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Old 22nd January 2009, 10:14 AM   #28
Gonzalo G
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Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Nothern Mexico
Posts: 458
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Sorry, Manolo, but Iīm not emotionally invested. It is not the subject of the discussion what bothers me, but the lack of references to valid sources, the repetition of common already discredited myths, the confussion of concepts, and the fact that I would feel disrespectful mentioning some subjects here, as we are only guests in a forum where there are people from diverse countries, and sombody could feel disturbed. This is the reason I pointed that the subject of the jews was gratuitous and off-topic, and only mentioned the role of the jews and spaniards in the conquest and colonization of Mexico just to show it.

No, I was not intending to "attack" something as abstract as "Spain". I can analyse the spanish conquerors, the spanish church or the spanish monarchy, but I can put in the same bag something as complex as spain in the beginning of the 15th Century, when Spain was only beginnig their fragmentary existence as a country. Because before that, there were only kingdoms, and their territorial extension was not the same and the actual territory of Spain, and it was occupied by peoples from a very diverse ways of thinking, loyalties and languajes.

I am perfecty aware that the Cardinals Pedro Gonzalez Mendoza and Francisco Jiménez Cisneros limited the intervention of the Inquisition in Spain. More aware than you, about the chichimeca, since they never made human sacrifices....You know, the chichimeca were the nomads of northern Mexico, and you are confusing them with the high neolithic cultures of Mesoamerica, as the meshica (or aztec, if you prefer), maya, tlaxcala, mixtec and others. which do practisized human sacrifices...like confussing a spaniard with a french.

Neverthless, your reference to this point as a venguance of a supposed attack against spaniards does not seems like a "bunch of friends and arm-chair historians". But let me explain this point, which is another of the great myths created by the european colonizators and conquerors to justify what was only the the ivasion of otherīs teritories for their pillage. In all world, peoples from the same historic horizon (I donīt mean "timeline"), practiced humnan sacrifices. In Mesoamérica (since Mexico already had yet no existence), their common-shared belief was that the universe should be renovated to keep it alive. Blood was the supreme sacrifice. And not only the war prisioners were sacrificed, but also all the ruling class and the rest of the population made self-sacrices in blood. There are many representations of maya kings passing a thorned cord throught a hole in their tongs to make self-sacrifice. The practice of making previously agreed wars to take prisoners alive to sacrifice, was not as attacking indefense neighbors. I must point you that the more celebrated "Guerras Floridas" (Florid Wars) to take this prisioners, as they called them, were mainly among the meshica (aztec) and the tlaxcalan, a nation the meshica never could subjugate, and latter were allies of the spaniards.

I can make parallels with european practices, as the human sacrifices practiced by the druids well after the Roman Empire, the gladiatorial sacrifices practiced by etruscans and latter by romans, which were originally funeral sacrifices, and after that only an amusement. There were many other cultures in the world practicing human sacrifices in the diverse periods of their history, and you can make a review of it. This practices continued latter as sacrifices on the tombs of kings, to ensure they have company in the afterlife.

And you speak about millions of sacrificed victims!! There is not a single prmimary and valid source in which you can obtain this information. In fact, there is only one refernce to a number of sacrificed persons in the very special occasion of the inaguration of the Main Temple in Tenochtitlan, and no more. You have not the slightiest idea of the demography of Mesoamerica, as far I can see. But let me tell you one thing: the only people who practiced genocide to a scale of millions, were the europeans. And not only in their neolithic stage, but as latter as the 20th Century. The Inquisition was only a stage....But there is a big difference with the sacrifices practiced by mesoamericans. Meanwhile mesoamericans sacrificed and self-sacrificed because a shared belief, which involved personal renounce and penitenty, europeans killed people for greed or intolerance, against their own adopted religion, agains the christian gospell, against a well known ethic code, widely diffused. There is no guilt were is no knowledge and intention, and so there is the other way around.

No, I did not tried to make a cheap shot about Lidice, I only thought there were a confussion, as I was answering to your last post, and not other posts at the same time.

