In the west, we are constantly told that we must apologize for our history and tear down the statues and monuments of our historical heroes. The pioneers who built our civilization must all be posthumously indicted for their alleged crimes and we must spit on their graves and express no admiration for their achievements. Only white western countries are required to be so ashamed of their past. It is not expected of anyone else. I think this attitude is nonsense, and disgraceful, and I want to explain why.
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If you were watching the show yesterday, you know that I started the show by kind of bragging a little bit about my globe here.
And for good reason, because a globe, when you add a globe into the situation, it immediately makes everything classier and more professional and more intelligent.
So even though I don't have a real studio or a real set, I do have the globe.
And the point that I made was, well, yeah, the other guys at the Daily Wire, they've got a studio, they've got a set.
They don't have a globe, though, do they?
So who really has the most professional show at The Daily Wire?
That was my argument anyway.
But after the show, a lot of people informed me that actually Klavan does have a globe on his set.
I never noticed it before, but I went back and I watched.
And yeah, there is kind of off in the corner.
It's not displayed prominently like my globe, but he does have a globe.
So this is what I'm going to do.
I didn't want to have to do this, but I'm going to add a second globe.
And so now I have the most globes, both in terms of globe quantity and also total globage volume.
And if it's really necessary for me to pull out the big guns, and I'm kind of hesitant here, because I don't mean to show off, but if I really need to, I also have this.
And I could do the entire show with this globe as well.
And what would look more professional or more intelligent than that?
But I won't.
I won't yet. Unless it's really necessary.
Now, these globes are kind of relevant to what I want to talk about.
And before I get into the real subject, in all seriousness, I should add a little bit of a parental disclaimer, parental advisory.
If you're watching this or listening to this and you have little kids around, you may want to pause it and come back to it because we're going to talk about some things that are a bit graphic and upsetting, but also necessary in order for me to make the point that I want to make.
So Ben Shapiro wrote a piece yesterday for the Daily Wire, taking note of a report which was published in Science Magazine, and the report yet again reveals the unbelievable scale of human sacrifice and barbarity among the ancient Aztecs.
And Shapiro was using this to make the point that we tend to romanticize foreign cultures, especially Native American cultures.
And in the process, when we're romanticizing them, we kind of tend to ignore just the sheer savagery that was, and in some cases still is, so common in certain cultures.
What Shapiro was really, the point he was really making, is that this kind of cultural Equivalency that we do, where we say, well, all cultures are equal, you can't judge any cultures, no culture is better than any other culture.
That is clearly not the case, as evidenced by the human sacrifices among the Aztecs.
The Spanish culture, the Spanish who conquered the Aztecs, their culture and their civilization was clearly better than the Aztec culture.
And this is me talking now, not Ben.
The Spanish culture was superior in every way.
Now, when I say superior, that is not a racial designation.
It's got nothing to do with race.
It's superior because it was superior in terms of its scientific achievements, its artistic achievements, even its philosophical and political achievements.
Yeah, the Aztecs had big cities and they had big temples that they built.
They even had some artwork, although their art was largely hideous and grotesque and terrifying.
But they had all that stuff.
But they had not advanced anywhere near as far as the Europeans had.
But when I say that the Spanish civilization was a superior civilization, I mean primarily morally.
It was a morally superior civilization.
The Spanish weren't perfect by any means, and they practiced slavery.
But then again, every single civilization in the world in the 16th century practiced slavery, so that's not much of a surprise.
None of that compares to the Aztecs, though.
The Aztecs would build these great temples where ritual human sacrifices would occur with a brutality and in a volume that is just incomprehensible.
Some historians estimate that the Aztecs sacrificed up to 50,000 human beings a year.
Keep in mind, there are only about 4 or 5 million people living in Aztec territory.
So that means that they would have sacrificed about 1% of their total population on an annual basis.
That is an astronomical figure.
And when I say sacrifice, we should understand what that means.
What it means is that they would take the offering up to the top of a pyramid.
They would put them down on a slab.
A priest would plunge a knife into the chest of the person.
And cut a big hole, reach his hand in, and while the person is still alive, rip out his beating heart.
And then they would cut off his head and his limbs, his torso would be rolled down the steps, and then his limbs would oftentimes be ritualistically consumed by the other Aztec priests.
There was a period of about four days when the Aztecs were coronating a new temple that they had just built, where they carried out this process with 80,000 people.
In four days, they sacrificed 80,000 people in four days.
And they would furnish themselves with sacrifices, mainly by conquering and subjugating neighboring tribes.
So when you hear about how the Europeans showed up and they stole land and they did all this, well, the Aztecs, like many other Indian civilizations, The land that they possess, they had themselves stolen it.
