This amazing tale of ritual sex and cannibalism beats most of the horror stories floating around today.
Except it took place in 1961, and the victim was Michael Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller. A Harvard scholar, he had traveled to an isolated part of New Guinea to study primitive art, and ended up ritually butchered and eaten. To restore, um, balance. To the world, of course.
Ajim, the head of one of the five men’s houses that comprised the Asmat village of Otsjanep, turned to Pep, who had killed more people than any of the tribesmen and collected more heads.
He was fearless and Ajim encouraged Pip to act.
‘He howled and arched his back and drove his spear into the white man’s floating ribs. Michael screamed, groaned a deep, inhuman sound,’ writes the author, and they pulled Michael into a canoe.
‘They had done this dozens of times following sacred rules that defined their lives and spirituality, made them men.
‘They were about to take his power, become him, and restore balance to the world.’
The fifty men in canoes rowed south on the Ewta River and turned into the shoreline that was soft mud where they dragged Michael out of the canoe and slapped him on his skull.
‘This is my head!’ screamed one of the tribe.
‘Fin and Pep and Ajim held his chest off the ground and pushed his head forward and with one blow of an ax in the back of his neck, Michael Rockefeller was dead.
There’s more, and it’s plenty grisly. No wonder it was covered up for years.
Of course, nowadays, there are people in academia who would maintain that “we” the civilized people in the West have no right to sit in judgment on the cannibals, because of course “we” are far more violent. And genocidal, etc.
I despair for sanity.
Comments
5 responses to “A more balanced world”
Someone should make Jared Diamond aware of it. His Papua Guineans are way smarter than pretty much everyone else, especially Europeans. Derb eviscerated worthless Diamond again, while reviewing Nicholas Wade’s upcoming book.
…“we” are far more violent. And genocidal,
As a matter of fact actually we are. From George Will’s latest Ukraine column at JWR:
Soon many Ukrainian children resembled “embryos out of alcohol bottles” (Arthur Koestler’s description) and there were, in Snyder’s words, “roving bands of cannibals”: “In the villages smoke coming from a cottage chimney was a suspicious sign, since it tended to mean that cannibals were eating a kill or that families were roasting one of their members.”
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will031714.php3#.UykWf6JRjZX
Frank-
How, exactly, does it prove anything to point out that a concerted effort to destroy western civilization caused westerners to act uncivilized?
I suspect you are confusing race and culture, just like Jared Diamond does.
Neil, I haven’t read, nor do I intend to read Jared Diamond’s tripe. The quote and comment were meant in an ironic sense. If you want to line up the numbers starting with the gassing in WW1 on through the Soviet famine and gulags, Hitler’s camps, and throw in Hiroshima for good measure, I bet it would exceed some few thousand cannibal killings in New Guinea.
Western Civilization must have reached a new peak of refinement and taste at Buchenwald with Ilse Koch overseeing the tanning of human skin for book covers and lampshades.
Gentlemen, it’s not a measure of how many died, but of why they died and how they died.
It’s quality, not quantity, that matters.