>were conquered by Cortez and his "army" of 500

Along with the other subjugated groups who turned on their imperial suzerain, as you briefly alluded to.

>The fundamental problem is that the Aztecs were armed with basic bows, and primitive melee weapons like wooden clubs. The Spaniards had rifles, plate armor, and longswords.

Yes that was certainly an important factor, though obviously entirely insufficient to explain how an entire continent of various empires confederations and cities fell over decades and centuries, and the vast majority of the population wiped out.

>This is what enabled a group of 500 people who didn't even speak the language to gather "allies" and single handedly destroy an entire empire with centuries of military experience

Sure in the isolated and specific context Cortez's victory over the Aztecs probably was largely influenced by their technological advantages along with their deception, ambushes, and the "suprise" of their foreign origin etc. (but not totally determined, since by their own account there was like a hundred different times they could have been slaughtered en-masse if their hosts weren't as initially hospitable).

You're gonna have to provide a bit more justification for how the rest of the continent's eventual collapse and depopulation follows immediately from that though. It takes a lot more to justify asserting that a single factor should be solely recognized as the determining historical cause for an outcome. There were many factors and any one of them must be considered carefully and in relation to all others, and my point was to show how neglected the others are in favor of "europeans conquered everything just cause they were better". There's a lot more to be learnt by recognizing and studying details over broad oversimplifications that require no more insight or nuance.

>There were also plagues that spread in the other direction - the obvious one is syphilis.

It seems likely but not entirely uncontroversial though I personally can't speak on it.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oa.802

In any case would you like to count plague for plague? There is an clear asymmetry in the scale of transmission as well as in the immunological defenses of the respective populations in the old world and new, it would seem reasonable the discrepancy could be due to the asymmetry of scale in large fauna to human proximity - which is responsible for intra-species transmission and by extension the major illness and plagues - but clearly none of these biological-historical conclusions are certain.

>Most of every great empire in the world had massive numbers of slaves.

Yes and none of them had the industrial system of slavery extraction and use on a massively depopulated continent in order to extract massive amounts of natural resources on a scale that was hitherto unparalleled historically. Note that I didn't want to talk about the unique social and economic system then emerging in western europe after the reformation since my comment was already meandering and oversimplified enough. I also agree that American slavery wasn't the sole money printing machine that led to European dominance, but a crucial factor in generating capital and material resources as well as a symptom of the more influential underlying mechanism - namely the emergence of the system of trade and economic relations that would later be recognized as capitalism, which proved far more effective in generating wealth and political power than whatever bastard form feudalism you could generally argue it superseded.

>colonies (come states) that were most averse to slavery would be the ones that would thrive the most.

Wow its almost as though financial hubs (especially ones based around centers of commerce linking a region of production with external trade) can generate profit from economic activities not in the immediate locality. Did you at least try to use your brain before you decided to insult me?

>It's just the neohistorical self loathing nonsense

Also self-loathing might be a bit of projection since I personally have no familial connection to the trans-atlantic slave trade or any nation that benefited from it. I'm sorry you suffer from such conflicted feelings on your own heritage but I'd recommend not lashing out at strangers in unrelated conversation.

>History's full of awful stuff, so is the present, and so too will be the future. Be happy it went as well as it did.

Again I'm not too sure why you've decided to read some kind of moral argument into my sweeping over-generalization of history? It's really not relevant to what was being discussed and even if it was I'm not sure that the takeaway is that we should just "happy it went as well as it did" or whatever? I'm not really sure what you think there is for people to be "happy" about or specifically what I've failed to be "happy" about since as far as I can tell I've provided a critical analysis of a historical period independent from any given moral framework. Unless of course you object to any such analysis that doesn't affirm your particular moral perspective.

>Be happy it went as well as it did.

lol for who? Wasn't too swell for the native americans... (nor my own people for that matter, if this is really the discussion you'd rather have). It might surprise you to learn that there are other people in the world with a different background to yourself.

But to be honest I couldn't be more disinterested in that useless conversation, trying to analyze history in a discrete set of "right" or "wrongs" that we must urgently assign condemnation or affirmation to at each point. History has happened and is happening, one should seek to analyze it's material basis either for its own sake or to apply it critically to the present, not paint hagiographies or interpretations to justify whatever belief systems or identities they've constructed.