Text/Hugh Thomson
Due to the deconstructionism after World War II and the cultural pluralism and even multiculturalism in recent years, many historical narratives have been twisted very strangely, even completely contrary to the facts. Travelogues written by conservative authors severely criticize these fallacies and correct some misunderstandings. For example, after the Spaniards arrived in the Americas, they actually greatly prevented the large-scale and endless slaughter among the Indians, and their enslavement of the Indians was generally not as good as the chiefs and kings before them, but the Indians could not resist the germs of the Old World in the Europeans, and the population was sharply reduced rather than increased.
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Mass murder among Indians can be found in:
Over the next few days I read Lawrence's feathered snake and found it full of holes.
Lawrence grafted the demons in his mind onto what he imagined Mexico. The two Mexican male protagonists became not only the leaders of the revolution, but also the resurrected incarnations of the Aztec gods, the feathered serpent god and the god of war, and they also revived the ancient tradition of human sacrifice (and he also implied that this was a noble act).
Aztec feathered serpent god
Kate, an observer from the West, witnessed all this. As a medium of storytelling, he appears in books from time to time, and he sometimes feels attracted to the male protagonist's willpower and sometimes rejects it.
What follows is Lawrence's a lot of about sex: She's lying prone in... The mystery of the ancient cult of phallus, the god of Pan with the duality of god and demon";
While Focusing only on a simple observation of life by the lake, Lawrence wrote some excellent descriptive passages. But to my chagrin, the revival of the pre-Columbian way of life became the central obsession of the novel. Those fragments depicting human sacrifice rituals, and their chants and dramatic words and deeds, are like a bad Ken Russell movie.
Lawrence seems to be saying that this is the real Mexico, and mexico now needs to rediscover that culture. Everything since the Spanish conquest has been a false consciousness that should be purged.
I've been exposed to this kind of thinking before. I have seen the great frescoes of the revolutionary painter Orosco. In his work, Cortés puts Montezuma to death, and the noble barbarians are helpless in the face of the greed of the conquerors.
One of the main principles of the Mexican Revolution was to "return the land to the Indians." Half of Mexico's towns have statues of cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, while it is said that there is only one statue of Cortés in the entire country.
I'm very skeptical about that. It all seems too easy.
The Aztecs, based in Tenochtitlan, in what is now Mexico City, maintained an evil tributary system against other vassal states, such as the Tarascans who lived by the lake. Tributes included not only slaves and goods, but also large living people to satisfy their increasingly large human sacrifices.
The Aztecs actually ruled for a relatively short period of time. Before Cortés arrived, they ruled only in the heart of Mexico for about two hundred years. Their greed was no less than any of the later Spaniards. Driven by this greed, their emperors worked closely with the priests and then led their people to ruthlessly conquer neighboring tribes (in fact, some emperors, such as Montezuma, had previously been priests).
As the priests gained more and more control over the Aztec war machine, the human sacrifices developed to an astonishing degree. When the Spaniards arrived, the Aztecs killed 20,000 captives a year. They would perform a collective ritual at the top of the pyramid, digging out the hearts of captives and letting the blood flow down the passages carved out of the stone steps.
The Aztecs took pleasure in killing people
Massacres are often carried out at grand celebrations
Originally, this was a way of worshipping the gods, but it has become a practical way to remind the surrounding tributary tribes who are in charge.
In a chilling way, the Aztecs artificially created wars, the so-called "War of Flowers." The Aztecs would force the conquered tribes to fight themselves again in order to sacrifice their god of war in new battles.
It is difficult to justify this atrocity on the grounds of "different value systems." The sacrifice of man was only the most extreme manifestation of the Aztec culture, driven by religious responsibility and bloodlust, to a degree sufficient to make the Catholicism of the Spanish Inquisition appear mild.
My feeling about Mexico is that the Spanish invasion brought about an unexpected fusion of two completely different cultures. After the initial confrontation, the two races found that they had a lot in common. This includes sexual attraction.
Spaniards and natives have crossed at a fairly rapid pace, and even in mexico today, while there may be discrimination against the economic dimension of indians, there is little racial bias (if anything, insults to white-skinned Europeans like me are more common).
The conquerors had their flaws, and certainly caused considerable damage, not to mention bringing smallpox and other Old World diseases, but their effects were not as vicious as Lawrence and others suggested.
The advantages of the Aztecs—or more appropriately, the Nahuatl or archaeologists called them Mexica—such as their dexterity, astonishing sculptural and craftsmanship, and even the name of the country, have been preserved. Spanish colonial elements, such as churches and the large square in the center of each town, are weighty gains.
Can human sacrifices be forgiven under the liberal pretext of "cultural differences"? I don't accept that from anyone.
Finally, as I cruised around in Ozmobil, I reflected that Mexicans wouldn't have wheels without Cortés.
While in St. Blas, a surfer showed me a song by Neil Young's "Cortez The Killer," suggesting that the same Lawrence-esque romantic myth still exists:
In Young's lyrics, when Cortés "came in a galleon, with a gun, wading through the water," he met a new age Montezuma, who gathered his subjects with coca leaves and pearls; the women were beautiful, the men mighty and upright, and "hatred was just a legend, and they didn't know what war was." This is the paradise that the brutal "Killer Cortez" wants to destroy.
These only make me feel more like a hippie hoax. "Hatred is just a legend", indeed. Didn't Neil Young wear a long suede jacket and tasseled braids? He was one of the reasons punk was born.
Hippies are truly the Beat generation
It's just that the old beauty has a thick foundation, and a generation can't toss it down
Like Pancho Villa, Cortés is one of my Mexican heroes.
"The real" Mexico is not an archaeological secret to be uncovered and reborn, it is now unfolding before me.
Among the many British writers who flocked to Mexico in the 1930s, the one who best fits this view was Evelyn Wohl, a staunch iconoclastic. He completely disagrees with the Lawrence view: "His loneliness and lack of humor, as well as his restless neurotic imagination, make Feather Snake one of the most stupid stories in modern literature." ”
Instead, Wohl proposes: "The traditions of Spain are still deeply embedded in the mexican character, and I believe that only by continuing to develop these traditions can this country go on happily ever after." He also incisively pointed out: "Mexicans feel like Aztecs, but think like Spaniards." ”
His book Robbery Under Law: The MexicanObject-Lesson has been overlooked by many readers, mainly Woe himself, who chose to ignore it, removing it from a later anthology of travelogues. The lengthy title and content of the book cover countries that are enough to be rejected thousands of miles away, like a protracted 1880s Time Herald.
Waugh wrote the book only because he was commissioned by the Pearson family, whose oil fields were confiscated by the Mexicans.
But this book contains some of his best travel writing. Like Graham Green, he arrived in Mexico in 1939, when mexico was in turmoil and some of the political divisions facing Europe were revealed.
Woe was an exceptional writer who could not have been completely attached to Pearson's instructions, and some of the cruel and blunt things he saw haphazardly in Mexico both appealing and shocking him:
The charm of Mexico lies in the excitement it gives to the imagination. Anything can happen there; and almost everything happens there; it has seen every extreme of human nature, good, bad, and ridiculous.
In a way, it is as important to Europe as Africa is to the Romans: it is a source of novelty.
This article is an excerpt from Agave Oil: Lost Mexico and has been published exclusively with permission from the publisher. This is one of the cultural travelogues translated by the Commercial Press, depicting all aspects of modern Mexico, with excellent literary and historical knowledge, especially the three views, which are worth recommending.
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