Origins of Violence: Climate Change in the Sahara 7,000 Years Ago

[Erna]

_http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-12-22-eastern-cape-circumcision-death-toll-rises

Eastern Cape circumcision death toll rises

Cape has risen to seven, with the deaths of another three boys in the past week, the provincial health department said on Monday.

Spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo said the deaths all occurred in the Maluti area of northern Transkei.

He said one of the youths had already been buried, near the initiation school he was attending. The department would apply for permission to exhume the body to ascertain the cause of death.

Kupelo also said the department was having particular problems with parents in Western Pondoland, who were refusing to allow their sons to be taken from initiation schools to hospitals when they needed medical attention.

"We must work together and save lives, not to have them killed unnecessarily," he said.

"If you deny your child healthcare, you're actually killing the boy."

He said the department was sending extra officials to the regionto deal with the problem.

Circumcision can lead to mental illness

_http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20080719085854365C850564

A 21-year-old Langa law student looked forward to his rite of passage to manhood but two weeks after his circumcision at an initiation school in the bush he had a psychotic episode and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

In another case, a 26-year-old man earned the money in Cape Town for his initiation and then returned to the Eastern Cape for the ceremony. But back in the city his life spiralled out of control.

He was dismissed from work for trying to stab a co-worker, and within a year of the rite was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia.

These are two case studies taken from the PhD thesis of medical anthropologist Lauraine Vivian, titled Psychiatric Disorder in Xhosa-speaking Men following Circumcision.

Vivian explored the mental histories of five young men, who each suffered from acute psychotic episodes after initiation ceremonies.

She is based at UCT medical school's Primary Health Care Directorate.

Her thesis examined how stress and anxiety related to personal, social and cultural factors, could possibly trigger the onset of a psychotic illness in vulnerable young men with a predisposition to such illness.

Circumcision and illegal initiation schools again made headlines in the news this month.

The circumcision death toll in the Eastern Cape has reached at least 20 so far this season, the provincial health department said.

Another 72 initiates were admitted to hospitals in the region, suffering from dehydration or septic wounds.

Vivian said as an anthropologist she had great respect for the Xhosa custom but there was a need to ensure the rights of these young men were protected and the practice was carried out safely.

"Our Constitution protects the rights of all these young men. The onus is on the health system to ensure that cultural practices do not turn abusive."

She graduated this year after doing six years of research at a number of psychiatric institutions in the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape and the Northern Province.

She screened over 50 patients who had suffered from various psychiatric illnesses linked to their circumcision but focused on five men.

She interviewed traditional surgeons and community elders, and worked closely with a task team in the Eastern Cape.

"At times it was distressing to hear what some of the young men had been through: how they were marginalised because they were mentally ill and received little care from their communities, who believed they were bewitched."

Adolescence and the pathway to manhood was tough enough in itself. In the cases she looked at, there was evidence that a lack of family support, especially the absence of a father, played a major role in exacerbating the patients' stress and anxiety.

"Evidence illustrated that the most significant stressor was when fathers did not fulfill their roles as required for their sons' circumcision.

Because the father/son equation underpinned this patrilineal rite of passage, their psychological health and social relations were compromised, it highlighted the stresses, psychological harm, cultural dissonance, poverty and stigma they had suffered and indeed continued to endure."

Ironically, she said, there was a local idiom that warned of possible mental illness in youth who were not circumcised to their fathers' line of descent.

"As much as it was a warning, it counselled that fathers, mothers and families needed to engage with their sons at this potentially turbulent time in their sons' lives."

All five of the men in Vivian's study went through their initiation without the support of their fathers.

They also developed psychotic illnesses within one year of their circumcision. Two suffered brief episodes, which improved when their cultural experience had been addressed through therapy.

Her work argues that in the cases of the five men, stressors involved in their circumcisions precipitated stress-related anxiety, and because they were vulnerable, this contributed to the onset of psychotic illness.

They suffered from either schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or cultural bound syndrome (a disorder brought on by cultural pressures).

 

[Erna]

Long post. Now that I’m reading The State of Africa – A History of Fifty Years of Independence by Martin Meredith I needed to get back to this thread.

while the role of the colonial past is minimized

the people have to have their cultural practices dissected, judged, and labled by the very outsiders who caused them so much suffering to begin with

As if many, many techniques cannot be used to further ponerogenic processes. Pathology uses all tools at its disposal to further its goals - do not underestimate this!

Webglider, I would never minimise the role colonialism played in shaping modern day Africa. I thought it would further complicate and distract from the original article posted in this thread.

During the Scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, European powers staked claims to virtually the entire continent. At meetings in Berlin, Paris, London and other capitals, European statesmen and diplomats bargained over the separate spheres of interest they intended to establish there. Their knowledge of the vast African hinterland was slight. Hitherto Europeans had known Africa more as a coastline than a continent; their presence had been confined mainly to small; isolated enclaves on the coast used for trading purposes; only in Algeria and in Southern Africa had more substantial European settlement taken root.

The maps used to carve up the African continent were mostly inaccurate; large areas were described as terra incognita. When marking out the boundaries of their new territories, European negotiators frequently resorted to drawing straight lines on the map, taking little or no account of the myriad of traditional monarchies, chiefdoms and other African societies that existed on the ground. Nearly one half of the new frontiers imposed on Africa were geometric lines, lines of latitude and longitude, other straight lines or arcs of circles. In some cases, African societies were rent apart: the Bakongo were partitioned between French Congo, Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola; Somaliland was carved up between Britain, Italy and France. In all, the new boundaries cut through some 119 culture groups. In other cases, Europe’s new colonial territories enclosed hundreds of diverse and independent groups, with no common history, culture, language or religion. Nigeria, for example, contained as many as 250 ethno-linguistic groups. Officials sent to the Belgian Congo eventually identified six thousand chiefdoms there.

Some kingdoms survived intact: the French retained the monarchy in Morocco and in Tunisia; the British ruled Egypt in the name of a dynasty of foreign monarchs founded in 1811 by an Albanian mercenary serving in the Turkish army. Other kingdoms, such as Asante in the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Loziland in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) were merged into larger colonial units. Kingdoms that had been historically antagonistic to one another, such as Buganda and Bunyoro in Uganda, were linked into the same colony. In the Sahel, new territories were established across the great divide between the desert regions of the Sahara and the belt of tropical forests to the South – Sudan, Chad and Nigeria – throwing together Muslim and non-Muslim peoples is latent hostility.

As the haggling in Europe over African territory continued, land and peoples became little more than pieces on a chessboard. ‘We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were,’ Britain’s prime minister, Lord Salisbury, remarked sardonically to a London audience. Britain traded the North Sea island of Heligoland with the Germans for Zanzibar, and parts of Northern Nigeria with the French for fishing rights off Newfoundland. France exchanged parts of Cameroon with Germany in return for German recognition of the French protectorate over Morocco. By the time the Scramble for Africa was over, some 10,000 African polities had been amalgamated into forty European colónies and protectorates.
Thus were born the modern states of Africa.

On the ground, European rule was enforced both by treaty and by conquest. From their enclaves on the coast, officials moved ever deeper into the interior to proclaim the changes agreed in the chancelleries and country mansions of Europe. The task was a prolonged one: French claims extended over about 3.75 million square miles; those of Britain over about 2 million square miles. Many treaties were duly signed. The Basuto king, Moshoeshoe, fearful of the encroachment of white settlers into his mountain terrain in Southern Africa, appealed for the protection of Queen Victoria, imploring that his people might be considered ‘fleas in the Queen’s blanket’ Several of his neighbours – the Tswana chiefdoms of Bechuanaland (Botswana) and the Swazi – followed suit.

It goes on and on like this, but you get the picture. It’s shocking, as you can see, so minimising it isn’t my intention. It’s not even ancient history either, it’s recent, and it’s still continuing. Africa’s geographic location, climate, fertility, minerals and sheer beauty make it too valuable a prize. Without simplifying it, I think this conclusion is at the heart of the matter.

So, what is happening? It seems that psychopaths and their networks have taken over a number of established groups to utilize them for their own purposes; groups such as political and religious organizations. This has occurred according to the patterns described in Lobaczewski's "Ponerology" and anyone who has read this has the tools to analyze these processes. "Lack" and "scarcity" can be associated with evil totalitarian regimes in history but few people have looked at it in terms of pathology. I think we need to. The article cited mentions how environment can induce changes in human beings and this is epigenetics in action. It is likely that the physiological changes, along with the social changes of need produce effective psychopaths as well as other pathologies and that could be the origins of some of the modern day strains of psychopathology.

It is pretty clear to me that what happened was an "exporting" of European psychopaths to Africa

The post independence African psychopaths have followed suit.

_ http://www.londonbookreview.com/lbr0032.html

It is possible to believe that the many problems that Africa faces - war, genocide, poverty, famine - are the faults either of Western governments and financial institutions and/or the result of natural disasters. How is it that an entire continent, pretty much, can be in such dire straights? Why is it that it is afflicted with so many deep-rooted and intractable problems? Martin Meredith's 'The State of Africa' seeks to explore the recent history of the continent, throwing much light on the answers to these difficult questions.

Meredith's work has an enormous scope, covering as it does the entire continent, from Egypt and North Africa right on down to South Africa, via the Congo, Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan and the rest. Add to this wide geographic scope the fact that it looks at the period from independence onwards, starting with the story of Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana in the late 1950s and closing with relatively recent events in Darfur and Zimbabwe. While the book certainly lacks the depth of a dedicated study of the history of any one country, Meredit makes a good job of providing convincing over-views of the principal events and key protagonists in recent African history.

