Pacifism Is A Lie And The Noble Savage Is Racist
Pernicious false beliefs about war and peace endanger societies, civilizations
These survey charts from Skeptic.com reveal something fundamentally broken about the way the western academy views human conflict. War is intrinsic to being human, but the most cultured people always pretend that humanity is intrinsically pacifist.
Military history has waned in the academy because any fair reading of archaeology, ethnography, and historical text completely debunks the pleasant notions of the human past that highly-educated people prefer to believe.
I learned this in 2020 when I asked a tenured professor of military history for a reading list on origins of war and primitive warfare. He gave me the list, but then confessed he no longer teaches the topic because female freshmen and department heads will lose their minds over any acknowledgement of binary human sex difference.
It is just easier to let them carry on with their feminized world-view than educate them about the real world.
Academic incentives are entirely inverted against an honest reading of the violent human past. While this is ostensibly aimed at eliminating bias, the ‘noble savage’ is in fact incredibly racist. It positions primitive peoples as inherently pacifistic when archaeology shows exactly the opposite, worldwide.
If Native Americans were perfectly peaceful, never ever fighting any wars before the evil white man showed up with his evil guns and his evil patriarchy and his evil capitalism, then the virtuous native is a political instruction for achieving perfect human harmony through the elimination of those supposed evils.
Contrarily, the fact that Native Americans were never peaceful or free of greed, while the tribes with matriarchal organization were equal in violence to the patriarchal ones, challenges any political program that proposes a progressive, peaceful utopian future.
Just as Marxist economics and social pseudoscience appeal to the hyper-rational academic, a false view of the violent past has become predominant among ‘the experts’ in the academy, regardless of the actual evidence.
The pacifistic view of Native American prehistory is simply untenable as a material matter. “Scalping has often been claimed to be of European origin. However, while Europeans may have encouraged and promoted the practice, the ethnographic and archaeological records indicate that it was present before European arrival”, Ashley Kendell writes.1
“There was no terminology to describe scalping in English, French, or Spanish, so when the Native American tradition was first encountered, new words had to be developed or old words were used ambiguously to refer to the practice.”
Kendall has studied 77 craniums of men and women killed in a massacre at Crow Creek, South Dakota in approximately 1375 AD that bear signs of perimortem scalping. This happened approximately 76 years before Christopher Columbus was born, so exactly zero white Europeans were involved.
Archaeologists have determined that the village was in the midst of replacing a dry moat with a new defensive earthwork when an overwhelming force attacked and destroyed the community, killing at least 486 people. Skeletal injuries include signs of torture, beheading, and dismemberment.
Nor is any distinction between soldier and civilian evident in the data. According to Kendall’s findings, the female skulls show a higher number and breadth of cuts consistent with scalping. The war party that overwhelmed the village was able to take their time killing the women after killing the male defenders.
In fact, there seems to have been a perverse incentive to slaughter and scalp the most helpless members of the community with the most care.
