Human sacrifice was just a harmless indigenous custom

Poor old NPR. They simply cannot help themselves.

They lead with 500 Years Later, The Spanish Conquest Of Mexico Is Still Being Debated by James Fredrick. The whole article is an unbalanced piece resting nearly entirely on the strawman framing of Penn State professor Matthew Restall.

The date was Nov. 8, 1519. Bernal's leader, Hernán Cortés, walked them down a causeway leading into the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, and was greeted by this land's most powerful man: Emperor Montezuma II. (Montezuma was Mexica, but the term Aztec is often used to denote the triple alliance of civilizations that made up his empire.)

According to Cortés, Montezuma immediately recognized the divine right of the Spanish and the Catholic Church to rule these lands and he surrendered his empire.

But according to historian Matthew Restall, author of the book When Montezuma Met Cortés, this is simply wrong.

"The more that I thought about [the surrender], the more I decided it just didn't quite make sense," he tells NPR. "But then what really got me interested was this question, 'If it's a lie, how has it lasted for 500 years?' "

The meeting of Montezuma and Cortés — in what today is Mexico City — and the true story of the conquest that followed it still weigh heavily in Mexico half a millennium later.

I have been intensely interested in archaeology since the early 1970s and I don't think I have ever seen an account in which Montezuma simply surrenders on the basis of a Spanish divine right. This is the crudest of strawman constructions. Restall or Fredrick are simply creating a false story to refute.

The rest of the article is simply a rehashing of Restall's refutation of the strawman argument. Entirely uninteresting and unuseful, resting as it does on a fiction. The dominant story of the past thirty years at least has been an exploration of the complexity of the conquest. Very old versions of the story are that the conquest was achieved through a mix of factors:

The existence of the Spanish was an epistemic shock

The diseases brought with the Spanish were devastating

The Spanish war technology was superior (iron swords, gunpowder, etc.)

The effect of Spanish horses and war dogs were disproportionately successful

The degree of Spanish motivation/desperation carried the day

Recent arguments substantially shade most of this and place more weight on the fragility of the Aztec Empire, its dependence on subjugated peoples and economies, its dependence on sacrifices from tributary peoples, etc.

A big reworking has been to bring to the fore, the role and importance of the Spanish alliances with rival kingdoms and the revolt of tributary peoples to the Aztecs.

None of this is mentioned in the NPR reporting. It is bad and simplistic history vomited up from a single source with no depth or acknowledgement of other views in the field.

The reporting is infused with the false and racist myth of the noble savage. No mention of enslavement of tributary peoples, no mention of dependence on human sacrifice, no mention of sustained and constant warfare by an Aztec military caste.

And where do you go for rectifying false mainstream media reporting? Why, to Twitter of course.

Human sacrifice was just a harmless indigenous custom. What you call corn, we call maize.

This has got to be the most @NPR story ever.https://t.co/UaxPrie3AX pic.twitter.com/D0lJKmYPoh

— Patrick Nonwhite (@NonWhiteHat) November 10, 2019

Click for the responses.

It is a pity that NPR does not have educated reporters, editors or fact-checkers because there is a fascinating story in the background if you can get past the 1960s edgy social justice postmodernist interpretation of history via an ideological lens.

Why were the Europeans successful remains an interesting question. An even more interesting one is why they were successful over time. The Aztecs and Inca's fell but for a century and more there continued to be indigenous revolts and challenges to the invasion. The puzzle is even greater as you go north. In terms of military parity, there was a century and half between first European contact and eventual dominance. European frontier settlements were still near the littoral one hundred and fifty years after arrival and still subject to massacre, defeat, and enslavement. Dominance and conquest was only achieved by 1800. Why the yawning gap? What was effective about indigenous alliances and approaches that forestalled the outcome for so long. Why was technology not in fact a determining factor in the early settlements.

There are fascinating questions and arguments to be had. And NPR went with a 1960s faculty lounge strawman rendition. Shame on them. They rob the indigenous people of their agency and achievements with this shallow misreporting.