> You’re mixing cultural genocide with actual genocide.
The Spanish conquest of the New World was undeniably a genocide in the literal mass murder sense. In a sense it was a continuation of the same genocide against Muslims and Jews that the Spanish committed during the Reconquista. However you want to categorize what he and other Spaniards did, it was undeniably and objectively morally wrong.
> Going from the other direction, if all information on Nazi ideology where removed from history, would we have Neo Nazis today?
Your analogy does not hold, the equivalent to de Landa's actions would be to destroy the entire Western canon and any written trace of the German language in response to the Holocaust. From your comments you seem to treat the entirety of Maya culture as atomic and inseperable from human sacrifice, while conversely you have conveniently seperated out Nazism from the whole of German culture. This double standard where the faults of Western cultures are treated as redeemable while the faults of other cultures are treated as immutable traits inherent to that culture is what led to de Landa's actions in the first place.
An individual priest did a specific thing which is separate from an actual genocide that took place. He could have just as easily done something else which would not have impacted the genocide. It’s simply sloppy thinking to associate them.
Maya culture is a sub set of South American cultures. So, the scope is narrower than your suggesting. Still let’s go with removing all of Germanic culture and language, the point still stands.
Fine, an individual priest committed cultural genocide and torture. It's still morally wrong and indefensible.
It's even sloppier thinking to somehow justify this by treating one small aspect of a culture as immutable and inherent to the whole of that culture, while hypocritically not doing the same for a culture you're more familiar with.
EDIT: GP added a second paragraph.
> Maya culture is a sub set of South American cultures. So, the scope is narrower than your suggesting. Still let’s go with removing all of Germanic culture and language, the point still stands
You have no point. Nazism has been removed without the destruction of German culture and language, human sacrifice could've been removed without the destruction of Mayan culture.
And no, the scope is not narrower. Mayan culture has as about as much in common with other South American cultures like the Inca as Western culture has to do with East-Asian culture.
We are talking about a continuation of a huge line of the same thing that happened in Europe of thousands of years. It’s not really a question foreign cultures, just the clash between different cultures.
> Nazism has been removed without the destruction of German culture and language
Nope, you can still read Mein Kampf today and many still believe in it.
> We are talking about a continuation of a huge line of the same thing that happened in Europe of thousands of years. It’s not really a question foreign cultures, just the clash between different cultures.
I'm not really sure what you're referring to by "the same thing", but if you're referring to the cultural genocide committed against pagans in Europe by Christians, then ironically that helped fuel the type of German nationalism that gave rise to Nazism. The Nazis famously used the Massacre of Verden committed by Charlemagne against the Saxons as historical justification for their ideology[0].
> Nope, you can still read Mein Kampf today and many still believe in it.
Nazism is not practiced to any significant extent, unless you want to argue that the existence of neo-Nazis warrants the destruction of all Germanic languages.
I am referring to the likely thousands of local religions that unlike say classical Greek myths we have zero direct evidence of. Looking back to say 2000 BCE cultures survived or died out more often than not through direct military action. The deaths of most oral traditions was through conquest, enslavement of the population, and spreading the remnants across an empire.
> unless you want to argue that the existence of neo-Nazis warrants the destruction of all Germanic languages.
It’s at least a trade worth considering. Was say southern culture in the US worth preserving after the civil war? I am not suggesting an answer just framing the question. Edit: To do otherwise is to presume the answer without consideration.
The Spanish conquest of the New World was undeniably a genocide in the literal mass murder sense. In a sense it was a continuation of the same genocide against Muslims and Jews that the Spanish committed during the Reconquista. However you want to categorize what he and other Spaniards did, it was undeniably and objectively morally wrong.
> Going from the other direction, if all information on Nazi ideology where removed from history, would we have Neo Nazis today?
Your analogy does not hold, the equivalent to de Landa's actions would be to destroy the entire Western canon and any written trace of the German language in response to the Holocaust. From your comments you seem to treat the entirety of Maya culture as atomic and inseperable from human sacrifice, while conversely you have conveniently seperated out Nazism from the whole of German culture. This double standard where the faults of Western cultures are treated as redeemable while the faults of other cultures are treated as immutable traits inherent to that culture is what led to de Landa's actions in the first place.