by César Tort
Preface to the abridged Gates of Vienna edition (English version) of a book from the series Whispering leaves
Throughout history and prehistory children’s lives have been a nightmare about which our species is barely starting to become conscious. “Parents are the child’s most lethal enemy,” wrote the founder of modern psychohistory. While paleoanthropologists have found evidence of decapitated infants since the time of our pre-human ancestors, and while it was known that infanticide continued into the Paleolithic and the Neolithic periods, the emotional after-effects on the surviving siblings was only first appreciated by Lloyd deMause with the publishing of History of childhood in 1974. In his preface to the internet version of The emotional life of nations, published in 2002, deMause wrote: “The purpose of this book is to reveal for the first time how the ultimate cause of all wars and human misery is the parental holocaust of children throughout history.” As we will see in the sixth discursion, substantiated by a hundred references [I published a fair portion of this discursion in a Citizendium article], infanticdal parents were the rule, not the exception. Even in the so-called great civilizations the sacrifice of children was common. In Carthage urns have been found containing thousands of burned remains of children sacrificed by parents asking favors from the gods. It is believed that infants were burned alive.
Although in a far less sadistic way than in Carthage and other ancient states, and this explains the genius of the classic world, Greeks and Romans practiced infanticide in the form of exposure of newborns, especially girls. Euripides’ Ion describes the exposed infant as: “prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend.” Philo was the first philosopher who made a clear statement against infanticide:
Some of them do the deed with their own hands; with monstrous cruelty and barbarity they stifle and throttle the first breath which the infants draw or throw them into a river or into the depths of the sea, after attaching some heavy substance to make them sink more quickly under its weight.
In some of his satires Juvenal openly criticized abortion, child abandonment, and the killing of adoptive children and stepchildren.
My first reaction in the face of such revelations was, naturally, a healthy skepticism. This moved me to purchase books about infanticide and histories of childhood not written by “psychohistorians”, but by common historians; and I started to pay special attention to certain kinds of news in the papers of which previously I scarcely gave any importance. One day in 2006 a notice caught my eye, stating that there are 32 million fewer women than men in India, and that the imbalance was caused by feticide. I recalled a photograph I had seen in the June 2003 National Geographic, showing a Bihar midwife in the rural North of India, rescuing a female baby abandoned under a bridge. Infanticide and selective abortion, particularly of girls, continue as I write this line. According to a Reproductive Rights conference in October 2007 in Hyderabad, India, statistics show that 163 million women are missing in Asia, compared to the proportion of the male population. They are the result of the exposure of babies, and especially of selective abortion facilitated by access to techniques such as prenatal testing and ultrasound imagery. These snippets of information gathered from newspapers, coupled with the scholarly treatises which I was reading, eradicated my original skepticism about the reality of infanticide.
But let’s return to psychohistory as developed by deMause.
- - - - - - - - -
There are cultures far more barbarous than contemporary India as regards childrearing. In the recent past of the tribes of New Guinea and Australia, little brothers and sisters witnessed how parents killed one of their siblings and made the rest of the family share the cannibal feast. “They eat the head first”, wrote Géza Róheim in Psychoanalysis and anthropology published in 1950. Gillian Gillison observed in Between culture and fantasy: a New Guinea highlands mythology, published in 1993, that the mother eats the son’s penis. And Fritz Poole wrote:
Having witnessed their parents’ mortuary anthropophagy, many of these children suddenly avoided their parents, shrieked in their presence, or expressed unusual fear of them. After such experiences, several children recounted dreams or constructed fantasies about animal-man beings with the faces or other features of particular parents who were smeared with blood and organs.
These passages are quoted in Lloyd deMause’s book The Emotional Life of Nations. Reading further in this work, one can also learn, as Wolfgang Lederer wrote when observing the tribes, that other primitives threw their newborns to the swine, who devoured them swiftly. (As for non-deMausean references to these claims, I repeat, several of them appear in the Citizendium article that I edited.) Lederer also recounts that he saw one of these mothers burying her child alive:
The baby’s movements may be seen in the hole as it is suffocating and panting for breath; schoolchildren saw the movements of such a dying baby and wanted to take it out to save it. However, the mother stamped it deep in the ground and kept her foot on it…
Australian aboriginals killed approximately 30% of their infants, as reported by Gillian Cowlishaw in Oceania; and the first missionaries to Polynesia estimated that up to two-thirds of Polynesian children were killed by their parents. In a 2008 article I learned that infanticide continues in the islands even as of the time of reporting. Tribal women allege they have to kill their babies for fear they might become dreadful warriors as adults.
Another type of information that shocked me in deMause’s books was the frequency throughout history of the mutilation of children. Once more, my first reaction was a healthy skepticism. But I had no choice but to accept the fact that even today there are millions of girls whose genitals have been cut. The Emotional Life of Nations publishes a photograph of a panicked Cairo pubescent girl being held down by adults at the moment when her family has her mutilated. Every time I see that photo I have to turn away my head (the girl looks directly into the camera and her pain reaches me deeply). According to the French National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), in 2007 there were between 100 and 140 million women who had had their genitals removed. The practice ranges from the partial cutting of the clitoris to the suturation of the vaginal orifice, the latter especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, some regions of the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The INED study points out that in Ethiopia three-quarters of women have been genitally mutilated, and in Mali up to 90 percent. The practice is also carried out in Yemen, Indonesia and Malaysia. In historic times there were a large number of eunuchs in Byzantium, and in the West mutilation was a common practice for boys. Verdun was notorious for the quantity of castrations performed, and signs hung above stores saying, “boys castrated here.” Castration was common as well in other cultures. DeMause observes that the testicles of boys between three and seven years were crushed or cut off. In China both the penis and the scrotum were cut, and in the Middle East the practice continued until recent times.
