[Samseau]

(09-28-2015 02:41 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  

But in those days, religious chauvinism was the rule. There was no such thing as "tolerance" or "cooexistence" in those days. They considered the Indians to be devil-worshippers, and thought they were doing the work of God by destroying their civilization.

This usually goes unsaid in the discussion of the Aztec conquest, but the Spanish were really just the most Islamic version of Christianity ever created.

After being ruled by Muslims for 600 years, the methods in order to achieve independence from Islam was brutal. The inquisition was the Christian response to purging a body of all alien elements, and ironically the methods used by the Christians were basically a mirror of Islam itself, casting out all Muslims and Jews with Christians on top, essentially inverting the normal hierarchy of Islam > Jews > Christians with extreme prejudice.

This spirit of Spanish Christian Inquisition was then carried over to South America, the most aggressive and violent of any Christian societies ever created. South America in many ways was a victim of Islam as much as Christian Spain was.

Even still, much of the brutality of the Conquistadors is still overshadowed by the fact that the Conquistadors were such a small group that took down a force thousands of times larger than itself. This was only possible due to the plagues that the Spanish unwittingly transmitted to the locals. The diseases that ravaged South America was such an extraordinary phenomenon that it can only really be understood as an act of God himself who wanted the land Christianized and let the Conquistadors reformat the continent.