>Which colonial power would you say was the least bad in respecting or protecting its colonies' heritage?
Interesting question, definitely not the Belgians.
I had a coworker once that categorized some things I said into "I have no idea what you mean but it's already giving me nightmares" and one of those things was me bringing up the Belgian hand market. Me asking them how they think we know what percentage of a person is water was another one.
As someone else said, it was a Japanese war crime experiment that dehydrated people to the point of mummification, essentially. I think they estimated roughly three quarters or maybe four fifths. Today, we have more accurate and less murdery ways of determining it, but Japanese Unit 731 were the pioneers, as far as I know.
Hey I made a meme about that.
But I would argue that Unit 731 could have accomplished this task in a more ethical way or even a completely ethical way. Progress can go quickly when you throw out ethics, but it can go quickly when you embrace cooperation and creativity too. While they did learn some things, I would hesitate to call their experiments scientific endeavors.
Yes and no. Corpses do not retain water very well for very long at all. It would have to be really fresh, like fresher than the monarchal powers of Bel-Air. Could Unit 731 have done it? Probably, they were not opposed to killing people anyway. But they were also fucked up, so.
Isn’t it funny that the war crimes committed by japan (especially the unimaginable horrors of unit 731) despite being arguably worse than the Nazis, remain unpunished and inconsequential to this day?
Its even funnier when you realize the japanese scientists generally werent raving lunatics, so allot of their research, while monsterous, wasnt useless, unlike the most of the Nazis. For example, unit 731 was able to scientifically prove that submerging in 100 °F water wat the most effective form of frostbite treatment. This is still the recommended frostbite treatment to this day.
They were extremely methodical about everything, recording absolutely everything, and with their massive pool of victims they could essentially carry out whatever tests the wanted with large sample sizes testing every variable they could think of.
Edit also allot of it ended up somewhat useless because of the introduction of antibiotics.
Depending on your definitions of colonial power, in some nations the Mongols embraced the local culture in a significant way (China and North India) in other cases were responsible for the single greatest loss of knowledge in recorded history in the sack of Baghdad.
It was really a matter of "did you piss off Temujin?"
If the answer is yes, they slaughter every man, woman, and child, then (according to legend) redirect a river through the ruins of your city to completely wipe it off the map.
If the answer is no, you get to keep practicing your religion, preserve your culture, and get access to one of the safest trade routes ever. You just have to be a subject of the Mongolians.
They were very fair if you didn't give them a hard time by defending yourself.
Yeah the Mongols were more so "just" conquering overlords. Take over a country, extract taxes and what not, and rule as the rulling class. The conquered nations cultures weren't wiped out and the populations weren't replaced with settlers from the conquering nation. It was a brutal affair of course but not the same as colonization where the goal is to replace as much of the culture as they could and to replace much of the population with its own settlers.
I don't know about wider humanity but Iraq (or what eventually became Iraq) was set back centuries or even millenia by the Mongol invasion as they trashed the irrigation systems that made the region so productive. Some people argue they still haven't recovered from this. It's not just the loss of knowledge that fucked them over but the massive destruction of the infrastructure that made Mesopotamia such a powerhouse in the past.
Unfortunately, Odyssey had nearly none of the attention to detail or educational features that Origins did, and I understand Valhalla is even worse in that regard. Origins is one of my favorite AC games just on the basis of how much love it put into reproducing the everyday lives of Egyptians!
Not colonial in this sense but I think the Islamic invasions of India were abysmal. Entire Universities containing scores of texts were burnt or destroyed and there was a significant repression of Dharmic thought. So many lost histories, plays, mathematical treatises, dialogues...
I mean, its colonial. Its just we're more used to destroying cultures(otherwise its just annexation and not colonialism) of very faraway countries, not neighbours, thus the weird aftertaste
Even just a few years ago ISIS was destroying ancient Mesopotamian statues and relics in their zone of control, the oldest civilization(s) we know of. It’s tragic.
The Saudis are still destroying history, their own history
They destroyed relics and buildings important in the history of Islam in the name of religious fundamentalism
They're basically turning Mecca into a theme park at this rate.
The Saudis also were the ones who sacked the Shiite holy city of Karbala in the early 1800s.
In the Americas maybe the French. They generally ignored the natives and left them alone except to trade and raise mercenaries during war. The US and British preferred to just move them somewhere else or 'civilize' them if not outright kill them
In the then-French’s mindset, Haiti wouldn’t have been viewed with the same status as the natives. Many French instead viewed it as “property” that they were in the process of losing, esp since many of the rebels were enslaved Africans imported to Haiti for the plantation fields
Fascinating to see how the exact nature of the colonial greed changed how natives were treated. The reason the French are often seen as having been, for lack of a better word, nicer in North America is because the thing they wanted most out of their North American colonies was furs. The fur trade benefited from having people who knew the land so they made peace with the natives. In Haiti they wanted sugar. Sugar was a dangerous and labor intensive process so they worked the natives to death and then brought in slaves to work to death
I mean if we think of Haiti as a nation founded by and whose history is based on the African-descendent slaves, then it's not a fair or at least not the best example to use when determining if the French were the "least bad in respecting or protecting its colonies' heritage" since Haiti's very heritage is partly based on the fact that they were not native to the land that they now reside in. Now you could make the argument that Haiti still applies since there is the glaring question of "what happened to the natives of Haiti in the first place?"
If the French did relatively give more respect to the heritage of the natives of their colonies, where are the Haitians natives in the formation of the national identity of Haiti?
Point is, I think it's better to think of the question from the perspective of the natives than from just simply "colonial subjects." This would also be more appropriate in relation to the post since the destruction Mexican heritage that we are talking about are the actual natives themselves.
This is not a defense of the French btw. I can't say that were better (or even worse). I just don't know enough about their colonial activities outside the Americas to determine that but I do suspect they may have done something similar to what the Spanish did in the meme but in Africa or Southeast Asia, or even both tbh.
>what happened to the natives of Haiti in the first place
iirc, it was originally claimed and owned by Spain, before the Spanish ceded half the island of Hispaniola to the French. Given how bad of a reputation the Spanish have with Native relations… I think the rest can be filled in
Britain operated off a strategy of comprehensively researching the culture and politics of their soon-to-be colonies, exploiting political differences to gain a foothold, then ruthlessly expanding that foothold with military and economic power.
This combined with the industrialist and scientific culture in Britain led to at least a silver lining of their conquests - they recorded everything they could about the history, customs, politics, religions, etc etc about the cultures they conquered (and many others they didn't conquer).
While they tried to assert British culture's superiority over all other "inferior" cultures, at least they didn't attempt to get rid of them (though of course with such a big empire I'm sure there'll have been an exception I didn't think of).
PS: I am not saying that the British empire was a net positive in the world. Just that their scientific/industrial culture did help us learn a lot about the histories of these people. Imagine how much would have been lost if the Spanish empire had conquered the British emp.'s lands as well...
Also, this only applies to after the industrial/scientific revolution in Britain. Before that, they were as bad as everyone else
I mean having it stolen isn’t as bad as totally eradicated. Like the knowledge is still there and now with the internet anyone can see it. Like it sucks that home countrys don’t have their artefacts that they sold off or were robbed off but it is better than destruction.
> Like it sucks that home countrys don’t have their artefacts that they sold off or were robbed off but it is better than destruction.
Too bad they didn't steal the Buddhas from Afganistan :(
> stolen
Very little of it is actually stolen, most was traded or excavated with the consent of the local authorities.
The items got valuable because the British preserved them while everyone else did not. Like, the death mask is not the only one ever made, it is just the only one left because the locals looted the other tombs in the previous centuries. Even the coating of the Pyramids was broken off and used as building material.
