Youtube comments of The Present Past (@ThePresentPast_).
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So @MajoraZ gave some insight I wanted to share here:
So, during the 15th and early 16th century when Europeans were first arriving in the Americas, the region's primary power was the Aztec Empire, centered in the Valley of Mexico in what's now Mexico City. This valley had been a major population center for almost as long as Mesoamerica had civilization: Tlatilco was a major town around 1000BC; Teotihuacan was a massive metropolis, one of the largest cities in the world at the time (and unusually with almost all it's denizens living in palaces + other unique traits) and perhaps conquering Maya cities over 1000km away from 100BC-600AD; etc. The Aztec Empire came into being after nomadic Nahua tribes from Northern Mexico, migrated into Central Mexico and adopted local urban statehood in the centuries before Europeans arrived. Over the course of the 15th and early 16th century, the Aztec Empire had basically expanded to fill up almost all of what's now Mexico City, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Hidalgo, Morelos, the state of Mexico, Veracruz, Guerrero and Oaxaca, with subject states from a variety of cultures, though there were some states which remained unconquered due to either being beneath notice (the Tlapenec kingdom of Yopitzinco, and Otomi kingdom of Metztitlan, etc) or being too tough a nut to crack yet (Tlaxcala & it's allies, who were Nahuas too, and the Mixtec kingdom of Tututepec). To the West, in what's now Michoacan, there was another large empire, the Purepecha Empire, that basically fought the Aztec Empire to a standstill and blocked further westward expansion, and to the east the Aztec Empire only had limited conquests in Chiapas, with much of it, Tabasco, Campeche, Quitana Roo, the Yucatan, and Guatemala and Belize having fragmented Maya polities with some notable city-states and kingdoms.
The point being, while Harris frames this as "land for the taking/without resistance", this area very much had armies, cities, resources, etc: By this point the Aztec captial of Tenochtitlan had 200,000 denizens by most estimates, in the same ballpark as European cities like Paris and Constantinople, and was built out of artificial islands with venice like canals, royal gardens, zoos, aquariums, large marketplaces, etc. It and other major cities had trades of spices, jewels, gold, ceramics, feathers, textiles, etc. Down in the Andes, they had their own long history of different city-states, kingdoms, and empires which had culminated in the Inca Empire more or less single-handedly swallowing up all competing states and expanding into the non-urbanized and less densely populated areas around it. But even then, beyond those two centers of urban civilization, other parts of South America; Central America between it and Mesoamerica; and parts of North America, like around and everything east of the Mississippi and the Southwest, still had town building, agricultural societies, even if not "as developed" (as if that's something you can objectively define): Cahokia for example was a city beneath what's now Saint Louis that had 10,000-40,000 denizens..We now know that many parts of the Amazon rainforest had sizable towns and much of it was intentionally cultivated, etc.
The fact that this was NOT just unclaimed land with a few primitive tribes on it wasn't lost on Europeans: Spanish explorers and Conquistadors in Mesoamerica clearly made a distinction between the civilizations there and the more scattered villages that had been found in Cuba and the Caribbean. Cortes, Bernal Diaz, etc would compare Mesoamerican cities to the greatest cities in Spain, or beyond and to fairy castles from fantasy stories. Spanish friars talked of them as "civilized pagans", like the Greeks and Romans, while Francisco Hernandez, the personal royal court physician to Philip II, documented Aztec medical and botanical records and admitted they were better then his own sciences. You see similar claims with explorers down in the Andes. Hernando de Soto in his travels through the Southern US and other explorers in the Amazon and Central America reported coming across semi-organized towns and polities which were disregarded for centuries but is now reflected in archeological research. Some Mesoamerican and Andean kings and nobles actually kept their status in the Spanish colonial administration, for a time, gaining heraldry and titles, a explicit acknowledgement by Spain that these were (though now conquered) sovereign nations, in many cases them being appointed governors of their cities or territories. (Likewise, many Mexican states are the rough boundaries and are the political successors to Prehispanic states: Tlaxcala, Michoacan etc)
Of course, those awe-inspired or begrudging praise and respect for these civilizations was also paired with the caveat that they were pagan or heathen, and that their conquest was justified. Or more often, that they never had a legal right to independence to begin with, as the Requerimiento, derived from similar justifications used against Muslim states, gave Spain the right to all territories in the name of the Church. The notion of them "not resisting" is likewise moreso a legal justification in many cases more then it was a factual observation: By claiming that a state or a group was pagan and therefore the land was Spain's to begin with; or that they had initially welcomed the explorers peacefully and into their cities and towns and palaces (you know, as you would do to foreign emissaries) and therefore were surrendering their land and belongings to them, those explorers and Conquistadors could then legally justify their wars and conflicts and conquests (which is the "resistance" Harris glosses over) as putting down rebellions or taking what was already theirs, rather then a sovereign state defending it's territory. When diseases caused societies to collapse, in many cases even ahead of Europeans arriving (hence seeing it as "virgin soil" open to the taking: By the time French, British, and American colonists spread across the Eastern US, let alone the Great Plains and the frontier, many of it's sedentary down building cultures had already collapsed and fragmented), it was "divine right/providence". While practices like sacrifices or cannibalism did occur, their scale and brutality got exaggerated to further justify conquests (Colonial accounts say the Aztec sacrificed almost 100,000 people in 4 days in 1487. Excavations of skull racks from that exact period suggests a scale more in the 100s to 1000s a year).
