Alas for Europe

...and any attempt at saving that society is met with bigotry, hatred and Dhmmitude disguised as calls for multi-culturalism, moral and religous relativism, and all-out efforts to silence by denigration, demeanization and demonization, followed by the final destruction of that culture. Pretty much what we're fighting in the US now.

The distinction between education and indoctrination:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17621

How would Americans react to Terror?:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20050426.shtml

American Border Secrets (Or: where the ALCU stands):
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17842

Thanks for posting your daily blather at so many JW and DW comments pages, Gary. We all forgot how to spell "frontpagemag.com" and "townhall.com" We could NEVER find our way there without your faithful beacon of hope and "Truth Never to be Silenced."

Didn't you get the word that it's time to send out another round of those "OUTRAGE!! Hillary Snubbs Gold Star Mothers" lies?

Gary, get back to the french fry machine, here comes your boss!

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Now for the adults here, go read the review at the link. The book in question is by Jared Diamond, a great author. I just read his "Guns, Germs, and Steel" book a couple of months ago, and read his "Third Chimpanzee" book when it first came out. I want to read "Collapse" but will probably wait 'til it comes out in paper back.

This is a quote from the article:

...It did get colder in Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds. But it didn't get so cold that the island became uninhabitable. The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the Norse had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food supply, iron tools, and ready access to Europe. The problem was that the Norse simply couldn't adapt to the country's changing environmental conditions. Diamond writes, for instance, of the fact that nobody can find fish remains in Norse archeological sites. One scientist sifted through tons of debris from the Vatnahverfi farm and found only three fish bones; another researcher analyzed thirty-five thousand bones from the garbage of another Norse farm and found two fish bones. How can this be? Greenland is a fisherman's dream: Diamond describes running into a Danish tourist in Greenland who had just caught two Arctic char in a shallow pool with her bare hands. "Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland . . . starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding," he writes. "Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows?"

It seems unlikely. There are no fish bones in Norse archeological remains, Diamond concludes, for the simple reason that the Norse didn't eat fish. For one reason or another, they had a cultural taboo against it.

Given the difficulty that the Norse had in putting food on the table, this was insane. Eating fish would have substantially reduced the ecological demands of the Norse settlements. The Norse would have needed fewer livestock and less pastureland. Fishing is not nearly as labor-intensive as raising cattle or hunting caribou, so eating fish would have freed time and energy for other activities. It would have diversified their diet.

Why did the Norse choose not to eat fish? Because they weren't thinking about their biological survival. They were thinking about their cultural survival. Food taboos are one of the idiosyncrasies that define a community. Not eating fish served the same function as building lavish churches, and doggedly replicating the untenable agricultural practices of their land of origin. It was part of what it meant to be Norse, and if you are going to establish a community in a harsh and forbidding environment all those little idiosyncrasies which define and cement a culture are of paramount importance. "The Norse were undone by the same social glue that had enabled them to master Greenland's difficulties," Diamond writes. "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity."

Sound familiar? Like a certain bunch of people that invented an ultra-harsh system of culture and "religion" that helped them to survive in an inhospitable desert? The same system that now threatens to destroy them (or would at least if they didn't have the good fortune of sitting on trillions of dollars in oil reserves)?

...

When archeologists looked through the ruins of the Western Settlement, they found plenty of the big wooden objects that were so valuable in Greenland--crucifixes, bowls, furniture, doors, roof timbers--which meant that the end came too quickly for anyone to do any scavenging. And, when the archeologists looked at the animal bones left in the debris, they found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in the barn, meaning that the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs covered with knife marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. But not fish bones, of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost sight of what they stood for.

Like the starving masses of Indonesia demanding more, bigger, newer mosques; and to hell with the condom factory, water treatment plant, and tropical forests.

Seeing as the 'blathe' as you choose to call it, is often analyzed and posted here by Mr. Spencer, your response to it doesn't say much- other than to prove my point. Thank you.

