Results for 2012-01
Lýðræði hefur marga kosti umfram aðra stjórnarhætti: valdaskipti fara almennt fram á friðsamlegan hátt, og stjórnkerfið sjálft skapar hvata sem fá valdhafa til þess að bæta hag almennings, að minnsta kosti í hjáverkum, í stað þess að verðlauna ávallt og einungis lítilli valdaklíku, eins og þekkist í nær öllum einræðisríkjum.
Meira og minna öll ríki eru að einhverju leyti kleptókratísk -- þ.e.a.s. rekin af eins konar þjófum, sem útdeila auðæfunum sem valdinu fylgir til klíkunnar sem kom þeim í valdastól. Lýðræðisríki eru hins vegar almennt ekki jafn kleptókratísk og einræðisríki. Þetta er m.a. vegna þess að klíkurnar sem koma mönnum til valda í lýðveldi eru yfirleitt svo fjölmennar að kerfisbundið arðrán til þess verðlauna fylgismönnum verður töluvert erfiðara og óhagkvæmara.
Flest ríkustu og valdamestu lönd heimsins eru vestræn lýðræðisríki. Hins vegar búa flestir jarðarbúar ekki við lýðræði. Ríku lýðræðisríkin á vesturlöndum tala mikið um að úbreiða stjórnarfari sínu til annara þjóðríkja, en árangurinn síðastliðna áratugi virðist stopull, jafnvel grunsamlega stopull.
Ég held að ef vesturveldin hefðu raunverulega hagsmuni af að breiða lýðræði út um heiminn allan þá væri það löngu orðið fait accompli. Sögulega séð hafa þau svo sannarlega haft efnahags- og hernaðarvald á liðinni öld til þess að ota öðrum þjóðríkjum heimsins í þá áttina. En það er með öllu óljóst hvort vesturveldin græði neitt beint -- eða til skamms tíma -- á aukinni útbreiðslu lýðræðis. Samskipti við kleptókratískar einræðisstjórnir eru mun einfaldari heldur en samskipti við önnur lýðræðisríki. Það eina sem þarf til þess að fá autokrata til þess að gera það sem þú vilt er nógu andskoti mikill peningur handa honum og valdaklíku hans, ásamt loforðum um að hjálpa honum að halda völdum. Af augljósum ástæðum er mun erfiðara að múta lýðræðisríkjum á þennan hátt.
Í dag byggist mikið af auði og velmegun vestrænu lýðræðisríkjanna á náttúruauðlindum fátækra einræðisríkja. Undir lýðræðislegu stjórnarfari er alls ekki víst að vestræn ítök myndu varðveitast í þessum fátæku ríkjum. Íran 1979 og Tyrkland 2003 eru mjög greinargóð dæmi um hvernig óþveginn almenningur fátækra lýðræðisríkja getur neitað að beygja sig undir vestrænt vald, jafnvel þegar miklir peningar eru í boði. Lýðræði og auðlindir eru hættuleg og ófyrirsjáanleg blanda fyrir vesturríkin og stórfyrirtæki þeirra.
Varla undra að það gengur illa að lýðræðisvæða heiminn.
Ég hef hugleitt vinstrimennsku eilítið undanfarið. Væri ég krafinn um að skilgreina mig á hægri- eða vinstrivæng stjórnmála, myndi ég tvímælalaust segjast tilheyra þeim síðari. Ég myndi jafnvel ganga svo langt að segja að ég sé vinstrimaður ekki bara í pólitík heldur í grundvallarafstöðu minni gagnvart lífinu sjálfu.
Hvað á ég eiginlega við með "vinstrimennsku"? Svo sannarlega ekki eitthvað samansafn af úreltum efnahagsstefnum eða félagsvísindalegum aðferðum. Ég á heldur ekki við þess konar vinstristefnu sem vill fela ríkinu mikil völd yfir lífi eða lifnaðarháttum borgara. Vinstristefna mín er heldur ekki "kratismi" eða "blairismi" eða neitt af þessum útþynntu, hrygglausu sósíaldemókrata-vinstristefnum sem vita ekkert hvar þær standa lengur. Hún ristir miklu dýpra en það.
