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"BBC: Human sacrifice on increase in Uganda"

98 Comments -

1 – 98 of 98
Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

"There were also several high-profile arrests of parents and relatives accused of selling children for human sacrifice."

It takes a village to ritually sacrifice a child.

1/8/10, 7:00 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Man, Komment Kontrol must have been in a good mood to get this thread approved.

I would never have been allowed to post something like that.

1/8/10, 7:02 PM

Blogger Dutch Boy said...

Albinos in sub-Saharan Africa have long been targets of persecution and now murder because of the belief that their body parts have special efficacy for witchcraft.

1/8/10, 7:17 PM

Blogger Dutch Boy said...

NAIROBI, Kenya — The mistaken belief that albino body parts have magical powers has driven thousands of Africa's albinos into hiding, fearful of losing their lives and limbs to unscrupulous dealers who can make up to $75,000 selling a complete dismembered set.

1/8/10, 7:19 PM

Anonymous anony-mouse said...

Well at least they're about to get their gays under control.

1/8/10, 7:20 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well at least they're about to get their gays under control.

Does that mean that now we're gonna get a bunch of anti-anti-sodomites to go with all the anti-anti-semites we have around here?

1/8/10, 7:44 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

To Mr. Sailer:

I have gone back to read many of your articles dating back to 1995(?) and I noticed that you've slowly abandoned your analytical, somewhat disspassionate/objective voice

and you've gotten more polemical.

What's going on?

1/8/10, 7:53 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Appropriate eighties techno song here from Toto Coelo

"All I wanna do, is make a meal of you
We are what we eat, you're my kind of meat
Got a hunger for your love, it's what I'm speaking of
Give a dog a bone, I can take it home

Sung in unison with last two lines of previous verse:
Hot pot, cook it up, I'm never gonna stop
Yum, yum, gee it's fun, I'm banging on a drum
Looks trim, vitamin, forget the dieting
I eat canniballls"






http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4O1A-mmBWw&feature=PlayList&p=936B8BC47B92A14F&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=8

1/8/10, 7:56 PM

Blogger Bill said...

How far back in time do we have to go to find this kind of stuff widespread among Caucasian people? 4,000 years? When did human sacrifice die out in the Middle East? What about in Europe?

1/8/10, 8:05 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

4,000 years?

4000 years gets you well into biblical and near-ancient times.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any cannibalism, but this really feels like a topic which is just crying for The Derb's expertise.

1/8/10, 8:21 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

'When did human sacrifice die out in the Middle East? What about in Europe?'

317 years ago.

Wasn't New England witch burning a human sacrifice to assuage the gods?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials

1/8/10, 8:24 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Human sacrifice was practiced in pagan Northern Europe until Christianity came along.

The Romans official outlawed it in 97 BC, but it appears to have faded out earlier.

There's one human sacrifice in the Old Testament and one in the Trojan War stories, but those are more exceptions that prove the rule that the Jews and Greeks didn't think much of it.

1/8/10, 8:25 PM

Blogger agnostic said...

"How far back in time do we have to go to find this kind of stuff widespread among Caucasian people?"

The more relevant question is how far do you have to go back to find it among other sub-Saharn African groups, like those in the far southern areas, or hunter-gatherers?

People from the Congo region are just plain fucked up, as Mr. Kurtz could have told you.

1/8/10, 8:26 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I wish Americans were more aware of just how commom this sort of thing is in Africa. We might hear less of how "we're all the same."

1/8/10, 8:29 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Wasn't New England witch burning a human sacrifice to assuage the gods?"

No witches were burned in New England. The Salem trials ended with several hangings, & one poor bastard was pressed to death. Different story in old England & Europe, of course.

1/8/10, 8:31 PM

Blogger Whiskey said...

The correlation with Matriarchy and this sort of behavior is very strong. While there are many things against Islam, human sacrifice and cannibalism are not among them.

Generally, you see this hyper-masculinity and paganistic, pantheistic superstition among Matriarchal peoples. Patriarchies can be plenty ugly, but not in this way.

Terrible, really. Northern Germanic Europeans used to indulge in this, so too the Celts, until the practice was wiped out by newly Christian kings. Charlemagne, IIRC, fought a War with the Saxons killing estimated around 125,000, considerable amount of the population in those days, to wipe out paganism, and in particular sacrifices to Wotan. The Old Norse and Celtic gods were always hungry for Blood. [This was IIRC from memory, around 900 AD or so. The true story of Christianization of Europe AFTER the Romans is hardly ever told because Europeans don't want to believe they were that bloody or primitive. But they were.]

1/8/10, 8:40 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The more relevant question is how far do you have to go back to find it among other sub-Saharn African groups, like those in the far southern areas, or hunter-gatherers?"

Like, zero years. There's this case of a Nigerian child sacrificed in London in 2001, and apparently there's ongoing ritual murder in South Africa, hundreds of cases a year.

1/8/10, 8:48 PM

Anonymous Tommy said...

Let's not forget our old friends the Druids.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/090320-druids-sacrifice-cannibalism.html

"Nobody knows who they were, or what they were doin'."

"That's funny, she doesn't look Druish."

1/8/10, 8:51 PM

Anonymous Glossy said...

"When did human sacrifice die out in the Middle East? What about in Europe?"

Ancient Phoenicians and Carthaginians (ancestors of the modern Lebanese and to a smaller
extent of the modern Tunisians and Algerians) sometimes sacrificed their own children to the Gods up until their conquest by the Romans roughly 2200 years ago. However, no one there was eating the children. The Romans were scandalized regardless, calling the Carthaginians savages. Some modern historians tried to brush this off by suggesting that Roman writers invented the whole thing to slander their Carthaginian enemies, but then mass deposits of infants' bones were found in Tunisia in sacrificial contexts, confirming the story.