No fries, scumbag. Flowers. With your fertilizer they really ought to bloom nicely.

'blather' with an 'r'.

http://www.osusentinel.com/theopenend-old-archive/2004_10_24_archive.html

Jared Diamond's "Collapse" is a curious book, one that ignores the influence of ideology just as his previous book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel," was careful to attribute the success of Western European civilization not to such formative influences as Hellenism and Judeo-Christianity, distinguishing elements that permitted the development of free and skeptical inquiry, and of modern science and modern economies. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel" he was determined to avoid any possiblity that one might inquire into differences among different groups of humans, and wanted to focus on such matters as the 14 animals capable of domestication and the latitudinal breadth of the Euro-Asian landmass. Indeed, he explicitly announces that his intent was to show that no other kind of explanation was permissible, or even, it seemed, conceivable. And because Diamond goes birdwatching every year in New Guinea, and finds the New Guineans to be wonderful people, he draws much of his evidence, his anecdotal evidence, from New Guinea. The book nonetheless received exaggerated praise.

This second book is also worthy in its intent (if one thinks a writer should necessarily set out with an intent). And here he seems to agree that what people believe, or do not believe, and how they react to situations, can matter. He see that Western dogmatism of one kind, and one kind, only, may lead to "collapse."

The kind that Jared Diamond has in mind is the dogmatism of the free market, the belief that somehow governments should not intervene (though of course they intervene all the time, every tiime a new provision is added, or an old one amended, in the Tax Code) for example, to end in a crash program, utilizing every possible bit of pressure and power that the government possesses, to limit the use of fossil fuels in this country and all over the world. And he is correct.

But he says nothing about the belief-system in much of the Western world that may lead to another kind of collapse, not a physical one, but one that would end Western civilization. And that is the dogma that all peoples, collectively and individually, are of equal worth, and that no judgments can be made. And this peculiar belief, for which there is not the slightest evidence, comes out as something often called, in praise or blame, "multiculturalism" or "relativism." It is madness.

And that brings us to the third dogma, far more dangerous than the two that have been described above, yet which is related to the two described above. And that dogma is Islam, which is an affront to tolerance, and peace, and which limits artistic expression, free inquiry, the rights of women and all non-Muslims.

Yet the free-market ideology that has so far prevented any systematic effort to cease the transfer of enormous wealth to OPEC oil states (some $10 trillion since 1973), 10 of the 11 OPEC members being Arab or Muslim-dominated states), and that also has so far largely prevented the kind of effort that may be needed to protect the physical environment that is being degraded before our eyes, in the name of Growth (for economic activity appears to be the only (hollow) Good by which most people can set store), prolongs and even increaases the power of Islam and of Muslim states and peoples.

And the other dogma, that of multiculturalism (which usually means that the Western, white, European and American peoples are supposed to be forever embarrassed, forever apologizing for, forever in the dock about, not only whatever evils were caused by European imperialism (while all the considerable good of colonialisim is ignored), but are to ignore completely the vast achievements of their own civilizations, and to forget who they are, and what Europe, and America, have managed to create.

And those two dogmas -- the Free Market as the Sole Answer to fossil fuel use (and hence to Muslim wealth which funds, in turn, mosques, madrasas, an army of Western hirelings, etc.), and the belief that All Cultures and Peoples and People are Equal, both get in the way of sensibly dealing with the third, and most dangerous, dogma -- that of Islam.

Diamond of course stays well away from that.

The comment, from Gladwell's review of Diamond, makes sense. Europe today is experiencing a slow death. it is lying in bed, waiting for the end, a slow death, and there is a box of chocolates to be consumed, and on the old phonograph player a dying swan who manages to sing (qui chante son trepas).

And meanwhile the forces of black reaction, bearing an ideology that has been a consistent failure, political, economic, intellectual, and social, and that has simply been a blueprint for conquest and subjugation, and that insured a kind of false success based on the accumulated capital (including intellectual capital) of those non-Muslims it conquered and subjugated, gather.

