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NATIVE CULTURE

How the Aztec Empire was Built by Spies

PBS Origins | October 17, 2024



Check out A People’s History of Native America here: https://youtu.be/dXJ4Ldy-hLQ

In ancient Mesoamerica, an elite class of merchants helped build the Aztec Empire. How? By mastering the arts of spycraft, disguise, and self-sacrifice. These Pochteca acquired plenty of wealth and status and they traveled between cities to collect tribute, trade for valuables, and most importantly work undercover to gather information. But this wealth and power sometimes came at a deadly cost.

Where exactly is Aztlán located? Is it a physical place or an ideological construction? Here is what we are listening and reading.
Creating Aztlán : Chicano art, indigenous sovereignty, and lowriding across Turtle Island, by Dylan A. T. Miner
Smith, Michael E.. The Aztecs, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2011
Tales from Aztlantis (podcast)

A note from the producer: The visual representation of Indigenous peoples in this episode relies heavily on the imagery contained in The Florentine Codex which was created by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), a Franciscan missionary who arrived in Mexico in 1529, as part of the Spanish colonial project. Sahagún purported that he worked with Indigenous community members to ensure the accuracy of the imagery and that some of it was actually created by those community members. Sahagún’s claims are accepted by some scholars and disputed by others. It cannot be independently verified.

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Rogue History
It’s been said that history is written by those in power. But what about the outlaws, outcasts, and rogues? What if they had their say? Rogue History, a digital series produced by PBS Digital Studios and PBS North Carolina, shakes the dust off the history books to unravel myths, unearth narratives, and discover fresh perspectives.

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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:22 Who were the Mexica
01:41 Pochteca, Merchant Ppies
03:17 Imperial Martyrs
04:22 Nose Lord
06:18 Warrior’s Death

Written by PBS Origins

Comments

This post currently has 30 comments.

  1. @lameetcalice3845

    October 17, 2024 at 9:37 pm

    Malum In Se/Malum Prohibitum

    Nothing moral requires authority. Authority is the claim to the exclusive exemption to morality. It is a monopoly on violence. Violence is a violation because it is the initiation of aggression, not self-defense. Offense/defense are ontologically distinct. All crime has a legal equivalent (ie, taxation is extortion).

    Every government is founded on Ad Baculum.

    Warren v. District of Columbia
    Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales
    DeShaney v. Winnebago County
    Lozito v. New York City

    You are legally compelled via the logical fallacies Ad Populum, Ad Baculum and Ad Verecundiam to pay for protection that they are not legally obligated to provide. That's a mafia.

    The highest Abrahamic value is Ignorance of Good and Evil. It's right there in Genesis. They worship Yaldabaoth, God of the Scapegoaters: God blames Man; Man blames Woman; Woman blames Serpent; Serpent blames God, more accurately – the Serpent defines God.

    God Condones Child Rape
    No.s 31: 17-18

    God Condones Rape
    Deut. 22: 28-29

    God Condones Abortion
    No.s 5: 11-31

    Unquestioning Obedience to Government
    Rom.s 13: 1-7

    Ritualistic classifying surgery as a means of psychic castration, like circumcision and sub-incision, are hallmarks of patriarchal culture, a demonstration to the young that the venerable old ones still wield the all-powerful knife – and the beginning of transsexualism. Those who do not perform the cult's rite can never enjoy full social status.

    Symbols of the castrated member, the tie and bow-tie, are mandatory accoutrements of the political wardrobe and phallic monuments are erected to commemorate the minds conquered long ago. Brute force is no longer necessary.

    The capitalist priest class of Psychiatry, working in tandem with the State bureaucracy, regulates and polices the new Restriction and gelding of desire. Psychiatrists, along with other legal arbiters, help to obscure justice with grey areas of intentionality, mental state, etc.

    Some mistake this as a system of Liberty, ignorant of the fact that Psychiatric Control is a cornerstone of the perfected Totalitarian State.

    All modern illnesses come from the absurd and tragic struggle of man's inability to bridle Nature. This dogma echoes perpetually, omnisciently by understanding voices in self-help books, billboards, radio commercials and television talk shows to convince the public to practice continual self-suppression and hormonal restraint. Any deviation is an indication of something severely wrong with the individual.

    Perhaps Lycanthropic Transformation Rites are in some way a Psychic Preparation for the millennial calamities that are thought to lie ahead.

    Legalism is a Language of Equivocations, a process of assimilation to violence and illogic.

    Etymology: government
    Gubernare: to control
    Mens/Mentis: mind

    culture
    Colere: to inhabit, to till
    Cult: collective mind
    -ure: process of

    civilize, etc.
    Civitas: city
    -ize: to do/to make like

    police, policy, politics, polite
    Polis: city

    authority
    Auctor: master, father, creator
    -ity: quality of

    religion
    Religare: to bind fast, to place an obligation on
    -ion: noun-forming suffix

    uniform
    Uni-: one
    Form: shape

    They lump themselves into a group. They want all the collective praise and none of the collective blame (No True Scotsman). If they were truly concerned for their reputation they wouldn’t wear a uniform. Badges are just snowflakes.

    "Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form. All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes. […] For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated holdup than to a real holdup. Because the latter does nothing but disturb the order of things, the right to property, whereas the former attacks the reality principle itself." – Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra & Simulation – 1981)

    "Our rulers, who rule our symbols, and so rule a symbolic class of life, impose their own infantilism on our instituitions, educational methods, and doctrines. This leads to maladjustment of the incoming generations which, being born into, are forced to develop under the un-natural (for man) semantic conditions imposed on them. In turn, they produce leaders afflicted with the old animalistic limitations. The vicious circle is completed; it results in a general state of human un-sanity, reflected again in our instituitions. And so it goes, on and on." – Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics – 1933)

    "I am a cosmopolitan." – Diogenes

    "If I could not be Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes." – Alexander the Great

    "A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years." – Lysander Spooner (No Treason: Constitution of No Authority – 1867)

    "It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement." – Étienne de la Boétie (Discours de la servitude volontaire ou le Contr'un – 1577)

    "Leadership in government is political power, and political power is an official form of antagonizing the people. Politics are rules imposed upon the people. They have every man in a straight jacket and without a passport he cannot move a toe. In a free world, they violate the natural rights of every citizen. They have become the weapons of political despots and if you don't think as they think you're deprived of your passport." – Michael Chaplin as Rupert Macabee (A King in New York – 1957)

    "Imagine, if you will, a world filled only with criminals of whom there are two classes: those too honest to rationalize their crimes and the powerful who scapegoat them." – Rod Serling

    "Eye have no Moral Obligation to ask permission from the person to whom Eye Morally Object if Eye may exercise mEye Moral Objection." – Unknown

    %]#^#{%#{##{}

  2. @madfx8058

    October 17, 2024 at 9:37 pm

    Growing up amongst Chicano Activist and seeing how the makeup of my community has become more indigenous over the past two decades (migrants who are Mixtec, Zapotec, Purepecha) its really interesting to learn this native history. I think Im really gonna dig this series!

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