In Tacitus's Germania we find a description of a German religious ritual which includes this passage:

"The rite is performed by slaves who, as soon as it is done, are drowned in the lake. In this
way mystery begets dread and a pious ignorance concerning what that sight may be which only those
who are about to die are allowed to see."

Obviously, that kind of thing would have disappeared with the spread of Christianity.

Human sacrifice does not need to lead to cannibalism. I'm not aware of any written or archeological evidence for any religiously-inspired cannibalism in Europe or in the Middle East.

1/8/10, 8:51 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh, I thought we were talking about cannibalism.

Don't you have to eat the Albinos to get the protection against AIDS?

1/8/10, 8:52 PM

Blogger Black Sea said...

Let's see Bono tackle this one.

1/8/10, 8:57 PM

Anonymous Bill said...

Come on, guys -- it isn't only the Africans.

Chinese were still sacrificing children to animist gods very recently. Qing emperors (17th-20th centuries) were forced to prohibit the practice by law. They may still do so in certain far-flung areas in China, for all I know.

Hindus still sacrifice widows occasionally.

And, you know, it probably does happen from time to time in the backwoods/nether regions here in the US.

Human sacrifice will happen wherever we have a breakdown of civilization, which is occurring here now, so I wouldn't at all be surprised to hear of some credible incidents in the US in the near future.

1/8/10, 9:06 PM

Blogger Mark said...

Count me among the anti-anti sodomites who haunts iSteve I guess.

And how is Uganda about to get gays under control - by instituting the death penalty as feared? I'd like to hear a coherent argument in favor of punishing homosexuality by death.

1/8/10, 9:06 PM

Anonymous Fellow Traveller said...

It surprises me that you're not up to date on South African muti killings. This recent news item predicts a bumper year given the World Cup. And the South African police has a special unit to deal with them.

As for human sacrifice in North America surely you can remember the Satanic abuse scandal of the 1980s and early 90s?

1/8/10, 9:19 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bill,

Just because this happens in Uganda doesn't mean it is routine for Sub-Saharan Africa. I personally know of Ugandans who live and work here in Canada who think the people who believe in the witchcraft pulp in Uganda to be nutters.

1/8/10, 9:28 PM

Anonymous Greg "Brown" Johnson said...

Human sacrifice was practiced in pagan Northern Europe until Christianity came along.

The last remnants of pagan Northern Europe were not converted to Christianity until after 1000 a.d., so human sacrifice was practiced there relatively recently.

1/8/10, 9:56 PM

Anonymous Arnold said...

From Queen Victoria's diaries:

"Then he [Prime Minister Lord Melbourne], and also I, looked at a new work called Sketches of the People and the Country of the Island of [New] Zealand, which are very well done. Lord Melbourne said, in opening it, 'They [Maoris] are a fine race, but they eat men, and they say it's almost impossible to break them of it.' He further added, 'There are no animals whatever there [what about sheep? - Arnold] and therefore they are obliged to eat men.' Lady Mulgrave observed that she thought they only eat their enemies; Lord Melbourne said, 'I fancy they eat them pretty promiscuously'."

Not sure when the Maoris lost interest in cannibalism.

1/8/10, 9:56 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So, how long will it be before they find a way to blame whitey?

1/8/10, 9:58 PM

Anonymous Dave R. said...

Off-topic tip. Drudge links "Immigrants riot in Italy amid racial unrest."

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LDE60716O.htm

Not inherently surprising, but telling its gotten bad enough to get through the multi-culti filter, and probably a picture of things to come for the US if we continue to import unassimilating immigrants.

1/8/10, 10:27 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

My vague impression is that Islam is the best at stamping out human sacrifice in Africa, better than Christianity at this job.

1/8/10, 10:39 PM

Anonymous Truth said...

"Not inherently surprising, but telling its gotten bad enough to get through the multi-culti filter, and probably a picture of things to come for the US if we continue to import unassimilating immigrants."



Why do isteve posters always warn of impending doom for this country, lest we deport every brown person (legal or illegal) in America?

I guess you guys have been seeing too many old Mad Max movies or you are just plain racist pigs (I am betting on the latter).

Unlike most here, I live in a state that is majority non-white (CA) and guess what: This state does not resemble a scene from "The Road Warrior."

1/8/10, 10:42 PM

Anonymous looking sad after the shot said...

"My vague impression is that Islam is the best at stamping out human sacrifice in Africa, better than Christianity at this job."

True, but the Muzzies will be into auto-human-sacrifice in the form of suicide bombing.

1/8/10, 10:54 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Unlike most here, I live in a state that is majority non-white (CA) and guess what: This state does not resemble a scene from "The Road Warrior."

Your gubernator, up in Sacramento, begs to differ.

[And he's an immigrant himself.]

Kalifornia, as currently constructed, will NEVER AGAIN have a balanced budget.

N.E.V.E.R.

It will NEVER happen.

N.E.V.E.R.

1/8/10, 10:59 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...


How far back in time do we have to go to find this kind of stuff widespread among Caucasian people? 4,000 years? When did human sacrifice die out in the Middle East? What about in Europe?


Oh, I dunno. I figure that we will hear about it happening all over Manhattan on a future episode of Law and Order.

Probably happens quite regularly in Canada and the northern states of the US as well.

1/8/10, 11:14 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...


Chinese were still sacrificing children to animist gods very recently. Qing emperors (17th-20th centuries) were forced to prohibit the practice by law. They may still do so in certain far-flung areas in China, for all I know


Would you care to provide a cite for that?

AFAIK, animism has not been a big religion in China for a long time. You know, thinks like Buddhism, Confucianism, etc, have held sway there for a long time.

1/8/10, 11:23 PM

Anonymous Truth said...

"Your gubernator, up in Sacramento, begs to differ.

[And he's an immigrant himself.]

Kalifornia, as currently constructed, will NEVER AGAIN have a balanced budget.

N.E.V.E.R.

