Posted on 07/18/2006 7:45:03 AM PDT by Pokey78
Nicholas Wade's Before The Dawn is one of those books full of eye-catching details. For example, did you know the Inuit have the largest brains of any modern humans? Something to do with the cold climate. Presumably, if this global warming hooey ever takes off, their brains will be shrinking with the ice caps.
But the passage that really stopped me short was this:
"Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. . . . 'I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially "pacified the past" and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,' says Keeley."
That's Lawrence Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois. And the phrase that stuck was that bit about artificially pacifying the past. We've grown used to the biases of popular culture. If a British officer meets a native -- African, Indian, whatever -- in any movie, play or novel of the last 30 years, the Englishman will be a sneering supercilious sadist and the native will be a dignified man of peace in perfect harmony with his environment in whose tribal language there is not even a word for "war" or "killing" or "weapons of mass destruction." A few years ago, I asked Tim Rice, who'd just written the lyrics for Disney's Aladdin and The Lion King, why he wasn't doing Pocahontas. "Well, the minute they mentioned it," he said, "I knew the Brits would be the bad guys. I felt it was my patriotic duty to decline." Sure enough, when the film came out, John Smith and his men were the bringers of environmental devastation to the New World. "They prowl the earth like ravenous wolves," warns the medicine man, whereas Chief Powhatan wants everyone to be "guided to a place of peace." Fortunately, Captain Smith comes to learn from Pocahontas how to "paint with all the colours of the wind."
In reality, Pocahontas's fellow Algonquin Indians were preyed on by the Iroquois, "who took captives home to torture them before death," observes Nicholas Wade en passant. The Iroquois? Surely not. Only a year or two back, the ethnic grievance lobby managed to persuade Congress to pass a resolution that the United States Constitution was modelled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation -- which would have been news to the dead white males who wrote it. With Disney movies, one assumes it's just the modishness of showbiz ignoramuses and whatever multiculti theorists they've put on the payroll as consultants. But professor Keeley and Steven LeBlanc of Harvard disclose almost as an aside that, in fact, their scientific colleagues were equally invested in the notion of the noble primitive living in peace with nature and his fellow man, even though no such creature appears to have existed. "Most archaeologists," says LeBlanc, "ignored the fortifications around Mayan cities and viewed the Mayan elite as peaceful priests. But over the last 20 years Mayan records have been deciphered. Contrary to archaeologists' wishful thinking, they show the allegedly peaceful elite was heavily into war, conquest and the sanguinary sacrifice of beaten opponents.... The large number of copper and bronze axes found in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age burials were held to be not battle axes but a form of money."
And on, and on. Do you remember that fabulously preserved 5,000-year-old man they found in a glacier in 1991? He had one of those copper axes the experts assured us were an early unit of currency. Unfortunately for this theory, he had it hafted in a manner that suggested he wasn't asking, "Can you break a twenty?" "He also had with him," notes professor Keeley, "a dagger, a bow, and some arrows; presumably these were his small change." Nonetheless, anthropologists concluded that he was a shepherd who had fallen asleep and frozen peacefully to death in a snowstorm. Then the X-ray results came back and showed he had an arrowhead in him.
Not for the first time, the experts turn out to be playing what children call "Opposite Land." There's more truth in Cole Porter's couplet from Find Me A Primitive Man:
I don't mean the kind that belongs to a club But the kind that has a club that belongs to him.
Although Porter was the kind that belongs to a club, the second line accurately conveys his own taste in men. He'd have been very annoyed if Mister Primitive had turned out to be some mellow colours-of-your-windiness hippy-dippy granola-cruncher.
Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."
Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? And to the point of pretending a bunch of torturing marauders devised the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. We do it for the same reason we indulge behaviour like that at Caledonia, Ont. We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.
I was interested to read Wade's book after a month in which men raised in suburban Ontario were charged with a terrorist plot that included plans to behead the Prime Minister, and the actual heads of three decapitated police officers were found in the Tijuana River. The Mexican drug gangs weren't Muslim last time I checked, but evidently decapitation isn't just for jihadists anymore: if you want to get ahead, get a head. A couple of years back, I came across a column in The East African by Charles Onyango-Obbo musing on the return of cannibalism to the Dark Continent. Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo (four million dead but, as they haven't found a way to pin it on Bush, nobody cares) had been making victims' relatives eat the body parts of their loved ones. You'll recall that, when Samuel Doe was toppled as Liberia's leader, he was served a last meal of his own ears. His killers kept his genitals for themselves, under the belief that if you eat a man's penis you acquire his powers. One swallow doesn't make a summer, of course, but I wonder sometimes if we're not heading toward a long night of re-primitivization. In his shrewd book Civilization And Its Enemies, Lee Harris writes:
"Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary."
