Thread by @lynchauthor

Okay, fellow white people, we need to have a TALK.

Raise your hand if you learned about Ancient Egypt or Rome in grade school
👋 👋

Great.

But did you learn about the pyramids of Peru which were built 5,000 years ago? That’s BEFORE EGYPT. (1/?)

https://twitter.com/dragonempressen/status/1152664157931524096

Before the Egyptian pyramids, before STONEHENGE, complex civilizations in Peru and surrounding areas were building massive stone cities complete with amphitheater’s, courtyards, sacred alters, you name it.

They made textiles. They had irrigation systems. (2/?)

Back when the Mesopotamian were developing their clumsy base 60 mathematics system, the ancient Peruvians were using a complex system of knots to calculate things and record sales etc.

They made beautiful flutes out of bones and studied the stars. They made no weapons.

None of the mummies and skeletons from this civilization show signs of being killed by other human beings.

They were peaceful, they made pyramids, they predated the Hamarabi code, and you don’t know their name because no one ever taught you. We call them the Norte Chico.

But the Norte Chico weren’t the only cities around. While their cities were inhabited and used for the next FOUR THOUSAND YEARS, other civilizations were growing up around them.

Most people know about the Maya and the Aztecs and the Incas. You’ve heard of Machu Picchu for example. You may even know that it’s the “lost city of the Incas”. Except it, like, totally isn’t.

Macchu Picchu isn’t a city and it isn’t even all that old. It’s a getaway home for an Incan Emperor, a fancy estate about 80 km outside of Cusco. And it was built in the 15th century. It’s younger than Windsor Castle.

The fact is that the Inca Empire spanned the entire west coast of South America, and their capitol, Cusco, was a busy and bustling hub. Their knotting system was now used as a form of writing, which we still cannot translate. They had no money but had a complex barter system.

But up North now we had the Mayan and Aztec empires spanning Central America and Mexico. All of these civilizations places a heavy weight on science and philosophy. The social structure was based on level of education rather than birth.

In fact, the Aztecs implemented standardized education across their empire so that every child could be appropriately educated. At 14, kids had the choice of continuing their education at various institutes learning medicine, astronomy, engineering, and philosophy.

The Aztecs had to figure out how to produce enough food for their people. The city of Tenochtitlán alone required 88 million pounds of maize a year.

So when they ran out of land they just figured out how to make floating gardens and farmed on the water too.

But I bet all you ever learned about the Aztecs was their brutal sacrifice practises. Which yeah, you know, they were a little spartan in their attitudes toward things. But they were a real civilization. As real and as big and as complex as Spain or Turkey or Greece...

Then there’s the Mayans. Their heyday was earlier, more like 750 BC to 900 AD but holy hell were they advanced.

They were big on astronomy AND astrology so they watched the stars and figured out a lot. They could predict solar eclipses. They had written language.

Their math system was on a base 20 system and their method of writing numbers allowed them to write absolutely massive numbers. Their Calendar system was accurate and in someways more accurate than calendars in Europe of the same time period. Their writing system was phonetic.

What I need you to realize is that when Columbus arrived in Central America he did not find an empty land. There were empires. Millions of people who knew science and writing and they had schools and colleges and metal weapons.

The Inca alone comprised at least ten million people, maybe more. There were around 5 million Aztecs. When you include the peoples of all of the Americas, historians think there were as many as 100 million people, in a time when the total population on Earth was 0.5 billion.

When the Spanish conquerors arrived st Tenochtitlán, having taken slaves and women along the way, they were greeted courteously by King Montezuma and invited in. They responded by sacking the city. Though the Aztecs eventually drove them away, their diseases remained.

Smallpox and other nasty European diseases wiped out 90% of the Aztecs. That’s 4.5 million people. GONE. The conquistadors returned and destroyed what was left, enslaving survivors, raping women, and destroying whatever they could.

The Spanish also attacked the Incas, and between their guns and their diseases, they wiped out that civilization too. Another 10 million people wiped out. Other smaller groups were erased like the Arawaks of the Caribbean. Gone.

The decimation of the planets population (literally - ten percent of the human population wiped out in a century) that it caused climate change. The abandoned fields of these civilizations were reclaimed by the rainforests, which sucked CO2 out of the air.

Now you know that too much CO2 is causing our current global warming, so the LOSS of CO2 from an entire continent suddenly reclaiming all agricultural land caused a mini ICE AGE.

