Ethology and animal violence (1)

‘Violence and Terrorism.- Their ideological mystification at the service of imperialism’

1 – Ethology and animal violence

Iñaki Aginaga and Felipe Campo

Since the world began, before and after the appearance of the human animal, the violence is the most direct, immediate, natural, normal, preferential, spontaneous and universal means of production and resolution of social conflicts. Social conflicts are constituted, developed, solved, limited or neutralized if that is possible through virtual or actual violence. “Animal or human, the combativeness has a strictly biological root.”

But the opposition between animal and human does not seem plausible. If the animality of humans is denied, all consideration, explanation or understanding of them is impossible. The animality is not only the past of the human but also his present and his future. The virtuous guardians of human animals believe to see in such propositions an attack to the highest values of the human being; and clinging to this error is for many humans a real need.

“There are people who see in this question an insult to human dignity. All too willingly, man sees himself as the centre of the universe, as something not belonging to the rest of nature but standing apart as a different and higher being. Many people cling to this error and remain deaf to the wisest command ever given by a sage, the famous ‘Know thyself’ inscribed in the temple of Delphi.”

It is “inseparably bound up and shot through with a most dangerous human quality, of which the proverb says that it goes before a fall: pride.” “Pride is one of the chief obstacles to seeing ourselves as we really are, and self-deceit is the obliging servant of pride.” “Responsible reason and moral, which have entered in the world but with the human, can very well give him the power to dominate it; provided that, in his blind pride, he denies not his animal heritage.” (Konrad Lorenz; ‘On aggression’, 1966.)

“Our ancestors the Gauls” is an ideological leitmotiv – at the service of the imposition of French National-imperialism in its colonies – that quite a lot of humans: whites and blacks who nothing had to do with such an ancestry, have accepted without too much difficulty in our Country and in others. “Our ancestors the apes” is a proposition that has met greater resistances. The idea that the human continues being an animal and behaving as such seems to be even more difficult to accept. And this despite the fact that “the certainty of the phylogenetic evolution theory is thousand times greater than the certainty we have on our entire past history”. Between onto-, ortho-, endo- and exo-genesis, the phylo-genesis is the ideologically worst considered of all the genetic-evolutive processes.

“It is a widely held opinion, shared by some contemporary philosophers, that all human behaviour patterns which serve the welfare of the community, as opposed to that of the individual, are dictated by specifically human rational thought. Not only is this opinion erroneous, but the very opposite is true.” (K. Lorenz; Ibid.)

The human species is the most conflictive, the most incurably aggressive and destructive that zoological evolution, mutation and selection have originated on the planet Earth; it is the most destructive of the ecology, the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, of other zoological species and of itself that has ever existed. Besides systematically attacking the plant world and the geological balance of the planet, its action does not tame the beasts but breaks the extra-specific balance and destroys the intra-specific inhibitions of the functional aggressiveness. The human is a weak and unarmed animal whose instinct of aggression has been strengthened, not limited, by cultural development. The interaction of fear and aggressiveness has made of the human the most conflictive and dangerous animal of prey. The human is the worst enemy of the humans. His nature determines relations of exorbitant conflict and exceptional intra-specific aggressiveness, that is, oriented towards the interior and against the own human species.

The human groups do mix with and react towards the others by means of the aggression; they try to destroy, dominate, steal, enslave, exploit, kill, eat, assimilate and impose on the others by all means at their disposal. Human societies have always been troubled, in form and degree that the other animal societies have never known. Their conditions of relationship, extension, evolution and involution; their dynamics, production and communication, make it inevitable. The immanent and permanent conflict is resolved by clash among powers: the strong eat, subjugate, exploit or destroy the weak; the rich, the poor; and the wise, the fool, according to universal laws of natural selection. The fight for survival determines the victory of the stronger and sets the natural selection in which survive the “best” ones; in any case, “the best” for surviving.

“The fighting and war of all against all”, among the non-human animals, is a false anthropo-morphist projection. “The layman, misguided by sensationalism in press and film, imagines the relationship between the various ‘wild beasts of the jungle’ to be a blood-thirsty struggle, all against all. In a widely shown film, a Bengal tiger was seen fighting with a python; and immediately afterwards, the python with a crocodile. With a clear conscience I can assert that such things never occur under natural conditions. What advantage would one of these animals gain from exterminating the other? Neither of them interferes with the other’s vital interests.”

“The survival value of inter-specific fights is much more evident than that of intra-species contests. [...] This kind of ‘fight’ between the eater and the eaten never goes so far that the predator causes extinction of the prey: a state of equilibrium is always established between them, endurable by both species. [...] What directly threatens the existence of an animal species is never the ‘eating enemy’ but the competitor.” (K. Lorenz; Ibid.)

In general and in their vast majority, animals have no need or reason, nor do they find satisfaction in killing each other. Nor Tarzan or King Kong, nor the big Bad Wolf or Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs are scientific references of zoological behaviour.

