With all due respect, you are brainwashed by 500 years of psychological determination through the eurocentric paradigm according to which everything that is good in the world is the product of the Caucasian/European civilization whereas the rest of the world is allegedly wallowing in blood-thirst and barbarism.
Your point of view works under the assumption that the concept of civilization itself is the product of the European world consideration and the implication that there is indeed an intrinsic race hierarchy representing inherent mental and psychological inclinations characteristic of the different ethnic groups populating the world.
Your point is also deeply tainted by the concept of progress whereby anything that is from the past is bad, that everything from the present is better and that everything in the future will be best. In short, that the history of human societies can be interpreted as a straight line going in one direction only, from the bad (worst) to the good (best), which translates into the general thinking by which the European societies, being the latest having appeared on earth, are necessarily better than any other.
All that being said, i'm not really blaming you, it is indeed the way humanities are taught in academic circles probably in the whole western civilization, which highlights according to me not a real intent to harm (even though sometimes it has indubitably been the case), but rather the inescapable impossibility of remaining totally objective when studying something as complex and subject to interpretation as the history of human civilizations. Even more so when the data and archaeological evidence are so scarce given the huge timespan in question.
The important thing to remember here is that all the concepts and ideas i mentioned earlier, such as progress, civilization and moral hierarchies based on ethnicities, all those notions as we know them have all been theorized and rationalized in western societies (especially during the XVIII and XIX c.) and as such are all deeply influenced by Caucasian/European ideology which makes them all inherently eurocentric. This is why for instance most people, just like you are convinced that the western world is the holy grail of civilizations, that it is the most perfect human organization possible and that the rest are mere barbarians towards whom the Europeans have a moral duty to bring the enlightenment of civilized progress.
Now for the content of your post:
The film is historically accurate on many levels, especially in its depiction of the brutality that was so pervasive in the Mayan and Aztec cultures
It's almost impossible to ascertain with certitude what those Mesoamerican cultures were or weren't and any attempt to do so is inevitably culturally biased. Let it be noted that most of what we know about human sacrifices among the Aztecs is known from post-conquest codexes such as Ramirez Codex, Codex Tudela, or Codex Magliabechiano, written by
baptized Christian Aztecs.
There is no comprehensive and even quantitative data from any non-Christian source. It is also known that Franciscan bishop Juan de Zumárraga burned all pre-Christian Aztec books that could shed any non-biased light at the pre-Christian Aztec customs.
Also, the concept of "brutality" itself is an ethnocentric one and the elements of its definition are inappropriate to consider other kinds of cultural behaviors. For instance, the fate that awaits a person sentenced to death can be considered as "brutality" or "barbarism" in any region of the world wherein death penalty is forbidden, whereas the same punishment is nothing more than the applicable law in regions that practice it.
Another example would be the habit spread among some royal courts in Europe (especially in France) of entertaining the guests and the royal family by torturing and burning small animals, such as cats and dogs. At the time, none of this was considered neither as brutality nor as barbarism.
As you can see, man has always found a way to define all vile behaviors and practices as being part of whatever doesn't constitute his own culture/reality. Evil is the other, never us. Reason why we are always so keen to throw around terms such as barbarism, brutality and cruelty towards everything that doesn't make sense in our own biased cultural view of the world.
The people who think the white Europeans were worse are funny.
What makes you think that the Europeans were better? I don't think anything can warrant such a claim. What about witch hunts? Burning people at the stake? Institutionalized torture? The Inquisition?
As for me, i don't think any culture is intrinsically worse or better than any other, just fundamentally different. Which means that any attempt to rationalize and fathom specific human and social behaviors using tools, concepts and references created by another civilization is doomed from the outset.
Europeans are not better nor worse than Aztecs, just different. Another cosmogony, another set of morals, different absolutes and different world considerations, moreover, notions such as brutality, cruelty and barbarism can be applied to the European civilization just as well as they are to the pre-Columbian cultures.
The question to ask yourself is, would you rather live in an ancient Mayan or Aztec society..... or in a white European society?
The answer seems so obvious to you, i find that unsettling. Do you know what life was like in the Middle Ages? It wasn't the oasis of happiness you seem to think it was. Life was rough, dangerous and pretty short and frankly, between living in a city riddled with sicknesses wherein people literally threw their dejections from their windows to the middle of the street and living in some village in the forest in harmony with nature, the choice is rather easy as for me.
If my account seems to be an idealization of the Mesoamerican cultures, which i accept, please know that your assessment is one too, except in an opposite manner. You
assume that we are good and civilized whereas the others are evil and barbaric.
The only way of discussing those subjects the most objectively possible is to see and admit the cultural biases we grew up with that compel us the feel morally superior and better than any other form of human society... It is an socially constructed and educationally spread illusion, nothing more.
People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs
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