Even though I agree with the author's conclusion about the Viking's failure to adapt to their environment, I am fear that Diamond's description of the crazy steps they took to maintain their cultural integrity might be interpreted as a blanket criticism of those who promote more reasonable measures to maintain America's Judeo-Christian identity.

The problem is that European society is on the verge of collapse precisely for the opposite reason the Viking settlement died out: Whereas the Vikings were too proud to "compromise" their culture and imitate the Eskimos, the modern-day Euroweenies are doomed by their TOTAL LACK of cultural self-esteem!

In the final analysis, I agree with Hugh, that liberarians are extremely short-sighted in their faith that the free market will solve the energy crisis (without compromising national security). Nonetheless, these same culturally stupid libertarians do bring up a very legitimate point:

How do we find alternatives to Muslim petroleum that will not undermine our trade deficit with China?

Unlike the libertarians, I believe we must rise to the challenge.

LOL... oh god.... you work in FLOWERS? LOL... ithn't that thweet! Do they sell gerbils there too? LOL.

Let's see, AND your wife works hundreds of miles away? AND you don't have any kids.... hmmmm. SOMEBODY may be suffering from "Finklestein Flu".

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Excellent analysis, Hugh. No, Diamond doesn't talk much about Islam. But he did point out in "Third Chimpanzee" the many genocides that have occured in the modern era, and didn't leave out the Egypt-Yemen War of the '50s, the Iran-Iraq War of the '80s, and the Bangledeshi Massacre of the '70s; and he didn't label the "Israeli takeover of palestine" as a genocide. So while he doesn't single out Muslims for criticism, at least he doesn't omit everything that doesn't suit their fancy, which is waaaay more than we can say about the core leaders of a certain administration.

...but are to ignore completely the vast achievements of their own civilizations, and to forget who they are, and what Europe, and America, have managed to create.

...Not too mention the many evils caused by the colonialization and Islamic Imperialism. See Bangladesh, 1971; Malaysia, now; Nigeria, now; Sudan, now; Israel, now; Lebanon, now; north Africa, 1500-2000 (and Algeria, now); Iran, now; Paksitan, now; Indonesia, now; the Philippines, now, etc. Really, varying degrees of Islamic Imperialism can be seen throughout the history of Islam, and in every place it has gained a toehold. Sometimes those that are made to suffer are of another religion, sometimes of another sect, sometimes of another gender; but there is ALWAYS an "other" that needs to be subjugated.

Again, Hugh, Diamond didn't claim to write a book about Islam. It seems to me that the main thrust of his book may be one on which he has touched briefly before, to wit: a warning about environmental degradation, in which the whole world is engaging hell for leather.

The Homeric Thersites comes again to defend the downtrodden. Great work as usual, KJ, and thanks too for the comments on the book you haven't read.

What gets me is that the apologists for Islamic culture keep refering to its great inventions such as the guitar, algebra, and the five or six other usual suspects. It seems to me that 99% of the inventions that humanity uses(intellectual inventions such as psychology - practical such as airplanes) has been invented by the West. The only invention that the Islamic Culture has created since the Middle Ages has been the suicide bomber.

Concerning "Collapse," Hugh is correct that the author places too much emphasis on geography and happenstance as to reasons why cultures die out. First of all, Diamond focuses on "fringe" cultures that really have no impact on the development of humanity. (Even though the Inuit survived Greenland, what received wisdom has the world benifited from their culture? Plus, the fact that the Vikings tried to expand and grow gives them gold stars in my book.) Sure, Easter Islanders suffered from their own hands, but if their forebears had writing, or a more sophisticated outlook to the natural world, that knowledge may have been passed down to them and they may have survived. Humanity learns from its mistakes.

The reason Islam hasn't grown is because all the received wisdom of universe is in the Koran. It's really a culture that has been dying since the Middle Ages. Let's just hope the rest of the world doesn't get dragged down with it.