Vinstrimennska mín er frá hjartanu. Hún felst í vantrausti á valdi almennt, valdi í öllum sínum birtingarmyndum. Ég held með litla manninum gegn þeim stóra. Mín samúð er með þeim fátæku og fyrirlitnu og misnotuðu, og með venjulegu, óbreyttu fólki að reyna að ná endum saman í sálarlausum heimi heimskapítalisma og póstmódernisma. Hún liggur alls ekki hjá stórfyrirtækjum, eða feitum úthverfaviðskiptaköllum á jeppum, eða Finni Ingólfssyni og samsvörum hans víðsvegar um heiminn, mönnum sem maka slímugan krókinn á kostnað skattborgara. Ég hef andúð á auðæfum, og siðferðislegu og félagslegu úrkynjuninni sem fylgir ríkidómi fárra á kostnað almennings. Ég er á móti sameiningu valds í hendur fárra, í hendur sérstakra stétta eða ákveðinna stjórnmálaflokka. Ég er á móti feðraveldinu, og þessum heimsku, gráðugu, alpha-territorial karlmönnunum sem eru helsti eyðileggingarkrafturinn í samstarfi og vináttu fólks alls staðar í heiminum. Ég er á móti nauðgun náttúrunnar af mannana völdum, ég er á móti rasisma, ég er á móti gervivísindum eins og hagfræði, ég er á móti teknókrasíu, ég er á móti stéttaforréttindum, áróðri, lygum og ofbeldi, ég er á móti niðurlægingu mannsandans í öllum sínum birtingarmyndum, ég er á móti heilaþvættinum í fjölmiðlum og menntakerfum hinna ýmsu ríkja, ég er á móti hræsni og sjálfsumgleði vesturlanda, og á móti kerfisbundinni misnotkun og nauðgun þeirra á hér um bil öllum heiminum gegnum beina eða óbeina nýlendustefnu. Ég er á móti óréttlátu valdboði yfirhöfuð.
Á meðan heimurinn er jafn fáránlega óréttlátur og hann er, þá er varla þörf á neinu til að vera með.
(Nanna)
Hvað finnst ykkur um nýju leturgerðina á þessum vef? Ég er að nota embedded CSS web fonts tæknina, og leturgerðina Garamond Premier Pro frá Adobe. Finnst þetta koma frekar vel út.
Verð að játa að innblásturinn kom frá þessari vefsíðu.
(Arnaldur)
Hvað sem mönnum kann að finnast um skoska heimspekinginn Thomas Reid, þá var hann skarpur og lifandi penni. Reid réðst gegn efahyggju Davids Hume, og áleit hann sinn helsta heimspekilega andstæðing. Hann hafði hins vegar eftirfarandi fínu orð um hann að segja:
A system of consequences, however absurd, acutely and justly drawn from a few principles, in very abstract matters, is of real utility in science, and may be made subservient to real knowledge. This merit MR HUME’s metaphysical writings have in a great degree. -- EIP II.12 [1]
Ein af ástæðunum af hverju ég sérhæfði mig í heimspeki 18. aldarinnar á sínum tíma var fegurð enskunnar á fyrri hluta nýaldar. Enska sem ritmál, undir áhrifum frá Bandaríkjunum og alþjóðavæðingu málsins, hefur orðið ljótari með hverjum áratuginum sem síðan hefur liðið. Ég sakna þeirra tíma þegar menn skrifuðu stórfenglegar enskar setningar troðfullar af flóknum lýsingarorðum og löngum undirklausum, með bragþungann ávallt í huga.
Almenn rituð enska okkar tíma er flöt, skilvirk, praktísk og bjúrókratísk. En það er kannski ekki bara vandamál með enskuna, heldur eitthvað sem snertir almenna málnotkun á heimsvísu og endurspeglar heimspekimynd nútímans. Við lifum á tímum innantóms orðagjálfurs. Það er intellectual arfleifð póstmódernismans.
(Steinn)
Mér finnst mjög fyndið að þetta forrit skuli vera til.
Eins og höfundurinn orðar það:
A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame.
