Tuesday, July 21, 2020
The past always comes back to haunt you
Aztecs vs. Spaniards —
Moctezuma vs. Cortés
In
Today's world, when past history is revalued and quite often downgraded,
Christopher Columbus and Hernando Cortés cannot escape that fate. The
re-evaluation of their historical role and action is most of the time very
cruel because it reveals their greed, their ambition, their ruthlessness, their
violence, and many other personal shortcomings, as well as their vision of
something they might not have understood clearly. At the same time it reveals,
in this case, the pandemic genocide they started, unaware at first of the
disaster, and then hypocritically using it to conquer new territory by
decimating the Indians with some smallpox and at least half a dozen diseases.
That is called the Columbian exchange or ecological release that also came with
pests and parasites like rats or peachtrees. But that kind of ecological
release was anyway inescapable, inevitable because sooner or later some human
beings, ships, and all, rats and bacteria, were to cross the ocean to go to the
other side because there is always another shore. Yet we have, in globalized
times, and in pandemic times, to assess what we can do to avoid the worst
consequences of our urge to travel and visit distant countries, and soon enough
distant planets.
2020, Medium.com
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:33 AM 