Is there a reason you are working so hard to prove me right, kj? I'm beginning to think you are deliberately putting on an act to show the Left how bad they look when they argue against people like Mr. Spencer.

I'll continue to support him. You may continue to decry all efforts to do anything about what your NEA is teaching in our schools.

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/zeiger/031130

I will never understand why you don't want people to see such information.
You are Clueless, kj.

Sonofwalker~ I never got into poetry until I read the Illiad and the Oddessy. But that particular character did not stick in my mind. Thanks, I shall be looking him up!

Hugh:

Jared Diamond made a good argument in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” about the importance of geography in determining how quickly civilization advanced. One thing I noted when reading his book is how he ignored (what to me was obvious) that any other Eurasian civilization such as China, India, Middle Eastern or South-East Asian should have been able to expand in the same manner as Europeans did. After all, his theory concluded that the broad Eurasian supercontinent had access to the same domesticated animals and crops, exposure to the same diseases (and resistence to them) and trade routes that allowed technology to filter back and forth. In a perverse way, western success could be attributed to the Islamic world – wasn’t the driving force behind European exploration and expansion, beginning in the late 15th century, the desire and necessity of breaking the Arab stranglehold on the spice trade?

Re: “Yet the free-market ideology that has so far prevented any systematic effort to cease the transfer of enormous wealth to OPEC oil states (some $10 trillion since 1973), 10 of the 11 OPEC members being Arab or Muslim-dominated states), and that also has so far largely prevented the kind of effort that may be needed to protect the physical environment that is being degraded before our eyes, in the name of Growth (for economic activity appears to be the only (hollow) Good by which most people can set store), prolongs and even increaases the power of Islam and of Muslim states and peoples. “

The free market is completely amoral in it’s functioning – this is just my observation and not a pejorative statement. It should be up to the people (through their elected governments) to provide a moral basis for this “free market”. From my somewhat limited reading of history, the western world (especially Europeans) have always willingly bought from, and sold to, their enemies. The most recent example is France trying to peddle arms to China even if it’s over the dead bodies of Taiwanese. The Middle East is awash with modern arms willingly supplied by western governments.

In Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond put forward an argument for environmental determinism as being responsible for the different trajectories of different peoples. He did not pay much attention to the cultural differences that have risen up since the beginning of literate, farming, trading societies.

JohnB: Diamond does refer to why one particular civilization, the Chinese, did not colonize the world. If you go towards the back of the book, he discussed who the Chinese had an internal power struggle which resulted in their completely banning ocean going travel.

In Collapse, from what I understand, he focuses on very contained societies. I do not think you can make comparisons between societies like that of Easter Island or Greenland with societies that are based on continent wide swathes of land.

The bottom line is that Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel does away with the racist arguments for the lack of success of in places like Africa. However, it is obvious that cultural differences do still play a role in how well a society does - and I don't have to tell Jihadwatchers that!

What an absolutely fascinating time in history.

Western Civilization seems to be facing a "perfect storm" made of three colliding weather systems -- internal cultural decay rooted in aggressive secularism (and a certain laziness born of prosperity); a resurgent and aggressive Islam; and a rising China poised at the edge of its century.

We're not on the ropes just yet, but in twenty or thirty years, it seems we might be in very serious trouble -- the kind the West hasn't seen since a few good Spartans made a stand at Thermopylae.

Counterjihadi:

'What an absolutely fascinating time in history.'

Hmm - sounds very like a Chinese curse?!

Counterjihadi:

'What an absolutely fascinating time in history.'

Hmm - sounds very like a Chinese curse?!

Sorry for the double post - there's a kind of glitch that makes it unclear whether the post has worked or not. We live in interesting times.