Eins og ég hef áður minnst á, þá er ég um þessar mundir að lesa The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined eftir þróunarsálfræðinginn Steven Pinker. Ég er enn að vinna að umfjöllun minni um bókina -- og faktískt enn að lesa hana -- þannig að umfjöllunin sjálf verður að bíða þar til aflestri lýkur, vonandi í næstu viku.
Í dag átti ég hins vegar mjög áhugaverð tölvupóstssamskipti við enskumælandi vin minn um kenningu bókarinnar: að ofbeldi hafi farið snarminnkandi, í heiminum öllum, en sérstaklega í Evrópu og Norður-Ameríku, frá og með byrjun nýaldar. Hér er útdráttur úr einu tölvuskeytinu sem ég sendi fyrr í dag, þegar við vorum að deila um hvort ofbeldi í heiminum hefði í raun minnkað eða ekki:
To me, it is obvious that when a much smaller proportion of people is killed violently in war, the world is a less violent place, -- unless the large-scale violence previously manifested in warfare reappears in other forms (e.g. the use of violent state power against citizens).
Nobody, not me, not Pinker, is arguing that the world isn't a violent place. The question at hand is whether it is more or less violent than previously, and by how much. Violence is a difficult thing to measure, especially since no official statistics exist for the many forms of violence that are perpetuated daily. However, the death count in developed countries is something tangible, something we can measure, and it tells a striking story of decline in violent death.
Regarding the measurement of "violence", an abstract concept, *of course* violence is a complex combination of things and can't be measured directly. But does that mean we can't say anything about it, can't do *any* research on it, can't acquire *some* understanding of it through social science? That, to my mind, is obviously wrong. Even if we can only see vague social indicators in one direction or another, it's still something amenable to study and research, something to build tentative conclusions on pending further available information.
Violent death is just one metric of overall violence, true enough, but I'd say it's a pretty important one. Murder is one of the worst kinds of violence that exists. It takes everything away from a human being. It destroys their consciousness and reduces them to inanimate physical matter.
Even assuming that the level of "rape, beatings, torture, threats, scaring people into silence and enslavement" had stayed constant in the past 500 years, the decrease in violent death alone is an important indicator of improvement in how our societies are organized.
Also, "something you have rarely experienced in your sheltered life" is a cheap ad hominem argument. I may lead a sheltered life, and I may not understand the true horror of brutish violence, having never been subjected to it, but I don't see how this has anything to do with my analysis (or Pinker's, for that matter) of whether the world is a less violent place than previously. First-hand experience of violence does not make somebody into an expert on this complicated question, which can only be answered with measurable facts about the world.
I agree that killing someone is just one of many aspects of violence. However, the murder statistics correlate quite strongly with other forms of violence, e.g. assault and rape, at least in those countries where any statistics are available at all. Countries with fewer murders tend to have less of other forms of physical violence as well. So a murder rate can be a good indicator of overall violence, even if it is just one benchmark.
You say that "a decrease in violence by death simply means that people have found better methods, more hidden and secretive of destroying other people and exploiting them."
