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”
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

kuffodog said…
Of course while I was writing this essay I was fully aware that people capture, kill and eat small children, including infants. There were recently documented cases of this in some African countries, places where war fighters would make human sacrifice a practice that imbued them with power... usually it had to do with having power over the subdued population whose children they killed an ate in front off, people who were powerless to stop it. This essay was an exercise in my verbose skills in the English language, not any real argument that human savagery, barbarism, and genocidal criminality somehow keeps infants off the menu of the ravenous predatory apes that terrorize me 24/7 for the last 19 years for their own crimes. For instance, in Uganda there is a market for children to be killed in rituals. Why let the meat go to waste? Are these apes in your burgers like giraffe meat is mixed into British beef? Test it. You'll find out.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/36167424/ns/world_news-africa/t/children-sacrificed-rituals-uganda/

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