80,400 people were killed in Mexico. This was in 1487, when a temple was consecrated by the Aztecs. We are talking about human sacrifice. For four days, an average of 14 people per minute were killed, which exceeds Auschwitz death camp at its peak.
250,000 people per year were killed in central Mexico. And the Aztecs were not the only ones who performed human sacrifice in the Americas.
In Europe we had witch hunts, and sacrificed thousands of innocent women. But we Europeans were also preeminent in arranging wars, culminating in the loveliest of them all, the Great War in 1914-1918, when young men were forced up above the trenches and mowed down by machine gun fire from the other side. Then the next batch. And the next. 1.5 million people were executed in this excellent way just at the Battle of the Somme.
Why all these victims? Because you can spend when you have a surplus. And the surplus comes about when you produce a lot of food, maize in the Americas, wheat in Europe, rice in Asia. Cultivation gave rise to throngs of people. In Africa, circumstances prevented a large surplus of human capital.
In Asia, war has also been used to trim the population. After Genghis Khan’s depredations China’s population had declined from 50 million to 8.5 million. In Asia, a large proportion of the population also were monks and nuns. In Tibet, perhaps a third of the male population were monks, which was also the case in Mongolia in the 1920s. These people were separated from society and forbidden to produce children, so in principle they were seen as dead.
All older civilizations have known what to do with surplus human capital. But we don’t anymore. War is “good for absolutely nothing”, human sacrifice is not politically correct according to the namby-pamby socialist elite, and the left has forbidden us to practice religion.
This is what I think of when I see riots in England. We get all kinds of unrest on the streets when we don’t trim the population. And for these unnecessary people the rioting may simply be taken as an alternative, convenient way to shop, as Zygmunt Bauman so succinctly puts it.
We should also remember that the ancient societies of the Americas, Asia and Europe were relatively stable, precisely thanks to the excess that was regularly removed. There were no stone-throwing mobs in the Aztec capital – the yob’s skin would likely have been stripped off and worn for 20 days by a priest.
“Bloody hell, let’s not riot or the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre priests will get their hands on us!” Give me that old time religion, it’s good enough for me.
We must realize that our ancestors knew a thing or two after all. You just have to find a trimming method that can be gulped down by today’s pampered effeminate milksop population.
William Von Pamp