This, to me, is equivalent to saying "Yeah, the statistics tell one story, but there are hidden forces we can't measure and don't know about out there." Now, I certainly don't deny that other forms of control, exploitation and subjugation are present, and that many of them are hidden, secretive, and, indeed, violent. They exist, and they are a great evil, something to fight against perpetually. But I do think they are on another level, both in terms of sheer quantity and in terms of social acceptance, than the ubiquitous violence of past ages, which permeated all of society and was acceptable and, indeed, normal to the population at large. I may not have much personal experience with violence, but I am an historian, and I have *read* a great deal about it. To my mind, in order to evaluate whether violence has declined, one needs to have a fairly good understanding of the world as it was just a few hundred years ago. You may understand the horror of violence more personally than I do, but I do know history. Bear with me for a bit:
Until the early modern period, Europe was a STAGGERINGLY cruel and violent place, where people -- including children -- were routinely tortured, executed and flogged, frequently as public spectacles for the frenzied mob, which of course enjoyed every minute of it. Every single human being in society -- even members of the upper classes -- experienced regular beatings at the hands of their elders or social superiors. Torture was commonplace in the administration of justice. Execution was the punishment for most crimes, especially trivial transgressions that infringed on the rights of the elites. Other punishments included amputation, or being "drawn and quartered" or "broken on the wheel". You can look up these routine medieval punishments on Google for the grisly details of unspeakable horrors -- their sheer monstrosity sends a shiver down one's spine. On top of that, warfare was incessant. A young man could expect to be forcibly enlisted into an army against his will, where he would spend his time getting flogged and beaten by his superiors, or out in the field fighting and killing people, and then pillaging and sacking entire cities, raping the women and murdering their children, before putting everything to the torch. These weren't isolated incidents, or occasional bouts of carnage, but the stuff which medieval life was made of. Now, you can say a lot of bad things about the state of the world today, but the only places in the world where such things are routine any more are those countries that are in an effective state of anarchy, where the rule of law and order has broken down. Even the manifold cruelties of US capital punishment, or the relatively frequent executions in modern-day China, are a mere shadow of Europe's medieval past, both in terms of quantity and in how they are administered.
In the West today, most people are appalled by the application of Sharia law, where women are stoned in Muslim countries for minor offences. But a few hundred years ago, we were persecuting and murdering people with equal cruelty, with equally ignorant religious fanaticism, torturing and burning witches by the hundreds of thousands. The very fact that most people in the West today consider this barbarism, and are appalled by it, shows that the public culture in these countries -- and in other countries that have walked the road to economic prosperity -- has changed to an extraordinary degree, and quite clearly for the better. Exploitation and manipulation of human beings is a great evil, but it is definitely a greater evil when it is maintained by violence instead of bribes or economic pressures.
I have no illusions about Western moral superiority. Nor do I believe that human beings have improved morally over time (whatever that would even mean). However, I believe that changing technology and economic circumstances have nudged developed (and developing) societies in a direction of less violence, a turn which can be quite well explained in terms of economics and the self-interest of the capital-owning elites, rather than the naive "people have become nicer" explanation, which obviously doesn't hold water. The population of the West is kept in line, kept obedient, not with harsh violent punishment, but with bribes in the form of consumer goods. The Western countries exert control over a very large part of the world, but most of it is indirect. The West's exploitation and methods of subjugating other countries have become largely non-violent (in terms of warfare), mostly thanks to the fact that violence has (through a set of complicated historical circumstances) become an inefficient method of expanding influence and control. Poor countries in the 3rd world are usually kept in line using sanctions or other forms of economic coercion. No empire ever controlled as large a part of the world using as little violence as the United States. That is a historical fact which simply cannot be written off.
I agree that Pinker can be glib and superficial in his discussions -- for example, his book does not discuss the "all-but-slavery" lives of people in places like Indonesia -- but he is definitely on to something with his book on violence, and that is what I plan to write in my upcoming review of it. His fundamental insight is correct -- we live in less violent times than ever before.
That being said, I think the reason why many people I discuss this with refuse to acknowledge it may be traced to the assumption that acknowledging it is somehow equivalent to saying "everything is just fine with the world" or "the world is not a violent place." That is definitely not what I am saying. I am saying that things are as they are -- that is to say, pretty bad -- but until very recently, they used to be much, much worse.
(Brandur)
Á heimasíðu PNG sniðsins rakst ég á eftirfarandi textabrot:
Note that the PNG home site has moved four times since 1995 (though the URL has changed only three times, and hopefully never again). The current site is hosted by the excellent folks at SourceForge. Mirror sites have been provided in the Netherlands courtesy of Gerard Juyn; in the UK courtesy of Dave Beckett and the JISC National Mirror Service; in Germany courtesy of Tobias Schwarz and AmbiWeb; in Karlsruhe, Germany, courtesy of Sascha Schwarz and Cybermirror; and in Oswiecim, Poland, courtesy of Piotr Maluty and Piotrkosoft. Thanks! (But please, no more! We're in good shape at this point.)
Ég og Arnaldur heimsóttum einmitt Oswiecim árið 2005.
