The Cold War VI: Three Days of the KGB

I have an interest in philosophy.  If you get a doctorate in history, the ironically cheap ink on the archival paper will read "Doctorate of the Philosophy of History"  Or something like that, I don't know, I'm not a prof.

Essentially, to simplify it, history classes go like this:

• Here, this is a civilization.
• Here, this is their economic philosophy
• Here, this is their social contract

And then they expect you to take A+B+C & figure out how it all got so fucked up.

That's why you don't see any historians support Objectivism. 

Nope, we've seen that shit before.  We know why that doesn't work & progress is the act of making entirely new mistakes & thinking of entirely new ways to fuck shit up.  Aren't we supposed to be progressing as a civilization to a point where we all lay around while our Robotic Cybernetic Solar-Powered Swedish Nympho Sex Slaves feed us grapes? 

That's progress.

Insanity is making the same mistakes & expecting entirely different results.  Objectivism is insanity.  It's also the economic & social philosophy of Ayn Rand.  Her philosophy is what the TEA Party, the Libertarians, the GOP & most everybody that listens to Rockabilly believes & follows.

This is Ayn Rand:

She looks a lot like Joe Pesci

And her Philosophy is really what Anton LaVey co-opted

Anton LaVey was sort of a rock-star wasn't he?  He's got a spooky stare & a snake.

Now you can read Any Rand, she's written a few books that only idiots think are interesting & well written, (cough cough) Atlas Shrugged (cough cough) or you can say "fuck it," & just read Anton LaVey.

Either way you are getting the same information, but with Anton you're getting that information with a little more style & class & a lot more little devil horn hands, head banging,  & some really kick-ass music.  You might even get a mosh pit or two & really, he's just a lot more fun.

Don't take that as an endorsement, they are both full of shit, we've seen their philosophy fail miserably.  I'm just saying, if you want to go down in flames, have fun doing it.

My buddy Bryan, old MCT, he gave me the philosophy book that I agree with the most.  Now that shit  really blew my hair back.  To blow one's hair back it has to be a new idea, what Bryan gave me was a philosophy book where you almost have to go, "yeah, that will work," when you finish reading it.

It was On Liberty, for those of you keeping track.

I was horribly in love with a girl named Pip & she gave me a philosophy book that I agreed with the least.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra!

I remember reading it & thinking: "Where the fuck is the philosophy?" There was really nothing in it that you could actually try.  Philosophy is supposed to be, you know, materialistic or at least functionally so.  Materialistic enough where you can actually try to apply it to the world in some way, shape, or form.

Friedrich Nietzsche applies to jack shit.  He seems smart, but if you can't put your philosophy into something that can be organized, categorized, tested, & implemented than all it is is masturbation.

It's religion.

Masturbation, religion, same thing, go read LaVey & have fun with it.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche loudly proclaimed that "God is Dead!"

At the time I was trying really hard to be an atheist & even I read it & thought: "pretentious."

Now I am 100% certain that there is a God & he hates us & it's actually probably a she because bitches dey be vindictive & I still think that Nietzsche is pretentious.

But now, you know, that whole internet thing has taken off & it contains all the information that you will ever need to know but sometimes you have to put it together & now I look at the internet & think Nietzsche was dead fucking wrong.

I log onto the internet when I want to know something.

I log onto the internet when I want to find an explanation about how the world works.

Knowledge, infinite knowledge is the definition of "God" in just about every culture.

I log onto the internet when I want to masturbate.

Masturbation is very much like religion.

The internet is God because it is infinite knowledge & thy laptop is thy temple because it what I use to masturbate.  

The only difference between the internet & the real God is that the internet doesn't hate us.

That was my philosophical riff.

You can implement it by trying to achieve a Millian Liberal social contract & beating off to internet porn.  Maybe add a dash of  big Jim Connolly for the economy.

Fucking Micks.  Mad rage in his eye.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us talking about the greatest spy movie ever made:

Three Days of the Condor

The book was actually Six Days of the Condor & worth picking up because it is also the greatest spy novel ever written & hella fun to read.

But we can't talk about the book because it was actually the movie that inspired one of the most successful KGB operations of all time.

Everyone in the KGB looks like a red featureless silhouette of Sean Conner in From Russia With Love.  And they all have yellow hammers & sickles on their chests.

What happened was, one day the KGB sat down & watched a Robert Redfrod spy movie because all spies love spy movies & they were already in the habit of snatching ideas from James Bond movies...no bull shit.