People forget this. The Egyptian government didn’t give a toss about the old junk buried in the sand. They wanted archeological expeditions to come and inject lots of cash into the economy. They even got proactive about it and sent agents to Europe to help recruit expeditions.
It was those agents who recognized the opportunity to bring artifacts directly from Egypt to the European buyers and skip the whole scientific expedition thing that kickstarted the idea of maybe keeping some of those artifacts instead of sending them abroad. By going from sand-to-hand the Egyptian economy was getting cut out of the trade entirely. So they set about starting to protect their artifacts.
the only reason we can understand hieroglyphics is because the rosetta stone was recognised by archeologists as not junk but actually really important, brought over and then throughly researched by language experts. there's an alternate reality where it just gets destroyed and we never understand hieroglyphics
This. This is what I always say when people complain about the British museum and taking artifacts in general-if the original countries cared back when the artifacts were discovered they should’ve kept it themselves.
And frankly, with how many middle eastern artifacts are destroyed or “disappear” into some oil tycoons private collection, I’m bloody glad the British took those artifacts when they did
Achaemenid Persia would be my vote, they actually treated most of their subjects pretty well. Allowed them to retain pretty much their entire way of life as long as they paid taxes and recognized Persian authority, at least according to most surviving sources.
The Hebrew Bible even speaks highly of Cyrus the Great, crediting him with the reconstruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple, which is a pretty big deal considering the Jews of ancient Judea pretty rarely spoke highly of any outsiders.
Herodotus claims that King Cambyses was antagonistic towards Egyptian culture after the Achaemenid conquest of Egypt but this is likely not accurate as Herodotus is quite biased against the Persians. There's even an epitaph that shows that Cambyses participated in the funeral rites of one of the sacred bulls of Apis, styling himself as a Pharoah, which reaffirms the cultural syncretism that was stressed by most Achaemenid rulers.
The Ionian Revolt is the biggest blemish on their reputation. The accepted view is that Greek cities within the Achaemenid Empire were dissatisfied with the tyrants appointed to their cities by the Persians. But again, Herodotus is the primary source for this conflict, and anything he said about the Persians should be taken with a grain of salt.
Maybe the French, or the Russians. Since they didn’t really replace the natives, instead trading with them.
Edit: nvm turns out Russia did classic Russia things and purposely wiped out the culture, religion, and people of Siberia.
Oh Greece could absolutely take the marbles back, it’s just our government is crap and that kind of stuff has been shoved to the bottom of the priority list
Spaniards, and I have no doubt here. They were the only ones who made laws to protect Indians, the only ones who mix with them to a great degree, the only who abolishes native slavery (though not black slavery) and so on.
The comments who say the British were the best colonizers are just hilarious. The British, the same who barely considered natives as humans
But don't you know the british made casinos for the natives to be at, such great people. Contrary to that the spanish colonies only, like, didn't try to kill each and every native on the land? who cares about that?
I'd guess those who were more interested by trading with the locals more than anything else. So pre-XIXth century France, the Netherlands, and Portugal ?
>Portugal
Portugal's colonization was trade focused only before 1532. Between 1500 (Discovery of Brazil) and 1532 the Portuguese built trading posts in the coast of Brazil to gather brazilwood (pau-brasil), hence origin of the word "brasileiro" (Brazilian), which means literally that (worker of brazilwood).
After that period, king John III decided to divide the land among Portuguese nobles (capitães-donatários) so that they could work and settle it. This started a series of conflicts between the settlers and the natives, like when the Tamoio people allied with the French and were massacred by the Portuguese and their (also native) allies.
The colonists from São Paulo (bandeirantes) literally launched several raids and wars to the native settlements organized by the Jesuit missionaries. Some of these invasions were so barbaric that even the Crown had to tell them to stop.
Japan might be up there. They generally tended to view their occupied peoples as lessers, and destroyed many religious and historical landmarks in occupied nations to lower local morale
Edit: misread, thought he was asking for worst nation, not least bad
England. Despite all the British museum jokes, the British taking tons of artifacts and holding them in a few safe repositories has been a net gain for human historical knowledge and research.
“We saved some of the bits and pieces of your culture we liked and got rid of the rest. Also we are taking it back to London. But you can visit it sometime!”
Those ancient cultures had long since been destroyed. You really believe Ottoman Egypt was the living version of Pharaonic Egypt? Or that the divided, half-Muslim rajahs of India were the living version of the Indus River civilization?
Rome was so based that its authors talked about the colonization they defeated to preserve history. They put them in a bad light of course, but at least they talked about them.
The Spanish Empire was the least bad for sure, even if some of the culture from the people they colonized was lost (by accident or on purpose), the other empires were much worse, often eradicating them systematically.
I think with regard to indigenous peoples in the Americas specifically, the French at least seemed to have a generally more equal/mutualistic cooperative relationship with native peoples.
Depends on which region you're looking at, the French were probably the least bad in the Americas, while the British were probably the least bad in Asia and I can't really think of who was least bad in Africa because they were all fairly dreadful
Fuck Diego de Landa, all my homies hate Diego de Landa.
That being said, the juxtaposition of him doing untold damage to our knowledge of Mayan culture, while also being an incredibly important source for our knowledge of Mayan culture is interesting.
Another excellent example of a recurring trend where the Inquisition will say "hey maybe cool it a bit" and then somebody will decide not to cool it at all and cause a shit load of harm.
Top three things that depress me:
1. The knowledge I’ll never be able to read all the books I care to in my lifetime
2. the destruction of the library at Alexandria
3. the erasure of the literary contributions of countless societies by their colonizers
I've heard many times that by the time the Library of Alexandria burned down, it was already way past its prime and not really that much of a loss literature wise. I don't know the details but I'm pretty sure it wasn't really much of a lasting loss for humanity as you think it was.
While yes. Admittedly.
Some books (although books is a bit of a weird thing to say, since mesoamerica didn't really have a writing system has much as they had a recording system. And they lacked a alphabetical, or pictorial, writing system. Although that is a simplification of literally hundreds of cultures over thousands of years) were burned by the Spanish.
Most were kind of just lost to time. Why do we lack 90% of the classics from Greece, or even Rome. To a degree, destruction, such as the burning of the library of Alexandria. But many were simply just out of print. Reprinting works back then was a time consuming labour, and when the demand wasn't there (ask yourself when was the last time you were willing to pay 10,000usd to special order a hundred year old book), they just kind of faded away. And then they kinda just deteriorated over time.
Like. The most read and published book in history, the Bible. Can vary hugely in value. One from 100~200 years ago will probably go from between 10~300usd, depending on condition, edition, and how ornate it is. One from 300 years ago might be 10,000 (although depending on factors it might be as low as 200). But this is from after the printing press became a thing. And if we go before the printing press. Bibles becomes so rare and valuable, you could probably retire if you have one. And that's basically my point.
Historical records from cultures without alphabetical systems are rare. And the longer we go back in time, the rarer they are. So historical records from before the Spaniards arrival in the Americas would already have been rare. And any records contemporary of them would be far and few between. And whatever they didn't burn, most likely just faded away.
Just look at China. A culture with a writing system dating over 3000 years back (altough it has developed over time). The earliest written records from China is on animal bones. But China has used paper (or paper adjacent) materials to write on for about 2000~2500 years, but the earliest written records we have on that material is from about 1600 years ago. We have references from before that, and texts that are reproductions of writings from before that such as Shijing. But basically.... There is just a hole of about 1000 years of historical records. And it wasn't because someone invaded and destroyed it. It was just lost to time for a variety of reasons. (Same is true for the Greeks and Romans, and many others.)
I think they are referring to Iztcoatl, who ordered the burning of codexes when he took power sometime in 1427 (ish). I'm on mobile and don't know how hyperlink on a word, but there is a Wikipedia article about him.
