The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (9 page)
Read The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment Online
Authors: Chael Sonnen
b) It was just lying on the ground in piles, like shiny anthills.
c) To paraphrase my mom when she deftly countered my frequent requests for money, candy, toys, or Pet Shop Boys vinyl albums for the millionth time, “Do you think it just grew on trees?”
d) It came in with the tide, and was then collected in whicker baskets by happy, singing, topless women.
e) None of the above.
You know the answer as well as I do, kids. This is how all that gold was obtained, broken down step-by-step:
1. Someone had to go out and find it.
2. Then someone had to go out and dig it out of the earth.
3. Then someone had to separate it from the dirt, rocks, and filth that encased it.
4. Then someone had to melt it down, refine it, and make it pure.
5. Finally, someone had to shape it into the phallic symbols South American Indians treasure so highly.
Not easy work. People generally don’t volunteer to do it. They have to be … well …
forced
to do it. They have to be made aware that their options are limited to:
a) Provide the rulers with gold.
b) Die.
This is, interestingly enough, not altogether dissimilar from the options the Spaniards presented to those two sick serial killers, those two mass murderers, Moctezuma II and Athahualpa, when they showed up to Mexico and Peru. Granted, it doesn’t make it
any more right
, but it was certainly
no more wrong
than what was already going on.
You don’t have to take my word for this, kids. You don’t even have to read the contemporary accounts of Prescott, Cortez, or Pizarro (the leaders of the Spanish expeditions of commerce, conversion, and cultural exchange in Mexico and Peru). You can go to Mexico and Peru and see
clear, incontrovertible evidence
of the gruesome goings-on pre-Spanish-contact, written and chiseled into stone in the
very hand
of the Native Americans who committed the atrocities. I warned you that traveling would be involved in this book, and now I am pulling that ace. Pack your bags, hop on a plane to one of these countries, and look at the walls on the temples still standing. Look at the paintings. You will see a clear, legitimate, cultural history of monoculture, monarchical inhumanity, mass murder, dismemberment, rape, infanticide, human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, extinction, and virtually every variety of human carnage and suffering that can possibly be imagined, and then enacted.
That’s the pattern, the norm, the baseline. And there is no spike on the graph of niceness, friendship, collegiality, forgiveness, or peace. There is a constant, grinding, irredeemable horror that permeates the cultures of the Americas prior to European contact, and it winds its way through the centuries with a grim, immovable rigor.
How in God’s name do you think Cortez or Pizarro, with fewer than two hundred men each, conquered empires with huge standing armies and populations in the millions? The men under Cortez’s and Pizarro’s command were not even professional soldiers. In fact, many of them had no military training at all. It’s not like Ferdinand and Isabella sent the Best and Brightest, the Flowers of the Soldiery, fresh from the Moors, to handle the grumpy natives of the New World. So just how did they do it? Do you think they had flying suits like Tony Stark in
Iron Man
? They had some horses, yes. And they had some guns. But they did not have many of either, and certainly not enough to make even a slight dent in the empire of either the Aztecs of Incans. But they showed up, and within a few years they
took over
. How?