According to the article in La Jornada one of the codices is a palimpsest! Under multispectral imaging older erased Aztec text is visible. If anything substantial can be recovered there it may be this should be counted as four new codices.
I guess it's possible for a palimpsest's erasure to be complete to the naked eye, but for its original text to still be distinguishable outside the visible spectrum.
> The newly discovered corpus was acquired by the Mexican government from a local family that wants to remain anonymous, but which were not collectors but rather traditional stewards of the cultural legacy of Culhuacan and Iztapalapa
It’s fascinating to imagine the journey of these books throughout the years. Kept in a basement somewhere? Passed down from generation to generation for safekeeping?
What survives is sometimes just by sheer luck. In the Acropolis Museum, there are a few reproductions of sketches on display by Jacques Carrey, a french artist who happened to visit Athens in November 1674. The Venetian's siege of the Acropolis in September 1687 famously destroyed a large section of the South side. Without this artists sketches, we would have no record of these lost parts of the frieze.
I went back to printing photos on a regular basis.
It is relatively easy to select the best and edit photos every other day on vacations or at home for printing. It is however a major PITA to do that for hundreds or thousands of photos at a time. Thus I am still too lazy to have a look at those 20 years gap where the only pictures I took were digitized and are stored on a hard drive and remote backup.
I told my [family member] this for years she should edit her digital photos. She said, no, my 40k pictures are a retirement project. Then I said <<you'll be overwhelmed by that many photos>> and actually I was wrong.
AI photo stuff massively improved, and all her bad photos were very easy to sort in Picasa and bring down to a reasonable 5k or so photos to put into albums over few years of retirement.
I'm still sore about Picasa. while it was great to use, it lost a few years of photos that I hadn't backed up outside the service. Figured it was online and safe.
Always been frustrated that this abstraction became so commonplace. It's not even like there's ever been a time in history where 'online' meant 'safe and reliable'. Marketing always wins out, I guess.
My ex and I had a wonderful tradition of collating all the photos we'd taken in a single year, and making a printed album of it. It's a fantastic ritual to let you appreciate the good moments.
I would print more photos if I could find a printer that didn't actively hate me. Even the ink tank one I got turned out to have non-replaceable waste ink sponge with an internal counter that will brick the unit long before it wears out.
Color Laser. Rumor is that HP-M254DW is great b/c it's before a lot of E15N has taken place (enshittification... we should numberize it!). I got mine used off Craiglist nearing 10 years ago and it's been a pretty serious workhorse, along with pretty decent "trash" picture output.
I say trash b/c home printed photos on regular paper are never going to compete with your local CVS/Walgreens prints (which I do batches about 2-3 times per year, putting them in letters / christmas cards).
...but if I'm willing to wait for really good prints, I've had a great experience with "PersnickityPrints" who I tried after a local pharmacy print shop gave me an envelope of my wedding prints where some of the fancy B&W ones showed ~2mm chromatic aberration (hence: all the photos were misaligned / mis-calibrated).
Persnickity basically says: "you take the photo, we print the photo!" ...no auto-redeye reduction, no trying to make the colors pop, and they calibrate their machines at least once per day as opposed to once a month or whatever the generic pharmacy places do.
1) Color Laser for "tossable" printouts. 2) Walgreens + Mobile App for "5 copies to send in letters" (pick up in ~1hr, ~$0.20 per print, often less). 3) Persnickity for 8x10's, custom paper, cards, or if I'm planning ahead. (~$0.40/print, modulo shipping, etc).
I have a canon Selphy for 10x15 format as well as a Kodak Mini Shot Saqure "instant camera" that I really use as a printer for square polaroidlike photos from the smartphone. I also own a Fujifilm Instax Wide and an old Polaroid 600 that I converted to rechargeable batteries so that I can buy the slightly less expensive I-Type films. Between the Polaroid and the Instax, I take an average of maybe 2 instant pictures per week, maybe more during Christmas period or if I have family visiting me. Sometimes pictures that I don't keep but just gift to friends I am meeting with. All in all 2 pictures per week is just around 100 pictures. 2 packs of 10 Instax Wide cost me around 20€, a pack of 8 polaroid I-Type is much more expensive, around 17€ but I don't think spend more than 150€ a year on those anyway. Both printing with the Selphy/Kodak and taking instant pictures is expensive compared to bulk printing at a shop or online but in my opinion it is worth it and is still better than forgetting about those photos or even not taking them in the first place. I tend to think it is still less money wasted than if I was smoking.
One of the last Polaroid picture I took was of a little girl playing with her mom. Her husband told me several week later that it had become a bookmark that he has pleasure rediscovering everytime he grab his current book. Sometimes the smallest but meaningful gifts are the nicest.
For holidays, special events, whenever I have more than a handful of pictures to print or if I want bigger format I am doing it through the local photo print shop or online.
There are remarkably few surviving Aztec codices. Wikipedia lists 39, of which only 3 are possibly pre-hispanic. The new codices all seem to be in the later group, but this is still a substantial increase of the corpus.
That's pretty fascinating, dzdt. The idea of a palimpsest hiding older Aztec text opens up so many possibilities. Wonder what kind of insights or history was considered worth erasing back then. Has anyone come across any initial findings or interpretations of the erased text?
> Wonder what kind of insights or history was considered worth erasing back then.
Generally, everything that they didn't know would be useful or important. These are written on parchment, which has great durability over time, but sadly this means that very little of all the material that was written on parchment survives. This is because parchment is both very expensive and easy to recycle, which means that for most of history the second someone no longer values the material written on their parchment, they are going to wash that off and use it for something else.
My impression is so far investigations are extremely preliminary, not much more than was necessary to validate the authenticity of the documents. Hopefully we will see a lot more detailed analysis come out in the coming years.
The survival rate for certain 15th/16th codices in Western Europe aren't great either. From England there are only three choirbooks (Eton, Lambeth, Caius) surviving from the first half of the 16th century, when the catalogue from just a single college at one university lists tens of choirbooks. Given the sheer number of cathedrals, colleges etc which supported musical institutions in pre-reformation England, the scale of the loss becomes apparent. Similarly there is almost a complete loss of all musical manuscripts from the royal court of France, such that the compositions of the leader of its court chapel need to be recovered (incompletely) from a Vatican manuscript.
The Conquistadors actively tried to memory-hole Aztec/Maya culture post conquest by burning all their written content.
