[filosofo]

The fact that people did bad things at one time doesn't imply that what they did was accepted generally or approved by moral standards of the time. For example, many contemporaries opposed the tactics of the Inquisition (mentioned in the article as the advent of waterboarding).

Using the same logic we could characterize 20th-Century people as accepting mass-murder, because it was practiced by numerous nations on a never-before-seen scale.