And when the Aztecs stole your land, they didn't just steal your land.
They would then start taking your people and bringing them to the top of a temple and ripping out their hearts.
That's what the Aztecs would do.
In fact, if you're curious about how the...
And that's how Aztecs treated...
Their own people and other Indians.
If you're curious about how the Aztecs treated the Spanish, I'll just briefly read a passage.
This is a book called Cortez about the clash of civilizations between the Spanish and the Aztecs by Richard Lee Marx.
It's a great book. I recommend reading it.
It's non-biased.
It's a very objective book. But here's just a quick passage.
So this is later on in the book after the fighting had begun between the Spanish and the Aztecs.
Up until this point, the Spanish had Been relatively merciful toward the Aztecs.
But then some Spanish were caught by the Aztecs.
They were prisoners of war.
And while the other Spanish soldiers stood off at a far distance, a few miles away, watching this, this is what happened to the Spanish prisoners.
They were all taken.
They were stripped naked. They were brought to the pyramid, to the temple.
They were brought up the steps. They were forced to dance naked in front of the demonic idols of the Aztecs.
And then here's what happened.
After an hour, this is an hour of dancing, of these prisoners dancing naked.
After an hour, a high priest signaled and the dancing was terminated.
though the beating of the drum and the jangling of the bells and tambourines continued.
Aztec priests rushed forward and took back from the dancers their headdresses and plumes.
Then the first victim was pulled to the sacrifice stone, thrown down on his back, and held spread eagle. The high priest came forward, held above his head the flint knife, and drove it into the victim's chest. He then cut across the ribs and, plunging his hand into the chest cavity, tore loose the beating heart. The priest held aloft the Spaniard's heart, with its few final spasms gushed blood that fell on the priest's face, while a din of shrieking rose from the other people, the
other Indians who were watching this.
The other priest took the heart into the temple, placed it before the idols, while others systematically cut off the victim's head, arms, and legs, and disdainfully rolled the split-open torso to the top of the steps with a few kicks sent it downward.
And then this was repeated for all the victims.
Now, as I said, up until that point, the Spanish had been relatively merciful towards the Aztecs, but now they're watching this take place.
And this, again, this is just barbarity and savagery that the Europeans had never encountered before.
They couldn't even conceive of it.
And they're watching this happening, and now their policy of being relatively merciful, well, that was out the window.
And I think understandably so.
They realize that, okay, if we're going to beat these people, we're going to have to be pretty brutal about it.
Now, the significance of this report in Science Magazine, which cites new archaeological evidence, is that it corroborates the testimony from the Spanish themselves.
The Spanish told stories of finding these temples stacked with human skulls, like thousands of human skulls that have been stacked and were being displayed like trophies.
And no one's ever doubted that these sacrifices took place.
That's a matter of historical record.
But some for a long time have tried to argue that the Spanish exaggerated the scale of it.
Well, we now have the remains of these giant skull racks And so it's pretty clear that the Spanish did not exaggerate.
I think we can glean two important things from all this.
Number one, it's what Ben argued is correct, that not all cultures are equal.
The Aztecs were clearly a more brutal, more savage, more, frankly, evil culture.
And if it was a white civilization doing this, if it was a white civilization enslaving thousands of people and ripping their hearts out and eating them, everybody would agree that that's a country that needs to be invaded and the ruling forces need to be toppled aggressively.
But in this case, we kind of see it as some kind of travesty that this brutal regime was toppled just because of the racial dynamics at play.
And by the way, when Cortes launched his final siege of the capital city, what is now Mexico City, it's true that ultimately the entire city was destroyed and almost every inhabitant was slaughtered.
But most of the wholesale slaughter did not happen on the part of the Spanish.
It was on the part of the Indian allies of the Spanish, who had been oppressed for years by the Aztecs, and so they wanted vengeance.
And so the other Indians went into the, you know, they went in with the Spanish and they started pulling men, women, and children out of their homes and just slaughtering them in the streets.
But here's the second thing that we can glean from all this.
It's okay for us in the West to admire and honor the great men who built our civilization.
Men like Cortez, for instance.
They were flawed.
You know, they certainly were flawed.
And Europeans were guilty of atrocities of their own.
But nobody tells Native Americans that they can't be proud of their heritage.
Nobody tells them that.
Even though in the case of the Aztecs and many other Indian civilizations, they were guilty of just barbaric atrocities.
But no one tells Native Americans you can't be proud of your past and you can't have your own heroes that you look to.
By the way, the Mayans also practiced human sacrifice.
In fact, archaeologists recently uncovered in Mayan territory a mass grave of toddlers who had been sacrificed.
The Incas down in South America, around the same time, they were also avid human sacrificers.
