Educated or not, born in the Stone Age or operating in the age of the information revolution, the human brain does not seem to perform any better. A provocative statement?
Geronimo was a famous Apache chief at the end of the 19th century. Like many Indian warriors, he fought against the white man. He fought against the white man in the north of Mexico and in the south of the United States. As he himself revealed in his autobiography, he was driven to take the warpath because unknown perpetrators had attacked his camp while he was away and killed all the members of his closest family. He ached for revenge. He was the hero of many a movie about the Old West, and he was the protagonist of the very well-made film Geronimo: An American Legend.
In his autobiography, Geronimo described Apache life from the cradle to the grave. We learn from his story that after his father died, the family was obliged not only to perform the accepted funeral rites concerning the deceased’s body, but they were also expected to give away all their father’s possessions to the members of the tribe and… to kill all his horses.
Now, when Geronimo wanted to get married, his fiancée’s father would only give him his daughter in exchange for—lo and behold!—a few horses. Up to the task, Geronimo looked around for the horses and brought them to his fiancée’s father. How? In his autobiography, he only told the reader that he would not have liked to be asked about how he had got hold of the mounts, but we may easily guess how: he stole them. Whether that involved wounding or killing the horses’ owner remains a secret.
No doubt the owner or owners, once they had figured out that it must have been Indians who had purloined the animals, could only think about retribution and retaliation. And just as was the case with Geronimo, who ached to exact revenge after his family had been slaughtered on anyone, so long as that anyone was an American or a Mexican, the horses’ owner or owners likewise did not care about the guilty individual: they sought revenge on Indians as such.
Why are we telling you this story? We are telling you this story to show how the human brain works. An individual, following a religious or ideological script, sacrifices his animals knowing full well that he will need them later in life, and knowing full well that to make up for the loss, he will have to take replacement animals by force, against the owner’s will, thus triggering a chain of retaliatory acts.
Don’t run away with the idea that what we have sketched out belongs only to the past and to a people who were at an early stage of their social, moral, and intellectual development. While it is true that many other nations and tribes sacrificed domestic animals and personal goods upon the death of an individual—specifically somebody of high status—that kind of logic is alive and well nowadays too.
Western intellectual and political leaders have been shoving it down our throats that the world does not need more people; consequently, they have been promoting either single-child or childless families. And then—surprise, surprise—the very same leaders keep telling us that we need immigrants by the thousands and by the millions, or else our economies are going to collapse. On the one hand, they promote single-child or childless families, which, among other things, implies killing babies in their mothers’ wombs, and on the other, importing people from other continents. Isn’t it like killing the horses mentioned above and stealing them from elsewhere?
Yes, stealing, because the same intellectual and political leaders have been telling us that immigration enriches the recipient countries. Now, if something enriches me, it must be valuable. If this valuable something is taken from another country, then by the same token the donor country must become impoverished.
The analogy with Geronimo’s horses does not stop here. As we have seen, Geronimo’s theft of someone’s horses triggered enmity. Geronimo may have gained a girl, but at the same time he exposed his tribe (and other tribes) to retaliation. Isn’t it the same with the importation of immigrants? The employers and the do-gooders may have achieved their goals—cheap labour and a sense of moral satisfaction, respectively—but the recipient nations have certainly absorbed trouble upon trouble, manifesting as psychological distress, foreign ghettos, violence in the streets, a loss of societal cohesion, and many other infelicitous phenomena.
The Apache approach was to kill their own horses in order to steal somebody else’s horses, thus entailing the enmity of the victim of the theft; the present-day American or European approach is to prevent conception or terminate pregnancy in order to import grown-up people, thus disrupting social cohesion and sowing the seeds of discord, not excluding future civil war.