Malcolm Gladwell is an OK guy I exchanged a few e-mails with him 3 years ago. I kept bugging him to put up on his site a New Yorker article he wrote
about a Wall Street trader



http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_04_29_a_blowingup.htm

http://www.gladwell.com/archive.html

"Collapse" is good book. Read it and agree with it about 70%. Jared Diamond veers into politically correct territory sometimes. But still a most worthy book. I also read "Guns germs and Steel" His theories are godless socio-biology oriented but I still like what he has to say

Mentat:

The issue of Chinese exploration is very interesting. I forget the historical details but prior to the banning of external contacts that you refer to, the Chinese under admiral Zheng He (aka Chen Ho) made some incredible voyages in Asia and on to the Red Sea and likely Africa. The scale of the expeditions was truly immense.

"The Europeans were not the only group to pursue exploration. In 1405 the Chinese began a series of voyages into the Indian Ocean directed by Cheng Ho, a powerful court eunuch of the Ming Dynasty. The motives for exploration were surprisingly similar to the Europeans: a desire to recover trade (profit) in the form of tribute from kingdoms in Southeast Asia; the reinforcement of the claim to universal authority (similar to the spread of Christianity as the universal religion) , and a thirst for knowledge. These expeditions involved tens of thousands of men and more than a hundred large junks (a style of ship) each. They visited the Maldive Islands, Calicut, Hormuz, and along the East African coast. They fought off pirate fleets near Sumatra, installed a new ruler in Calicut and defeated the king of Ceylon. They returned with many exotic items, including a giraffe from Africa that quickly became the emblem of the Ming Dynasty. The last expedition in 1431 sent the adventurer Hung Po with a party of Muslim merchants to Mecca who return with many more precious cargo for the Emperor. Half a century later, Portuguese ships approached the same region from the south. By then the Ming program of expansion had faded and the Europeans would wait to meet the first Chinese ships in Malacca and Canton.

http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/eurvoya/asia.html

http://scalemodel.net/Chineseship.aspx

Mentat:

I've spent quite a bit of time backpacking around Central and South America (many years ago) and was always impressed by what the Incas and Mayas had constructed given the obstacles they faced (e.g. lack of good draft animals, terrain, etc.) The Maya were master mathematicians and Inca engineering was amazing. It really is a thrill to see the intact foundations of Cuzco after hundreds of years of earthquakes. And to think one of their main domesticated food animals was the guinea pig.

Cheers.

As for Jared Diamond's book, he's right to point out that material conditions are important; yet they're still only half the story.

In the snippets about Norse Greenland, I'm impressed by what he left out. I understand from other sources that the archaeology of Norse Greenland points to seal and walrus bones at other levels of excavation; which points not to a dogmatic preservation of a beef-eating culture, but an acceptance of foods probably eaten for a long time by peoples accustomed to living near the northern waters.

As for the absence of fishbones at the latest levels, I am shocked. Most Norwegians I've met have been big-time ichthyophages.

Hence, my guess is that the Greenland Norse twilight as described by Diamond represents a common companion of traditional, pre-industrial societies in the northern hemisphere: depletion of resources and famine due to forces beyond human control--i.e., the fish were swimming further down in the Atlantic or beyond Baffin Island; a harsh winter froze the sea to a depth that made fishing impossible, whatever. No, the eating of cows down to the toes, newborn calves, and dogs suggests that there weren't any fish or the sea mammals that feed on them to be had.

Diamond's thesis of a purely material and ecological basis for civilization collapses on precisely the issues raised in this blog: the intellectual and spiritual forces that drive people. Before the rise of Islam in the 7th century, the Mediterranean was a highway binding together a culture rather than a boundary between two competing ones. Had Muhammad been a successful Christian missionary to the Arabs rather than a prophet wannabe, he would have represented the farther expansion of a common Mideastern-Western civilization that might have headed farther east and south rather than the beginning of a long-standing civilizational war that established its fronts to the north and west of Arabia. Before the Cold War, the lands east of the Elbe participated fully in the economic and technological development of the rest of Europe and had their important technical and economic centers prior to the man-made disaster of Marxism-Leninism. If Taiwan ultimately emerges as a nation with an identity quite separate from southeastern coastal China, we can also blame ultimately a stupid Japanese mimicry of Western imperialism and racial mythology in the late 19th century and Mainland Chinese Marxist-Leninist dogma in the 20th--plus the attraction of Western democracy for certain Sinitic intellectuals--rather than a strait that for three hundred years was a highway. Indeed, the triumph of Marxism-Leninism in the 20th century came not from objective factors, but from the determined political wills of people like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

