Ben Shapiro uses a report published in Science Magazine to prove that the Aztecs were no better than any other civilization in terms of their human sacrifice practices, and that they were even worse than the Spanish and the French.
00:00:00.000If you were watching the show yesterday, you know that I started the show by kind of bragging a little bit about my globe here.
00:00:08.720And 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.
00:00:18.560So even though I don't have a real studio or a real set, I do have the globe.
00:00:23.920And 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.
00:00:28.760They don't have a globe, though, do they?
00:00:31.680So who really has the most professional show at the Daily Wire?
00:01:30.520Now, these globes are kind of relevant to what I want to talk about.
00:01:33.000And before I get into the real subject, in all seriousness, I should add a little bit of a parental disclaimer, parental advisory.
00:01:39.860If 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,
00:01:48.140but also necessary in order for me to make the point that I want to make.
00:01:51.500So Ben Shapiro wrote a piece yesterday for The Daily Wire, taking note of a report which was published in Science Magazine.
00:01:59.680And the report yet again reveals the unbelievable scale of human sacrifice and barbarity among the ancient Aztecs.
00:02:10.400And Shapiro was using this to make the point that we tend to romanticize foreign cultures, especially Native American cultures.
00:02:18.980And 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.
00:02:31.840What 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.
00:03:12.520It's superior because it was superior in terms of its scientific achievements, its artistic achievements, even its philosophical and political achievements.
00:03:21.400Yeah, the Aztecs had big cities and they had big temples that they built.
00:03:26.160They even had some artwork, although their art was largely hideous and grotesque and terrifying.
00:03:59.960None of that compares to the Aztecs, though.
00:04:01.900The Aztecs would build these great temples where ritual human sacrifices would occur with a brutality and in a volume that is just incomprehensible.
00:04:15.300Some historians estimate that the Aztecs sacrificed up to 50,000 human beings a year.
00:04:22.180Keep in mind, there were only about 4 or 5 million people living in Aztec territory.
00:04:26.320So that means that they would have sacrificed about 1% of their total population on an annual basis.
00:09:13.180But some, for a long time, have tried to argue that the Spanish exaggerated the scale of it.
00:09:18.920Well, we now have the remains of these giant skull racks.
00:09:24.000And so it's pretty clear that the Spanish did not exaggerate.
00:09:28.560I think we can glean two important things from all this.
00:09:33.380Number one, it's what Ben argued is correct, that not all cultures are equal.
00:09:38.140The Aztecs were clearly a more brutal, more savage, more, frankly, evil culture.
00:09:45.460And if it was a white civilization doing this, if it was a white civilization enslaving thousands of people
00:09:52.100and ripping their hearts out and eating them, everybody would agree that that's a country that needs to be invaded,
00:10:00.300and the ruling forces need to be toppled aggressively.
00:10:05.160But 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.
00:10:13.980And by the way, when Cortes launched his final siege of the capital city, what is now Mexico City,
00:10:22.100it's true that ultimately the entire city was destroyed and almost every inhabitant was slaughtered.
00:10:27.480But most of the wholesale slaughter did not happen on the part of the Spanish.
00:10:31.440It was on the part of the Indian allies of the Spanish who had been oppressed for years by the Aztecs,
00:14:58.300And if, that's if the Vikings did stumble upon Newfoundland at some point centuries prior,
00:15:04.960they didn't establish a lasting colony.
00:15:07.000They didn't continue their exploration.
00:15:09.140They didn't understand the significance of their discovery or leave clear records of it.
00:15:13.620So as far as Europe knew in 1492, the world consisted of one giant landmass and a huge ocean in between, you know, separating one side from the other.
00:17:42.880I think that's quite an achievement, you know?
00:17:45.040And you'd think that a bunch of people in modern society who can't even locate their local supermarket
00:17:51.800two and a half miles away without GPS, you'd think we'd be pretty impressed with Columbus.
00:17:58.860Like, in order for you, if you wanted to go 10 miles down the road on a highway,
00:18:05.580you're going to be using your GPS, which is connected to a network of satellites in space.
00:18:10.160I mean, you need a network of satellites in space communicating with your phone at the speed of light
00:18:17.040just to make it, you know, 50 blocks down the street.
00:18:21.460So yeah, I think we should be pretty impressed with Columbus and the other explorers.
00:18:26.000And what about the Indians that Columbus encountered?
00:18:30.140Yeah, some of them were peaceful, but we've taken this image of the peaceful Indians to ridiculous lengths.
00:18:35.580I mean, bear in mind, there was a tribe called the Caribs, and they reigned terror on the region where Columbus landed.
00:18:43.420These were brutal and violent people who regularly feasted on human beings.
00:18:49.400This, again, is a concept utterly foreign to Europeans, the idea of eating other people.
00:18:56.260And this was not uncommon among Indian tribes.
00:19:00.020Now, on his first voyage, Columbus never encountered any Caribs, but he heard about them.
00:19:06.560And then he encountered them on his second voyage.
00:19:09.300Here's something they don't teach you in school.
00:19:11.980Columbus actually tried to free, actually did free, a number of Indian captives that the Caribs were preparing to eat.
00:19:20.280So 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.
00:19:34.300And so when Columbus encountered stuff like that, he would oftentimes free the people.
00:19:39.280So, 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.
00:19:53.440He was a man of his time in that way, and he was a pretty incompetent governor.
00:19:58.020But 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.
00:20:14.000And then when you made it to your destination, you also had to be a politician and a governor and a king.
00:20:19.080I mean, you had to be all of those things.
00:20:21.260And very few of those men could do all of those things perfectly.
00:20:24.980I don't think any man in the world could.
00:20:28.540So I think all in all, it should be said that Columbus was brilliant on the sea, not so brilliant on land.
00:23:47.780That requires a truly great man to do something like that.
00:23:52.440And 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.
00:24:07.080And 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.
00:24:16.940And I think it's a huge mistake when we start apologizing for and erasing our own history.
00:24:28.620And it's also just a disgraceful way to treat these men who gave you everything.
00:24:34.860I mean, the people that complain about Columbus, you're just sitting back on your butt, on the sofa, 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.
00:24:52.380And you're just sitting there like, yeah, but you know what?
00:24:57.820There'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.
00:25:09.180And you'd still have the Incas killing children as sacrifices to their gods.
00:25:13.620I mean, there's a very good chance that that would still be happening if the Europeans hadn't shown up.