American Demons

Violence as a motor of progress

In the fall of 1531, Francisco Pizarro González succeeded in arresting the Inca Atahualpa. He has a man in his hands whose people obey his every word. A raised eyebrow and everyone throws themselves into the dust. Peruvians view Atahualpa as a blood-drinking god. In the "Processes of Civilization" Norbert Elias classifies hunger for power and violence as engines of progress. Part of the bigotry of colonial rape policy is that the local kings have too little polish and too much clumsy head-off when it comes to running the state.

Pizarro knows that Atahualpa's imprisonment undermines the divine authority; the phenomenon is familiar from Mexico. The Aztec Moctezuma, kidnapped by Cortés, was stoned to death by his own people. They simply no longer believed that an unfree man was a god.

Moctezuma had considered Cortés an ancestor. This explains his willingness to cooperate, which resulted in compliance and death.

Moctezuma saw his greatest enemy as a great-grandfather.

Atahualpa is not that stupid. He does not submit. He does not regard the Spaniard as a divine colleague. He goes into captivity with a large retinue, he couldn't even clip his own nails himself.He goes to buy his freedom. He realizes that every royal offer incites the greed of foreigners. The Dominican monk Vicente de Valverde is planted in his fur like a louse. The missionary sweet-talks and flatters, Pizarro growls and grumbles. An army stands ready to liberate Atahualpa - the eagle front. The athletes long for the order to strike out - on their territory. A thousand miles away from the nearest Spanish settlement.

Atahualpa does not give the signal, do not rise.

On the other side are, all in all, the lame foot soldiers counted down to the last bungler, not even two hundred men, Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, French, stateless people, runaways, freedmen, illiterates, stutterers, school dropouts, perverts of all stripes, voice-noisers, incontinent, indisputable. The broken. Addicts. Dealers. A Volkssturm and last stand. People with training wheels attached to their helmets. In contrast to this bunch, which is all Pizarro has at his disposal, Atahualpa commands a special task force in army strength. At the gates of his residence city of Cajamarcas, highlanders are waiting to prove themselves. They run a hundred kilometers in six hours and then play three hours of fiber-crack-free soccer with the heads of their enemies before producing the next generation of athletes.

In his autobiography, first published in 1538 under the title "Memoirs of a Thresher", Bruno Carrera recounts how he saw Atahualpa falter.

"I firmly believed", writes the Genoese in Spanish service and veteran of the Cortés raid, "that the Inca would set his troops in motion. We could have been destroyed any day."

Yes, annihilated. And in pleasant temperatures. With thermal baths within easy reach.

I will be brief. Atahualpa didn't fight, he preferred to be blackmailed. Grandiloquently, he had a room filled with gold. 

 "The room was twenty-two feet long and seventeen feet wide. Our longest man couldn't reach the ceiling with his outstretched arm."

This is a mere assertion. Pizarro demanded only the gold-covered floor. The Inca then stretched his arm up to the ceiling and said from above:"I will fill your place with first-class temple gold. This is small tennis for me."

This Atahualpa is completely unscrupulous himself. He had his brother Huàscar killed. The Spaniard's cold-bloodedness impresses him.