In the movie, Robert Redford works for the CIA as an analyst in a little office where he just reads.  Books, journals, comic strips, anything & snatches the clever ideas & plot points that the writers come up with & gives them to the CIA to try out.

And some of the other people in the office look for potential codes & operations in newspapers & publications from all over the world.

And then someone kills everyone & the plot was turned into an action movie called Mission:Impossible & it stared Tom Cruise & not Robert Redford but was really the same movie with far more action.

The thing is that Tom Cruise had a different job from Robert Redford's.

And the KGB had already gone bye-bye by the time it was released.

The CIA never had an office like Robert Redfords, but after watching the movie, the KGB assumed we did because it seemed like a really good idea at the time, so they opened up one of their own in Moscow.

It seemed to work really well, so they gave it more & more funding, & by the time the USSR fell, they were employing 2,000 people to read as much as they could & steal as many tricks as they could.

Knowledge, infinite knowledge is the definition of "God" in just about every culture.

They weren't just pilfering ideas from James Bond movies, they were taking ideas from everywhere they could & just about every successful KGB operation following the release of that movie, had actually taken the idea or part of it from that office in Moscow.

Dick Tracy Serials.  Comic Books.  Detective Novels.  History Textbooks.  Movies.  Trashy Romance Novels.  Pornography.  Children's Books.  News Papers.  Magazines.  Fucking Greeting Cards.

And then boom.  Psychic spies.

Nope, the KGB put absolutely no money into it.  They got the idea out of a book & wanted us to think that they were researching it so we would spend money researching it & not something else & it gave us another spy movie.

And they lifted an idea out of a book that would become a River Phoenix spy movie.

And that turned into an operation that was successfully caught by the FBI, only recently & turned into a pretty good television show:

And this was all because someone in the KGB watched a lot of Robert Redford films because, well, he really is a pretty good actor, isn't he?

Yeah, there wasn't very much to that story.

Had to put a shit-ton of filler into it.

I'll leave you with this:

People of the Sun III: The Pyramid Builders

I have this occasional reoccurring dream, well, it's more of a nightmare.  It happens whenever I get really seriously stressed out & I wake up with my jaw so sore it hurts to open it.    It's the same dream over & over & over again & I've been having it since I was in my middle twenties.

Some of the people at my last job, the one at the Health Department, my boss in particular & one of my coworkers give things like reoccurring dreams some significance.  Maybe it is a Freud thing, maybe it's a New Age thing, a question that you didn't know to ask, or a premonition, or maybe just the source of my worries & stress.

I don't know.  The point is that they told me to look up the key images in my dreams to find something more about myself.

I never believed in things like that, but hey, they were trying to help, so why not?

Pyramid
Association: - Communication with the higher consciousness, - old knowledge.
Question: - Which higher planes of consciousness do I want to reach?
Answer:- Well that's a no brainer.

Human Sacrifice
 If you are the sacrificial victim, the dream may be a reflection of your attitude. Do you always ‘play the martyr’? Perhaps you have tendencies of self-punishment & self-denial. You may feel that other people undervalue your talents & good qualities.

Heart
To dream that your heart is bleeding or aching represents desperation, despair, extreme sadness & sympathy. You are lacking support or love in some a situation in your life.
 

Wait, no, it's me we're talking about.  I've always been a materialist.  A communist, an individual that has never really been all too mystic.

Much better.

Anyway, according to the mystics, the psychologists, & the people that actually put a lot of meaning into your dreams, I am depressed because I play the role of a martyr in my search of a higher consciousness. 

Shit.  It's actually not that bad is it?  I was sort of hoping it would end up completely ridiculous. 

But the thing is, that reoccurring nightmare is actually a lot more vivid than North by Northwest.  I can find exactly where the dream takes place on a map.  The people that ritually sacrifice me are always the same.  I know exactly what the knife they use on me is made out of.  I know the drug that they use to subdue me.  They wear authentic dress.  The only thing out of place in that nightmare is me & the nose rings.

I'm the one that doesn't fit.  I'm white, of European decent.  I speak English.  I'm kinda sorta very vaguely Catholic.  I'm also dressed as a typical American male.

The most disturbing part of the dream has always been myself.  I can never get around the fact that I'm wearing jeans & a flannel.  Before they give me the drugs I try to explain to them that, no, I'm not dressed appropriately, but they don't understand English.

I try to undress but, no, they won't even let me take off my Doc Martins.

They don't understand that they can't ritually sacrifice me when I'm dressed like the cast of Singles.  They have to at least wait for me to strip nude.

But they have never seen Singles.  That movie hasn't been released yet.

