The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust: A Memoir by Ben-Zion Gold

    I was looking for a book that might give me some idea of my grandfather's experience in the Holocaust, and I found this beautiful memoir of a man born the same year as my grandpa, also in Poland, 100 miles away. However, Ben-Zion Gold was much more religious than my grandfather's family, and a lot of his reminisces are about religious life at cheder and yeshiva. I know that like Gold, my grandpa had to worry about being attacked on the street for being Jewish, even before the war. Gold writes that of the three and a half million Jews living in Poland in the 20s and 30s, less than a third were religious. The majority were attracted to different Jewish ideas, like Zionism or the Jewish Socialist Bund, or to Communism.

    This book is especially good because Gold writes with immense wisdom as an octogenarian. He can look back on his childhood and understand better not just his own feelings, but the feelings and thoughts of the other children around him. With age, he is more accepting and forgiving of everyone, and I think he also feels nostalgic for everything, even what was bad, because it came from a world and a people destroyed by the Holocaust.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

    This was a very challenging book that I did not fully understand, but the parts I did understand were pretty interesting. In brief, Kuhn argues that the history of science is not continuous and is not always the history of pure progress. Rather, it is a history of revolutions and paradigm shifts. Apparently this book popularized the word "paradigm." Science depends on paradigms to set out the goals of research, the questions worth asking, many of the rules of a field, and the general conception of what is true. With a paradigm in place, scientists can conduct normal research (synonymous, I think, with basic research), which is a type of science designed to confirm the paradigm, using experiments to confirm the theory. However, sometimes, in the course of normal research, scientists discover anomalies. Some anomalies, and more likely when many anomalies of the same type are found, it can trigger a crisis in the field--the paradigm ceases to adequately explain the world. Then, from that crisis, a revolution in science can occur, in which a new paradigm emerges to explain both the old paradigm and the anomalies as well. A paradigm doesn't need to completely explain all phenomena, it just needs to be better at doing so than its competitors.

    Paradigms are useful because, once they can be taken for granted, scientists don't need to publish long treatises, establishing very fact upon which they make assumptions for more detailed research. Rather, once a paradigm has crystallized out of experience and theory, scientists can publish shorter articles, acknowledging, sometimes implicitly, the paradigm under which they work, and continuing to develop more detailed knowledge within that paradigm. Then, information can be passed on more quickly through textbooks that compile the normal research that occurs within the paradigm. Given this, scientists need to be aware that the science they learn in textbooks is an incomplete history of science. The science of textbooks, by eliminating all the rejected paradigms and interpreting all research through the accepted paradigm, imply that the development of the field has been a linear process of construction one block onto another. A more accurate conception of scientific development would be something like a story of searching for a road through dark woods, with different paths representing different paradigms, and the normal research under the current paradigm being the best and longest path out that has been discovered so far. But other paths have been taken in the past which led to becoming lost, backtracking, and working down the current path/paradigm. This means that, when looking back, all scientific production would seem like progress, but it may in fact be leading to a crisis and revolution.

A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs, by Theodore Draper

    This book is way too long but it is just so impressive. I found myself being so bored with the granularity of getting three versions of mundane conversations, while also being so impressed with how detailed Draper's research was. He not only reported on Iran-Contra at the time, but Draper went through over 50,000 pages of primary sources to create this book, which is essentially a reference book for the Iran-Contra Affairs (Draper says they really should be thought of as two separate but connected schemes) told in chronological format.

    So why did I read this book? Well, I had some questions about the Iran-Contra Affair. I did not need this many answers. But anyway. This is what I knew. I understood the Iran-Contra Affair to be a scheme in which the Reagan administration sold weapons to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War in order to make money to send to the Contras in Nicaragua, and that Ollie North was the fall guy. This was a very incomplete understanding, and it also made me wonder why the Reagan administration would work with Iran, a country/regime that was not Reagan's preferred one. I was also curious to know what Reagan's personal involvement was. What I learned was that the Iran-Contra Affairs were caused by the collision of a vague use of presidential authority with the massive delegation of power to the "imperial presidency." The cumulative effect of growing power to the president made it so that the president was presumed by many bureaucrats to have sole power over foreign policy, and the creation of the National Security Council Staff empowered bureaucrats (Ollie North) to plausibly act with that increased presidential authority.

