Re:Witch Burnings in Papua New Guinea
by whyIndeed on Saturday October 31, 2015 @10:31PM
(#10485201)
They liked it, they explained, because the trumpets
sounded exactly like the brassy screams of captive
women selected for feasting.
That's really an author injecting context where it might not belong.
Considering that these people aren't particularly sophisticated in a social sense, you can't interpret a statement like that directly.
It needs to be examined as:
a. i like this sound, and appreciate what i'm hearing.
b. gee, it reminds me of that time the woman was
tortured, and her cries echoed across the valley.
something i can never forget. something that
cannot be stopped when mobs rule our culture.
To lend some credence to my detached perspective on this, consider the following:
Imagine people crafting a sculpture in the likeness of an animal, large enough to load an adult person inside, and being entertained by the noises of people (maybe your enemies, maybe not) being burned to death inside of it. Probably sounds like trumpets, no? Lest we forget what ancient Greece was like.
Cruel and unusual punishment isn't as far into the distant past as we'd like to imagine, either. This is just what that quote happened to remind me of.
Mob rule, in a place where social stratification is not adequate enough to provide for objective behavior modification by third party authoritarian paramilitary forces, takes on similar shapes around the world.
To drive the point home, I like a lot of ridiculous music, and some of the vocalists in the bands I like, they scream like they're being tortured to death. Having never witnessed any form of actual torture, firsthand, I still like the music, even though I'm not gripped by any particular desire to induce screams like that in any of my fellow human beings.
Considering that these people aren't particularly sophisticated in a social sense, you can't interpret a statement like that directly.
It needs to be examined as:
To lend some credence to my detached perspective on this, consider the following:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull
Imagine people crafting a sculpture in the likeness of an animal, large enough to load an adult person inside, and being entertained by the noises of people (maybe your enemies, maybe not) being burned to death inside of it. Probably sounds like trumpets, no? Lest we forget what ancient Greece was like.
Cruel and unusual punishment isn't as far into the distant past as we'd like to imagine, either. This is just what that quote happened to remind me of.
Mob rule, in a place where social stratification is not adequate enough to provide for objective behavior modification by third party authoritarian paramilitary forces, takes on similar shapes around the world.
To drive the point home, I like a lot of ridiculous music, and some of the vocalists in the bands I like, they scream like they're being tortured to death. Having never witnessed any form of actual torture, firsthand, I still like the music, even though I'm not gripped by any particular desire to induce screams like that in any of my fellow human beings.