Anyway, I've always just thought that this was a dream based off of something that I had to study in college & for some reason, despite all of the awesome horrible things that I learned in school, these people sort of stuck in my subconscious, so whenever I get really stressed out my brain decides to take my grungy ass back to a valley in the Andes & scare the ever loving shit out of me for punishment.

So today we are going to talk about the Sican Culture, also known as the Lambayeque Culture because they were located in the Lambayeque valley & were the predecessors of the Moche Culture & if you are interested, the Museum of Natural History in Chicago has some pretty cool relics of the Moche Culture.

But first, there are about 82 Pyramids in Egypt & they were all built by the Ancient Aliens that gave us the Stargate.

I only bring Egypt up to use as an example,  When people think of a Pyramid building culture they usually always think of Egypt & then they thing of the Giza, or the three at Giza.

Let's put it into a little more perspective.  Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, lived closer to the invention of the I-phone than she did the building of any of the pyramids that you think of.

By the time that she died, the pyramids were already ancient & Egypt had stopped building them thousands of years ago.

The Sican people built 26 in the Valley of Túcume alone.  They build about 36 in the middle era & about 76 in the late era.

26+36+76=138 & this is from 750-1375 AD.

Of course, Egypt built theirs in a desert & some of them were even built out of stone, so you know, the erosion didn't take hold & left even their mud brick structures in actual pyramid shape.  In the Valley of Túcume, well, they look like the Badlands & not so much like actual pyramids any longer.

That's what happens when you build pyramids out of mud in a region prone to flooding.

They were also, the Egyptians, using their pyramids for a singular reason.  In Egypt, all the Pyramids were tombs...unless you really believe Ancient Aliens, in which case they were either electrical generators, spaceships, or interstellar radios....with tombs built into them.

In the Sican Culture the pyramids they built were actually homes & temples & civic centers.  But, mind you, they were all single family homes.

In Europe everyone lives in a castle, in the Túcume Valley, everyone lived in a pyramid, or on a pyramid, & by everyone that meant that it was only the upper one-percent & everyone else had to worship them.

It's great if you are a Republican.  You got to force your people to build you a giant pyramid so that you can live above them & they were forced to worship you & every time it rained, you were allowed to ritually sacrifice some peeps from the middle & lower classes.

And it was socially acceptable for the upper class to wear enormous nose rings.

In my nightmare, they are silver & not gold & that ALWAYS made me uncomfortable.  Not only was I out of place, but the people that were going to sacrifice me were wearing the wrong nose rings.

It's the little shit in dreams that always freak the fuck out of you.

Whatever.  They only had one real style of jewelry.  Whatever.

So why did they build all of those Pyramids?

Back to me.

My senior year of High School was the absolute best year of my life, weather wise...I think it was my senior year.  It might have been my senior year.

That year came with a thing called El Niño.  Which is Spanish for "The Niño."

It looks like this:

Now, if you are living in Illinois, El Niño means that the summer is going to be nice & cool & not horribly hot & the winter is going to be nice & cool & not horribly cold.  El Niño, in Chicago, means that you are going to have one year of absolutely perfect weather.

El Niño means that Chicago weather is not actively trying to kill you for a change.

But that is Chicago.

In the Valley of Túcume El Niño means something completely different.  It means something like this:

Now that does NOT make for a perfect senior year of high school.  That sucks.

The thing with the Sican Culture is that they knew a shit-ton about Astronomy & Botany & really next to nothing about climate & weather & what caused things like rain & flooding.

For them, all of that was related to the gods.  Thunder meant that the gods were bowling again.

The gods caused the thunder & the lightening & every time it rained it was the gods calling for a blood sacrifice to prevent a massive flooding that would drown the 99% that was living beneath the safety of the pyramids.

So they would pull a commoner or twelve up onto the pyramid, drug them, cut their throats open with an obsidian knife, & then ritually remove their hearts to prevent the floods that spelled the end of their world.

And then they would tell their people that, since they were ordained by god, they followed the rules, killed some of the lesser people & prevented the floods.

It seemed to work...unless it was an  El Niño year.

When Chris Farley struck, the valley flooded & the upper class sacrificed hundreds of commoners to appease the gods & prevent the floods, but the floods came anyway & washed the farms & the homes of everyone else away, leaving only the pyramids.

And that caused the people to flee onto the pyramids & rise up against their rulers.

Now, we have mentioned it in a previous post, but the people came to the conclusion that the old pyramids were embedded with evil, so they rose up against their leaders, ritually burned down the old pyramids, or at least the homes on top of the old ones, moved their civilization a little further down the valley & built it up again.