If you break the oral tradition by dispersing groups and you burn written records, you can wipe a culture from history. Conquistadors didn't succeed at this, but they very well tried.
They did the same to the Incan Quipu, which more recent study and discoveries suggest was an actual full written language, not just a counting system.
The conquistadors came across full-fledged empires with sophisticated arts and cultures who’d built cities that dwarfed their European counterparts with building techniques and on terrain that would’ve flummoxed western builders at the time (and still cause us to pause today) and destroyed as much of it as they could put their hands on. Smallpox was the disease, but the Spaniards were the plague.
I agree this is tragic and under-reported, but I think you weaken your case when you exaggerate like this.. Its not a direct contest for "greatness" since they were so different.
As the other response notes, Tenochtitlan was possibly the largest city in the world at the time, and the Aztec empire contained many other cities with populations over 10k. The Inca built a massive empire (8-12M people) centered on the Andean mountains linked together by roads and suspension bridges and built monumental architecture using masonry techniques that are impressive even today. We're just starting to get a handle on the scale of the Mayan empire, because they built their cities in parts of the Guatemalan jungle we have a hard time getting through today - some of the more recent work has found evidence of raised causeway networks stretching over a hundred miles linking large scale settlements. Go further south, and the Amazon jungle basin has been considered uninhabitable because of the density of the jungle and the poor quality of the soil, except that we've found evidence of cultivation of plants and more recent evidence of large-scale settlements and waterworks.
The Spaniards did not walk into a backwards people or somehow just miss what they were looking at - the civilizations and cities they found were advanced and obviously developed and on a scale that, even outside Tenochtitlan, would have rivaled European cities at the time for both size and sophistication.
It's not that much of an exaggeration. Tenochtitlan--the capital of the Aztec Empire--is estimated to have been about 120-150k people at the time of contact, which is larger than any city in the Spanish Empire at the time. Even the Spaniards themselves, as they recorded in their journals, were astonished at the scale of Tenochtitlan.
this story is tragic and it is not widely known, and also..
the story of Jonah in the Hebrew bible describes a city of 100,000+ people .. and that was just one city somewhere at that time.. that was three thousand years ago in the Middle East
Rome reached the million people mark in the 2nd century. All great cities of classical antiquity (familiar to the Spanish of that time) had over 100k pop: Carthage, Tyre, Byblos, Athens, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople...
Malthus was wrong on a ton of things, but his theory of population growth in pre-industrial cities effectively holds to the data (even according to economic historians).
Cities were effectively constrained by available food and transportation costs before the steam engine, so you'd get cycles of population growth, followed by population decline.
Particular places reached support capacity of surrounding land until something caused systemic failure, and population decline. Think of ancient China, for example with its cyclic population growth in a unified empire, followed by some natural catastrophe or political instability -> civil war as the political system weakened.
Because the natives joined in with them. The Aztecs were hated and ruled through military subjugation. They had a strict class system where the warriors were always trying to expand the empire and held most of the power. They required tributary and glory for the warriors (Aztecs started out as mercenaries). They'd invade their neighbors and bring in captives for human sacrifices... During one of their big holidays they "sacrificed" over 20,000 people by ripping open their chests with rudimentary knives.
That was extreme and insane to most of the native inhabitants. And it was even more outrageous to Europeans (or Asians). The Spanish weren't hero's and they exploited the natives and unwittingly spread disease but the Aztec civilization had to go and it died just as much from internal revolt than from the small amounts of European men that Cortes commanded. I have more respect for the Pueblo's than I do for the Aztecs. They survived harsher environments and had impressive self-taught farming and structural engineering skills.
This is not an apologist perspective, my heart weeps for the knowledge that was lost. But from the perspective of the Spanish conquistadors, all of Aztec culture looked like devil worship. Bear in mind these were Catholics who were suddenly immersed in a culture that regularly performed ritual human sacrifice. So they buried their statues and burned their books. It's tragic, but not all that surprising, really.
I'm sharing my admiration for the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, one of the best museums in the world. An absolutely astounding collection of history, archaeology, and art. Well presented. Worth a visit to CDMX just for itself. If you ever are in the area plan at least a half day at the MNA; you could spend two full days and not see everything. (Take another day to visit Teotihuacán!)
* "The first is called Map of the Founding of Tetepilco, and is a pictographic map which contains information regarding the foundation of San Andrés Tetepilco ...": San Andrés Tetepilco must have been Spanish, of course.
* "The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco ...": Churches would be Spanish.
* "Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco, is a pictographic history ... comprising historical information regarding the Tenochtitlan polity from its foundation to the year 1603.": At least it seems to be about Aztecs.
Why were the first two books about Spanish topics but written in the local language? If Spanish people writing, wouldn't they write in Spanish? If Aztecs were writing, why would they care to record these things? I suppose the latter is plausible if they were absorbed into Spanish society.
The Aztec Empire fell in 1521, but of course its people didn't disappear. If the codices date after 1603, that's plenty of time for the Spanish to influence their lives, even without full absorption.
That San Andrés Tetepilco has a partly-Spanish name now doesn't necessarily imply that Spaniards had a role in its founding or lived there in significant numbers at the time the codices were written. The church might have been founded by a Spanish missionary, but it might also have been an Aztec convert instead. The history apparently also covers events that happened under Spanish rule, so it's not entirely about a non-Spanish topic either.
> San Andrés Tetepilco must have been Spanish, of course.
It is not. I mean, yes, the “San Andrés” part of the modern name of the settlement (from a church there built not long after the conquest) is, but its one of Itzapalapan settlements that was later conquered by the Aztecs, so an Aztec codex about its founding is Aztecs writing about pre-Aztec history.
> “The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco …”: Churches would be Spanish.
Yeah, unlike the colonization of the United States, the native peoples were still present in and often the bulk of communities after the conquest of Mexico, they weren’t simply displaced for the Europeans (not to say the Spanish were better, but the pattern of colonization was very different.) So, while the Church was built under the direction of the Spanish, it would have been built and attended largely by locals, who would record things for the same people anyone would record things about the community they live in.
Yeah Spanish colonialism was very different from English colonialism. The Spanish attempted to coopt and convert the local population, not displace and kill them. That’s not to say it wasn’t a nasty process but to this day there are millions of people in Mexico who speak Nahuatl (the Aztec language) as their first and primary language.
> The Spanish attempted to coopt and convert the local population,
Population densities in Mexico and throughout much of what is Latin America were considerably higher than in the North.
