The West didn't colonize. It civilized

Every four years, the World Cup comes around and Americans become interested in soccer until the men’s team loses. Then it is back to football. There is women’s soccer, too, but it attracts little interest, in large part because it is woke.

The rest of the world is soccer mad because it is three minutes of action packed into three hours of drinking beer. Americans have baseball for that.

Soccer also has a political side, which Alain Destexhe of the Gatestone Institute explored in this year’s celebration in Belgium — the de facto capital of Europe. The cheering was raucous and illuminating.

Destexhe wrote, “Violent clashes took place in Belgium after the Morocco-Belgium football match during the World Cup in Qatar.

“Riots took place in Brussels, Antwerp and Liege, where a police station was attacked by about 50 youths, and also in several cities in the Netherlands. Beyond these incidents, the popular jubilation in the predominantly Moroccan neighborhoods of Brussels, especially in Molenbeek, revealed that in these areas, the Moroccan identity has remained much stronger than the Belgian one, even though most of the inhabitants have dual nationality.

“One would have to be blind and trying to fit reality into the ideology of living together at all costs not to see that the sympathies of Moroccans in Belgium were with the Moroccan team and not with the team of their second homeland. Some journalists tried to do so, with headlines like ‘No matter who wins between Belgium and Morocco, it will be a party.’”

The colonizers have become the colonized due to the suicidal immigration policies of modern Europe. A continent that repeatedly fought and repelled Muslim invasions (the Battle of Tours in 732, the Siege of Vienna in 1529, and the Battle of Vienna in 1683) has rolled out the welcome mat to men who have no intention and no desire to assimilate. They are exempted from traditions that date back thousands of years

Destexhe wrote, “While the slaughter of animals without first stunning them is forbidden in Flanders and Wallonia, the Muslim lobby in the Brussels Parliament has succeeded in blocking a legislative proposal in that direction. During trials or elections, it is common to see women arriving with their husbands, and explaining that they cannot be retained as jurors or assessors because they do not speak any of Belgium's official languages, thus attesting to a completely failed policy of integration. The vivre ensemble (live together) praised by the Belgian political world is a myth, with communities living side by side but not mixing with each other. Moroccans marry Moroccan women and Turks marry Turkish women, whom they often bring over from their native country. Family reunification is now the primary source of immigration in Belgium, as in France.”

The West conquered the world and brought advanced technology and prosperity. Compare and contrast those isolated tribes in the Amazon to how Brazilians live. It is no contest. Natives are better off thanks to the West.

Consider Mexico.

On April 21, 2021, Reuters said, “Claims that the Aztecs or the Mexica sacrificed their own leaders have no basis, experts say. A popular allegation online says they did so in times of pandemic or famine, but there is no evidence that they sacrificed their leaders at all or that they immolated anyone in times of disease.”

The wire service also said, “There is no historical evidence supporting the claim that Mesoamerican empires sacrificed their own leaders or that sacrifices more broadly were carried out to counter epidemics.”

That is a sly way of obscuring the fact that Aztecs indeed engaged in human sacrifice on a scale that boggles the mind. They indeed did no sacrifice their leaders. They sacrificed their enemies. In Paragraph 7, Reuters mentioned that, oh by the way, they sacrificed war-captures, but never their own people.

That is like saying the Nazis were OK because they exterminated Jews and gypsies, not Germans. Well, at least not healthy ones.

Reuters’s bizarre fact-check also fit the lefty narrative that sure, there were sacrifices, but Catholic priests exaggerated the numbers.

History on the Net reported this month, “Human sacrifices Aztecs were a part of their religious ceremony that they believed properly appeased their gods to spare them from suffering. The numbers of people sacrificed by the Aztecs is a mystery today and will probably remain a mystery, unless more archeological evidence is uncovered. Whether only a few thousand of victims were sacrificed each year, or 250,000 as some scholars say, few human remains such as bones have been found at Templo Mayor or other Aztec temples. A couple of dozen skeletons and a few thousand loose bones and skulls do not add up to 250,000 or 20,000 or whatever number is cited.

“Evidence of human sacrifices comes from both the Aztecs themselves, their art and codices containing their writings, and from the Spanish conquerors. However, it is safe to say that the Spanish could easily have exaggerated the numbers killed to make the Aztecs seem more savage and brutal than they actually were.”