They would take children, fatten them up, Lead them to the top of a mountain and then strangle them to death or leave them there to die of exposure in the cold.
And the Mayans, Incas, Aztecs, these were the three major Indian civilizations throughout Central and South America.
All of them were unspeakably brutal, yet we don't indict them for it.
And we don't say that those who have that heritage shouldn't be proud of it.
But this is how it goes. Every non-Western, non-white country is allowed to celebrate its history, allowed to celebrate its heritage.
They're allowed to celebrate the great men and women who helped build their civilizations, even if those men and women are guilty of terrible things, and even if they also stole land and enslaved and did all those things.
I mean, you could go to Mongolia and find monuments to Genghis Khan.
Genghis Khan raped half the women in Asia.
I mean, Genghis Khan just went throughout Asia enslaving, conquering, and raping.
That was his entire career.
Yet they build monuments to him, and nobody would ever even dream of telling a Mongolian that you shouldn't look up to Genghis Khan, even though Genghis Khan was a horrible person.
Yet In the West, we're supposed to hold our heroes and our pioneers to this impossibly high standard.
And if they committed any crime, if they were guilty of any sin, even if it was a sin utterly common to their time and shared by almost everyone of all races, like slavery, well, in that case, we're supposed to tear down their monuments and spit on their graves.
That's only in the West.
We don't expect anyone else to do that.
It's only in our civilization, in our culture, that we're required to do that.
Take Columbus as another example.
Columbus. You know, our treatment of Columbus in modern times is just disgraceful and utterly stupid.
Columbus was a great man.
A great, great man.
Who achieved something spectacular, achieved something earth-shattering, world-changing.
He achieved something far more significant than anything you will ever in your life achieve, or me.
Will never even come close to doing what Columbus did.
And yet now we treat him with contempt.
And we focus, oh no, this is the bad thing that he did.
Look at these bad things.
Dumbest of all, people will go, you know, this is the stupidest thing when people say, well, Columbus didn't even mean to discover America, and he never set foot on North America, and the Vikings got there first.
What an idiot Columbus was.
He didn't even mean to. Yeah, those are nice little tidbits of information that you acquired from Facebook memes, but they're not relevant to anything.
Of course Columbus didn't mean to discover America.
Nobody knew that America existed.
How could they? No one knew it was there.
No one had seen it. And if, that's if the Vikings did stumble upon Newfoundland at some point centuries prior, they didn't establish a lasting colony, they didn't continue their exploration, they didn't understand the significance of their discovery, or leave clear records of it.
So, as far as Europe knew, in 1492, the world consisted of one giant landmass and a huge ocean separating one side from the other.
That's as far as anyone knew.
How could anyone know differently?
Somebody had to get in a ship and sail across this unknown body of water to find out what was on the other side.
Because it's not like anybody out west was going to get in a ship and go that way.
The Aztecs and the Mayans and the Incas, they weren't getting in ships and exploring anything.
So Columbus had to be the guy.
He didn't have satellites, okay?
Columbus navigated mostly with dead reckoning through completely uncharted waters.
He covered like 5,000 miles of uncharted ocean with nothing but dead.
You know what dead reckoning is?
That's like you figure out your last fixed point, so the last port where you were at, and you figure out based on mathematical calculations, and you come up with kind of an estimate of where you're headed.
But part of that calculation, you know what you need for that calculation?
You need to know how fast you're going.
Well, in 1492, how do you figure out how fast your ship is going?
Again, you don't have GPS. So you know what they had to do?
They called it heaving the log.
For us, we just check the speedometer, but for them, it was heaving the log.
And so that literally meant that they would take a piece of wood and they would throw it into the water and then just judge based on how long it takes for the wood to drift away from them.
From there, they'd extrapolate their speed.
And then they would factor that in with the last fixed point and the other calculations, and then they would figure out where they were going.
So using that method across unknown waters, Columbus managed to make it to the Caribbean and then make it back there three more times.
You want to try that? Okay, start in Spain with nothing but a compass and a piece of wood, get into a ship, and make your way to Cuba.
You think you can do it? Alive?
I think that's quite an achievement.
And you'd think that a bunch of people in modern society who can't even locate their local supermarket two and a half miles away without GPS, you'd think we'd be pretty impressed with Columbus.
Like, in order for you, if you wanted to go 10 miles down the road on a highway, you're going to be using your GPS, which is connected to a network of satellites in space.
I mean, you need a network of satellites in space communicating with your phone at the speed of light just to make it, you know, 50 blocks down the street.
So yeah, I think we should be pretty impressed with Columbus and the other explorers.
And what about the Indians that Columbus encountered?
Yeah, some of them were peaceful, but we've taken this image of the peaceful Indians to ridiculous lengths.