    The NSC, as originally created, meant four members: the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, along with two advisory members, the CIA Director and the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were originally granted staff, but under Eisenhower, the NSC staff were put more squarely under the sole control of the President through the Executive Office of the President. The National Security Advisor position, created post-WWII, developed over the next four decades to become a rival with the Secretary of State for control of foreign policy. The NSC staff also grew to 1,600 by President Reagan's time, from just 35 under LBJ, who were mostly temporary assignees from the State Department. The Reagan-era NSC was large enough to duplicate many roles in the State Department and operate independently of it. This capacity would allow for Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North to start his own covert operations outside normal channels.

    North gained too much influence as an NSC staffer from staying too long. On assignment from the Marine Corps, it would be typical for North to spend 2-3 years at the White House, North was there for nearly six years, over and over again managing to get the White House to override the orders of the Commandant of the Marine Corps for him to follow a normal career progression to become an infantry battalion commander.

    Before this all happened, Congress passed some laws that the Reagan administration would go on to break. They were the Boland Amendments, passed between 1982-86, which limited US government assistance to the contras in Nicaragua. Moreover, in 1983, the State Department launched Operation Staunch, which was an attempt to stop the flow of weapons from any country to Iran. The Reagan administration would break both of these, one being a violation of the law and an arrogation of power from Congress, and the other being a violation of the administration's own policy, showing the internal divisions between Reagan and his own Secretary of State, George Schultz. Reagan was also just plain confused about what was going on, and also just didn't want to know. He was repeatedly telling his subordinates to do things that were very legally questionable, and then just telling them to "follow the law" over and over. 

    To get around legal restrictions on aid to the Contras, North started to coordinate funding from third party donors, starting mostly with private individuals. This alone was already pushing the limits. Congress had made clear the government could not send military aid to the Contras, but North was sort of inventing a loophole to send non-governmental money to the Contras. North even acknowledged in letters that he was deceiving Congress and hiding the money from Congress. North was not just doing his job. He was clearly very passionate about the Contras and got carried away- one private funder quoting him as saying, "no, I don't care if I have to go to jail for this and I don't care if I have to lie to Congress about this." Draper acknowledges some kind of post-Vietnam syndrome affecting North, blaming the American defeat in Vietnam on a lack of funding from Congress, and seeing this as a noble opportunity to get around Congress.

    The reason why Draper calls it the Iran-Contra AffairS is because he very convincingly shows that they were really two different issues that got combined later on, not a master plan in the slightest. The reason that Iranian money got sent to the Contras was not because it was planned that way, but because the two covert operations were both handled by Ollie North. The Iranian plan really originated outside the US government with Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi and sketchy Iranian businessman Manucher Ghorbanifar. They wanted to end the arms embargo on Iran and sell arms to Iran as a business opportunity, since Iran was in desperate need in its years-long war against Iraq. They ended up developing the idea that they would use Israel as an intermediary, which became the reality.

    The Contra affair is somewhat straightforward, since it makes sense that Reagan would want to send cash to anti-communists. But Iran makes no sense. SecState, George Schultz, was opposed. SecDef, Caspar Weinberger, was opposed. But analysis out of the CIA and the NSC Staff showed that there was some room for a rapprochement with Iran, which felt threatened by the ongoing Soviet invasion of its neighbor, Afghanistan, which would last until 1989. But there was some confusion about whether it would be weapons sold to the government of Iran for rapprochement or to some opposition group to topple the government. And there was also analysis of different camps in the Iranian government jockeying for power (mostly invented by Ghorbanifar), which confused things more. Ultimately, it seems like Reagan did not know what he wanted out of Iran policy, but wanted to free hostages in Lebanon that he thought Iran could control. But Iran didn't even have these hostages! Hezbollah did! The State Department's policy was still that there was an arms embargo on Iran, but by the late summer of 1985, people in government were explicitly talking about an arms-for-hostages deal through Israel with Iran. Simplified, the plan was for Israel to sell weapons to Iran  and for the United States to resupply Israel. Israel thought that new weapons for Iran would prolong the war with Iraq, but official US policy was that it wanted the Iran-Iraq war to end, not stalemate for years.