Þjóðverjarnir kölluðu bæinn Auschwitz á 5. áratugi síðustu aldar.
(Sveinbjörn)
Ég hló með sjálfum mér þegar ég las eftirfarandi staðhæfingu frá Friðriki J. Arngrímssyni, framkvæmdastjóra LÍU:
"Umræðan um sjávarútveg hefur því miður ekki verið nógu málefnaleg."
Aldrei hélt ég að ég yrði sammála framkvæmdarstjóra LÍÚ um eitt eða neitt, en hér hittir hann naglann á höfuðið. Umræðan um sjávarútveginn hefur nefnilega alls ekki verið nógu "málefnaleg." Það er m.a. vegna þess að hann og kvótagreifavinir hans, og svo stjórnmálamennirnir sem þeir hafa í vasanum, halda úti umfangsmiklum hræðsluaróðri sem dynur yfir landann á hverjum degi, meira að segja á RÚV. Það hlýtur að kosta þá drjúgan skilding að reka Morgunblaðið hans Dabba og þetta hlægilega hlutdræga Sjávarútvegsblað, en þetta er klárlega góð fjárfesting til langs tíma. Það eru eftir allt saman hundruðir milljarða í húfi.
Aðferðafræði Karls Marx, að greina uppbyggingu mannlegra samfélaga á grundvelli hagkerfisins, hefur mikið til dottið úr tísku í sagnfræðinni. En gamla góða latneska cui bono? -- eða jafnvel ameríska follow the money -- veitir manni samt sem áður einstaklega góðan skilning á uppsprettu valds í íslensku samfélagi. Þeir sem stjórna fiskinum stjórna landinu, beint eða óbeint.
(Þorvaldur Hrafn)
Úr umfjöllun um bók Corey Robins, The Reactionary Mind, á intellektúalablogginu The Crooked Timber of Humanity:
[...] Consider the standard claim about conservatism put forward by Michael Oakeshott in 1956 (also cited by Robin):
“To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”
Now consider how someone who actually held these views in the Britain of 1956 ought to have regarded trade unions. Of all British institutions, they were surely amongst the most familiar and factual, embodying the preference for actual present benefits over utopian projects. Yet that was not, as far as I can tell Oakeshott’s position at all (though his refusal of an honour from the Thatcher government may suggest some reconsideration later in life).
Robin’s thesis is that claims like Oakeshott’s about conservatism (and also, those of Hayek about classical liberalism) are nothing more than a mask for attempts to resist, and where possible, roll back the claims of the working class against their rulers.
I think this is broadly correct. Although there are people with the conservative disposition described above (and also, people who are attracted by radicalism as such), there is no inherent correlation between conservatism as a [character] disposition and support for the political views commonly associated with conservatism.
Ég er hjartanlega sammála. T.a.m. þá er nýfrjálshyggja okkar tíma byltingar-hugmyndafræði með það markmið að umbreyta samfélaginu á radical hátt, ekki að halda í hið gamalgróna, örugga og kunnuga.
Á norðurlöndunum eru það í raun kratarnir sem eru "íhaldið". Ég fjallaði stuttlega um nákvæmlega þetta í grein minni í safnritinu Eilífðarvélin: Uppgjör við nýfrjálshyggjuna, ritstj. Kolbeinn Stefánsson, Háskólaútgáfan 2010.
(Steinn)
[...] the religious divide between Americans and Europeans may be smaller than we think. The sociologists Rodney Stark, of Baylor University, and Roger Finke, of Pennsylvania State University, write that the big difference has to do with church attendance, which really is much lower in Europe. (Building on the work of the Chicago-based sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley, they argue that this is because the United States has a rigorously free religious market, in which churches actively vie for parishioners and constantly improve their product, whereas European churches are often under state control and, like many government monopolies, have become inefficient.) Most polls from European countries show that a majority of their people are believers. Consider Iceland. To judge by rates of churchgoing, Iceland is the most secular country on earth, with a pathetic two percent weekly attendance. But four out of five Icelanders say that they pray, and the same proportion believe in life after death. [ed.]
Citation needed?