By the time white people found their way to places like Vancouver, the land was already empty because their disease had preceded them. The First Nations If BC were once immense and bustling but they were destroyed by disease too.

But despite all of that, the genocide wasn’t complete. Did you know that a million people still speak the language of the Aztecs? Much of their culture remains in Mexico, from its name to its tacos. And descendants of the Mayans still inhabit Guatemala and surrounding areas.

In Peru, half the population still speak the language of the Incas and schoolchildren learn the names of the emperors the way British school children learn monarchs and American children their presidents.

So the Incans and the Mayans and the Aztecs aren’t gone. They are all around us. They are still trying to flee the violence, still trying to recover from the damage done to them. And as they ask for help, European people in red hats tell them to go back to where they came from.

So think of that the next time you drink hot chocolare or eat a taco, delicious remnants of an empire that was blown apart and is still being persecuted hundreds of years later.

I wanted to add an addendum now that it is no longer 2 am.

There can be no reparation or healing until we freely and openly acknowledge the damage we did, and that the people of Central American are the remnants of a civilization we completely destroyed.

Do we need to feel guilty? Not for all of it. The disease thing is mostly unfortunate. Europeans had disgusting hygiene and medicinal practices at the time of colonization whereas the people of the Americas were more hygienic and more spread out.

At a time when Europeans were crapping in the streets or dumping their sewage in the same river they drank from, the Aztecs were employing street cleaners, importing fresh water via aquaducts, and exporting human waste to be used a fertilizer.

The Aztecs valued cleanliness and used saunas, regular swimming, lathering plants as soap, and brushed their teeth. The Spanish at the time considered filth a Christian virtue because they associated the cleanliness with their enemies, the Moors who were “heathens”.

So the sad fact is that even if Cortez had recognized Montezuma as the king of a great nation and engaged in friendly diplomacy, the plagues would still probably have started. But just as Europe survived the Black Death, the Aztecs and especially the Incas would have survived.

Besides the wholesale murder and raping of the surviving peoples, the Spanish who were fiercely Christian went out of their way to destroy all evidence of advanced civilization such as writing. So much of the history of these empires were deliberately destroyed.

What we do have is the few scraps archaeologists have unearthed in more recent times, and the ruins of cities that were not completely torn down. Many cities, like Tenochtitlán and Cusco, were built OVER. Mexico City sits on top of Tenochtitlán.

And we can’t blame it all on the Spaniards because the French and the English and the Dutch and the Portuguese all joined in, enslaving the local people (slavery eventually did in the Arawaks for example) and taking over land which clearly already inhabited.

And do I feel shame for all of this? Not really. All of Eurasia and Middle Eastern history is just a series of conquering and being conquered. The conquerors were just doing what had been done to them. Might made right back then. None of that is my fault.

But I DO feel shame when I see white people glossing it over. When I see them putting a spin on it to act as if colonization was this marvellous act of discovery and new growth when in fact it was a disgusting act of invasion and destruction.

There is basically nothing about that period in history in which we did anything that could be called good. It is hundreds of years of invasion, enslavement, marginalization, and genocide. And we need to ACKNOWLEDGE THAT.

My mother is into genealogy. I’m directly descended from the Planters of Eastern Canada, come over from Europe. They ousted the Acadians, the French who had already ousted the First Nations of the area. That’s my family history. I’m not ashamed. But I ain’t PROUD.

What does make me ashamed is that even thought I was educated in Central America and was taught about the Arawaks and the Mesoamericans and slavery, I still bought into the “new world” storyline. I thought it was sad that it happened so violently but really I still had no idea.

Because even though I learned the gist of it, the teachers didn’t go into the brutal scope of it. I kind of got the idea that these civilizations faded way like the ancient Egyptians. I didn’t understand that two continents of people had been WIPED OUT.

I didn’t know that so many people died in such a short period that it caused CLIMATE CHANGE. I didn’t grasp that this was the biggest genocide in the history of mankind. I didn’t realize that it was a holocaust.

The colonization of the Americas WAS A holocaust. And that is how it needs to be taught in schools. That is how we need to frame it. Because only then will people look at those brown faces in concentration camps in the US and realize that those holocaust STILL HASN’T ENDED.

By the way, the name for this holocaust is “The Great Dying” which I think is a BS name because it’s so freaking passive.