In the zoological field, the exhortation to “love one another” comes much late and gives rise to a much more mitigated adhesion and more reduced application than the fundamental norm “eat one another”. “The living beings do eat to each other: the animals eat plants, the big fishes eat the small ones, and the lions eat the lambs.” “All the cases described above, in which animals of different species fight against each other, have one thing in common: every one of the fighters gains an obvious advantage by its behaviour or, at least, in the interest of preserving the species it ‘ought to’ gain one. But intra-specific aggression: aggression in the proper and narrower sense of the word, also fulfils a species-preserving function.”

Nothing allows to believe that there are sociable and unsociable, peaceful and aggressive Peoples “in themselves”. There is not historic or prehistoric example of a People which, being able to prevent it, has willingly accepted the proximity and the free development of others; however, there are specialized and gifted Peoples for whom subjugation, oppression, liquidation and replacement of the others is a permanent, priority and indispensable enterprise, up to reach to jeopardize with it their own welfare, freedom and existence. There has never been any peace other than the peace of law, imposed by violence; whether it be applied either in defence of fundamental human rights, in which case it is a legitimate peace, law and violence; or in violation of those rights, in which case they are criminal and illegitimate. The “universal” laws of the market do only govern where and insofar as the laws of the – brute or civilized – force cannot do it.

“Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre as is of every man against every man. [...] For as long as every man holdeth this right of doing anything he liketh, so long are all men in the condition of war.” (T. Hobbes; ‘The Leviathan’, 1651.)

Neither the limitation by the instincts, nor the emergence of reason, nor the invention of morality, nor the civilization and the cultural and technical progress have allowed humans to go any further but quite the opposite. It’s the humanization, not the dehumanization, which leads to the ruin of Humanity and of the planet by its same natural development, according to the internal logic of the system created by humans.

For its part, the real ideological and political class that governs the destiny of the world has nothing to do with the sanctimonious humanism that its propaganda proposes to the othersas a remedy to the ills of the world. Actually it is vulgar, loutish, ignorant, conceited, fatuous, obtuse, corrupted, aggressive, dependent and addicted to the brute force and terrorism as solution for all the problems.

The humans and their leaders: selfish and aggressive, blind or stupid, do stubbornly continue their march to the abyss. Humanity has in itself the key of its destruction; it does not run towards an inevitable happy ending of the story but towards the catastrophe. “Whether we like it or not, so things stand.” And so they will remain standing in all predictable future; unless the human species can avoid destroying itself, incidentally destroying the planet and taking out all its inhabitants.

“Since I know the humans, I love the animals.” “I’ve devoted myself to what is most miserable upon the planet Earth: the animal. Because the animal is even more miserable than the most miserable of all human beings. Since the latter does not end in the slaughterhouse!” (?)

“There are still worse consequences of intra-specific selection, and for obvious reasons man [sic] is particularly exposed to them. Unlike any creature before him, he has mastered all hostile powers in his environment, he has exterminated the bear and the wolf; and now, as the Latin proverb says, ‘Homo homini lupus’.” Thus, he has turned into his own enemy.

Now then, “All the inferences of animal data to the human kind are uncertain.” The old proverb: “the man is wolf to man”, confuses the concepts and is injurious for the four-legged carnivore. Actually “the wolf is the best and the most loyal of friends.” The inverse statement: “the wolf is human to wolf” would be a piece of nonsense, since the proverbial aggressiveness of the wolf is extra-specific, while that of the human is mostly intra-specific. “There are animals that completely ignore the intra-specific aggression and that live their entire life in compact bands.” “The higher animals do not kill each other in the inside of the species, don’t organize their struggles. Sometimes happens that the wolves fight between them, but an instinctive inhibition prevents the fratricide: the life of the defeated animal that offers its throat to the winner is saved.” “It’s no less true that animals of species that the human considers the fiercest ones (because owing to their ‘weapons’ they are the most dangerous for him) do rarely kill among themselves, and that they are shielded from self-destruction by the instinct to save the life of the defeated.” “The wolves and the lions – no more than the sheep or beavers – do not make war on each other.” However, “Such inhibitions do not exist in all species, especially in species considered to be peaceful.”

“Only the so-called social animals make war among themselves.” If we consider the “political creatures”, “those living in a sociable form with one another”, it’s well known that “the collective struggle of a community against another” is a trivial thing among “the great communities of social insects, which sometimes have millions of individuals”.

“However, there are also among the mammals, most particularly among rodents, super-families that behave in a similar manner.” “I will try to show how the misfunctioning of this social form of intra-specific aggression constitutes ‘evil’ in the real sense of the word, and how the kind of social order now to be discussed represents a model in which we can see some of the dangers threatening ourselves. In their behaviour towards members of their own community the animals here to be described are models of social virtue; but they change into horrible brutes as soon as they encounter members of any other society of their own species.”

