Re: off topic: different cultures, same ideas

[Jay McNally jmcnally@xxxxxxxx]

The Caribe tribe discovered by Columbus was a cannibal tribe.
Both the Mayans killed and the Azetcs killed thousands of their own people
in rituals that included cutting out the hearts of the living as crowds
watched.  They also participated in sacrificing young virgin girls to
their gods to try to bring on good weather. All of this is well documented.
The much-maligned Inquisition lasted more than 300 years in Spain. The
death toll was, depending on which historian you read, between 3,000 and
10,000 during those three centuries. It was NOT the savage process
described by Edgar Allen Poe and recent writers, and it was nothing
compared to the brutality of tribes in N. and South America. The
Inquisition was an honest and open effort by the government of Spain to
remove Muslims from the population who were bent on subverting the
culture. (we see some effort in America along those same lines today. In
the last year there has been a formal, government-sanctioned "inquisition"
of thousands of Muslims on vague suspicions of possible treason). It is
well documented that Catholic Church tried to distance itself from the
excesses of the Spanish government's Inquisition.
It is rare to find writers favorable to the Inquisition, but they are out
there and worthy of reading for those who don't know their argument. These
are available on the Internet. One good one is by James Hitchcock (do a
google search) and Warren Carroll has written on this matter.
The death toll at certain Aztec or Mayan festivals was more than 1,000 in a
day!



At 05:56 PM 9/4/02 -0400, you wrote:
> I agree that "savage brutality" is probably rhetorical overkill, and the
> point that the indigenous peoples did not wage war for ideological reasons
> is a very interesting idea I had never considered. And, too, the horrors
> of the Inquisition in the name of Christ must certainly set some kind of
> record in the history of humanity for hypocrisy. I can't think of anything
> I know of to parallel (sp?) it with the Native Americans.
> Nonetheless, taking great delight in the suffering of prisoners -
> indigenous or white - being tortured to death was a staple of
> entertainment for many Native American tribes, and their willingness to
> turn on each other for pay from the whites - the Hurons definitely come to
> mind, and I remember Kit Carson, who specialized in helping the U.S.
> Cavalry exterminate whole tribes by first guiding the soldiers to their
> hidden crops so they would starve and then guiding them to their hiding
> places so the soldiers could kill them in their weakened state - certainly
> does them no honor, and reinforces the idea that most tribes were as
> murderous toward the members of other tribes as the Nazis were to the
> Jews, Gypsies and Poles.
> I think that one or another of the Native American tribes, sooner or
> later, left to their own devices, would have developed sufficient
> technology to become a version of the Nazis. Then the horrors that already
> occurred in America at a relatively low rate would have been multiplied
> just as many-fold as ever happened in the concentration camps of the Nazis.
> I remember learning that one of the tribes, I forget which one, which was
> a notably peaceful tribe, nonetheless only applied the concept "human" to
> people of their own tribe.
> So, I think it's really a matter of quantity, not quality. The Nazis were
> really efficient, but essentially there was no difference.
>
> Charles