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And how did these local groups see it? Let's return to the Aztec Empire: today it's downfall is seen as Cortes manipulating local states against one another by preying on existing resentment towards Aztec rule (or even less accurately, "liberating" them from it). In fact, I believe this is something you're referencing at 10:55 in your response to Harris. But it's wrong (sort of): the reality is a lot more complicated and way cooler, as I explain below:
Due to the rough geography and a lack of draft animals, large states in Mesoamerica were fairly hands off, without the direct management and administration of subjects, founding of colonies, and instituting of a unified national/cultural identity: Political power was cemented more through fragile tax/tributary and vassal relationships, flaunting your military might, economic success, and ties to other legendary civilizations and kings to get states to align with you and suck up with political marriages, etc. Obviously, Eurasian polities did these too, and there still WAS some examples of more hands on imperalism in Mesoamerica. But hands off and indirect imperalism and methods of establishing political power which much more the norm and were more fundamental in statecraft in the latter then the former. The Aztec Empire was no exception here, and it's primary goal in expansionism was to gain resource rich states as tax-subjects to extract goods and luxuries without expending direct effort, with those states keeping their rulers, laws, and customs and mostly being left alone if they coughed up.
Accordingly, what was really going on, as much or more then Cortes manipulating local states, was local kings and officials manipulating Cortes to benefit their own political ambitions: In a political system where subjects mostly stayed independent, they had the motivations and the capacity to secede, backstab, and preform coups opportunistically to sway or cause the house of cards they held up that their capitals rested on to collapse, so they could advance politically. Especially by allying or pledging themselves to another group (since again, as a subject they had little to lose) to then work together to take out existing political rivals or capitals, to then be in a position of higher standing in the aftermath. (The Aztec Empire itself was founded this way in the late 1420s) . For example, the city of Cempoala (and it's king Xicomecoatl), the capital of one of 3 major kingdoms of the Totonac civilization, and a recent conquered subject of the Aztec, lied to Cortes about there being an Aztec fort oppressing them at Tzinpantzinco, which was really a rival Totonaca capital city.
They then led the Conquistadors into the territory of Tlaxcala, one of the states in Central Mexico the Aztec hadn't manage to conquer yet, and which the Totonacs were hostile with. When the Tlaxcaltecas and the Conquistadors fought to a standstill and allied with one another (with different Tlaxcalteca officials like Xicotencatl I, Xicotencatl II, disagreeing on what to do, later on Xicotencatl II would end up being executed when a rival Tlaxcalteca politician got Cortes to execute him) en route to Tenochtitlan (as Tlaxcala was an active target of Aztec invasions and DID have resentment towards the Aztec), they stopped in Cholula, where the Tlaxcaltecas fed Cortes rumors of them planning to assassinate the visitors, and it just so happens that the Tlaxcaltecas end up propping up a pro-Tlaxcalteca political faction after they and the Conquistadors sack the city, after Cholula had recently switched from being aligned with Tlaxcala to the Aztec. Finally arriving at Tenochtitlan, Moctezuma II allows them into the city: Cortes claiming he "surrendered" it, but in reality, metaphorically offering one's throne or city to a visiting diplomat in Mesoamerica was standard procedure, and within the political framework I explained, flaunting the grandeur of your city and it's opulence was a common method of courting a foreign state into becoming a vassal or an ally (to say nothing of the princesses they gave to high ranking conquistadors, an attempt at political marriages the Conquistadors mistook as offerings of concubines). When PƔnfilo de NarvƔez arrived, who actually was sent by the governor of Cuba to arrest Cortes as he had been out on his expedition illegally, Narvaez actually worked with Aztec officials to get capture Cortes, since by this point they realized Cortes wasn't a licensed diplomat representing a foreign king.