“In higher vertebrates, the bands or hordes often show aggressiveness towards foreign individuals. So, the wolf makes the difference between the members of its band and the others. More rarely is manifested the aggressiveness in the inside of the bands or hordes.” “The animals that live in group, in general have a travel or hunt territory, and consider as an enemy any member of another horde venturing over their own.” “But it’s between sub-varieties of a similar species where the hetero-phobia is the fiercest, and tends to the elimination of the one by the other.” “In the human species, especially, the manifestations of aggression are inseparable from collective life.” “The human is naturally dangerous to the human.” “The ‘weapons’ of humans are much scarier than the fangs or claws of wolves or lions; the winners do not always have spared the life of the vanquished.” “It is the economic interest, rather than the instinct, which prevents his death.”

Human culture and sociality have not reduced the animal aggressiveness of the human but have increased and strengthened them. “The mouse that has received a beating subdues himself to the strongest, and the hierarchy of domination is stable. But the human is capable to prefer rebellion to humiliation; and their truth, to life. The hierarchy of master and slave will never be stable.” “Natural society is the opposite of democracy.” “The natural society is a warlike one; and the real wars, the decisive wars were wars of annihilation.” “The warrior instinct is so strong that it is the first one that appears when we scratch on the civilization so as to re-encounter the nature.” In fact it’s not necessary much scratching or re-encounter much good.

Even though the extermination and genocide are not of essence in every war, nevertheless they are the logical development, which turns the “relative and partial” war into “absolute and total” war. The monopoly of criminal Violence and the weapons of mass destruction, in the hands of the “great” imperialistic Powers, turn the war into absolute and total; and the annihilation of the “enemy”, into something not less but more desirable and necessary, as it has been proved in practice with the use of atomic weapons. However, despite having all this in view, what unfortunately counts in such situations is what humans believe to be the most serious or what hurts their imagination the most (however distortedly though all this may occur), thanks to the deliberate action of the monopolies of ideological-psychological conditioning of masses.

“If humanity survived, as after all it did, it never achieved security from the danger of self-destruction. [...] With humanity in its present cultural and technological situation, we have good reason to consider intra-specific aggression the greatest of all dangers.” (K. Lorenz; ‘On Aggression’.)

It is not sure to be “the greatest”, but it is the most visible and predictable. In any case it is, by itself, a danger widely sufficient so as to cause the most catastrophic destruction to Humanity, or to end with it; or, still in a bigger way, with the entire planet.

With regard to the most serious hazards, those ones derived from geological and astronomical cataclysms are largely unpredictable and uncontrollable, and the knowledge we have of them all is more than reduced. As regards to those ones derived from other animals, among the last dinosaur and the first human there was a range of safety of sixty-four million years; and the contemporary “large carnivores” have never been the greatest extra-specific danger for humans. On the contrary, insects and micro-organisms have always caused incomparably greater disasters, especially since “the emerging communities of herders and farmers were forced to remove vegetables and animals that jostled for the same vital space occupied for the species that were being domesticated”. (J.A. Urbeltz.) “The need to preserve them altered the ecological balance and reduced significantly the food chain.”

On the other hand, the interactive relationship existing between the “particular” dangers makes them even more serious. Ecological disasters, deforestation, atmospheric pollution, overpopulation, Malthusian cycles, hunger, cold, plagues, pandemics, wars and persecutions are always closely linked. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse continue riding together: one for all and all for one.

“Among the primates, the human species is located on top of the scale of aggressiveness.” “Carrying in their hearts the instinct of aggression inherited from their anthropoid ancestors and that their reason cannot control”, and victims of the imbalances that their own cultural development has determined, humans have nullified the limits that the higher vertebrates have placed on intra-specific aggression and extermination, and kill each other without such annoying and frustrating restrictions. Against what the “humanistic” apologetics intends to, the violence is not a remainder of animality in humans, or a remnant of barbarity in civilized people. It is humanization, civilization and culture the factors that have increased violence, aggression and cruelty to hitherto unknown levels.

“Having abandoned cannibalism, which placed the humans on a par with the great predators such as lions and wolves, their formidable hunting ability managed to bring them to the top of the food chain, eliminating the risk of being systematically eaten by other more powerful predators.” (J.A. Urbeltz.) But ‘cannibalism’ is not the same as ‘anthropophagy’; so, in reality, cannibalism has never placed humans “on a par” with wolves and lions but far below them, since these ones are generally not cannibals even if they are anthropophagous, while humans are so:

“However, cannibalism is very rare in warm-blooded vertebrates and almost unknown in mammals, probably for the simple reason that conspecifics ‘do not taste good’; a fact observed by polar research scientists when they tried feeding the flesh of dead or emergency-slaughtered dogs to the team survivors.” (K. Lorenz; Ibid.)