However, physical evidence now supports the recordings of those Catholic priests.

This month, Science.org reported, "Some conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. But historians and archaeologists knew the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexica culture. As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether the tzompantli had ever existed.

“Archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City can now say with certainty that it did. Beginning in 2015, they discovered and excavated the remains of the skull rack and one of the towers underneath a colonial period house on the street that runs behind Mexico City's cathedral. (The other tower, they suspect, lies under the cathedral's back courtyard.) The scale of the rack and tower suggests they held thousands of skulls, testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world. Now, archaeologists are beginning to study the skulls in detail, hoping to learn more about Mexica rituals and the postmortem treatment of the bodies of the sacrificed. The researchers also wonder who the victims were, where they lived, and what their lives were like before they ended up marked for a brutal death at the Templo Mayor.”

130,000 skulls.

Aztec human sacrifices were not about crops or weather or religion. The sacrifices were about power because the intent was to stroke fear in any or all who would oppose the empire.

Those skulls are why Hernándo Cortés and Spanish conquistadors captured Tenochtitlán in two years, leveled it and built Mexico City atop it. War-capture, as Reuters so delicately put it, turned other native tribes against the Aztecs. With a small band of men, Cortés worked with Indians opposed to the Aztecs to bring the empire down. They encircled the capital.

The History Channel reported, “With Tenochtitlán encircled, the conquistadors relied on their Indigenous allies for key logistical support and launched attacks from local Indigenous encampments. Meanwhile, another factor began to take its toll. Unbeknownst to the Spanish, some among their ranks had been infected with smallpox when they had departed Europe. Once these men arrived in the Americas, the virus began to spread—both among their indigenous allies and the Aztecs. (Some research has suggested that salmonella, not smallpox, had weakened the Aztecs.)”

Disease spared the conquerors.

The History Channel said, “Spaniards and their allies were taken in as prisoners (the Aztecs tended to hold captured prisoners for sacrifice to the gods, rather than kill them in battle) and traces of the virus were left on the clothes, hair and on the dead bodies of those who had had the disease. As Tenochtitlán residents contracted smallpox they had no place to turn for help. Aztec priests and medicinal practitioners knew of no remedy and Tenochtitlán residents had little immunity.”

Bringing the conquistadors to the city was a mistake. The smallpox (salmonella) epidemic allowed them to take over the city and end the Aztec empire.

Under Spanish rule, slavery continued and the most of the Aztecs — now called Mexicans — remained poor. But the blood sacrifices ended. The Spaniards brought technology and Catholicism, a revolutionary religion that taught people that there is an afterlife, bringing hope to the people. Mexican independence ended slavery beginning in 1821.

This was repeated throughout Central and South America by the Spanish. Other European powers conquered other nations across the world. The British gave Indfia, the United States and places like Kenya the foundation for Western-style democracies that replaced dictatorships, or in the case of the USA established as a first government.

Yes, there was slavery, particularly in Africa. But slavery had always been there. The British did not hunt down Africans to enslave. They simply bought them from African kings. For a few centuries, Ghana was one of the richest nations on Earth thanks to its role in the slave trade.

Sandra Greene is an African-American history scholar at Cornell. She studied at the University of Ghana and is well-versed in the subject. African kings sold 12 million slaves to Europeans over 400 years, according to Greene. Millions more were retained in Africa.

Greene said, “It’s not something that many West African countries talk about.”

Slavery was different in Mother Africa.

She said, “They didn’t have racial slavery. The distinction was, and is, by kinship. People there are very clear about an individual’s background, and they retain oral records of who is who within a family. In some families slave origins still matter, even today.”

According to Greene, courts in Ghana ruled that descendants of slaves to not enjoy the full rights of those whose ancestors owned slaves. Reparations? Don’t make me laugh.

But there are nations that are giving reparations. Europeans have foolishly opened their doors to the nations they colonized. The migrants want to colonize Europe, as witnessed by the Moroccans rioting in Belgium to celebrate their country defeating Belgium in soccer.

Kick them out. They do not come to civilize. They do not come to assimilate. They come to destroy.