Also IIRC the number of Spanish colonists who came to the Americas during the 17th century is about the same as the number of immigrants to the English colonies on the East Coast. Considering how massive the Spanish empire was there just weren’t that many Europeans there. Trying to subjugate and assimilate the natives was really the only option they had.
Sure, underlying conditions were different and partially explain the different colonizing strategies. Doesn’t change the fact that there were key differences that manifest themselves in evidence like these newly discovered codices.
Can someone tell me what an Aztec codex is? I assumed Aztec writing was not on paper but on stone... these seem to be from the colonial period, so are they hybrid cultural forms or what?
It's a book. Paper bark or parchment. . The Aztecs didn't have full writing in the sense of a system to represent a spoken language. Aztec codices are more to the calendar and graphic end of things. (But I could be wrong, since so few examples, are truly from pre-exchange times.)
The primacy of stone is a misconception. The following applies not just to the Aztecs, but also Sumer and Babylon, Egypt, the Maya, etc: the primary writing material for all of these civilizations was not stone. It was perishable materials, including parchment, wood bark, wax tablets, papyrus in Egypt, or just drawing in a pile of fine sand to do some arithmetic. (Babylon and its fired clay is a bit of an exception, maybe. But they also wrote on wood, bark paper and cloth, among other things.)
That means we only get monumental inscriptions. I'm more familiar with the Maya, who did have a complete writing system for spoken language, and we strongly suspect the Maya had literature in the same way the Egyptians, Chinese or Sumerians did. Poetry anthologies, mythological anthologies, religious texts, and also textbooks on medicine and astronomy, etc. Obviously, they didn't carve those on monuments, they wrote them on the closest analogue to paper they had.
Unfortunately, neither Mexico's meteorological climate nor Spain's religious climate at the time was conducive to preserving such fragile books.
> Babylon and its fired clay is a bit of an exception
It wasn’t just Babylon but dozens of other civilizations in the region. IIRC we have a lot more Assyrian tablets because Babylon and their allies sacked and burned the Assyrian capital which preserved their library.
They had a pre-colombian pictographic writing system with some phonetic elements that they wrote on animal hides. Priests did most of the writing and there was quite a lot recorded by them before it was mostly destroyed after contact with Europe.
Codex means a book in the modern sense of bound leaves one can flip through for random access to any one page. The opposite is volume or scroll, which involves sequential reading or scrolling to arrive at a particular page (like tape storage).
It will be interesting to find out why Cortes is depicted as a Roman. Considering the church inventory, it reminds me of the Holy Week processions in Spain where you often see people dressed as roman soldiers.
Before someone asks: No you're not gonna see this in an LLM/ML/AGI anytime soon. The corpus of text is far too small to make the statistical simulation viable.
There's so few surviving because guess what? European colonizers destroyed a bunch for religious reasons.
On the Mayan side the destruction rate is well north of 99%. To quote one of the bishops that did a book burning party:
"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 regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."
Yeah, because that was their literature, history, science, philosophy ...
I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying stuff.
Hopefully some indigenous scholars managed to stash some in a cave or tomb somewhere 500 years ago and we simply haven't found them yet.
Well the aztecs did the same before the europeans:
"Before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, the Aztecs eradicated many Mayan works and sought to depict themselves as the true rulers through a fake history and newly written texts"
I dont mean this to be taken as a justification or something, but there is this tendency of picking historical eventsand judge them by todays standards, and is particularly egregious when it is only applied to just one side portraying others as innocent victims when they were actually doing the same thing.
If alice murders bob, then charlie murders alice, 2 murders have been committed, indepdendent of one of the victims also being a perpatrator. Its still perfectly reasonable to be upset about the murder rate, and it's ok to be upset that alice was murdered.
Also I'm getting tired of people using Europeans as a whole all the time when it's one particular country. How are Bulgarians, Greeks, Estonians or Swedes to blame for anything there. It's amazing. No one is blaming Japanese, Vietnamese or Malaysians for the Mongol invasions in Europe. It's beyond ridiculous.
No one is blaming Eastern Europeans. Everyone knows they were not capable of carrying out colonization. They were the slaves used in the Arab world for a lot of antiquity.
The middle ages, not sure there were many East European slaves in pre-Islamic Arabia. Also plenty of them were “imported” into the Byzantine empire and Italy. After the Vikings Venice and Genoa mostly controlled the slave trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea and also the Balkans (Venice had a massive slave market).
Also non-colonizer Europeans, for the same religious reasons, did burn more knowledge (and persons) here, in their own towns.
Most of the history that we got, is what those ancestors did leave in their writings.
Today the inquisition simply consists of our beloved governments, covering up their dirty dealings, and telling a different story in the media, media dominated to the most inquisitorial extreme.
At least in Spain, videos are deleted, the monetization of certain channels on social networks is cancelled, forwarding of certain content on WhatsApp is rate-limited, and today, Telegram is closing in Spain, while all the ministers, the president and their families are involved in continuous corruption scandals, forgiven by judges who have been put in position by the same politicians.
Politicians forgiving the robbery of politicians, while TV only talks about the color of the air (if they don want to be reported and economically punished).
Journalists without a journalism career, who only look with a magnifying glass to the families of the monarchies, but totally forget forever about the families of the hundreds (thousands?) of Spanish politicians and ex-politicians.
Journalist without a journalism career, who try to tell us that life has increased a 6% (hello, do you mean that what previously did cost 1 Eur, now costs 1 Eur and 6 cents? where? basic education mathematics, please?)
The same supposedly lefty politicians, who criticize priests, are worse than priests, in this inquisitorial sense.
Something I ask myself... if the history that we got, was what the priests did write or didn't burn... what history will get about us, people in 500 years? That lies published in the media? 24 different versions of the same fact? Nothing at all if it's about ministers stealing public money? Whatever the generative AI tells them?
Yeah, this comment about the mass destruction of Mayan texts actually reminds of me of something I read in another one of the codices, the Florence one.
It was a little prologue that the monk wrote to justify its preservation. I don't have it in front of me so I'm paraphrasing, very roughly, but it quoted a catholic scholar (I don't remember who, maybe even a saint) and used that quote to argue that to fight the devil and save their souls they must know the devil's work.
I thought it was interesting and it seemed to me like the author/editor of this codex knew what was needed to be said to justify the creation of that text, in a political climate like the one above. Even in those times people had to navigate a bureaucracy and play politics to do what they thought was the right thing in the name of humanity and intellectual curiosity.