They chose new leaders, new priests, built new pyramids for the upper class to live in & did the whole thing over again, from scratch.  A total reset.

It seems odd, but even in modern times, when leaders fail the people one too many times, there is a revolution & the old order gets purged & killed & a new civilization is created.  The differences is that today we understand a lot more & generally use firing squads & guillotines.

But sometimes the weather still plays a part in it.  Or at least sometimes climate change does as we have learned in a previous post.

In any case, this post has a very, VERY important moral behind it.  Especially if you are a parent.

Whatever you do, DO NOT, under any circumstances, tell your children that thunder & lightening is just God bowling.  If you do, they are going to build tens of dozens of massive pyramids in a valley in Peru & ritually sacrifice hundreds of thousands of people to assure that God gets a strike or at least a spare & I am going to have another culture to have nightmares about.

I'll leave you with this:

People of the Sun Part 2: Aztecs

I once drank my own piss.

It really didn't taste as bad as I thought it would.

Now hold on, I didn't do it on purpose.

You see there are certain advantages that come with being a man & when you are on a road trip out to a place called Karney Nebraska in the hopes of getting a job at the local news paper, well, you use those advantages.

Men can kinda, sorta take it out & use an empty coffee cup in order to save time on the road.

Of course, three hours later, the danger is that you forget what is in that coffee cup.

And the contents of that cup go from your coffee cup to your mouth to your window, your dashboard, your steering wheel, & a little on you as you swerve uncontrollably in a dead panic & try to find the first possible turn off.

It really doesn't taste like anything, for the most part it is sterile, but the fact remains, human waste is not something that you want to regularly consume.  And we have already covered why.

I only bring it up because it is sorta, kinda, important to the story.

Now we have already covered how we think that people first came to America & we have covered one of the more pressing of the million question marks of pre-Columbian Americas.  Now, we'll talk about one of the more familiar civilizations.

I'm pretty sure there are things here that you didn't learn in school because, well, you were deemed too young by the powers that be.

In this case, the story you heard in school is on the Mexican flag.

Now, to be honest, the story you heard is correct.

What you heard in school was a story about a tribe of natives that were wandering through the desert in search of a home.  One of their priests had claimed that they would arrive when they found an eagle eating a rattlesnake while perched on a cactus.

The story is true.  What they taught you in school is certainly true.

But it is not the whole story.  The entire story is a bit more twisted & largely ignored because of cultural sensitivities.  It was one of those things that they told me not to teach because it might be a little insulting.  Another example would be the mutiny on the Russian submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that was for other reasons.

The whole story starts with a wedding.

Now we have already briefly talked about how horrible Hitler's wedding was & how much worse his honeymoon was, but believe me, this was the type of wedding that the wife was not going to complain about.

Back in the day in Europe & America & Asia & Africa & well into today, the whole wedding thing was sometimes used to solidify alliances.  One family marries into another family & the in-law thing meant that there was loyalty between the families, nations, tribes, whatever.

Sending your daughter to marry a prince is sometimes a little girl's dream.  She was going to be a princess with daddy, but in this case, she was going to be a queen.

It's good to be the Queen.  It was probably also done under the assumption that even a king had to listen to his wife & he probably wouldn't be touching that if he turned his back on her people or went to war & killed her daddy.  And then, on the other side, a king is probably not going to go to war with his daughter or sister.

It was a safe alliance.

The Aztecs at the time were an upstart tribe with no real power & the prospect of marrying into a larger & more powerful tribe was, well, it was enough to make them feel a little safer.

But things get lost in translation.

So the Aztec king was pleased with his bride & he consummated the marriage on the wedding night, just like he was supposed to.

And then to honor the union, he invited the princess's tribe to a feast, along with her father.

The thing is, well, the princess was the main course.

Of course her father didn't know this.  He had no idea that he was eating his daughter.

But he did find out quick when...

...I'm not a very good cook...

..I think the term is "flay."

Anyway, they flayed her alive & they saved the skin for after the feast.

And then, to honor the wedding & the union of the two tribes, the high priest wore the princess's skin & did a ceremonial dance in front of her father.

Like I said, lost in translation.  Instead of being honored that the Aztecs served the king his daughter's heart in a nice stew, & then wore her skin & gave him a dance to unify the tribes under the eyes of the gods, he was a little upset.

Actually, no, he was very, very upset.

And he sort of declared war on the Aztecs right then & there, which sent them on the run.  And he sort of chased them onto an island in the center of a murky lake, Lake Texcoco, in the desert of present day Mexico.