Just as war puts the human up to the levelof the so-called “social insects”, the cannibalism places him on a level with the carnivorous insects. “Anthropologists concerned with the habits of Australopithecus have repeatedly stressed that these hunting progenitors of man have left humanity with the dangerous heritage of what they term ‘carnivorous mentality’.”

Now then, once again “This statement confuses the concept of the carnivore and the cannibal which are, to a large extent, mutually exclusive.One can only deplore the fact that man has definitely not got a carnivorous mentality! All his misfortune arises from his being a basically harmless, omnivorous creature, lacking in natural weapons with which to kill big prey, and, therefore, also devoid of the built-in safety devices which prevent ‘professional’ carnivores from abusing of their killing power to destroy fellow-members of their own species. [...], all heavily armed carnivores possess sufficiently reliable inhibitions which prevent the self-destruction of the species.” (K. Lorenz; Ibid.)

Unlike the “great predators”: potentially anthropophagi but not cannibals, the humans are cannibals and therefore anthropophagi. Not as a result of cultural underdevelopment nor in spite of cultural development but precisely becauseofcultural development. Humans’ anthropophagous cannibalism, as well as war, is a result of knowledge, conceptual thinking and language. The cultural superiority of the human has enabled him to develop the instincts, the will, the fondness and the more powerful and refined instruments that ever existed in order to oppress, kill and torture other humans.

War nourished slavery, which in its turn had humanized war. “Until then, it was not known what to do with the prisoners of war, therefore they were simply killed; in a still more distant date they were eaten.” Later “their life was spared and their work used”. “The slavery had been invented.” “That, even for the slaves, was a progress: the prisoners of war, among whom the mass of slaves was recruited, did now at least conserve life, while before that they were exterminated in mass and without defence, and still earlier they passed to the grill.”

As soon as the human produced the artificial weapons, he used them to kill, steal and enslave their neighbours; and as soon as he managed to master the domain of fire and developed the culinary arts, he availed of them to roast and eat his neighbour. The bad taste or the nasty smell of a fellow’s flesh removes the appetite to the most voracious of the other animals, but not to the great inventor of the culinary arts. There where archaeology discovers traces of domesticated fire, there also appear cooked human remains product of “the culture, civilization and progress” of humankind.

“The final criticism of its physical side [the fact of her having been burnt at the stake] is implied in the refusal of the Marquesas islanders to be persuaded that the English did not eat Joan. Why, they ask, should anyone take the trouble to roast a human being except with that object? They cannot conceive its being a pleasure.” (G. B. Shaw; ‘Saint Joan’, Preface, 1924.)

“Above all, it is more than probable that the destructive intensity of the aggression drive: still a hereditary evil on mankind, is the consequence of a process of intra-specific selection which worked on our forefathers for roughly forty thousand years, that is, throughout the early Stone Age. When man had reached the stage of having weapons, clothing and social organization, so overcoming the dangers of starving, freezing and being eaten by wild animals, and these dangers ceased to be the essential factors influencing selection, an evil intra-specific selection must have set in. The factor influencing selection was now the wars waged between hostile neighbouring tribes. These must have evolved into an extreme form of all those so-called ‘warrior virtues’ which unfortunately many people still regard as desirable ideals.” “The invention of artificial weapons upset the equilibrium of killing potential and social inhibitions.” “The rapid transformation of the human ecology and sociality unbalances the mechanisms of phylogenetically adapted behaviour.”

Among the diverse animals in their natural environment operates the guarantee of the “minimum or critical distance”, socially or territorially established, that is: the threshold whose “illegal” crossing triggers the “critical reaction”, the aggression or the defence, and decides between the flight and the desperate attack. “There is only one drive of which it can be said that it generally subjugates all others – the escape drive – but even this one sometimes meets its master.” “Almost every animal capable of self-defence, from the smallest rodent upwards, fights furiously when it is cornered and has no means of escape”; unless the terror and panic paralyze them completely, subtracting them all defensive and offensive ability.

“The expression ‘fighting like a cornered rat’ has become symbolic of the desperate struggle in which the fighter stakes his all, because he cannot escape and can expect no mercy. This most violent form of fighting behaviour is motivated by fear, by the most intense flight impulses whose natural outlet is prevented by the fact that the danger is too near; so the animal not daring to turn its back on it, fights with the proverbial courage of desperation.” The famous “ferocity” shown by the large carnivores or herbivores when faced with their human land-fellows generally comes from the same conditioning.

