There were no Spanish representatives when Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as Mexico’s first female president this month. The hard-left former mayor of Mexico City wanted the king of Spain to apologize for the “tremendously violent, painful, and unjustifiable” conquest of the Aztecs. Spain’s socialist government dismissed her demand, noting sardonically that Sheinbaum saw no problem with asking Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose crimes are a lot less than 500 years old. In the end, with their king disinvited, Spanish ministers also boycotted the inauguration.
It was bound to cross the border sooner or later, this obsession with white guilt that has become the most irritating American export of the 21st century. Everything is seen through the lens of imagined victimhood. History is reduced to a morality play about slavery and colonialism (though, in real life, the latter was in no small part launched to stamp out the former).
The fall of the Aztecs is typical enough. The Conquistadores were motivated by a lust for gold, which, in the 16th century, exerted an almost mystical pull on Europeans far beyond their desire for material wealth. The annexation was violent, and in its aftermath, many indigenous people were forced to work for their conquerors through the encomienda system. Hernán Cortés falls short of our modern human rights standards.
By the standards of contemporary Mesoamerica, though, there was nothing unusual about his behavior. Conquest and tribute were part of the immemorial order. Indeed, many of the peoples who had been subjugated by the Aztecs were only too happy to ally with the pale-faced strangers who rode on strange deerlike creatures and carried glinting tubes that hurled fire. The strangers were mainly interested in gold, which was not considered especially valuable in pre-Columbian America. The Aztecs, by contrast, demanded a constant stream of victims for their gruesome sacrifices.
Cortés could never have overcome Moctezuma’s vast empire with just 500 soldiers. He succeeded because the Aztecs’ vassal peoples, as well as some of their former allies, threw in their lot with him. Yes, Spain assaulted and occupied the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, but so did Tlaxcala, Tetzcoco, Totonacapan, and many other surrounding cities. For years after the Aztecs’ defeat, these places were glad enough to be protectorates, running their own affairs under the loose sovereignty of the Spanish crown.
Did they all live happily ever after? No. There was looting and racism. The aboriginal peoples, lacking immunity to imported pathogens, died in tragic numbers from smallpox, measles, and other European diseases (though if spreading a disease is a question of moral culpability, China owes the rest of us one hell of a debt).
All I am saying is that things are more complicated than Sheinbaum pretends. For one thing, the descendants of the Conquistadores are far more likely to be found in Mexico than in Spain. Today’s Spaniards are descended from the people who stayed home.
For another, the Spanish crown was constantly trying to hold back the adventurers who acted in its name, issuing proclamation after proclamation to the effect that its subjects in the New World were Christians, entitled to the same rights as their fellow subjects in Iberia. Although the “woke” often trot out “colonialism and racism” as a binomial phrase, empires tended to be more concerned with the rights of indigenous peoples than independent republics. One of the causes of the American Revolution was the British crown’s reluctance to let the colonies expand westward. In Mexico, the extirpation of indigenous languages and customs dates overwhelmingly from the postcolonial period.
The most depressing aspect of all this is the changed role of the United States in the Western hemisphere. Until a decade or so ago, the U.S. was the regional grown-up, the country that promoted reason over superstition, cool-headedness over conspiracy theories, and individuals over groups. Now, it is busily exporting irrationalism and collectivism, promoting the notion that white people carry some kind of Original Sin — a notion enthusiastically taken up by both indigenous activists and “woke” whites in Latin America.
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Spain, meanwhile, has kept its head. Even under one of the few surviving socialist governments in Europe, one that hails the loopy lefties in Mexico’s ruling party as “fellow progressives,” it refuses to play along with notions of ancestral guilt, collective responsibility, and sham apologies. As I noted in these pages a while ago, Christopher Columbus is still treated there as a hero despite his many personal failings.
Because Spain does not go out of its way to invite historical criticism, no one seriously expects it to pay reparations for things done 20 generations ago in an unimaginably different age. There is, I am sure, a lesson in there somewhere.
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Publish date : 2024-10-03 22:15:00
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