It will NEVER happen.

N.E.V.E.R."



And this relates to "The Road Warrior"/doomsday scenario of " the immigrants will kill us all" how?

It has been years since the USA has had a "balanced budget" (the USA has been running a deficit for a long time).

1/8/10, 11:30 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You know, I don't care much for the low-IQ hoards who are taking over the world.

And it's all to easy to make jokes about them.

But as stupid as these poor children are, they're still human - can you imagine the sheer horror [not to mention the pain] that they must experience as they're sacrificed [or, God forbid, eaten]?

Better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck...

1/8/10, 11:37 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

all to = all too

1/8/10, 11:39 PM

Anonymous Greg "Brown" Johnson said...

All this talk of cannibalism reminds me of the film "The Road" that came out this past November based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name.

It was a good movie, much better than that overhyped snoozefest "Avatar."

Which reminds me, I don't think Steve ever reviewed "The Road." Is this due to editorial changes at Taki's Mag?

1/9/10, 12:42 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ancient Phoenicians and Carthaginians (ancestors of the modern Lebanese and to a smaller
extent of the modern Tunisians and Algerians) sometimes sacrificed their own children to the Gods up until their conquest by the Romans roughly 2200 years ago. However, no one there was eating the children. The Romans were scandalized regardless, calling the Carthaginians savages. Some modern historians tried to brush this off by suggesting that Roman writers invented the whole thing to slander their Carthaginian enemies, but then mass deposits of infants' bones were found in Tunisia in sacrificial contexts, confirming the story.


And the Romans killed so many of their own children, in the words of one historians we have unearthed Roman sewers clogged with the bones of baby girls. I guess it's somehow better if you don't say a prayer first?

1.3 million abortions a year in the US kinda puts Uganda in the shade.

1/9/10, 1:59 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

At least they've figured out another way to deal with overpopulation, however gruesome this may be.

1/9/10, 2:12 AM

Anonymous Dave R. said...

Why do isteve posters always warn of impending doom for this country, lest we deport every brown person (legal or illegal) in America?

Because unassimilated immigration has worked out so well for France, Italy and Britain. Because multiple cultures worked out so well for Serbia/Kosovo.

Anyway, despite your lame attempt at a straw man, it's not deportation I'm after for its own sake, and certainly not deportation based on skin color, its assimilation. And failing assimilation, we don't need a roundup as much as we need to close the borders and end direct and indirect welfare and subsidies to immigrants. America did a respectable job of assimilating immigrants up until the 1960's immigration "reform," after which we stopped abruptly. In fact we now actively discourage it.

The history of peoples separated by language and culture but bound together by proximity and nation is not happy. And European countries including Italy are roughly a generation ahead of us down this path, giving us a useful look at where we're headed.

For that matter, on hearing of racial tension between immigrants and nativists in another country with high immigration, why is your response a shrug of the shoulders? If you read the article, the natives don't come off any better than the immigrants, at least not the ones who started the trouble. So I'm not just bashing the darker-skinned immigrants, I'm pointing out that hey, they're all in a bad spot with no good way out. And it's the same spot we're putting ourselves in. If you think iSteve readers are racist for talking about issues of loyalty and culture now, give the US twenty years and ask a working class white man how he feels about Spanish-speaking welfare recipients. And ask yourself where we go from there, cause its not likely to be pretty.

1/9/10, 2:51 AM

Anonymous Cordelia said...

Is this something that some (primitive) peoples do when times get tough, like if there's an impending famine?

I mean, they know someone's gonna die during a famine -- a lot of people, in fact. So, why not curb the population beforehand? And, who are you gonna cull? Well, some young kids. Shame, but then the adults may have better chances to live another day and make more kids later.

Of course, most people couldn't think so rationally about such an option (and I'm not advocating it!), so they wrap it all up in some religious mumbo-jumbo to rationalize it.

1/9/10, 3:15 AM

Anonymous l said...

How far back in time do we have to go to find this kind of stuff widespread among Caucasian people? 4,000 years? When did human sacrifice die out in the Middle East? What about in Europe?

I dunno. One could make the case that the World Wars, the holocaust, the blood-lettings in communist countries, the 'War on Terror', etc. are expressions of atavistic urges. The gods' thirst for blood must be slaked.

1/9/10, 3:38 AM

Blogger IoshkaFutz said...

We in the west are very much into human sacrifice... Abortion and Euthanasia. They do it to propitiate success, we do it to propitiate success. Our definition of success differs.

The Muslims also perform human sacrifice, but unlike the Aztecs they do it without ritual and for any (rather immediate) cause that might suit them. No fantastic robes, no calendar dates, no pomp and circumstance, but for RATIONAL purpose (to disrupt this truce, that meeting, that agreement, etc.).

There will always be human sacrifice is one shape or another... And those with a higher IQ might give it a fancy name, but it is and remains human sacrifice.

1/9/10, 3:57 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dienekes blog on cannibalism in China:

http://dienekes.50webs.com/blog/archives/000498.html

"We need to remind ourselves that the Chinese people are not particularly different from the other races of the world as far as the practice of survival cannibalism is concerned. When it comes to learned cannibalism, however, its practice is quite different. Worthy of note here is the fact that some types of learned cannibalism are found only in China. This study will attempt to examine this unique phenomenon."

"Particularly in ancient times, learned cannibalism was often practiced in China for culinary appreciation, and exotic dishes were prepared for jaded upper-class palates in times of health and/or sickness."

"As late as the 19th century, it was not unusual for Chinese executioners to eat the heart and brains of the criminals they disaptch. They also ate a portion of the human meat for health reasons, but when some extra meat was left, they sold it for profit."

"Apart from this, the Chinese often ate their enemies out of hatred or revenge during wartime."

