I would like to add a postscript to my previous post about the book On Exterminationism. Yesterday Autisticus Spasticus asked me:
César, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for quite some time. Do you, personally, have it in you to kill non-white women and children in cold blood? Imagine they were lined up before you, black and arab women and children, sobbing, pleading desperately for their lives as you level a machine gun at them. Could you bring yourself to do it? I’m genuinely curious. Have you ever given it much consideration?
The best way to answer him and others who ask me similar questions is through an experiment of the imagination, already mentioned in the final pages of another of my books:
It is enough to see the photographs of mammals in laboratory experiments that are carried out throughout North America and Europe to perceive that the human being is truly a wicked species. I will not incur the rudeness of adding those photographs in this text: a task I leave to my readers.
My exterminating fantasies would not seem unhealthy if we do another thought experiment. In Dies Irae I quoted a non-fiction book by Arthur Clarke where he talked about the ‘judgment from the Stars’ that earthlings could experience. If we imagine that in real life someone similar to a Karellen visited our planet, what is the first thing he would see from his distant silver ships, far above the human tingling? Urban spots. Industries that destroy the environment and, bringing his cameras closer, abject human misery and inconceivable suffering of the other species that share the planet with us. If, as in Clarke’s novel, the visitor also possessed machines to open a visual window to the past to study the species, he would perceive that, besides the hell that the naked apes subject their cousins, through history and prehistory they had behaved in an absolutely horrendous way with their own children. It does not hurt to summarize the revelations of the previous pages.
With his machines to literally see the human past this hypothetical extraterrestrial would be taken aghast by the magnitude of infanticide: nine percent of all human births. He would see thousands of young children slaughtered ritually, offered to the goddess of Babylon. He would see the infant sacrifices of the Pelasgians, the Syrians, the sacrifices in Gezer and in Egypt of the centuries that the earthlings call 10th to 8th before Christ. And let’s not talk about what the visitor would see with his machines when focusing on the ancient Semites of Carthage, where the burning of living children ordered by their own parents reached levels that surpassed the exclamation of Sahagún. Something similar could be seen by our visitor about other Phoenicians, Canaanites, Moabites, Sepharvaim, and ancient Hebrews: who in their origins offered their firstborn as a sacrifice to their gods. With his magic to see our past, the alien visitor would learn that both the exposure and the abandonment of infants continued in Europe until a council took action against the custom of leaving the children to die in the open.
With technology based on unimaginable principles the visitor would also see much worse behaviour in the lands of coloured people: thousands of babies, mostly women, abandoned in the streets of ancient China, and how those babies that were not abandoned were put in cold water until they died. He would see how in feudal Japan the baby was suffocated with wet paper covering her nose and mouth; how infanticide was systematic in the feudal Rajputs in India, sometimes throwing the living children to the crocodiles; and how in pre-Islamic Arabia they buried alive not a few new-borns. The visitor would also see that the sub-Saharan inhabitants of Africa killed their children much more frequently than other races did. He would even see that the sacrifice of children in Zimbabwe was practiced as recently as the beginning of the century that the earthlings call the 20th century. The window to the past would also make visible the incredibly massive slaughter of infants among the natives of the countless islands of Oceania, New Guinea and even more so among the extremely primitive aborigines of Australia, Tasmania and Polynesia. He would realize that in the American tribes, including the redskins, infanticide continued at a time when the practice had been abandoned in Europe. The same happened not only in Central American and South American tribes, but also in the civilizations prior to the Spanish conquest: where the ritual sacrifice of women and children suggests that they did it out of pure sadism. Finally, the visitor would see how, after the Conquest, the sacrificial institution of the Mesoamerican and Inca Indians was forbidden only to be transferred to the animals in the so-called santería in times when our visitor no longer has to use his devices to open the Complete Book of History and Prehistory of the species he studies.
It’s clear where I want to go… If it is legitimate for this hypothetical extraterrestrial to remove from the face of the Earth a newly-arrived species whose haughtiness blinds them from seeing their evil ways, how can it be pathological for an earthling to arrive at identical conclusions? Just because, unlike the visitor, he lacks technological power? The sad truth is that the infanticidal passion and cruelty of primitive humans have not been atoned, only transferred to our cousins.
In answering questions like those of Autisticus Spasticus, it is essential not to fall into stereotypes like the films that Jews make about Nazis.
Unlike the archetypical Hollywood Nazi, in the real world the scenario I imagine would mean liberating various zones in the US, and, from there, launching calls for white males who want to fight in the HRWs, and white women who want to procreate, to flee to the liberated zones—away from the archipelago of Gomorrahite cities that are about to be punished. Once those whites who want to survive take their families to the liberated zones, cut off electricity to the degenerates and deprive them of oil. It is obvious that those who stay in Gomorrah would start dying like flies. (In the sacred book of the Jews it is Yahweh who punishes and exterminates; in the HRWs it will be the Aryan man who does it, whose religion will no longer be Judaic but panentheistic.)
As you can see, none of this resembles the stereotype of the Hollywood Nazi, especially if all this is done in the name of the 4 words, like the alien of our Gedankenexperiment. On the contrary: it is something that could be done with the utmost coolness and preferably without eye contact with those who are about to be exterminated, or with as little contact as possible. I call what the Gomorrahites would suffer necessary suffering (remember that the four words say something else: eliminate all unnecessary suffering).
It’s the same as starting to exterminate the gangs of killer whales that torture a whale calf for hours by drowning her slowly. By shooting them with Apache helicopters, the object wouldn’t be to make them suffer, but to eliminate the whale calf’s unnecessary suffering. That the gang of orcas would suffer during the slaughter (let’s imagine that even one would evade the rockets and survive, traumatised) is what I call necessary suffering. Needless to say that after exterminating the offending species there will be no need to use the Apaches in the oceans.
With the Neanderthaloid versions of humans we would proceed in exactly the same way. The distinction between necessary and unnecessary suffering is fundamental to understanding our point of view.
