At
the time Columbus discovered the New World , the great difference
between the main Mexica god and the European God was that the European
God would kill you for not being good, and the Mexica god would kill you
for not being bad.
Even when we had mischievous gods, we were better than the Mexica, the most dominant tribe of the Aztecs. Going all the way back to the Romans,
God might throw an army under the bus because a general broke his word,
and the Jews, the Muslims, and the Christians all believed that God is
better than us — which is why He warred with us constantly. Huitzilopochtli,
the main god of the Mexica, had no such benevolence to fall back
upon. You fed him, or he would wipe you out. And the way that you fed
him (and other lesser deities) was by flaying people, or burning them
alive, or cutting out their hearts. Sometimes two of the three. I'm
told that some priests even took the human skin and wore it, like
Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Things
had been this way for a long time before the Spaniards arrived. By the
time whites got to America, the Mexica religion had already reached its
worst. Decades of bloody imperialism had brought the Mexica to the
top. A few years of heavy snows and crop failures had brought the
empire to the brink. They cranked up the sacrifices to a level nobody
had ever seen before, perhaps in the history of the whole world — ten
thousand in a single festival, circa 1450. Unfortunately, right after
they did, the weather got better again. This reinforced the already
murderous mindset of the Aztecs, and they went ravaging the countryside
for people to loot, rape, flay, and burn.
T.R. Fehrenbach says in Fire and Blood,
his history of Mexico, that estimates of victims after this "miracle"
range from the tens to the hundreds of thousands. At one point, the
capital, Tenochtitlán, became so covered in blood that diseases easily
broke out, and its lake, which was already on the verge of toxicity,
became filthy, putrid, and dangerous. Tallies of the dead depended on
who was doing the talking. The pro-Spanish conquistadors, whose
interest lay in demonizing the natives (and thus taking an obvious moral
high ground), said they found as many as a hundred thousand trophy
skulls, and Bernal Diaz says around twenty thousand people a year were
slaughtered before the conquest. The pro-Indian Spaniards, such as
Bartolomé de las Casas, looking to downplay the atrocities and save an
already brutalized ex-brutalizer, said the yearly "expenditure" was only
a hundred. Nice guy, but definitely a lie.
Some
people might blame the Mexica for bulldozing and brutalizing their
neighbors, but the plain fact is that their neighbors, had they had the
genius and organization of the Mexica, would have done the same thing in
their place. Culturally and religiously, they were too similar. The
Mexica simply beat them to it, just as the Spaniards (thank God)
out-produced and out-organized the Aztecs, and as we beat and out-bred the Spaniards.
The
great Mexica conqueror's name was Tlacaelel, who ruled somewhere
between 1430 and 1481. He was great founder like Lycurgus, or Moses,
though he preferred to work behind the throne rather than on it. He
took a backwater, down-on-their-luck people and gave them a new
history. Told them they were the chosen race, sent by Huitzilopochtli,
the Sun-god, to do His will. What was God's will? Not to be just, or
wise, or even just kind, but to make all the other races sacrifice the
right way and to the right god. How were they to accomplish
this? Through heartless and perpetual warfare*. Obedience on Earth was
rewarded with wealth and power and successful crops. A good death was
rewarded by an eternity in paradise.
Tlacaelel
gave them the myth and then organized them into an army. They were
just a random tribe, at first, and relatively egalitarian. He split the
people into classes, and the first of these was the warriors. Being a
warrior was the only way up after that. You had to distinguish yourself
in battle, or you would never get a fiefdom or a good position in the
government. Once you did kill enough enemies, you took land and serfs
and slaves from all the peoples around you. You made them work for you,
giving them only a bare subsistence, as the Spartans did the with the
Helots, and you used everything beyond this to enrich yourself and your
family. You would be given a title, and the title would be passed on to
your children.
Beyond
this military aristocracy sprawled a massive bureaucracy — the lawyers,
engineers, teachers, administrators, and other officials necessary to
keep up the Aztec empire. Most Mexica lived on their own little plots
and farmed for themselves and their families. Massive amounts of land,
on the other hand, were stolen from (and worked by) the conquered. A
merchant class, not existing for the sake of itself, but to do the
special bidding of the state, ran special errands for the
government. I'm told by Fehrenbach that nobody except the freeholder,
working his own land to feed his own family, worked for anybody other
than the state.
So war socialism was the modus operandi. Large tracts of farmland, known as Shield or War Fields,
were tilled by the conquered and reserved for the military. Thus,
warfare became long-range and protracted. Nobody in the whole region,
reaching from the desert up north to Panama down south, was safe from
rape and plunder and sacrifice. Pretexts to warfare were easily
invented. An insult, a delayed tribute, a harassed merchant were all
excuses to mass-murder. And I'm told the Mexica were experts at being
insulted.
You
would think subjugating the neighbors would be enough for any people,
but the Mexica were bad at forging alliances. Why sacrifice your own
people when you can capture the neighbors? So for a while, they left
enemy cities virtually in charge of themselves and put them under
tribute, and when rebellions perennially broke out, they decided to raid
them — unless there was an unconditional surrender. There was no Pax
Mexicana. Wars were staged to find victims, and the need for victims
was endless. Governors were placed over cities, and cities were
brutalized into rebellion.
Religion
aside, the machinery of the state would allow nothing less. The most
prominent people in the society were warriors. The only way for the
lower classes to get into the upper classes was by killing or
capturing. The growing bureaucracy needed more plunder. The Mexica
peasantry wasn't allowed to be plundered. And the best way to get into
heaven was by dying in battle. There was probably no people, in the
history of the world, more inclined by their system to warfare and mass
murder.
I try to avoid comparing people to Hitler, but I have no problem comparing Hitler to Tlacaelel.
