So why were native South American cultures so brutal?
Not all of them were. But the non-brutal ones were either isolated or got killed by the brutal ones.
The Inca were the leasted fucked up of the main Latin-American Empires, and they have tons of stories of all the peaceful agrarian societies they met then killed or enslaved.
A lot of the brutality of North American tribes (and it wasn't just the plains Indians who were fucked up) was because fighting and war is costly. Its costly in calories, in lost people, in time devoted to fighting and not to survival. You couldn't afford to be fighting your neighbors constantly, so you make damn sure they know that if you catch them, you're going to fuck them up. You murder one guy as horribly as possible so you don't have to murder any more of them.
Indians in the Pacific Northwest were violent little warmongers, but they (largely) didn't go for A Serbian Film torture killings; there are a couple reasons for this, but they stem from a single cause - PNW tribes had easy access to TONS of food resources that didn't require much effort obtain. They had numbers, and enough spare man power, to spend on war so they didn't need to castrate and flay alive every trespasser, but also there was just so much stuff around that they didn't really have to protect every fucking fish in the river.
But the Indians aren't unique. Early European cultures were also brutal, and from archaeological evidence, just as fucked up: look at Otzi. You can also look at our closest relatives the Chimps and see that the drawn out and fucked up murdering of interlopers is not a uniquely human trait.
So what happened in Europe? The answer is domestication of the horse.
I'm going to try to tl;dr this so it might be a little confused, but basically when you are limited by foot travel, anyone you meet is probably trespassing, and is very likely in your area to start some shit. Murdering them is probably the right move; the fact early humans did it, and Chimps still do it (and Bonobos don't, and have very small populations) seems to show that to be true.
When you domesticate the horse, you are now able to travel very, very far from home. Now, you can meet people you don't need to murder. And in fact given the range you can now travel, murdering every stranger you encounter is a very costly and risky endeavor. So what happens is you see a short increase in brutality as you're now able to carry your murder sprees further from home, and then a decrease in brutality as you don't have to rigorously defend every square inch of your now larger territory. You can make agreements with your neighbors, and almost as importantly, you can more easily ensure they are being adhered to. You can punish transgressors instead of needing to set gory examples.
Horses were introduced to the plains in the late 1500s or early 1600s. After the introduction of horses, and until the arrival of American whites, the great plains Indians, with the exception of the Comanches, were showing signs of this decreasing brutality. Some of the first tribes that elected to go far west to avoid America were mostly able to reach peaceful accommodation with the current inhabitants. But as the mass arrival of whitey forced more Eastern Indians west, and caused increased pressure for land and resources, and forced the Plains tribes to defend their territory by going back what they knew - killing interopers in really fucked up ways to keep them off their property.
While the Comanches were not slowing down in their fucked up killing shit, they were shrinking as a people. Violent societies tend not to last, and the Comanches in particular had astronomical rates of infant mortality; one of the reasons they went on raids would be to capture children to forcibly adopt. They would club infants, but kids between 2-7 were brought into the tribe and treated like those who had been born into the tribe. In a few hundred years they would have gone extinct if whitey hadn't shown up.
The Aztecs were brutal and very young; they weren't very old when they founded their capital in the 1320's (estimated based on solar eclipse), and didn't become an "empire" until about 1440. They'd been top dog in the region less than 100 years by the time Cortez showed up, so there's good odds their system was not sustainable. There were already signs they'd reached their limit and were starting to burn, and someone slightly less fucked up would have over thrown them and taken their place and we'd have never known much about the Aztecs, except for the timing of Cortez' arrival.
Though its also important to note that the Aztecs did more than JUST murder & sacrifice people 24x7. When they conquered tribes, like the Mongols, they would take craftsmen and merchants and bring them into the tribe. They had excellent weavers, stone-workers, and a vast trade network as well, all from knowledge taken from tribes they'd defeated in battle.
This post is long enough, and this is the Trump Thread not the Bad Hombres thread, so I won't get into the societal mechanisms of human sacrifice. If you want to be bored, start a convo or direct me to a more appropriate thread for 'sperging.
What would happen if a group of pocs which practiced the old religions wanted to migrate to America? Would liberals still protect them?
You know very well the answer is yes. As someone else quipped, 'Islam'.
"Murdering crying children in caves is their culture! You can't judge!"