    On August 20, 1985, the first shipment of arms reached Iran from Israel. But no hostages were released. Ghorbanifar explained that these weapons were seized by an "extremist" faction, and did not make it to the moderates for whom it was intended, as if they existed or were separate groups in the government controlling weapons (false). Then, arguments broke out--it turned out that the weapons were mistakenly delivered on an Israeli-marked plane, which could cause huge embarrassment to Iran, and were also of the wrong type. So, the Israelis agreed to send more weapons in exchange for one American hostage, who was the least valuable. The most valuable hostage was a CIA agent who was, unbeknownst to all, already dead in Lebanon. In November, to avoid the earlier embarrassment, Israel planned to ship the weapons to Iran by way of Portugal, so it wouldn't be clear what was happening. But nobody told Portugal, and the Portuguese authorities detained the flight. North became involved at this point and directed retired Major General Secord, who had been privately working on the Contra affair, to go to Portugal to try to get the plane off the ground. The Portuguese were befuddled at why the Americans, whose State Department was proclaiming an arms embargo on Iran, was trying to get them to let a shipment of arms reach Iran. To finally solve the problem, the CIA provided a charter flight from Portugal to Iran for the weapons, for which the Israelis deposited one million dollars into Secord's private account, Lake Resources, which was used for Contra funding, mixing the Iran and Contra funds. This was the first direct use of US government funds to support the Iranians. Critically, CIA covert activities require a finding of their necessity by the President, which nobody did at the time.

    As the relationship went on into January 1986, significant profits were made, some of which were due to typos, which resulted in the Army selling the weapons too cheaply to Israel, who marked them up and sold them to Ghorbanifar, who marked them up and sold them to Iran. North, who never ever took a cut for himself from these funds, took the "residuals," $16 million from the arms sale to Iran, and diverted it to the Contras. The US government just got bad deals over and over on the arms shipments. The original goal, hostage release, was not being met, since Iran could not get Hezbollah to release hostages. And the money that the Department of Defense got was miniscule compared to what Ghorbanifar, Secord, and the Contras were getting. I really wish that Draper had more information on the Hezbollah-Iran negotiations, which were impossible for him to get, but that would have revealed a whole lot of information about a whole other side of the negotiations. It was honestly just so funny that in May of 1986, somebody finally asked Hezbollah to release the hostages and they said hell no- we'll release them when Israel withdraws from the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon, Lahad prisoners are returned, Da'wa prisoners freed in Kuwait, and for the United States to pay all of Hezbollah's expenses in holding the hostages. Come on now. 

    As the scandal was revealed, the nightmare was impeachment, a la Watergate. People in the executive branch reacted so differently than they would in today's much more partisan environment. They were hurt by the fact that they pissed off both liberals and conservatives in both parties. And the public generally didn't believe the administration's explanations. Even Barry Goldwater, Mr. Republican, said, "I think President Reagan has gotten his butt in a crack on this Iran thing." Nowadays, I think the president would just say he can do what he wants and nobody in his party would blink, but then, North was shredding so many documents that the shredder broke, and the Attorney General was investigating his own president for breaking the law.