(Steinn)
Steven Pinker's summary of the Old Testament in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined:
Like the works of Homer, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was set in the late 2nd millennium BCE but written more than five hundred years later. But unlike the works of Homer, the Bible is revered today by billions of people who call it the source of their moral values. The world's bestselling publication, the Good Book has been translated into three thousand languages and has been placed in the nightstands of hotels all over the world. Orthodox Jews kiss it with their prayer shawls; witnesses in American courts bind their oaths by placing a hand on it. Even the president touches it when taking the oath of office. Yet for all this reverence, the Bible is one long celebration of violence.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God took one of Adam's ribs, and made he a woman. And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain. And she again bare his brother Abel. And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. [...] No sooner do men and women begin to multiply than God decides they are sinful and that the suitable punishment is genocide. When the flood recedes, God instructs Noah in its moral lesson, namely the code of vendetta: ”Whoso sheddeth a man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."
The next major figure in the Bible is Abraham, the spiritual ancestor of Jews, Christians and Muslims. Abraham has a nephew, Lot, who settles in Sodom. Because the residents engage in anal sex and comparable sins, God immolates every man, woman and child in a divine napalm attack. Lot's wife, for the crime of turning around to look at the inferno, is put to death as well.
Abraham undergoes a test of his moral values when God orders him to take his son Isaac to a mountaintop, tie him up, cut his throat, and burn his body as a gift to the Lord. Isaac is spared only because at the last moment an angel stays his father's hand. For millenia readers have puzzled over why God insisted on this horrifying trial. One interpretation is that God intervened not because Abraham had passed the test but because he had failed it, but that is anachronistic: obedience to divine authority, not reverence for human life, was the cardinal virtue.
Isaac's son Jacob has a daughter, Dinah. Dinah is kidnapped and raped -- apparently a customary form of courtship at the time, since the rapist's family then offers to purchase her from her own family as a wife for the rapist. Dinah's brothers explain that an important moral principle stands in the way of this transaction: the rapist is uncircumcised. So they make a counteroffer: if all the men in the rapist's hometown cut off their foreskins, Dinah will be theirs. While the men are incapacitated with bleeding penises, the brothers invade the city, plunder and destroy it, massacre the men and carry off the women and children. When Jacob worries that neighboring tribes may attack them in revenge, his sons explain that it was worth the risk: "Should our sister be treated like a whore?“ Soon afterward they reiterate their commitment to family values by selling their brother Joseph into slavery.
Jacob's descendants, the Israelites, find their way to Egypt and become too numerous for the Pharaoh's liking, so he enslaves them and orders that all the boys be killed at birth. Moses escapes the mass infanticide and grows up to challenge the Pharaoh to let his people go. God, who is omnipotent, could have softened Pharaoh's heart, but he hardens it instead, which gives him a reason to afflict every Egyptian with painful boils and other miseries before killing off every one of their firstborn sons. [...] God follows this massacre with another one when he drowns the Egyptian army as they pursue the Israelites across the Red Sea.
The Israelites assemble at Mount Sinai and hear the Ten Commandments, the great moral code that outlaws engraved images and the coveting of livestock but gives a pass to slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide of neighboring tribes. The Israelites become impatient while waiting for Moses to return with an expanded set of laws, which will prescribe the death penalty for blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath. To pass the time, they worship a statue of a calf, for which the punishment turns out to be, you guessed it, death. Following orders from God, Moses and his brother Aaron kill three thousand of their companions.
God then spends seven chapters of Leviticus instructing the Israelites on how to slaughter the steady stream of animals he demands of them. Aaron and his two sons prepare the tabernacle for the first service, but the sons slip up and use the wrong incense. So God burns them to death.
As the Israelites proceed toward the promised land, they meet up with the Midianites. Following orders from God, they slay the males, burn their city, plunder the livestock, and take the women and children captive. When they return to Moses, he is enraged because they spared the women, some of whom had led the Israelites to worship rival gods. So he tells his soldiers to complete the genocide and to reward themselves with nubile sex slaves they may rape at their pleasure.