"During World War II, hate-cannibalism is reported to have occurred in China. Later, as the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists went on for control of China, some Communist soldiers were executed routinely in a far-interior district; and their flesh and bones were eaten out of a spirit of revenge. One American priest told of seeing a Chinese Nationalist officer cut out and eat the heart of a Chinese Communist."

"The many instances of cannibalism in China throughout antiquity serve as a prelude to the way that the practice of cannibalism later became an integral part of Chinese culture."

pp. 55-62: listings of Chinese surival cannibalism incidents Han to Ming (about one ever 1-2 lines)

"Cannibalism was also often involved in the punishmen of criminals in Imperial China. After having been publicly executed, the bodies of the criminals were made available for public exhibition and consumption."

"In short the Chinese people used humans not only for food and medicine, but they also expressed their feelings of hatred or revenge by publicly eating the flesh and bones of their fellow men."

"In April 882, when the price of one tou (peck of rice went up to 30 min in Chang-an the rebels captured by government troops were sold as food."

"According to a more recent study, Chinese soldiers stationed in Taiwan before the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 used to eat human flesh of the aborigines like pork; they could buy it at the marketplace. Human flesh was considered as a source of protein and a way to increase male sexual stamina."

"One Western observer said that the most shocking consequence of famine was the rapid spread of cannibalism... The Roman Catholic Bishop of Shansi, ... reported... "... now they kill the living to have them for food. Husbands eat their wives. Parents eat their sons and daughters, and children eat their parents." This was confirmed by a Chinese district magistrate, who made the following observations:

... a grandson chopped his grandomother to pieces, a niece boiled and ate her own aunt ..."

1/9/10, 3:59 AM

Blogger Grumpy Old Man said...

Armin Meiwes is in prison in Germany for killing a supposedly willing victim, and eating parts of his body.

1/9/10, 5:13 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

the 'War on Terror'... atavistic urges

Oh come on.

Did you not watch the people jump off the World Trade Center rather than suffer the heat of the jet fuel as it burned?

Jesus Christ.

1/9/10, 5:35 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

An African told me that when a local king dies (they still have kings who have no official authority, they sound like mob bosses the way he describes them), they'll kidnap a few kids and bury them with the king or something like that. People keep their kids inside at those times to avoid that.

1/9/10, 5:59 AM

Blogger Mark said...

Good point regarding abortion. How many human fetuses have we sacrificed to the god of Choice?

The question is rhetorical but I'll answer it nevertheless. Since 1973 we have killed over forty million. About twelve percent of these, or four million give or take, were second or third trimester abortions.

Who was it who said he trembled when he considered that God is just?

1/9/10, 6:02 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"My vague impression is that Islam is the best at stamping out human sacrifice in Africa, better than Christianity at this job."

Yes, and despite permitting polygamy, it's more successful at suppressing the kind of behaviour that leads to AIDS.

1/9/10, 6:40 AM

Anonymous Tommy said...

"Oh, I dunno. I figure that we will hear about it happening all over Manhattan on a future episode of Law and Order."

Down in some hidden crypt beneath the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, no doubt.

1/9/10, 6:45 AM

Anonymous dorcas said...

"Wasn't New England witch burning a human sacrifice to assuage the gods?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials"

God, not gods.
Please don't just repeat old, received info without fact-checking, however satisfying it is. No witches were burned in New England or anywhere else in the "new world" because they were not burned in England. The penalty for witchcraft was hanging. One of the accused was pressed to death, but even that was preferable to tearing of flesh and impaling, as practiced in Germany and some eastern countries. By English law, burning was for female traitors (this included women who killed their husbands, or, oddly, who were counterfiters) and heretics of both sexes. Male traitors were drawn and quartered, and this happened once, and only once thank God, in New England about 1675 (a white soldier who had supposedly betrayed his own to the Indians.) A few years after the New England trials, official apoligies were made for the whole dreadful mess, a ritual that foresees the 20th century. The witch craze lasted about 200 years in Europe, roughly 1460 to 1660 and the Salem trials were almost somewhat anomalous considering the time and place. Still, it keeps reminding us that anomalies signify.
In any case, the scale was nowhere near what is going on Africa, and the New England settlers were also doing things like setting up universities and inventing stuff. Ben Franklin would be born not long after. Makes a difference.

1/9/10, 7:02 AM

Anonymous headache said...

I doubt Whiskey's take. I think he is making things up to make Germans look bad. Must be that ingrained Scotch-Irish prejudice against things Germanic.

1/9/10, 7:17 AM

Anonymous SFG said...

I think Steve here is the only conservative I've ever (virtually) met who's read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

The sort of mind that can contain HBD and Hunter S. Thompson is truly to be admired.

Steve, you are really cool.

1/9/10, 7:19 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm sure they'll all turn into Swedish-Americans once they come here via the "diversity lottery".

1/9/10, 7:36 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I live in a state that is majority non-white (CA) and guess what: This state does not resemble a scene from "The Road Warrior."

_________


Just because you are too young to remember what CA was like 30-50 years ago, doesn't mean it has not changed significantly for the worse. I remember how awesome CA was in the early 70's. No comparison to today.

1/9/10, 8:09 AM

Blogger silly girl said...

"Anyway, despite your lame attempt at a straw man, it's not deportation I'm after for its own sake, and certainly not deportation based on skin color, its assimilation."

__________


All I want for immigration control is RULE OF LAW which is something that seems to have passed into history. People who come illegally should be deported. Just plain enforce the rule of law that our representatives enacted in our lawfully elected legislature.

There is nothing inhumane about expecting foreign nationals to live in their own countries. We aren't being cruel.

1/9/10, 8:16 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Did Christianity Cause the Crash?"



Steve,
The Right needs to come up with a catchphrase that describes the now-common lefty-media tactic of the deliberate misassignation of blame for whatever unfortunate event.


I haven't thought up any as of yet.