I believe many of these catholic priests were serious scholars, but they still had to be careful about what was put in writing and how it may be used against them by their enemies and competitors within the church.
> Details:The National Resistance Center has reported that the Russians are using the pretext of removing "Nazi literature" to explain their actions, while the list of such literature includes all books in Ukrainian. In doing so, the occupiers are repeating the practice typical of Nazi Germany.
Ah, that's the justification. I've never understood the official Russian "denazification" position; it should be clear to them no one now or ever is going to take it seriously, why continue with this absurd pretense?
That said, in this case it's more barbed than the article suggests. As part of denazification, the Allies did destroy books. To suggest book destruction is what typifies Nazis is absurd unless we also call the Allies Nazis.
> As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were then banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offense. All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed.
That said, Aztec culture was full of horrors we can now no longer even imagine, paling even before the Nazis. To the extent the destruction of codices was deliberate, much of what went on would have seemed to be a relatively necessary de-Aztecification.
Well, so far it is not even a conspiracy, as you said nothing except saying you cannot say it.
Things very seldom get deleted here btw. but yes they do get flagged (and hidden for most users unless they choose to see it, like me) if many think you are not contributing.
So your post is already flagged, you are now free to say it, if you have anything to say about the matter.
Effectively banning Russian language (they cannot, but they do try), tacit license to use violence against people who see themselves as Russians (massacre of Odessa, other cases), the ukranian nationalism which is a direct continuation of that of nazi collaborationists and jew murderers (yes, I know that Zelensky is a jew; so am I). Encouraging killing russians (all russians) on their telegram channels.
I could compose here a text with examples etc, but I don't see the point of doing this. I think this post will soon be deleted ("flagged"), the account shadow banned or whatever, and so I would simply waste my time.
So you are saying the reason for russia to destroy everthing ukraine, is the ukraine trying to destroy everything russian in ukraine, after russia invaded in 2014?
Maybe you got cause and effect mixed up here?
In either way, I condemn both attempts at attacking different cultures. Still, ukraine did not declare there is basically no russia. And the did not invade russia to exterminate. But russian officials did it with ukraine. Saying they are all russian. And invaded. And are destroying everything ukraine in Ukraine.
That is the reason Ukraine tolerates their nazis, as they fight against the threat to all of them. But they surely ain't all Nazis.
That is just a weak reason to reestablish a russian empire. And that's the main thing here happening, for some reason Ukraine does not want to be part of your empire anymore and you try to force them.
(After russia confirmed their sovereignty in Budapest 1994)
Sorry, I have work to do (as probably also you), so I will be brief.
"after russia invaded in 2014": Crimea was taken away, this yes, while the uprise in Donbass was, as far as I know, spontaneous, with tacit Russian support; both followed the coup organized by the west in Kiev (there is no doubt about this, it was an unconstitutional coup, and the west did breach an agreement - tacit perhaps, I don't recall - with Russia as Lavrov stated).
"Maybe you got cause and effect mixed up here?" - telegram channels calling to kill all russians did indeed appear after February 2022, or at least I think so.
As for ukranian nationalism, it was encouraged by the west, with end purpose to get NATO to Russia borders. You see, contrary to what americans would like to believe, there is nothing truly exceptional about your democracy. Though there are substantial differences between Athenian democracy and what you call democracy, its way to expand by luring the people governed by oligarchies with "people's government", disrupting existing order, causing chaos, war and misery - at least until it substitutes the existing oligarchies with "people's" oligarchies, is unchanged for at least 2400 years (you can try to read, if you have not read them before, Thucydides and Machiavelli's "History of Florence", preferably older translations where they do not translate "demos" as "democrats", I have seen also this lately).
"That is just a weak reason to reestablish a russian empire. And that's the main thing here happening, for some reason Ukraine does not want to be part of your empire anymore and you try to force them." - in a recent book ("Occidente e il nemico permanente") by Elena Basile, an Italian ex diplomat, she states that all of this would never happen if the west had not turned Ukraine into an anti Russian state (I would cite more, but I don't have a time to look this up). She is not a Russian propagandist, but just a person trying to reason by herself given the sources available, as so many people whose voices get silenced in the west under the pretext of "Russian propaganda", while she calls for mutual tolerance and respect of rights. (And of course there are many other examples besides her.)
"As for ukranian nationalism, it was encouraged by the west, with end purpose to get NATO to Russia borders. You see, contrary to what americans would like to believe, there is nothing truly exceptional about your democracy. "
I am not american. And none of this matters to the argument. But if you want a glimpse of my knowledge about the situation, then I can tell you, that already germany in WW1 did encourage ukrainian nationalism.
I am not a fan of any nationalism.
And I also do know that some russian propaganda channels get supressed like RT in the west, which I am also not a fan of - but no one goes to prison or worse because of spreading lies. In russia people went to prison for calling the war a war. And many who did more, accidently fell out of a window. Or died in prison.
So it is no surprise most of Ukraine clearly wants to remain independent and not become russian. No matter who influenced whom at what time. That always happens. What matters is, what people want here and now. And what treatys they signed and broke.
> while the uprise in Donbass was, as far as I know, spontaneous, with tacit Russian support;
The European Court of Human Rights analyzed this when they were judging a case regarding the shot down airliner, and they found no evidence of any local insurgency. Instead, according to the facts established by the ECHR, the fighting in Donbas and Crimea was between armed forces of Ukraine and forces under the command of Russia.
> followed the coup organized by the west in Kiev
After over 100 protesters were shot and killed under Yanukovych, he fled the country fearing criminal charges, and was removed from office by the parliament with 328-0 votes. No-one even from his own party opposed this. Whatever legal tehnicalities there could've been, they're settled after Ukraine held new elections months later and elected a new president with a full mandate.
> the west did breach an agreement - tacit perhaps, I don't recall - with Russia as Lavrov stated
If you are referring to the sob story about NATO promising never to accept Eastern Europe into NATO, then here's Gorbachev directly calling it a myth: https://twitter.com/Jesuitchild/status/1749887239226617873 Minister of foreign affairs Shevardnadze, minister of defence Yazov and others have also said that it's a fabrication.
> she calls for mutual tolerance and respect of rights.
That is exactly how Sweden and Finland have tried to live next to Russia. Finland's policy even spawned the term finlandization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization But seeing the way Russia has treated Ukraine made it abudantly clear that such policy was untenable and irresponsible, and both countries abandoned neutrality in favor of alliances designed to contain the imperialistic expansionist behavior of Russia. This is an especially large pivot for Sweden, which had been neutral for over 200 years.
