A Modern Rebuttal to Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal”
Marcin Kubik
January 7,
2017
A Modern Rebuttal to Jonathan
Swift’s “Modest Proposal”
The very basic premise of Jonathan Swift’s proposal to
reduce poverty within a nation state, is that one should look to the culinary
utility of unwanted offspring as a means of increasing both the gross domestic
product & reducing poverty, is a solution for those invaded and exploited,
not the imperialist oppressors who starve entire countries or bleed them dry
and steal their resources. It just so happens that I live in the modern
equivalent of the British occupier of Ireland, presently the biggest, the most
ruthless and genocidal empire in Earth’s history. While eating of one’s own
offspring is a viable option to few, a solution I probably would not prefer,
one that has Mythological and historical roots even in antiquity, with Caligula
gutting his pregnant wife to consume an unborn child mimicking Zeus, a god
conceived by the Greeks but whom the Roman emperor fancied himself a likeness
of, the practice of killing or selling children has been widely practiced even
in modernity. This however is generally reserved for countries that are
oppressed and exploited, not a domain of the oppressors and exploiters.
Let us consider that during Holodomor, the famine
artificially and intentionally created by Stalin’s Soviet Union, Ukrainians
were driven like the Irish by the British in Swift’s time, to complete
destitution as their crops and livestock were forcibly confiscated so as to break
their will, starve them to death and destroy their dream of self rule.
Interestingly enough, the clever Ukrainians quickly figured out that it was
adults not the turkey sized infants which were the better choice for
cannibalism. Granted, they usually waited until natural death of starvation
before using the body of the deceased to feed those still living, but it still
presented much more nutrition than the tiny body of an infant. With millions of
Ukrainians dropping dead due to Stalin’s agricultural policies, the supply of
human meat was constant and ample, for those who opted for it. Here’s the
point, absurdly enough, even when facing death of starvation very few
Ukrainians decided on a diet of human flesh for steaks and bone for soups,
leading me to believe that the market for small children would be niche, and
even if I were to put an infant on the market, its sale might prove very
difficult. Consider that the carcases of Ukrainians that littered their rich
land during Holodomor were free of charge! Presumably, there were also infants
available, maybe a bit scrawny, but never the less available for free!
As recently as ten years ago, it was commonplace in Africa
for children and adult Pygmy residents of the tropical jungle to be hunted for
their hearts and meat. They had to send a delegation to the United Nations
explaining that they are indeed humans and not game animals. This did not deter
their persecutors, the hunting and consumption continued. In this case there
clearly was a market for human and infant meat, but it was limited to an
African ethnic minority of a very short stature, one that could be easily
mistaken for another type of primate by those not well versed in human
anthropology. I am not a Pygmy but a Caucasian, even if I were to attempt to
cross breed, the result would be a half-breed much lighter in tone and out of
its natural habitat. The demand for such half-breed Pygmy infants has not been
proven. There is an added element of cultural bias here: they have to be hunted
not purchased. The reason they are hunted and eaten is that the flesh,
especially that of the Pygmy heart, imbues the hunter with great psychological
strength and power. There is no scientific link between gaining such power and
the Pygmy meat itself, thus one must conclude that it is the hunt and the
slaughter that’s important, not the meat itself. The market for a commercially
available half breed Pygmy is dubious or non-existent.
While Swift has not lived long enough to see British rule in
India, had he been able to see the exploitation of the much more populous
country. he would have realized that his idea is only half right. The British
have robbed the subcontinent blind, eventually spurring its residents like
George Orwell to write disdainfully satirical books on the issue, but there
never seemed to be a market for infant meat, even during the greatest
destitution. During the Second World War, the British leader Winston Churchill
decided to follow in his close friend’s Joseph Stalin’s Holodomor success and
starve Bengali Indians to death, while confiscating whatever foodstuffs they
produced to support his military effort in evicting a very eloquent and
outspoken leader of Germany named Adolf Hitler from power. In the process, Mr.