"False fingerpointing"

"bum steer"

"Deliberate slander"

"Mis-blamed"


Lawrence Auster has noted that the media uses exceedingly passive language in describing crimes by Muslims.
Auster mentioned a crime in Sweden where a Muslim man stalked and shot to death a woman and four coworkers in terms that didn't let you know a Muslim immigrant killed a Swede or anyone else. The subtitle to the story went something like: "Gun death raises questions about the right to bear arms in a country where hunting is popular".

The whole tone there is to mis-assign blame psychologically in the collective mind. The Right needs to take a tactic of the left and use it against them by giving explicit -names- to the tactic, so we can identify them and expose them with a clinical-sounding air, as if we were discussing a mental patient's progress condescendingly, just like the left does to the right. The left is doing this all the time now in service to hiding the effects of illegals. We need to come up with a catchy phrase people will remember and use it constantly so that it sticks in minds.

1/9/10, 8:32 AM

Blogger PRCalDude said...

I guess you guys have been seeing too many old Mad Max movies or you are just plain racist pigs (I am betting on the latter).

Why does Troof continue to attempt these tired last-century ad hominems as if they are going to have any effect on the commenters here?

Some of us have been living in places like, say, California for several decades and have watched the visible decline. Surely you've noticed we're in the middle of a global depression that germinated in the manufactured need for more minority home ownership, or is you affirmative action job so secure that you can ignore such things?

1/9/10, 8:36 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jesus some mornings I wish I never read your blog. This is too depressing. Maybe Kipling was right both ways.

It really is White Mans Burden.

Lost Pilgrim

1/9/10, 8:53 AM

Anonymous Truth said...

"All this talk of cannibalism reminds me of the film "The Road" that came out this past November based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name."


This was a decent movie.

However, I can't believe that everyone would resort to cannibalism so easily.

Couldn't they have grown edible wild mushrooms in their dark basements?

There also appeared to be enough light to grow certain edible plants if you just made a green house.

1/9/10, 10:04 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

-Unlike most here, I live in a state that is majority non-white (CA) and guess what: This state does not resemble a scene from "The Road Warrior."-

You don't remember the pursuit of OJ?

1/9/10, 10:17 AM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

"l said...


I dunno. One could make the case that the World Wars, the holocaust, the blood-lettings in communist countries, the 'War on Terror', etc. are expressions of atavistic urges. The gods' thirst for blood must be slaked."

I was going to make much the same point. One might add to your list the terrors conducted during the french and russian revolutions.

On the subject of Islam being opposed to human sacrifice, I seem to recall, soon after 9/11, reading excerpts from Mohammed Atta's diary, in which he admonishes himself to kill the crew of the plane he intends to hijack much as he would a sacrificial animal. And of course there are the numerous muslim suicide bombers, whose acts are not unlike a ritual of human sacrifice.

1/9/10, 10:20 AM

Anonymous Simon said...

Truth:
"Unlike most here, I live in a state that is majority non-white (CA) and guess what: This state does not resemble a scene from "The Road Warrior.""

Eh, have you seen the *first* Mad Max movie? Try comparing *that* to your California.

We won't be at the second movie for at least ten years I'd think.

1/9/10, 10:30 AM

Anonymous Henry Canaday said...

“Our breast echoes forever with the cries, ‘In murdering goodness we sinned,’ and ‘By murdering goodness we were saved.’ ‘The lamb is innocent and must not be killed,’ ‘The dead lamb brings us salvation,’ so we live in chaos. This state is the less likely to be relieved because those who defend the rock are too cunning to commit their case to terms that could be grasped and disputed.”

- Rebecca West, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon”

1/9/10, 10:49 AM

Blogger albertosaurus said...

I always think of cannibalism whenever I go over the Donner Pass on the way to Reno. But I think that doesn't count. Anymore than does the cannibalism of city dwellers under siege, if it did then Europe probably has had more cannibalism than black Africa, if only because of more cities, more city walls and more advanced armies.

No, people are not really concerned when four guys on a life raft decide to eat the fifth guy - the one no one liked anyway. What is shocking is public socially approved cannibalism when you are not starving.

Bokassa was tried and convicted of cannibalism in a court of law. So was the Japanese island commandant from whom the senior George Bush narrowly escaped. Rather less reliable are the persistent web rumors that the younger George Bush ate parts of young children for breakfast each day.

There was an anthropologist who published an opinion that as every culture on earth had some stories about cannibalism this was proof that cannibalism was therefore a myth. Maybe I'm not being fair to his argument. I was never quite able to follow that logic.

1/9/10, 11:29 AM

Anonymous David Davenport said...

I dunno. One could make the case that the World Wars ...

Do you think the USA should have stayed out of WWII?

Yes or no?

1/9/10, 11:47 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

this will never make it past komment kontrol but...
Sir Richard Francis Burton believed that a priest in Damascas was ritually murdered by Jews... and the son of an Italian rabbi came out with a book a couple of years ago that said yes, a small sect of askanazi did actually ritually murder Christians. Needless to say the book was not only removed from the shelves, but destroyed (much like Burton's manuscript).

Like I said, this will never make it past Komment Kontrol

1/9/10, 12:01 PM

Anonymous tiki said...

Will the anonymous dork please stop whining about "Komment Kontrol"?

1/9/10, 2:07 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have gone back to read many of your articles dating back to 1995(?) and I noticed that you've slowly abandoned your analytical, somewhat disspassionate/objective voice


and you've gotten more polemical.



This post is simple a reposting of a BBC story. What is so non-objective and polemical about that?

1/9/10, 2:14 PM

Blogger Baloo said...

Nobody's bringing up the obvious fact that cannibalism has a disparate impact!

1/9/10, 2:54 PM

Anonymous l said...

In defense of the Uganda witch doctors -

Human sacrifice has been a traditional population regulation mechanism: Your village gets too many children. It gets hard to feed everybody, even in good times. Then you have a drought. Things get really bad. What do you do? Sacrifice a bunch of children. Eat their livers. Ask the gods for rain. There are fewer mouths to feed and eventually it rains again, so problem solved.