The Resistance was utterly ineffective? The allied command did not thought so. Surely you did not expect they expelled by theirselves the germans, when the french army didnīt. They had a modest, but necessary specific role, and because of it, they had the support of the allied command. But I can refer many other guerrilla that had success and take command of their countries. To begin with, in China. But maybe we are taling about different things. Guerrilla is an irregular army making an irregular war, not a conventional war. The killing of Heydrich in Czechoslovakia was a useless isolated act of terrorism, and does not represents a usual tactic of a guerrilla group, but from a terrorist group. Maybe we are not talking about the same thing, as the media has confused this concepts and made then synonyms. Guerrilla warfare was made even by USA americans in their fight for their independence, and it should not be confused with organized gangs dedicated to bandiditry and pillage, though it can be some resemblance in their methods of combat. Nor it should be confused with terrorism. There are elemental military and political differences among them. I am talking about true guerrillas, motivated on political ends and using the support of the population. Pepoples uses this kind of resource when they donīt yet have enough strenght to form a regular army, or when fight behind enemy lines. Again, we have an example in the War of Independence of USA, or in the independece wars in the american continent against spanish domination...And we won.

Another "conspiration" of the jews, this time to appropiate America for the pople of Israel? My godness!!! Well, this is new for me. Colon never knew that he was travelling to another continent, and he tough he was going to China. Do you think the few jews that went with him in itīs travels (if there were any), calculated to overcome the chinese empire? Or they knew where they are going to? Also, I understand the banking support came directly from Elizabeth the Catolic (Isabel la Católica), accordig with all sources. You know the story about how she used her jewlery as garantee to pay for the trip. That garantee was given to jewish bankers? Is it a proof that this trip was a jewish enterprise? What primary source do you have of this...unusual statement? Do you think the spanish crown would candidly permit it? Or that the jews were so candid to believe it?...It sounds more like another fascist invention.

The turks taking sides with germans and Stalin? To my knowledge, they used the same methods used by the european armies, with little differences. Yu should revew the history of the Crusades. And they never made something like genocide, nor the indian american did, so there is no point in comparing the sistematic extermination of a determined population, or sector of the population, made by contemporary dictadorships, in the civilized and christian Europe, with perfect knowledge about the meaning of their behavior in the context of their own civilization, with the conquest behavior of the turks or the meshica, specially when the meshica belonged to the cultuiral horizon of the stone age, in the neolithic stage!

But letīs say no more. Your arguments are the same arguments used to justify something which has not justification. The resource to "naturalist" arguments to justify conquest, are not valid, because if we take this arguments to their logical implications and consecuences, then all moral, all ethics, does not have validity, and nobody can be condemned for what he does, and so there is no valid responsability, crime or punishent: we are just poor animals. On this basis even the senseless acts of terrorism canīt be condemned. But the fact is that we are not animals. Animals are not greedy, they figh over territory or females when necessary; they donīt accumulate; they donīt have ethics, moral or culture; they not destroy their natural habitat; they not torture or kill for pleasure; they donīt produce a civilization or can evolve to a superior stage. The fact is that people and nations behave like that because they have the power and the intention to do it. Power has been the basis of the whole thing, and the intention comes from greed and intolerance. But there is an incovenient in accepting this kind of "moral status": anything made on the basis of power, is justified, and all situations can be reversed against the victimary, in an endless spiral of violence. And all condemnations against it, based on moral or ethical grounds would become a hypocrisy. And I cannot accept that. Nor I think we should, if we want to survive as a species.

Instead, I believe, and naturalists sees to confirm (actual naturalists, not the old "imperial" 19th Century naturalists and their followers), man evolved from mutual cooperation, not from competence. Languaje, society, thinking, develops in the same measure of the cooperation. Thatīs what make us different from the animals. The more intelligent animal species are those who cooperates on a more complex ways, conforming elemental societies. We must expand this to another level. Civilization implies a level of superior values, the higer the more inclusive and tolerant, meanwhile culture reflects technogies, traditions and beliefs. There were cultures with superior war technologies, but not superior civilization. And civilization does not implies out of necessity weaknes.
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