Indeed, without Spain's desire to make Catholics of the heathen or Engflish Puritanism's search for a haven, the wheat-beef culture of Eurasia would have stopped at the Atlantic. Ideas do matter. The fact that a purely materialistic ideology failed to deliver on the promises it suggested to 19th century thinkers is a keen embarrassment to people like Diamond. He can paint the broad-brush picture, but the devil's still in the intellectual and spiritual details.

Also, KJ, the Indonesian people are right to say to hell with the condom factory. Look what Europe's embrace of that, abortion, sexual perversion, and the rest did for it.

Kepha
Fine post. Thanks.

Johnb:

I went to quote Diamond to you about the Chinese but I must have given away my last copy of Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond never denies that the Chinese were capable of making sea journeys nor that they had been making them. What he says is that after this power struggle, they ceased to make them which left the field wide open for the West.

As far as the Inca and Maya, Diamond does not denigrate their achievements but seeks to explain why a few thousand Europeans could wreak such havoc amongst them.

In any case, what a strange world we live in. The scientific achievements of the last 50 years are absolutely mindboggling; yet we have all these people who want to take us back to the seventh century but, at the same time, feel quite comfortable using 21st century technology and weaponry to do so. It truly is a mad, mad world.

Ciao!

I haven't read Jareds new book, but it does seem to me a stretch that Vikings didn't eat fish. They certainly eat them now, and evidence of fish-eating in 9th century Nordic lands is plentiful.

As for Chinese history in Guns,Germs,and Steel, Jared made the point that Europe was divided compared to China, and no one person could have limited the impulse to exploration even if they had wanted. In my opinion this is an ideal argument against centralization.
I think it is also significant that the Chinese expeditions were mainly an exercise in prestige, and not really a profit generating activity ( how could any large government project be ). In Confucian society, businessmen had the lowest theoretical rank, and probably the least influence at court. The emporor certainly liked taking their money in taxes and fees for entry to the ruling classes, but the emporer paid more attention to what the military and peasant classes were saying.
In the West, it was the traders who pushed for a route around the Muslim world, and ended exploring the world. The love of money is not the root of all evil: more evil is commited in the name of the hate of money.

The no fish theory is one put forward by Dr. Thomas McGovern from City University of New York. I have never agreed with that theory that the Greenland settlement died after 500 relatively prosperous years because of an injunction against eating fish and seafood. There was no such injunction in any other Viking/Norse culture. As a Christian country, one so much part of Christendom that they supplied successive popes with hunting falcons and contributed to the crusades, the eating of fish would have been de rigeur on Fridays and other fast days. The excavation of the farm where the butchered calves and hounds were found uncovered no human remains, neither in nor near the farmhouse.

By coincidence I have been looking up Viking stuff this week for the sprogs school project. My husband is from a part of Northern England where his Norse descent is still clear and this is a lifelong interest of his. This link http://www.ualberta.ca/~publicas/folio/38/16/03.html is research from 2001 by the University of Alberta and the Danish Antiquity Society which challenges that theory and postulates other solutions.

Julian Richard's work Blood of the Vikings researched (amongst other topics) the distribution of Norse DNA (a particular Y chromosome signature) around the British Isles. I have long thought that similar work amongst the Innuit, were that acceptable to them, would be very interesting.

Granny Weatherwax.... good post thanks. I didn't know there was Viking blood in Scotland/North England until I read Jared Diamond's book.

Johnb:
"The free market is completely amoral in it’s functioning – this is just my observation and not a pejorative statement."

The survival of a true free market depends on freedom and morality.

Please compare with Communism: its presercation requires opression and wickedness.