Nowadays Western countries send Africa a lot of development aid and medicine. At the same time we tell them that it's wrong to sacrifice their excess kids. Now when the drought or grasshoppers come, instead of a few hundred people starving in scattered villages, it's everybody, everywhere. People go berserk, like the guy in Uganda who says he killed at least 70 kids (before he found Jesus): "Holy moly this drought is bad! I'm gonna have to kill a bunch of kids to fix this." Because there are berserk witch dr.s, running around chopping up everyone they meet with machetes, everybody runs for their lives and crowd into 'refugee' camps where there are Army soldiers who will arrest the witch doctors if they show up -- and where people can get some free food from NGOs.

Of course, there's nothing to do in refugee camps -- except have sex -- so even more kids are born.

1/9/10, 3:01 PM

Anonymous Dahlia said...

"My vague impression is that Islam is the best at stamping out human sacrifice in Africa, better than Christianity at this job."

Steve,
Check out the CIA World Fact Book. Islam also does the best job stamping out AIDS. Christianity is a close second with animists and others a very distant third.
One reason I've heard given is that liberals (working as peacekeepers and other aid workers) tend to work in the Europhilic countries that are, of course, Christian countries and where missionaries have been and still work. The liberals help corrupt the Christian Africans.
I think there is definitely something to this, but more importantly, Islam puts more emphasis on personal behavior than Christianity currently does and is thus far more conservative.

1/9/10, 3:06 PM

Anonymous l said...

David Davenport said...
I dunno. One could make the case that the World Wars ...

Do you think the USA should have stayed out of WWII?

Yes or no?

Yes.

1/9/10, 3:07 PM

Anonymous Glossy said...

"This post is simple a reposting of a BBC story. What is so non-objective and polemical about that?"

It constitutes a hate quote. :-)

To all the commenters who have compared human sacrifice and cannibalism which was
not caused by starvation to terrorism, abortion and the world wars:

Rational human beings can decide that they don't want a kid at this or that particular time.

Rational human beings can also end up on opposite sides of wars - happens all the time. Life is a Darwinian struggle for survival and wars will always be a part of that. From a certain perspective it's always smart and good to win and it's always stupid and bad to lose. The mere fact that a man has willingly participated in a war says almost nothing about him other than that he's not a coward. From this perspective wars can be quite rational and each side can be right to celebrate its heroes. Of course I hope that every terrorist caught rots in jail or is executed, and more generally I hope that the side I happen to be on wins all of the conflicts it enters, but I can also see the bigger Darwinian picture.

Now, you're comparing all this to people who kill albinos so that they could use their body parts for luck. That's a qualitatively different level of stupidity.
What IS the bigger picture here? There is none.

I just don't see this comparison as very apt.

1/9/10, 4:13 PM

Blogger kudzu bob said...

Some on the cutting edge of what Paul Gottfried now refers to as the Alternative Right seem to prefer Neopaganism to Christianity. This story should serve to remind them that they should be careful what they wish for.

I say this as one who is not religious, merely prudent enough to fear radical social changes that bring about unintended consequences.

1/9/10, 5:21 PM

Anonymous Harry Baldwin said...

Truth said ...[The Road]was a decent movie. However, I can't believe that everyone would resort to cannibalism so easily. Couldn't they have grown edible wild mushrooms in their dark basements? There also appeared to be enough light to grow certain edible plants if you just made a green house.
...

I enjoyed "The Road" but it starts falling apart if you think about it realistically, rather than as some sort of metaphor. I couldn't understand how the people who were alive fed themselves, especially those large gangs. Most canned food would be no good 10 years after a disaster. (I had to throw out a lot of Y2K supplies a couple of years ago.) How does a guy end up with two bullets for his gun? It seems to me there's plenty of ammo in this country. Also, I couldn't see why everyone ended up in rags. I have enough clothes stashed in my closet to last me the rest of my life, especially if I ever get skinny again.

As far as cannibalism, in the circumstances depicted--people but no animals--I imagine a lot of people might decide to sample some "long pig."

1/9/10, 6:45 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Rational human beings can decide that they don't want a kid at this or that particular time...

Now, you're comparing all this to people who kill albinos so that they could use their body parts for luck. That's a qualitatively different level of stupidity.

What IS the bigger picture here? There is none.

I just don't see this comparison as very apt.


You aren't understanding the comparison. It's not rational, Darwinian, or any of your other adjectives to have a culture where people feel free to engage in those actions which produce children which they slaughter by the millions. It's barbaric and savage and it is *worse* that it happens in Uganda because it is much harder for someone in Uganda to rise above savagery than it is for us.

Note that this is true even if you do not believe that what is being killed is a child. How exactly did we get to the point that more than a million American women a year undergo a painful and humiliating medical procedure, one that is not riskfree? Perhaps if you don't believe that a child is being killed, a better comparison is to the barbaric and savage practice of FGM. But we do it to ourselves. This is so much worse.

1/9/10, 10:45 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"and you've gotten more polemical.

What's going on?"

He's also has more sympathy for white nationalism.

1/9/10, 10:56 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Some on the cutting edge of what Paul Gottfried now refers to as the Alternative Right seem to prefer Neopaganism to Christianity.

Scratch a Libertarian, get a Stalinist.

1/9/10, 11:56 PM

Blogger kudzu bob said...

>Scratch a Libertarian, get a Stalinist.<

I have absolutely no idea if you mean that the people I'm reffering to are Stalinists, or if that remark is directed at me. And who said anything about Libertarians? And why Stalin, anyhow?

