>I'm worried that the records being systematically destroyed include
>learning histories and other documentation that people could still learn
>from.
Three examples of this come to mind.
In the libraries of Spain and the Vatican are records of all of the
journeys and transactions of the conquest of the Americas. The Spanish
were as good as record keepers as the modern Germans. Without this record
we would be stuck with the pseudo-history put out by the romance
historians who glorify the successful. In this case the "successful" kept
records of how they did it and much lies untranslated. What has been,
tells a completely different story from the official histories. The need
for doctoral thesis's is slowly translating this material. In this case
reality is much more brutal than myth but much more human as well.
On the other hand the Spanish destroyed the libraries at Chichin Itza and
Tenochtitlan. There are only seventeen out of the thousands of volumes
from these libraries left. This lack of material has allowed the winners
to pretty well say what they wish about these great cultures. As opposed
to the romance history about the Spanish conquerors, they have created a
horror with stories of the conquered. i.e. priests killing ten thousand
people in one day. No body bothers to consider the math of this act, (as
a theater director, I couldn't make a believable scenario out of their
story) also they tell stories about how the priests never washed the
sacred water (blood) from their bodies with old blood forever matted in
their hair. Again consider the possibility of the bacteria (butcher's
rash) of such an act and that the lack of cleanliness of the Spaniards
constituted germ warfare against the Native populations. The fact that
these populations and their agricultural sciences supply 60 to 80% of the
world's food resources as well as developing the long strand cotton (in
colors) that made cotton available to the populations of the rest of the
world. The historians have not, until recently told of the destruction of
Amaranth, the greatest plant protein on the planet, developed by the
Aztecs and that the multi-colored cotton was allowed to "go to seed" and
was lost until recently. The Spaniards claimed it was a myth. The former
head of the National Institute for the Humanities in the Bush
Administration recently complained that the newer histories for children
stressed the creativity of these cultures rather than the older more
violent stories which she preferred.
On the other hand the Spaniards did not destroy the Moslem libraries when
they kicked the Moslem population out of Spain. They were in culture
shock from such things as the discovery of zero. They also learned to
venerate the Greeks from the magnificent preservation that the Moslem
scholars had accomplished in hiding the old texts from the Christian
bookburners. Add to this incredible information shot, into their
consciousness, the discovery of other realities across the Atlantic and
they begin to sound like the television description of the U.S. Military
at Roswell, New Mexico in the 1940s. Consider that the Moslems and the
Mayans had the concept of zero and how narrowly the modern computer world
was saved by the fact that they didn't burn the Moslem libraries as was
their history and inclination.
Ray Evans Harrell
-- mcore@soho.ios.com (Ray Evans Harrell)