IMMOLATION 20XX
Genocide has always been with us. We humans. Probably every religious institution throughout its history has inflicted genocide on non-aligned groups. Wars might be regarded as indirect genocides, since civilians are often collateral victims, often in huge numbers.
The Bible states that God instructed the Israelites, on their journey to the promised land, that when encountering inhabitants of cities to be conquered: “shall devote them to complete destruction.”
Ancient empires almost routinely exterminated enemy nations.
Christian martyrs were killed by Romans and in Alexandria pagans were massacred by perfervent Christians. Years later Catholics were killing Protestants.
Americans murdered thousands of Native Americans. Turks annihilated Armenians. Then the Holocaust. Recently the Islamic extremists. The list is not endless but very long and continuing to accrue probably without end:
Now we have the pope, the lugubrious history of sexual abuse by priests still with him, who has recently gone to Canada on a “pilgrimage of penance” to apologize for the death and abuse of hundreds of indigenous children. The self-exculpatory behavior of Vatican emissaries, local and international, seems truly sanctimonious and outrageously hypocritical, though actually it is a long-familiar self-defensive practice among all humankind. We make a show of memorializing our victims, often according them totemic stature.
Yet history has a way of paving over past iniquities, so that apologies, even when rendered, tend to rebound as self-serving, as if tapping us on our collective shoulder for remembering.
In the great chain of being every living thing serves a predator.
To sustain the balance of thriving and reproducing all ecological systems depend on a rigorous practice of downstream consumption. Apex predators, those at the top suffering no predation are self-limited. Sharks, for example, do not reproduce until their twenties and each birth is separated by several years. Thus they cannot overwhelm their food supply.
Humans, ever increasing in numbers almost geometrically, may use genocide as well as war to limit population proliferation. Natural occurring methods of population control, such as famine and disease, have also stymied growth.
Human territoriality has apparently been with us from our earliest time. Seizure of other’s territory has often been accompanied by communal life cleansing. Genocide is perhaps a vaster expansion.
I pose one new idea, a point, about our global failure to respond to the threat of climate change. Perhaps, deep in our collective evolutionary consciousness, is a kind of death wish. This may be the living planet’s own ecological plan. As Avi Loeb, in his recent book, Extraterrestrial, proclaimed: “civilizations with the technological prowess to explore the universe are also highly vulnerable to annihilation by self-inflicted wounds, betting wrong and planning too little and too late could hasten our extinction.”
Is this the millennium of our final farewell?