And that was where he saw the eagle with the rattlesnake perched on the cactus & told his people that this was the sign, they needn't run any further.  They had found their new home.  So they called it Tenochtitlan where they turned it into the greatest city on earth & from there forged an empire.

That was the part that you don't learn until college.

And with the exception of Lia & my sister, every married woman I know has bitched about her wedding not being perfect.

Perspective ladies, perspective.  You have had a wonderful wedding compared to Eva Braun & the first queen of the Aztecs.

The Aztecs, by the way, called themselves the Mēxihcah Tenochca.  "Aztec" was a  Nahuatl word for them & they weren't exactly fans of the Aztecs because of the, well, the queen & the ritual sacrifice thing.

Not that the Nahuati actually were clean as far as human sacrifice goes.

You see this story really starts in another city called Teotihuacan.

For the Aztecs & just about every other people in the region, Teotihuacan was the city of the gods.  It marked the place where the gods had once lived & come from the underworld to the earth & for them, just like it is for us today, the city was in ruins.

They all worshiped the gods that came from there, but the names & rituals change depending on the tribe.  They knew slightly less about the city than we do.

Today we know that the entire city was ritually burned by it's own inhabitants.  It wasn't burned from an invading army in a time of war.  It was burned & abandoned by it's own people to remove an evil stain that controlled the city.

This wasn't unusual, from the Southwest United States all the way down to the Southern tip of Chile, the native populations would ritually burn their old civilizations to the ground to cleanse them of the evil that had taken control of them.

It reset their civilization back to zero.  A lot of the time, it meant that the civilization was destroyed along with a lot of the technology & it was only the aspects of their religion that continued.

We know this because of the different counts on the Mayan calendar. 

You know, the one that proved that the world ended in 2012.

One of the Mayan short count resets came with the destruction of Teotihuacan.

So the Aztecs were about as likely to sacrifice a human being as the Mayans & all the other people who followed a religion that originated in a city that was destroyed by its own people who, over the centuries they all thought was the city of the gods & worshiped the ruins accordingly in order to honor their gods & prevent the end of the world through an offering of human blood.

One of the big differences, however, was the the Aztec priests & nobility would eat you after they killed you.

They were called chinampa's & they were one of the reasons that the Aztecs were able to survive & thrive when so many people were out to exterminate them because of that whole normal wedding faux pas.

A chinampa is a floating garden.  When you are stuck on a little island on a murky lake, you have to come up with creative ways for eating in order to survive & thrive so your people can eventually become strong enough to leave the island to kill their enemies & forge an empire.

They literally made floating islands that they used for farm land & harvested it on canoes.  Early hydroponics. 

Lake Texcoco was their protection as well as their farm fields.

It was also their water source & that leads us back to me drinking piss.

They used human waste as fertilizer, so the Aztecs were farming on the lake, they were emptying their waste into the lake, & they were drinking that same water.  Is caused a lot of dietary problems.

These problems were solved, in part, by the Chili pepper, which aided in the digestion that was becoming an issue because of the consumption of their own waste.

They would actually mix it into a drink with coco, which isn't half bad, & use it for just abut everything else.

The thing is, when you are stuck on an island & living off of what you can farm, protein is a problem.  Unlike a lot of the other tribes in the area, they didn't exactly have chickens, at least for the first years before they became an empire & they were stuck on an island surrounded by enemies.

Thankfully, they weren't opposed to eating human beings & like all the other religions, they practiced human sacrifice.

Babies taste of chicken.  We know this because cannibals say that humans taste like chicken, so you figure that babies taste of chicken as well.

Not that they were eating babies.

Most of the time, they were eating their enemies.

The Aztecs didn't kill people when they went to war with them.  They considered killing your enemy excessive.  You were doing the people a disservice by killing your enemies.

When the Aztecs went to war, they fought to capture & not kill.  A captured enemy could be ritually sacrificed.  A killed enemy was no use to the gods.

This is another difference as most other cultures in the region sacrificed their own people, of a specific age & gender & did not eat them afterwards.

The Aztecs, on the other hand, killed people from other tribes, didn't care about their age or gender, & then the royalty & priests had a nice feast with chili flavored chocolate to wash it all down.

 This meant that to assure a steady flow of sacrificial victims, the Aztecs were nearly always at war & if they were not, they would simply go to the tribes that they had conquered & choose the people that they wanted to kill in order to offer their blood to the gods & prevent the end of the world.

This tactic meant that when Hernán Cortés finally came to Mexico to conquer the region, with only a handful of soldiers, he was able to find literally thousands of people that the Aztecs had already conquered to rise up against them & help exterminate them off the face of the earth.