Unfortunately for Africa the first generation of post-independence leaders set a pattern that continues to the present day. Without exception leaders like Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Nyerere and so on took power with excellent motives only to build regimes that were dysfunctional, corrupt, nepotistic and unfailingly authoritarian. With inexorable logic the systems they built lapsed into gangsterism that obeyed a single directive and that was to retain power at all costs. In many cases this meant exploiting tribal and racial differences, building huge networks of patronage and nepotism, enriching supporters and exploiting the rest of the population.

The following generations of leaders have been, if anything, worse. Seizing and keeping power by force, these leaders have plundered their countries to an unimaginable extent. Meredith paints detailed portraits of people like Mobutu, Amin, Bokassa and so on, men who bled their countries dry and whose policies led to poverty and war that continues into the present.

This is not to say that Meredith ignores those factors that contributed to these dismal outcomes. Artificial borders imposed by colonial powers, under-development, lack of educational opportunities for Africans, Cold War power politics and more were all factors that contributed to the problems that newly independent states faced in Africa. However, the narrative that Meredith effectively outlines makes plain that these factors were exacerbated many-fold by incompetence, egotism, greed and plain old fashioned lust for power. Without established institutions in place to check their power the new leaders of Africa turned their countries into money-making machines for themselves, families and supporters.
The dismal and depressing picture that emerges is not without hope. Botswana, for example, managed to steer a course towards a viable economy, multi-party democracy and stable society. Nelson Mandela turned his back on 'Big Man' politics, in stark contrast to Robert Mugabe in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

However, the over-whelming picture that emerges is of tyranny, violence and venality on a scale that beggars belief. It is not the Western banks that emerge as the principal villains, but those African leaders who swallowed up loans and bribes by the billion. It is the population of Africa who are the real victims of this story - they have suffered poverty, violence, ill-health and oppression. It needn't have been so. It doesn't have to be that way even now.

He ignores the fact that African dictators / leaders are Western puppets. Leaders who don’t advance Western agendas on the continent are eliminated. Unsurprisingly, he also doesn’t identify psychopathology by name, although obviously in narrative…

‘A brilliant and vitally important work for all who wish to understand Africa and it’s beleaguered people’

‘In Africa the past does matter. It explains the present and no one is going to move anywhere without it. That is why this book is important.’

 

[Laura]

Also read Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" which has quite a bit about the colonialization of Africa by pathological types.

 

[Erna]

Thanks Laura!

 

[Marcus-Aurelius]

Hi all,
will apologize to come back to the situation in Congo, but am Congolese and I can even say that the search for the root causes of the situation in the East of my country, and the women nightmares there was a triggering factor, is what allowed me to discover Laura work with her team and the Cs (I know, am still suffering of belated-intro horribilis and hope to cure myself soon).
Actually, my theory on the causes of this tragedy can be traced back to the climate change in the Sahara.
The Hamitic tribe of Tutsi lived in the Nil area currently part of the Sahara desert. When the climate changed and their environment was slowly turning to a desert, they emigrated progressively to the South anticipating the desert expansion, looking for pasture for their herds. From this, we can hypothesize that the psychological conditions described in the Laura’s introductory post to this thread can be applied to them.

When they arrived in Great Lakes region, they found an area where they could find great pastures area for their herds. But the only problem was that it was already inhabited by agrarian tribes in greater number than themselves, principally the Hutu, organized in a kingdoms. It seems an agreement has been reached with the autochthons, so they settled there. As their women are very beautiful, they gave them as wives to Hutu kings, with the intention to “tutsinize” the monarchy and take over the power. It seems they succeeded as some years later, this kingdom was ruled by Tutsi kings and elites, while this tribe formed only 12% to 15 % of its population. They were controlling all the strategic life areas of the kingdom creating frustration amongst Hutu and periodical threats between the two tribes. This state of affairs of division continued and has even been promoted by colonialists (Germans and Belgians) who required that the name of the tribe be mentioned on people’s identity card, putting the Tutsi to elites position while only “secondhand” jobs were left for Hutu. At the independence, the Hutu in greater number in Rwanda, took the power and began to rule the country while the Tutsi were ruling Burundi. As one could have predicted, the Hutu began to do to Tutsi what they have been done in the past in Rwanda. As a result, Tutsi migrated to all neighboring countries Burundi, DRC and particularly Uganda where Museveni, from another Hamitic tribe, supported by the USA was ruling. They created the FPR, an army trained by USA forces amongst Uganda’s army and went back in Rwanda to take the power 1990, resulting in a civil war, distribution of power between the two tribes, and culminating in genocide in both sides. French, through operation Turquoise, came there to try to help their Hutu allies, the FAR, but these latter couldn’t resist the FPR pression, so they convinced Mobutu and his government to accept these guys as refugees in DRC territory which of course they accepted. But the most important fact here is they let these guys, these REFUGEES, get in our country with all their guns, creating the mess we are in now in this area. The FAR now installed in refugees camp in DRC began to organize themselves and create an army to come back in Rwanda, which Paul Kagame regime could not tolerate. So they sent their army in DRC, helped by these occidental multinationals wanting DRC minerals for free, veiled in a liberation army against Mobutu. In their passage, they tried kill as much Rwandese Hutu they could find, so the FAR were obliged to retreat in forest/ remote area to escape and stay alive. Just imagine what will be the psychological state of someone who in majority of his life has seen only blood, murders, who actually was born amongst dead bodies and guns (FAR members’ sons), not aware of any other reality, to whom return to his home country is denied, is hunted like an animal by his enemies, who is in security nowhere, and who has no other future than violent death. And have this kind of persons controlling a region for 15 years, what can result from this? BESTIALITY. Of course, emulation rose from local population as well, creating what is currently in Kivu and Ituri regions.
It is just my hypothesis on this subject based on what I have read and can still need some enhancements.

And some odd infos which can perhaps lead to other source for all this situation:
The physiology of Tutsi cranes is similar to Nefertiti’s one.
Some Tutsi claim to be Jews, descendants of King Salomon’s children with the Saba queen and send to Great Lake region to secure King Salomon gold mines located in DRC.
As per some very controversial recent writings, the Tutsi have actually planned and pushed the genocide to take place in Rwanda, in the same patterns as the Jews genocide in Europe, to make their country the Israel of Africa. And in my opinion, they have succeeded to an extend!

 

[Erna]

This state of affairs of division continued and has even been promoted by colonialists (Germans and Belgians) who required that the name of the tribe be mentioned on people’s identity card, putting the Tutsi to elites position while only “secondhand” jobs were left for Hutu.

Thanks for your input, Marcus-Aurelius. The hate between the Hutus and Tutsis goes deep. Those ID cards were certainly one of the main catalists.

We watched Shooting Dogs last night, about the Rwandan genocide. The reason it's called Shooting Dogs, was because the Tutsis kept begging the UN troops to shoot the Hutus surrounding the school, and the lead UN commander kept saying they are there to monitor the peace, nothing more. He said their mandate doesn't allow to shoot without being shot at. Problem is, it was a machete genocide - no guns. At one point the UN troops started shooting the dogs, and the Catholic priest sardonically asked the UN commander if the dogs shot at them, because their mandate only allows shooting if being shot at.

The rest is history. After the UN pulled out, 800 000 Tutsis slaughtered with machetes between April and July, and the world did nothing (except initially arguing if it actually constitutes as a genocide or not)...

 

[Marcus-Aurelius]

The rest is history. After the UN pulled out, 800 000 Tutsis slaughtered with machetes between April and July, and the world did nothing (except initially arguing if it actually constitutes as a genocide or not)...

As has been said earlier, victors write history. We are aware of the number of Tutsi killed through the their propangada and lobbying (they have emulated Jews quite well again in this aspect), but they will of course never say to us the number of Hutu they have themselves killed. I know, it does not excuse the Tutsi deaths, but it seems that the 1994 genocide as described by mainstream medias as being only a Tutsi one, ignoring totally hutu deaths, is not fair. It took place both in tutsi and hutu sides, causing deaths in both tribes as all the others threats between these two tribes. And some researches ( french, spanish, african) even point Tutsi elites as creators and planners of the very events of 1994. And considering the the USA support to them at this time, one can ask if the arguing you describe above was not deliberate to set up the exact event we see today. And of course, when you say this, you are a negationist (again a similarity with Jews).
Actually, Tutsi have a quite strong inclination to power, claiming to be of another make-up than the other tribes in the region (were have I heard of this before? ahaah, Jews!), more intelligent than them, thus superior and deserving power positions on them. And suspect this particular drive to power to be the very root cause of what is taking place in the region.
As said to me by one of my closest friends originating from the neighboring region to Rwanda, during the 2nd Congo war begun 2001, when they arrived in a village, the first thing they do is to gather all traditional chief and "notables" of the village with their large families and kill them all. Of course it is just hearsay for majority of people, but seems like they have an agenda for this region and are setting up territory or society were THEY will be Rulers and no one else? Future will say!
And again apologize for driving this discussion further off-topic and for mistakes in my posts as am not a fluent english speaker.

