Sure, but we hate native brown people more. Before you dare praise any culture without European roots, heed the ladylike racism of IWF’s Charlotte Allen. Responding to an archeologist quoted in the New Yorker as saying of pre-Columbian Brazil, “All the settlements were laid out with a complicated plan, with a sense of engineering and mathematics that rivalled anything that was happening in much of Europe at the time,” Allen (no doubt an expert in archeology herself) responds with, “What?” She goes onto defend the virtues of European architecture, of which there are many, all while arguing that no other civilization compares. Heck, she says, they still don’t compare:
The Brazilians, by contrast, for all their admirable moats and roads, built no monuments of any kind, didn’t get past pottery in terms of art, and had neither reading nor writing. Their tribal descendants today, living off Brazillian government welfare, don’t do much besides run around naked, fish for piranha, wage murderous wars against their enemies, kill the occasional white intruder, practice polygamy (two wives apiece is standard), and try to keep their television-preferring children interested in the traditional customs, such as secluding teenage daughters inside the house for years until it’s time for the big fertility blowout.
Yes, those dirty naked savages still exist today! And they’re a conservative’s nightmare: they love welfare, aren’t ashamed of nudity, spit on traditional marriage, and hate white people (although they do, redeemingly, love war). She goes on to basically argue that Mayan culture has no good qualities either because they engaged in human sacrifice, their hands dripping blood “incessantly.” The Aztecs were barbarians, too. Her point: She *hearts* Europe. Or at least, pre-Columbian Europe. Because compared with them injun savages, she’d take Europe any day — assuming, of course, that we aren’t talking about France.