Americans have just exited the multi-month season where the media and diligent foot soldiers of the left harass them about celebrating their heritage of discovering the continent and founding the nation. This is a season in the progressive calendar. This leads into the war on Christmas during December, which then flows into the MLK glorification in January that launches us into black history month in February. Starting in October, Columbus is criticized. Following up on this, Thanksgiving is turned into a denigration of the pilgrims who we formerly turned into our foundational myth for arriving, struggling but persevering in a harsh, new land. The growing Mexican contingent in America means the media and academia can condemn all conquistadors and glamorize all pre-Columbian tribes. This is textbook leftist inversion. It is also whitewashing of the current allies of the most devious sort.

Foundational myths are important. They tie a nation together as we share the story that exhibits specific traits and recounts deep within them the struggles that define us. The pilgrims and Plymouth Rock are an interesting choice. They arrived after the permanent Jamestown settlement and the heroic exploits of John Smith. The local Wampanoag that helped the pilgrims, Samoset, spoke very good English despite the pilgrims being the first in the new land they would call Massachusetts. The American left has been tearing down the origin story of America with nothing to replace it, thinking this is not required to maintain social cohesion. An example of poor national myth making is the New York Times 1619 Project, which only divides people, centers the American story around blacks, and cannot even get full academic support.

A recent addition to this tear down and willful ignorance game with the early days of the New World is the media’s obsession with describing the Aztecs as welcoming lords of the land, and expressing confusion as to what mountains of skulls may have meant or stating that the sacrificed were just warriors and giving life to the gods in neutral tones. Separated by two years, the authors cannot agree on how to frame the atrocities. Framing is important. Montezuma must be portrayed as the welcoming, nice lord who is attacked by the evil Europeans.

The Washington Post author understands readers would associate holy ground with something good but would not associate human sacrifice and displaying victims as good. By the 2019 NPR article, it is presented as just another gift to the good gods with a wave of the cultural relativism wand. The 2017 article is confused as to why they would display skulls on their holiest sites while the 2019 article frames the demonic sacrifices as giving life to the gods. The older article is more honest about who was being killed while the newer article writes it as warriors sacrificed. A resolution will occur for a unified portrayal of the heart ripping Aztecs to be whitewashed as shamans and rudimentary scholars eager to learn about chest cavities.

There is a solution to this that quickly cuts through the spin. It is important as to why the academics of today have course reading lists full of books written after 1980 and no primary sources. Let us check what Bernal Diaz wrote in “The Conquest of New Spain“. Diaz is very specific about tribes that engaged in cannibalism, sodomy and even caged men for fattening to make them better sacrifices. Diaz also details the constant warfare tribes engage in and how many tribes hated Montezuma for the taxation, the young sacrificial children sent to Montezuma’s imperial center and generally tyranny. It is obvious the tribes were a low who linked with a new potential high (the conquistadors) to upend the current power dynamic and their low status.

Montezuma is no welcoming lord. He did put on a good face for when Cortes and his men finally pressed their point. Before this appearance in the capitol, Cortes and his men were spied on and attacked by proxies of Montezuma under his orders. In an ambush attempt, Montezuma ordered for his representatives to “arrange with the people of the city that they should combine with an army of twenty thousand men, which he had sent and which was ready to enter Chlolula, to make an attack on us by night or day“. Please note that today’s writers state how the native allies were doing the heavy lifting. One must read this to understand just how out-manned Cortes’ crew was in hostile, alien land yet scored victories. Repeatedly, Cortes and his men fight against outlandish odds, win and then win their opponents over as allies due to their good fortune and fighting prowess. Everything under progressive rule must be framed for broader consumption within the narratve of native = good/honorable and European = bad/tricky.

Recounts of these towers of skulls, sacrifices and offerings are portrayed today as merely religious rituals that are just a different culture. The media will dance around the details. To understand why the tower of skulls and other religious rituals shocked the Spaniards, it is best to read what they witnessed.

There were smoking braziers of their incense, which they call copal, in which they were burning the hearts of three Indians whom they had sacrificed that day; and all the walls of that shrine were so splashed and caked with blood that they and the floor too were black. Indeed, the whole place stank abominably… The walls of this shrine also were so caked with blood and the floor so bathed in it that the stench was worse than that of any slaughter-house in Spain… Here too all was covered with blood, both walls and altar, and the stench was such that we could hardly wait to get out.

This is over just two pages. There is much more before and after this passage. Diaz describes the smells, sights and sounds of the rituals and general atmosphere. Drums are beaten, hearts are burnt and heads are decapitated and sometimes thrown at Spaniards during sieges.

These are the details of Aztec sacrifice. The conquest of Spain is framed as an evil perpetrated by the Spanish against the indigenous. This is rather odd considering the nation has a very large contingent of its population from both the Spanish and indigenous. Cortes started this himself with his son by La Malinche known as El Mestizo. It is true. The name for Cortes’ Mexican son is the moniker for the entire mixed population of modern day Mexico. Asking for an apology from Spain is like looking in the mirror, yelling, and pointing a finger.

These devious acts must be avoided. It is part and parcel for progressive rule. There is an echo of this. If you know the video sites or have seen the stills, these acts continue to this day. Catholicism is new in Mexican soil. It also has fewer parishes and priests than one would expect for a devoutly Catholic nation of its size. Mexico also experienced a communist revolution that had an anti-clerical streak as evident in its constitution that inspired the Bolsheviks. Something old bubbles up in the Mexican soul. Cartels decapitate en masse. Cartels take chainsaws to necks. The academics and journalists are doing their best to make sure people never look at history and at the people around them and ever infer the equivalence.