Comments by "Angry Kittens" (@AngryKittens) on "Pictorial books from Mexico defy our definition of writing – Ñuu Dzaui pictography" video.

  1. It hurts my heart as a human being to know that thousands of these were burned by the Spanish.
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  2.  @IsacDaavid  It wasn't really the Royals who ordered it. Rather it was the Inquisition, missionaries, and just regular conquistadores. So, the Spanish (and the Portuguese, to a lesser extent). The Spanish Empire was kinder than other colonial powers because they treated natives as true subjects once they became Catholic. But, they were worse at cultural damage than Protestant Europe, because they really did try their best to "Europeanize" their subjects, to the point of destroying things like records or temples. Unlike the British or the Dutch for example, who didn't care about the natives or their culture, just their resources. You can still see this difference in modern countries. Former colonies of Spain and Portugal are heavily acculturated, in contrast to colonies of other empires which tend to preserve original cultures (if they weren't wiped out, at least).
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  3.  @IsacDaavid  I'm Filipino. The Philippines was a former Spanish colony. Having someone else tell me I should be thankful we only lost culture is darkly funny. I'm not saying one is better. I'm just stating a fact that the Spanish were worse at preserving culture, but better at treating natives than Protestants. It's a generalization, but it's still true. The loss of either of the two things has the exact same effect when it comes to identity and both define the G term that you used. Arguably, culture loss has an even greater relevance to G, because it's easier to do. Those lost codices are an irreplaceable part of what made the Mixtec, the Aztec, the Maya, etc. a distinct people. Not their DNA.
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  4.  @IsacDaavid  As for the "didn't care" part, the full sentence was: "who didn't care about the natives or their culture, just their resources." That last part is important. The Protestant empires, as a rule, sent no missionaries. They didn't care what beliefs were followed by the natives of the lands they acquired. They didn't bother "Europeanizing" them (until the tail end of the colonial era at least). They only cared about them when they got in the way of acquiring resources (like in the US and Canada), treated them as resources themselves (like in Africa), or as resource producers (like the plantations and mines everywhere else). Other than that, they did not care and ignored the natives. Even letting local rulers continue ruling as long as they didn't impinge on their interests. They either moved in and pushed the natives away or built enclaves to keep the natives out. This is what differentiates them from the Spanish. Whose motivations had the additional facet of conversion. Unlike other powers, they assimilated the natives. They lived with the natives. Intermarriage was common and even encouraged. Converted them, educated them, and while doing so, they also did their best to erase the old culture. Hence the burning of codices, the destruction of other material culture, and the erasure of cultural memory, not only in Latin America, but in our country as well. They scoured even the remotest villages to convert them. Hispanicization. A term with no other contemporary equivalent. The end result of that is that native cultures are more likely to survive protestant colonization. Like in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, etc. than in Catholic colonization. Even Native Americans and First Nations preserved more of their culture despite what happened, from the survivors. They can at least still rebuild an accurate picture of their old ways. Unlike in acculturation, where even if millions survive, the culture itself has been forgotten. Latin America and the Spanish East Indies retain a significant or even majority native descent. But for most of us, our cultures have been heavily Hispanicized, that we are nothing like our pre-colonial forebears. And what little records we have like the codices or the leaf/bamboo scrolls were deliberately destroyed so we can't reclaim what we've lost. That part has nothing to do with the gold or silver everyone was looking for.
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