For some reason, the Conquistadors bring out leftism in people—perhaps, as Serrano observed, it’s because they weren’t really European (they were moriscos or conversos—or contained a high blood quantum from those groups, anyway).
Earlier this year, I pointed out a meme, commonly circulated in many iterations, where the Conquistadors were shown stopping an Incan human sacrifice—I pointed out this was leftist in nature, because the idea is “we conquer countries for ameliorative social action”; just as we conquered Afghanistan so they could have LGBT+ and feminism.
Real “colonialism” is in your interests—you invade to acquire more territory for your tribe to live upon and expand upon (or for booty).
The meme above is leftist because it presents the Conquistadors not as “humanitarian intervention” but as feminists—it’s feminist because it’s about sexual satisfaction. To kill people—the masculine role—is arrogated to Britain (in a psychological act of splitting) and so is “evil”. It’s evil not because it’s British but because it’s masculine, therefore bad—we should all just snuggle up and have sex, think about sex all the time, and never kill anyone (decadent hedonistic feminism); and that is to be “good”.
The real crime, as with Hitler’s Germany, is not be “bad” but to be masculine—to be a real killer, to be effective.
Of course, the Conquistadors killed many people as a fact—often in quite grotesque ways. But perhaps it’s easier to romanticise the Spanish Empire (Portuguese Empire) because it’s so old—it just doesn’t seem real, so you can project whatever fantasy (which, given modernity is leftist, will be leftist) onto it you want. In relative terms, in the modern world, the Spanish and Latin Americans tend to be victims of the gringos and so even their history can be read as “sympathetic” (the victim’s history). In reality, the Spanish were martial and ferocious—it’s just they were where Britain was in 1911 and America is today in the mid-1600s.
It was the Spanish, harried by plucky English privateers, who were the decadent empire with too many bureaucrats (priests) and too much luxury (South American gold)—and England was the coming empire, just as America was the coming empire in 1914.
But that was all a long time ago—and the time when the Spanish were vital, during the Reconquista, was even longer ago (fewer memes about the Reconquista—because those might offend the Muslims, and we’re leery of that; it’s better to think the Spanish Empire was Club Med, a chance to get laid with Indian cuties, than an operation to push back dar al-Islam).
As an aside, this meme mentions the Portuguese—and so it’s even more more ironic, because, according to certain Edwardian sources I read, the Portuguese Empire lost its vitality because the Portuguese mixed freely with their black slaves; and hence a once vital country became a permanent backwater (notable only, in recent times, for legalised heroin)—and perhaps that’s a salutary lesson for Britain and America, since we seem to be following the same policy, if our ads are anything to go by, so relegating ourselves to 500 years+ of obscurity. So never mind your Carib cuties…
Anyway, perhaps it’s that the invasion of South America was a late imperial expedition that explains why the Conquistadors are so easy to make progressive—by the time they started their expeditions they were already decadent Spaniards, just like the British in Sudan in the late 1800s. Then again, perhaps it’s just because they never had much European blood to begin with…