1/10/10, 1:25 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Human sacrifice has been a traditional population regulation mechanism: Your village gets too many children. It gets hard to feed everybody, even in good times. Then you have a drought. Things get really bad. What do you do? Sacrifice a bunch of children. Eat their livers. Ask the gods for rain. There are fewer mouths to feed and eventually it rains again, so problem solved."

Please, think before writing stuff like this. The number of cases of child sacrifice in places like Uganda aren't anywhere near enough to have a significant effect on overall population.

1/10/10, 3:50 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Whiskey is making even less sense than usual:

"The correlation with Matriarchy and this sort of behavior is very strong. While there are many things against Islam, human sacrifice and cannibalism are not among them.

Generally, you see this hyper-masculinity and paganistic, pantheistic superstition among Matriarchal peoples. Patriarchies can be plenty ugly, but not in this way.

Terrible, really. Northern Germanic Europeans used to indulge in this, so too the Celts, until the practice was wiped out by newly Christian kings. Charlemagne, IIRC, fought a War with the Saxons killing estimated around 125,000, considerable amount of the population in those days, to wipe out paganism, and in particular sacrifices to Wotan. The Old Norse and Celtic gods were always hungry for Blood. [This was IIRC from memory, around 900 AD or so. The true story of Christianization of Europe AFTER the Romans is hardly ever told because Europeans don't want to believe they were that bloody or primitive. But they were.]"


Those German pagans you hate weren't a Matriarchy, Whiskey! You make no sense whatsoever; you just want to put all the things you hate (women, Germans, pagans, whatever) into a single basket - your strawman basket.

Human sacrifice was dying out in pagan Europe before the Christians arrived. As with the case with ancient Greece and the ancient Hebrews, they figured out on their own that ritual human sacrifice wasn't a great idea. They didn't need any Christians to tell them that. Charlemagne slaughtered the Saxons because they rejected Christianity (and by extension, the rule of Charlemagne), not because they were practicing human sacrifice. And where do you get your absurd numbers from?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne

"In the summer of 779, he again invaded Saxony and reconquered Eastphalia, Engria, and Westphalia. At a diet near Lippe, he divided the land into missionary districts and himself assisted in several mass baptisms (780). He then returned to Italy and, for the first time, there was no immediate Saxon revolt. In 780 Charlemagne decreed the death penalty for all Saxons who failed to be baptised, who failed to keep Christian festivals, and who cremated their dead. Saxony had peace from 780 to 782.

He returned in 782 to Saxony and instituted a code of law and appointed counts, both Saxon and Frank. The laws were draconian on religious issues, and the indigenous forms of Germanic polytheism were gravely threatened by Christianisation. This stirred a renewal of the old conflict. That year, in autumn, Widukind returned and led a new revolt, which resulted in several assaults on the church. In response, at Verden in Lower Saxony, Charlemagne allegedly ordered the beheading of 4,500 Saxons who had been caught practising their native paganism after conversion to Christianity, known as the Massacre of Verden ("Verdener Blutgericht"). The massacre triggered three years of renewed bloody warfare (783-785). During this war the Frisians were also finally subdued and a large part of their fleet was burned. The war ended with Widukind accepting baptism."


This thing about pagan ritual human sacrifice is mostly a convenient red herring used by Christian conservatives to divert attention away from the many centuries of bloody Christian lunacy (burning of heretics, witch hunting, religious wars, the Inquisition, internal Crusades, ie, Crusades against European pagans and heretics, the Albigensians/Cathars, "kill them all, God will know his own", etc), that killed far, far more innocent people in Christian Europe than were ever ritually sacrificed in pagan Europe.

You really think that all ritual human sacrifice is the same? You think that all pagans were like the Aztecs? Really? You're misinformed.

1/10/10, 6:50 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The last remnants of pagan Northern Europe were not converted to Christianity until after 1000 a.d., so human sacrifice was practiced there relatively recently."

Lithuania was thoroughly pagan until 1387. Almost a thousand years of bloody wars and crusades were waged in Europe to impose Christianity and stamp out paganism, and it had nothing to due with eliminating human sacrifice, which was hardly a common practice of European pagans at the time, in any case. Stamping out paganism was about political control and expanding into new territory - ie, colonization and imperialism, plain and simple.

You don't need Christianity to get pagans to abandon human sacrifice. The ancient Greeks seemed to have done it pretty easily on their own long before Christianity. Paganism and human sacrifice are two entirely different matters. Frankly ritually killing a few slaves or criminals from time to time, as European pagans used to do, is not comparable to what is going on in Africa now, and it is hardly any worse than the kinds of nasty things that were considered normal under most of the history of Christianity - torture as public entertainment, burning people to death because they held "incorrect" beliefs about God, etc.

Not all "pagans" are alike, and not all "human sacrifice" is alike. Making the sweeping generalization that pagan Europe was "essentially the same" as animist sub-Saharan Africa, because both happen to practice human sacrifice, is just silly. Europe, lacking only urbanization, has been very advanced in many ways since the neolithic era. Sub-Saharan Africa has nothing to compare; their fetish for human sacrifice is a symptom of the problem, not the source, and converting them to Christianity or Islam will not fix their problems.

1/10/10, 7:19 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Some on the cutting edge of what Paul Gottfried now refers to as the Alternative Right seem to prefer Neopaganism to Christianity. This story should serve to remind them that they should be careful what they wish for.

I say this as one who is not religious, merely prudent enough to fear radical social changes that bring about unintended consequences."


"Careful what they wish for"? Really? You think sub-saharan Africa is comparable culturally to Periclean Athens just because both happen to be "pagan"?

You do realize how silly it is to lump all practices labeled "ritual human sacrifice" into the same cultural category, as though the Aztecs were comparable to the Celts were comparable to the Phoenicians were/are comparable to sub-Saharan African animists simply because they all practiced/practice human sacrifice?

It's absurd. You might just as well say that all cultures are essentially the same if they have capital punishment. So the USA is essentially the same as Saudi Arabia! It's polemical nonsense.