 

[Marcus-Aurelius]

[quote author=Marcus-Aurelius]
Actually, Tutsi have a quite strong inclination to power, claiming to be of another make-up than the other tribes in the region (were have I heard of this before? ahaah, Jews!), more intelligent than them, thus superior and deserving power positions on them. And suspect this particular drive to power to be the very root cause of what is taking place in the region.
[/quote]
Of course, there is always correct persons in any group, so labeling the entire tribe is perhaps not so objective. And perhaps this is just another consequence as psychopathology, ponerology and hyperdimensional realities may suggest? For man is just a slave who can't stop war as Gurdjieff put it.
Work available in this site shed a new light on my quest for answers to this subject. thanks again to Laura and all for the wonderful work.

 

[Juba]

Similar pattern of desert spreading & cultural changes were found in South America (with many archaeological sites: Chankillo, Las Aldas, Sechin,Moche, Puca Pucara, Can Can, Huaca, Cahuachi etc ) & Mid. Amerika (with millder climate changes) and although recent research following spreading of desert up to 800BC when south American desert gain final shape, it is significant that cultural changes were going head to head with climatic changes, for example: agriculture was replaced with war and fortifications, in stead of building roads and cities people were more and more using ritual sacrifices up to mass torture & sacrifices, nicely explained by: Elisabeth P. Benson in: Ritual sacrifice in Ancient Peru.

Or in:

The Aztec Solution

by:Michael Kile

Climate modelling of new data from the Aztec Codex Cihuacoatl has identified a relationship with important implications for global warming mitigation. The research suggests a strong causal pathway exists between climate change and Aztec rituals of “nourishing the gods” with blood sacrifice.

The evidence supports a revival of (humane) human sacrifice (HHS) as a mechanism for retarding environmental degradation and reducing dangerous climate change. HHS also would improve crop yields by allowing more effective control of surface temperature and rainfall; create anthropogenic biochar for soil enhancement and long-term carbon enrichment, especially in tropical environments with low-carbon sequestration capacity and depleted ferrasol and acrisol zones; and reduce population growth rates as the Earth’s carrying capacity comes under further pressure this century.

Aztec culture has attracted scrutiny ever since Hernan Cortéz and his conquistadors entered King Montezuma’s palace in the lagoon city of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) on November 8, 1519, triggering the destruction of an entire civilisation in only two years.

There has been, however, no investigation into whether Aztec sacrificial rituals might have influenced climate change in Middle America. Did they affect regional temperature and rainfall patterns? Did they improve crop yields in ways unknown to modern science?

Recent research by Mexico’s Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia and international climate experts is producing new data that could answer these controversial questions. But why has the subject been neglected for over half a century?

First, cultural sensitivities and entrenched superstition discouraged study of Aztec human sacrifice. Second, there was a lack of evidence. While pictorial codices and other accounts of Aztec society exist, it took the sensational rediscovery last year of missing sections of the Codex Cihuacoatl (circa 1520) to revive academic interest.

Third, climate research has been refining its knowledge over the past two decades. The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP)—and its Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) model—only recently acquired the capacity to “simulate and project climate with unprecedented accuracy”[1]. With CLIVAR, reconstruction of past Middle American climates with greater precision has been possible. It has allowed complex time series simulation and use of eclectic proxies for temperature and other variables where empirical data is lacking.

The new Codex evidence is reviewed here with reference to Aztec cosmology, sacrificial rituals, sacred tonalamatl (divinatory) calendars, CLIVAR modelling and Mexico’s mammoth discoveries. Implications for global warming mitigation are discussed and recommendations made for the urgent attention of international agencies and governments.

Tenochtitlan

When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Valley of Mexico in 1519, they saw Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, rising out of an immense lagoon known as Metzliapan, or “lake of the moon”. (Mexico means “in the middle of the lake of the moon”.)

At its centre was the coatepantli, a cluster of monumental buildings dedicated to deities Aztecs believed controlled climate, weather and their fate. It was dominated by the teocalli, a thirty-metre-high flat-topped pyramid with two sanctuaries on top. One was for Tlaloc, god of rain and fertility; the other for Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun and strife.

Facing the Great Teocalli was the temple of Echecatl, god of winds. The adjacent courtyard was used for tlachtli, a ritual ball game where the ball symbolised the sun. On the right was the Tzompantli (“hairy skulls”), a huge rack displaying skulls of sacrificial victims. (Cortez’s companions counted 136,000 of them.)

Sacred Sacrifice

Aztecs believed their cultural continuity depended on sacrifice: “All life exists because of the gods. Their sacrifices gave us life and sustenance. We must repay them through sacrifice.” Central to their apocalyptic worldview was a sense of sacred obligation, possibly similar to our concern for the environment. The Aztec word for debt repayment, nextlahualli, was also a metaphor for human sacrifice. Without constant sacrifices the Aztecs believed the sun would become “angry”, temperatures would rise, corn yields decline and their world would be threatened with imminent destruction.

All life had an animating spirit or tonalli. Everything was tonacayotl, a manifestation of the gods. Everything came from them. Human blood hosted tonalli, hence there was an insatiable divine “hunger for the heart” of sacrificial victims.

According to Bernardino de Sahagun (1540–85), victims were taken to the top of a teocalli and laid on a stone slab. The abdomen was sliced open with a ceremonial flint knife. The still-beating heart was pulled out by priests. It was placed in a bowl held by a statue of the honoured god and the body was thrown down the temple stairs. The Aztecs sacrificed 80,400 prisoners in just four days during their 1487 re-consecration of Tenochtitlan’s Great Teocalli.

Cortéz (1523) described a typical sacrifice in his Letters:

They have a most horrid and abominable custom which truly ought to be punished and which until now we have seen in no other part, and this is that, whenever they wish to ask something of the idols, in order that their plea may find more acceptance, they take many girls and boys and even adults, and in the presence of these idols they open their chests while they are still alive and take out their hearts and entrails and burn them before the idols, offering the smoke as sacrifice. Some of us have seen this, and they say it is the most terrible and frightful thing they have ever witnessed.[2]

Sacrifices were made on specific days. There were eighteen festivities annually, one for each Aztec month. Sacrifices were made at all of them. Each god required a different kind of victim: young women were drowned for Xilonen; children were sacrificed to Tláloc; Nahuatl-speaking prisoners to Huitzilopochtli, and so on.

Aztec ritual revolved around both agricultural and sacred calendars: a 365-day xiuhpohualli (year count) agricultural cycle based on the sun; and a 260-day tonalpohualli (day count) ritual cycle. The two cycles formed a fifty-two-year “century”, which was to them literally a life cycle. Because of the fear that all order would collapse without appropriate rituals, the end of each “century” required a huge New Fire ceremony. Many human sacrifices had to be made to ensure the sun’s reappearance the next morning.

Attempts have been made to explain the prevalence of human sacrifice in Middle America. Sacrificial ceremonies clearly had important political and religious functions. Aztecs used them as a deterrent against enemies. Fallen conquistadors were often sacrificed, sometimes skinned alive, their heads placed in the Tzompantli.

Some scholars argue cannibalism was the main driver. For them, the aristocracy valued human flesh as a source of protein and merely designed rituals to validate this habit. For others, such as Lloyd deMause, the urge to sacrifice was an unconscious response to “traumatogenic modes of childrearing”.

The new Codex evidence, however, suggests another rationale for such a pervasive ritual. Human sacrifice was an ancient mitigation strategy to neutralise the threat of dangerous climate change and risks of rising temperature, declining precipitation and poor crop yields.

Codex Cihuacoatl

The Codex Cihuacoatl, also known as Codex Borbonicus, is held at the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale in Paris, which now occupies the original Palais Bourbon. Named after the goddess Cihuacoatl, it was written by Aztec priests shortly before the Spanish invasion.

Cihuacoatl (“snake woman”) was an Aztec motherhood and fertility goddess. She helped Quetzalcoatl (“feathered serpent”), the sky and creator god, to create humankind by grinding up bones from previous ages and mixing it with his blood. She is often shown as a fierce skull-faced old woman carrying spears and a shield.

The Codex is divided into three sections. The first section contains one of the most intricate surviving divinatory calendars (tonalamatl). The second shows (in order) the dates of the first days of each solar year in the fifty-two-year cycle. These days are correlated with Nine Lords of the Night. The third (now complete) section describes rituals, especially those at the New Fire ceremony marking the end of each cycle.

The Codex is a single 14.2-metre sheet of amatl “paper” with forty accordion-folded pages. Each page represents one of the twenty trecena (thirteen-day periods) in the tonalpohualli (260-day) year. Most of each page depicts a ruling deity or deities, with the remainder taken up with thirteen-day signs and thirteen other glyphs and deities. Aztec priests used these symbols to create horoscopes and divine the future. For example, the thirteenth trecena depicts the goddess Tlazolteotl. She is shown upper left wearing a flayed skin, giving birth to Cinteotl. The thirteen day-signs of this trecena are in a bottom row and begin with 1 (Earthquake), 2 (Flint/Knife), 3 (Rain), and so on.

Discovery of the Codex’s missing first and last two pages in 2008, together with a hitherto unknown part of the second section, in the French National Assembly Library archives, is now attracting international attention. There are two reasons for this interest. The rediscovered trecena contain the most comprehensive Aztec data set yet found. They detail annual sacrificial numbers over the entire empire and relate them to crop harvests—predominantly maize, wheat and barley. The data set extends over 300 years, from the Early to Late Post-Classic Period.

Second, the remarkable second section contains nine depictions of sacrificial rituals involving mammoths. It establishes for the first time that Aztec awareness of climate change and its relationship to solar irradiance extends much further back than previously thought, possibly several thousand years.

