Decent Indians

Mexico's demi-millennial commemoration of the fall of the Aztec empire has been marked by debate over the role of the Tlaxcalans, an indigenous faction who fought with Cortés. The Aztecs, of course, were vicious imperialists who performed human sacrifices instead of burning witches like decent people; the Tlaxcalans and other imperial subjects provided tens of thousands of fighters to supplement the few hundred Spanish pirates, and these sepoys and their descendants were subsequently rewarded with privileges and even the possibility of intermarriage with their new rulers. The Spaniards' attitude towards their Indians makes a salutary contrast with the British Empire's treatment of its own: people of mixed descent were rigorously excluded from positions of authority while the British East India Company was being a force for good, and connoisseurs of moderate centrism by present-day Catholic asset-strippers will recall the Blairites' battle to keep British jobs safe for British workers when the home islands were threatened with invasion by Gurkha and Iraqi military resources who didn't know their place.