Yesterday was the 500th Anniversary of the arrival of the Spanish conqueror of Mexico, the man who overthrew the Aztec Empire, bringing Christianity and European civilization to Mexico and putting an end to cannibalism and large scale human sacrifice.

It is typical of our insane and twisted times that no celebration of this hugely important anniversary has been scheduled, and that, last month, the president of Mexico sent letters to the Vatican and the King of Spain demanding apologies for Cortes’ Conquest of the Aztecs and the Conversion of Mexico to Christianity. (BBC — March 26)

The current Marxist lie is that the harmless and peaceful Aztecs were brutally conquered by avaricious and rapacious Europeans, out only for power and gold. The truth of the matter is that the Aztecs themselves were the brutal and tyrannical conquerors. They built an empire covering roughly a quarter of modern Spain, fueled by a faith in their own superiority based on a special relationship with Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird god of war, who required frequent, and abundant human sacrifices.

The conquered and subjugated tribes living under Aztec rule provided the sacrificial victims as well as slaves. The conquistador Bernal Diaz relates what the chief of the Totonacs told the Spaniards about Aztec rule.

He related so much of the cruelties and oppression they had to suffer, and thereby sobbed and sighed so bitterly that we could not help being affected. At the time when they were subdued, they had already been greatly ill-used; Montezuma then demanded annually a great number of their sons and daughters, a portion of whom were sacrificed to the idols, and the rest were employed in his household and for tilling his grounds. His tax-gatherers took their wives and daughters without any ceremony if they were handsome, merely to satisfy their lusts. The Totonaques, whose territory consisted of upwards of thirty townships, suffered like violence.

Hernan Cortez with only 600 soldiers, 15 horsemen, and 15 cannons was able to overthrow an empire with an estimated population of 5 million precisely because large numbers of warriors from the oppressed subject tribes eagerly joined him in the fight against their Aztec rulers.

William H. Prescott, in his 1843 History of the Conquest of Mexico, observed:

a government, which does not rest on the sympathies of its subjects, cannot long abide; that human institutions, when not connected with human prosperity and progress, must fall, if not before the increasing light of civilisation, by the hand of violence; by violence from within, if not from without. And who shall lament their fall?”

Obviously, today’s Woke Marxist Social Justice Warriors will lament their fall, cover up their crimes, and vilify the liberators.

Hat tip to James Harberson.

Today’s Wall Street Journal features a story on Jonathan Amith, an American anthropologist who is recording, and attempting to preserve, Nahuatl, the language of the pre-Colombian Aztec Empire.

Word by word, Mr. Amith is creating an extensive archive of Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs at the time of the 16th century Spanish conquest and now the first language of 1.5 million Mexican Indians. He records fables and personal histories, collects plants and insects, and keeps up a nonstop patter with locals, searching for information to add to a Web site he is building that is part dictionary, part encyclopedia and part storybook.

His goal is both daring and quixotic: to preserve Nahuatl so that native speakers don’t discard their language as they turn to Spanish, which they need to compete in contemporary Mexico…

..Nahuatl strings together prefixes, word roots and suffixes, sometimes into very long words. One 18-syllable Nahuatl word used in towns near Cuernavaca is translated “you honorable people might have come along banging your noses so as to make them bleed, but in fact you didn’t,” according to SIL International, a religiously oriented linguistics group that is translating the Old Testament into Nahuatl. Others are simpler: the Nahuatl words chicolatl and tomatl gave English “chocolate” and “tomato.”

Mr. Amith recruited computational linguists to devise software to separate Nahuatl words into their component parts, which is vital for looking them up on his Web site.

How to Use the Nahuatl Dictionary

The web-site is password protected. The Journal supplies: USERNAME: oapan — PASSWORD: nahuatl