NDN Support Latin America

Human sacrifice

by Theo van Rossum

It's very unfortunate how distorted the ge-neral view on human sacrifice actually is. If you for instande google "human sacrifice", 9 out of 10 times the upcoming links will say "Aztecs". And the only one that is left after the other nine will be "Druids". This does not make sense, nor does it represent any reality here because the truth is that human sacri-fice has in fact appeared ALL OVER THE WORLD and on every single continent. It's just that when some societies started to condemn the practice, suddenly the term "ri-tual murder" was used for it. I've seen people talking down meso-americans by focusing on the human sacrifice cult of the Aztecs, trying to prove apoint about how "bloodthirsty" they are. Yet the same people who do this, get offended when black people are on about slavery and they'll say "Get over it! We abolished that 150 years ago!" That's right, and so you did, but how many years ago did

the Aztecs stop their practice of slavery and human sacrifice? A lot longer than that I think, so why are you still trying to rub it in then? Because if people are still playing on that Aztec hu-man sacrifice I'll be more than willing to open a big can of worms about all the human sacrifice elsewhere in the world. In popuar culture like in Tin Tin's "Prisoners of the Sun", Tin Tin, Pro-fessor Calculus and Captain Haddock are about to be burned to the stake, until a solar eclipse suddenly saves them. But that is as unauthentic as it can get, not only because the burning of people was a European practice but also because Hergé had decided to have it take place in the 20th century, even though he admittedly had been so nice to make a young Indian boy called Zorrino one of the heroes in the story. You may ask me, why talk about a comic? That's because the Tin Tin comics by Hergé are still popular all over the world and they'll have more influence on people than you think they have. No offense to Hergé and the more than enjoy-able adventures of Tin Tin, but since Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadores murdered the last of the Inca dynasty, they no longer have any monarchy, let along an Inca King.

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