But first Cortés had to make up his mind about conquering them or learning from them.  When he first arrived he was dead set on conquest, until he saw Tenochtitlan & came to the conclusion that it was the biggest, most populated, & most architecturally advanced city on earth & became convinced that trading with them would be the better choice.

But that attitude changed from conquest to knowledge to genocide the moment he saw the temple & watched the human sacrifices.

The Aztecs, after they took the heart out of their victim would boil it until it blew up & use the blood to paint the inside of the temple that sat on top of their pyramids.

Imagine the smell.

It was enough to change Hernán's point-of-view for a third time.  After witnessing the human sacrifices he concluded that, for the good of the world, the Aztecs needed to be completely exterminated & the people that the Aztecs had already conquered & were occasionally used as human sacrificial victims concluded that they were better off under the Spanish than they were the Aztecs.

The war had begun.

And it wasn't just the Spanish versus the Aztecs, it was the Spanish & everyone the Aztecs had conquered versus the Aztecs.

The Aztecs didn't stand a chance.  Once again the entire world was against them.

But the really amazing thing is that all of this took place within the span of 200 years.  The Aztecs went from a nomadic tribe on the run from everyone else, to the world's biggest & most populated city & Mexico's largest empire, to nothing in the span of just 200 years.

They were not so much a flash in the pan as they were an explosion in the pan.

But hey, that's what you get when you eat your wife & dance around in her skin.  That is kinda, sorta, the moral of this story.  Whatever you do, do not flay your bride alive, serve her to your guests, & dance in her skin.  It is a regularly occurring wedding faux pas, but one that you want to avid at all costs.

I'll leave you with this:

People of the Sun Part I: The Chavín

Welcome to the People of the Sun posts.  I'm pretty excited about them, it's really my area of the globe, but it is also shrouded in mystery, so the three questions of a good researcher have to be applied:

1. What do I think?
2. What do I know?
3. What can I prove?

 Keep them in mind, because from here on out, even the truly academic are walking that thin line between history & conjuncture.

Moving on:

I'm a big fan of Latino's because they are hot.  Beautiful skin, brown eyes, they are, well, they are:

Tall & tan & young & lovely 

And when she passes each one she passes goes "Aaah."

When she walks, she’s like a samba
That swings so cool & sways so gently
That when she passes, each one she passes goes, “Aaah"

And of course we are talking the Astrud Gilberto, João Gilberto, & Stan Getz version.  You know, the absolute best version.

And even when they are not hot, even before they cleaned up & became hot, they were into some very kinky shit.  I mean, pre-Columbian Latin America was honestly one horrible drug induced nightmare.

It's really not a place that you would want to ever experience.  Not even if you were king.  It's not like you are dealing with the civilizations that most people think of when they hear the words "pre-Columbian America."

These aren't the people that helped the Separatists live through their first Thanksgiving & they are not the people that Andrew Jackson forced to march down the Trail of Tears. 

Those Native Americans lived in the north & they were a civilized race that had no real writing system, but still pulled off the "civilized" better than most Europeans.

Those Indians lived north of the Rio Grande.  That river separated sanity from insanity.  We have horror stories about ritual cannibalism & human sacrifice in Stone Age Europe.  There are Bog Men that we still pull out of the moors & the peat fields today & we think that it was horribly uncivilized of our European ancestors.

But they grew out of it after a few hundred years.  It wasn't something that they embraced.

Here there be monsters.  This is going to be a game of blood.

The man you see in the above picture is named Hernán Cortés & if you are in Mexico, he was a real sonuvabitch.  He's kinda sorta the villain because of what he did to the Aztecs.


 He sorta kinda wiped them off of the face of the earth, & to be fair to history, he came to Mexico, illegally, with the intent of conquest.

That is until he saw Tenochtitlan, current Mexico City, & the capital of the Aztec Empire.

At the time London was the largest & most populated city on Earth & Tenochtitlan was twice as big, twice as populated & far, far cleaner.

In his journal he wrote about how civilized the Aztecs were.  he wrote about how much Europe could benefit form trade with them.  The architecture surpassed anything he had seen in Spain.  They were cleaner & healthier than even the Arabs.  All thoughts of conquest faded & instead he wanted Europe to learn from them.  He idolized them as the perfect civilization.



And then the next day they took him to the temples.

And he climbed stairs that were coated in human blood to reach the temple itself that was painted in human blood.

And he saw the pyramid of skulls & the bodies of a mass sacrifice.

