The only thing that can be done that will make a difference is to stop all this collective praise and blame and to recognize that justice requires looking at and judging all human beings individually, based on their own choices to act well or badly
Wonderful, and thank you.
With that particular example, let's get real: neither side were ones I'd invite over for a weenie roast. And, who was breaking into whose turf in the name of civilization? What a nasty rumble.
The Incas took the big equatorial mistake to a brutal, celestial art form. Joseph Campbell describes the general problem in his book "Myths to Live By"- the core problem is a little different (not specifically a Sun God, etc.) but you'll get the idea.
…In those zones, furthermore, the common sight of rotting vegetation giving rise to new green shoots seems to have inspired a mythology of death as the giver of life; whence the hideous idea followed that the way to increase life is to increase death. The result has been, for millenniums, a general rage of sacrifice through the whole tropical belt of our planet, quite in contrast to the comparatively childish ceremonies of animal-worship-and-appeasement of the hunters of the great plains: brutal human as well as animal sacrifices, highly symbolic in detail; sacrifices also of fruits of the field, of the first-born, of widows on their husbands’ graves, and finally of entire courts together with their kings. The mythic theme of Willing Victim has become associated here with the image of a primordial being that in the beginning offered itself to be slain, dismembered, and buried; and from whose buried parts then arose the food plants by which the lives of the people are sustained.
Nasty enough. The Spaniards had their own demons, though.
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