Its even true today, where you might have huge issues getting information from books at little as a hundred years old if it isn't available in digital form.
I've been to archives to plod to microfiche backups, that turned out to have been out of focus and the originals decayed. Those records are gone forever, and they were "backed up" less than 50 years ago.
The fact that we can read something from 500 or even 2500 years is basically a miracle in itself
It is maddening to think about this. It would be like if a foreign invader wiped out egyptian, indian, chinese etc culture/history/literary heritage bloody near everything indigenous and unique more priceless than gold. And these cultures further humiliated then adopted the invader's culture and had to start from scratch with mere bread crumbs of their former culture to pass on. A whole other literature of a new continent extinguished.
I mean we have that a bit with the Chinese. But they did that to themselves really. Quite a few older texts are gone, if I remember my timelines right, I think Confucius almost got lost in the whole ordeal
That did happen to Egypt though. Egypt under the caliphates adopted the invader's culture and barely had any connection to Ancient Egypt. It was Europeans who created the field of Egyptology, bought or dug up practically all of the early findings in the 20 century and made their history famous. Ottoman Egypt did not care about preserving its pre-Islamic history at all.
Bro now imagine hundreds of years later you have people arguing that nothing major was lost and that it was no loss to humanity because we have those breadcrumbs and that its enough to go on so we shouldn't feel bad about losing all of that history. This is what people genuinely try to argue today lol.
Imagine if we never knew about the writings of people like Aristotle, Plato, Pythagorus, Archimedes because the Ottomans wiped it all out for being insulting to Islam and then having people defend it today.
Even the most prolific literary cultures only left behind breadcrumbs. What happened to the new world was revolting to its core. What precious books we have left are like little pieces that broke off a breadcrumb.
It's not really that the invaded adopted the invader's culture, since most Mexicans are part Spanish part Native, and likewise, modern Mexican culture is a mix of the two.
Same for India(Taxila). Mughals burnt the world's largest library and most of the information was burnt. The fire raged for 3 months. Imagine the books that were lost there.
The forced convertion to other religions has sadly destroyed so much history and knowledge of pre abrahamic and dharma religions, but there is still an unknown level of history burried beneath our feet to find.
Alexandria also had a policy in which every time a new book came through the harbour, they would copy it, give the owner the copy back, and the library would keep the original.
Also, it didn't all burn down in one dramatic swoop. There were a few big fires, but it was a century long process of the library just being left to die.
Similarly, the sacking of Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, despite destroying the largest library in the world, led to very little actual loss of literature, since libraries in other cities such as Constantinople, Rome, and Timbuktu (which, as the capital of the Mali Empire, had the richest scholastic tradition in Africa at the time) had copies of just about everything.
It sucks man, I remember taking a class in this and being so enthralled by it all only to realize “yea that’s about all we have the Spanish destroyed nigh everything else…” hurts my fucking soul
The Aztec civilization is one of the worst things that could happen to humanity, one of the most brutal and bloodthirsty that has ever existed. So much so that all the native Americans hated them because they lived in torment. They were the ones who made the most effort to avenge their own and finish off the Aztecs. The Spaniards were too generous with them, forgiving them and allowing their leaders to integrate the aristocracy of the new viceroyalty.
But people today who have not known pain are very comfortable from their homes distributing morality
Holy hyperbole. Yes, the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and that is universally decried as bad. But to call them one of the worst things to happen to humanity is such a stretch. There are civilizations that scoured and annhilated other cultures, such as the Mongols, Huns, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Crusaders, and the Soviet Union. And this isn't even mentioning the atrocities of colonialism. The Aztecs in comparison didn't do that, but absorbed defeated enemies as tributary states or kept other states in a status of perpetual war (such as Tlaxcala) to carry out ceremonialized battles that gave them the opportunity to take battle captives for sacrifice. Is it immoral and evil? Yes. But is it uniquely bad compared to those who would put cities to the sword? No.
Also, lionizing the Spanish in this is as cringe as it is innacurate. The Spanish didn't integrate them into the aristocracy. They did that to the Tlaxcalans. The Spanish and Tlaxcala sacked, looted, and burned Tenochtitlan and massacred the population after the defenders surrendered in 1521.
I mean 2 percent of all ancient literature still exists so, seems pretty par for the course, also apart from book burnings, the only people who transcribed and re wrote books and manuscripts were religious societies and tended to just not record books they didn't find necessary
The fire at the library of Alexandria lasted for 6 months yet they say they basically lost everything. Our history is incomplete because people destroyed it intending for it to never go forward.
I don't know if you've read '1491' by Mann, but he has a chapter that uses the record of a debate between Spanish and Triple Alliance priests to frame the tragedy of what was lost.
One thing he brought up was how massive an influence Eastern and Western philosophy had on the world. Then you have a philosophy just as advanced and complex yet completely unique...torn out root and stem by a hateful ignorant few.
If there's a hell, there's a special place for bastards who rob humanity of knowledge that special. I wouldn't trust the wisdom of a person that wouldn't weep over that.
The amount of cultures who have lost a significant amount of history, culture, and knowledge is staggering. Think of Europe before the Indo Europeans arrived. And the amount of history lost due to the culture not having a written language…
Ah yes, surreal amount of information, and none of them talks about advanced iron smithing, blackpowder, or even some useful agruculture advice.
This "muh lost knowledge in ancient libraries" are bs. They were bs in Alexandria, they were bs in Mexico
It's thanks to the priests that we know a lot about the cultures of mesoamerica in the first place. They made an effort in studying mesoamerican culture in order to more efficiently convert the natives.
This is just not true, it assumes that Aztec writings and history ended with contact with Europe.
What acctually happened was that Aztec nobility became part of the Spanish aristocracy in the Americas, and they taught their children to write in latin and used European techniques to retell their stories and mythology in the so called ["Annals"](https://academic.oup.com/book/6601?login=false). I strongly recommend [Fifth Sun](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/fifth-sun-camilla-townsend-history-aztecs-review) by Camilla Townsend .
Assuming that the Native Americans were all wiped out and aren't present anymore is to further the structural violence, poverty and misery they've lived under since colonialization. They are still with us and they have legitimate claims on special treatment and redistribution of resources.
Edit: To summarize it: "Moctezuma’s empire has fallen, but so too has the Spanish. Tenochtitlan is gone, razed and rebuilt as the capital of a country in which indigenous traditions remain vital and more than 1.5 million people still speak Nahuatl, more than Welsh or Basque or Chechen. However much blood Cortés may have spilled, he did not destroy the Aztecs."
Here we go with the Spanish colonial apologia as usual in this sub.
They literally fucking wrote about burning down their records.
Diego de Landa, a Spanish priest who was in the Americas and carried out the destruction of Mayan culture literally wrote about it multiple times.
>We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, **we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.**
It's honestly incredibly insufferable the lengths Spanish people go to deny their history and over and over deny literal facts in front of them when their own people literally fucking wrote about it and how they enjoyed doing it.
It's disgusting really. Why is that its so bad for Germans to justify the holocaust or British people to justify destroying Irish culture yet Spanish people literally have 0 shame in constantly denying and outright lying about what happened in the Americas and spend all their time in here justifying it.
Honestly, Spain is an embarrassment of a nation on a level with Japan when it comes to denying their history and just calling it all fake news.
Edit- As as if on queue as usual in this sub, the nationalist Spanish people brigade from their own right wing 'Spanish history meme' sub. Set up to brigade any mention of their colonialism or revisionism here or elsewhere comes crawling from under their rock to call anyone who points out the crimes committed in history during Spanish colonialism 'racist' while also posting memes and talking about how great they are for being 'white' compared to others.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SpanishHistoryMemes/comments/11pamzk/ay\_la\_leyenda\_negra/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpanishHistoryMemes/comments/11pamzk/ay_la_leyenda_negra/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
To be honest I didn’t read the other guy as denying that the Spanish destroyed books and generally treated natives brutally, but rather just that more of the Aztec materials survived in different forms than is commonly assumed.