All thoughts of learning from the Aztecs instantly disappeared.  All thoughts of conquest disappeared.  Hernán Cortés, in his next journal entry, concluded that the Aztecs needed to be exterminated for the good of the world.

He was no longer as interested in conquest as he was righteous genocide.  Mind you, this is Hernán Cortés, the man that saw the racism in the English colonies & concluded that Mexico had to breed the races together to be more civilized with the native populations.

But we aren't going to talk about Mexico or the Aztec's today.  They are just a flash in the pan & a more modern example of the blood lust that gripped the people south of the Rio Grande.  Today we are going to talk about a people far older & a lot further south.

But don't worry, it's still a game of blood.

So today we are going to talk about the Chavín, a civilization that controlled their people through the clever use of Hallucinogenic drugs & religion, & not through violence & force of arms.


The Chavíns?

I know, I know, you're an American & as such everything South of the Rio Grande with the exception of Club Med is a blank spot on the map.  I know, I know, you're not an American, you're not from the Americas & everything South of the Río Bravo del Norte is a blank spot on the map.

For those of you that know fuck all of the things south of Mexico, we're talking about a people from here.

For those of you that do not know where Peru is, we're talking right here.

Yes, there really is a South America, it's not just Texas.

No, it's not the Incas, the Incas were here:

Wait, that over laps, right?  I swear to God that over laps.

You're right, it does.

The Incas were an Empire that lasted from roughly 1438 to 1533 in the present era.  A fucking flash in the pan, right?

But we all know who the Incas are because of their beautiful ruins:

Their brightly colored hats:

Their terrifyingly erotic statues:

And the fact that they invented the soft drink:

But that is all in recent antiquity.  The Chavín people we are talking about date from between 900-200 BC, so they were long dead by the time the Incas started their rise to power.

To put it into perspective, The Bronze Age was coming to an end, Classical Greece was entering a dark age & Solomon became king of the Israelites.  This is much older than the pre-Columbian history you learned in high school.

And that leads us to a rather pressing question about their culture:

What do a jaguar, an anaconda, chili peppers, peanuts, & a black caiman have to do with the Andes?

If you can honestly answer that, well, congratulations, you have solved one of the greatest pre-Columbian mysteries out there.

All of those feature prominently on the Tello Oblisk, which was one of the center pieces, if not the centerpiece of the drug-induced Chavín religion.

I know, you are an American & that doesn't seem like too much of a mystery.  They are all native to South America, right?

Well, yeah, they are all native to the Amazon Jungle.

They are all native to right about here:

And the Chavín civilization was right here:

And between them are the Andes Mountains & they are enormous & extremely hard to cross, especially if you are trying to cross them 3,000 years ago.

There are two white things in that picture, the first is snow which caps most of the Andes & below the snow are clouds.

This is where the Chavíns lived, only a little further to the east & at a little lower altitudes.  Which means that jaguars, anacondas, chili peppers, peanuts, & black caimans were nowhere near their civilization &  something that they really never had any contact with.  Certainly not any regular contact.

Like you, most of them have probably never even seen an anaconda in the wild or even know what a black caiman is.

There you go, now when was the last time you heard about a mountain alligator?

Why they worshiped those animals is mystery #1.

Misterio número uno.

Mystery #2 is what happened to them.  We don't know.  They clearly left a written record, but we can't read it.

That is the Raimondi Stela.

That is the Lanzón Stela.

And we know fuck all what they say.  I mean, we don't really have a South American Rosetta Stone...the actual Rosetta Stone, not the over-priced software

And even if we did, we'd need to have languages we could actually read to connect them to & the Spanish did a pretty good job, along with the Catholic Church, of destroying all hopes of that.

We really don't even know what language they spoke or what they called themselves.

But we do know that they had no military to control their people & this makes them very unique for an ancient civilization.  The fact that they never really bothered to fortify their shit really makes them stand out.

It also leads us to a former mystery.

Mystery #3: how did the rulers keep control without a military?

That one we can answer:

Drugs & human sacrifice.

Seriously, drugs & human sacrifice.  You see that building?  It was their religious center, it was entirely underground, had a massive man-made waterfall, no real light source & they would give their people powerful hallucinogenics walk them into the pitch darkness, where they heard the noice of the waterfall echoing off the stone walls, & would preform a ritual human sacrifice to prevent the end of the world.

Killing people to prevent the end of the world was a very common thing south of the Rio Grande.  It's like the two things that links all the different civilizations together.