DeMause’s books are eye-openers also about another practice that no text of traditional anthropology had ever taught me: the tight swaddling of babies. It is worth noting that historians, anthropologists, and ethnologists have been the target of fierce criticism by some psychohistorians for their failure to see the psychological after-effects brought about by such practices. Through the centuries, babies were swaddled by their mothers with swaddling clothes wrapped around their bodies, several times and tightly fastened while they screamed in their vain attempts at liberation. Before reading deMause the only thing I knew of such practice was when I as a boy saw a cartoon of a couple of Red Indians who had their baby swaddled, of which only a little head was visible crying big time, while the Indians walked on casually. Despite its being a cartoon, I remember it made a mark in my young memory because of the pity I felt for the baby boy and how I noted the parents’ indifference. This happened decades before I read Foundations of Psychohistory, wherein it is described that this practice was universal and that it goes back to our tribal ancestors.
Swaddled boy of the Indian tribe Nez Perce (1911)
In Germany and in some Austrian families swaddling continued into the twentieth century. We can imagine the baby Hitler as he was swaddled by his mother, Clara Hitler, and left choking with sobs with his excrement enclosed in his swaddling bands [the second and third books of my Whispering leaves series recount how Hitler was abused as a child]. Even Alice Miller herself, the heroine of my third book, was swaddled as a child. In Europe swaddling is still practiced in some rural parts of Greece. The sad spectacle of the swaddled newborns in Yugoslavia and Russia draws the visiting foreigners’ attention. Even in the city in which I was born a few friends have told me that some relatives swaddled their babies. (My mother confessed to me that both she and my father disliked the practice, and that they gave it up, on returning home, after having had it done to me and my siblings as newborns in the hospital.)
Those who have read my previous book would not be surprised that the man in the street has barely thought about the ravages that these practices — swaddling, mutilation, growing up knowing that mom and dad had abandoned or sacrificed a little sister — caused in the surviving siblings who witnessed it. What we have before us is the most potent taboo of the species: a lack of elemental consciousness of what parents do to their children. As we will see at the end of this book, some historians of infanticide who do not belong to the deMausean school, such as Joseph Birdsell, Laila Williamson, and Larry Milner, estimate in astronomical figures the infanticide rate since the Paleolithic. If their estimates are accurate, quantitatively speaking the Nazi Holocaust was insignificant compared to the children murdered by their parents.
But before elaborating further on this nearly unbelievable information, I must write down a few words about my forefathers.
Note for Gates of Vienna readers:
Those two family chapters will be omitted in this edition of The Return of Quetzalcoatl. The English Table of Contents of the chapters I will be translating from the original Spanish manuscript is available here.
Besides the Robert Godwin article, why the contents of this book are so relevant to GoV concerns has been explained, albeit briefly, in my blog. The fuller explanation will be apparent as a substantial part of this book is published here in the forthcoming weeks/months. I thank Baron Bodissey for allowing me to publish this preface.
©2008 César Tort
31 comments:
“The purpose of this book is to reveal for the first time how the ultimate cause of all wars and human misery is the parental holocaust of children throughout history.”
A dubious assertion at best,
... infanticdal parents were the rule, not the exception
There is a distinct statistical rule that tends to prohibit such a statement.
Overly infanticidal parents would murder the majority of their offspring and, therefore, not transmit their genes or the practices of infant sacrifice.
Clearly, there must be some sort of imtermediate resolution to this equation.
I am well aware of parents gleefully hurling their infants into the furnaces of Baal. Still, this could not represent the vast majority of cases or self-extinction would have ruled.
Admittedly, there is a certain obtuse logic to parents subjecting their offspring to rigorous tasks in order to weed out the least hardy, but it does not support the case of infanticide.
In Carthage urns have been found containing thousands of burned remains of children sacrificed by parents asking favors from the gods. It is believed that infants were burned alive.
Perhaps the origin of "carthago delenda est"?
Although in a far less sadistic way than in Carthage and other ancient states, and this explains the genius of the classic world, Greeks and Romans practiced infanticide in the form of exposure of newborns, especially girls.
This makes only slightly more sense in terms of the continuing practice of female infaticide that persists in the current atmosphere of male preference which continues to this day.
My first reaction in the face of such revelations was, naturally, a healthy skepticism.
I'm very glad to hear this.
One day in 2006 a notice caught my eye, stating that there are 32 million fewer women than men in India, and that the imbalance was caused by feticide.
This is where your argument gains justifiable weight.
Infanticide and selective abortion, particularly of girls, continue as I write this line.
Something that I have written about many times long before this. You are referred to comment № 26 where I refer to China's Perfect Storm:
3.) China’s “one family – one child” policy has led to endemic gender based abortion and female infanticide. This lopsided demographic is already beginning to affect Chinese society with the “Little Emperor” syndrome of intensely spoiled male children. As both parents toil in day jobs, these brats are left in the care of grandparents. Chinese culture deems even slight deformities as an insurmountable impediment to marriage. By threatening to injure themselves, these “Little Emperors” extort ice cream and candy from their grandparent caretakers. Imagine such manipulative, cosseted and ill-tempered only-children taking command of China’s nuclear arsenal.
Further, the lack of marriageable women can only presage some sort of increase in male homosexuality. Slowly eroding cultural mores will remove some of the stigma attached to homosexuality and lack of female companionship will do the rest. At present, once unmarriageable peasant girls from rural provinces now have their pick of male suitors. Starving North Korean mail-order brides are also being imported to meet this demand.