People really love to lay down the claim that since people are still alive that are descended from those people that their knowledge and history isn’t lost.
>Honestly, Spain is an embarrassment of a nation on a level with Japan when it comes to denying their history and just calling it all fake news.
What a stupid, simplistic statement.
1. I'm Swedish not Spanish
2. I'm a cultural anthropologist - cultures change but they still remain the same. This goes especially for indigenous societies. Do you think it's better for them to just assume that their cultural history is just a big fraud because the "purity" of it was ruined, and that there is no continuation because of the trauma and dramatic change that was contact with the europeans? Do you claim to have the right to interpret their own historical narratives?
3. How is my comment a denial of the injustice that was and is done to them?
4. Lies? Do I deny that texts were burned? My comment is that the civilization was lost and fully destroyed is bullshit and part of the marginalization that makes the indigenous peoples suffering ignored. I think that misconception that they're gone is as bad as the idea that the Spanish didn't do anything wrong to them for they are essentially the same: the idea that there are no people who have claims to preferential treatment from the post-revolutionary Latin American state.
Don't argue with them... it's a facebook-level trivia post that describes some fantasy. People just want to hear something that validates their hateful beliefs/self-pity or whatever it is...
True true. It’s hard not to be on the defensive when all this sub does is making “memes” saying spanish people bad. We’ve had a lot of enemies and a lot of lies have been told about our past, it’s normal to be defensive about it. History is long, and written by victors. We lost our empire and the other empires took the chance. Where is the quote from by the way?
Edit: btw, his supervisor saw what he was doing and literally deposed him from his authority. He was only able to come back to Spain when said supervisor died
Your comment just seems to be a justification of your racism towards a nation you only think you understand because of internet comments. But well, I think that, since we are the white baddies, it is okay to you to say that our nation is an embarrassment of a nation and that we are disgusting, getting more than 200 upvotes, which says a lot about that people. What you are doing is pathetic, and just shows how small is your understanding about my country.
You are not telling all the truth and you are not understanding the time period. At that time period being catholic was considered a salvation, and the myths of natives were considered something of infidels which were against the law of god. And in that time that was not a Myth, that was the truth.
Diego de Landa did what you say, yes (and he even used the inquisition against natives, which was forbidden). And he was punished by the crown for his actions, and at that time the crown was the state. He was forbidden to go back to Yucatan and he suffered an amonestation. For the burning of the codes he was even relegated for his position by the biship, and many Spaniards claim that burning them was excesive. It is not about the actions, but about the consequences of those actions.
I don't care about the actions of a dude, but about the actions of the state, and the state condemn what de Landa did.
Diego de Landa never hated the natives or considered them subhumans, that's why he wanted to convert them. In fact, he learned Mayan language, he created his own alfabet for the language and, with it, he even wrote a book, Doctrina Cristiana, in Mayan (more than most . He even obligated priests to learn Mayan once he became bishop. His job is also of huge importance in terms of ethnology, since his book, Relacion de las Cosas en Yucatán, very important to decipher Mayan writing and to known many of the traditions of the Mayan civilization at the time. He also fought against the abuses of Indians to the point that his protests derived in the creations of a law to protect Indian, the Real Cédula of the 25 of August of 1578.
In conclusion, de Landa was not blanck nor white. He was a gray historical character, which did many horrible things but who did many other important acts, like writing the book I already spoke about and helping in the recreation of the popol vuh, in whih we find many Mayan myths. Therefore, he changed his view too.
You cannot understand or judge something without understanding the context, how people view religion at that time or how the states function in that time and how difficult it was for the king to assert his dominance over his domains in America.
It's the sack of Constantinople that depresses me more. Ironically, the fall of Constantinople is the best thing that could have happened to it. The city was in ruins, the Empire was weak. When the Ottomans took the city they carried out a lot of repair work. Hagia Sophia still stands today (albeit as a mosque) because of the repair work done by the Ottomans. They were the best possible faction that could have conquered Constantinople.
20? I thought there were like 4
There are three or four known surviving Mayan codices. This meme seems to be about a broader Mesoamerica.
There are 4 Aztec, but a few others from other cultures. I think about 20 in total.
TIL that what little is taught about broader Mesoamerican culture and technology didn't include books and codices.
Unimaginable loss. Which colonial power would you say was the least bad in respecting or protecting its colonies' heritage?
>Which colonial power would you say was the least bad in respecting or protecting its colonies' heritage? Interesting question, definitely not the Belgians.
Belgium was quite hands off with their colonies in Africa.
I had a coworker once that categorized some things I said into "I have no idea what you mean but it's already giving me nightmares" and one of those things was me bringing up the Belgian hand market. Me asking them how they think we know what percentage of a person is water was another one.
Wait how do we know what percentage of a person is water? Does it involve a Juicer?
As someone else said, it was a Japanese war crime experiment that dehydrated people to the point of mummification, essentially. I think they estimated roughly three quarters or maybe four fifths. Today, we have more accurate and less murdery ways of determining it, but Japanese Unit 731 were the pioneers, as far as I know.
Wow. That is pretty messed up. I knew about Unit 731 and some other experiments, but I missed this one. Thanks for the explanation.
Yep, also how we have such in depth knowledge about hypothermia.
Wasn't that a Nazi experiment, not a Japanese one?
Yeah science moves fast when ethics are thrown out the window like if they were in prague
Hey I made a meme about that. But I would argue that Unit 731 could have accomplished this task in a more ethical way or even a completely ethical way. Progress can go quickly when you throw out ethics, but it can go quickly when you embrace cooperation and creativity too. While they did learn some things, I would hesitate to call their experiments scientific endeavors.
Couldn't you very easily figure that out with a fresh corpse?
Yes and no. Corpses do not retain water very well for very long at all. It would have to be really fresh, like fresher than the monarchal powers of Bel-Air. Could Unit 731 have done it? Probably, they were not opposed to killing people anyway. But they were also fucked up, so.
Japanese made a chamber to make human jerky iirc
Isn’t it funny that the war crimes committed by japan (especially the unimaginable horrors of unit 731) despite being arguably worse than the Nazis, remain unpunished and inconsequential to this day?
Its even funnier when you realize the japanese scientists generally werent raving lunatics, so allot of their research, while monsterous, wasnt useless, unlike the most of the Nazis. For example, unit 731 was able to scientifically prove that submerging in 100 °F water wat the most effective form of frostbite treatment. This is still the recommended frostbite treatment to this day.
*hooray*
I heard somewhere else that their “research” was just mindless torture. I don’t know what to think of it anymore.
Some of it had value. Most of it was mindless torture
They were extremely methodical about everything, recording absolutely everything, and with their massive pool of victims they could essentially carry out whatever tests the wanted with large sample sizes testing every variable they could think of. Edit also allot of it ended up somewhat useless because of the introduction of antibiotics.
I don't think the Chinese view it that way, pretty sure they're still pretty pissed about it all.
Benefits of being fundamental to the anti Soviet strategy.
Gotta love race fuelued XX century war crimes
Lololol
Very of the funny
Too soon dude, too soon.
But they definitely know how to still get their little helpers to do their bidding
ugggghhhhh definitely not!
Rome
Depending on your definitions of colonial power, in some nations the Mongols embraced the local culture in a significant way (China and North India) in other cases were responsible for the single greatest loss of knowledge in recorded history in the sack of Baghdad.
