Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

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Which in turn reminds me of Richard Feynman describing the Mayan Calendar in his famous lectures on quantum mechanics, as an example of how the Mayans understood how the planets moved by looking, that they even figured out a number of patterns and predictions, but that they still did not know why the planets moved as they did, his point being that current understanding of quantum mechanics is very similar to this[0].

At the end, he tangentially mentions that we only know about this calendar because it is described in one of the three surviving books of their culture, out of thousands[1]

> "Just imagine our civilization reduced to three books, just the particular ones left by accident, which ones... So eh.. anyway, I get off the subject..."

The genocide of Native Americans is of course horrible by itself, but somehow this remark made me realize what "genocide" means beyond people being killed en masse. So much culture and knowledge was lost.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdZMXWmlp9g&t=25m28s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdZMXWmlp9g&t=32m26s

And the reason that there are only a few surviving books is that the Spanish conquerors plucked those out to send back to Europe as curios before they burned down all the libraries.

Anything survives in a museum?

As for Mayan codices, only three (The Dresden Codex, The Madrid Codex, and The Paris Codex) are known to survive.

Most of the books themselves were destroyed as the work of heretics, e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices

This stuff drives me so nuts. It also seems to be something that I've only ever noticed being done by religious people who follow done monotheistic believe. Does anyone know if any destruction of a culture and its artifacts had happened by someone not motivated by monotheistic delusions?

It was common in the ancient world -- "we won because our god(s) are greater than your god(s)."

Look at the (pagan/polytheist) Romans' actions in the seige and destruction of (monotheist) Jerusalem, for one example. Or (pagan) Viking raids on English/Welsh/Irish Christian monasteries for another.

Do you consider the Chinese cultural revolution to be the product of monotheistic delusion? What about the more recent Chinese occupation of Tibet?

What about the Nazi party? The Japanese occupiers of Korea and China during WWII?

The British burning the Burmese royal library in the late 19th century? Or the current massacres of Muslims in Myanmar by Buddhists?

The US Army in its genocide of indigenous North American tribes?

My impression is that there are at least some anti-intellectual authoritarians in every country, religion, and political movement.

"Do you consider the Chinese cultural revolution to be the product of monotheistic delusion?"

Yes, actually. The religion was Marxism (i.e., the most murderous religion in history), with Mao Zedong as its Prophet.

There was a interesting discussion somewhere (can't remember where) that called communism the first techno religion. The idea was that everything is build around the expectation that labor will become less important and owning means of production becomes paramount because of automation. Very relevant thoughts nowadays. Nice to look in the mirror of the past.

I highly recommend Eric Hoffer's The True Believer if you're interested this topic at all. It's a short book full of major ideas.

Hoffer's treatment of the phenomenon is just as fresh and relevant today as it was when he wrote the book in the 1950s.

I got downvoted for suggesting that Maoism was a religion, but it quite clearly had more commonalities than differences with the more extremist religious cults (as did Stalinism, Nazism, etc.)

This was a honest question. With so many atrocities going on it's hard to differentiate which ones don't only seek out to kill all members of a given culture but also their cultural artifacts. Thank you for listing several that fit the bill.

That’s exactly what I just said... the Spaniards burned all of the books except for a small handful which were sent back to Europe as curios.

> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction. – Bishop De Landa

Once again someone many have accused of tinfoil battery being shown to be onto some nugget of truth. He had a medical scare recently, anyone know how he's doing?

I have trouble seeing the connection between your reply and my comment - did you intend to post it elsewhere and did it accidentally end up with mine?

EDIT: My best guess is that this was intended as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16292738 an referring to Charles C Mann and his book?

Sorry for some reason I misread Feynman as something else...

There have been quite a few crackpots saying ludicrous things about the Mayan calendar, so that sounds like understandable mistake to me.

This is why liberals are sometimes using the term genocide more broadly in a way conservatives don’t like. They reference things like “black genocide” and conservatives get mad because the actual slayings are too few to be considered “genocide”.

Yet in terms of lost culture, putting a high enough percentage of individuals in prison, and confining enough of the others to ghettos, while driving them out of historical cultural centers, has an equivalent result to genocide in some ways.

Essentially, a percentage of the people can be alive while also having “the culture” be as dead as dead can be.

Of course the culture is born again in a different form, as Native American culture endures today, despite “genocide”. And rendering that invisible is just a continuation of that genocide so I certainly don’t want to intimate that such culture is truly gone.

> Of course the culture is born again in a different form, as Native American culture endures today

Well, a culture is born again; culture just tends to happen if you put people together, it's in our blood. The question is whether it flourishes. I am from Europe so cannot say this for certain, but I get the impression that all over both American continents, Native Americans are still very much an ethnic minority whose rights are being trampled over.

In Guatemala, they’re an ethnic majority whose rights are still being trampled over.

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