As to FGM (Female Genital Mutilation), it is nothing but some sort of perpetual life-long rape that denies women of their most basic right to sexual pleasure. Practitioners of it should be shot on sight unless slower means of extermination are available.
DeMause’s books are eye-openers also about another practice that no text of traditional anthropology had ever taught me: the tight swaddling of babies.
This is incorrect. More than a few Western textbooks cover how Samoan and Mayan natives used swaddling along with stones or boards to flatten the foreheads of infants while they were still maleable.
[to be continued]
This happened decades before I read Foundations of Psychohistory, wherein it is described that this practice was universal and that it goes back to our tribal ancestors.
However mean-spirited it might seem, swaddling achieved what was, back then, a possibly important goal.
A wriggling infant might prove to be such a distraction whereby new mothers could not gather enough food to feed their families. Immobilizing these new-borns, harsh as it might seem, may have been the only way to eliminate their distracting influence.
None of this neutralizes how such immobilization may have had distinctly harmful after effects upon the infants involved.
Even in the city in which I was born a few friends have told me that some relatives swaddled their babies. (My mother confessed to me that both she and my father disliked the practice, and that they gave it up, on returning home, after having had it done to me and my siblings as newborns in the hospital.).
I am astonished that such an obviously harmful tradition would have been kept up until such recent times.
What we have before us is the most potent taboo of the species: a lack of elemental consciousness of what parents do to their children.
Despite all of my foregoing objections, there is a strange and, yet, applicable component of what you say with respect to modern child-rearing.
Abandoning an infant to a non-relative (whose scent and mannerisms may have no direct relation), or simply planting a newborn in front of a television set could well equate, in some degree, to similar forms of these ancient abuses.
As we will see at the end of this book, some historians of infanticide who do not belong to the deMausean school, such as Joseph Birdsell, Laila Williamson, and Larry Milner, estimate in astronomical figures the infanticide rate since the Paleolithic. If their estimates are accurate, quantitatively speaking the Nazi Holocaust was insignificant compared to the children murdered by their parents.
I would vote that practices of this sort should be viewed through a similar lens as that of the Female Genocide which took place throughout old Europe in the form of witchcraft persecutions. While your model is clearly more extensive, both of them contain similar elements of variability whereby they require study that includes, perhaps not skepticism, but a devotion to factual evidence that will help to preclude unfair or prejudicial information gathering.
Thanks for your constructive criticism Zenster.
Since I discovered “psychohistory” (PH) I have struggled about how to evaluate it rationally. The academia ignores not only Islamization but other thorny subject as well, such as the devastating effects of child abuse in non-Western cultures. Very little debate of academics on PH is available in the net (I will quote it in the discursions). So any healthy debate on PH is most welcome.
“The purpose of this book is to reveal for the first time how the ultimate cause of all wars and human misery is the parental holocaust of children throughout history.”
A dubious assertion at best,
Yes: deMause overstates his case (“all wars”). While I totally disagree with deMause on the basic etiology of war, I quote him to suggest that the etiology of evil in mankind has to do with childrearing, as will be apparent in the forthcoming chapters.
“... infanticdal parents were the rule, not the exception.”
There is a distinct statistical rule that tends to prohibit such a statement. Overly infanticidal parents would murder the majority of their offspring and, therefore, not transmit their genes or the practices of infant sacrifice.
That’s exactly what I thought the first time I read deMause. But after reading PH further I gathered that, say, in some tribes two or three kids out of a family of ten could be exposed according to the customs and taboos of the tribe and yet the surviving offspring would not only be “educated” in exposure, but would have internalized their parents’ violence too.
“DeMause’s books are eye-openers also about another practice that no text of traditional anthropology had ever taught me: the tight swaddling of babies.”
This is incorrect. More than a few Western textbooks cover how Samoan and Mayan natives used swaddling along with stones or boards to flatten the foreheads of infants while they were still maleable.
I should have written “no school text” instead of “no text of traditional anthropology”. But the point is the same: current anthropology abhors to point out to barbarous practices in non Western cultures. When I was a child I saw in the (Mexican) National Museum of Anthropology the skulls of Mayan children flattened with boards. It made a vivid impression since then. However, in school no single Mexican professor condemned such practices openly.
None of this neutralizes how such immobilization [swaddling] may have had distinctly harmful after effects upon the infants involved.
Very harmful is Muslim childrearing, as you have learnt already while reading the Robert Godwin article linked above. I have a 21st century newspaper color photo showing two Afghan women holding their babies tightly swaddled while they cry in agony in their vain attempts to liberate themselves. No wonder that, when they grow up, the feel that way toward women…
I have a lot of work these days and still have to do a proper reading of your article on “water and blood” before commenting it (and of course adding it in my blog).
Cheers,
WHY?
Why is the practice of killing females so widespread, and in such diverse cultures.
It is, and most certainly was, according to this article, prevalent in very different cultures, in climates that ranged from hot to freezing, in cultures that were hunter gatherers or agrarian. If so, then it must be something that is innate to humans.
Very upsetting.
Yes, DP111: it’s very upsetting.
As to your question, there are many theories in academic circles, most of them pure speculation from the PC MC “noble savage” paradigm. Conversely, I tend to take seriously what tribal perpetrators say: that if allowed to grow the babies wouldn’t take care of the parents, or that they may become demons so they must kill them. In academic circles it’s common to dismiss these explanations.