1. Human Sacrifice
2. Belief that the End is Nigh

When they killed you, sometimes it was to ensure a harvest, sometimes it was to win a battle or thank the gods, & most of the times it was to prevent a cataclysmic destruction that we hear about in every culture & that historians & geologists call the "end of an ice age."

But wait, you said it was pitch black?  How did they find their way through a maze of pitch black stone?

Because, you know, there is no evidence that they used torches...the same thing goes with Egyptian tombs.

I know what you are thinking, giant reflective mirrors like in The Mummy movies.

Nope.  For starters, there is zero evidence of that, even in Egypt & after testing it out Archeologists found that it did NOT work at all.

Wiffer!  But an "A" for effort.

The answer is actually really easy.  I'll give you a moment to think about it....

Tick...Tock...Tick...Tock.

You have it yet?

 I'll give you a hint:

Now please, don't take my word for it.  I want you to do a little experiment & find out on your own.  It will only take a few hours of your time & as an adult really you should be open to new worlds & experimentation.

First you will need to call up your dealer & pick up some LSD.

Or, if you want to go all natural, peyote will work just as well.

You got the shit man?

Great, now I want you to drop it, lock yourself in a room, turn off all the lights & make it as dark as possible.

Trust me, you'll be able to see just fine.

You're not just seeing shit, you are really seeing shit...& you are probably also seeing shit.  Good  hallucinogenics sorta kinda give you night vision.  Anyone that went through college & some people that dropped out of high school can tell you that.

You can see a lot better in the dark when you are tripping balls than you can when you are dead sober.  That's just how it works.

Your pupils are really dilated a lot more than is normal at night.  That's how cops know you're tripping, you look like fucking Bambi.

And anyone that has gone through college knows that you can trip balls & write a turn paper, finish an art project, whatever, it's really not as incapacitating as the straight-edge people will tell you it is.

It also was a part of EVERY ancient culture across the globe had in common.  It's the one thing that ALL ancient cultures had in common from the Flintstones straight through the Romans & it only started to die with Christianity.

They were all tripping balls & all sorta kinda drunk & we're already covered why.  Come to think of it, we've briefly covered why they all used drugs too.

Here is what we can prove:

1. They had a small group of elites
2. Everyone else was in the lower classes
3. The elites got their power from a divine connection.
4. They changed their traditions to remain in power...like ALL religions once they become institutionalized
5. They used a lot of psychotropic drugs as a medium for manipulation

You don't believe point number 4?  Read your Bible, or your Torah, David wouldn't be a Jew today, Bathsheba wouldn't be a Jew today, & neither would Uriah, who fought for David, was considered in his inner circle, & got killed so his buddy could doink Bathsheba.

Big fucking change for the Jews to adopt a policy that makes David a gentile. 

That shit is done so someone will stay in power.

None of that is unusual.

Not even the drugs & the human sacrifice.  The only difference is is that the Chavín killed their people underground & the civilizations that followed them killed them all above ground.

Here is what we know:

1. The Chavín's worshiped multiple Gods, including jaguars, anacondas, & black caiman, at least that is what the Tello suggests & from the looks of it, that obelisk was a focal point.
2. Chili peppers, peanuts, & some of the other food were not grown by the Chavín's & none of the evidence suggests that they traded for or even eaten.
3. They used religion & drugs & not military force to control their population.

Now, to be fair, point 3 is speculation based on the fact that there doesn't seem to be any military contact between the Chavín people & any other culture that might have existed in the area at the time.

That & it's also based on the fact that the only real weapons that anyone found were intended for human sacrifice & not warfare.

It is also based off the belief that, with the exception of the Aztecs, most of the time, the human sacrifices were done to the most respected non elite people in the community.

Here is what we think:

1. They originated in the Amazon jungle & moved their entire civilization into the Andes keeping their old gods & traditions.
2. Through trade, they learned that the Amazon river was a giant Anaconda & started worshiping it like most of the other cultures.
3. There was a new wave of settlement that brought gods that the people gradually used to replace their old gods
4. They were an isolated civilization that weren't fortunate enough to research any of the techs first & thus had to wait for discovery before they could found a religion, like sometimes happens with the Americas if you play the Earth 18 Civs scenario on Civilizations V.

And that is that.  No point here, it's hard to draw conclusions about civilizations that we know extremely little about.

Pre-Columbian America is a fucking mystery.

A mystery wrapped in an enigma.

And an enigma with a chocolate flavored peyote coating.

But I figured, we'll start with them because you might be able to figure some of that shit out & it leaves us open to move gradually through the civilizations that we know a lot more about.

Wait until we get to the male genital mutilation. 

I'll leave you with this: