From brucet@csufresno.edu Mon Nov  1 12:14:45 1999
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Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 13:19:20 +0100
To: classics@u.washington.edu
From: brucet@csufresno.edu (Bruce Thornton)
Subject: Re: A "Balanced" View

 It always seems to be a shock to students to realize that
>Cortes would have been a heartless corpse bouncing down the steps of
>the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan if he had not had the good luck to
>encounter people like the Tlaxcalans who had superb reasons for wanting
>to destroy the Aztec Empire.

I hope you don't reduce the success of the Spaniards merely to the
fortuitious presence of the disaffected Tlaxcalans. Don't you think that
the uniquely Western intellectual dynamism-- the freedom to rely on
individual initiative, to adapt quickly to rapidly changing circumstances,
to improvise new solutions and tactics unforeseen in rigid, deterministic
cosmologies, etc etc-- had a tad bit to do with it?

Bruce S Thornton
209-278-7037 (voice mail)
209-278-7878 (FAX)


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