    The fundamental problem that caused the Iran-Contra Affairs was a failure to respect the Constitution. The Constitution empowers three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances on each other. But LtCol North and his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter made clear in later testimony to Congress and trials that they gave their absolute loyalty to the President. They thought this was they duty, but they were mistaken. While they served at the pleasure of the President, they swore an oath not to the President, but to the Constitution. And it is Congress who the Constitution appoints as the holder of the power to appropriate funds, not the President. North and Poindexter asserted that the President controls foreign policy, but this is not what the Constitution says. While the Constitution grants the President significant affairs over foreign policy, it requires approval of the Senate to approve treaties, and both houses of Congress must be responsible for any funding. Similarly, when North and Poindexter made calls to other government officials from the White House, those officials "snapped to," thinking of doing what the President wanted, but not that what the President wanted may have been against the law. Draper concludes the book by focusing on these constitutional issues. He points out that Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, was clear that 

The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world to the sole disposal of a magistrate, created and circumstanced, as would be a president of the United States.

The massive power that rested in the executive by the time Reagan was President, and is even greater today, has proven to be the greatest danger to the existence of the constitutional republic in the United States. None of this power has been taken by force, but has been willingly granted by Congress and the courts. The problems of the Iran-Contra Affairs were not problems unanticipated by the founders and framers of the Constitution. The founders understood that the power of foreign policy could not be solely controlled by the executive. As James Madison put it, "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace in the legislature, and not to the executive department..." and later, in a letter to Jefferson, that 

The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging, and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other.

 

 

Mexico in Review

    As I finished the Russia unit, I started to intersperse some miscellaneous books because it gets boring to read only the same topic over and over again. But the big unit I moved to next was another country, Mexico. I read 6 books about Mexico: Pedro Páramo, Mexico's Crucial Century, 1810-1910, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl, Fifth Sun, El laberinto de la soledad, and then All the Pretty Horses. All the Pretty Horses is the first in a trilogy that I plan to read, but I am cutting off the blog post here, and I hadn't even been sure I would include it as a Mexico book, but the book was set mostly in Mexico and I finished it before writing this post. Two of the authors, both of more "literary" books, were Mexican. I tried to avoid the Mexican Revolution since I think there is just so much on it, but it was impossible to truly avoid it since almost everything in modern Mexico is touched by it. So Pedro Paramo, El laberinto de la soledad, and All the Pretty Horses all discussed the Revolution or the Cristero War in some way or another.

    The first big theme I picked up on in my reading was modern Mexico needing to catch up to the modern world. There is sort of a feeling that Mexico was this great empire under the Aztecs and then a really successful colony under the Spanish through the 18th century, but that it fell behind, and that the 19th and 20th centuries have been a big effort by Mexico to catch back up. This is really noticeable in Mexico's Crucial Century, as well as in El laberinto de la soledad, where Octavio de la Paz is very explicit that he sees the Revolution as a big moment that allowed Mexico to reach modernity.

    The other big theme was most apparent in Shadow of Quetzalcoatl and Fifth Sun, which was the birth of Mexico through contact between the indigenous people and the Spaniards, resulting in alliances or war between and among all the different people in contact with each other. It is pretty unusual in world history for two people to merge so fully like in Mexico, and when I went to Mexico City in June, it was apparent in murals and art and in the history museums that Mexicans see themselves as a combined people, who glorify their European and their indigenous history, especially the Aztec side of things. 

    Visiting Mexico in June made all of this a lot more significant and salient for me. Getting to see Teotihuacan and the Templo Mayor made it really cool to see how massive of structures the people of Mesoamerica could build, but then also how primitive it was compared to what the Spanish were doing an ocean away. The arrival of the Spanish was nothing short of cataclysmic, just like the arrival of the English and the French to the north. But the difference was that the natives combines with the Europeans in Latin America in a way that didn't happen to the north, and the way that people conceive of themselves in North and South America today are different as a result. North Americans can only really claim either Native American or European heritage, but it is very unusual to be able to claim descent from both like is common in Mexico.

    A big difference from the Russia unit is how the state is felt in each country. In Russia, the state is the primary violent actor. There was tons of death and destruction, but it was all at the hands of the Russian state or a state invading Russia. In Mexico, it was the opposite: a more extensive violence that operated at a higher level than Russia at peace but a lower level than Russia at war. The big danger to the safety of the people I read about in the Mexico books was not the government of Mexico, but the local government or criminals. 

