died for him. He put himself at risk, as well.

How many modern leaders would be willing to put themselves at risk, as one of the conditions of going to war?

That's just silly. The role of a modern leader is to lead, not be a pawn on the battlefield. Losing that leader needlessly in a battle would be a completely senseless blow to both, the administration, as well as the morale of the country.

Surely there are better solutions that make sure that Leaders don't go to war for nothing, than to throw away representatives who have not been voted into office for their abilities on the battlefield.

 

[Traitorfish]

That's just silly. The role of a modern leader is to lead, not be a pawn on the battlefield. Losing that leader needlessly in a battle would be a completely senseless blow to both, the administration, as well as the morale of the country.

You have a weird notion of how pre-nineteenth century warfare worked.

 

[Ryika]

But I wasn't even talking about pre-nineteenth century warfare...?