In developed cultures, however, the parental “reasons” may be different, as Zenster has pointed out in his analysis of feticide in China. As my book develops, especially in the section on childrearing methods in Mesoamerica, answers to many questions will be forthcoming.
Chechar; I think this is part of what is meant when some of the Christian Church Fathers (recall that from the Didache and also in Tertullian's letter infanticide is prohibited) they say that childbearing is the cause of evil - or the perpetuation thereof - in mankind. I have little doubt that the numerous evils that we in our ignorance commit against our offspring are an important part of this, that is, the childrearing part of generation.
It is interesting to note that despite the love for Celibacy among the ancient Christians, Origen, who was a prolific writer and considered a great teacher, was eventually anathemetized because it was discovered that he castrated himself.
It makes one wonder just how different the Christian anthropology is - and how this simple difference has perhaps reduced the level of evil in the world subtly but gradually. (Obviously as you have noted, even in Christian countries some abusive practices still persist.)
Is there anyway to quantify the abuse vis-a-vis swaddling? To a certain extent, the fact that we cannot take care of our young perfectly allows them to grow emotionally/psychologically at all. Where is the line drawn? What is 'pathological' and what is not? Is the striking of children always wrong, or does it depend on how it is done? (etc)
Interesting article, by the way.
I await with interest how Chechar will develop his argument from the above data, though I can guess the broad strokes.
Hi River Cocytus,
* “Is there anyway to quantify the abuse vis-a-vis swaddling?”
Maybe this Wikipedia section I edited answers your question.
* “What is 'pathological' and what is not? Is the striking of children always wrong, or does it depend on how it is done?”
It is always wrong. (By the way, here we must be aware of the cultural relativists’ double standards.)
Puzzling Questions on Chechar's preface
Chechar, I must agree with Zenster about infanticide and the fact of higher mortality rates. We must remember that high infant mortality from natural causes was the rule, not the exception before 200 years, at least in many time periods. Lack of concern for children is not 'primitive', it is decadent (One sign of putting perverse self-actualization ahead of survival needs). A culture can previously be 'advanced' and collapse into being a 'primitive tribe'.
My next question is, What is bad about swaddling? Don't we wrap newborns tightly in a blanket? They like it-- it makes them feel familar and secure. To carry a baby in a sack before two months old is NOT harmful, and may be at times appropriate. Furthermore, children can hardly remember anything (later in life) before 3. To say that children are traumatized because they were swaddled as newborns is silly.
Next, I am concerned about DeMause, as he was a graduate of Columbia University -- The location of the Frankfurt school, the fountain of Cultural Marxism (and PC MC Post-Marxism). It makes me suspicious that he came from the same place as Cloward and Piven.
Additionally, I have a question about the "bad parenting" thesis-- Muslims are ready to fight, die, and kill the 'other', and are loyal to their 'tribe' --They must be doing SOMETHING RIGHT in their parenting. Meanwhile, the 'progressive' leaders in the West are trying to TEAR DOWN their societies when they have gotten everything a person could want. Western Parenting must have done something PROFOUNDLY WRONG. More to the point, these Western people were raised in an environment most psychologists would have to agree (if they looked at the facts) that was far more HUMANE than at any other time in history. Why are Westerners raising a generation of milk-toast wimps who concede everything to the 'other', or at least not deposing those who do?
The first rule of existence is survival. The question of "how is Muslim parenting bad" is irrelevant to the thesis of the survival of the West. The proper question should be, "How have Muslims built loyalty to their society by their parenting, and why hasn't the West done so by its parenting?"
We must realize so the world has changed. In the words of Fjordman, "We battle for Western supremacy is over. The battle for Western survival is about to begin." Throughout the 20th. Century, Westerners have been accustomed to dictating how other cultures should operate. The Muslims will NOT change their parenting as long as they are conquering us.
It would not have been fitting for the Native Americans to complain about how the White settlers were not "doing things right"-- they should have tried to fix what they did WRONG. The same goes for US westerners, NOW, SINCE WE ARE NOW IN THE SAME situation they were in.
We have to fix whatever is causing us to NOT want to struggle to survive, and have parenting that makes people want to survive. I think that many secular psychologists have caused some very bad unintended consequences for the West based on theories of parenting.
Please respond to these points.
Well, thank you Chechar for studying the last post. Here is a theory of mine.
More about welfare state roots
If you want to be a good parent, DON'T give your children everything they want, even if you can easily afford it. Teach them to work for it, and you will have children who can successfully struggle for survival (rather than delusional adults that think 'peace, prosperity, and endless ease and entertainment' are their "fundamental human rights". When you think about it, most Leftist Philosophers came from privileged backgrounds and grew up without having to work and struggle for survival. Thus, they developed philosophies to attack societies’ “restrictions”(really the moral and ethical framework that Western society had in place to ensure the proper discipline and responsibility for survival).
Another historical example is apt. Many people were so traumatized by the Great Depression (and manipulated by Leftists) that their philosophy as parents in the 1950’s and ‘60’s was “I don’t want my children to go without”, since they had swallowed the line that struggle and deprivation are psychologically harmful. They are NOT—the generation that lived through the Great Depression is now known as “the Greatest Generation”. As a result of this false idea that “doing without” is harmful, many baby boomer children thought that “our parents only care about money!” This was a factor in the Western Cultural Revolution.