It might perhaps be a relief, for the delicate champions of the supposed intra-specific non-violence and extra-specific isolationism of humans (values that they attribute to them, after having declared them supposedly “superior and alien” to primates), to know that, despite their closest resemblance and kinship, are not the monkeys that present a social behaviour more similar to that of humans. “The social organization of humans resembles much to that of the rats, which are also, in the interior of the closed tribe, social and peaceful beings but which behave as true devils towards their conspecifics that do not belong to the same community.” “The rat operates basically with the same methods as those of man, by traditional transmission of experience and its dissemination within the close community.” “There are never any serious fights within the large family even when this comprises dozens of animals. [...] Within the pack there is no real fighting.” Among them, the critical distance is unnecessary: “Animals of contact [...], the rats like touching each other.” “Among rats, the procreation stops automatically when a certain degree of over-population is reached, while the human has not found yet an effective system to prevent what is called demographic explosions.” The latter has instead invented the artificial weapons, giving it the domination or extermination of the other big predators, and the weapons of mass destruction, allowing it to periodically alleviate the demographic problem and a few others, opening up unlimited prospects of destruction and self-destruction.

The extra-specific aggression in humans and rats is much lower than the intra-specific of the ones and the others. The rat – an animal that is sociable, peaceful, affectionate, respectful of its fellows, protector and patient with the weak and defenceless fellows, attentive and considerate with the opposite sex – shows signs of an unlimited aggressiveness, ferocity and cruelty with the individuals belonging to another community which have the terrible misfortune of entering the wrong tribe and territory. The collective fury is such, that the aggressive psychosis does overflow even in the interior of the super-family; and the state of emergency inherent to the hunting of other rats suspends in part the peaceful intra-communitarian inhibitions.

The fate of the strange rat is, indeed, terrifying: “With eyes bulging from their sockets, their hair standing on end, the rats set out on the rat hunt. They are so angry that if two of them meet they bite each other. ‘So they fight for three to five seconds,’ reports Steiniger, ‘then with necks outstretched they sniff each other thoroughly and afterwards part peacefully. On the day of persecution of the strange rat, all the members of a rat-clan are irritable and suspicious.’ [...] in this case we did not await the bitter end but put the experimental animal into a protective cage [...]. Without such sentimental interference, the fate of the strange rat would be sealed. The best thing that can happen to it [...] is that it should die of shock. Otherwise it is slowly torn to pieces by its fellows. Only rarely does one see an animal in such desperation and panic, so conscious of the inevitability of a terrible death, as a rat which is about to be slain by rats. It ceases to defend itself. One cannot help comparing this behaviour with what happens when a rat faces a large predator that has driven it into a corner whence there is no more escape than from the rats of a strange clan. In the face of death it meets the eating enemy with attack, the best method of defence, and springs at it with the shrill war-cry of its species”, and “with the courage that gives despair”, instead of being paralyzed by terror and panic, as it is before a foreign family of rats.

To find something not just similar but incomparably worse we should look again to that privileged cocoon of the evolution of the species which is the human. The optimistic vision of the family, tribal, and national “sociability and pacifism” of the humans equates them in that respect to their four-legged neighbours and guests; however, the internal tensions and disputes of the human nations are far superior to those of the rats. The intra-specific aggression of the rat is inhibited in the interior of the super-families, and limited only to the “international” field. Instead, the infighting that occur between humans: economic, of class, sexual, religious, between generations and others are not limited to inter-tribal or international relations. The human animal does not suffer from such inhibitions of his – natural, innate or cultural – aggressiveness. His universalism and broadmindedness allow him to look at things in grand style, without so narrow and annoying limitations.

Sometimes, the intra-specific affinity of humans seems to even stimulate their most aggressive and cruel impulses, as when “unreasoning and unreasonable human nature causes two nations to compete, though no economic necessity compels them to do so; it induces two political parties or religions with amazingly similar programmes of salvation to fight each other bitterly; and it impels an Alexander or a Napoleon to sacrifice millions of lives in his attempt to unite the world under his sceptre. We have been taught to regard some of the persons who have committed these and similar absurdities with respect, even as ‘great’ men; we are wont to yield to the political wisdom of those in charge, and we are all so accustomed to these phenomena, that most of us fail to realize how abjectly stupid and undesirable the historical mass behaviour of humanity actually is”.

The human groups hate their peers because they are different. Strictly speaking, their hatred of diversity makes it more common that they do prefer to kill, steal and torture the Races, Tribes or Nations different than their own; but in this preference there is nothing narrow, humiliating, discriminating or exclusionary towards their own compatriots or fellow-religionists, whom – if properly stimulated by certain ideological conditioning – they kill, steal and torture when they can with undisguised satisfaction. Nobody has slain so many US Americans as did their compatriots in one single War Between the States. Nobody has persecuted, tormented and burnt alive so many Christians as did the Christians. Nobody has locked up, tortured and executed so many Communists as the Communists did. No one has imprisoned, tortured and murdered so many Spaniards as did General Franco.

In the war that followed the military, clerical, imperialistic and fascist “uprising” of 1936, “it is true that there also were the anarchists and the communists; but the enemy, the real enemy was the Basque”, says Jose L. de Vilallonga, who burns with the desire to repair his youthful weaknesses by finally shooting the Basque priests he let escape then. What did not prevent the Spanish Nationalists on both sides: military, civilian and ecclesiastical, from killing and torturing each other with delight and without restrictions.

