Re: [Marxism] Debunking Third World myths

[Shane Mage <shmage@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Feb 20, 2009, at 11:10 PM, Paula wrote:
>>  it is also a fact that their ancestors
>> enjoyed a better diet and more leisure time on average five hundred
>> years ago.
> My guess is that the majority of Mexicans today would not want to go  
> back to pre-conquest times, and for very good reasons. For example,  
> a significant
> amount of leisure time in those days went into religious festivals  
> that
> included horrific human sacrifices. Modern forms of leisure such as
> television aren't always very exciting, but they are far more  
> civilized.


Don't sneer at the Meso-Americans.  They were civilized long before  
the Europeans were.  Their apotropaic sacrificial rituals,  dating  
from a time close to the catastrophes that persuaded the whole human  
race that the gods were bloodthirsty,
were appropriate to the peril of mass destruction that inspired them  
and so escaped the danger of internalization--unlike the Christian and  
other monotheistic religions which, by incessant commemoration or  
repetition of sublimized forms of human sacrifice like the  
cannibalistic Eucharist,  ever and always reinforce the violence at  
the origin of all apotropaic rituals, resulting in the Eastern (from a  
Meso-American viewpoint) world's *truly* horrific history of religious  
wars, inquisitions, massacres, and suicide bombings.

Shane Mage

> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos

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