    Reading the Mexico unit made me want to read a lot more literature in Spanish, building on my goal of reading more fiction this year. I think I've turned a corner and gotten a lot more interested in reading fiction, but I still don't know how to write about it yet. With my non-fiction books, I've settled into a "reflection," where I write the things I think are important to know from the book and I give a couple of my thoughts on it. But that has gotten a little redundant so I am trying to mix it up in these units where I can do some comparisons. With fiction, it is a totally different ballgame and I still don't know exactly what to write about for those books. But this unit has encouraged me to add more books in Spanish to my miscellaneous reading in between and throughout units, because I really need the practice. Next, I am moving on to some books broadly in the category of science.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

     Man, this was a good book. Better than I expected. Contact McCarthy can really write. He doesn’t just create a good story about boys going on horseback from Texas to Mexico in the fifties, he can make it all about the important things in life without taking you out of the context of the story for a moment. He can put such interesting words in peoples’ mouths and also just describe what they say really well. At one point he writes,

     

He spoke of his campaigns in the desert of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold. His own father said that no man who has not gone to war on horseback can ever truly understand the horse and he said that he supposed he wished that this were not so but it was so. 

     Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shared a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all the horses that ever were.

     McCarthy writes wise characters who go on soliloquies about life in believable ways, despite being teenagers or peasants. When he writes words into the mouths of peasant children, they are simple, but cut to the heart of issues like love, money, etc. the people in his writing all have a very functional intelligence. The protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a teenager who loves horses and doesn’t need to speak much. But he is a talented young cowboy who loves horses and the western lifestyle. When he is in a dark cell recovering from knife wounds, McCarthy writes, “So he thought about horses and they were always the right thing to think about.” The horses are honestly big characters in the novel, and their connections to their riders are so important. It is no coincidence that McCarthy calls Blevins’ big bay horse “thunderstruck,” when it was Blevins who feared being struck by lightning.

     All in all, I loved this book and crushed it in a few days, and I will definitely be continuing with the rest of the border trilogy. Thanks to Frank for the recommendation. 

El laberinto de la soledad por Octavio de la Paz

 Mientras leía este libro, perdí mis anotaciones, y ahora no tengo con que recordarme de mis pensamientos. También estoy de vacaciones y prefiero relajarme que escribir tanto. Voy a decir esto- la gran diferencia entre México y los Estados Unidos se ve en las relaciones raciales y étnicas. En Estados Unidos, hubo un genocidio de los indígenas. En México pasó lo mismo, pero el fenómeno más significante es la combinación entre los indígenas y los españoles. Por eso, la fundación de México es un nacimiento doloroso, pero en Estados Unidos es un cuento de desplazamiento y una conquista más pura de puede decir. Creo que esta diferencia impacta toda la auto concepción de los dos países. La otra mitad de este fenómeno tiene que ver con la esclavitud pero no forma tan gran parte de la historia mexicana, pues no voy a escribir tanto de eso ahora.  

     Otra cosa importante de que escriba De La Paz es cómo imperios sienten una “seducción  al muerte” en sus últimos días, sin embargo, los aztecas nunca sintieron eso porque estaban todavía muy temprano en su ascendencia sobre los pueblos de Mesoamérica cuando llegaron los españoles. Me parece inusual que cae un imperio así, en plena ascendencia, de una fuerza external. Lo más usual sería el largo declive hasta un colapso, como el imperio romano. Pero no sé. Quizás me parece así porque me siento que veo en mi mundo más declive.

     Algo interesante del libro es que De La Paz está escribiendo sobre “el fin de la Historia” en México, anunciando la llegada de México, después de la revolución, al laberinto de la soledad, que describe el dilema de los pueblos cuando llegan a la modernidad. Para él, a diferencia de Fukuyama, el mundo alcanzó el “fin de la Historia” después de la segunda guerra mundial. Para Fukuyama, la Historia finalizó cuando cayó la unión soviético, revelando que la democracia liberal es la última fase del estado o del gobierno. Para De La Paz, el dualismo de la unión soviético y los Estados Unidos es una especie de fin de Historia porque es un “empate.” Sabemos nosotros que se rompió este empate unas décadas después de la publicación de este libro, y también sabemos que el liderazgo de los Estados Unidos sobre el mundo ha sido en declive desde el libro de Fukuyama.

