Richard Jernigan -> RE: Spanish Village called "Kill the Jews" (Apr. 18 2014 1:31:04)
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ORIGINAL: BarkellWH I want to be very clear about the thoughts expressed in my posts on the subject of the Aztecs and the Spanish. I am not condemning the practices of the Aztecs in exacting tribute and sacrificial victims from their imperial subjects. Far from it. I think it is a mistake to apply our cultural values and standards today to societies and cultures that existed in the 16th century. What I condemn is the double standard that is widely prevalent today that exempts the Aztecs from criticism for operating within their cultural framework at the time but roundly condemns the Spanish for practices that were acceptable within their cultural framework. It is the double standard that I find intellectually dishonest and inconsistent. I think you and I are pretty much on the same page here, Bill. An acquaintance, Dick Reavis, is married to a Mexican woman. He wrote a book called "Conversations With Moctezuma" about Mexico in the 1980s. Only half facetiously he compares the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which ended up ruling Mexico for 73 years, with the system of tribute of the Aztec Empire. One reason for the fashionability of condemning the Spaniards was the political rhetoric of the PRI. They portrayed themselves as heirs to the War of Independence from Spain in the early 19th century, proudly proclaiming their Aztec heritage--whether they were descended from the Mexica or not. One of several streams of ideology and military power that fed into the Revolution of 1910 was Zapatismo, led by the peasant Emiliano Zapata. Zapata was not an enslaved debt peon on one of the big sugar haciendas of the state of Morelos, just south of Mexico City, but he was a mestizo land owning peasant who identified with downtrodden campesinos whose land had been stolen over generations of Spanish rule, and during rule by an elite of Spanish descent after independence from Spain. The campesinos were always an important segment of the PRI's political base. Any big political rally in the Zocalo, the immense, monumental city square of Mexico City, was always attended by hundreds, or even thousands of campesinos bussed in by the PRI from the countryside. Zapata's populist, land reforming ideology was one of the main streams of Mexican political rhetoric during the years following the Revolution, though they were honored in the breach as much as in the observance. Vilifying Spain's oppression of Mexico's peasants was a big part of the PRI's propaganda, well up into the late 1950s when I started subscribing to Mexican newspapers, and for years after that. This extended into a glorification of the noble Indian ancestors, and their ill treatment by the savage and corrupt Spaniards. About the only major relic of Cortez that survives is his palace in Cuernavaca, just over the mountains to the south of Mexico City. It looks like a brutally fortified redoubt, compared to the beautiful Baroque mansions, gardens and churches of the prosperous centuries that followed. Even the PRI's Presidents, retiring as billionaires at the apex of the PRI tribute machine, tended to buy palaces in Rome or Florence, rather than in Spain. Of course, the PRI, leftist in rhetoric if not always in action, never recognized the Fascist government of Franco. RNJ
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