I don't think your claim about numbers killed by the spanish inquisition vs aztecs on a single day are accurate, although it's a weird thing to compare. (and th

I don't think your claim about numbers killed by the spanish inquisition vs aztecs on a single day are accurate, although it's a weird thing to compare. (and the inquisition is a mostly separate thing from colonization?) And generally I'm not sure how you compare mass brutality ("infinitely less brutal"?), but the Spanish invasion of the Americas, beginning with Columbus, was shockingly shockingly brutal on many occasions. But what I'm really curious about is why people are so obsessed with comparing mass brutality like this. It seems like it's always to excuse it, right? Like, if it's not singular, it is okay? If someone says "Oh, the Nazis actually didn't kill so many more people than X, you know, as a % of population" -- does whether this is true or not even matter to our assessment of nazi genocide? What might be the motivation of someone making this claim? Or their implied suggestion as the significance of the comparison? I would say that it's true that people sometimes romantisize all pre-contact American civilizations, some of which at some times/places were indeed also brutal empires. But the reason we pay more attention to, say, the brutality of the Spanish invasion of the Americas than to the Incas brutality is becuase it's the Spanish colonization that resulted in the world system we have today, and has lasting implications for it. If the Inca Empire (which was actually pretty new when the invasion began) had won and its descendent societies still ruled today, we'd be talking about different things.And if the Incan empire had invaded Europe and decimated it and still ruled parts of it today, well, yeah, we'd be talking about pretty different things. Nothing very puzzling about that.