     Lo interesante de este libro que no contiene The End of History and the Last Man es que es el primer libro en que leo de la llegada al fin de la Historia un país desarrollando. Fukuyama solo habla de países desarrollados. El consejo de De La Paz a México al fin de la Historia es lo siguiente: México, como cualquier otra nación, llega solo an fin de la Historia. En este laberinto de decisiones que encuentra, los mexicanos deben buscar los demás naciones solitarias para formar una solidaridad entre las naciones contemporáneas. Así todos se trascienden los problemas de la modernidad.

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend

Image from the book.

    Fifth Sun is a really cool Aztec history that seeks to primarily use indigenous sources, focusing on primary sources from the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. I really liked it. Townsend covers the earliest Aztec history, from the Mexica migration to what became known as the Valley of Mexico, until about a hundred years or so after the Cortez's conquest of Tenochtitlan, by which time the Aztec Empire had passed out of living memory and was being recorded by the grandchildren of those who lived through it.

    The Aztecs originally came from the American Southwest to the Valley of Mexico sometime in the mid-13th century, at first arriving as a nomadic people who served as mercenaries for the other Nahua peoples who had settled the area in the century prior, also coming from the same region and speaking similar language. Then, the Aztecs were called the Mexica (Meh-SHEE-ka), and they settled the city of Tenochtitlan on bad marshland that nobody wanted in the middle of Lake Texcoco sometime in the early 14th century. There is obviously a lot of history I'm skipping over, but long story short, they became the dominant people in the valley after a civil war erupted in 1426. That was the year that Tezozomoc, ruler of the Tepanecs, the most powerful people in the basin, who had ruled since 1370, died in his bed. During the unrest, the Aztec ruler (who still only ruled the small city of Tenochtitlan at this point), Chimalpopoca, was killed, and so was his son, Xihuitl Temoc. His cousin, Itzcoatl, would become the first Emporer of the Aztecs, with the help of Tlacaelel, another relative, by forming the Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan against Azcapotzalco.

    An issue that never went away after the war that led to Aztec dominance in the valley was Tlaxcala (Tlash-ka-la). The Tlaxcalans were never defeated by the Aztecs. This became the basis of human sacrifice, since the Aztecs could not fully defeat the Tlaxcalans, but could capture them for sacrifice. The most interesting thing about the Aztecs to most people is human sacrifice. However, when the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs had only been practicing human sacrifice for a couple decades, and really mostly against the Tlaxcalans. Like many things about the Aztecs, it was more recently established than many would think. This not only served a religious purpose for the Aztecs, but allowed them to save face by claiming that the Tlaxcalans did not defeat them, but rather needed to be kept around for the ceremonial "Flower Wars" to capture future sacrifices.

    Under Moctezuma I, the Aztecs united their royal dynasty by agreeing to a system of power sharing between the Itzcoatl's branch of the family and Chimalpopoca's. Moctezuma and Tlacaelel were both sons of Chimalpopoca. They would do this by having their successor, from the other side of the family, always take as his primary wife a daughter of the ruling emperor.

    When Moctezuma II took power in 1502, the Aztecs were for the first time unopposed in their region, and faced no rebellions from the other Nahuas they ruled over. With more time, their Empire would have become incredibly strong across the region. At thirteen, Aztec boys left home to train to be warriors, and went as teenagers into battle ingroups in order to gang up on and separate a man from his battlefield cohort and bring him down as a unit. They would finish with apprenticeship by about twenty, and were then responsible for making kills and taking captives on their own. By the reign of Moctezuma II, his sacrificial role took up lots of his time, and he rarely went to the battlefield. Those sacrificial practices were often used as religious and propaganda opportunities, as some captured warriors from enemy groups would be taken to Tenochtitlan just to watch sacrifices, and then set free to tell their people what they saw. 

