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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

I meant far closer to the present than "past few hundred thousand years" but yes, that's why I used the past tense "did" rather than the present tense "does."

Slavery? Genocide? Plunder? Rape? Religious violence? Slaughter of peoples they considered inferior? The "civilized" Christian cultures of the time did everything the Aztecs did, minus the human sacrifice.

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There's something many people find uniquely, particularly offensive about using the machinery of war to perform human sacrifice as its own end (and not as the means to some variety of conquest or resource extraction), and there aren't many cultures that have actually historically engaged in that sort of thing.

They weren't performing human sacrifice as its own end, they were performing literal human sacrifice to honor their God... which is essentially what the Crusades were, an act of figurative ritual human sacrifice to honor the Christian God.

One is just more alien to Western culture than the other, so it seems more viscerally evil, and their means differ but their nature is the same.

This is a wild misunderstanding of what the Crusades actually were.

That’s not at all what the crusades were.

The crusades were armies raised in response to the Muslim invasions of Christian countries. Motivations varied between religious (defense of the Christians being oppressed) to political (I want a kingdom to rule over) [1].

[1]: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/7915/are-there-a...

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