CLIVAR Modelling

Statistical climate reconstruction techniques using the CLIVAR model produced accurate temperature anomalies for Middle America and Valley of Mexico region for various time periods. Several independent proxy data sets, including the invaluable new Codex data on sacrificial frequencies and corn yield, were used to derive estimates of regional spatial temperature covariance patterns (corrected for atmospheric absorption) and amplitude changes in them through time. A modified principal component analysis technique was used to optimise this combination of spatial and temporal information. Verification statistics obtained from data subsets confirmed the validity of the CLIVAR reconstructions.

The reconstructions confirm, on the balance of probabilities, that the major forcing agent determining regional temperature anomalies was the frequency of human sacrifice. Cooler periods, for example, showed an impressive causal connectivity with (lagging) high sacrificial numbers. Sacrificial frequency also directly influenced local rainfall patterns and corn yields.

There were other intriguing outcomes too. For example, young male sacrifices were statistically the largest percentile and tended to drive cooler weather, while female sacrifice produced warmer weather. The meteorological outcomes of child and animal sacrifice were less clear, and probably masked by the adult groups.

Recent research by David Lobell and Christopher Field concluded that wheat, maize and barley yields decline with increased temperatures. Annual global temperatures have increased by about 0.04 degrees since 1980, with even larger changes in some regions. This has had a negative impact on crop yields and produced serious losses.

Mexico’s Mammoths

It is not widely known that mammoth skeletons and artefacts were discovered in 1952 near Tepexpan, thirty kilometres north-east of Mexico City. According to Wormington’s Ancient Man in North America (1957), the discovery “provided incontrovertible proof of the contemporaneity of men and mammoths in the Valley of Mexico”. The Direccion de Prehistoria of the Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia identified the bones as those of imperial mammoths (Mammuthus (archidiskodori) imperator Leidy). They were imbedded in an Upper Pleistocene lake deposit of fine green mud. The formation was dated at between 7000 and 10,000 years by geological methods.

In mid-1954, the Direccion de Prehistoria excavated a second fossil mammoth of the same species nearby. There was evidence of butchering. The skull was smashed, probably to extract the brains. Many bones showed cuts and grooves made by stone tools. The inscriptions on them are the earliest known depictions of solar sacrifice. Their extinction, then, was not caused solely by habitat disruption due to rapid climate change at the Pleistocene Holocene transition. Human predation for sacrificial rites was important too.

David Nogués-Bravo and his team used mathematical modelling to examine the importance of each of these factors. They predicted climate and species distribution at different times—126,000, 42,000, 30,000, 21,000 and 6000 years ago—and performed temperature and rainfall simulations. The results suggest mammoths suffered a catastrophic loss of habitat, with the species 6000 years ago relegated to just 10 per cent of the habitat available 37,000 years earlier, when glaciers were at their peak.

In Nogués-Bravo’s optimistic case for mammoth numbers 6000 years ago, humans would only have had to kill one mammoth each every three years to push the species to extinction. There was a marked increase in mammoth mortality rates through time. Mammoth sacrifices therefore also seem to have affected solar irradiance and modulated warming, at least until species extinction. From that point, however, the temperature rose rapidly, melting the vast North American ice sheet and raising sea level worldwide. The Aztecs, then, were continuing rites that had been practised for thousands of years.

Age of Sol

Human sacrifice is clearly a potent forcing agent in climate equilibration. Furthermore, analysis of the climate record suggests its decline has been a key driver of rising global temperatures. The Aztec (and other) priests were right. Only sacrifice will ensure humankind’s survival.

Given this outcome, should there not be an independent review of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) perspective? Are atmospheric carbon dioxide increases really the dominant forcing agent for global warming (IPCC, 2007, p. 136), with the main contributor to human carbon dioxide emissions being fossil fuel combustion (IPCC, 2007, p. 512)? The review should assess whether other factors, such as global population growth, are important contributors to global warming.

Opposition to human sacrifice as a climate change mitigation strategy is possible. However, society is on the cusp of a paradigm shift. Excessive individualism is in decline. Neo-liberalism is under attack. There is growing recognition our fate is determined by mysterious events related to the Sun (Sol)—333,000 times more massive than Earth and just eight light-minutes away. The Age of Sol is dawning.

The eco-spirituality that led to the first Earth Day celebration in Stockholm on April 22, 1970, fortunately has deepened over the past three decades or so. Voluntary sacrifice is no longer seen as the macabre ritual of a barbaric culture. It is more dignified than it was 500 years ago too, due to advances in psychotherapy and therapeutic medicine. There is a place for it in Sol’s pantheon. After all: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends (and future generations). He shall gain everlasting life.”

The threat of climate change is real. A long period of dangerous solar irradiance is inevitable without decisive action. Humankind has angered Sol for too long. The precautionary principle justifies reviving (humane) human sacrifice (HHS). It would be a wise exercise in risk management. To be climate-change-ready, national and global mitigation strategies should include HSS commitments, based on national population growth projections.

In Australia, the government should offer generous grants to HHS dependants; issue free (securitised) sacrificial credits to working families; create a new Order of the Bleeding Heart; and restructure the now redundant carbon emissions trading scheme as the Human Pollution Reduction Scheme. These initiatives would send a strong message to the world—and to all Cihuacoatl sceptics and Huitzilopochtli deniers—that this country is serious about climate change.



Michael Kile is author of No Room at Nature’s Mighty Feast: Reflections on the Growth of Humankind. He is also a Perth playwright. Grateful acknowledgement is made to Mexico’s Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale in Paris, and the World Climate Research Programme for research assistance.

References:

American Society of Plant Biologists, 2008, “Maize (Corn) May Have Been Domesticated In Mexico As Early As 10,000 Years Ago.” June 30, ScienceDaily [http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/06/080627163156.htm].

American Society of Plant Biologists, 2008, “Ancient Mexican Maize Varieties: Sequencing Of Ancient Corn Landraces To Ensure Genetic Diversity And Resources. June 28, ScienceDaily [http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/06/080626075534.htm].

Cortés, Hernán, 2005, (1523), Cartas de relación. México: Editorial Porrúa.

deMause, L, 2002, The Emotional Life of Nations. NY: Karnac.

Diaz del Castillo, B, 1963, (1632), The Conquest of New Spain. Penguin Classics, J M Cohen (trans.) (6th printing (1973) ed.). Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.

Harner, M, 1977, “The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice”. American Ethnologist, 4 (1), 117–135.

Hassig, R, 2003, “El sacrificio y las guerras floridas”. Arqueologia mexicana, XI, 47.

Hassig, R, 1988, Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2007, Fourth Assessment Report.

Kile, M G, Montellano, X, & Borges, J L, 2008, “Re-interpreting Codex Cihuacoatl: New Evidence for Climate Change Mitigation by Human Sacrifice.” Ancient Mesoamercia, 19(4) 225-265.

Kile, M G, 1995, No Room at Nature’s Mighty Feast: Reflections on the Growth of Humankind. Demos Press [http://www.popline.org/docs/1186/251527.html]

Lobell, D B, & Field, C B, 2007, “Global scale climate-crop yield relationships and the impacts of recent warming.” Environmental Resources, Letters, 2.

Nogués-Bravo D, Rodríguez J, Hortal J, Batra P, Araújo MB, 2008, Climate change, humans, and the extinction of the woolly mammoth. PLoS Biol 6(4): e79. doi:10. 1371/journal.pbio.0060079.[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080331223843.htm.]

Ortiz De Montellano, B R, 1983, “Counting Skulls: Comment on the Aztec Cannibalism Theory of Harner-Harris”. American Anthropologist, New Series, 85(2), 403–406.

Penn State, 2006, Early Americans Faced Rapid Late Pleistocene Climate Change And Chaotic Environments. ScienceDaily, February 21, [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/02/060221090316.htm.]

but than we have horror case from 1960 in Chile:

A 1989 book by investigative journalist Patrick Tierney documents a modern ritual human sacrifice during the devastating earthquake and tsunami of 1960 by a machi of the Mapuche in the Lago Budi community [75].

The victim, 5-year-old José Luis Painecur, had his arms and legs removed by Juan Pañán and Juan José Paincur (the victim's grandfather), and was stuck into the sand of the beach like a stake. The waters of the Pacific Ocean then carried the body out to sea. The sacrifice was rumored to be at the behest of local machi, Juana Namuncurá Añen. The two men were charged with the crime and confessed, but later recanted. They were released after two years. A judge ruled that those involved in these events had "acted without free will, driven by an irresistible natural force of ancestral tradition."

The story is also mentioned in a Time Magazine article from that year, although with much less detail

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#Pre-Columbian_Americas

it is disturbing to know that modern climate changes can produce such pathological behaviour and after all legalizing the same by the justice.

 

[Erna]

Marcus-Aurelius, I understand that the international media is sympathetic towards Rwanda. Always a clear indication that the reality reflects the opposite…

The Hewa Bora cabin crew had laid out copies of a Kinshasa newspaper, L’Avenir, on the seats in business class and I snaffled one as I shoulder-barged my way to my economy seat. It was more of a samizdat newsletter than a newspaper, comprising four pages amateurishly printed on a single folded sheet of very cheap, coarse paper. The ink came off on my fingers and there were no decipherable photographs. But I could decipher the paper’s tone, a tone that was rabidly anti-Rwandan. There were various articles claiming that the paper had seen documentary evidence proving Rwanda was about to attack the Congo and there were vicious denunciations of various pro-Rwandan Congolese rebels, such as my old contact, Adolphe Onusumba. Under the terms of the 2002 peace deal that was meant to have ended the Congo’s war, all the major rebel groups, including the pro-Rwandan ones, had taken their place in a transitional, power-sharing government in Kinshasa. The arrangement was fragile and, as I could see from the deeply xenophobic tone of L’Avenir, the fault line separating Rwandans from Congolese remained explosive.

