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For a contrast, when the Aztecs were overthrown in Mexico, the Catholic Church didn't torch old documents—it had them translated.

Sadly, this simply isn't true.

Sadly, how soon we forget. Here's a well-known example indeed of a Spanish priest burning Mayan and Aztec codices—and being condemned for it by the Spanish (Catholic) government itself.

It gets even more complicated. This very priest, Fr. Diego de Landa, had created a phonetic alphabet for recording and translating the Mayan hieroglyphic code. It is because of his work that we can read Mayan symbols at all. (His system was finally understood as phonetic, rather than ideographic, in 1952.) And Mayan culture and society are understood today because of his journal and other writings. What he said was that most of what he burned involved devil-worship. The Spanish decided he'd gone overboard, and condemned him for it.

Here we are, living in a culture that respects the past—comparatively speaking, since we did not do as Mao did, torching every speck of ancient Chinese knowledge and architecture he could get his hands on. (Which the ancestor-worshipping ancient Chinese sages had preserved.) Torching your enemies' stuff (oops, as the pagan Vikings and Huns also did) is typical human behavior. It's only a confident culture that seeks objective truth that fights this urge and seeks instead to understand what went before—knowing that its own search for truth in Christ is stronger than faction or tribe.

The Soviets extirpated all the inconvenient knowledge they could, and it crippled them and resulted in their downfall. The liberals here rewrite history continuously, and their lies never agree with each other—so they must continually change the subject and "Move On." (There has never been a more aptly named organization.)

Get this straight: Yes, the victors among men usually try to destroy their enemies' history. But we live in a culture (the Christian tradition) where this is largely not the case. The lamentable exceptions to our historical sensitivity are just that—exceptions. Don't accuse the West of being in the same category as the Moslems or most other pagans.

And what went on before the Mayans and the Aztecs? Certainly the practical-minded Aztecs did not invent the writing or Indian culture they used. Did they torch it all?