While nobody but the unfortunate Professor Diamond could possibly
explain how he achieved such a monumental fiction in the pages of the
New Yorker Magazine, one might surmise that he was driven to tailor the
facts to a conclusion that he had worked out in advance, namely that
under duress “modern state systems” devolve into bloody killing sprees
such as the kind that Samuel Wemp supposedly took part in.
Even when modern state societies wage war, they are not nearly as
bloodthirsty as indigenous peoples such as the ones that feuded in Papua
New Guinea. Diamond states “the actual percentage of the population that
died violently was on the average higher in traditional pre-state
societies than it was even in Poland during the Second World War or
Cambodia under Pol Pot.”
So brutal and inhumane were the Papuan tribesmen to each other that when
the European colonizers arrived, they submitted to their own
“pacification” happily. Finally, the blood feuds would be eliminated by
the more civilized representatives of modern state societies. Despite
Diamond’s carefully crafted image of himself as an enlightened
“multiculturalist”, this analysis is not that different from the ones
put forward during the Victorian era. The bloody natives had to be
rescued from themselves.
The problem with Diamond’s case is that it rests on bogus history. He
deploys Daniel Wemp as an expert witness in describing a savage tribal
war that went on for years, when in fact the only fighting that took
place in recent years was a rather tame affair described by Mako J.
Kuwimb, one of Rhonda Shearer’s PNG consultants and a model of restraint
in his debunking of Diamond’s version.
The “war” in question did not take three years and cost 29 lives, as
Diamond asserts. It was instead a fight between two youths over a couple
of dollars that went missing during a card game that got out of hand
after one had his jaw broken. Fighting lasted for three months and only
four men died. Samuel Wemp, who Diamond described as a warlord seeking
revenge for his tribe, was not involved in this affair at all.
Apparently, Diamond wove together some actual incidents and others that
were cooked up, all the while exaggerating the severity of the conflict
turning the PNG highlands into something on a par with contemporary
Congo. Meanwhile, Samuel Wemp and the other participants are described
as having almost as much fun killing each other as if it were a sport.
You can read Mako J. Kuwimb’s entire rebuttal of Jared Diamond on the
Savage Minds blog, but this one brief excerpt demonstrates that the
indigenous person is every bit as civilized as the famous UCLA
professor, if not more so:
"The comparison between international European war and tribal fights is
too farfetched. Killing of enemies are never paraded; some old men who
speared their enemies told me of nightmares. Killing is not fun at all
as the article seems to suggest."
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/jared-diamond-the-new-yorker-magazine-and-blood-feuds-in-png-part-2/
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