In Deuteronomy 20 and 21, God gives the Israelites a blanket policy for dealing with cities that don't accept them as overlords: smite the males with the edge of the sword and abduct the cattle, women and children. Of course, a man with a beautiful new captive faces a problem: since he has just murdered her parents and brothers, she may not be in the mood for love. God anticipates this nuisance and offers the following solution: the captor should shave her head, pare her nails, and imprison her in his house for a month while she cries her eyes out. Then he may go in and rape her.
With a designated list of other enemies (Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Preizzites, Hivites and Jebusites) the genocide has to be total "Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them ... as the Lord thy God commanded thee".
Joshua puts this directive into practice when he invades Canaan and sacks the city of Jericho. After the walls came tumbling down, his soldiers "utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword." More earth is scorched as Joshua "smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded."
The next stage in Israelite history is the era of the judges, or tribal chiefs. The most famous of them, Samson, establishes his reputation by killing thirty men during his wedding feast because he needs their clothing to pay off a bet. Then, to avenge the killing of his wife and her father, he slaughters a thousand Philistines and sets fire to their crops; after escaping capture, he kills another one thousand with the jawbone of an ass. When he is finally captured and his eyes are burned out, God gives him the strength for a 9/11-like suicide attack in which he implodes a large building, crushing the three thousand men and women who are worshipping inside it.
Israel's first king, Saul, establishes a small empire, which gives him the opportunity to settle an old score. Centuries earlier, during the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, the Amalekites had harassed them. And God commanded the Israelites to "wipe out the name Amalek." So when the judge Samuel anoints Saul as king, he reminds Saul of the divine decree: "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." Saul carries out the order but Samuel is furious to learn that he has spared their king, Agag. So Samuel "hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord."
Saul is eventually overthrown by his son-in-law, David, who absorbs the southern tribes of Judah, conquers Jerusalem, and makes it the capital of a kingdom that will last four centuries. David would come to be celebrated in story, song and sculpture, and his six-pointed star would symbolize his people for three thousand years. Christians too would revere him as the forerunner of Jesus.
But in Hebrew scripture, David is not just the "sweet singer of Israel"; the chiseled poet who plays a harp and composes the Psalms. After he makes his name by killing Goliath, David recruits a gang of guerrillas, extorts wealth from his fellow citizens at swordpoint, and fights as a mercenary for the Philistines. These achievements make Saul jealous: the women in his court are singing "Saul has killed by the thousands, but David by the tens of thousands." So Saul plots to have him assassinated. David narrowly escapes before staging a successful coup.
When David becomes king, he keeps up his hard-earned reputation for killing by the tens of thousands. After his general Joab "wasted the country of the children of Ammon," David "brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron." Finally he manages to do something that God considers immoral: he orders a census. To punish David for this lapse, God kills seventy thousand of his citizens.
Within the royal family, sex and violence go hand in hand. While taking a walk on the palace roof one day, David peeping-toms a naked woman, Bathsheba. and likes what he sees, so he sends her husband to be killed and adds her to his seraglio. Later, one of David's children rapes another one and is killed in revenge by a third. The avenger, Absalom, rounds up an army and tries to usurp David's throne by having sex with ten of his concubines (As usual, we are not told how the concubines telt about this). While fleeing David's army, Absalom’s hair gets caught in a tree, and David's general thrusts three spears into his heart. This does not put the family squabbles to an end. Bathsheba tricks a senile David into anointing their son Solomon as his successor. When the legitimate heir, David's older son Adonijah, protests, Solomon has him killed.
King Solomon is credited with fewer homicides than his predecessors and is remembered instead for building the Temple in Jerusalem, and for writing the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song Of Song (Although with a harem of seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines, he clearly didn't spend all his time writing). Most of all he is remembered for his eponymous virtue, "the wisdom of Solomon." Two prostitutes sharing a room give birth a few days apart. One of the babies dies, and each woman claims that the surviving boy is hers. The wise king adjudicates the dispute by pulling out a sword and threatening to butcher the baby and hand each woman a piece of the bloody corpse. One woman withdraws her claim, and Solomon awards the baby to her.
[...]
The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery [ed]. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including children. Women are bought, sold and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no apparent reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament.
(Eiki)