Comment by nkoren | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nkoren | Hacker News Reader

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The destruction of those codixes is, without a doubt, one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in history. Absolutely tragic.

At the same time, I've read a bit more about that incident, and... this is probably not politically correct to say, but I did develop some sympathy for that bishop. Yes, he was a religious zealot who couldn't distinguish other cultures from "satanism". But also, well, the Maya were in a pretty rough state when he encountered them. They'd been experiencing severe drought and civil war and plagues brought by the Europeans and more. Their way of dealing with this was mass human sacrifice. The Maya didn't have a sacrificial-industrial complex the way that the Aztecs did, but when nothing else would appease the gods, that's what they'd do.

So anyhow, the Bishop had apparently witnessed a mass human sacrifice. Of children. And it really got to him, convincing him that their religion was strictly satanic. Given his own cultural frame, and what he witnessed, it's hard for me to say that I would have done any differently under the circumstances. That would've gotten under my skin too. Hard to say I would've kept perspective after that.

That's a pretty fair stance. I've actually been to Southern Mexico where their descendants live today. Even today, to my American frame, the indigenous people are strange. But that's what drew me to check out some of their villages.

I highly recommend these places out! Their churches which mix Catholicism with their own believes are very far out.

You don't even need to go to Southern Mexico for that. There's a small enclave town in Phoenix, Arizona, called Guadalupe. It's a Mexican / native community. In the centre of town, there's a public square flanked by two Catholic churches.[1] One is a very traditional Catholic church. The other is a syncretic church which (according to people I knew in the community) mixed in many elements of Yaqui spirituality.

The survival of native spirituality, even within syncretic religion, is always somehow reassuring to me, given how much cultural vandalism occurred during the colonisation of the Americas.

1: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.3690036,-111.9644457,3a,15.4...

You have a point, even today I would consider the mass sacrifice of children to be “satanic” if I believed in the concept.

> Given his own cultural frame, and what he witnessed

This type of fashionable moral relativism can be used to justify any atrocity. From an objective point of view, he could've stopped the child sacrifices without committing genocide, both cultural and literal. Sure, it may be that from his perspective that the genocide was necessary, but that is the case for every perpetrator of genocide in history. I take it that many in this forum feel no connection to the Maya people, and are therefore comfortable empathizing with their abusers. I have seen your exact same logic used to express sympathy for the Nazis by people who have no personal connection to the West. If that bothers you then you should reconsider your perspective on what happened to the Mayans.

You’re mixing cultural genocide with actual genocide.

Going from the other direction, if all information on Nazi ideology where removed from history, would we have Neo Nazis today? That may seem abhorrent and or impossible, but other ideologies have been erased from history and outside of the academic context that could be a net positive.

Ideology’s that promote ritual human sacrifice could be inherently dangerous by attracting a tiny number of people to actually carry through with such acts. Diverse cultural history has real value, but those cultures can come with heavy baggage.

> You’re mixing cultural genocide with actual genocide.

The Spanish conquest of the New World was undeniably a genocide in the literal mass murder sense. In a sense it was a continuation of the same genocide against Muslims and Jews that the Spanish committed during the Reconquista. However you want to categorize what he and other Spaniards did, it was undeniably and objectively morally wrong.

> Going from the other direction, if all information on Nazi ideology where removed from history, would we have Neo Nazis today?

Your analogy does not hold, the equivalent to de Landa's actions would be to destroy the entire Western canon and any written trace of the German language in response to the Holocaust. From your comments you seem to treat the entirety of Maya culture as atomic and inseperable from human sacrifice, while conversely you have conveniently seperated out Nazism from the whole of German culture. This double standard where the faults of Western cultures are treated as redeemable while the faults of other cultures are treated as immutable traits inherent to that culture is what led to de Landa's actions in the first place.

An individual priest did a specific thing which is separate from an actual genocide that took place. He could have just as easily done something else which would not have impacted the genocide. It’s simply sloppy thinking to associate them.

Maya culture is a sub set of South American cultures. So, the scope is narrower than your suggesting. Still let’s go with removing all of Germanic culture and language, the point still stands.

Fine, an individual priest committed cultural genocide and torture. It's still morally wrong and indefensible.

It's even sloppier thinking to somehow justify this by treating one small aspect of a culture as immutable and inherent to the whole of that culture, while hypocritically not doing the same for a culture you're more familiar with.

EDIT: GP added a second paragraph.

> Maya culture is a sub set of South American cultures. So, the scope is narrower than your suggesting. Still let’s go with removing all of Germanic culture and language, the point still stands

You have no point. Nazism has been removed without the destruction of German culture and language, human sacrifice could've been removed without the destruction of Mayan culture.

And no, the scope is not narrower. Mayan culture has as about as much in common with other South American cultures like the Inca as Western culture has to do with East-Asian culture.

We are talking about a continuation of a huge line of the same thing that happened in Europe of thousands of years. It’s not really a question foreign cultures, just the clash between different cultures.

> Nazism has been removed without the destruction of German culture and language

Nope, you can still read Mein Kampf today and many still believe in it.

> We are talking about a continuation of a huge line of the same thing that happened in Europe of thousands of years. It’s not really a question foreign cultures, just the clash between different cultures.

I'm not really sure what you're referring to by "the same thing", but if you're referring to the cultural genocide committed against pagans in Europe by Christians, then ironically that helped fuel the type of German nationalism that gave rise to Nazism. The Nazis famously used the Massacre of Verden committed by Charlemagne against the Saxons as historical justification for their ideology[0].

> Nope, you can still read Mein Kampf today and many still believe in it.

Nazism is not practiced to any significant extent, unless you want to argue that the existence of neo-Nazis warrants the destruction of all Germanic languages.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Verden

I am referring to the likely thousands of local religions that unlike say classical Greek myths we have zero direct evidence of. Looking back to say 2000 BCE cultures survived or died out more often than not through direct military action. The deaths of most oral traditions was through conquest, enslavement of the population, and spreading the remnants across an empire.

> unless you want to argue that the existence of neo-Nazis warrants the destruction of all Germanic languages.

It’s at least a trade worth considering. Was say southern culture in the US worth preserving after the civil war? I am not suggesting an answer just framing the question. Edit: To do otherwise is to presume the answer without consideration.

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