GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

August 15, 2006

Podhoretz

Filed under: GA — adam @ 3:41 pm

I think he passes a little too quickly over some of our present difficulties, but here is a powerful, unconflicted defense of the Bush Doctrine from the godfather of the neo-conservative movement.

 

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/files/podhoretz_0906.htm

 

Scenic Politics

White Guilt Meets the Aztecs

Filed under: GA — ericgans @ 8:21 am

As a vacation from the Middle East, this sample of Europe’s historical self-hatred is taken from an interview conducted by the leftish French weekly Le nouvel observateur with novelist and world traveler J.M.G. Le Clézio. See if you can detect what is missing in this picture (hint: obsidian knife):

N.O. – At the time of the conquest of Mexico, in what areas were the Amerindian civilizations ahead of Europe?

JL – Except for the practice of total war (firearms, cavalry, but above all the practice of terror: burned villages, women and children sold into slavery or massacred, the use of bacteriological weapons), the Amerindian civilizations were ahead of Europe in just about all areas: hydraulic agriculture, exact sciences, astronomy, medicine, zoology, anatomy. It is difficult to evaluate the domain of Aztec and Inca philosophy, but the first Spanish chroniclers, who arrived when almost everything had been destroyed, speak with admiration of the moral discourses, literary contests, and metaphysical discussions that enlivened these societies, of which the testimony of the few survivors (the final battle of Mexico-Tenochtitlan left 260,000 dead, most of whom belonged to the city’s elite) gives only an approximate idea.
Le nouvel observateur July 13, 2006 p. 51

-eric gans

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