Churchill starved around four million Indians to death, but the market for
human meat, just as was the case with Mr. Stalin’s earlier historical precedent
of Holodomor in the Ukraine, has been rather weak, even though the carcasses
were readily available and free of charge for food processing. Mr. Hitler
himself was a fan of prudent utilization of all human flesh, especially of
Jewish ethnicity, but with the help of IBM’s algorithms, he had meticulously
calculated that it was far more cost effective to work and starve adults to
death. When it comes to infant meat in India, it is readily available even
today, but instead of sales, infanticide is practiced whereby the infants are
either buried alive or discarded. In fact nearly 350 million Indian infants
have thus gone to culinary waste in the last century, and keep in mind that we
Americans throw out nearly half of the food that’s already produced, never mind
the unprocessed product’s protein precursors! We live in a globalized society
where no animal is safe from poaching and all big ones are going extinct, even
for the price of a tiny part of their anatomy like a tusk or a horn. One has to
conclude, that if there were a market for Indian infants, the supply would be
ample and sale would thrive, the absence of one either means that Hindu meat is
of the wrong ethnicity or more generally infant meat is not found to be a
culinary delight.
The part on poverty reduction by population control in
Swift’s “Modest Proposal” with infanticide as a solution, has now been
historically proven to be a great success! The Han Chinese have in fact
instituted a government policy that only allowed one child per couple and now
all of them are pampered and spoiled, in a good way. China has grown to become
the wealthiest nation on Earth, with the largest gross domestic product valued
over $21 trillion in purchasing power parity, according to the International
Monetary Fund, one that puts even the enormously rich USA in third place behind
the European Union. However, while human meat consumption is practiced in
China, it is mostly limited to interspecies post mortem feeding of dead men to
the Tibetan vultures as a means of burial. This like most funeral practices is
time consuming and labor intensive, as the meat has to be cut into smaller
pieces for the birds to be able to eat it all. Since deceased Tibetan infants
are disposed of in a similar fashion, one must conclude that even in China,
where consumption of rats, dogs and cats is commonplace, the human infant is
not on the menu.
At this point I will assume that I have proved, that a
market for human infants for culinary purposes has not existed over the last
three centuries, nor does it presently exist. While one could argue that human
trafficking in the US, a common practice for pedophiles’ sexual exploitation of
minors, numbers in the hundreds of thousands cases per annum and it could
potentially be extend into a niche infancy market, this would be eating of
quite another kind. Cunnilingus and fellatio jokes aside, selling a child for
meat in the US is not possible as due to absence of demand, it is also very
hazardous due to constraints placed by the law. The simple fact is that the US
economic and legal landscape is prohibitive when it comes to sale of human
infants. There is however a thriving market for organs, harvested from killed
persons and smuggled through the Mexican border. This presumably includes
infant parts. While it could prove quite lucrative, selling off my infant for
body parts in Mexico to be smuggled back into the US and sold for thousands of
dollars, is not within the scope of this discussion. Regardless, I’m a
proponent of a solar photovoltaic farm along the border, one built to produce
electricity for American cities while giving employment to potential foreign
migrants in Mexico and create a land barrier of well and cheaply guarded power
plant private property.
References:
1. Swift,
Jonathan "A Modest Proposal"
1729, ” pg. 220-226 of “Current Issues
and Enduring Questions” by Sylvan Barnet & Hugo Bedau, 10th Edition
2. BBC,
“Holodomor: Memories of Ukraine's silent massacre
3. BBC, “DR
Congo pygmies appeal to UN”
4. Black,
Edwin “IBM’s Role in the Holocaust — What the New Documents Reveal”
5.
Wikipedia, “Bengal famine of 1943"
6.
Wikipedia, “List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita”
7.
Calebwilde.com “Tibetan Sky Burial: 36 Photos”
8. The Hindu
“India loses 3 million girls in infanticide”
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/India-loses-3-million-girls-in-infanticide/article12551293.ece
9. Zurita,
Brenda “Human Trafficking Estimates and Statistics” American Thinker July 10,
2014
10. Associated Press, “Child organ trafficking ring busted
by Mexican police”
11. Hanley,
Steve “ Mexico Should Build A Solar Border Wall” 31 December 2016, Clean
Technica
Comments
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/36167424/ns/world_news-africa/t/children-sacrificed-rituals-uganda/