The Left obsessively romanticizes ancient
cultures — purer, closer to Mother Earth, matriarchal, greener, more
progressive. And these cultures' contacts with the West (and
Christianity in particular) — were Always Bad. But the truth has
gotten out yet again about how harsh and inhuman these cultures were in a
news story about unprecedented child sacrifice discovered in an ancient
empire in Peru, the Chimú civilization.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
Anthropologists have found evidence of a mass ritual
killing that involved the deaths of more than 140 children, three adults, and
at least 200 young llamas on the northern coast of Peru.
The archaeological site, known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas,
represents one of the largest known cases of mass child sacrifice ever seen in
the Americas.
Gabriel Prieto, a professor of archaeology from the
National University of Trujillo who started excavating Huanchaquito-Las Llamas
in 2011, said the discovery shocked him and his colleagues.
"In Peru we are familiar with human bones, but in this
particular case there were so many skeletons and they were all children,"
he said. "It was astonishing."
The sacrificial victims ranged in age from 6 to 14, and
appear to have been killed in a well-planned and choreographed event on a
single, horrific day. Their mummified bones were found carefully
arranged with their heads facing the ocean and their feet facing the
mountains. Many of their remains were found with the bones of one or
two young llamas lying on top of them.
The children, both boys and girls, all appear to have been
killed in the same way — with a single horizontal slice across the sternum.
As if all this wasn't gruesome enough, researchers say that
many of the children's rib cages appear to have been pried apart. This
suggests that their hearts were removed shortly after they died.
The Times and other news outlets report that the discoveries are
significant because they represent the largest child massacres ever found in
the Americas. The Times notes that it wasn't the only one — another
huge massacre Chimú site was found nearby, meaning that it was probably a
regular event. How a civilization could survive by killing so many
of its exquisite fresh-faced children, which we look at as the image of God in
our Judeo-Christian culture, is, well, as the lefties say,
unsustainable. No wonder the Inca eventually conquered the
Chimú. And the Inca weren't pure, either. They
also engaged in human sacrifice — and they were toppled easily by
the Spanish.
More significantly, many of the native peoples did
embrace Christianity as it was offered, very quickly — not just in Peru,
but in that other redoubt of human sacrifice, Aztec Mexico, because among other
things, there was no human sacrifice. The Spanish soldiers who led
the way for it were tough bastards, but the friars who accompanied them
were kind, and numerous instances through history signaled that they often
served as the native peoples' defenders. Franciscan friar Junípero
Serra, who is often reviled on the Left as the founder of California, taught
the Indians skills in the missions he founded because he wanted to make sure
the Spanish didn't slaughter them. Needless to say, he had no
affection for the Aztec alternative, which is particularly romanticized now on
the Left.
Most of the lefties who now dress up as Aztecs aren't descended in
the least from the Aztecs. Many are descendants of the Tarasco of
Michoacán, Mexico, the somewhat more peaceable craftsman empire that was the
sworn enemy of the Aztecs. When the Aztec empire sought help from
the Tarasco to defend their empire against the Spanish, the Tarasco leaders
slaughtered the Aztec messengers as their reply. None of these
ancient cultures was pure.
And forget about that human sacrifice — cannibalism was practiced
at one time by the Native Americans in the U.S. southwest as
well. The Anasazi,
who had a civilization in what is now Colorado, and around the four corners
area, terrorized their fellow tribes by literally eating them and excreting
their remains on their kitchen tables. There's evidence that it
wasn't just the Anasazi who engaged in this abhorrent practice.
There are also the Left's other favorite dreamscape from
ancient cultures: the so-called matriarchal
societies. This research indicates
that the phenomenon was not quite what lefties think it was.
This is not to say there is nothing to respect or admire in
ancient cultures — I have been to Peru myself, and I collect the beautiful
Chimú black clay pottery. If you go to Peru's museums in Lima, or
Mexico City's famed Museum of Anthropology, you will marvel at the beautiful
things these ancient people created — textiles, metal work, pottery, and other
kinds of art, as well as respect the fact that they could found a civilization
against harsh natural elements. But the ugly truths aren't and
shouldn't be papered over.
The mass murder practiced by the Chimú pretty well kills the
leftist romance about ancient peoples being culturally superior by the
standards we insist on living by. No, not all cultures are
equal. Romanticizing some past ones as somehow better, superior,
more wonderful in all ways than the way we live now is gone there on that
bone heap found in northern Peru.