Given the current conditions, a good first step towards mutual tolerance and respect of rights would be Russia packing up its things and getting out of Ukraine. And then, perhaps in a hundred years when everyone who remembers how Russians gleefully raped and murdered in Ukraine have died, further steps towards reconciliation can perhaps be made.
But before that, it'd would perhaps be a good idea to ask forgiveness for the past crimes first. Today marks the 75th anniversary of 1949 mass deportations by Russians that saw around 100 000 people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania deported in entire families, from babies to bed-ridden elderly, into Siberian wilderness because they were "class enemies". On such anniversaries, Russian embassies usually put out releases saying that it didn't happen, or if it did, they deserved it. Can you imagine German embassies acting like this on Holocaust remembrance days?
I think it continues to happen in forms we don't easily recognize
because of our biases. When Google tried to scan every book in
existence, the copyright lobby put a stop to it because of
"intellectual property rights". Nobody's claiming that Sci-hub is
sacreligious, but it's on our cultural gatekeepers' hitlist all the
same. I suspect that future generations will view these events in the
same light as the destruction of the Mayan codices or the library of
Alexandria.
Or maybe people here are not brain-dead and russian propaganda does not fly here. It's not like russians occupied bunch of Ukrainian territory and started burning books there.
You are flattering yourself. The level of US people's acquaintance with anything outside of their country is well known across the world, and I am afraid that the information you get from your media is not as informative as you think.
On my cell phone I have a video of some polish mercenaries (or volunteers) burning Russian church books, laughing and obviously pleased about what they are doing. I will share it with you if you want.
In Kiev, not long ago, a monument to Pushkin was taken down. Bulgakov is practically forbidden. I will stop here.
Have you stopped for a moment to consider why it’s happening? Every single person in former eastern block (including me) is sick of russian propaganda and being ruled by them for last few hundred years. War in Ukraine was a great excuse to get rid of russian sh**.
I will point to the fact that before the collapse of Soviet Union, most Ukranians did not see any difference between them and Russians, and most of them voted for keeping Soviet Union intact in the referendum held on 17.3.1991 (as in most other USSR republics), ignored then by Yeltsin and other people who wanted to get their share of power sponsored by US. The division between Russia and Ukraine, as far as I know, was mostly administrative. In Odessa and Kiev people laughed at ukranian nationalism, which was then confined to L'vov and such places.
As for "hundreds of years", Russia was seen as liberator by the same eastern Europe when it fought against the Turks and nazi Germany, was seen as oppressor in some of Caucasus and in Poland, which in their turn thought it was their right to take the land of barbaric Russians. And in the Baltic states there are sources from the 16th century (Guagnini, an italian at the service of Polish court) which describe the Lithuanian Vitold governing Russians in Vilnius, stating that there seem to be more Russian Orthodox churches in Vilnius than catholic ones (and Guagnini cannot be suspected in sympathy to Russians).
So you see, you simplify history, and you do so, I think, first because you don't read, and then because your own country just changed one empire for another.
Russia fought along Nazis to occupy eastern europe afterwards. It was not a liberator. As for Turks, it was Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth that stopped Turks by Vienna.
As for „most Ukrainians“, western Ukraine was not under Russian control till post WW2. Then there was Holodomor in the East. And there's a difference between ethnic Ukrainians and Ukraine citizens. Which is a tricky situation in Donbas and Crimea especially.
As for Lithuanian Vytautas, we're taking in Ruthenians running from Moscow rule for a loooong time. But modern Muscovy / Russia is not the same as Ruthenians.
I think that a person must try, for himself, adhere to the historical truth. Which many times differs from what is written in wikipedia, especially the English version of it when it speaks of the Russian people (to be fair, also the Russian version is often biased in this regard, with an opposite sign).
"It was not a liberator" - tell it to the people who greeted the Soviet Army with flowers when they entered Vilnius (I know personally of concrete evidence). Tell it to the Jews, who were being murdered by Lithuianian nationalists, Lithuanian communists aside. Tell it to Serbs and Bulgars.
And I do not try to deny any of the the other historical facts: Stalin's repressions to start with. (By the way, what do you think would happen if some of the events which led to Soviet invasion of Chechoslovakia would happen in some european country, with americans taking the role of USSR?)
And Soviet Union was perceived as the liberator from the nazis, and not US, contrary to modern Holywood "tradition". People knew then the facts. And I do not try to depict USSR as something different from what it was.
"As for Lithuanian Vytautas, we're taking in Ruthenians running from Moscow rule for a loooong time"
Who are exactly "we"? The documents of the early Magnus Ducatus Lithuaniae were written in Latin and a Russian language variety ("old Ukranian", of course, of course..). This variety of Russian was its de facto official language.
And then these mysterious "Ruthenians".. Guagnini speaks of Russians in general ("omnibus Ruthenis"), and "gens Moscovitica" are just part of them.
Regarding history in general: what I know personally is the very short period since the 90s. And I know for a fact that Russians were not, at least until 2007, the "aggressors" the west, especially the balts, try to depict them ("forgetting" the elephant in the room, NATO expansion to the east). On the contrary, in Lithuania the aggression came mostly from lithuanians (aggression does not mean necessarily actual physical violence, it can be directed against language, culture, and history), while Russia was actively refusing to defend the rights of the Russian minority (I know this from first hand source).
So, also judging by how this period is being depicted by the west, I make my judgement also about the depiction by the west of other periods of Soviet and Russian history.
One of the greatest tragedies of human knowledge loss. Right up there with the library of Alexandria. The 4 remaining Maya codices are a wealth of information. Imagine if we had the rest.
Its importance and size are massively over-emphasized though. We aren’t even sure if that were that many books left there when it was supposedly destroyed.
The historical significance of the burning of the Library of Alexandria is absolutely overstated but not for the reasons most think. Like most Libraries today, the bulk of the collection most likely consisted of reprints of works that could be found other libraries littered across the Mediterranean. (And there was a LOT of them: (Royal Library of Antioch, Imperial Library of Constantinople, Academy of Gondishapur, not to mention local city libraries) The best analogy I've read was it would be like the equivalent of the library of congress burning; sure we'd lose some stuff but most of the collection still exists in one form or another.
Obviously that isn't to say it wasn't a tragic event, just that in terms works that were forever lost has been vastly overstated in public consciousness.