The defense of the free market is totally moral.

Sonofwalker:

I haven't read the book, but I am very familiar with the author. YOU can tell us about Homer, I'LL tell you about Stephan King, Jared Diamond, and Henry Rollins. Okay?

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Gary: Get back to the flower thop, thweetheart, and thell your panthies and petuniath.... LOL…. No wonder you didn’t serve you country in uniform.

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...i.e., the fish were swimming further down in the Atlantic or beyond Baffin Island; a harsh winter froze the sea to a depth that made fishing impossible, whatever.

So what were the native Inuit (Eskimos, Skraelings, whatever) eating? I don't like your "theory" because if they had boats that went from Iceland to Greenland, they should have been able to get beyond the ice and fish.

No, the eating of cows down to the toes, newborn calves, and dogs suggests that there weren't any fish or the sea mammals that feed on them to be had.

OR they didn't think that fish were food suited for human consumption. Much like Roman and even later European nobility suffered from severe malnutrition because they rarely ate healthy food (vegetables, bread, fiber, etc.) preferring alcohol, candy, cake, extra-salty meat, and other junk. They thought that vegetables, which come from the ground, were dirty food suited only for the low-class peasantry and slaves.

[BTW... to give you an example of how tastes in food change, consider the fact that in colonial Boston, they actually made a LAW that said you couldn't feed lobster to your slaves more than three times a week. Because some people were feeding their slaves nothing but (gasp!) Lobster! At the time, doing so was considered so cruel that it was outlawed. People thought that lobsters were just big sea cockroaches (which they are, in fact) and would often catch them and throw them to the fields to die and be plowed under for fertilizer.]

Furthermore, the gentry of the Confederate South were FAAAR more educated and knowledgeable than the 15 c. Norsemen of Greenland, and many of them died of malnutrition rather than eating collard greens, etc. This despite many cases of slaves and former slaves BEGGING them to eat. They didn't think it was food suited for human consumption and would not eat it, even when there was nothing else to eat. For the same reasons you and I wouldn't eat grass, leaves, dirt, or dung: we THINK it's not food. (In this case, we are right.)

Just ask yourself, would Muslims eat pigs if that was all they had to eat? Would we eat our own children if that was all we had to eat? Sure, you and I would eat fish, seaweed, and oysters (shudder!)… but the Norse of Greenland may have not been so rational. I’m an animal-loving vegetarian and haven’t eaten fish or meat in 15 years but if it came down to my survival, I would eat worms, roaches, fish, clams, and whatever lovable, warm, fuzzy thing I could find.

I think it should be obvious that Diamond's main point is that people often THINK false things that can prove to be ruinous.

Like the Arabs attacking Israel in 1947, 1956, 1967, and 1973, each time thinking "We CAN'T lose! God is on OUR side!"

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Kepha:

So the "embrace" of condoms, sexual perversion, and abortion is going to lead to the ruin of Europe? Whatever. Way to change the subject and plug your cult.

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DennisW:

Please don't encourage Kepha’s cheap craptalk.

You didn't know that Vikings inhabited Scotland and England? Remember the Norman Invasion? Norman... Nor-man.... Nor-men.... North-men... Norse Men. They were all over Britany and even conquered England! Of course their genes spread (a nice way to put it) to Scotland, but the Vikings are well known to have settled the Shetlands, the Faroes, and even Ireland. They didn't even stop at Iceland and Greenland... they made it all the way to Labrador/Newfoundland.

Archeologists have found their pre-Columbian remains in Canada. I've never heard the no-fish theory before until this thing about Diamond came up. Maybe it was only practiced in Greenland... or eventually maybe they will find a trashmidden that is full of fish bones. At that time, Diamond will have to revise (or shelve) his theory, but until then, I think the theory is sound.

Superstitions can and certainly do occur in isolated areas. Thanks to all this talk about Diamond, I may have to get the book before it's out in cheap paperback form. For those of you that enjoyed this discussion, I hope you'll read "Collapse" and the previous "Third Chimpanzee" and "Germs, Guns, and Steel." (And should you get your fill of Jared Diamond, check out Desmond Morris.)