More to the point, the view that ‘poverty’ [struggle] causes social (psychological) problems is very destructive to the West when it is faced with ‘migrants’. The Leftists think that poor people are “less fit” to survive than wealthy people (such as themselves], due to the idea that hardship harms ‘proper psychological development’. Thus, we must make poor people “more equal” by ‘redistributing the wealth’ so that people can “progress” to ‘better states of psychological development’. (We can see the ugly racism behind the welfare state now.) When people from say, Somalia, come to Sweden, they are modern humans very well trained in the struggle for survival. The Swedes have been brainwashed into thinking that THEY HAVE NO STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL. Thus, the face off isn’t going to turn out like the Leftists think it will.
Another problem with Western ease and entertainment is “virtual reality”. This technology came about in the 1990’s, but the problem is that many Westerners have trouble knowing what is really real and what is make-believe. More to the point, when Native Europeans hear all this speech making by Muslim “community leaders” about Shariah/Caliphate/Jihad etc. they assume that it is a bunch of clowns shooting their mouths off. (A culturally diverse form of entertainment, if you will). After all, Westerners experience much (music and video games come to mind) that would be scary if taken literally, but it is just fantasy and talk. They don’t get that the “Community Leaders “ (Imams and Sheikhs) speeches are for real , and the real thing.
I am interested how Chechar will expand the concept of “bad parenting” to include “pampered children with too much entertainment and not enough knowledge of work, self-denial, and delayed gratification”.
DP111: WHY?
Why is the practice of killing females so widespread, and in such diverse cultures.
The emergence of patriarchal societies was a predictable outgrowth of fundamental biolgical differences that confer greater muscular strength upon male homo sapiens.
As more successful hunters, they were better protectors, better providers and could sustain larger families in better health through more challenging circumstances. This created a genetic predisposition towards even more muscular and testosterone-laden males. Early forms of polygamy only entrenched the genetic domianace of physically superior male specimens.
The later evolution of warrior kings and priests only served to cement this gender dominance and patriarchal structures in general but it was also the titular position of men as land owners, business proprietors and political figures that all led to further consolidation of male preference.
The slightly higher natural ratio of female births probably contributed to various forms of female infanticide. Even without the normative of males taking care of their elderly parents, there was still the scenario of too many daughters getting prenant without previously having paired off and therefore burdening the main clan with a preponderance of bastard children (more usually female), who impacted overall survival with their consumption of food stocks and care giving.
The impact of single motherhood was only magnified by how juvenile birth mothers were less able to participate in food gathering or the creation of assets via planting, herding or the manufacturing of goods such as baskets and clothing. Additionally, interference with care giving to the elderly inhibited the retention of knowledge that adults could transmit. No small asset when compared to another tiny mouth to feed.
A much more complex issue resides in the apparent technical proclivity of males. The original springboard of early male preference allowed an even greater headstart in terms of invention and innovation. Even though females of the species were capable of innovation (e.g., a female Japanese macaque was responsible for teaching her troop to wash sweet potatoes prior to consumption), too many other mitigating factors existed for women to obtain any lead in this department.
Please keep in mind that had early socities been more gender balanced, women might just as easily have made similar significant contributions to the advance of technology. However, the era of toolmaking dawned upon an age of tasks that favored physical strength and "sprint" type stamina as opposed to the substantially greater physical endurance exhibited by women.
As an example, flint knapping used in the production of edged tools like scrapers, axes and knives plus points such as spear tips or arrowheads all originally required the physical strength to dig out obsedian or chert deposits along with the stamina to lug whatever weight of stones back to camp in order to work upon them.
As these flint deposits were not usually in the immediate vicinity of desirable camp sites the more raw material one could harvest and carry in a single go, the better odds of producing sufficient points needed for survival and, eventually, trade of those crafted items.
All of this early technology, be it flint knapping, the hardening of wooden shafts or taking down all-important game that provided not just food but skins, pelts, bones and the horn materials that drove the very earliest phases of advanced toolmaking, favored the superior physical strength of males.
Again, this is represents an early lead that women were never able to catch up to until the empowerment confered by modern civilization. At that point, it was too late and a fundamental imbalance had been imposed upon nature's original schemata.
[To be continued]
DP111 and Watching Eagle:
I am really busy this day and won't be able to properly respond to your many points. However, very quickly I can only say: please read the article on infanticide that I wrote for Citizendium, linked above.
Watching Eagle: that swaddling is a torture is visible in the Afghan photo referred to above. Muslim babies forget but unconscious memory makes them assassins as adults. I have a whole chapter in my second book on it: “Tormented babies—willing executioners”.
Zenster
Your essay is going along virtually the same lines as I was thinking.
Here is my contribition
Part 1
The prevalence of female murder through infanticide has been common in mankind through the ages. It occurs in non-violent and peaceful societies such as Hindus and Chinese, or in Europe, as well as in primitive societies in Pacific islands or in Africa. It is so common that it must have been part of the human condition, and accepted by all societies, till the present.
I’m no expert but just following on from general knowledge. Corrections or complete dismissal of the idea here presented will be accepted.
The idea that human beings, and men in particular have been brutal and murderous by nature goes against the generally accepted idea of good and evil. Morality has been based on this for thousands of years, and murder was not acceptable. And yet, female infanticide was acceptable. Why?
Let us examine how societies have been organised through the last ten thousand years or more. Lack of communication and travel meant that societies could only be organised over a very limited geographic area viz a village or at most a town. These societies were essentially tribal in nature.
A tribe could be several thousand in population, and would be required to generate the wealth for its survival via hunting or agriculture. The excess could be used for trade with nearby tribes. Given the lack of power tools, the burden of this activity would naturally have fallen to men, leaving women with the occupation of looking after the home, but more importantly, giving birth to the future generation. The main occupation of women, and thus their worth to the tribe, would be their ability to produce children. The rest would be of secondary importance.