It is only after 1. Cortes panics, Moctezuma II and other Aztec rulers and officials get captured, locked up (Cortes of course claims this happened earlier and he was always in control) and then are killed; 2. the Aztec nobles and elite warriors are killed while unarmed during a religious festival; 3. smallpox broke out, and 4. the Conquistadors and Tlaxcalteca flee back to safety; that then other core-Aztec states inside the valley like Texcoco (the second most powerful Aztec city), Chalco, Xochimilco, Itzpalapan, etc ally with Cortes. Because by then, Tenochtitlan was weak, vulnerable due to it losing it's elite soldiers, its king (always a period in Mesoamerican history where subjects would stop paying taxes and see what they could get away with untill the new ruler re-asserted their military power), and struck by plague. Furthermore, these also made Tenochtitlan unable to project it's power and wield its political authority; and by extension, said core subject states inside the valley didn't benefit as much from the tax influx into the area (which was secured by the threat of retaliation if taxes weren't paid, something currently jeopardized) or their political marriages with Tenochtitlan at the moment, de-valuing their close relationship with it. (Ixtlilxochitl II of Texcoco also had a grudge against the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, as in a recent war of successon after the prior Texcoca king died, the Mexica favored a competing heir as the claimant to the throne, so when the Conquistadors and Tlaxcalteca returned to the valley to siege Tenochtitlan, Ixtlilxochitl II, who had split power with other heirs, sided with Cortes wheras other Texcoca royals sided with Tenochtitlan)
I could go on and on about this, but the bottom line here is that these Indigenous rulers, nobles, men, women, etc weren't passive actors, they were key figures who had agency who were actively shaping the events as much as the Europeans involved, variously fighting defending their territory, using Europeans to topple their rivals and advance politically, seeking political marriages to gain status in the ever shifting political situation, etc: But obviously Spain and other Europeans were not playing the same political game, and between that and diseases it backfired. Keep in mind also that the last independent Mesoamerican state didn't fall till 1697, almost two centuries after the Aztec Empire collapsed: This sort of complex political game and conflicts were going on across dozens of other Conquistador campaigns and conflicts for decades.
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Ā @_Dope_Ā I don't have to do anything. I'm not even vegan, and a big part of my point was: 'wouldn't it be nice if we can have meat without hurting animals'. The fact you got triggered over that is mind boggling to me. But hey let's go.
You missed the point. It's not about the fact that these animal might go extinct, it is the fact that untold horros were inflected on these animals long after any 'need' (for lubrication, light or food) was long gone. They were hunted because it was cheap.
'Plants have feelings too'. You don't actually care about plants, you just use to try to score a point in an argument. But hey, I'll honor you, plants don't have a central nervous system, so they don't feel pain, emotions or experience consciousness like other sentient animals.
In an ideal world all life should be equally cherished, but we need to feed the world so yes I will give a greater moral weight to sentient beings and, I'd rather sustain human life by eating plants.
But because you care about plants so much let's look at it from an efficiency standpoint. We currently use around 77% of the worlds land just to feed animals. It is also wiiildly inefficient to convert plants calories to animal protein. For every 100 grams of feed protein for cattle you get back 3.8 grams of protein. So if we stopped eating meat we would actually save a ton of plants! That must make you happy.
"Whereas the animals we use for food , we always come up with ways to sustain them ." Did you take a look at the fish stocks lately?
Meat was amazing in the past to help the human race advance (although for long periods we didn't even eat all that much meat because it was so expensive). But most of the people watching this channel live in the world where they have plenty of other options and cut back on their meat intake a lot.
The wild thing is, I'm not even a full vegetarian, I don't really care if you make the decision to make meat. And part of this answer is a response to other comments in this thread that get triggered because I dare to talk about a world with meat without animal suffering. But just know that is a choice, not a necessity. You're not an inuit hunter gatherer in 1000 AD.
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