Since the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has been regarded by many outsiders as a tiny, frail country bullied by it’s larger neighbours. This is a grossly inaccurate generalisation. With a government now dominated by Tutsis, Rwanda punches way above it’s weight in regional affairs. There are clear parallels with Israel, another small country of people driven by the memory of mass murder committed against them to dominate its neighbours militarily, and the neighbour that Rwanda bosses most is the Democratic Republic of Congo. On a map, tiny Rwanda is overshadowed by the vastness of the DRC, but for the past ten years it has been Rwanda that has loomed over the DRC. In 1996 Rwanda’s Tutsi-dominated forces invaded the country and orchestrated the ousting of Mobutu the following year, and in 1998 the same forces turned on Laurent Kabila, the man they had installed as Mobutu’s replacement, starting the conflict that has so far cost four million lives.

For many Congolese, the Tutsis who now rule Rwanda play the role of bogeyman. Tutsis are taller and thinner than their ethnic neighbours, with finer features, and I heard many Congolese cursing them for ‘not looking like us’. There were plenty of less polite insults. The Tutsi/non-Tutsi divide is one of central Africa’s great social divisions and it was to have enormous impact on my attempt to cross the Congo.

Eight weeks before I flew to Lubumbashi, an ethnic Tutsi Congolese warlord broke the terms of the 2002 peace treaty when he mobilised a force and launched an attack on the Congolese town of Bukavu that sits on the border between DRC and Rwanda. His motives were unclear, but the result fitted into the depressing pattern of central African turmoil. After thirty-six hours of savagery, scores of people lay dead, thousands had fled their homes and the entire Eastern sector of the country was pushed to a state close to war. The Congolese authorities were quick to blame the Tutsi-led regime across the border in Rwanda, accusing them of arming and protecting the rebels. The accusations were soon followed by retaliatory attacks from Congolese troops on groups linked to Rwanda’s Tutsis. I knew that the relationship between the DRC and Rwanda was tense, but the racist bile I read in L’Avenir revealed the depth of enmity between the two sides. All I could do as the plane made the three-hour crossing from South Africa over Zimbabwe and Zambia en route to Lubumbashi was pray that some sort of calm would be re-established before I reached Eastern Congo.

Getting back to the pathological element:

Leaders who don’t advance Western agendas on the continent are eliminated.

Not for sensitive readers:

If you look at a map of the Congo, you see that the country appears to have grown a vestigial tail around it’s bottom right-hand corner, known as the Katanga Panhandle. On the surface there seems no clear reason for this outcrop of Congolese territory surrounded on three sides by it’s Southern neighbour, Zambia. It is below the soil that you find the reason why the early Belgian colonialists in the late nineteenth century staked the territory so obstinately, in defiance of British pioneers probing Northwards from what was then Rhodesia. The panhandle includes some of the richest deposits of copper, cobalt and uranium on the planet, a geological quirk that the early Belgian colonialists identified more smartly than their British counterparts.

While Congo’s other provinces have large diamond and gold deposits, it was mainly on Katanga’s mineral wealth that the Belgian colony grew rich in the mid-twentieth century. The uranium for the atom bombs dropped by America on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from a mine in Katanga, and it was Katanga’s vast copper deposits that really powered the colony’s growth when the reconstruction of Europe and Japan after the Second World War drove a surge in demand for copper. Most of the mineral profits of Katanga were taken by the Belgians, repatriated to Brussels and divided among shareholders from various private corporations, or Sociétés, created by the colonial authorities. But some of the profits were reinvested in Katanga, to build a number of mines, processing plants and factories, serviced by new towns built out of the virgin bush and connected by a web of roads and railways. By the mid-twentieth century Katanga was the most developed province in all of the Congo.

The blessing of Katanga’s mineral wealth became it’s curse when Belgium granted independence to the Congo on 30 June 1960. While maintaining the illusion of handing over a single country to the black Congolese, the authorities in Brussels secretly backed the secession of Katanga from the Congo, financing, arming and protecting the pro-Belgian Katangan leader, Moise Tshombe, in return for a promise that the Belgian mining interests in Katanga would be protected. It was one of the most blatant acts of foreign manipulation in Africa’s chaotic independence period, and it culminated in one of the cruellest acts of twentieth-century political assassination, when Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese national figure to win an election, was handed over by Belgian stooges to be murdered by Tshombe’s regime.

Lumumba’s mistake was to hint at pro-Soviet sympathies. The mere possibility of the Congo, with it’s huge deposits of copper, uranium and diamonds, falling into the Soviet sphere of influence during the Cold War was too much for the Western powers. Several African nations were already moving into the Communist camp but the Congo was, in the eyes of the West, simply too important to lose to Brussels, with the connivance of Washington, engineered Lumumba’s arrest, torture and transfer to the capital of Katanga, then known by it’s Belgian name of Elizabethville, today Lubumbashi.

It was at the city’s airport in the middle of January 1961 that Lumumba was last seen in public. Members of the UN, already deployed to Katanga to try to deal with the secession crisis, watched Lumumba being bundled out of a cargo plane by soldiers loyal to Tshombe. They said he had been so badly beaten on the flight that he barely moved when he was pushed into a waiting vehicle that whisked him away to a nearby villa owned by a Belgian colonialist. For a long time, what happened next was one of the great mysteries of modern African history, mainly because Lumumba’s body was never found. There were rumours that it was cut up and fed to pigs, or even thrown into the headwaters of the Congo river that rises in mountains to the North-West of Lubumbashi. Tshombe’s regime initially refused to admit he was dead, but when they finally did, they lied, claiming he had been shot dead by villagers after he escaped on foot from police custody.

It took almost forty years before the mystery was eventually solved by a Belgian academic, Ludo De Witte, piecing the history together from official documents released by Brussels in the 1990s. He discovered that various Belgian policemen and security officers – nominally under the command of Tshombe but, in reality, following orders from Brussels – had, on the night of 17 January 1961, driven Lumumba from the villa where he had been taken to rendezvous with a firing squad of local Katangan soldiers about forty-five minutes’ drive from the airport. Lumumba, his face battered almost beyond recognition and his clothes spattered with blood, was made to stand against a large anthill illuminated by the headlights of two cars. He was then executed by firing squad and his body buried in a shallow grave. Fearful the grave might be discovered and turned into a shrine, the Belgians and their Katangan stooges later moved to erase all traces of the Congo’s elected leader. The day after the execution, the corpse was exhumed and driven deeper into the Katangan bush, where it was reburied in another shallow grave until arrangements could be made to get rid of it once and for all.

Under cover of darkness on 22 January 1961 two Belgian brothers, with connections to the Belgian security forces, returned and exhumed the body for a second time. They used a hacksaw and an axe to dismember the decomposing corpse, before dissolving the remains in a 200-litre petrol drum filled with sulphuric acid taken from a nearby copper–processing plant. One of the brothers later admitted he used pliers to remove two of Lumumba’s teeth as souvenirs.

It took place both in tutsi and hutu sides, causing deaths in both tribes as all the others threats between these two tribes.

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

And in the case of the Great Lakes region, quite literally…

For man is just a slave who can't stop war as Gurdjieff put it.

"There was a question about war. How to stop wars? Wars cannot be stopped. War is the result of the slavery in which men live. Strictly speaking men are not to blame for war. War is due to cosmic forces, to planetary influences. But in men there is no resistance whatever against these influences, and there cannot be any, because men are slaves. If they were men and were capable of 'doing,' they would be able to resist these influences and refrain from killing one another."
"But surely those who realize this can do something?" said the man who had asked the question about war. "If a sufficient number of men came to a definite conclusion that there should be no war, could they not influence others?"

"Those who dislike war have been trying to do so almost since the creation of the world," said G. "And yet there has never been such a war as the present. Wars are not decreasing, they are increasing and war cannot be stopped by ordinary means. All these theories about universal peace, about peace conferences, and so on, are again simply laziness and hypocrisy. Men do not want to think about themselves, do not want to work on themselves, but think of how to make other people do what they want. If a sufficient number of people who wanted to stop war really did gather together they would first of all begin by making war upon those who disagreed with them. And it is still more certain that they would make war on people who also want to stop wars but in another way. And so they would fight. Men are what they are and they cannot be different. War has many causes that are unknown to us. Some causes are in men themselves, others are outside them. One must begin with the causes that are in man himself. How can he be independent of the external influences of great cosmic forces when he is the slave of everything that surrounds him? He is controlled by everything around him. If he becomes free from things, he may then become free from planetary influences.

"Freedom, liberation, this must be the aim of man. To become free, to be liberated from slavery: this is what a man ought to strive for when he becomes even a little conscious of his position. There is nothing else for him, and nothing else is possible so long as he remains a slave both inwardly and outwardly. But he cannot cease to be a slave outwardly while he remains a slave inwardly. Therefore in order to become free, man must gain inner freedom.