Given high infant mortality in times until the quite recent, each woman would be required to give birth to around 5 or 6 children. This means that men would be required to generate enough produce to sustain themselves and a dependent family of 6 or 7. As a woman can easily produce 5 or 6 children but a man through physical exertion alone cannot produce enough to sustain 6 or 7 dependents, means that there will be a premium for male children. The population can be sustained at the same levels by having more men then women; more men also means greater wealth. Obviously there is an “ideal” ratio, and this will depend on the kind of society or tribe is. For a nomadic society or tribe, dependent on conquest and seizure of the produce of others, the ratio of men to women would necessarily have to be higher then of an agrarian tribe, as the more men there are, the more effective its war making capability.
In our present industrial society, our ability to generate wealth is dependent on the availabilty of energy. Energy =_wealth. Long term wealth requires the sustainability of energy resources In the pre-historic or tribal eras, energy was basically manpower. Therefore sustainable energy and wealth for a successful society, was one that maximised the generation of manpower, i.e. men.
The other reason that male children were to be favoured was that given the work men
did, they were more likely to be seriously injured or killed, in hunting or in the back
-breaking work scratching out a living off the land. Men were also
required to defend the tribe from attack by other tribes. Given all these factors - a limit of resources and its creation via manpower, it is no surprise that boys would be favoured over girls. Women are therefore not wealth creators but producers of men who then create the wealth.
To increase the wealth meant seizing the wealth of others. To increase the production of manpower without incurring the cost of bringing up females to puberty, meant that that raiding neighbouring tribes, killing them and taking captive of the females - a veritable arms race, with men being the “arms”.
Part 2
All this may appear cruel, but in the context of those times, where group survival meant life or extermination of the males and females carried off. Murder was wrong but extermination of the tribe was far worse. The economics of survival dictated that females be sacrificed for the greater good.
In the industrial era, men harnessed mechanical power, and “manpower” in the literal sense, was no longer a measure of military might. If we follow the same principles that led to the requirement for more males, industrialisation and the consequent generation of surplus wealth, meant that women no longer had to be sacrificed for a larger number of males to be brought up.
Have things changed in the last few centuries such that the basic philosophy or principle is redundant? If we follow the same principle of efficiency, then industrial strength, and consequently military strength, led to colonialism. So not much change there.
What about the very present? Leave that open.
Chechar
Thanks for the link
Chechar
If you read German, you might find these two links give you food for thought regarding islamic aggression and their treatment of sexuality:
http://www.kybeline.com/2009/07/24/zum-besseren-verstandnis-der-islamischen-sexualitat/
and
http://www.kybeline.com/2008/08/26/zur-besseren-verstandnis-der-islamischen-sexualitat-hauptziel-stolze-krieger/
The consequence of having a deficit of females, forces the tribe or group to bolster its strength by invading another tribe. If they win, they kill all the defeated men, capturing productive females - a readymade productive capability for which they have not spent any resources.
Such a system leads to rapid evolution, its driving impetus being survival – its means – an arms race. This is the quickest way for rapid evolution.
Summarise
Efficiency requires a surplus of males and a deficit in females.
Keeping a deficit in females, leads to incessant warfare with the objective of increasing the military and wealth producing sector, by capturing productive females.
Without incessant warfare and the capture of females, a tribe would soon fall prey to degeneracy associated with inbreeding.
The basis for rapid social evolution is based on the above three.
Of course as far as an individual tribe is concerned, it is win some lose some, but the system as a whole, progresses rapidly.
Hi DP111,
Thanks for such a complex theory of infanticide. As the chapters of my book unfold, you will see that psychohistorians have a totally different approach (google "Early infanticidal childrearing" if you want an explanation of it right now).
Watching Eagle: My next question is, What is bad about swaddling? Don't we wrap newborns tightly in a blanket? They like it-- it makes them feel familar and secure. To carry a baby in a sack before two months old is NOT harmful, and may be at times appropriate. Furthermore, children can hardly remember anything (later in life) before 3. To say that children are traumatized because they were swaddled as newborns is silly.
There is a difference between blanketing a child and immobilizing it. Regardless of trauma or not, inhibiting a newborn's locomotor activity will delay onset of coordination and reduce its eventual life expectancy.
A similar effect is now emerging with kids who are exposed to television. Children who grow up with parents that regularly watch a lot of television exhibit a delayed onset of vocal skills. Those who also watch a lot of television in their early years display an even greater delay in the advent of functional vocal communication. Part of this deficit is attributed to parental distraction from otherwise beneficial interaction with their offspring that results from over-comitment to attention devoted to viewing, but the attention-grabbing aspect of typically intense video conveyed content also contributes to a neglect of conversational interaction.
In a variant of the "Television Vocal Deficit" theory, there is also increasing opposition to the use of "baby talk" with infants. "Widdle pwecious inkum dinkums" misdirects a child's larning paths over to dysfunction word meanings and speech paths that inhibits the timely increase of ability during learning of vocalization skills.
Additionally, I have a question about the "bad parenting" thesis-- Muslims are ready to fight, die, and kill the 'other', and are loyal to their 'tribe' --They must be doing SOMETHING RIGHT in their parenting.
That is unless you accept how Muslims completely over-reach the support structures required to enable successful "parenting". Modern day Muslims are outbreeding all of their available material resources, be they water, food or medicine.
From the expansionist history of Islam, it would appear as though this has been a consistent pattern of behavior throughout the entire existence of Muslim culture. They are currently becoming almost wholly reliant upon externally produced goods and technology for their survival. Self-extinction hardly qualifies as "doing something right".
