On 12/22/2015 1:18 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 8:21 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
It wasn't their land either until they conquered whoever was there
before them.
"Their" in the sense of being born there, and having some culture
develop organically.
Incidentally, you might like this:
https://vimeo.com/50531435
The "prime directive" was to not interfere in another
culture...it didn't say anything about replacing it.
Fuck, you must have been listening to too many political debates.
Either that or you became a lawyer.
Should the Spaniards have "respected" the human sacrifice
religions of the Aztecs.
Perhaps, but I don't hold discovery-era Spaniard to modern standards.
So you're saying that by modern standards they should have obeyed the
prime directive and not interfered?
Their civilization was much less advanced.
Although it was more advanced than Hawiian culuture which still buried a
slave under each corner post of the king's palace.
Surely they could have respected the historical and anthropological
value of Aztec temples, instead of burning everything down to extract
the gold. By today's standard.
In realty, 16th century Spaniards couldn't give a rat's ass about
human rights.
I don't know how you know that, but from their contemporary writings
they were appalled at daily sacrifice of slaves and flaying captives
alive as religious ceremony.
It's just that the Aztecs were worshiping the wrong deity (which is to
say, they bowed to the wrong power structure). And the Spaniards
really wanted their stuff -- the land and natural resources.
Were we wrong to interfere in the Nazi culture of killing Jews and
Gypsies?
Not at all, and there was no Nazi culture.
Sure there was: Wagner. Heroic Aryan legends. The Crusades.
Anti-semitism going back to Martin Luther. There was even a distinctive
German physics going back to WW1.
There was an attempt by a charismatic leader to derail existing
culture, taking advantage of post WWI German defeat and humiliation.
Do we have so little confidence in our own culture that we can't
tell superstition from reason?
I never said one couldn't or shouldn't tell superstition from reason.
What I am saying is that you cannot bomb a population into reason (or
replace a government, or perform financial warfare or whatever...)
I have so much confidence in our culture that I believe we can lead by
example.
And the right example would have been to tell the Hawiians that their
gods wanted the telescope.
Brent
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