Aggression, fear, escape, appeasement, inhibition and submission are resources that meet social functions for the other animals; resources that are ineffective for human beasts. For the non-human animal the defence eventually becomes an attack when he understands that cannot do anything else. Instead, for the human animal the defence necessarily tends to the final, decisive or “preventive” attack. The basic instinct of escape: common resource in all animal species, steps back in the human and gives way to the unlimited extension of the aggressive instinct, powered by the reason, a privilege of the human. Even though the sub-human aggression is limited by the territory, the general conditions of survival, and the instincts of preservation of the family or supra-family groups, the human aggression instead does not know and has overflowed such bounds. The capacity of association of the human is still very limited, yet his capacity for conflict and destruction is incomparably superior, without no possible comparison in all the evolution of the species.

“The close crowding of many individuals in a small space brings about a fatigue of all social reactions.” “That crowding increases the propensity to aggressive behaviour has long been known and demonstrated experimentally by sociological research.” “Humans do not experience any pleasure (but, on the contrary, a great displeasure) in their meeting when there is not a power capable of imposing on all of them.”

We do now link with a prohibition characteristic of primitive Peoples: the taboo. In Polynesian cultures, the taboo is a prohibition of a magic-religious character that basically can affect persons, things and places: what is taboo cannot be touched and, sometimes, not even regarded or named. We read in Freud: “In the early childhood has been developed an intense pleasure to touch”. “To this pleasure, an external prohibition of realizing this contact has promptly ensued.” “The main, central phobia in the neurosis is, as in the taboo, that of contact, from where comes its name: prohibition of touching.”

Yet, with the consequent obstinacy and extremism of fanaticism (which lead to the unrestricted extension of the field of repression), from the phobia of contact we have moved on to the phobia of proximity, of meeting, and of all forms of relationship. From the ‘noli me tangere’, humans have passed to the prohibition of vision and hearing, to the fear of nudity and hygiene, to the dress obsession and to the burqa, to self-repulsion, to physical and moral self-mutilation, to masochism, and to the sexual-territorial segregation and isolationism in the social coexistence, production or education; according to the varying degrees of disease that each case presents. For the patients of a mind that has become neurotic by the repression and the phobia to touch, “the touching is the beginning of all attempt to take possession of an individual or a thing, to dominate it, to take out of it exclusive and personal services”.

The propagation of the Christian faith by means of Violence and Terror has not respected the beliefs, rights and life of the others; yet, the pagans have generally been “better” regarded and treated than the “infidels” belonging to the other religions of the Book, and these ones, better than the heretics and relapses. Apostates, renegades and colonial regular troops have overflowed in political and ideological ferocity towards their compatriots and co-religionists by adoption, in “reason” of their own selective affinities, and have obtained at times – when they have been wrong in choosing the winner – the corresponding treatment of their former countrymen and brothers in religion.

The human species has inverted the effect of “critical distance”. The weapons of mass destruction do allow to dilute and multiply the capacity to kill or make others suffer; depersonalize the objects which violence is aimed to; shorten the duration of the warlike action; increase the combativeness by concealing danger and decreasing fear; and relieve the exaggerated scruples and sensitivity of the delicate souls, eventually badly adapted to the high mission assigned to them. Thanks to the weapons of long and wide scope, the human not only multiplies his power of death and destruction but he counteracts the incipient natural or cultural inhibitions that make it difficult or traumatic, for some, the individual aggression carried out at sight or with stab. From which are derived the military “drilling”, the hard and costly periods of training and conditioning of the (“non-violent”) armed forces for killing, or the subterfuge of the blank – bullet-less – cartridge in a firing squad. (Not everybody has the frame of mind of Vilallonga, “Grandee of Spain”, who acknowledges that his father introduced him to those squads as a “volunteer”, that he was there “every day of a month”, and that in the end, “after eight days you do that just as if you were killing rabbits”.)

Given the high moral level with which humans do gut among themselves, the psychological assistance, the religious casuistry, and the ideological indoctrination of recruits are intended so as to relieve or cancel the “unhappy consciousness”. As the French mathematician, physicist and catholic theologian Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) put it: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction”.

In this sense, an Anglican Bishop did his best to combat the “Christmas truce” of 1914, leaving it openly clear the rarefaction and oblivion of the Christian ideology of illusion: charity, universal brotherhood in Christ etc., in the face of the urgent needs of the ideology of reality:

“[...] Well, my brethen, the sword of the Lord is in your hands. You are the very defenders of civilization itself: the forces of Good against the forces of Evil. For this war is, indeed, a Crusade! A holy war to save the freedom of the world. In truth I tell you: the Germans do not act like us, neither do they think like us, for they are not, like us, children of God. Are those, who shell cities populated only by civilians, the children of God? Are those, who advance armed hiding behindwomen and children, the children of God? With God’s help you must kill the Germans: good or bad, young or old, kill every one of them so that it won’t have to be done again. The Lord be with you”.