This also carries over to other Muslim practices as well. Using their children as bomb vest murders, instructing them from a single book, the rampant abuse and intentional illiteracy of women all indicate societal practices that defy orderly and healthy evolution. Consanguinious marriage is a supreme example of accommodating immediate needs with methods that utterly defeat more vital long-term goals of genetic sustainability.
Zenster said,
"Self-extinction hardly qualifies as "doing something right".
I could not agree more. However, you fail to realize who is undergoing "self-extinction". Native Europeans (Whites)in Europe at current fertility rates will lose 50% OF ITS POPULATION under 45 in 50 years!! (people over 45 are too old to breed or fight). Meanwhile, the EU elites plan to pump 50 Million Workers (not including wives and children) from (North) Africa alone into the EU.
amren.com/mtnews/archives/2009/01/50_million_invi.php
Fallaci pointed out that Muslim culture was good at only one thing -- conquering other cultures-- either by war, or by migration (Al-Hijra). So what if they have shortages of this or that in the MME-- there will be plenty to plunder from Europe as tens of Millions of them move there.
About consanguinious (cousin) marriages, well, in hasn't wiped them out yet (I presume it has been going on in Dal-al-Islam for centuries). As for 'orderly and healthy evolution', natural selection is concerned with survival first: other characteristics are irrelevant. If White Western culture facilitates its 'exercise in self-extinction', what's the point? What about the point of negative marginal returns (changes in the same direction lead to things gettting worse)?
If we fail to consider the possibility that we could lose, and can't see to change what the West is doing wrong, we will certainly live to see a Eurabian Caliphate (and go self-extinct even if we don't).
We now have a culture that tolerates traitors in power, and that can't think to say to Muslim whiners firmly and consistently "NO, NO, NO, there will NEVER be any Shariah here ever, and if you think otherwise, then scram!!"
['This denial might traumatize them and damage the psychological development of their human personhood.' say the Leftists]. Besides, say the Leftists, what harm can these little surrenders to the Demand for a little more Shariah of the day do, anyway?
Is THIS 'orderly and healthy societal evolution'???
This is a POST-FUNCTIONAL society.
We ought to ask, what have we done wrong? The Muslims are not going to listen to anything we say as they are conquering us.
Demographic Winter is very bad while you are at war, and population expansion is very good during war. (See the conflict between Native Americans and White 'migrants' from 1740-1890).
Watching Eagle: I could not agree more. However, you fail to realize who is undergoing "self-extinction".
Do I?
Islam has a few brief decades yet to live. It has so antagonized much of the entire outside world (Dar al Harb) that its fate will endure less than another twenty years without having undergone some sort of significant alteration.
Please feel free to argue against this.
Should Islam manage to perpetrate upon the West the sort of horrific atrocities that it so feverently desires, its lifespan may shrink to less than ten or twenty years at most, if not far less.
Watching Eagle: However, you fail to realize who is undergoing "self-extinction". Native Europeans (Whites)in Europe at current fertility rates will lose 50% OF ITS POPULATION under 45 in 50 years!!.
Grasshopper, it is you that fails to realize exactly who is going through "self extinction".
Fertility rates mean nothing if your are a sand-loving lamb-eating Arab Muslim that is using a wooden stick to jab at the nuclear-armed Western dragon.
Sure, BHO is Islam's ŵħõŗĕ. Does that mean anything in terms of what happens in the next ten or twenty years? Face the question squarely.
About consanguinious (cousin) marriages, well, in hasn't wiped them out yet (I presume it has been going on in Dal-al-Islam for centuries).
Turkish Family Walk On All Four
Summarise
Efficiency requires a surplus of males and a deficit in females. Besides men are likely to be killed in warfare, or mass murdered if their side loses. So men have top be in a slight excess over females.
Keeping a deficit in females, leads to incessant warfare with the objective of increasing the military and wealth-producing sector, by capturing productive females.
Without incessant warfare and the capture of females, a tribe would soon fall prey to degeneracy associated with inbreeding.
The basis for rapid social evolution is based on the above three. The arms race keep each tribe and its men in a constant push to better strategy, or arms and tool making. Capture of females from different tribes keeps the gene pool from stagnating.
Of course as far as an individual tribe is concerned, it is win some lose some, but the system as a whole, progresses rapidly. All this would occur quite naturally, by a process of survival.
Now to the present. In the post-industrial era, it was no longer required to maintain a deficit of females, as industry provided more then enough wealth and military power to maintain adequate defence. In this circumstance, women would, over a period of time, become a small majority over men. This surplus of females is something that is quite new, when looked at over the long stretches of human existence. What is also unusual is that this excess of women is not leading to any great increase in population, and the consequent increase in power – industrial and military, the reverse in fact.
Now comes the zinger. Given the excess female population in the West, and large amounts of excess wealth, why allow in millions of sexually deprived aggressive males of a totally different culture into the country?
It does not make sense unless the entire political class subscribe to an idea that is so inchoate that they are unable to explain it clearly, or if they do, they know they will be hanged from the nearest lamppost. In the UK, despite massive public disquiet over immigration, not one major political party (BNP accepted, but they are so far, a marginal party), has ever raised the issue in a consistent manner. NOT ONE. This is absolutely astounding.
Here a working link about the Turkish family that walks on all fours.
Wow! What a family...
Too many cousin marriages...
Does Zenster think that the year is 1954? Wake up, people!
You ask me to give a square answer. Here are the first two points:
1) No rule (cosmic, metaphysical, or otherwise) guarantees the continued existence of Western civilization.