I mean, bear in mind, there was a tribe called the Caribs, and they reigned terror on the region where Columbus landed.
These were brutal and violent people who regularly feasted on human beings.
This, again, is a concept utterly foreign to Europeans.
The idea of eating other people, And this was not uncommon among Indian tribes.
Now, on his first voyage, Columbus never encountered any Caribs, but he heard about them.
And then he encountered them on his second voyage.
Here's something they don't teach you in school.
Columbus actually tried to free, actually did free, a number of Indian captives that the Caribs were preparing to eat.
So in one village on an island where Columbus had stopped, The Spaniards, they found a young boy tied up in a cage, and he was being fattened for consumption.
And so when Columbus encountered stuff like that, he would oftentimes free the people.
So, you know, Columbus, he never governed with the savagery of an Aztec king or even a Carib chieftain, but he was a pretty bad governor in his own right, and he did take slaves.
He was a man of his time in that way.
And he was a pretty incompetent governor.
But we have to keep in mind, back in those days, if you were an explorer and a sea captain, you were expected to be, I mean, you had to be a navigator, a captain, an astronomer, a mathematician.
And then when you made it to your destination, you also had to be a politician and a governor and a king.
I mean, you had to be all of those things.
And very few of those men could do all of those things perfectly.
I don't think any man in the world could.
So I think all in all, it should be said that Columbus was brilliant on the sea, not so brilliant on land.
It's kind of a common dynamic.
Cortez was a great warrior.
When he conquered the Aztecs, he wasn't a very good governor afterwards.
Magellan was an incredible navigator who sailed the circumference of the globe, almost, but he got himself killed in an unnecessary battle with a tribe in the Philippines.
So, you know, he also had his flaws.
And Magellan, you know, Magellan's another guy that we now look to and we judge for his ruthlessness.
But you think about what he was up against.
He was looking for a passage so that he could sail all the way around the globe in the 1500s, again, without GPS, without anything.
And along the way, he had to deal with hostile tribes that he encountered.
He had to deal with starvation.
He had to deal with disease.
He had to deal with mutinies.
And so, yeah, he was a little bit brutal.
In fact, when he made it to South America and they decided to kind of camp out in a harbor, For winter, there was a mutiny took place.
And now, I mean, just think about Magellan.
He's got his ships.
He's on the other side of the world.
He's in this unknown wilderness.
He's thousands of miles away from any kind of authority.
And now he's got a mutiny on his hands.
So what does he do?
He brutally squashes the mutiny And he takes one of the mutineers as an example.
He has him executed, and he quarters him, which means he cuts off his limbs, and he puts his limbs on different parts of the ship as a warning to the others not to try that again.
Now, we can look at that and we can say, oh, that's just very bad.
You see? This is not a man that we can look up to or admire.
Well, again, let me ask you, how do you handle that?
You're thousands of miles away from any kind of help.
You're on this expedition.
Now you've got a mutiny on your hands and all your men are ganging up to take over the ship and kill you.
I mean, what do you do? How do you handle that?
So I think ultimately what we're left with, with, you know, a lot of our cultural heroes, we're left with this legacy of flawed men who are also responsible for some of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind.
And maybe you can look at them and say, well, I could have done that better.
I guarantee that you couldn't, but you could say that.
I know that I couldn't have done it any better.
But the real fact of the matter is you wouldn't have even tried.
You would not have gotten into a ship and said, all right, I'm going to sail that way across this body of water.
And I have no idea what's on the other side of it, or if there even is anything on the other side of it.
and we'll see what happens.
You wouldn't have even done that.
That takes courage.
I mean, that takes boldness.
That requires a visionary.
That requires a truly great man to do something like that.
And the only reason why we exist today, the only reason why our civilization exists, is that great men took great risks and did great things.
And yeah, I think we ought to look up to them and admire them and build statues to them and tell our children about them and honor them.
And I think it's a huge mistake.
When we start apologizing for and erasing our own history.
And it's also just a disgraceful way to treat these men who gave you everything.
I mean, the people that complain about Columbus, you're just sitting back on your butt, on the sofa, you know, eating a snack, watching TV, living off the fat of the land, living off of this civilization that wouldn't have existed without men like Columbus.
And you're just sitting there like, yeah, but you know what?
He did this and that wrong.
So, yeah, you know what?
I don't need that guy. There's a very good chance, you know, that if the Europeans had never come to the new world, They would still be ripping—you'd still have the Aztecs ripping out hearts, and you'd still have the Incas killing children as sacrifices to their gods.
I mean, there's a very good chance that that would still be happening if the Europeans hadn't shown up.
All right. Just going to move my globe there so you can see both of them.
Thanks for watching, everybody. Thanks for listening.