It's worse than Harris thinks. We're not merely "forgetful." We've constructed a fantasy past in which primitive societies lived in peace and security with nary a fear that their crops would be stolen or their children enslaved. War has been the natural condition of mankind for thousands of years, and our civilization is a very fragile exception to that. What does it say about us that so many of our elites believe exactly the opposite -- that we are a monstrous violent rupture with our primitive pacifist ancestors? It's never a good idea to put reality up for grabs. You can bet your highest-denomination axe on that.
"four million dead but, as they haven't found a way to pin it on Bush, nobody cares"
Priceless quote.
I saw an interesting reconstruction of the Battle of Agincourt. You may recall that the English Logbow was credited with virtually wiping out the massed armored knights of the French Army. The battle reconstruction focused on the narrow frontage & treated the French heavy cavalry charge from a "crowd control" perspective. Essentially the heavily armed & armored French were hemmed in so tightly that there wasn't enough room to fight -- or to escape. They literally trampled themselves & those survivors were slaughtered by the English -- many after they surrendered.
I would also suggest "War" by Gwynne Dyer. Dyer is a bit of a lib, but his approach to the subject -- especially ancient warfare -- is pretty enlightening.
Yeah, I had the same take on that book. It's almost as if the writer were straining to tag Americans with a crime that would balance off the tendency of the Japanese to behead & eat their prisoners.
Careful there. There were pirates & fishermen from Europe visiting the eastern seaboard many years before the first settlement. It's possible that the first real contacts with the natives were just not all that well documented.
It looks like the Norse settlements in Canada & Greenland were wiped out by Inuit expansion as well as environmental factors (the Little Ice Age).
:')
Oh yeah, the offensive mascots BS.
Sounds like a plan...
Use of "decimation" by a purportedly educated person to mean "devastation" sounds and is IGNORANT. It is a public school phenomenon and its user should not be proud to claim he accepted public school limits without looking beyond what he was presented there. It is not a matter of "purism" in this case but of random use of adjectives because one doesn't know what a word actually means and decimation sounds kind of like destruction and some of those other big words and, gee, youse knows what I mean anyways.
New World Dictionary of American English:
decimate -- 1) (orig) to select by lot and kill every tenth one;
2) to destroy or kill a large part;
3) (obs) to take a tenth part of
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:
decimate -- 1. To destroy or kill a large part of (a group);
2. a. To inflict great destruction or damage on;
b. To reduce markedly in amount;
3. To select by lot and kill one in every ten of;
USAGE NOTE: Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group.
Mirriam-Webster:
decimate -- 1 : to select by lot and kill every tenth man of;
2 : to exact a tax of 10 percent from;
3 a : to reduce drastically especially in number;
b : to cause great destruction or harm to;
Shall I go on? There are dozens of others, up to and including the Oxford, which, by the way, doesn't even include the archaic definition except as a footnote "more or less totally superseded" by the modern usage.
So are YOU the authority or are you simply some smarmy, smug, self-righteous word nazi who thinks he knows something nobody else does? I know full well the etymology of the word. But I also know its CURRENT usage, you know, the one that ISN'T 2,000 years out of date.
As did I! I got really annoyed with his trying to justify the horrendous crimes of the Japanese in World War II.
Oh, and about that Tim Rice quote... while I respect the man for doing so, I wish he hadn't declined and stuck with us with Schwartz, who is notorious for his awful lyrics and gave us such subtle messages as "They're different from us, which means they must be evil!"
I am not surprised to read that a YEC thinks "ability to torture the logic of others" is what debate is about.
The current Merriam Webster's is simply not useful nor is the New World Dictionary. If 3 people can be shown to have used a word a certain way on the street and another has written it in something that got published once then MW and NWD will baptize that word and/or usage. It still sounds ignorant, aggressively ignorant. It is like using "they" for third person singular.People who use such words with their new street validated meanings usually have problems discussing things that require that they and their interlocutors actually know what they are talking about. It becomes feelings and emotions because that doesn't require any precision.
The current Merriam Webster's is simply not useful nor is the New World Dictionary. If 3 people can be shown to have used a word a certain way on the street and another has written it in something that got published once then MW and NWD will baptize that word and/or usage. It still sounds ignorant, aggressively ignorant. It is like using "they" for third person singular.People who use such words with their new street validated meanings usually have problems discussing things that require that they and their interlocutors actually know what they are talking about. It becomes feelings and emotions because that doesn't require any precision.
Thanks, it sounds like a fun book!
Similarities to what happened at Cannae. The Roman soldiers were so tightly packed together that many of them were crushed and died while still standing.
"You can lay a thousand bricks; but that won't make you a Mason.
But eat just ONE penis, and......"
LOL!
Oh bull!
Seems I recall there being MILLIONS of bison when the Europeans arrived!
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