The intra-specific fights involve a much greater and more imminent danger for the survival for the species of ‘homo sapiens’ than for any other animal species. Thanks to the cultural development, Humanity has invented the struggles and wars: national and international, of religion and of classes, the repression, terrorism and torture. One who has seen or learned what are the behaviour of an army of war or occupation, a religious persecution, crusade or holy war, or a national repression, knows what the human superiority over beasts and rats is about. The takings and massacres of St. John of Acre and Jerusalem, of Béziers and Montségur, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the wars of conquest, the national or international class struggles, the continental and inter-continental genocides, the Inquisition, the Tribunal of blood, the Royal or Republican Justice, the auto-da-fé, the demonology, the witch-hunts, the incendiary or nuclear bombs on open cities, and the universal terrorism organized by the “great” States, are the incomparable, catastrophic and irreversible product of the human culture, and of the irrationality, hatred and cruelty which only the human is capable of.

To these spectacular signs of violence are added, more insidiously, the “peaceful” forms of political, economic and cultural conflicts: compulsory military service “in peacetime”, monasticism and initiation tortures; elimination of the previous generation and institutional purge of the new one through infanticide; disregard and sexual mutilations of the female sex, and repression and castration of the male from the first age; sexual exclusion, oppression and repression, and struggle between generations and between sexes; over-exploitation by labour and persecutions that – like wars – never are missing when they are “necessary”; defencelessness and super-exploitation of the weakest, and ideological domestication, conditioning, indoctrination and intoxication aimed to the annihilation of rationality and critical sense; “selective institutions”, cultural selection a contrario from the first age and infantilization of adults, carried out by despots and mandarins; pseudo-pedagogical methods of “education and teaching”, and examinations, competitions and oppositions aimed above all to the stultification of people and to the exhaustion and destruction of their intellectual resources; ruin and squandering of the material and spiritual work inherent in the “wild” industrial and commercial competition; and deliberate fatigue, discouragement, physical decline, exhaustion, sterilization and annihilation of the dangerous energies and forces of the human spirit.

If they survive to war, repression and universal Terrorism, “Human beings of today are attacked by so called managerial diseases, high blood pressure, renal atrophy, gastric ulcers and torturing neuroses; y they succumb to barbarism because they have no more time for cultural interests”. Even so, barbarism: the intermediate stage between primitive animality and civilization, could not destroy the human species. Instead, with “the civilization”, the conflicts have acquired the dimensions, conditions and instruments with which the human: irresponsible, obtuse, suicidal and incomparably gifted for the destruction,can effectively destroy himself.

“What would be a human community without a service of order and security? A cage of wild beasts”, writes the French Bishop of the Basses Pyrenees, Baiona and Oloron, Mgr. Moleres. Like the central ideologists of the imperialism (or its peripheral ones, such as those of the Basque nationalist Party [Pnv] and its satellites included the Eta group), who denounce violence in prisons, barracks and police stations, Bishop Moleres condemns violence in the cage; however, he “forgets” to include the cage itself, that is: the imperialistic and fascist State of Francespain, as a fundamental, original and permanent criminal Violence.

But the jungle is not cage. The animal behaviour in their natural environment is radically different from the animal behaviour in the artificial conditions of captivity that humans create. The cages of “wild beasts”, the “natural” reserves, the zoos, the circuses or the bullrings are not made by the natural history: they are constructions of the human beasts: who imagine themselves as exclusive carriers of moral and eternal values, and not of the others. They are the humans who artificially modify the behaviour of the other animals. They are humans the beasts that cage and condition those animals, fierce or meek, so that humans can kill them; so that they combat and kill each other; or to help humans fight, cage and kill each other without limitations, as they have always done. Who protects “the beasts” from humans?

Perhaps the fate and images of the Christians in the amphitheatres of the Roman Empire – at that time inside, and not outside the cage – is not alien to his prejudices and preventions; yet, it is the “violence” that disturbs the peace “in his Department” of the French Empire what has worried the French Bishop Moleres. “The cage of wild beasts” is his terrorist reference so as to make understand what awaits to those who do not accept the French monopoly of criminal Violence; outside of which there is not – according to him – order, nor security, nor police, nor judges nor possible nor conceivable Salvation. The Prelate of the Lower Pyrenees condemns the individual attempts; but affirms the necessity and legitimacy of the (French) forces of war and repression, the (French) police, the (French) “Justice” and the (French) prisons. He does also justify, recognize and bless the additional violence extra or intra-cage of the French (non-violent) police, “needed to tame and pacify” his caged victims, (whom, to make matters worse, he nevertheless sends a greeting).