One thing that we definitely lost forever was all the notations made by contemporary scholars as the Library was a mecca of intellectual thought for hundreds of year... Truely heartbreaking to think about about all the information we could of gleaned about their worldview from the annotations they made on those works.
Where are talking about when it was supposedly burnt during the civil war with Caesar/Cleopatra? Or some other event?
> for hundreds of year
> Truely heartbreaking to think about about all the information we could of gleaned about their worldview from the annotations they made on those works.
It’s heyday supposedly lasted ~100 years. It was unavoidable though because how unstable rhe ancient world was. Basically you had to have an extremely stable central authority willing to dedicate enough resources to it for hundreds of years for that to happen. While in reality libraries like this rarely survived for longer than a few generations. Decentralization seems to be a lot more sustainable longterm (e.g. 50 medieval monasteries instead of a single massive centralized library)
Have you heard of the spanish inquisition? Or the general treatment of the pagans?
I do not think what we now call human rights mattered to them in any way.
It was a different and therefore enemy religion. It was beaten and then destroyed. That was the main thing. That they also happened to sacrifice humans was maybe a moral bonus to justify it, but destroying the cultural foundation of the culture you want to conquer was quite standard and old practice. Ask the druids for example.
Once a culture lost its foundation, it becomes way easier to control.
Also it is a proof, "see, your gods did nothing to protect you, they are powerless, like you. So joining us (means working for us) is your only option"
Theological disagreements, such as the nature of Jesus' divinity, the proper relationship between Christianity and Judaism, what even is the Trinity, etc.
I know. But the person above made its point that the christians only eradicated other cultures/religions, when they were cruel and sacrificing humans. So my point was: no, obviously not.
"this is also how the early Christians felt, which is why they eradicated Roman paganism"
does sound a lot like it to me. Because why make that argument at all, when they in fact not just eradicated the pagans? (which just means non christian religion btw. they were and are quite diverse)
I think everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve to be eradicated, not in the sense of killing everyone who practices that culture (of course the Spanish didn’t exterminate the Mexica either) but in the sense of converting or reprogramming them into a different culture. This is what was done to Germany and Japan after the Second World War for instance.
Literal human sacrifice is a sufficient but not necessary condition. Though I suppose in a broader and more metaphorical sense, Germany and Japan also practiced human sacrifice.
No, when it really comes down to it, it isn't the case, aside from a few fringe pacifists. Some cultures, like the Germans and Japanese, engaged in repeated aggressive military expansion until the rest of the world was forced to conquer them and reprogram them into pacifists. Other cultures engage in practices that are outside of what even tolerant liberals are willing to tolerate, like female genital mutilation or not letting girls go to school or not tolerating homosexual behavior or having traditional gender roles, and so we use human rights NGO's and Western mass media to attempt to assimilate them into our culture.
If you look at what the Spanish actually did to the Aztec Empire, they basically organized a coalition of other indigenous tribes who were tired of living under Mexica domination (and having their people intermittently sacrificed), overthrew the Mexica, and installed themselves as the new suzerain. This isn't far off from what the Western countries were trying to do during the Arab Spring or Syrian Civil War, except the Western countries tried to either install a local client or pushed for elections, and neither of those plans tended to work out for the countries involved.
And in general no, like the other commentor said, the german or japanese culture was not eradicated. Just forced to stop their imperialistic aggression.
And the spanish christians you are defending here, did destroy all the other cultures they conquered down to their root and language. Making them slaves. Taking everything of value. Installing a racist regime, with white people on top. Whatever the atztecs did, the spanish did not do better.
If they would have been motivated by freeing the people from the aztecs, then they just could have done so. But maybe that was not what the were after, but rather the gold and power?
Seven million Mexicans today fluently speak an indigenous language, significantly more than in the United States. And you’re kidding yourself if you think the United States hasn’t also gotten a lot of money and power out of maintaining friendly regimes in Europe and East Asia.
Yes, they were apparently not succesful. But as late as in the 20. century christian schools in south america largely forbid the use of native language.
I understand there are extreme cases like the Nazis. I'll say something about that below. But I'm not sure we can group the Aztecs in with them, certainly not to the point that so much of their culture was destroyed as it was. Also worth nothing they weren't sailing around the world conquering peoples. Yes, maybe they were doing it at home, but Spanish culture is the one that survives, even though they also behaved abbhorently. And I love Spanish culture even though they did. I wish Ï could enjoy Aztec culture in a similar way.
I disagree that Japan and Germany had their cultures eradicated. Both nations maintain rich cultural traditions and express them within the safe bounds of their nation states. What happend in meso-America was much closer to the kind of eradication of cultures the Nazis wanted to see, which was the reason they are so reviled.
And just to say I don't think it's fair to say pacifism is a fringe idea. Many of our world's states are officially pacifistic, many of our greatest philosophers have subscribed to it and there have been mass movements for peace which in some cases have resulted in decolonisation or have bolstered democratic opposition in war time.
> But I'm not sure we can group the Aztecs in with them, certainly not to the point that so much of their culture was destroyed as it was. Also worth nothing they weren't sailing around the world conquering peoples.
The Aztec empire was only about a hundred years old when it fell. They were very active conquerors on top of committing human sacrifice.
> I disagree that Japan and Germany had their cultures eradicated. Both nations maintain rich cultural traditions and express them within the safe bounds of their nation states. What happend in meso-America was much closer to the kind of eradication of cultures the Nazis wanted to see, which was the reason they are so reviled.
Seven million Mexicans today are fluent in indigenous languages while between 11-23 million identify or are identified as indigenous, so clearly their cultures weren’t eradicated in the same way that the Nazis sought eradication. It’s all a matter of degree. For what it’s worth I agree that these things should be carefully targeted only at the most dangerous and problematic aspects of a culture, but of course, how else are we going to decide which aspects of a foreign culture are “problematic” except by comparison to our own cultural values? Also, cultural assimilation is never quite so targeted. How many countries can you name whose leaders don’t wear Western suits and ties or where nobody plays soccer or where you can’t find a McDonalds? (And before you say Russia, they basically transformed all of their McDonalds into a knockoff Russian brand that is still basically McDonalds).
> And just to say I don't think it's fair to say pacifism is a fringe idea. Many of our world's states are officially pacifistic…
There’s probably a single digit number of countries that don’t have a military, and one of them (Iceland) is nonetheless a NATO member with foreign security guarantees so I wouldn’t even count them as pacifist.
