The Real Reason Cortes Conquered the Aztec Empire | Victor Davis Hanson

They heard about this magical land of gold, they thought, the Aztec Empire. So when they got there, they walked about 170 miles inland, and they found Tenochtitlan, the city upon the lake. And they all at first were initially impressed with it. They thought it was like Venice. There was an empire of 4 million people, a quarter million people, right on the lake with causeways, living on, you know, small game, but mostly aquaculture. very sophisticated they thought and then they started to uncover things and they looked at the skull rack they looked at pictorial evidence and then they started to witness human sacrifice where the heart was torn out of the chest while it was beating the incantations were said and then the person was killed and rolled down the steps and parts were carved up for i guess you would call it salsa and in some cases cannibalism but then they gave it to the imperial zoo the body and uh from their own records they had surmised that uh a few decades earlier they had killed over 80,000 people that year and at one point during that mass sacrifice. They had teams that had to rotate. They threw 20,000 or 30,000 bodies into Lake Tenochtitlan, and it fouled it. They had to stop it. I mean, they couldn't use it for drinking water. They couldn't use it for anything. So what I'm getting at is this idea of the conquest of paradise is not true. I mean, the Europeans didn't come over there and see this peace-loving country they found and the proof of the pudding is how did Cortez that rarely ever had more than a thousand people at one time with Narváez's his own forces but my point is how did he conquer for for an empire of four million he did it with the Tlaxcalans and other peoples who felt that he was a liberator as bad as he they as bad as they imagined he might be and they thought that by the way the Spanish and the horses were centaurs they were connected as one they'd never seen a wheel before they'd never seen gunpowder they had never seen spanish steel they had never seen armor they had never seen horses they had never seen dogs larger than a chihuahua basically this was so they thought they were superhuman and for a while they did they don't i think it's wrong to think they thought they were gods but they thought they were something other than human and And so everyone was scared of them, but very quickly they thought they would be useful. The Tlaxcalans, all these other conquered peoples had tried to attack them on their march, but they found them formidable and scary, so they allied with them. And they were very loyal, and they would have never taken Tenochtitlan, destroyed the Aztec Empire, if it hadn't been for the Aztec subject people. which tells you my point was they have to be pretty bad where an indigenous people favors foreign europeans to help them liberate themselves from a tyranny and that's what it was i'm well thank you that's an excellent history lesson i must say i was a little afraid you were going to use this opportunity to to attack italians in because you had Leif Erikson and envy of who deserves a founding of america award anyway anyway my friend speaking of immigration or were we uh here's a headline Ilhan Omar responds to raid on dc home with five-word warning to trump so that's happened today uh squad member Ilhan Omar democrat of minnesota claimed that a homeland security investigations raid of her washington dc residence on Monday was part of a targeted effort by President Trump to intimidate her as a political foe. I'm okay. Make no mistake, though. This is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement, Omar said in a statement on X. For 10 years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in the campaign of intimidation. I will not be silenced, et cetera, et cetera. What was her five-word warning? I will not be silenced. Well, nobody's going to silence her. It's a free country. But the question is, if she's worried about impartiality, the question is simply, did she or did she not marry her own brother to facilitate his getting a residence permit in the United States? And did she or did she not lie subsequently about that? and if she did she committed immigration fraud and then the question is did she is she getting impartial treatment now out of a vendetta because she's attacked Trump or was she getting impartial treatment by the Biden and Obama administrations that never even investigated what had been widely reported and i mean i don't think that we got a SWAT team with reporters tipped off, like CNN, or it was something like the Mar-a-Lago raid. And the other thing is, her father, as we've reported before, was a colonel in the army of Siad Barre, the Somalian genocidal dictator, for 20 years. And so he was an elite. And she said that he was a teacher, but there had been Somaliland dissidents and victims of that genocide who had reported and stated that he was central to many of the military operations that Siad Barry conducted. So, we have the word genocide is in the air often by Ilhan Omar. So, the question is not was there a genocide in Somalia. Everybody knows there was. They wiped out up to 200,000 people of a hostile, what they felt was a hostile tribe that wanted to break away. So that's clear. And it's clear that Siad Barre was a dictator and ordered that.