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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
BARBARISM
"Barbarism ends with the production of Grand Barbarians. "
Lewis Morgan
Ancient Societies
"The friendly and flowing savage , who is he? Is he waiting for civilization, or is he past it, and mastering it?"
Whitman
"The term 'savage ' is often misapplied, and indeed when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a fevered civilization, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marques an Islanders sent to the United States as missionaries, might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.
Herman Melville
"With every advance of industrial civilization the savage past will be more and more appreciated, and the cult of D.H. Lawrence’s Dark God may be expected to spread through an ever widening circle of worshippers."
Aldous Huxley
"I left these happy islanders with much distress, for the utmost affection, regard and good fellowship was among us during our stay....their good sense and observations joined with the most engaging disposition in the world will ever make them beloved by all who become acquainted with them as friends."
Captain Bligh (of the Bounty)
"The evangelists were a strange assortment, picked by the Society on the score of their probable usefulness to uninstructed savages, and they included a harness-maker, bricklayer, farmer, weaver and a butcher and his wife. None of them had ever left England before and few had left their native villages. It was four years before any of them learned enough of the language to preach a sermon to a puzzled though sympathetic audience. The Tahitians built their houses, fed them, and provided them with servants galore, but after seven years not a convert had been made. Children called upon to line up and repeat over and over again this simple verse in Tahitian did so obligingly and with good grace.
No te iaha e ridi mei ei Jehove ia oe?
For what is Jehova angry with thee?
No te taata ino wou no to'u hamani ino
Because I am evil and do evil
But another seven years of such attempted indoctrination produced no results, then suddenly the great breakthrough took place.
The device which eventually established the unswerving missionary rule is described in a letter to home by one of the brethren, J.M. Orsmond. 'All the missionaries were at that time salting pork and distilling spirits....Pomare (the local chief) had a large share. He was drunk when I arrived and I never saw him sober.' Orsmond describes the compact by which Pomare, reduced to an alcoholic, would be backed in a war against the other island chiefs on the understanding that his victory would be followed by enforced conversion. Since Pomare was supplied with firearms to be used against the opponents' clubs, victory was certain. 'The whole nation', Orsmond wrote, 'was converted in a day.'
Norman Lewis
The Missionaries
List of missionary recommendations and prohibitions-all issued in God's name:
"God wants us to wear pants. He wants us to use money. He tells us that we have to work hard to get our food. He does not care to see us lying around in hammocks. He does not wish us to plant sugar cane any longer. God wants us to use soap. He wants us to eliminate unpleasant odors; to wash under the armpits and around anal area."
Norman Lewis
Ibid
"This time....the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing for quite some time."
-Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtu
"In the past, civilization was a sensibility shared by a class of people, while barbarism would be found not only in tribes beyond the frontier, but also in the slaves and the servile within the realms of civilization itself. In modern liberal democracies, the clear distinction between a culture and a class has disappeared. Everyone is touched by the higher forms of culture. Schooling, museums and the media are available to all. But barbarism remains an active force in modern societies, partly in gracelessness and ignorance, and partly in a loss of cultural coherence found among those who mistake a few years at an institution of higher learning for education itself."
-Kenneth Minogue article: "How Civilizations Fall" The New Criterion
"There is the moral of all human tales;
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past.
First freedom and then Glory-when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption,-barbarism at last."
-Lord Byron "Childe Harold's pilgrimage"
"the Mongols' lack of religious fervor is well demonstrated in one of their most lauded characteristics, their firm policy of religious tolerance, which so appealed to writers of the eighteenth century. 'The Catholic inquisitors of Europe', wrote Gibbon in a celebrated passage, 'who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of philosophy and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration.' He goes on to add, in a footnote, 'a singular conformity may be found between the religious laws of Genghis Khan and of Mr. Locke.' This is rather to overstate the case. Toleration there certainly was, but it was determined not so much by high-mindedness as by indifference, by a feeling that any religion might be right and that therefore it would be sensible to have every subject praying for the khan; and also by the fact that nomadic society in the steppes was accustomed to the practice of many religions. Buddhism was well known; Muslim merchants passed to and fro; and many of the Uighur Turks, those influential intermediaries between sedentary civilization and the steppes, were Manichaean's; and several of the tribes of Mongolia professed Nestorian Christianity."
-David Morgan
The Mongols
"A well-worn joke today is to refer to a strongly conservative person as being 'to the right of Genghis Khan," but the joke gets it wrong: Khan was, if anything, a liberal by modern definitions; he instituted a government system of record keeping, put the Mongolian language into writing, outlawed the kidnapping of women, assured diplomatic immunity to his neighbors, established an independent judiciary, and levied stiff taxes on the lands he conquered. As the historian Timothy May has noted, he also instituted a welfare system for widows,. Khan was also known for his sexual appetite: DNA tests reveal that about one-sixteenth of the population of eastern Asia is genetically descended from as single person, believed to be him"
-Tom Zoellner
Uranium: War, Energy, and the rock that shaped the world
"...the Englishman devised the savage's form to fit his function. The word savage thus underwent considerable alteration of meaning as different colonists pursued their varied ends. One aspect of the term remained constant, however: the savage was always inferior to civilized men....The constant of Indian inferiority implied the rejection of his humanity and determined the limits permitted for his participation in the mixing of cultures. The savage was prey, cattle, pet, or vermin-he was never citizen. Upholders of the myth denied that either savage tyranny or savage anarchy could rightfully be called government, and therefore there could no justification for Indian resistance to European invasion."
-Francis Jennings
"The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"it is the "barbarians" (the proletariat), who now represent faith in human destiny and the future of civilization, whereas the "civilized people" find their salvation only in barbarism: the massacre of the (Paris) Communards and the return to the Pope."
-Michael Bakunin Protestation of the Alliance, 1871
"Ours is the age of barbarians with microchips, of zealots who cannily exploit the civilized world's rules in their attempts to destroy it. We are learning that many human beings prefer certainty, no matter how oppressive and primitive, to the risks and responsibilities of freedom."
-Ralph Peters
"The age-old barbarism which for centuries lay bound and hidden under the severe discipline of a high culture, is again awakening that warlike healthy joy in one's own strength, which despises the age of rationalistic thought and literature, that unbroken instinct of a strong race which wishes to live otherwise than under the pressure of books and bookish ideas."
-Oswald Spengler
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Book: "The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity" by Richard Fletcher
Book: "Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection" by John Man
Book: "The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians" by Peter Heather
Book: "The Day of The Barbarians: The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire" by Alessandro Barbero
Book: "Enemies of Rome: Barbarians Through Roman Eyes" by I.M Ferris
Book: "Genghis Khan: Conqueror of the World" by Leo DeHartog
Book: "Genghis Khan's Greatest General: Subotai the Valiant" by Richard A. Gabriel
Book: "Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection" by John Man
Book: "Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire" by Jean-Paul Roux
Book: "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford
Book: "The Blue Wolf: The Epic Tale of the Life of Genghis Khan and the Empire of the Steppes" by Frederic Dion
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