> The Aztec empire was only about a hundred years old when it fell. They were very active conquerors on top of committing human sacrifice.
I'm aware. I was aware when I said I don't believe we can group them in with the Nazis. Are you saying we can?
> Seven million Mexicans today are fluent in indigenous languages while between 11-23 million identify or are identified as indigenous
I'm not ready to conflate language with the practice of a culture or the self determination of a people.
> Also, cultural assimilation is never quite so targeted. How many countries can you name whose leaders don’t wear Western suits and ties or where nobody plays soccer or where you can’t find a McDonalds?
I don't know what you're saying here.
> There’s probably a single digit number of countries that don’t have a military, and one of them (Iceland) is nonetheless a NATO member with foreign security guarantees so I wouldn’t even count them as pacifist.
I think you've done a disservice to what I said by focusing on a particular aspect that you personally disagree with. The point still stands that pacifism is not a "fringe" idea. You might not believe pacifist countries are "truly" pacifist by your definition, but the rhetoric of pacifism is part of mainstream politics in many parts of the world. You can read about various peace movements globally here:
> I was aware when I said I don't believe we can group them in with the Nazis. Are you saying we can?
Considering the fact that they were an aggressive, conquering empire that committed institutional mass murder, yes, they’re roughly equivalent to the Nazis. Why wouldn’t they be?
> I'm not ready to conflate language with the practice of a culture or the self determination of a people.
It demonstrates that the culture wasn’t completely eradicated, just like the cultures of Germany and Japan weren’t completely eradicated. And I think you’re kidding yourself if you actually think either of those countries had real self-determination after the war.
Besides, what makes you think self-determination is so important? That’s just your cultural value that you’re trying to impose! That’s the deeper point I was making that you’ve completely glossed over.
> I don't know what you're saying here.
Food, clothing, popular sports, etc. are all aspects of culture, and many of them are becoming globally homogenized, which represents the eradication of culture. Whatever clothing high status Chinese or Japanese or African men wore in previous centuries has all but disappeared in favor of Western suits, for instance. If anything this completely superficial and harmless piece of culture has replaced other cultural expressions far more successfully than the explicit values that the West has been explicitly trying to propagate, like “human rights” or “feminism”.
> You might not believe pacifist countries are "truly" pacifist by your definition, but the rhetoric of pacifism is part of mainstream politics in many parts of the world.
When push comes to shove, almost nobody actually believes it. The rhetoric is just rhetoric that’s usually contingent on how a specific conflict is perceived. Most of those who opposed the war in Iraq now support the war in Ukraine for instance.
> Considering the fact that they were an aggressive, conquering empire that committed institutional mass murder, yes, they’re roughly equivalent to the Nazis. Why wouldn’t they be?
So could we say the Spanish were also equivalent to the nazis? Are they equivalent to the nazis today? And did anyone need to eradicate Spanish culture for this change to take place? What about in Britain or the Netherlands?
> It demonstrates that the culture wasn’t completely eradicated
No, it doesn't. Looking closer to home I can tell you that the Irish language is still spoken despite centuries of measures taken to eradicate it. What no longer exists, however, is the culture that was present prior to the arrival of the the Christians and the British. We literally don't know their beliefs, they were perverted and silenced by those who wrote the histories and set the norms going forwards. At best we have an image.
Contrast this to Japan or Germany where our understanding goes back much further. Japan has living traditions older than the furthest date back where we can confidently talk about the practice and belief of the Irish. Neither Japan nor Germany underwent the same level of cultural eradication.
> Besides, what makes you think self-determination is so important? That’s just your cultural value that you’re trying to impose! That’s the deeper point I was making that you’ve completely glossed over.
No, quite the contrary. The people you are talking about: where do they live today? Who governs the land they live on? By what laws do they live? Are those laws more rooted in Roman legal structures or Aztec ones? The imposition of a Westphalian style state on them is exactly what I see as evidence of their loss of cultural power. The words I have to describe this are admittedly rooted in European thinking and I wish I had alternatives myself.
> Food, clothing, popular sports, etc. are all aspects of culture, and many of them are becoming globally homogenized, which represents the eradication of culture
I'm still not sure what you're saying. I agree with you here and I think it's tragic. Cultural imperialism never ended and Europe and her descendants still haven't learned to listen to others.
> explicitly trying to propagate, like “human rights” or “feminism”.
Almost every part of the world has taken on the European model of statehood. These are almost all signed up as members of the United Nations, which is again rooted in Westphalian thinking. As part of this they make commitments to human rights and to feminist actions. These have created serious change on the ground in many places.
I also want to say that it shows a bias to consider these western ideas. Many movements around the world do and have existed in support of personal freedoms and against the continued oppression. And indeed the west is not at all unified in these matters and still has far to go.
> When push comes to shove, almost nobody actually believes it.
How can you say this when there is ample evidence against it? Even in Ukraine there are conscientious objectors choosing not to fight. Again they might not be "pure" enough for you but the idea that pacifism is fringe or that you can speak better to their true belief than they can is ludicrous.
> No, quite the contrary. The people you are talking about: where do they live today? Who governs the land they live on? By what laws do they live? Are those laws more rooted in Roman legal structures or Aztec ones? The imposition of a Westphalian style state on them is exactly what I see as evidence of their loss of cultural power.
Why does that matter to you? Why don’t you simply believe, as most cultures throughout history effectively believed, that might makes right and that the ability to conquer equals the right to govern? You hold a very specific set of cultural values that you arrogantly imagine to hold the status of “universal human rights” which are fundamentally rooted in Christian humanism.
> How can you say this when there is ample evidence against it? Even in Ukraine there are conscientious objectors choosing not to fight.
I never claimed that genuine pacifists didn’t exist, only that they are a fringe, which is true.
I take it you agreed with everything else I said about language etc?
> Why does that matter to you?
I grew up in a post-colonial society and know how painful it can be. I believe that there are structures in place in the society I live in that perpetuate systemic disadvantage to the cultures of others, and that they effectively do so in my name. I am aghast at the behaviour of Europe in the past and feel a sense of responsibility to understand and fight against modern day imperialism.
> You hold a very specific set of cultural values that you arrogantly imagine to hold the status of “universal human rights” which are fundamentally rooted in Christian humanism.
I would ask you not to call me arrogant. I explained the short comings of my language. I disagree with Westphalian defaultism.
