Flippant Remarks about Guns Germs and Steel
My time-management instinct tries to keep me from writing about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. You read the book. I’m talking about the National Geographic DVD. One of the design goals of this project is to turn European conquest into a coffee table book for a mahogany table in front of a navy regency. It is an opportunity to speak of murder with seductive diction and patriarchal feminine wiles. It assumes that planning and designing sophisticated technical massacre requires no psychological explanation. It permits the unimaginative to assume that any human society with the geographic advantage supposed for Europeans would “conquer the world.” Not everyone was raised on a diet of Emperor Ming and Flash Gordon. So you can see how my words can go on and on about this—and such ranting was for my twenties back in the 1980s, when what is now being presented as of July 12 2005 was taught to me correctly and in more detail by African scholars. Jared Diamond is the Vanilla Ice of African-centered world history—okay Vanilla Ice may be too hard so let’s say Dave Brubeck. The Fertile Crescent, homeboy, is closer to Africa than modern Sweden. The people who drew the boundaries around what you call Africa were not even born when the Fertile Crescent was Eden. So it does well to actually be curt and flippant and reign in myself on this one:
- It is important to point out that many white supremacists are offended by Guns, Germs, and Steel. I leave it to your curiosity to find out who they are and why… my guess is that the intestinal fortitude to wade through corpses is of Wagnerian beauty that Jared Diamond’s ‘cold’ science ignores…
- It was important for me learn just how few domestic animals there are in the world—barely a dozen. So clearly the people who talk about nature being “tamed” can’t count—or they can’t speak correctly, confusing taming with destroying.
- The symbolic meaning of the train and the railway has been revived for a new generation through Guns, Germs, and Steel. This is great and explains to one too many Negro soccer moms why encouraging their children to watch PBS cartoons about talking trains is misleading to say the least.
- The real, deadly meaning of malaria and colonization was dramatized in the last episode of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Negroes (who imagine themselves as Africans) “living” in big, European-style cities are literally killing their children trying to be white. The previous sentence sounds cruel but too many Negroes “think” that assimilation with the total elimination of ancestral information is harmless. For more information about this health crisis, see the Zambia Malaria Foundation. My commendations go out to the makers of Guns, Germs, and Steel for taking the time to explain that pre-colonial Africans knew how to live with malaria and that their descendants, robbed of their data, are literally dying for lack of knowledge!
- The final cut of Guns, Germs, and Steel permits the viewer to assume that Africans “decided” to not eradicate malaria from their lands. And in celebrating the collective achievements of the people of Singapore and other Asian “tigers” we are seduced (yet again) to blame the African for inaction. This seduction obscures the thought that Africans being capable of collectively eradicating malaria from their lands also strongly suggests that they would be capable of eradicating Europeans who steal natural resources from their lands as well. Such a situation would cause all financial systems as we know them to collapse. Scores of African children must die to keep one “Benz car” on the road for a young Negro, international, jet-setting playboy in tailored military fatigues. Welcome to the law of the jungle.
- This film also may mislead our deeply misinformed, coffee-table viewer into thinking that Europeans first appeared in Africa in the region we now call South Africa. We miss out on the Portuguese appearance in West Africa much earlier. And we really miss out on the Greek appearance in Africa in the region most “properly” educated people call “the near East.”
- The first two episodes of Guns, Germs, and Steel failed to explain why the indigenous peoples of North America thrived for so long in spite of the Spanish colonial presence. It would have done well to show a few images of “Red Indians,” plains peoples with horses and guns. My suggestion is that the peoples of what we now call North America were decentralized—not under a single, sprawling Inca or Aztec imperial order. Yes, folks I am aware that non-Europeans build empires too. It would have been a great opportunity to explain how the concept of empire (single-point failure with a known bottleneck) can have drawbacks.
- But Guns, Germs, and Steel is clearly more appealing to a materialist American. The concept of empire is too “heady”—yet treating this as a formal historical/psychological subject is the secret to unraveling the secrets that make “us” ask those “big questions” with patriarchal feminine wiles. Remember to breathe heavy and put your hands on your hips when say this, “Why do we fight wars?” “Why can’t we all get along?”
- The imperial revolution was a groundbreaking, watershed event in human history that must be downplayed and obscured. Imperial consciousness must be assumed to be natural human consciousness—this assumption conceals the (evil) genius of imperial piety, a triumph of the will that white supremacists of all skin colors worship as god. In fact “our” concept of worshipping as a god is imperial. Even though the science clearly shows us something called “Biological Altruism” our scientist, Jared Diamond, takes imperial order for granted and has no explanation as to why a ‘man’ can march into a strange land planning to mow down people living there with a machine gun.