In addition, the intra-specific, cataclysmic and apocalyptic apotheosis of the “non-nationalist and non-violent French humanism”, namely: the nuclear war, is for him and his colleagues in sacred ministry “not only a right but a duty of the French people”. A pastoral Letter from the French Bishops proclaims the moral obligation of the French people to use the atomic weapon “if necessary”. (But not without its necessity: in these things the ecclesiastical morality is very demanding, and their casuistry extremely strict; it’s not allowed to drop nukes, just like that, by taste or whim, unless “the French people” deems it necessary.)

It should be recalled, to the sensitive but forgetful “adversaries of all violence”, that the initial and official objective of the force de frappe was to get rid or burned alive of fifty million women, men and children within a matter of hours; and that the French nuclear tests, at the expense of the natives of the colonies (that they call “overseas French territories”), have resulted in more unrecognized suffering, sick and dead that many official wars. “To manufacture, transport, or use bombs is to kill,” reminds us the Prelate. Manifestly, “Sonsignor” Moleres does not like tiny bombs: he only likes the big ones – nuclear, if possible, but anyway French – used by the French Government in the service of French Nationalism.

In matter of beasts, as in matter of cages, wars and bombs including the atomic ones, the zoology and anthropology of the French Nationalist prelate have only one goal: to hide and simultaneously sanctify the French monopoly of criminal Violence, and condemn all attempts of Resistance against it among its patients, the beasts of his film.

The imperialistic Nationalism – whether civil or ecclesiastical, governmental or episcopal – does always produce the same perverse and disgusting ideological rubbish. No matter on what it’s about: it might as well deal with theological, sociological or ethological-behavioural issues. The theoretical nonsenses are the ideological daily bread of the French-Spanish imperialistic propaganda in the territories of the Basque People occupied by French-Spanish imperialism.

The zoo-phobic references are not new, either. They were already heard or read in the early stages of the Aryan harassment – ecclesiastically induced – against the basconic tribes and the Kingdom of Nabarre and its Confederate State. Closer to us, it’s enough to just remember the speech of Areilza, the first francoist Mayor of Bilbao, addressed to the occupation troops of General Mola, which called themselves Nationals and that the whole world called Nationalists. (It had not yet been invented by the Pnv the ineffable euphemism of “non-nationalists”, of a so immediate and significant adoption by all the propaganda services of the Spanish Nationalism.) “Let us not be talked about rights. We do not recognize any right except that of conquest. We will chase the Basque nationalists through the mountains as if – they were – wild beasts.” (Some years later, Aresti used the expression “basa-pizti” [wild beast] to denigrate those who sought to restore the use of the Basque Language (Euskara) in the areas where the use of the Spanish “had been” imposed by then.)

In the reality and genetics of the conflicts, the war precedes the peace; the oppression, to the freedom; the selfishness, to the altruism; the disorder, to the order; and the “evil”, to the “good”. “Intra-specific aggression is millions of years much older than personal friendship and love. [...]. Thus intra-specific aggression can certainly exist without its counterpart, love; but conversely, there is no love without aggression.” (K. Lorenz; ‘On Aggression’.)

Love comes from a socially functional inhibition of the instinct of aggression. The human has not invented the intra and extra-specific solidarity, neither the respect nor the protection of the weak, nor the consideration and respect between the sexes. He has not invented love, nor altruism, nor the spirit of sacrifice, nor the personality that conditions them.

The humans are capable of everything: of the best and, above all, of the worst. But the best has, often, precedents and basis in the other animals. Instead, the worst is organized by the humans without the preparation nor the help from anyone. The most original contribution of the human species to the animal kingdom does not consist in the love of one’s neighbour, it consists in the hatred of one’s neighbour. It is in the aggression, death, destruction, suffering, revenge, cruelty and evil for the sake of evil: gratuitously inflicted without social service nor compensation in favour of the species, where the human, thanks to his cultural superiority, surpasses all limits and stands above all species.

Out of necessity, art, sport, sadism or sheer fun, the “heroic” hunters, tamers, bullfighters and other “non-violent” animal-crackers do “face” the teeth, nails, beaks, horns and hooves of non-human animals armed with traps, cages, pikes, iron bars, repeating rifles and sub-machine guns. And if they ever have to “pay the price” instead of earning it, no one could say they didn’t ask for it.

There is not any zoomorphist projection in noting that the extra-specific conflict between humans and animals has political and ideological correspondence in the intra-specific struggles imposed by imperialism and fascism to the humans that they have subdued. The humans have partially or completely done away with countless animals and species of animals; and yet, they present themselves as innocent victims of the aggression and ferocity of these ones. Similarly, the national-imperialistic and fascist ideologists of the predatory Peoples: which have occupied their history in the destruction of Peoples and civilizations whom they have previously subjugated, pretend to be innocent and non-violent victims of the Resistance – more or less real or effective – of the Peoples that they are still oppressing and trying to annihilate while they spread the opposite ideology, necessary in order to falsify and hide that reality.

(From: ‘Violence and Terrorism.- Their ideological mystification at the service of Imperialism’.)