You want dire warnings about unintended consequences and "be careful what you wish for"? Here's a taste of your own medicine (and I'm not fooled by the "I'm not religious": beware agnostics promoting Christian Conservatism): be careful about wanting to "return" to your Golden Age of Christianity. It wasn't as nice as some folks like to think it was.

The numbers of "neo-pagans" on the right is so absurdly small, it makes the dire warnings of the paleos appear even more ridiculous. Rightist neo-pagans are no more likely to be imposing their wishes on anyone anytime soon than Catholic Monarchists are. Both are simply mourning for lost pasts: they just disagree about how long ago we all took the wrong historical path.

1/10/10, 7:36 AM

Anonymous ben tillman said...

The Right needs to come up with a catchphrase that describes the now-common lefty-media tactic of the deliberate misassignation of blame for whatever unfortunate event.

It's called "scapegoating".

1/10/10, 9:26 AM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

"David Davenport said...

Do you think the USA should have stayed out of WWII?

Yes or no?"

David Davenport: Are you a child molester?

Yes or no?

See there how easy it is to imply someone is a moral reprobate?

You know who likely was against American involvement in WWII?

One of the 400,000 American men who were killed in the war and who were drafted - i.e., who were never asked whether they wanted to fight in a war overseas, but who none-the-less were invited to share in the dying part of war.

1/10/10, 10:21 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

***Albinos in sub-Saharan Africa have long been targets of persecution and now murder because of the belief that their body parts have special efficacy for witchcraft.***

Is this what Blombkamp was getting at with the Nigerian dealers in District 9, trying to eat Alien flesh?

1/10/10, 3:14 PM

Anonymous Templar said...

I was going to make much the same point. One might add to your list the terrors conducted during the french and russian revolutions.

And Communist show trials, and cultural revolutions.

1/10/10, 3:22 PM

Anonymous Templar said...

This thing about pagan ritual human sacrifice is mostly a convenient red herring used by Christian conservatives to divert attention away from the many centuries of bloody Christian lunacy (burning of heretics, witch hunting, religious wars, the Inquisition, internal Crusades, ie, Crusades against European pagans and heretics, the Albigensians/Cathars, "kill them all, God will know his own", etc), that killed far, far more innocent people in Christian Europe than were ever ritually sacrificed in pagan Europe.

Don't be pathetic. "Bloody Christian lunacy" is a convenient red herring used by various and sundry anti-Christians (atheists, neo-pagans, etc) to depict the usual unpleasant business of human strife as something somehow uniquely dependant upon Christianity.

1/10/10, 3:29 PM

Comment deleted

This comment has been removed by the author.

1/10/10, 5:11 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't be pathetic. "Bloody Christian lunacy" is a convenient red herring used by various and sundry anti-Christians (atheists, neo-pagans, etc) to depict the usual unpleasant business of human strife as something somehow uniquely dependant upon Christianity.

But some Christians go around claiming that Christianity is uniquely civilising, but there's no proof of any dramatic change in behaviour or improvement in quality of life after Christianisation, which is ironically consistent with what you are saying now.

One thing that we do know is that Christians and particularly Christian clergy generally support causes that will, if unopposed, destroy western civilisation. The pope was in the news today spouting vaguely creationist cant about human nature. He was going to bat for African immigrants in Italy.

1/10/10, 5:15 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You're not making too much sense either. Religiously motivated wars were only part of Christianity. Much charity, submilimely beautiful music and art. While I don't know what the stats were regarding human sacrifice (I don't think it was too common even among the Druids), Christianity did organize Europeans around a common belief system. In the beginning most accepted with enthusiasm, not the least being the Irish (Island of saints and scholars.) It was the Irish who willingly went as scholars and "saints", not warrior, to convert central Europe.
I am not really trying to be an apologist for Christianity--that is too much to ask of a few paragraphs. But I am weary of those who relentlessly concentrate on the evils of that society. Science and progress developed in Europe at least partly BECAUSE of Christianity, not in spite of it. The better angels of its nature did distill into humanism and "progress" to a degree unknown in other parts of the world, or in history. Demonizing Christians is as wearying and dishonest as some of the wackier feminists describing all sexual intercourse as "rape."

1/10/10, 6:31 PM

Blogger kudzu bob said...

Good refutation of an argument I never made, Aunt Sally.

Look, I’m neither unfamiliar with, nor unsympathetic toward, Gore Vidal’s contention that Europe took a wrong turn when it settled on worship of a single insanely jealous Sky God. That remarkable author usually manages to get his analyses right. I just don’t see how any good can come from the replacement of one Supreme Being--Who at least has had the good manners to have made Himself pretty scarce lately--with a multitude of equally non-existent deities dusted off by obese lesbians and avid collectors of German war memorabilia. Western Civilization desperately needs to move forward again, not backward.

1/10/10, 7:13 PM

Blogger Dutch Boy said...

A point of historical order: the ancient Saxons were an aggressive lot and Charlemagne decided to put an end to their depredations against his empire with the sword and the baptismal font. You need not admire his methods to acknowledge his justification (i.e, to make an omelette, you need to break some eggs).

1/11/10, 8:32 AM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

"tiki said...

Will the anonymous dork please stop whining about "Komment Kontrol"?"

Seconded! The repetetive (and unamusing) ironic use of K's makes you sound like a retard. The mental image of the user that it conjures up is of one of those unwashed loser nobodies whom the LaRouche cult used to send to college campuses to hand out their literature.

1/11/10, 1:18 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The mental image of the user that it conjures up is of one of those unwashed loser nobodies whom the LaRouche cult used to send to college campuses to hand out their literature.

You mean like former LaRouchie-dork David Goldman aka "Spengler"? He seems to be doing ok these days.....he's on CNBC sometimes and has a fancy blog at "First Things" and everything.

1/11/10, 8:17 PM

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