"The first reason for man's inner slavery is his ignorance, and above all, his ignorance of himself. Without self-knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave, and the plaything of the forces acting upon him.
"This is why in all ancient teachings the first demand at the beginning of the way to liberation was: 'Know thyself.' […]

G had more to say about war:

war must be looked upon as one of those generally catastrophic conditions of life in the midst of which we have to live and work, and seek answers to our questions and doubts.

"Again you speak of something different,"' he said. "You speak of errors arising from perceptions but I am not speaking of these. Within the limits of given perceptions man can err more or err less. As I have said before, man's chief delusion is his conviction that he can do. All people think that they can do, all people want to do, and the first question all people ask is what they are to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood. Everything happens. All that befalls a man, all that is done by him, all that comes from him—all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere or the surrounding clouds, as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind.

"Man is a machine. All his deeds, actions, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions, and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action. Everything he says, does, thinks, feels—all this happens. Man cannot discover anything, invent anything. It all happens.

"To establish this fact for oneself, to understand it, to be convinced of its truth, means getting rid of a thousand illusions about man, about his being creative and consciously organizing his own life, and so on. There is nothing of this kind. Everything happens—popular movements, wars, revolutions, changes of government, all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as everything happens in the life of individual man. Man is born, lives, dies, builds houses, writes books, not as he wants to, but as it happens. Everything happens. Man does not love, hate, desire—all this happens.

"But no one will ever believe you if you tell him he can do nothing. This is the most offensive and the most unpleasant thing you can tell people. It is particularly unpleasant and offensive because it is the truth, and nobody wants to know the truth.

"When you understand this it will be easier for us to talk. But it is one thing to understand with the mind and another thing to feel it with one's "whole mass,' to be really convinced that it is so and never forget it.
"With this question of doing" (G. emphasized the word), "yet another thing is connected. It always seems to people that others invariably do things wrongly, not in the way they should be done. Everybody always thinks he could do it better. They do not understand, and do not want to understand, that what is being done, and particularly what has already been done in one way, cannot be, and could not have been, done in another way. Have you noticed how everyone now is talking about the war? Everyone has his own plan, his own theory. Everyone finds that nothing is being done in the way it ought to be done. Actually everything is being done in the only way it can be done. If one thing could be different everything could be different. And then perhaps there would have been no war.

"Try to understand what I am saying: everything is dependent on everything else, everything is connected, nothing is separate. Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go. If people were different everything would be different. They are what they are, so everything is as it is."
This was very difficult to swallow.
"Is there nothing, absolutely nothing, that can be done?" I asked.
"Absolutely nothing."
"And can nobody do anything?"

"That is another question. In order to do it is necessary [/i]to be[/i]. And it is necessary first to understand what to be means. If we continue our talks you will see that we use a special language and that, in order to talk with us, it is necessary to learn this language. It is not worth while talking in ordinary language because, in that language, it is impossible to understand one another. This also, at the moment, seems strange to you. But it is true. In order to understand it is necessary to learn another language. In the language which people speak they cannot understand one another. You will see later on why this is so.

"Then one must learn to speak the truth. This also appears strange to you. You do not realize that one has to learn to speak the truth. It seems to you that it is enough to wish or to decide to do so. And I tell you that people comparatively rarely tell a deliberate lie. In most cases they think they speak the truth. And yet they lie all the time, both when they wish to lie and when they wish to speak the truth. They lie all the time, both to themselves and to others. Therefore nobody ever understands either himself or anyone else. Think—could there be such discord, such deep misunderstanding, and such hatred towards the views and opinions of others, if people were able to understand one another? But they cannot understand because they cannot help lying. To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; and one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to be able to speak the truth. The wish alone is not enough. To speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know."

The conversation began with my question: "Can war be stopped?" And G. answered: "Yes, it can." And yet I had been certain from previous talks that he would answer: "No, it cannot."
"But the whole thing is: how?" he said. "It is necessary to know a great deal in order to understand that. What is war? It is the result of planetary influences. Somewhere up there two or three planets have approached too near to each other; tension results. Have you noticed how, if a man passes quite close to you on a narrow pavement, you become all tense? The same tension takes place between planets. For them it lasts, perhaps, a second or two. But here, on the earth, people begin to slaughter one another, and they go on slaughtering maybe for several years. It seems to them at the time that they hate one another; or perhaps that they have to slaughter each other for some exalted purpose; or that they must defend somebody or something and that it is a very noble thing to do; or something else of the same kind. They fail to realize to what an extent they are mere pawns in the game. They think they signify something; they think they can move about as they like; they think they can decide to do this or that. But in reality all their movements, all their actions, are the result of planetary influences. And they themselves signify literally nothing. Then the moon plays a big part in this. But we will speak about the moon separately. Only it must be understood that neither Emperor Wilhelm, nor generals, nor ministers, nor parliaments, signify anything or can do anything. Everything that happens on a big scale is governed from outside, and governed either by accidental combinations of influences or by general cosmic laws."

This was all I heard. Only much later I understood what he wished to tell me—that is, how accidental influences could be diverted or transformed into something relatively harmless. It was really an interesting idea referring to the esoteric meaning of "sacrifices." But, in any case at the present time, this idea has only an historical and a psychological value. What was really important and what he said quite casually, so that I did not even notice it at once, and only remembered later in trying to reconstruct the conversation, was his words referring to the difference of time for planets and for man.
And even when I remembered it, for a long time I did not realize the full meaning of this idea. Later very much was based on it.
Somewhere about this time I was very much struck by a talk about the sun, the planets, and the moon. I do not remember how this talk began. But I remember that G. drew a small diagram and tried to explain what he called the "correlation of forces in different worlds." This was in connection with the previous talk, that is, in connection with the influences acting on humanity. The idea was roughly this: humanity, or more correctly, organic life on earth, is acted upon simultaneously by influences proceeding from various sources and different worlds: influences from the planets, influences from the moon, influences from the sun, influences from the stars. All these influences act simultaneously; one influence predominates at one moment and another influence at another moment. And for man there is a certain possibility of making a choice of influences; in other words, of passing from one influence to another.

"To explain how, would need a very long talk," said G. "So we will talk about this some other time. At this moment I want you to understand one thing: it is impossible to become free from one influence without becoming subject to another. The whole thing, all work on oneself, consists in choosing the influence to which you wish to subject yourself, and actually falling under this influence. And for this it is necessary to know beforehand which influence is the more profitable."

"The fact is that the enormous majority of people do not want any knowledge whatever; they refuse their share of it and do not even take the ration allotted to them, in the general distribution, for the purposes of life. This is particularly evident in times of mass madness such as wars, revolutions, and so on, when men suddenly seem to lose even the small amount of common sense they had and turn into complete automatons, giving themselves over to wholesale destruction in vast numbers, in other words, even losing the instinct of self-preservation. Owing to this, enormous quantities of knowledge remain, so to speak, unclaimed and can be distributed among those who realize its value.

"There is nothing unjust in this, because those who receive knowledge take nothing that belongs to others, deprive others of nothing; they take only what others have rejected as useless and what would in any case be lost if they did not take it.

"The collecting of knowledge by some depends upon the rejection of knowledge by others. "There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge. This, in its turn, necessitates the work of collecting this matter of knowledge which would otherwise be lost. Thus the work of collecting scattered matter of knowledge frequently coincides with the beginning of the destruction and fall of cultures and civilizations.

"This aspect of the question is clear. The crowd neither wants nor seeks knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd, in their own interests, try to strengthen its fear and dislike of everything new and unknown. The slavery in which mankind lives is based upon this fear. It is even difficult to imagine all the horror of this slavery. We do not understand what people are losing. But in order to understand the cause of this slavery it is enough to see how people live, what constitutes the aim of their existence, the object of their desires, passions, and aspirations, of what they think, of what they talk, what they serve and what they worship.

Consider what the cultured humanity of our time spends money on; even leaving the war out, what commands the highest price; where the biggest crowds are. If we think for a moment about these questions it becomes clear that humanity, as it is now, with the interests it lives by, cannot expect to have anything different from what it has. But, as I have already said, it cannot be otherwise. Imagine that for the whole of mankind half a pound of knowledge is allotted a year. If this knowledge is distributed among everyone, each will receive so little that he will remain the fool he was. But, thanks to the fact that very few want to have this knowledge, those who take it are able to get, let us say, a grain each, and acquire the possibility of becoming more intelligent. All cannot become intelligent even if they wish. And if they did become intelligent it would not help matters. There exists a general equilibrium which cannot be upset.

This of course produced a particularly deep impression on us, because it was said in 1916, when the latest manifestation of "civilization," in the form of a war such as the world had not yet seen, was continuing to grow and develop, drawing more and more millions of people into its orbit.

I remembered that a few days before this talk I had seen two enormous lorries on the Liteiny loaded to the height of the first floor of the houses with new unpainted wooden crutches. For some reason I was particularly struck by these lorries. In these mountains of crutches for legs which were not yet torn off there was a particularly cynical mockery of all the things with which people deceive themselves. Involuntarily I imagined that similar lorries were sure to be going about in Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna, Rome, and Constantinople. And, as a result, all these cities, almost all of which I knew so well and liked just because they were so different and because they supplemented and gave contrast to one another, had now become hostile both to me and to each other and separated by new walls of hatred and crime.
I spoke to our people about these lorry-loads of crutches and of my thoughts about them at a meeting.