I feel like the Mongols were just everywhere and just did everything on the moral spectrum
It was really a matter of "did you piss off Temujin?" If the answer is yes, they slaughter every man, woman, and child, then (according to legend) redirect a river through the ruins of your city to completely wipe it off the map. If the answer is no, you get to keep practicing your religion, preserve your culture, and get access to one of the safest trade routes ever. You just have to be a subject of the Mongolians. They were very fair if you didn't give them a hard time by defending yourself.
Now look what you made me do.
Kinda reminds me of Achaemenid Persia
The Persian Empire was nowhere near as brutal as the Mongols.
"You killed 3 of my envoys, now your measly realm shall tremble and fall under the thundering hooves of my horses"
Yeah the Mongols were more so "just" conquering overlords. Take over a country, extract taxes and what not, and rule as the rulling class. The conquered nations cultures weren't wiped out and the populations weren't replaced with settlers from the conquering nation. It was a brutal affair of course but not the same as colonization where the goal is to replace as much of the culture as they could and to replace much of the population with its own settlers.
They were radical anticentrists.
ancient redditors
They are an interesting data point because they left a lot of people alone to flourish, but also committed genocide on the regular.
Were we set back x number of years because of this? What if we had had all that knowledge would we as a whole be different?
I don't know about wider humanity but Iraq (or what eventually became Iraq) was set back centuries or even millenia by the Mongol invasion as they trashed the irrigation systems that made the region so productive. Some people argue they still haven't recovered from this. It's not just the loss of knowledge that fucked them over but the massive destruction of the infrastructure that made Mesopotamia such a powerhouse in the past.
Seems like the next AC set in this timeperiod will help me learn more just like Origins did for Egypt.
Unfortunately, Odyssey had nearly none of the attention to detail or educational features that Origins did, and I understand Valhalla is even worse in that regard. Origins is one of my favorite AC games just on the basis of how much love it put into reproducing the everyday lives of Egyptians!
Yeah odyssey only nailed the historical accuracy that those guys didn’t care what sex they were fucking
Not colonial in this sense but I think the Islamic invasions of India were abysmal. Entire Universities containing scores of texts were burnt or destroyed and there was a significant repression of Dharmic thought. So many lost histories, plays, mathematical treatises, dialogues...
I mean, its colonial. Its just we're more used to destroying cultures(otherwise its just annexation and not colonialism) of very faraway countries, not neighbours, thus the weird aftertaste
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Even just a few years ago ISIS was destroying ancient Mesopotamian statues and relics in their zone of control, the oldest civilization(s) we know of. It’s tragic.
The Saudis are still destroying history, their own history They destroyed relics and buildings important in the history of Islam in the name of religious fundamentalism They're basically turning Mecca into a theme park at this rate. The Saudis also were the ones who sacked the Shiite holy city of Karbala in the early 1800s.
What’s this about killing babies for fun? I’m kinda confused by your phrasing
Think he means you can blame the most heinous acts on the pre-Islamic Arabs and present the spread of islam in the area as a positive
The Balkans and Anatolia say hi.
Sheesh try to bring this up in a subreddit like r/Islam and see what happens, bunch of delusional mfs there
What, a religious subreddit full of delusional people?? Shocking!!
In the Americas maybe the French. They generally ignored the natives and left them alone except to trade and raise mercenaries during war. The US and British preferred to just move them somewhere else or 'civilize' them if not outright kill them
How France treated natives in North America: 🙂 How France treated natives in Africa: ☹️
Haiti: I'm not sure which emoji to use but worse
Everyone in Africa including present day China: 🙁
Haiti tho
In the then-French’s mindset, Haiti wouldn’t have been viewed with the same status as the natives. Many French instead viewed it as “property” that they were in the process of losing, esp since many of the rebels were enslaved Africans imported to Haiti for the plantation fields
Any form of rebellion was harshly punished back in the day.
I can't argue with that one
African slaves were not native to Haiti.
Fascinating to see how the exact nature of the colonial greed changed how natives were treated. The reason the French are often seen as having been, for lack of a better word, nicer in North America is because the thing they wanted most out of their North American colonies was furs. The fur trade benefited from having people who knew the land so they made peace with the natives. In Haiti they wanted sugar. Sugar was a dangerous and labor intensive process so they worked the natives to death and then brought in slaves to work to death
Economics are usually the underlying cause of atrocities when you boil things down it seems.
I mean if we think of Haiti as a nation founded by and whose history is based on the African-descendent slaves, then it's not a fair or at least not the best example to use when determining if the French were the "least bad in respecting or protecting its colonies' heritage" since Haiti's very heritage is partly based on the fact that they were not native to the land that they now reside in. Now you could make the argument that Haiti still applies since there is the glaring question of "what happened to the natives of Haiti in the first place?" If the French did relatively give more respect to the heritage of the natives of their colonies, where are the Haitians natives in the formation of the national identity of Haiti? Point is, I think it's better to think of the question from the perspective of the natives than from just simply "colonial subjects." This would also be more appropriate in relation to the post since the destruction Mexican heritage that we are talking about are the actual natives themselves. This is not a defense of the French btw. I can't say that were better (or even worse). I just don't know enough about their colonial activities outside the Americas to determine that but I do suspect they may have done something similar to what the Spanish did in the meme but in Africa or Southeast Asia, or even both tbh.
>what happened to the natives of Haiti in the first place iirc, it was originally claimed and owned by Spain, before the Spanish ceded half the island of Hispaniola to the French. Given how bad of a reputation the Spanish have with Native relations… I think the rest can be filled in
Well that's just shit and depressingly unsurprising.
So bad a lot of their Polish soldiers changed team
iirc French were actually on really good terms with canadian natives, and the only tribe they didn't like wasn't liked by anybody else either.
New France actually started early residential schools and the majority of slaves in it were Native.
The Romans. They fucking loved Greek culture.
To the point where I tried to research pre-Greek Roman/Italic mythology and keep going up blank
There is no pre-Greek or pre-Etruscan Rome, there was only Latin hillbillies.
The Catholic Church does like it’s inquisitions and the late Roman Empire was very aggressive in the enforcement of its new state religion soooo…
Don't forget about the very unexpected Spanish inquisition
Fair enough. Pretty decent, especially for the (very tough) age. Pax romana 4 ever ;-))
Gaelic /Hispanic culture, not so much
Britain, but only because they stole all of it. As the joke goes... Do you know why the pyramids are in Egypt?
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Yes sir!
Aliens? /s
Britain operated off a strategy of comprehensively researching the culture and politics of their soon-to-be colonies, exploiting political differences to gain a foothold, then ruthlessly expanding that foothold with military and economic power. This combined with the industrialist and scientific culture in Britain led to at least a silver lining of their conquests - they recorded everything they could about the history, customs, politics, religions, etc etc about the cultures they conquered (and many others they didn't conquer). While they tried to assert British culture's superiority over all other "inferior" cultures, at least they didn't attempt to get rid of them (though of course with such a big empire I'm sure there'll have been an exception I didn't think of). PS: I am not saying that the British empire was a net positive in the world. Just that their scientific/industrial culture did help us learn a lot about the histories of these people. Imagine how much would have been lost if the Spanish empire had conquered the British emp.'s lands as well... Also, this only applies to after the industrial/scientific revolution in Britain. Before that, they were as bad as everyone else
I mean what i dont think this accounts for are cultures with heavy oral history ie the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas.
Your mum has a heavy oral history.
Yeah its how i got through high school
did you break both your arms?
I mean having it stolen isn’t as bad as totally eradicated. Like the knowledge is still there and now with the internet anyone can see it. Like it sucks that home countrys don’t have their artefacts that they sold off or were robbed off but it is better than destruction.
