Friday, August 29, 2008

Fjordman: On Human Sacrifice and Political Correctness

Fjordman’s latest essay has been posted at The Brussels Journal:

The head of the Maori Studies Department at Auckland University, Professor Margaret Mutu, said cannibalism was widespread throughout New Zealand. “It was definitely there. It’s recorded in all sorts of ways in our histories and traditions, a lot of place names refer to it.” She said Maori cannibalism was not referred to by many historians because it was counter to English culture.

We are often told that people of European origins invent negative stereotypes about other peoples. Notice how in this case — and it is far from the only such example — Europeans actually downplayed very real and serious flaws in other cultures. And this was long before Political Correctness as we know it today was invented.

[…]

So, the Aztecs were a sophisticated bunch of natural philosophers who were great lovers of food and had good health care. They were presumably at the brink of developing microwave popcorn, interplanetary travel and laser eye surgery when the Europeans showed up and invented racism and global warming.

It is undoubtedly true that there were brutal aspects of early modern European culture. It was a brutal age. However, whatever Europeans did at this time, they didn’t eat other people’s internal organs on a regular basis. I know of indications that human sacrifice was once practiced in Europe, China, Egypt and elsewhere, but that was in very ancient times. By the sixteenth century AD, human sacrifice was not an established feature among any of the major Old World civilizations, but it was quite common among New World peoples.
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You can find traces of the concept of cannibalism in European culture, for instance in the story about Hansel and Gretel, one of the many traditional fairy tales such as Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella that were collected and popularized by the Germans Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early nineteenth century. However, in this fairy tale adapted by the Brothers Grimm, the idea of eating people was attributed to the villain of the story, the evil witch, and the practice was seen as self-evidently immoral and unacceptable.

Making apologies for undeniably barbarian aspects of non-European cultures while denigrating European culture has become quite widespread, even among people who are themselves of European origins. When I was reading about the history of chocolate, I found that the author of one of the most commonly cited books, Michael D. Coe, thought that the Aztecs were in some ways better than the Europeans. Yes, those Aztecs, who ripped out people’s hearts, ate their organs with tomatoes and drank their blood mixed with chocolate. They had better health care, while European medicine was “pathetic.”

Read the rest at The Brussels Journal.

9 comments:

Diamed said...

Diamond's New Guinean Supremacism is a joke.

IQ is not culturally biased, thousands of different tests have been devised over hundreds of years and they all give the same results, if a test could be made which would give a different result, then it would have been already.

Furthermore IQ tests accurately predict success in life and correlate highly to wealth, education, lifespan, criminality, even successful marriages. If the test is culturally biased and isn't measuring new guinean's 'true' potential, then that should be shown by new guineans consistently outperforming the expectations the IQ tests predict. Instead they act just as predicted, poorly, criminally, uneducatedly, shortly.

The same for any IQ test that gives a group a bad 'rap.' If it is merely a cultural bias, then that group should perform much better than the IQ test predicts they would. Instead every low IQ group does wonders at proving just how right the IQ test was. They are dysfunctional, degenerate, impoverished, unemployed, violent, uneducated, beat their wives, have bastards, drunkards, etc. It all matches their IQ exactly.

And IQ tests can be given to kids as young as 6 and even infants, so it is the cause not the effect. A low IQ brother and a high IQ brother growing up in the same home with the same parents, same school, same nutrition, etc will still have results exactly matching their IQ not anything else. The low IQ brother will get a bad education, be poor, go on welfare, turn to crime, just like any other low IQ person. The high IQ brother will get a degree, get wealthy, be a model citizen just like other high IQ people. Poverty doesn't cause low IQ, low IQ causes poverty. Lack of education doesn't cause low IQ, low IQ causes lack of education. And so on. IQ is genetic, all powerful (ie no other factor matters in a person's success or failure IQ determines it all), and unevenly distributed between individuals and groups. From this central truth the entire world is revealed.

Diamed said...

btw the two brothers one high IQ one low scenario is a study by Charles Murray I didn't just make it up.

Madouc said...

while it is true that some east asian groups have have higher avg IQs that whites, they also have fewer geniuses. The number of asian IQs over 120 is very small. That being said, the number of IQs under 90 is very small as well. Could explain why the culture tends to so much conformity.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sftfi1%7Bimage3%7D.gif

and here is a great read on IQs throughout the world and what it means for economies.

http://ave-imperator.blogspot.com/2008/08/brains-bucks-and-bolshevism.html

Afonso Henriques said...

Thank you Baron. It is really important for us all to keep following Fjordman's essay. That one was really good (a bit borring in the end), thank you very much.

By the way, I don't think the other guy believes in Papuasian Supermecism, I want to believe that this is his way to say:

We would all be better to unite, go to the jungle and behave like Nehandertals... what the man wants is a heavy, heavy party!

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Diamed, just one little thing about IQ. It is not only genetic. I saw... a study (via Youtube, I know, I know) with very nice arguments which stated that IQ is 70% genetic. The other 30% has to due with stimulation. That's why richer kids tend to do better at school than impoverished ones, in other words, that is why richer kids whose parents have the same IQs of poorer children tend to do better than poor children.

And once you are so "crazy" over IQ, I heard a genious had nothing to do with genetics, is it true?

Hesperado said...

"Europeans actually downplayed very real and serious flaws in other cultures. And this was long before Political Correctness as we know it today was invented."

It depends on what the date was. No date is given in the article. Nobody can pinpoint when PC began, though its mainstream dominance certainly has prevailed over the past 50-odd years.

As to its appearance among historians and Orientalists of old, I have documented and analyzed four cases on my blog, The Hesperado:

1963, 1942, 1917, and 1849.

When Did PC Begin? A Fourth Case Study

Beyond these four cases, in my readings I have noticed a few others from various dates prior to 1950 that I have not yet documented.

Aside from that, we have the development of the romanticization of the "Noble Savage", whose roots can be traced back as far as the 17th century at least, certainly increasing with the Enlightenment period of the 18th century, and becoming full-blown by the 19th century.

Barry Brummet said...

We don't have human sacrifice now? What about the forty million sacrifices to the feminist cult since Roe vs Wade?

Diamed said...

I didn't mean to say IQ is wholly genetic, just that it is genetic, the greatest single factor in life outcome, and differently distributed between individuals and groups. Until someone tackles this truth and builds a philosophy around the reality of human existence, our governments will continuously lead their people to ruin and disaster. We need to get people into power who recognize the truth and the limits to social engineering and the limits of integration. It's unbelievable how crucial this truth in in determining almost every government policy on earth and to have it unknown is causing chaos and mayhem worldwide. Jared Diamond as the posterboy for the camp of denial has made it that much harder to save the world with the harsh and necessary truth. I hope he's happy with his tongue in cheek 'papuan supremacism' because it will eventually directly be the cause of millions of unnecessary deaths and trillions of useless spending programs.

xlbrl said...

The first commentary made on political correctness was made by Tacitus. " It is common to esteem what is unknown." He may have commited it himself in writing with unrealistic admiration of the barbarian tribes of Germany in his 'Germania'. As we grow too familiar with our own growing peculiarities, we tend to admire qualities in another culture that may not be there.

Panday said...

Here you go. This sums up all of it:
Tradition