"'What do you expect?" said G. "People are machines. Machines have to be blind and unconscious, they cannot be otherwise, and all their actions have to correspond to their nature. Everything happens. No one does anything. 'Progress' and 'civilization,' in the real meaning of these words, can appear only as the result of conscious efforts. They cannot appear as the result of unconscious mechanical actions. And what conscious effort can there be in machines? And if one machine is unconscious, then a hundred machines are unconscious, and so are a thousand machines, or a hundred thousand, or a million. And the unconscious activity of a million machines must necessarily result in destruction and extermination. It is precisely in unconscious involuntary manifestations that all evil lies. You do not yet understand and cannot imagine all the results of this evil. But the time will come when you will understand."

"If instead of religion in general we take Christianity, then again there exists a Christianity number one, that is to say, paganism in the guise of Christianity. Christianity number two is an emotional religion, sometimes very pure but without force, sometimes full of bloodshed and horror leading to the Inquisition, to religious wars. Christianity number three, instances of which are afforded by various forms of Protestantism, is based upon dialectic, argument, theories, and so forth. Then there is Christianity number four, of which men number one, number two, and number three have no conception whatever.

"In actual fact Christianity number one, number two, and number three is simply external imitation. Only man number four strives to be a Christian and only man number five can actually be a Christian. For to be a Christian means to have the being of a Christian, that is, to live in accordance with Christ's precepts.
"Man number one, number two, and number three cannot live in accordance with Christ's precepts because with them everything 'happens.' Today it is one thing and tomorrow it is quite another thing. Today they are ready to give away their last shirt and tomorrow to tear a man to pieces because he refuses to give up his shirt to them. They are swayed by every chance event. They are not masters of themselves and therefore they cannot decide to be Christians and really be Christians.

Actually, Tutsi have a quite strong inclination to power, claiming to be of another make-up than the other tribes in the region (were have I heard of this before? ahaah, Jews!), more intelligent than them, thus superior and deserving power positions on them. And suspect this particular drive to power to be the very root cause of what is taking place in the region.

Some Tutsi claim to be Jews, descendants of King Salomon’s children with the Saba queen and send to Great Lake region to secure King Salomon gold mines located in DRC.
As per some very controversial recent writings, the Tutsi have actually planned and pushed the genocide to take place in Rwanda, in the same patterns as the Jews genocide in Europe, to make their country the Israel of Africa. And in my opinion, they have succeeded to an extend!

"If instead of religion in general we take Christianity, then again there exists a Christianity number one, that is to say, paganism in the guise of Christianity. Christianity number two is an emotional religion, sometimes very pure but without force, sometimes full of bloodshed and horror leading to the Inquisition, to religious wars. Christianity number three, instances of which are afforded by various forms of Protestantism, is based upon dialectic, argument, theories, and so forth. Then there is Christianity number four, of which men number one, number two, and number three have no conception whatever.

"In actual fact Christianity number one, number two, and number three is simply external imitation. Only man number four strives to be a Christian and only man number five can actually be a Christian. For to be a Christian means to have the being of a Christian, that is, to live in accordance with Christ's precepts.
"Man number one, number two, and number three cannot live in accordance with Christ's precepts because with them everything 'happens.' Today it is one thing and tomorrow it is quite another thing. Today they are ready to give away their last shirt and tomorrow to tear a man to pieces because he refuses to give up his shirt to them. They are swayed by every chance event. They are not masters of themselves and therefore they cannot decide to be Christians and really be Christians.

"In any case, if 'Christian morality' brought Europe to the war which is now going on, then it would be as well to be as far as possible from such morality,"
"Many people say that they do not understand the moral side of your teaching," said one of us. "And others say that your teaching has no morality at all."
"Of course not," said G. "People are very fond of talking about morality. But morality is merely self-suggestion. What is necessary is conscience. We do not teach morality. We teach how to find conscience. People are not pleased when we say this. They say that we have no love. Simply because we do not encourage weakness and hypocrisy but, on the contrary, take off all masks. He who desires the truth will not speak of love or of Christianity because he knows how far he is from these. Christian teaching is for Christians. And Christians are those who live, that is, who do everything, according to Christ's precepts. Can they who talk of love and morality live according to Christ's precepts? Of course they cannot; but there will always be talk of this kind, there will always be people to whom words are more precious than anything else. But this is a true sign! He who speaks like this is an empty man; it is not worth while wasting time on him.

"Morality and conscience are quite different things. One conscience can never contradict another conscience. One morality can always very easily contradict and completely deny another. A man with 'buffers' may be very moral. And 'buffers' can be very different, that is, two very moral men may consider each other very immoral. As a rule it is almost inevitably so. The more 'moral' a man is, the more 'immoral' does he think other moral people.
"The idea of morality is connected with the idea of good and evil conduct. But the idea of good and evil is always different for different people, always subjective in man number one, number two, and number three, and is connected only with a given moment or a given situation. A subjective man can have no general concept of good and evil. For a subjective man evil is everything that is opposed to his desires or interests or to his conception of good.

"One may say that evil does not exist for subjective man at all, that there exist only different conceptions of good. Nobody ever does anything deliberately in the interests of evil, for the sake of evil. Everybody acts in the interests of good, as he understands it. But everybody understands it in a different way. Consequently men drown, slay, and kill one another in the interests of good. The reason is again just the same, men's ignorance and the deep sleep in which they live.
"This is so obvious that it even seems strange that people have never thought of it before. However, the fact remains that they fail to understand this and everyone considers his good as the only good and all the rest as evil. It is naive and useless to hope that men will ever understand this and that they will evolve a general and identical idea of good."
"But do not good and evil exist in themselves apart from man?" asked someone present.

"They do," said G., "only this is very far away from us and it is not worth your while even to try to understand this at present. Simply remember one thing. The only possible permanent idea of good and evil for man is connected with the idea of evolution; not with mechanical evolution, of course, but with the idea of man's development through conscious efforts, the change of his being, the creation of unity in him, and the formation of a permanent I.

"A permanent idea of good and evil can be formed in man only in connection with a permanent aim and a permanent understanding. If a man understands that he is asleep and if he wishes to awake, then everything that helps him to awake will be good and everything that hinders him, everything that prolongs his sleep, will be evil. Exactly in the same way will he understand what is good and evil for other people. What helps them to awake is good, what hinders them is evil. But this is so only for those who want to awake, that is, for those who understand that they are asleep. Those who do not understand that they are asleep and those who can have no wish to awake, cannot have understanding of good and evil. And as the overwhelming majority of people do not realize and will never realize that they are asleep, neither good nor evil can actually exist for them.
"This contradicts generally accepted ideas. People are accustomed to think that good and evil must be the same for everyone, and above all that good and evil exist for everyone. In reality, however, good and evil exist only for a few, for those who have an aim and who pursue that aim. Then what hinders the pursuit of that aim is evil and what helps is good.

"Christianity forbids murder. Yet all that the whole of our progress comes to is progress in the technique of murder and progress in warfare. How can we call ourselves Christians?

"No one has a right to call himself a Christian who docs not carry out Christ's precepts. A man can say that he desires to be a Christian if he tries to carry out these precepts. If he does not think of them at all, or laughs at them, or substitutes for them some inventions of his own, or simply forgets about them, he has no right whatever to call himself a Christian.

"I took the example of war as it is the most striking example. But even without war the whole of life is exactly the same. People call themselves Christians but they do not realize that not only do they not want, but they are unable, to be Christians, because in order to be a Christian it is necessary not only to desire, but to be able, to be one.

Then a great deal was elucidated for me by the idea that each center was not only a motive force but also a "receiving apparatus," working as receiver for different and sometimes very distant influences. When I thought of what had been said about wars, revolutions, migrations of peoples, and so on; when I pictured how masses of humanity could move under the control of planetary influences, I began to understand our fundamental mistake in determining the actions of an individual. We regard the actions of an individual as originating in himself. We do not imagine that the "masses" may consist of automatons obeying external stimuli and may move, not under the influence of the will, consciousness, or inclination of individuals, but under the influence of external stimuli coming possibly from very far away. […]

"Let us take some event in the life of humanity. For instance, war. There is a war going on at the present moment. What does it signify? It signifies that several millions of sleeping people are trying to destroy several millions of other sleeping people. They would not do this, of course, if they were to wake up. Everything that takes place is owing to this sleep.

"How many times have I been asked here whether wars can be stopped? Certainly they can. For this it is only necessary that people should awaken. It seems a small thing. It is, however, the most difficult thing there can be because this sleep is induced and maintained by the whole of surrounding life, by all surrounding conditions.

In the first place it was clear to everyone who was able and who wanted to see it that the war was coming to an end and that it was coming to an end by itself through some deep inner weariness and from the realization, though dull and obscure yet firmly rooted, of the senselessness of all this horror. No one believed now in words of any kind. No attempts of any kind to galvanize the war were able to lead to anything. At the same time it was impossible to stop anything and all talk about the necessity of continuing the war or of the necessity of stopping the war merely showed the helplessness of the human mind which was even incapable of realizing its own helplessness.

 

[sankara]

Marc Aurèle said:
And some odd infos which can perhaps lead to other source for all this situation:
The physiology of Tutsi cranes is similar to Nefertiti’s one.
Some Tutsi claim to be Jews, descendants of King Salomon’s children with the Saba queen and send to Great Lake region to secure King Salomon gold mines located in DRC.
As per some very controversial recent writings, the Tutsi have actually planned and pushed the genocide to take place in Rwanda, in the same patterns as the Jews genocide in Europe, to make their country the Israel of Africa. And in my opinion, they have succeeded to an extend!