> Why don’t you simply believe, as most cultures throughout history effectively believed, that might makes right and that the ability to conquer equals the right to govern?
Why would I? I have my own set of beliefs and my own cultural background. I don't believe the Spanish were right then because they had more might. I don't believe the Nazis were more right than the people they eradicated. I believe the modern Mexican state does inherent violence to the expression of the cultures that came before it.
Do you? It seems you're arguing that the cultures that were there weren't eradicated at all and still exists happily, while also telling me to accept that they didn't have enough might to be right and that's why they had to go.
> I never claimed that genuine pacifists didn’t exist, only that they are a fringe
We might have different definitions of "fringe" then. But the original reason why I commented to you was to take issue with your claim that "everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve to be eradicated."
> I take it you agreed with everything else I said about language etc?
Not at all; I just didn't feel like repeating myself.
> I would ask you not to call me arrogant.
I apologize. I think the better term might be "ethnocentric", in the sense that you are using your own culture as a frame of reference to judge other cultures, in this case that of colonial Spain. Which isn't necessarily a problem--most of us do the same thing--but it's good to be self-aware about it and to understand that this inevitably leads to conflict between cultures, of exactly the type that we've been discussing. I'm just trying to get you to back up far enough to see that. More about this later.
> It seems you're arguing that the cultures that were there weren't eradicated at all and still exists happily
As I've been saying, what actually happened is a matter of degree that doesn't quite fit the term "eradication". If you took a late 19th century Prussian and showed them modern day Germany, they would probably lament that their Germany no longer exists. You would probably get a similar answer from a Meiji-era Japanese. And I think we agree you'd definitely get the same answer from a 16th century Mexica. Some version of all three cultures exist today, but all three cultures were bloodily dominated by a foreign conqueror with fundamentally incompatible values and then forcibly reshaped to fit those values. It's harder to see the parallels because you and I are closer to the values of 1940's America than 16th century Spain, but in principle it's the exact same thing.
> while also telling me to accept that they didn't have enough might to be right and that's why they had to go.
Not at all. I'm trying to take things up a level of abstraction and point out that your rejection of "might-makes-right" is, in and of itself, an expression of your own cultural values.
Let me see if I can illustrate this another way, with an anecdote from the British rule of India. In some parts of India, there was a religious custom, "sati", in which a widow would be burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre. The British found this horrifying. Charles James Napier was one of the British governors in India, and he enforced the British policy of prohibiting sati. When the priests complained to him that sati was simply part of their religious customs and that their customs should be respected, Napier replied, "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
At some point, this sort of thing inevitably happens whenever two cultures are incompatible enough. Let me try and pull in the last piece now.
> But the original reason why I commented to you was to take issue with your claim that "everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve to be eradicated."
If you'll give me enough leeway not to take the word "everyone" completely literally, I think my claim is pretty defensible. For instance, virtually everyone did seem to agree that ISIS needed to be eradicated. There are some principled pacifists who would have preferred to leave ISIS alone, but I think it's perfectly fair to consider those people a fringe, especially if they, themselves, were directly being attacked by ISIS--not just to the degree of random acts of terrorism but in the way ISIS was violently invading parts of the Middle East in their heyday.
Was ISIS a "culture", or just a radicalized mass movement of murderous fanatics? They considered themselves a caliphate. I'm sure the Aztec priests who hauled unwilling victims to the top of a pyramid and cut out their still-beating hearts on a regular basis also had a certain self-regard, just as I think the Spanish probably considered them a bunch of murderous fanatics. And look, I agree that the Spanish in total did a lot of terrible things in Mexico, but I don't think eradicating a religion that is centered around hauling unwilling victims up a pyramid and cutting out their still-beating hearts was a bad idea, just as I don't think it was bad for the British Empire to prohibit sati or to (eventually) stop the slave trade, even though the slave trade was a long-standing practice of many west African cultures. That's not the same as endorsing everything they ever did, any more than I endorse everything the Allies did in the Second World War.
My point here is that there are always going to be limits to cultural relativism, and that almost every culture in the world is eventually going to try and reshape other cultures to be more compatible. And when it comes to my personal preferences, I think I am actually much more on the "just leave other cultures alone" side than most people. But there's always going to be some limit to that, and even the decision of where that boundary lies is just going to depend on your culture. There's no neutral middle ground outside of anyone's cultural values here.
I do think if there’s an objective thing that can condemn a culture, it’s willingness to sacrifice its children is that thing
And I do think this extrapolates to modern cultures, from slapping a suicide vest on a toddler, to “one child” policies to “children are bad for the environment” type movements.
And we lost a lot every time. I don't believe it was needed to crush the cultures of America and elsewhere because of disagreeable religious practice. The argument could be made that we should wipe out Islamic culture because of their opression of women. And it would be an abbhorent argument.
Just wanted to add that this reads like the Romans condemned the Celts for practicing sacrifice, and that the Christians did the same for the Romans. This is not true.
I'm curious as well on that topic: what do we think of legal sacrifice in Rome? Should we condem their entire culture because they crucified people?
I see a strong and continous cultural and political link from Rome to the Church of Rome to Charlemagne and on through the various duchies and unified provinces to get to the modern European state that I live in today, in and old Roman settlement just below the Rhine delta.
I live by customs and laws rooted in Roman practice. Much more so than I do live in any way resembling the ways of the people who lived here before their arrival, or the ways of the people who lived in my native land before the arrival of the Catholics of Rome.
Sure. As one of Neal Stephenson's characters observed, it's a measure of what utter shitheads the Aztecs were that when the Spanish Inquisition took over, things actually got more humane. To name just one issue, the Spaniards weren't cannibals.
> Ask the druids for example.
The druids, in turn, were such utter shitheads that the Romans (not exactly a bunch of bleeding hearts) were horrified by their cruelty.
Europeans were widely practicing things like public executions as well as torture. They also engaged in traditional castration and circumcision. This was also a time long still before the witch hunts began. And don't forget how many women and children they kidnapped and forced into slavery.
It does seem to be painting with an overly broad brush to talk about "Europeans" (which covers everyone from Portugal to greater Russia) when it was a very small group of Spanish conquistadors and priests who actually did all of what we're discussing.
And frankly the Wikipedia article talks specifically about "Spanish" invaders, and the word "European" isn't even in the article. I'm not sure why you think that link supports the idea that someone other than the gp here turned "Spanish" into "European colonizers".
[1] https://www.jornada.com.mx/2024/03/21/cultura/a03n1cul