Saturday, April 14, 2007

This Can't Be True

Pre-Columbian natives of the Western Hemisphere were ideal people, living in harmony with nature and each other. Bourgeois concepts such as "force" and "taxes" were unknown to them until the white man arrived.

5 comments:

CaliforniaTeacherGuy said...

No, it can't be true. What about those human sacrifices by the Mayans?

Darren said...

We gloss over that, and celebrate their diversity.

Anonymous said...

This isn't new, though you don't hear about it much. The Andean culture area was perhaps the bloodiest in the new world, even outdoing mesoamerica. What's curious is that the areas in the new world that were the cruelest and bloodiest also developed the highest civilizations.

Ellen K said...

Yep-that's why those peaceloving Aztecs used to have lines of captives two miles long to execute and remove their beating hearts to appease their sun god-to prove just how complacent and peaceloving they were. Talk about sanitizing history.....

Ellen K said...

I guess it goes counter to the "conventional wisdom" of the left that the indigenous people of the Americas were honest and peaceloving. Never mind the pyramids of human skulls or even just the iconography on the outside of their temples that SHOW people having their hearts ripped out in rituals. And although there were some agricultural tribes in North America, many of the natives that have been so polished up as moral paragons, were just as murderous and bloodthirsty as those who conquered them.