Defending Savagery in the Name of Multiculturalism

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What’s not to like about multiculturalism? After all, isn’t diversity our strength? Don’t cultural influences from around the world add spice and flavor to the bland, Eurocentric West, which some people even say has no culture of its own? Take food, for example; as everyone always points out when this topic comes up, different cultures bring a smorgasbord of vibrant cuisines to the West! Also rape gangs, no-go zones, and machete attacks, but that’s a small price to pay for a corner kebab stand.

Many years ago, when I was a musician paying no attention to politics, nothing excited and inspired me more than the mix of multicultural influences that rockers like Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne incorporated into pop music. My favorite section in record stores was labeled simply “world music,” where I immersed myself in exotic artists like South Africa’s Johnny Clegg and Savuka, Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour, avant-garde Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the drummers of Brazil’s Olodum, all of whom found crossover success in America and Europe. That’s all the word “multiculturalism” meant to me.

I didn’t learn until many years later that multiculturalism also referred to a subversive movement, born of political correctness, that swept through academia, where so many stupid and destructive ideas are born and nurtured, and from there out into the culture at large. Multiculturalism takes the relativistic position that all cultural expressions are equally valid, that all cultures should be equally celebrated rather than judged – except for Western civilization, which is viewed as the fount of all oppression, exploitation, and genocidal violence in world history. In fact, as Keith Windschuttle wrote in The New Criterion, multiculturalism is “entirely a negation of Western culture and values.” Its raison d’etre is not to promote tolerance and diversity but to undermine the West.

Multiculturalism has spawned a couple of generations of progressive Americans who uncritically revere any and all non-white cultures past and present, but reject their own Western legacy as uniquely shameful and evil. Thus they cannot bring themselves, for example, to condemn Middle Eastern jihadists for any number of terrorist atrocities from 9/11 through the October 7 attacks, but also feel compelled to tear down statues of Western icons of liberty like George Washington and Winston Churchill for their connections to past sins of slavery and imperialism. These self-righteous revolutionaries would happily have you jailed for misgendering someone but refuse to denounce such barbaric practices of ancient Central American cultures as human sacrifice.

And that brings me to a perfect recent example: the case of Emily Pool, an 11-year veteran history teacher at a Colorado high school who posted a TikTok video in which she assures viewers that the child sacrifices carried out by the ancient Incan civilization were “voluntary” and “kind” because the victims were drugged first. Oh, that’s cool, then.

According to her LinkedIn page, the nose ring-wearing Pool is “talented in successfully differentiating learning styles in for [sic] socially, economically, and racially diverse classrooms.” She also apparently has a talent for whitewashing the savagery of ancient nonwhite cultures. In her video, she defends the Incan practice of child sacrifice by noting that “most other civilizations in history” practiced human sacrifice too. This isn’t the moral defense she seems to think it is. She also neglects to mention that the civilization that ended this savagery was that of Christian Europe.

Pool adds that being appalled by the concept of human sacrifice is “indicative” of a “quite white education” — meaning, you are focused on the negatives of ancient nonwhite societies, such as the routine murder of children to placate the gods, and not the “wonders [the Inca] accomplished,” like impressive temples and roads. In her mind, a “white education” teaches one to make moral judgments, and that runs against the grain of multiculturalism. The only moral judgment allowed when you view everything through the Marxist paradigm of oppressor-versus-oppressed is to condemn the oppressor – i.e., the West.

Besides, she says, Incans weren’t like those bloodthirsty Aztecs when it came to human sacrifice. The Inca “would use coca leaves… to drug up the sacrifice and leave them on a cold chilly mountain to be exposed to the elements” (pictured above). “A volunteer sacrifice where you’re heavily drugged before you die…?” She then shrugs as if to say, not so bad, LifeSiteNews.com reports. This defense is the hill she will die on, she declares – ironically, like the drugged children the Incas left to freeze to death or to be eaten by wild animals.

But according to anthropologist Maria Costanza Ceruti, archaeological evidence indicates Inca human sacrifice included four other methods: “strangulation, a blow to the head, suffocation, or being buried alive while unconscious.” We’re talking about very small children, remember – but I guess that’s just my white education talking.

Pool goes on to state that she “could equate human sacrifice throughout history to so many things” – but doesn’t do so, maybe because the most obvious equivalent today would be progressive women sacrificing their unborn children on the altar of personal convenience and boss-girl careerism.

But the really great thing about Incan sacrifice, she points out, is that the victims were from the “elite class.” For progressives like Pool – and I feel very comfortable assuming that she is politically progressive – it’s perfectly palatable if it’s rich children who are doing the dying.

Her comments regarding human sacrifice echo those of Mexican archaeologist María Belén Méndez (who was not part of the project). She too soft-pedaled the issue of sacrifice. “It’s not that [the Incans] were violent; it was their way of connecting with the celestial bodies.” Oh, thanks for clarifying that, but in the West, our way of connecting with celestial bodies is to pray. But again, that’s just my white education.

Needless to say, Pool was rightly raked over the coals on social media for this awful take on the barbarism of her “most favorite civilization of all time.” Daily Wire pundit Matt Walsh reposted the video and commented,

I don’t know what’s more deranged, the idea that it’s kind to leave somebody to die on a mountaintop, as long as you give them cocaine and hallucinogens ahead of time, or the idea that an 8-year-old child sacrifice could in any sense be considered a volunteer who consented to this practice.

“Presumably, she also believes that it’s kind when women execute their own children today,” added Walsh.

Mark Meckler, the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, also slammed Pool’s defense of child sacrifice. He pointed out that not only did the children have “no choice” in the matter, but the parents themselves were coerced into sacrificing their own children through external pressures. “So no… sorry.  This was a vicious, violent pagan society,” wrote Meckler.

But multiculturalism demands that the vicious paganism of an ancient nonwhite culture be celebrated, not shamed. When CBS News recently reported that an altar from the Teotihuacan culture that was discovered in Tikal National Park in Guatemala, the center of Mayan culture, was believed to have been used for sacrifices, “especially of children,” CBS gushed that Tikal was “a cosmopolitan center at that time, a place where people visited from other cultures, affirming its importance as a center of cultural convergence.”

And of child sacrifice. Sorry, there goes my white education again.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior