Eating People Is Not Wrong
Taste Testing the Anti-Racist, Anti-Homophobic, Cannibal Rights Movement

1,936 words

Cannibals Contemplating Human Remains – Jean François Gigoux

Asked to review a book about cannibalism for another outlet recently, [1] I was pleased to be reminded of a 1970 Monty Python sketch in which a group of sailors stranded in a lifeboat eagerly compete to see who should be served for dinner to the rest of the crew first. This was followed by a second skit in which a man in a funeral parlor is offered the ultra-budget burial option for his dead mother of simply eating her, then vomiting her flesh up into the open grave. Both sketches were accompanied by boos from the studio audience, which I had always interpreted as just another joke about the literally poor-taste nature of proceedings; but it turns out otherwise. So determined were the BBC to maintain the social taboo upon anthropophagy that adding a live soundtrack of jeers and catcalls was the only way station controllers were willing to allow these scenes to be broadcast, lest they otherwise encouraged their audience to eat one another!

Not all Westerners these days are quite so keen to maintain the prevailing taboo upon consuming ‘long-pig’ (as South Seas cannibals allegedly termed human flesh), however. In the name of tolerance and open-mindedness, shouldn’t chewing other humans down to the raw bone just be considered yet another fine example of diversity in action? Advocates of mass immigration often praise the wonderfully expanded menu of international cuisines now on offer in Chinese, African and Indian restaurants as one of the most visible major public benefits of multiculturalism. Should long-pig cafés one day be considered likewise?

Montaigne, Moved

The first Westerner I am aware of who evinced some sympathy with non-white foreign practices of cannibalism was the great French Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne, in his c.1580 composition On the Cannibals. In one of the earliest examples of progressive cultural relativism on record, Montaigne describes new colonial knowledge of the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil and their supposedly ‘noble’ habit of eating their vanquished enemies following battle. Prior to the final dinner-gong sounding, such future human meals were kept as captives and “treated well for quite a long time with every consideration they can possibly think of”, apart from the key consideration of not ultimately roasting them all in a big pot before “sending portions to absent friends” as free takeaways.

Rather than being repelled, Montaigne broad-mindedly views the Indians’ habits of anthropophagy whilst walking around without any pants on to be enchanting and curious acts of multiculturalism in action:

I find, from what I have been told about these people, that there is nothing barbarous and savage about them, except that everyone calls things which he does not practice himself barbaric. For, in fact, we have no test of truth and of reason other than examples and ideas of the opinions and customs in the country where we live.

This is somewhat true, but it does not then necessarily follow that the habits of foreigners are therefore automatically positive by comparison. Yet Montaigne disagrees, saying many of the Indians’ qualities, such as their lack of words for “lying” or “falsehood”, are actually rather admirable, not that the average narrow-thinking European would ever be able to spot such a fact. As Montaigne famously concludes, putting words into the mouth of a blind white French bigot: “All that is not too bad, but what of it? They wear no breeches.” Today, Montaigne would no doubt be defending often-trouserless Pakistani rape-gangs in the English Midlands on a similar rationale too.

Sweeney Todd

Possibly, were he to be alive today, Montaigne would be an enthusiastic participant in the classes of one Todd Kashdan, an American psychologist and “leading expert on the psychology of well-being, curiosity, mental flexibility, and social relationships”, who runs lessons for his students with bizarre #BeKind titles like “Is Consensual Cannibalism a Path to Well-Being?: Exploring the Margins of Diversity”.

In an online lesson plan, Kashdan reveals how he begins his patented “Science of Well-Being Class” by describing the actions of literal penis-swallower Armin Meiwes, a gay German “consensual cannibal” who back in 2001 advertised for a fellow gustatorily disturbed homosexual on fringe online dating app The Cannibal Café who was willing to have his own sausage chopped off and then shared at the table during a romantic dinner, stuffed with garlic. Sadly, “neither of them could digest the meat” (maybe there was too much garlic?), but his date did then consent to being stabbed to death, chopped up, and absorbed piecemeal over the next few days nonetheless. This, says, Kashdan, made Meiwes’ partner an enthusiast of something called “vorarephelia”, or the niche new queer identity of choosing to self-ID as a chicken casserole.

Although not a cock-chomper himself personally, Kashdan doesn’t like to be judgmental, so next splits his students into groups and asks them to discuss “Why is or isn’t this cannibalistic date acceptable?” whilst his favorite band Explosions in the Sky plays in the background. So brainwashed are they by cultural relativism that the mini-Montaignes in Kashdan’s class soon end up producing genuine responses like these:

• Loneliness might be the origin of seeking to eat or be eaten. One cure for loneliness, being unable to connect deeply with another person, is to consume them. You literally have another person inside you. [Surely there are easier sexual ways of achieving this aim?]
• This might have been a suicidal gestureby someone who feels their life is devoid of meaning. The idea of satisfying someone else’s desire for human consumption can be viewed as a final act of generosity.
• If consenting adults are involved, with sufficient mental capacity, why can’t they interact with each other in the privacy of their homes as desired? For several decades, therapists and scientists have been trying to remove fetishes as disordersunless there is nonconsensual harm.
• Legalize consensual cannibalism and crime rates might go down. The cannibal is not hunting innocent people – kidnapping, assaulting, and murdering on the streets. Instead, the cannibal uses modern dating apps to find willing matches (even if The Cannibal Café isn’t as popular as Bumble). As long as the cannibal limits the search to willing recruits, it might be a useful service for the public safety and health of innocent civilians.

Kashdan thinks all this is admirable, applauding “the willingness of students to adopt the perspective of diverse characters in a strange storyline” – once you put yourself in someone else’s shoes, you begin to see the innate value in marginalized groups’ perspectives on things, gaining social empathy for everyone from blacks to gays to transsexuals and cannibals. And, indeed, black gay transsexual cannibals. The ultimate conclusion students should draw is this: “There are multiple paths to well-being … It is worthwhile to contemplate the range of intersections that are possible. To do anything less is to stray from diversity to myside bias.”

In other words, objecting to others killing and eating one another on moral grounds is racist or homophobic. So speaks a qualified psychologist.

White Meat

Encouragingly for liberals like Todd, cannibalism is not technically specifically illegal in many Western countries at present, with generic “murder” or “preventing a lawful burial” charges being brought against offenders instead, hence the recent appearance of online petitions like the following:

I like the phrase “cannibalism is potentially dangerous.” What, if you only have a little nibble?

When we consider cannibals, we stereotypically think of fat black Africans like Idi Amin, Emperor Bokassa, or The Notorious BIG. But does cannibalism amongst non-whites even truly exist? In his 1979 book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy, enlightened white Western researcher William Arens famously claimed there was no evidence whatsoever that foreigners had ever been partial to the odd grilled granny or boiled baby, and that the whole idea was simply a lying attempt by European colonialists to paint Africans and South Americans as primitive savages so as to justify their subsequent colonization in the name of civilizing the darkies into understanding how to eat dead cows, pigs and horses instead, preferably with a knife, fork and napkin.

Such denials of reality are delusional. It is a simple fact that in Africa today, black people cut up and eat the body parts of sacrificed albino Africans, believing such muti to possess magical powers. Doesn’t this mean that, if imported over towards the (traditionally) white West, such persons will naturally view the pale-skinned natives as one giant magic larder, as Elon Musk suggested last year in relation to alleged immigrant cannibal gangs flooding into America from Haiti? President Trump’s Homeland Security tsar Kristi Noem recently claimed her ICE border-agents had arrested one illegal immigrant so cannibalistic he had actually tried to eat himself; even worse than those old rumors about why Prince had one of his ribs removed. At least he didn’t try to swallow it in the literal sense.

Once You Taste Black, You’ll Never Go Back

If the fears of Musk and Noem are true, we’ll never be allowed to say it. In 2023, Netflix released their series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, in which the real-life infamous white US cannibal serial-killer was depicted preying on young black boys, not just because they tasted better doused in ketchup, but because of something called systemic racism, which apparently now even affects cannibalism. The only real cannibals, some deluded leftists now began to claim, were privileged racist white men like Dahmer, not poor, disadvantaged black Africans like Idi Amin, possibly the most egregious case of race-swapping in TV history.

Nowadays, if you so much as make a joke about African cannibals, you are liable to get yourself cancelled. In 2007, a Canadian comedy group were treated even worse than Monty Python once were by the BBC when they had a federal human rights complaint lodged against them by do-gooders for an online sketch they put out featuring images like this:

I’m sure I saw that man on the left standing behind the counter in my local kebab-shop last week.

Even prestigious sources like New Scientist magazine now seem to be trying desperately to legitimize cannibalism as an acceptable lifestyle choice, so keen are they to demonstrate their anti-racist, queer-friendly credentials. In 2024, the journal ran an op-ed piece titled “Is it time for a more subtle view on the ultimate taboo: cannibalism?”, featuring Montaigne-aping views like these:

Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine. If a body can be bequeathed with consent to medical science, why can’t it be left to feed the hungry? […] maybe [our traditional aversion to it] is culturally ingrained, with roots in early modern colonialism, when racist stereotypes of the cannibal were concocted to justify subjugation. These came to represent the ‘other’ to Western societies – and revulsion towards cannibalism became a tenet of their moral conscience … [Cannibalism was often performed as part of] funerary rituals to honor the dead [like on Monty Python?] … Like it or not, then, cannibalism is a part of our story.

It’s not a part of my story. I don’t even like pork pies. The above argument then prompted the following reader letter in the next issue: “Cannibalism solves the food shortage problem and is environmentally friendly. So why not?” [2]

Yes, why not just begin eating people like the blessed Tupinambá Indians did? Such endlessly ‘tolerant’ modern Montaignes may pose as being the true moral grown-ups in the room, but in reality, like Professor Kashdan, they’re all no more than a bunch of overgrown Sweeney Toddlers.

Notes

[1] Eaters of the Dead by Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.

[2] For a piece of mine on Patricia MacCormack, an Australian academic and environmental occultist who thinks all humanity should cannibalize itself into extinction to save the planet, see here.