It's not all the PC crap you may expect from an academic. One thing I got out of "Germs" is the fact that the black people of South Africa that were displaced by the Boers were themselves Johnies-come-lately Bantus that did the same thing to the NATIVE Capoids ("Bushmen") a few centuries prior. Like the native Aborigines of Australia, the few remaining Bushmen have now been relegated to the environmentally-marginal hinterlands of Angola, Namibia, and South Africa.

Likewise it's important to remember that the poor, oppressed Scots of Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" were actually the descendants of recently-immigrated Irishmen and Vikings who did the same thing to the native Picts that Edward Longshanks did to the Scots... only the Picts were actually wiped out.

I.e., almost no one is without blame. There are only a few places where the "indigenous" people are still around, much less in charge.

An original part of the thread was how societies commit suicide (culturcide?). It reminds me of the oft-repeated comment that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" in relation to the issue of using state power to protect those who attack the state.

It is not encouraging that many other societies really have let themselves be liquidated, rather than violate some minor rules.

What distinguishes the societies which let themselves be liquidated from those which did not? As far as I can tell, it is simple: conviction that their culture is worth fighting for against intrusion by other cultures. And real mass support seems to require some sort of religous fervor (Christian, Communist, or whatever). Is there a way out of this dilemma?

While I have not read this book, I think it a bit odd that it apparently (i.e. from the posts) did not give much credit to the change in operational temperatures associated with the cooling of the 14th – 16th centuries in the demise of the Norse colony. Or perhaps it was Gladwell’s review of the book, which seemed to downplay The Little Ice Age. As a side note, many “scientists” advocating the global warming thesis like to ignore the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age, a climatic cycle that does not fit well into their global warming thesis. Not sure where Gladwell sits in that dialog – but that is another subject.

The Norse discovered Greenland near the beginning of a warm climatic (AD 900-1300) era (warmer than at present). This likely brought many warm-water species near shore from an enhanced gulf current. As cooling of the Little Ice Age set in, this warm current moved farther south and the winter ice-buildup likely kept their boats in port, preventing both fishing and an exodus out when the final year came. It may be a moot question whether they starved to death or froze to death. However, the cooling likely took place over decades with obvious consequences in agriculture and fishing; probably most of them got out, before the end came.

In “Climate: Present, Past and Future”, Volume 2, H.H. Lamb notes that it became so warm in Northern Europe and England during the Medieval warm period (AD 1000-1300) that wineries flourished in the London countryside, and even the French feared English competition in the wine market. The subsequent cooling killed off wineries in Northern Europe, even till this day. It was this same Medieval warming that nourished the Norse adventure and the same cooling that wiped out the Greenland colony. That last wedding reminds me of those who went down on the Titanic singing Amazing Grace, or indeed anyone else invoking God’s grace when there is no choice but death.

I guess there are many views of history, just like the elephant and the blind men story.

But back to Robert’s lead point:

"The lesson of "Collapse" is that societies, as often as not, aren't murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death."

What strikes me in the first few chapters of Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia is that the leftist godless leaders of Europe, particularly France, Belgium, and Germany, pretty much signed off on a ton of agreements with Arabic Islam in the 1970s that not only sold out Israel, but also sold Europe down the Islamic river, apparently without much input from the European rank-and-file, who are now only beginning to realize the extent of this betrayal. This sell-out for oil by the leftist leaders is similar to the sell-out of their peoples to another leftist cause, the Kyoto Treaty, which will cost Europe billions, maybe trillions, for no useful purpose. Europe needs to have a revolution, again. The ruling class has gone berserk. The godless relativism that has been a centerpiece of European education and society for the last half century or more has, with the connivance of these leaders, set up Europe for Islamification and dhimmitude. Benedict XVI understands these trends and has warned against them. The question is, can his lone voice turn Europe around?