My
maternal grandfather was a Irish merchant seaman from 1917 till he
met my granny, fell in love, and changed his profession! They had a
marriage that was as beautiful as it could be and lived ''until death
do you part” with true love. I think I would have been embarrassed
to go a drive-in double-date with them when I was 20!
This
doesn't have much to do with anything, just a pair of future
lovebirds!
Grace, my grandmother, at age 17.
She looked the same at 47!
Arthur, my granddad, at age 21 aboard ship.
He taught me 3 ways to knife-fight at age 8.
He
had a rather large collection of 19th and early 20th
century African explorers which I read, plus a almost complete
collection of Robert Ruark's fiction. Ruark's fiction is like James
Mitchener's, historical fiction based on true accounts and
embellished with the exception of Ruark actually being present for
the Mau Mau wars.
The
earlier explorers brought out the incredible richness and natural
beauty of Africa plus the complex and, to my mind, the very
fatalistic outlook of the peoples. The very cheapness which human
life, indeed all life, was held was so alien that it makes one wonder
if this is something that is nurture or nature. When the European
colonists were booted out in the early 60's, all hell broke out
including such mass slaughter of wildlife for food (the white man
brought the means) there was no possible way that the people wouldn't
be totally de-sensitized. Miles and miles of boneyards, uncounted
people being involved in the butchering of hippos, elephants,
antelopes, etc. that had just been slaughtered in mass quantities.
I'll link the movie and also give the URL, however I will re-remind
you that the movie is far more than gore, it is a blight on one's
soul.
The
blight gets worse with the helicopter shots of mile after mile of
Arabs being forced to walk to their eventual death where enormous
pits were filling with corpses. THIS IS NOT A MOVIE, this is reality.
Cannibalism was shown and described such as slaves being bought for
food, sometimes several buyers for one slave where the various buyers
would mark the “cuts” they wanted with the slave taking this
treatment without a stir. Grisly. This was LIFE, not a special
effects movie. When not slaughtering Europeans or Arabs, they were
busy killing and eating each other. Millions disappearing down the
collective maw (Mau Mau?).
Africa
is mind-boggling huge. Just the big three, the US, China, and India
make up a population of what, 3 billion? Displayed this way really
gives one perspective. Population pressure does generate expansionist
pressure. Remember “liebensraum”? Nice war ya got thar...
Remember Japan? In this era of hydrogen weapons, even a mindless
piece of warlord dung can acquire such. ...plenty of folk in the
right places to provide lots of “help”. A grotesquely pitiful
collection of sovereign “nations” like Africa, ignorant beyond
belief, is very much like a petri dish with lots of different
colonies spreading, leaving the center dead with the effluvia of its'
life, encountering other colonies doing the same. ALWAYS, all the
colonies die. A non-sustainable situation will not be sustained.
Something will replace it. In the petri dish's place comes a scraping
out and the dishwasher. In the unbelievably fecund humans' place will
come what? War absolutely, but a standard world war won't fix it this
time. Plague? The Second Coming? The Coming of the 12th
Imam? (I give myself the giggles)
Many
moons ago, a fellow known as Paul Erlich wrote a book called “The
Population Bomb”. He did something incredibly stupid; he put dates
to his predictions. Who's to say an “enlightened” population
cannot be as high as Azimov's Trantor?
Or,
then again, maybe we'll be happy we have the H-bomb.
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