Reply #96: So you think Cortes was a HERO !!!

[Liberator_Rev]

The following are excepts from the book, American Holocaust (which are quoted at http://www.LiberalsLikeChrist.Org/AmericanHolocaust:
" Rather than meeting resistance when he approached the great city, (the Spanish leader Hernando) Cortés was greeted in friendship and was welcomed by Montezuma. In retrospect this behavior of the Aztec leader has usually seemed foolish or cowardly or naive to Western historians. But Meso-American political traditions had always dictated that war was to be announced before it was launched, and the reasons for war were always made clear well beforehand. War was a sacred endeavor, and it was sacrilegious to engage in it with treachery or fraud. In fact, as Inga Clendinnen recently has noted: "So important was this notion of fair testing that food and weapons were sent to the selected target city as part of the challenge, there being no virtue in defeating a weakened enemy." In this case, therefore, not only was there no reason for Montezuma to suppose Cortés intended to haunch an invasion (the Tlaxcaltec troops who accompanied him could have been part of an effort to seek political alliance), but Cortés had plainly announced in advance that his purposes were not warlike, that he came as an ambassador of peace."
"Once the Spanish were inside the city's gates, however, it soon became apparent that this was a far from conciliatory mission. {p. 76 } . . .
"Once the disease dissipated -- having devastated the city's residents and killed off most of the Aztec leaders -- Cortés prepared to attack again. First, he had ships constructed that were used to intercept and cut off food supplies to the island capital. Then he destroyed the great aqueduct that brought fresh water to the city. Finally, the Spanish and their Indian allies laid siege to the once brilliant white metropolis and its dwindling population of diseased and starving people. "Siege," as Inga Clendinnen has observed, was for the Aztecs "the antithesis of war." Viewing it as cowardly and dishonorable, "the deliberate and systematic weakening of opposition before engagement, and the deliberate implication of noncombatants in the contest, had no part in their experience." But it had been the European mode of battle for many centuries, deriving its inspiration from the Greek invention of ferocious and massively destructive infantry warfare. To the Spanish, as to all Europeans when committed to battle, victory -- by whatever means -- was all that mattered. On the other side, for reasons equally steeped in ancient tradition, the people of Tenochtitlán had no other option than to resist dishonor and defeat until the very end. The ensuing battle was furious and horrifying, and continued on for months. Tenochtitlán's warriors, though immensely weakened by the deadly bacteria that had been loosed in their midst, and at least initially hobbled by what Clendinnen calls their "inhibition against battleground killing," were still too formidable an army for direct military confrontation. So Cortés extended his martial strategy by destroying not only the Aztecs' food and water supplies, but their very city itself. His soldiers burned magnificent public buildings and marketplaces, and the aviaries with their thousands of wondrous birds; they gutted and laid waste parks and gardens and handsome boulevards. The metropolis that the Spanish had just months earlier described as the most beautiful city on earth, so dazzling and beguiling in its exotic and brilliant variety, became a monotonous pile of rubble, a place of dust and flame and death." { p.78--9}
. . .Recalled Cortés "We now learnt from two wretched creatures who had escaped from the city and come to our camp by night that they were dying of hunger. . . We resolved to enter the next morning shortly before dawn and do all the harm we could. . . and we fell upon a huge number of people. As these were some of the most wretched people and had come in search of food, they were nearly all unarmed, and women and children in the main. We did them so much harm through all the streets in the city that we could reach, that the dead and the prisoners numbered more than eight hundred."

. . ."They moved their forces to another section of the city where they slaughtered and captured more than twelve thousand people. Within a day or two they had another multitude of helpless citizens penned in: "They no longer had nor could find any arrows, javelins or stones with which to attack us." More than forty thousand were killed in that single day, and "so loud was the wailing of the women and children that there was not one man amongst us whose heart did not bleed at the sound." Indeed, because "we could no longer endure the stench of the dead bodies that had lain in those streets for many days, which was the most loathsome thing in all the world," recalled Cortés, "we returned to our camps." But not for long. The next morning the Spanish were in the streets again, mopping up the starving, dehydrated, and disease-wracked Indians who remained. "I intended to attack and slay them all," said Cortés, as he observed that: The people of the city had to walk upon their dead while others swam or drowned in the waters of that wide lake where they had their canoes; indeed, so great was their suffering that it was beyond our understanding how they could endure it. Countless numbers of men, women and children came out toward us, and in their eagerness to escape many were pushed into the water where they drowned amid that multitude of corpses; and it seemed that more than fifty thousand had perished from the salt water they had drunk, their hunger and the vile stench.. . . And so in those streets where they were we came across such piles of the dead that we were forced to walk upon them." {p.80}