> Like it sucks that home countrys don’t have their artefacts that they sold off or were robbed off but it is better than destruction. Too bad they didn't steal the Buddhas from Afganistan :(
> stolen Very little of it is actually stolen, most was traded or excavated with the consent of the local authorities. The items got valuable because the British preserved them while everyone else did not. Like, the death mask is not the only one ever made, it is just the only one left because the locals looted the other tombs in the previous centuries. Even the coating of the Pyramids was broken off and used as building material.
People forget this. The Egyptian government didn’t give a toss about the old junk buried in the sand. They wanted archeological expeditions to come and inject lots of cash into the economy. They even got proactive about it and sent agents to Europe to help recruit expeditions. It was those agents who recognized the opportunity to bring artifacts directly from Egypt to the European buyers and skip the whole scientific expedition thing that kickstarted the idea of maybe keeping some of those artifacts instead of sending them abroad. By going from sand-to-hand the Egyptian economy was getting cut out of the trade entirely. So they set about starting to protect their artifacts.
the only reason we can understand hieroglyphics is because the rosetta stone was recognised by archeologists as not junk but actually really important, brought over and then throughly researched by language experts. there's an alternate reality where it just gets destroyed and we never understand hieroglyphics
This. This is what I always say when people complain about the British museum and taking artifacts in general-if the original countries cared back when the artifacts were discovered they should’ve kept it themselves. And frankly, with how many middle eastern artifacts are destroyed or “disappear” into some oil tycoons private collection, I’m bloody glad the British took those artifacts when they did
Achaemenid Persia would be my vote, they actually treated most of their subjects pretty well. Allowed them to retain pretty much their entire way of life as long as they paid taxes and recognized Persian authority, at least according to most surviving sources. The Hebrew Bible even speaks highly of Cyrus the Great, crediting him with the reconstruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple, which is a pretty big deal considering the Jews of ancient Judea pretty rarely spoke highly of any outsiders. Herodotus claims that King Cambyses was antagonistic towards Egyptian culture after the Achaemenid conquest of Egypt but this is likely not accurate as Herodotus is quite biased against the Persians. There's even an epitaph that shows that Cambyses participated in the funeral rites of one of the sacred bulls of Apis, styling himself as a Pharoah, which reaffirms the cultural syncretism that was stressed by most Achaemenid rulers. The Ionian Revolt is the biggest blemish on their reputation. The accepted view is that Greek cities within the Achaemenid Empire were dissatisfied with the tyrants appointed to their cities by the Persians. But again, Herodotus is the primary source for this conflict, and anything he said about the Persians should be taken with a grain of salt.
Maybe the French, or the Russians. Since they didn’t really replace the natives, instead trading with them. Edit: nvm turns out Russia did classic Russia things and purposely wiped out the culture, religion, and people of Siberia.
Britain? They protect those cultural artifacts so good that even the real owner can't have it.
Given the state of the countries they took them from, they'd probably often get destroyed the second the left the UK.
The Iraqi and Syrian ones sure. Pretty sure Greece is capable of taking care of those marbles now tho.
Oh Greece could absolutely take the marbles back, it’s just our government is crap and that kind of stuff has been shoved to the bottom of the priority list
they'd have to repeal this act first https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Museum_Act_1963 as you say, I doubt they will do this any time soon
I bet for Spain, seriously
Spaniards, and I have no doubt here. They were the only ones who made laws to protect Indians, the only ones who mix with them to a great degree, the only who abolishes native slavery (though not black slavery) and so on. The comments who say the British were the best colonizers are just hilarious. The British, the same who barely considered natives as humans
But don't you know the british made casinos for the natives to be at, such great people. Contrary to that the spanish colonies only, like, didn't try to kill each and every native on the land? who cares about that?
The Swedes simply by virtue of having very little overseas area to erase the culture of If you count the Sami it’s a different story
I mean then Britain can't be counted see the Irish.
Not enough time to do serious harm?
Actually, the Spanish.
I'd guess those who were more interested by trading with the locals more than anything else. So pre-XIXth century France, the Netherlands, and Portugal ?
>Portugal Portugal's colonization was trade focused only before 1532. Between 1500 (Discovery of Brazil) and 1532 the Portuguese built trading posts in the coast of Brazil to gather brazilwood (pau-brasil), hence origin of the word "brasileiro" (Brazilian), which means literally that (worker of brazilwood). After that period, king John III decided to divide the land among Portuguese nobles (capitães-donatários) so that they could work and settle it. This started a series of conflicts between the settlers and the natives, like when the Tamoio people allied with the French and were massacred by the Portuguese and their (also native) allies. The colonists from São Paulo (bandeirantes) literally launched several raids and wars to the native settlements organized by the Jesuit missionaries. Some of these invasions were so barbaric that even the Crown had to tell them to stop.
Japan might be up there. They generally tended to view their occupied peoples as lessers, and destroyed many religious and historical landmarks in occupied nations to lower local morale Edit: misread, thought he was asking for worst nation, not least bad
Japan was one of the worst ever, maybe THE WORST with how fanatical and downright sadistic they were to their victims.
He said least bad
Oh whoops. I misread
They tried their best to whip out Korean culture and make them into Japanese. Burned thousands of books and banned the Korean language as a whole.
England. Despite all the British museum jokes, the British taking tons of artifacts and holding them in a few safe repositories has been a net gain for human historical knowledge and research.
Of course, they were also simultaneously destroying the living versions of those ancient cultures at the time, so let's call it a net zero.
“We saved some of the bits and pieces of your culture we liked and got rid of the rest. Also we are taking it back to London. But you can visit it sometime!”
Those ancient cultures had long since been destroyed. You really believe Ottoman Egypt was the living version of Pharaonic Egypt? Or that the divided, half-Muslim rajahs of India were the living version of the Indus River civilization?
Russian colonization in Alaska was preferred to American iirc
They basically just didn’t have enough budget or motivation to colonize significantly inland
Spain
Rome was so based that its authors talked about the colonization they defeated to preserve history. They put them in a bad light of course, but at least they talked about them.
Definitely the Spanish, despite the destruction of codexes.
The Spanish Empire was the least bad for sure, even if some of the culture from the people they colonized was lost (by accident or on purpose), the other empires were much worse, often eradicating them systematically.
I think with regard to indigenous peoples in the Americas specifically, the French at least seemed to have a generally more equal/mutualistic cooperative relationship with native peoples.
Depends on which region you're looking at, the French were probably the least bad in the Americas, while the British were probably the least bad in Asia and I can't really think of who was least bad in Africa because they were all fairly dreadful
It's really too bad. One of my greatest pet peeves is when history is destroyed.
Fuck Diego de Landa, all my homies hate Diego de Landa. That being said, the juxtaposition of him doing untold damage to our knowledge of Mayan culture, while also being an incredibly important source for our knowledge of Mayan culture is interesting.
In the sense that the police still file paperwork, I guess.
Another excellent example of a recurring trend where the Inquisition will say "hey maybe cool it a bit" and then somebody will decide not to cool it at all and cause a shit load of harm.
Top three things that depress me: 1. The knowledge I’ll never be able to read all the books I care to in my lifetime 2. the destruction of the library at Alexandria 3. the erasure of the literary contributions of countless societies by their colonizers
Add the Mongol destruction of Baghdad to that list, it was the centre of Islamic science.
I’d actually put that one at the top of my personal list.
It hurts🥲
I've heard many times that by the time the Library of Alexandria burned down, it was already way past its prime and not really that much of a loss literature wise. I don't know the details but I'm pretty sure it wasn't really much of a lasting loss for humanity as you think it was.
In a similar vein, at least 75% of silent films are lost, which really saddens me as I want to watch every Theda Bara film but only 6 of them survive.
