Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Given his own cultural frame, and what he witnessed This type of fashionable moral relativism can be used to justify any atrocity. From an objective point of view, he could've stopped the child sacrifices without committing genocide, both cultural and literal. Sure, it may be that from his perspective that the genocide was necessary, but that is the case for every perpetrator of genocide in history. I take it that…
You’re mixing cultural genocide with actual genocide. Going from the other direction, if all information on Nazi ideology where removed from history, would we have Neo Nazis today? That may seem abhorrent and or impossible, but other ideologies have been erased from history and outside of the academic context that could be a net positive. Ideology’s that promote ritual human sacrifice could be inherently dangerous by…
The Spanish conquest of the New World was undeniably a genocide in the literal mass murder sense. In a sense it was a continuation of the same genocide against Muslims and Jews that the Spanish committed during the Reconquista. However you want to categorize what he and other Spaniards did, it was undeniably and objectively morally wrong.
> Going from the other direction, if all information on Nazi ideology where removed from history, would we have Neo Nazis today?
Your analogy does not hold, the equivalent to de Landa's actions would be to destroy the entire Western canon and any written trace of the German language in response to the Holocaust. From your comments you seem to treat the entirety of Maya culture as atomic and inseperable from human sacrifice, while conversely you have conveniently seperated out Nazism from the whole of German culture. This double standard where the faults of Western cultures are treated as redeemable while the faults of other cultures are treated as immutable traits inherent to that culture is what led to de Landa's actions in the first place.