Think much better off they’d be if they hadn’t spent thousands of years doing this shit.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Today I Learned (TIL)
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1: "They" didn't. The Aztec empire lasted from 1300 to 1521.
2: Most of their sacrifices were war captives or slaves from their tributary tribes/nations.
3: They had a huge population base, by contemporary European standards.
4: The conquistadors and colonizers killed far, far more people out of greed than the Aztecs ever dreamed of. And that's not even counting the plague victims.
The lesson of the Aztecs is don't conquer your neighbors and treat them as a lesser people, it just breeds resentment. The conquistadors didn't conquer the empire with gunpowder and steel (though that helped, as did the germs), they convinced their oppressed subjects to kill the Aztecs for them, and it was easy to do so because the Aztecs were an empire, and thus assholes.
Ok. Cool