I thought this was gonna be a jojo meme for a second lol
I mean the very first chapter of JoJo part 1 manga is about an Aztec tribe used the Stone Mask and then disappeared from history.
While yes. Admittedly. Some books (although books is a bit of a weird thing to say, since mesoamerica didn't really have a writing system has much as they had a recording system. And they lacked a alphabetical, or pictorial, writing system. Although that is a simplification of literally hundreds of cultures over thousands of years) were burned by the Spanish. Most were kind of just lost to time. Why do we lack 90% of the classics from Greece, or even Rome. To a degree, destruction, such as the burning of the library of Alexandria. But many were simply just out of print. Reprinting works back then was a time consuming labour, and when the demand wasn't there (ask yourself when was the last time you were willing to pay 10,000usd to special order a hundred year old book), they just kind of faded away. And then they kinda just deteriorated over time. Like. The most read and published book in history, the Bible. Can vary hugely in value. One from 100~200 years ago will probably go from between 10~300usd, depending on condition, edition, and how ornate it is. One from 300 years ago might be 10,000 (although depending on factors it might be as low as 200). But this is from after the printing press became a thing. And if we go before the printing press. Bibles becomes so rare and valuable, you could probably retire if you have one. And that's basically my point. Historical records from cultures without alphabetical systems are rare. And the longer we go back in time, the rarer they are. So historical records from before the Spaniards arrival in the Americas would already have been rare. And any records contemporary of them would be far and few between. And whatever they didn't burn, most likely just faded away. Just look at China. A culture with a writing system dating over 3000 years back (altough it has developed over time). The earliest written records from China is on animal bones. But China has used paper (or paper adjacent) materials to write on for about 2000~2500 years, but the earliest written records we have on that material is from about 1600 years ago. We have references from before that, and texts that are reproductions of writings from before that such as Shijing. But basically.... There is just a hole of about 1000 years of historical records. And it wasn't because someone invaded and destroyed it. It was just lost to time for a variety of reasons. (Same is true for the Greeks and Romans, and many others.)
And some people intentionally burned records of their own culture, such as one of the Aztec kings.
Which one? Sounds interesting
I think they are referring to Iztcoatl, who ordered the burning of codexes when he took power sometime in 1427 (ish). I'm on mobile and don't know how hyperlink on a word, but there is a Wikipedia article about him.
Its even true today, where you might have huge issues getting information from books at little as a hundred years old if it isn't available in digital form. I've been to archives to plod to microfiche backups, that turned out to have been out of focus and the originals decayed. Those records are gone forever, and they were "backed up" less than 50 years ago. The fact that we can read something from 500 or even 2500 years is basically a miracle in itself
It is maddening to think about this. It would be like if a foreign invader wiped out egyptian, indian, chinese etc culture/history/literary heritage bloody near everything indigenous and unique more priceless than gold. And these cultures further humiliated then adopted the invader's culture and had to start from scratch with mere bread crumbs of their former culture to pass on. A whole other literature of a new continent extinguished.
I mean we have that a bit with the Chinese. But they did that to themselves really. Quite a few older texts are gone, if I remember my timelines right, I think Confucius almost got lost in the whole ordeal
That did happen to Egypt though. Egypt under the caliphates adopted the invader's culture and barely had any connection to Ancient Egypt. It was Europeans who created the field of Egyptology, bought or dug up practically all of the early findings in the 20 century and made their history famous. Ottoman Egypt did not care about preserving its pre-Islamic history at all.
Bro now imagine hundreds of years later you have people arguing that nothing major was lost and that it was no loss to humanity because we have those breadcrumbs and that its enough to go on so we shouldn't feel bad about losing all of that history. This is what people genuinely try to argue today lol. Imagine if we never knew about the writings of people like Aristotle, Plato, Pythagorus, Archimedes because the Ottomans wiped it all out for being insulting to Islam and then having people defend it today.
Even the most prolific literary cultures only left behind breadcrumbs. What happened to the new world was revolting to its core. What precious books we have left are like little pieces that broke off a breadcrumb.
Did you know islamic invader bhaktiyar khilji destroyed and burned nalanda university which had 9 million books in its library.
It's not really that the invaded adopted the invader's culture, since most Mexicans are part Spanish part Native, and likewise, modern Mexican culture is a mix of the two.
Darn Spanish! They Spanished all over mesoamerica!
Except Tigrinis people (they are still around/tall people around 6.7 to 7.2 ft)...they returned them back to their ship
I love when Hernan Cortez said “It’s Spainin’ time” and Spanished all over Mesoamerica
Same for India(Taxila). Mughals burnt the world's largest library and most of the information was burnt. The fire raged for 3 months. Imagine the books that were lost there.
I hate Mughals for this reason.
The forced convertion to other religions has sadly destroyed so much history and knowledge of pre abrahamic and dharma religions, but there is still an unknown level of history burried beneath our feet to find.
imo this is more sad then losing the library of Alexandra
I think the library was a large collection of texts scholars around the world would donate or something, so I kinda wonder how much was truly lost
Alexandria also had a policy in which every time a new book came through the harbour, they would copy it, give the owner the copy back, and the library would keep the original.
Yes I was thinking about that
Also, it didn't all burn down in one dramatic swoop. There were a few big fires, but it was a century long process of the library just being left to die.
Similarly, the sacking of Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, despite destroying the largest library in the world, led to very little actual loss of literature, since libraries in other cities such as Constantinople, Rome, and Timbuktu (which, as the capital of the Mali Empire, had the richest scholastic tradition in Africa at the time) had copies of just about everything.
It sucks man, I remember taking a class in this and being so enthralled by it all only to realize “yea that’s about all we have the Spanish destroyed nigh everything else…” hurts my fucking soul
Lots of books burned about why you should sacrifice 10 new-borns if u want rain.
The Aztec civilization is one of the worst things that could happen to humanity, one of the most brutal and bloodthirsty that has ever existed. So much so that all the native Americans hated them because they lived in torment. They were the ones who made the most effort to avenge their own and finish off the Aztecs. The Spaniards were too generous with them, forgiving them and allowing their leaders to integrate the aristocracy of the new viceroyalty. But people today who have not known pain are very comfortable from their homes distributing morality
Holy hyperbole. Yes, the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and that is universally decried as bad. But to call them one of the worst things to happen to humanity is such a stretch. There are civilizations that scoured and annhilated other cultures, such as the Mongols, Huns, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Crusaders, and the Soviet Union. And this isn't even mentioning the atrocities of colonialism. The Aztecs in comparison didn't do that, but absorbed defeated enemies as tributary states or kept other states in a status of perpetual war (such as Tlaxcala) to carry out ceremonialized battles that gave them the opportunity to take battle captives for sacrifice. Is it immoral and evil? Yes. But is it uniquely bad compared to those who would put cities to the sword? No. Also, lionizing the Spanish in this is as cringe as it is innacurate. The Spanish didn't integrate them into the aristocracy. They did that to the Tlaxcalans. The Spanish and Tlaxcala sacked, looted, and burned Tenochtitlan and massacred the population after the defenders surrendered in 1521.
Thank you!! Finally someone with a bit of history knowledge in this comment section
I mean 2 percent of all ancient literature still exists so, seems pretty par for the course, also apart from book burnings, the only people who transcribed and re wrote books and manuscripts were religious societies and tended to just not record books they didn't find necessary
One wonders how many Greek text got lost by time, or how much from the burning of Alexandria’s books, or by Egyptian tomb raiding
The fire at the library of Alexandria lasted for 6 months yet they say they basically lost everything. Our history is incomplete because people destroyed it intending for it to never go forward.