    The arrival of Cortez and the Spanish brought about the downfall of the Aztecs. The Spanish made landfall and heard tales of a vast city in the heartland of Mexico and began to make their way there, defeating all the peoples they met in between, developing quite a reputation. And then, on their way, they met the Tlaxcalans, who hated the Aztecs and formed an alliance with the Spanish after being defeated by them initially. Townsend disagrees with any notion that the Aztecs saw the Spanish as gods. But they definitely did see the Spanish as a very powerful people who could not be defeated on the battlefield. Part of the myth of the Aztecs viewing the Spanish as gods may have been due to them using Nahuatl words for gods in reference to the Spanish talking a lot about converting to Christianity to worship the Christian god.

    Cortez arrived without permission from the Spanish crown and was in a rush to take Tenochtitlan and show off his success before he could be recalled. But then, while he was in Tenochtitlan, he got word that a second fleet arrived, from his rival, the governor of Cuba. Moctezuma II hoped that this tension would save his city, but instead, Cortez took Moctezuma hostage and travelled to the coast, where he bribed the men sent to capture him, and actually reinforced his party. They reentered Tenochtitlan and boarded in Axayacatl's palace, the great palace in the center of the city. But the next day, the Mexica attacked. At this point, the narrative gets confusing. I'm not clear on the exact order of things, but at some point, the Mexica begin the celebration of Toxcatl, which involves lots of dancing in front of an effigy of Huitzilopochtli. As the danced, the Spaniards flowed out of the palace and began slaughtering the Mexica with the help of their Tlaxcalan allies. The Mexica pushed them back into the palace, which they fortified, creating a stalemate in which the Mexica couldn't get in and the Spaniards couldn't get out. 

    After seven days, the Spaniards made a break around midnight, traveling quietly to the sole causeway that remained after the fighting had torn apart the city. They were discovered on the causeway, and the Mexica launched war canoes at them, killing 56 of the 80 horses the Spanish had, and dozens of Spanish men drowned or were killed, with about one-third surviving the night. An even smaller proportion of the Tlaxcalans survived the "noche triste."

    After escaping, it was time for the Spanish to reinforce to take and occupy the city for good. To do this, Martin Lopez, a shipbuilder, taught the Tlaxcalans to build brigantines, small sailing ships, which could quickly traverse the lake. This was the most important memory of the Tlaxcalans who related their stories years later, since it was the first time they ever sailed. Battle went on for weeks. The Tlaxcalans and the Spanish used their brigantines to land in less defended areas, loot them and leave. They used cannons to knock down walls and buildings, and then would go fill in canals with rubble or sand. Then, with a flat, open space available, the Spanish were invincible with horses and lances. The Mexica would re-excavate canals, and were twice able to isolate and kill large groups of Spaniards. During the fighting, the city transformed with barricades and canals, and the Mexica took captives to the top of their pyramids to sacrifice them where their comrades would see. The Mexica strung decapitated heads from a rope for all to see. The fighting lasted three months, and the Mexica also dealt with the effects of starvation and their first-ever wave of smallpox. They offered the Spanish safe passage to leave and forget all this, but were rebuffed.

    That's all I have in me for this one. I'm very busy right now and I just wanted to get through my notes on the actual conquest of the city.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Aztec girls (and maybe boys too?) were not given names until their personalities were known, and were called something like "Elder daughter" or "Youngest daughter" until then. 
• Townsend does a great job of telling the story of the Aztecs from a native point of view, which reminds me of Facing East From Indian Country, which I liked for the same reason.
• Until about 1600, more Africans were brought to Mexico than anywhere else in the world.
• Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz wrote some poetry in Nahuatl.
• Indigenous identity in Mexico suffered most in Mexico during the 19th century, when liberals came to rule the country and forced a sort of "Mexicanization" that required everyone to adopt the national culture and speak Spanish.
• Emiliano Zapata soke Nahuatl.