Recently I watched the harrowing 2023 survival thriller Society of the Snow, based on the book of the same name about the real-life 1972 plane crash in the Andes that left a rugby team and families and friends to fend for themselves in the unforgiving elements. Over the following two-and-a-half months after the crash, as search efforts were unsuccessful and then abandoned, the dwindling number of survivors (only 16 out of 45 passengers and crew were ultimately rescued) were forced to resort to cannibalizing the bodies of the dead in order to survive.
The movie (pictured above) captures, with an unflinching eye, the extreme reluctance of the starving survivors, who held out as long as they could out of a mix of revulsion, respect for the dead, and religious conviction.
It is not possible to watch Society of the Snow without asking yourself, How long could I hold out before I lowered myself to eat human flesh? Most of us Americans can’t go even several hours without craving a snack; very, very few of us know what real hunger feels like: the gnawing demand over the course of days and then weeks and then months – “the sensation that our own bodies were consuming themselves just to remain alive,” as one survivor put it:
The bodies of our friends and team-mates preserved outside in the snow and ice contained the vital, life-preserving proteins that would keep us alive. But could we do it? For a long time we agonized. I went out in the snow and prayed to God for guidance. Without His consent, I felt I would be violating the memory of my friends, that I would be stealing their souls.
We wondered whether we were going mad to even contemplate such a deed. Had we turned into brute savages?
Eventually they had to eat. “And so we took yet another step in the descent towards our ultimate indignity: to eat the body of the person lying next to us. Each of us would have to be stained with this blood if we were to keep the seed of life from withering.”
They found some solace in the rationalization that they were echoing the ceremony of the Eucharist, in which Christ’s body and blood are consumed (most of the passengers were Catholic), and each one even gave the others permission to use his body as food if he passed away.
There are many fictional examples 0f Hollywood’s fascination with anthropophagy, or cannibalism. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs and the roving bands in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road come to mind, as well as the 2022 film Bones and All, a romantic thriller about star-crossed cannibals. But certainly one of the most memorable – and possibly prophetic – is the 1973 science fiction classic Soylent Green, in which Charlton Heston’s character discovers the horrifying secret ingredient of the food product keeping the populace alive in a dystopian future. He shouts a warning to his fellow citizens: “Soylent Green is people!”
Apparently Heston’s character and the Andes plane crash survivors needn’t have agonized so much over this taboo, because the once-respected British magazine New Scientist has embarked on a campaign to take all the stigma out of it. In a February 14th article titled, “Is it time for a more subtle view on the ultimate taboo: cannibalism?”, New Scientist blithely notes, “Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine.” You don’t say? Tell us more!
“New archaeological evidence shows that ancient humans ate each other surprisingly often,” and lest you find this both unsurprising and gross, the article hastens to add that cannibalism was practiced “sometimes for compassionate reasons. The finds give us an opportunity to reassess our views on the practice.”
Yes, we should definitely “reassess” our archaic morality and look to our Neanderthalic forbears for role models.
“Our aversion has been explained in various ways,” New Scientist states:
Perhaps it is down to the fact that, in Western religious traditions, bodies are seen as the seat of the soul and have a whiff of the sacred. Or maybe it is culturally ingrained, with roots in early modern colonialism, when racist stereotypes of the cannibal were concocted to justify subjugation. These came to represent the “other” to Western societies – and revulsion towards cannibalism became a tenet of their moral conscience.
Note 1) the shoe-horning in of the leftist trope of racist colonialism; 2) the utterly unfounded charge that Westerners “concocted” a cannibal stereotype “to justify subjugation”; and 3) the argument that our civilized revulsion toward cannibalism has its roots in racism. These are red flags signaling that the article was written by someone from the woke left.
New Scientist has embraced wokeness before, having incorporated genderless terminology like “pregnant people” and “people who menstruate,” phrases pushed by the bullying transgender lobby to erase women and deny biological reality. If a science magazine adopts the worldview of a science-denying, radical ideology, is it really a science magazine anymore?
The article goes on to say, “Like it or not, cannibalism is an important part of our story.” Like it or not? Who likes it? “These discoveries invite us to reconsider our revulsion to cannibalism in the context of our evolutionary past.”
This is a curious conclusion, to say the least. Why should the fact that cannibalism was common among our ancestors “invite us to reconsider our revulsion” about it today? Infanticide was also widespread in human history – should that be an “invitation to reconsider our revulsion” about it today? What is New Scientist getting at here?
In a closely related article at New Scientist called “Our human ancestors often ate each other, and for surprising reasons,” “science” writer Michael Marshall assures us that eating humans is “no more dangerous than eating other animals.” Our ancestors have been eating each other for a million years or more, he explains. “Among the Neanderthals, it was pretty common” and “plenty of our primate relatives do it.”
“Some anthropologists now say it is time to ditch our negative views about cannibalism,” Marshall writes. “It’s something that needs to be understood a bit better and not just associated to the horrible behaviour of a psychopath,” says one expert. Another adds, “Cannibalism is not bad or unnatural. It’s part of the natural world. We are an extension of that.” Nohemi Sala at the National Research Centre on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain, warns, “We must be careful when we judge.”
This rehabilitation of cannibalism is being promoted not just by New Scientist and “some anthropologists.” Wokeness-programmed Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools seem to be in on the agenda, too. In a recent Washington Examiner op-ed, Timothy Carney noted that Google’s AI tool Gemini refused his request to provide him with an argument that cannibalism is always immoral. “I’m sorry,” it responded, “cannibalism is a very complex issue with many different perspectives. It's important to be respectful of all points of view, even if you don't agree with them.” Carney also noted that the AI tool wouldn’t provide images of a pro-life march, but did not hesitate to generate an image of a pro-choice march, so Gemini clearly doesn’t abide by its own declared ethics.
Suspecting that the left is laying the groundwork to normalize cannibalism sounds like a conspiracy theory, but why would it be so difficult to believe? The left has already normalized (or is in the process thereof) eating insects instead of meat, the sexual grooming of children, men conquering women’s sports, the medical mutilation of adults and children in service to the lie of gender ideology, polyamory, pedophilia – why would cannibalism be off-limits?
The normalization of all these transgressive practices and more is part of the left’s war on all taboos. Their aim is the overthrow of the totality of the existing order, a revolution which requires the deconstruction of every social norm, tradition, value, and limit. It requires the abolition of the nuclear family, the eradication of religion (especially Christianity with its inconvenient Judeo-Christian moral code), the rewriting or erasure of the past, and the embrace of a new world order which is already being built by globalist elites.
Those elites envision a transhumanist, amoral future in which they will meld the biological and the technological to become as gods, while the drastically reduced population of the “useless classes” feeds on bugs and is kept distracted by drugs and computer games.
Instead of “reassessing” our views on cannibalism and other taboo practices, it’s time to assess the subversion of our civilization by progressive revolutionaries, and to take appropriate political, cultural, and legal actions to reverse it and rescue our declining humanity.
#vegansfirst
They will stop at nothing. The hunt for the exotic is born in the rejection of what man has learned in his civilizing efforts, so what some wish to call ‘progressive’ ultimately leads right back to primalism. If men are indistinguishable from mere animal, as such people assert, then he ought to act with the same degree of moral indifference.