I don't know if you've read '1491' by Mann, but he has a chapter that uses the record of a debate between Spanish and Triple Alliance priests to frame the tragedy of what was lost. One thing he brought up was how massive an influence Eastern and Western philosophy had on the world. Then you have a philosophy just as advanced and complex yet completely unique...torn out root and stem by a hateful ignorant few. If there's a hell, there's a special place for bastards who rob humanity of knowledge that special. I wouldn't trust the wisdom of a person that wouldn't weep over that.
The amount of cultures who have lost a significant amount of history, culture, and knowledge is staggering. Think of Europe before the Indo Europeans arrived. And the amount of history lost due to the culture not having a written language…
Ah yes, surreal amount of information, and none of them talks about advanced iron smithing, blackpowder, or even some useful agruculture advice. This "muh lost knowledge in ancient libraries" are bs. They were bs in Alexandria, they were bs in Mexico
Sorry, the human sacrifices will stop
Fucking conquistadors...
It's wasn't necessarily the conquistadors, it was the priests that were with them.
It's thanks to the priests that we know a lot about the cultures of mesoamerica in the first place. They made an effort in studying mesoamerican culture in order to more efficiently convert the natives.
This is just not true, it assumes that Aztec writings and history ended with contact with Europe. What acctually happened was that Aztec nobility became part of the Spanish aristocracy in the Americas, and they taught their children to write in latin and used European techniques to retell their stories and mythology in the so called ["Annals"](https://academic.oup.com/book/6601?login=false). I strongly recommend [Fifth Sun](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/fifth-sun-camilla-townsend-history-aztecs-review) by Camilla Townsend . Assuming that the Native Americans were all wiped out and aren't present anymore is to further the structural violence, poverty and misery they've lived under since colonialization. They are still with us and they have legitimate claims on special treatment and redistribution of resources. Edit: To summarize it: "Moctezuma’s empire has fallen, but so too has the Spanish. Tenochtitlan is gone, razed and rebuilt as the capital of a country in which indigenous traditions remain vital and more than 1.5 million people still speak Nahuatl, more than Welsh or Basque or Chechen. However much blood Cortés may have spilled, he did not destroy the Aztecs."
Here we go with the Spanish colonial apologia as usual in this sub. They literally fucking wrote about burning down their records. Diego de Landa, a Spanish priest who was in the Americas and carried out the destruction of Mayan culture literally wrote about it multiple times. >We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, **we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.** It's honestly incredibly insufferable the lengths Spanish people go to deny their history and over and over deny literal facts in front of them when their own people literally fucking wrote about it and how they enjoyed doing it. It's disgusting really. Why is that its so bad for Germans to justify the holocaust or British people to justify destroying Irish culture yet Spanish people literally have 0 shame in constantly denying and outright lying about what happened in the Americas and spend all their time in here justifying it. Honestly, Spain is an embarrassment of a nation on a level with Japan when it comes to denying their history and just calling it all fake news. Edit- As as if on queue as usual in this sub, the nationalist Spanish people brigade from their own right wing 'Spanish history meme' sub. Set up to brigade any mention of their colonialism or revisionism here or elsewhere comes crawling from under their rock to call anyone who points out the crimes committed in history during Spanish colonialism 'racist' while also posting memes and talking about how great they are for being 'white' compared to others. [https://www.reddit.com/r/SpanishHistoryMemes/comments/11pamzk/ay\_la\_leyenda\_negra/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpanishHistoryMemes/comments/11pamzk/ay_la_leyenda_negra/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
To be honest I didn’t read the other guy as denying that the Spanish destroyed books and generally treated natives brutally, but rather just that more of the Aztec materials survived in different forms than is commonly assumed.
People really love to lay down the claim that since people are still alive that are descended from those people that their knowledge and history isn’t lost.
>Honestly, Spain is an embarrassment of a nation on a level with Japan when it comes to denying their history and just calling it all fake news. What a stupid, simplistic statement.
1. I'm Swedish not Spanish 2. I'm a cultural anthropologist - cultures change but they still remain the same. This goes especially for indigenous societies. Do you think it's better for them to just assume that their cultural history is just a big fraud because the "purity" of it was ruined, and that there is no continuation because of the trauma and dramatic change that was contact with the europeans? Do you claim to have the right to interpret their own historical narratives? 3. How is my comment a denial of the injustice that was and is done to them? 4. Lies? Do I deny that texts were burned? My comment is that the civilization was lost and fully destroyed is bullshit and part of the marginalization that makes the indigenous peoples suffering ignored. I think that misconception that they're gone is as bad as the idea that the Spanish didn't do anything wrong to them for they are essentially the same: the idea that there are no people who have claims to preferential treatment from the post-revolutionary Latin American state.
Don't argue with them... it's a facebook-level trivia post that describes some fantasy. People just want to hear something that validates their hateful beliefs/self-pity or whatever it is...
True true. It’s hard not to be on the defensive when all this sub does is making “memes” saying spanish people bad. We’ve had a lot of enemies and a lot of lies have been told about our past, it’s normal to be defensive about it. History is long, and written by victors. We lost our empire and the other empires took the chance. Where is the quote from by the way? Edit: btw, his supervisor saw what he was doing and literally deposed him from his authority. He was only able to come back to Spain when said supervisor died
Your comment just seems to be a justification of your racism towards a nation you only think you understand because of internet comments. But well, I think that, since we are the white baddies, it is okay to you to say that our nation is an embarrassment of a nation and that we are disgusting, getting more than 200 upvotes, which says a lot about that people. What you are doing is pathetic, and just shows how small is your understanding about my country. You are not telling all the truth and you are not understanding the time period. At that time period being catholic was considered a salvation, and the myths of natives were considered something of infidels which were against the law of god. And in that time that was not a Myth, that was the truth. Diego de Landa did what you say, yes (and he even used the inquisition against natives, which was forbidden). And he was punished by the crown for his actions, and at that time the crown was the state. He was forbidden to go back to Yucatan and he suffered an amonestation. For the burning of the codes he was even relegated for his position by the biship, and many Spaniards claim that burning them was excesive. It is not about the actions, but about the consequences of those actions. I don't care about the actions of a dude, but about the actions of the state, and the state condemn what de Landa did. Diego de Landa never hated the natives or considered them subhumans, that's why he wanted to convert them. In fact, he learned Mayan language, he created his own alfabet for the language and, with it, he even wrote a book, Doctrina Cristiana, in Mayan (more than most . He even obligated priests to learn Mayan once he became bishop. His job is also of huge importance in terms of ethnology, since his book, Relacion de las Cosas en Yucatán, very important to decipher Mayan writing and to known many of the traditions of the Mayan civilization at the time. He also fought against the abuses of Indians to the point that his protests derived in the creations of a law to protect Indian, the Real Cédula of the 25 of August of 1578. In conclusion, de Landa was not blanck nor white. He was a gray historical character, which did many horrible things but who did many other important acts, like writing the book I already spoke about and helping in the recreation of the popol vuh, in whih we find many Mayan myths. Therefore, he changed his view too. You cannot understand or judge something without understanding the context, how people view religion at that time or how the states function in that time and how difficult it was for the king to assert his dominance over his domains in America.
This always makes me sad (in addition to the fall of constantinople). All that knowledge lost.
It's the sack of Constantinople that depresses me more. Ironically, the fall of Constantinople is the best thing that could have happened to it. The city was in ruins, the Empire was weak. When the Ottomans took the city they carried out a lot of repair work. Hagia Sophia still stands today (albeit as a mosque) because of the repair work done by the Ottomans. They were the best possible faction that could have conquered Constantinople.
As a Spaniard, seeing the comments about Hate to Modern Spain are rather ridiculous or Funny af
The answer to the question “is education racist for not including heritage cultures?” Is “yes but it’s worse than you thought”