> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paleolithic Eating Support List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gale
> Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 3:34 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Happy 4th of July, folks
> 
> Dammit!  Beaten again. lol
> 1995 Mississippi.
> They're a little slow down there I guess.
> gale
> 

Yeah, acknowledging that slavery is bad was obviously not a high priority.
:-) 

An interesting connection to our forum's main subject is that chattel
slavery (in which humans are treated as property) reached a mass scale with
the development of large-scale agriculture, particularly monoculture (such
as of wheat, maize, cotton, etc.). Large-scale monoculture, what Daniel
Quinn terms "totalitarian agriculture," also led to large-scale genocides. 

Ben Kiernan, a history professor at Yale University identified agrarianism
as one of the four main causes of genocide in his book, Blood and Soil: A
World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, and spoke
about this in a discussion of the causes of genocide:

“[T]he combination of ethnic hatred and violence with territorial expansion
is a very important one. And then [there are] another couple of ideological
influences that I think are important in at least detecting genocides before
they occur or while they are occurring, [and] also I think they have an
influence that exacerbates the genocidal mentality. Those two influences are
a cult of cultivation, the idea that the indigenous people or the urban
people or the pastoral people who are being subjected to genocide are not
using the land by cultivating it, and therefore have no right to retain it,
and can be killed or driven off their land with justification, in the sense
that the perpetrators will put the land to its proper use. And this [is] an
ideology of cultivation, or an agrarian ideology that I think is pretty
close to the center of perpetrator thinking in, not every case, but most
cases of genocide throughout history. And finally, the cult of antiquity, as
I call it, the idea of an ancient precedent for genocide, as the
Carthaginian case served for many European perpetrators in later millennia,
is important as well. There are other cultures and other empires around the
world that have their own record of antiquity, which they draw upon for
justifying the subjection of contemporary victims to genocide. But there
usually is a sense of an ancient precedent which serves as a model and a
justification. There is also a sense of lost glory of a pristine agrarian
society which used to exist, but has been either contaminated or undermined
by ethnic groups who are now targeted as the enemy. And the cult of
antiquity inspires the perpetrators to try to regain that lost past, that
ancient glory.”

So totalitarian agriculture is behind many of the horrors of civilization
and explains so much of why so many things seem to be going terribly wrong
(slavery, genocide, overpopulation, famine, drug abuse, crime, environmental
degradation, social decay, etc.)--beyond the obvious epidemic of chronic
diseases of civilization--in the midst of growing global wealth. This is
what happens when a species steps outside of the cycles and constraints of
nature and decides that it is no longer subject to the "Laws of Nature"
(and/or of "Nature's God," depending on your perspective). 

There are other factors, of course--such as tyranny and statist
economics--but they too are underpinned by totalitarian agriculture. Without
totalitarian agriculture, totalitarian states cannot exist. There has to be
a massive store of food to feed the armies, police forces and intelligence
services of a tyrannical state, as well as the criminal gangs and syndicates
that infect modern societies, so they can spend their time enforcing tyranny
or robbing people instead of hunting and gathering their food. Totalitarian
agriculture, by its very nature, leads to tyranny and professional crime and
these evils will exist as long as totalitarian agriculture exists.