Where are my fellow spain haters?
I see a lot of hate here for the french and british which is valid of course but no one ever talks about spain. I’ve been learning a lot about colonialism in the Americas and honestly I wanna go back in time so I can strangle hernan cortez to death with my bare hands. I have shed genuine tears for people who lived centuries before me. I cannot die at peace knowing spain still exists.
This was supposed to be a sorta joke sorta serious post but I’m deciding to expand on the serious bit.
emotion dump
The more I learn about history the angrier I get about the state of the world. It’s incredible that it has come to this. How have we not gotten past this? It’s the same shit over and over with a different face, how do most people not see this? I feel so incredibly powerless to even begin to approach changing the problems I see in our world. Hell I feel powerless to affect even smaller local issues. Sitting here and watching the slaughter and abuse perpetrated by our ruling class is sickening but what am I to do really? So I sit in my room and shake with rage, I sob for people I can never even meet and everyday that pressure in my chest grows. I feel this insatiable desire to do something but there is genuinely so little I can do where I am. Reading helps I find, developing myself political helps me feel like I am atleast doing something, not just pretending these problems don’t exist like I see so many others doing. I find though, that reading history has the opposite effect. It’s cathartic in that I can let out those awful turbulent emotions through my empathy with different subjugated peoples and my anger at their oppressors. I can let these emotions fill me so that I may understand them better and fuel my revolutionary spirit. This was true in the beginning at least. These days however, its just depressing and awful. I come out of these journeys into the past wondering if things will ever change when they have gone on like this for so long. Will I ever see the world I dream of? Will the slaughter ever end? Idk really, no one ever does I suppose. I smoke a lot more these days.
I know many of you here are likely more educated than me on both history and theory so I ask. How do y’all cope? How do you maintain hope?
Shit genuinely has me like
You really witness the inhumanity of Western imperialism, that was then replayed in every first contact with the West since the 1500s, being first expressed through the period of early Spanish settler-colonialism. And you see the inability of those they encountered in grasping the refusal of Western chauvinism to ever see them as human equals.
You see it in Montezuma welcoming the armed Spanish conquistadors to the Aztec capital; you then see it with Lin Zexu’s letter to Britain’s inbred Victoria (which she never read) appealing to her “better virtues” to stop the opium trade right on the eve of the First Opium War; you see its modern reincarnation with Gorbachev betraying the entirety of Europe’s actually existing socialism with his delusion of a “Common European Home” and his weepy need for approval and “friendship” from Reagan, H.W. Bush, Thatcher and Kohl, an especially reactionary generation of mediocre Western leadership that had been utter domestic policy failures, which he then elevated into the history books through the credit they took for the capitalist restoration of Eastern Europe and the USSR.
Because English language academic “scholarship” on the extermination of the Aztec state are obsessed with getting the “conquistador” perspective and revisionist apologia, same as every other Western historical atrocity, to treat historical figures like Cortes “with more nuance,” the best history on the subject likely remains Miguel León-Portilla’s 1962 “Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico,” a compilation of Aztec primary source documents.
In the Aztec account, first contact between the Aztecs and the Spanish in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan begins like this:
After the Spanish place Montezuma under house arrest in his own palace, a festival leads to a massacre:
Another account of the Fiesta of Toxatl Massacre:
After this moment, the Aztecs unite and retaliate, driving the Spanish out of the city. In a pathetic historiographical display of playing the victim card, the Spanish-dominated historical record calls this eviction “la Noche Triste” or “the Night of Sorrows.” They later return to put the city under siege and this leads to the fall of Tenochtitlan:
After the Spanish colonial regime is established, one indigenous leader rebuilds on the land left to his people:
I’ve been reading about and reading passages from the Florentine codex. It is through the accounts of the massacre during the fiesta of Toxatl and of the Spainish blockade that I truly came to understand their dread and anguish. The cruelty that came after was just as if not more horrific. Being forced through slavery to not only destroy the history of your culture but to build atop it the culture of your oppressor. I can’t fathom the feeling. Worse still, the Aztecs were thriving, they were at their peak even. As far as they were aware they were the most powerful people in the world. To have that dynamic flipped upon so suddenly had to be humiliating and terrifying. I think it’s the dread that radiates from this history that affects me the most though, that feeling of certain impending doom is palpable. I feel as though I can’t properly put into words the miasma of it.