2) There is no law of science that says that western secular government, western human rights, western democracy, or any of the things we take for granted MUST be around in the year 2100 (or 2050, for that matter.)
If you think that any military officer could ‘push the red button’ without the President’s authorization and “glass” you know where, without getting any less than 200 years in prison for TREASON; you don’t understand the Leftists and what they believe about foreign policy (which Muslim ‘migrants’ are turning into domestic policy in the West), any more than the Leftists understand what the Islamists agenda is about (a global theocratic empire).
Notice that nearly nothing was said in protest about China’s persecution of the Uigur? They know that if they mess with China, they are going to be gotten (like you predict), so the Islamists don’t ‘struggle’ against China NOW.
The West will be provoked to Nuke the MME? Not if the Leftists can stop it!!! Look at the meeting of Hizb-ut-Tahrir the other day, in London.
http://uppompeii1.uppompeii.com/2009/07/27/hizb--ut-tahrir-and-the-grateful-dead.aspx
They called for a Caliphate. What does the UK government do? Why, nothing, of course --their human right to sedition would be violated, if the UK government tried to stop them. Had they tried this in 1954, they would have been STOPPED (the West had a functional culture back then).
Have you really listened to what Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Jeremiah Wright, NION, ANSWER, Code Pink, Moveon.org, and the entire peacenik Left says and teaches about foreign policy and terrorism (never mind Islam)??? Or studied what the Leftist media did in its coverage of the war in Iraq?? Do you think that everybody in the West is basically patriotic, and would approve of nuclear strikes against Muslims? Poor GWB was crucified (for ALL the wrong reasons) by the Left when he tried to fight the Islamists in Iraq, using kid-glove tactics. (How dare he fight back when America was attacked? (!))
Now we have BHO, and listen to him--
‘The US is NOT, and NEVER WILL BE, at war with Islam.’
“If you look at the numbers, the US is actually one of the largest Muslim countries in the world”
“It is important that Western Countries, let Muslims in their countries practice their religion as they see fit… We can’t justify hostility to any religion behind the pretense of liberalism.”
Think BHO is an aberration? Where is the outrage?? ANY Democrat president is going to say and do exactly what BHO is saying and doing (toward the Muslim world) from now on. Kerry is now one of the chief leaders in the Senate for “engagement” with the jihadis. “Engagement” means having a dialogue with jihadis to prevent future violence (Shariah, Shariah, and more Shariah in the West).
At this rate, in 10 to 20 years, what will be is that the ‘vote cattle’ as you have called them will enable the “Community Leaders” (Imams and Sheikhs) to control the Leftist parties in Europe [getting Shariah piecemeal will be the main social issue in the West].
Bin Laden thought that the U.S. was a ‘paper tiger’ that would talk after 9/11, and concede to Shariah. Given our response to the African embassy and USS Cole bombings, one can see why he believed that. Ever wonder why Bin Laden seems to sound like the Leftist media? He is watching it to figure out who we are and what to say! Bin Laden said, “Boy, I was wrong about the West fighting back if we attack them militarily-- we have to rework our strategy.” However, he discovered that there was method in his madness. To his surprise and delight, 9/11 unleashed the Leftists as warriors who ‘struggle’ against “western Imperialism’ and are in need of allies. Now, the military jihadis simply need to keep the West’s attention while Al-Hijra proceeds unnoticed.
If one cannot escape terrible punishment by acting without orders, how about a coup?
Well, if you are an army officer, and succeed in a coup, will you face down Leftist traitors? Will you do things like shut down the courts? Crack down on the media to prevent leftists from toppling your regime? Round up Leftist traitors and shoot them enmasse? (That will get the Islamists attention.) Curtail Leftists in other ways? And will you be able to handle what Islamists and Leftists around the world throw at you (Mega-Hyper - Nazi for starters)? What if Russia and China place the MME under their “nuclear umbrella” and threaten to retaliate if you launch a strike? (This is where it gets dicey). Two more questions-- 1) How are you going to maintain enough support to stay in power? 2) How are you going to stay alive, when Interpol, the new KGB, the Chinese Intel, and every other foreign special forces (aside from the Mossad, maybe) are out to get you dead?
Pinochet did this kind of thing in Chile in the 1970’s, but he is HATED by leftists for it, and there is far less planning in America (and their wasn’t such broadspread HATRED of country in Chile as there is in the West) today.
Also, if you are killed before the Leftists are wiped out, even if you have Nuked the MME, the Leftists will probably surrender the West immediately to Shariah (“it’s the least we can do, to atone for our crimes against humanity”), this CAN’T be done halfway, once started.
If you really objectively study the Leftists writings about foreign policy, you will find that Leftists consider Islamists their “comrades in arms” arrayed in the “just civil rights struggle” against “Western Imperialism and Western Hegemony”. The Leftists would infinitely PREFER that 200 million Muslim “migrants” would settle the West than for ONE Western nuclear device to ‘go off’ in a city in the MME. The Leftists WILL sell the West into Shariah rule eventually, if they are not removed from power. If you dismiss this concept out of hand, you are naïve in the extreme.
If you aren’t sure about this, read Unholy Alliance [Horowitz] or United in Hate [Glazov] also read The West’s Last Chance [Tony Blankley].
At the moment, it is not the Islamists who are very foolish into provoking their annihilation, it is the West who is, by failing to take care of its own traitors, and stop sedition.
* If you aren’t sure about this, read Unholy Alliance [Horowitz] or United in Hate [Glazov]
...which is why I insist the real problem is Western self-hatred. Until we tackle this psychological issue (I will try in the GoV P.S. to this book) we don't even know what we are really dealing with.
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