From: "Andy Robertson" 
Subject: Re: (urth) TBOTSS and colonialism
Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 07:49:41 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jerry Friedman" 
>>The same applies to race.  As far as gender goes, I've heard some
>>interesting statistics about salaries and levels of advancement, but
>>I don't know the methods used to compile them.


I refer to depictions of race and gender in literature and the media, not
real life.    I repeat that you should read Wolfe with an eye to these
things.


>
> Anyway, one reason humanity on Blue and Green shouldn't strive to
> exterminate the inhumi is that humanity is in large part responsible
> for the way the inhumi act.


No.  And this is part of the ambiguity.    Humanity is "responsible" in the
sense that the inhumi get their patterns of behaviour from humans, but
humanity is not "reponsible" for the fact that the inhumi are psychic and
physical parasites and that this is how the inhumi must and do act.

Consciously, the inhumi may even be friendly: but their genetic drives are
completely counter to human welfare, and when it comes to the pinch the
genetic drive is what counts.

As Alice said, they are demons, and remain demons  *even if they believe
they are human and try to act human*.

The basic message is, or at least seems to be, the primacy of genetic drives
over cultural conditioning.

But one could certainly answer that this is just the latest of a series of
ambiguous conclusions Wolfe comes to, and as I said I am not sure that he
knows the true, final, answer himself.



>.  Another reason may be that the inhumi weren't hurting anybody
> on Green after the Neighbors left and before humans showed up--unless
> the speculation is correct that the inhumi were involved in bringing
> the _Whorl_ to their system.


The inhumi don't *have* to come to blue and prey on humans.


> > Now let's really, really,  stir this one up.
> >
> > Inhumi = jews?
>
> In what way?  Wolfe can't mean that Jews have to drink the blood of
> Christians (literally or metaphorically) to live, or that our souls
> are copies of Christians'.  He can't mean that the only two choices
> for dealing with us are Christian love and genocide--the U.S., for
> instance, hasn't tried either.  Possibly that, in the words of Auden,
> "those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return"?  That applies to
> a lot of groups; Auden was talking about the Nazis.

As you very well know the blood libel *did* say that jews drank the blood of
christians, and jews have been pictured as evil superintelligent
behind-the-scenes manipulators, pretending to be "human" but actually damned
demons (because they killed christ) very much like Quetzal, for generations.

I'm not going to push this one too hard, but I do think there is some input
here, not from real jews, but from what you might call the catholic
legendary picture of jews.


    hartshorn





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