By Andrew L. Jaffee

While pumping up his latest movie, “Apocalypto,” Mel Gibson has taken the opportunity to draw an inaccurate analogy between the fall of Mayan civilization and the U.S.-led Iraq war. Not only is his reasoning flawed, but his analogy is based on erroneous history. Here’s Mel:

“The precursors to a civilization that’s going under are the same, time and time again,” Gibson said after the work-in-progress screening in Texas.

“What’s human sacrifice if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?” he said.

First of all, the Maya’s were not a unified country like the U.S. They were always split into a large number of city-states ruled by petty tyrants (“these cities were shown to be capitals of smaller kingdoms that were almost constantly in conflict with one another”). Mayan city-states like Tikal, Palenque, and Copan, were constantly attacking each other, and their rulers constantly recorded their “triumphs” in hieroglyphic texts etched in stone:

Previously mythologized as a civilization of pacifists and stargazers, the Maya were actually a people of great pageantry. They relished bloodletting, be it in battle, sacrifice, or on the playing field, and they were very much concerned with war. Their world was organized into warring city-states, and their writing speaks of dynastic struggle, marriage politics and the creation of the universe.

Human sacrifice, as practiced by the Maya, was performed by despots to terrorize their own people, and frighten neighboring city-states.

The war in Iraq is an attempt by the U.S. to put a stop to the plague of Islamist terrorism before it reaches our shores again. We may have societal problems, but only have suffered one civil war 145 years ago.

Gibson is a nincompoop, even though he’s a rich one. His outburst about American “human sacrifice” holds about as much water as his virulent anti-Semitism — his words: “fucking Jews.” We should listen to this man?

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Related: United States, War Against Islamo-fascism, Political Correctness, Media/Blogsphere, Anti-Semitism

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