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Comment by zasdffaa | Hacker News Reader

Aztecs weren't charming in this regard and by that probably sowed the seeds of their own defeat by pushing other tribes to support the invading spaniards, but the conquistadors went in for full on genocide, totally deliberately.

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Nonsense. The conquistadors were indeed appalling in many ways, but no they did not go for full on genocide. The diseases that came with them killed off possibly 90% of the New World population regardless of what they did or didn't do. They were slavers for a time and even that was fought against quite vigorously by a surprising number of other Europeans (read for example about Bartolomé de las Casas). Much of the modern narrative mixes up an essentially unstoppable and non-deliberate mass die-off from European diseases with genocide. The two things were not the same even if the conquistadors also did often butcher native populations in specific contexts. As for the Aztecs, they truly were barbarous to their subjects. Their culture, for all its sophistication and many fascinating aspects, was based on an enormous amount of ritual and practical violence across many areas. There's no white washing this for PC reasons if you read even a moderate amount of literature about their empire. Even the Spanish didn't practice the ritual slaughter of over 20,000 people in just a few days simply for the sake of a religious festival. The Aztecs did indeed do this at times.

Well, read this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples...>. It's not very long. Genocide is discussed, depending on defintions of it. Some say genocide, some say it wasn't.

I've heard the claim of 100,000 killed in 3 das by the aztecs which has been put down to exaggeration by the invaders to justify their brutality towards aztecs, do you have a reliable link to the 20,000 figure?

> white washing this for PC reasons if you read even a moderate amount of literature

I have, and any whitewashing is your assumption of me, not my view (I mean, literally read my comment that you replied to). They were bloodthirsty (flower wars etc), but the spanish catholics were far worse in my view.

The conquistadors were not set on carrying out genocide, and did not carry out genocide. They were just vastly more advanced than the nations they encountered and consequently were able to conquer many of them.

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