[/quote]
Hello Marc Aurèle. It's nice to hear of someone else new reading sott in Africa. :D
I have been an active member of the NGO "Survie" and so, most of my information relate from the datas this organisation has gather plus some reading like Braekman's books and others. I also have first hand account of what happened but I'll comme back to it later on.

From what I have known up to now, the Catholics in Rwanda (they had the grip on that society) invented the mythology used by the Tutsie in order to play the "divide and rule game". So a colonial/religious elite was born out of this fallacies. The Roman Catholic Church has been heavily involved in the slaughter. Many priests were involved and many western churches hid many of them to the extent that this has became public and trials were set.

From what I know, their are no language differences between the Hutus and the Tutsies, so it does seem that somehow a strong 'ideology' distinguish between these groups. This ideology was in the interest, not of the Tutsies per se, but of the elite and their western masters.

"Radio Mille Collines" which call on the massacres was finance by french interests. Mitterrand used to say « Dans ces pays-là, un génocide, ce n’est pas trop important »( "In such countries, genocide is not an important matter"). The French delivered communication system during the slaughter. As to the "operation Turquoise", the role of the French army was to protect the 'genocidors", this has been confirmed to me oraly by two french militaries, one of them being an intelligence officer. The soldier even went so far as to report that he and some friends fired at the guys they were suppose to escort, while their officers didn't see.
Of course little Rwanda invaded Congo with another western interest backing them, happening to be the US (operating of course for the sake of predators corporates).The ex-Zaïre was a huge country, so how come could little Rwanda have performe to rule it. The troops were well equiped, with good weaponeries, new uniforms...

From what I know, the population had mixed in great extent and for most of the Rwandese "race" was not a problem, it was not existential. Again the elite (psychopatic) was more concerned by the ideological stuff, because it would jutified their power.

There is another aspect which must be taken into account if we are to understand what happened. Rwanda was at that time one of the most crowded place on earth. Christopher Simpson has demonstrated in his book, "The Splendid Blond Beast", analysing the Armenian and the Nazis experience, that a new power would get support because it will give new opportunity for the perpetrators of the slaughter who can take the wealth of the victims.

So it is crystal clear here that the western empire engineered this abomination. It is the continuity of the colonialisation process of accaparment of the african ressources. This is not to say that Africans are without reproach (there are psychopats in Africa selected to rule the area as it has been said already).

Marc Aurèle, could you give your sources for the information you refere to in the quote( especially the nefertity claim)? This is highly interesting. Anyway the church has spread the old testament mentality and thus have give the pattern for the process you describe, like it has been done with the white Africans in South africa.

"E", thanks a lot for the elements you have braught. Same with Jubazo.
respect

 

[Erna]

"E", thanks a lot for the elements you have braught.

You're welcome! I actually had a nightmare last night having to revisit Blood River yesterday looking for the bits I considered beneficial to this discussion - up from 4:00 onwards... at it again! The Congo just beggars belief! As I progress through State of Africa I will keep a record of all the pathological role players in Central Africa and the rest of Africa and post here. I’m sure a generous portion would have been allocated to Joseph Kabila! Tim Butcher's almost obsession with the Congo combined with his journalistic background made his book a treasure trove. It was my introduction to the Congo...

http://www.bloodriver.co.uk/

(the videos are a must visit)

 

[Marcus-Aurelius]

[Quote author=E]Marcus-Aurelius, I understand that the international media is sympathetic towards Rwanda.[/quote]
E, do you really think that shutting down the deaths of many Hutu Rwandans to be a mark of sympathy towards Rwanda? I don't think so; think the sympathy is going to the elite currently ruling Rwanda.
Have never done a comparison or discussion of Rwanda vs. DRC, what your post/quotes seem to imply (if that is not the case please clarify).
I actually “admire” the organizational skills of Paul Kagame in the way he has developed Rwanda but don’t think this is sufficient to forget what he did during FPR rebellion and while Rwandan Vice-President.

[Quote author=sankara] Marc Aurèle, could you give your sources for the information you refere to in the quote( especially the nefertity claim)? This is highly interesting.[/quote]
This was a personal observation. Just take a Nefertiti’s crane picture ( you can found some in this link _http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/nefertiti.htm) and compare it with any 100% Tutsi you can know, you’ll see the similarities. Try with Paul Kagame if you wish. The elongated crane, expanding a little bit in the sides in the back is the same.

I am still trying to retrieve the site where I came across the claim of Tutsi descending from Jews, will post it once retrieved. Close to 2 years have passed now since the last time I read this site so have some difficulty to remember it.

For the controversial writings, please read Pierre Péan’s Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs., Charles Onana’s Les Secret du genocide rwandais:enquêtes sur le système d’un president; Les Secret de la justice internationale: enquêtes truquées sur le génocide rwandais ; Silence sur un attentat and Ces tueurs Tutsi au cœur de la tragédie congolaise. Don’t know if these books can be found in English
You can also read about investigations done by the French judge Jean-Louis Brugière and also the Spanish judge Fernando Andreu Merelles.

Interviews of Charles Onana: _http://www.inshuti.org/onana2.htm; _http://www.laconscience.com/article.php?id_article=3171
An article by Luc Marchal, the former commander of the MINUAR: _http://www.laconscience.com/article.php?id_article=7393

 

[Erna]

[quote author=Marcus-Aurelius]
E, do you really think that shutting down the deaths of many Hutu Rwandans to be a mark of sympathy towards Rwanda?
[/quote]

Don't you? I've never heard anyone describe the Rwanda genocide as a Hutu genocide, and the movies about it garner strong sympathy for the Tutsis, both Hotel Rwanda and Shooting Dogs. You were the one who brought up the strong parallels to Israel. I don't think all the pro-Rwandan propaganda and one sided media coverage / journalism is accidental.

Not quite sure what you are getting at here:

[quote author=Marcus-Aurelius]
I don't think so; think the sympathy is going to the elite currently ruling Rwanda.
[/quote]

after this post:

[quote author=Marcus-Aurelius]
We are aware of the number of Tutsi killed through the their propangada and lobbying (they have emulated Jews quite well again in this aspect), but they will of course never say to us the number of Hutu they have themselves killed. I know, it does not excuse the Tutsi deaths, but it seems that the 1994 genocide as described by mainstream medias as being only a Tutsi one, ignoring totally hutu deaths, is not fair. It took place both in tutsi and hutu sides, causing deaths in both tribes as all the others threats between these two tribes. And some researches ( french, spanish, african) even point Tutsi elites as creators and planners of the very events of 1994. And considering the the USA support to them at this time, one can ask if the arguing you describe above was not deliberate to set up the exact event we see today. And of course, when you say this, you are a negationist (again a similarity with Jews).

Actually, Tutsi have a quite strong inclination to power, claiming to be of another make-up than the other tribes in the region (were have I heard of this before? ahaah, Jews!), more intelligent than them, thus superior and deserving power positions on them. And suspect this particular drive to power to be the very root cause of what is taking place in the region.
As said to me by one of my closest friends originating from the neighboring region to Rwanda, during the 2nd Congo war begun 2001, when they arrived in a village, the first thing they do is to gather all traditional chief and "notables" of the village with their large families and kill them all. Of course it is just hearsay for majority of people, but seems like they have an agenda for this region and are setting up territory or society were THEY will be Rulers and no one else? Future will say!
[/quote]



[quote author=Marcus-Aurelius]
Have never done a comparison or discussion of Rwanda vs. DRC, what your post/quotes seem to imply (if that is not the case please clarify).
[/quote]

I was merely illustrating the erroneous international perception of the regional conflict, compared to the reality. I wasn't implying anything. You've made quite an about turn in this last post of yours, unless it's just my perception.

[quote author=Marcus-Aurelius]
I actually “admire” the organizational skills of Paul Kagame in the way he has developed Rwanda
[/quote]

What is there to "admire"? Not sure if you used the quotation marks to signify something. With the information currently at our disposal, all indications are that he is a US puppet sowing discord in the region, and purposely maintaining the instability. They (Western powers) can't afford order to come to the region, because they will lose their stronghold on the minerals.

And that goes for Kabila as well.

 

[sankara]

Marc Aurèle,
Thank you for the books, Onana seems to be interesting and we definitely need to know more about what happened. While searching for more Tutsi pictures I found this
http://www.la-croix.com/article/index.jsp?docId=2356415&rubId=786
The infamous frankist albright is around, it smells bad...This might be a clue as to why why Kagame could "develop" his country...The empire of greed backs him, like I said already and this is why Rwanda could invade RDC and develop. It's not just about skill, but about money and the most powerful backers indeed. Albright is now at the apex of NATO...
As to the Tutsis physical traits, they do rather look like the Amharas in Ethiopia or the Fulanis in West Africa. The history of Africa remains mostly hidden so it is easy for the westerners to falsifie... I had never thaught of my girlfriend as nefertity
Bon courage aux gens de RDC.

E, I went on the link you sent but I had nothing but plain blank...to bad. Giving more datas about Africa is interesting and it may be a tribute to all who suffered while remaining just a snapshot for most westerners... Next week I'll add a pathological player to your list, Gnassimbé Eyadema called the toad by the people.

I had first read the text that jubazo had send in diagonal, but when I took time to read it I was just totaly amazed. Is this serious??
I'm surprise nobody on the sott forum have reacted to that incredible document...I still don't know how to deal with it at that moment