Video - BD's avatar Captain Koons from Pulp Fiction.
FGF | During the early nineteenth century, a slave trader named Theophilus Conneau kept a journal of his experiences in Africa. On one occasion he witnessed a cannibal orgy, in which one tribe performed acts of torture and mutilation, including castration and decapitation, on another tribe which they had subdued.
Conneau was particularly struck by the ferocity of the women of the conquering tribe, who, their naked bodies decorated with chalk and red paint, gleefully led the gruesome festivities. The chief matron “bore an infant babe torn from its mother’s womb ... which she tossed high in the air, receiving it on the point of her knife” before eating it. During the ritual this same woman was “adorned with a string of men’s genital parts” while “collecting into a gourd the brains of the decapitated bodies.”
Such practices may not justify European colonialism, but they do help explain why the Europeans thought they were bringing civilization to savage places. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, regretting the white man’s arrogance need not mean idealizing the conquered natives. Chesterton also observed that cannibalism wasn’t a primitive practice but a highly decadent one.
The cannibals weren’t satisfying physical appetites, like carnivorous animals, but indulging a specifically human — or diabolical — malice. The historian Francis Parkman describes Iroquois Indians, having captured a party of Algonquins, roasting and devouring their infants “before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with mockery and laughter.”
Mocking the suffering of the victims was part of the fun; the very essence of it, in fact. The lion doesn’t gloat over his prey, with a circle of his fellow felines whooping at the agony of a slowly dismembered antelope.
Inflicting and observing torture for amusement is a distinctively human delight. In the case of the African cannibals, it would be a feeble excuse to say that the unborn child was a mere “fetus,” and therefore somehow not “fully human,” as we say now; the woman who killed it obviously regarded it as human, which was more or less the point of the orgy.
Eating a fetus might strike even the National Abortion Rights Action League as a little unseemly; our enlightened society still retains a few irrational inhibitions, which may, however, eventually go the way of so many other taboos. Western man (including Western woman) has learned to justify abortion, if not yet to enjoy it. We still observe a certain nervous and clinical decorum about the subject. Fist tap Big Don. (The Francis Griffen Foundation and dead Joe Sobran are absolutely priceless - Thanks!)
FGF | During the early nineteenth century, a slave trader named Theophilus Conneau kept a journal of his experiences in Africa. On one occasion he witnessed a cannibal orgy, in which one tribe performed acts of torture and mutilation, including castration and decapitation, on another tribe which they had subdued.
Conneau was particularly struck by the ferocity of the women of the conquering tribe, who, their naked bodies decorated with chalk and red paint, gleefully led the gruesome festivities. The chief matron “bore an infant babe torn from its mother’s womb ... which she tossed high in the air, receiving it on the point of her knife” before eating it. During the ritual this same woman was “adorned with a string of men’s genital parts” while “collecting into a gourd the brains of the decapitated bodies.”
Such practices may not justify European colonialism, but they do help explain why the Europeans thought they were bringing civilization to savage places. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, regretting the white man’s arrogance need not mean idealizing the conquered natives. Chesterton also observed that cannibalism wasn’t a primitive practice but a highly decadent one.
The cannibals weren’t satisfying physical appetites, like carnivorous animals, but indulging a specifically human — or diabolical — malice. The historian Francis Parkman describes Iroquois Indians, having captured a party of Algonquins, roasting and devouring their infants “before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with mockery and laughter.”
Mocking the suffering of the victims was part of the fun; the very essence of it, in fact. The lion doesn’t gloat over his prey, with a circle of his fellow felines whooping at the agony of a slowly dismembered antelope.
Inflicting and observing torture for amusement is a distinctively human delight. In the case of the African cannibals, it would be a feeble excuse to say that the unborn child was a mere “fetus,” and therefore somehow not “fully human,” as we say now; the woman who killed it obviously regarded it as human, which was more or less the point of the orgy.
Eating a fetus might strike even the National Abortion Rights Action League as a little unseemly; our enlightened society still retains a few irrational inhibitions, which may, however, eventually go the way of so many other taboos. Western man (including Western woman) has learned to justify abortion, if not yet to enjoy it. We still observe a certain nervous and clinical decorum about the subject. Fist tap Big Don. (The Francis Griffen Foundation and dead Joe Sobran are absolutely priceless - Thanks!)
