0 comment Sunday, November 2, 2014 | admin
The story of the British ship HMS Bounty and the infamous mutiny, which has been told in books and in several Hollywood movies, is one that has for some reason fascinated me over the years. I haven't read the book on which the movies were based, but I've seen three versions of the film: the one with Errol Flynn, then the Clark Gable version, and the Marlon Brando version. There was a more recent film with Mel Gibson I believe, but I ignore more modern movies.
In my college anthropology class, we spent some time studying about the Bounty, mainly in the context of the 'Founder effect' as seen in the Pitcairn Islanders, who were the descendants of the Bounty mutineers and the Polynesian men and women who went with them to Pitcairn.
I suppose the story was fascinating to me in that I found it hard to envision how a group of English sailors could simply blend with a group of South Sea Islanders. The two peoples and their ways of life seemed so profoundly different, to me.
What could motivate them to do such a thing?
Here, The Narrator, who blogs at Signals From the Brink, writes a very interesting essay on the HMS Bounty, the mutiny, and the resulting Pitcairn Island society. He makes a novel analogy between the Mutiny and the present Western crisis.
There are various ways of describing and understanding the unfortunate turn many in Western Civilization have taken over the past century. Comparing events to "revolutions" and the course of specific nations to the Titanic striking the iceberg are common (engaged in by this writer as well). But every now and then a new perspective may help better see the possible causations as well as the potential remedies/outcomes to our plight.
"History repeats itself" we are told and sure enough that seems to most often be the case. More than that, specific historical incidents seem to foreshadow events on a greater scale and era.
Such an event is the Mutiny On The Bounty. (I should state that I�m no expert on the subject and that my casual interest in it was sparked by viewing the 1984 film �The Bounty�.)
That mutiny, wherein a group of men from a civilized Western nation, having temporarily grown accustomed to a leisurely life of hedonistic nihilism on a tropic Island, rebel against their commander when faced with returning to a orderly and disciplined, (Western) way of life, has a general theme which can be applied to our current situation.''
It's a fascinating piece. He makes a case that the mutineers acted of their own accord to rebel against the Western (and I would add, Christian) society into which they were born, and to start a new life of 'noble savagery' with their newfound Polynesian companions. As history has shown, the paradise went awry fairly early, as such efforts always do, especially when 'diversity' and culture clashes are built-in.
An overview of the Pitcairn Island history is here, at this Seventh Day Adventist website. The Adventists brought their faith to the mutineers' descendants, and though the article notes that there are only small numbers of Adventists there now, they don't even hint at the troubled nature of the society on Pitcairn, which is dealt with here in a Vanity Fair article. It seems that the Christian veneer of the Islanders was rather skin-deep, and the sexual mores of the people seemed to follow the kind of anything-goes approach to sexuality so admiringly cited by anthropologists like Margaret Mead, who wrote of the casual attitude to sex in the South Seas. From the VF article:
Headlines around the world had focused on the criminal case: Pitcairn�s cloud of vice. But a more dramatic story lay buried in the thousands of pages piled high on a table partly shielding the Privy Council lords from the commoners facing them.
For most of its history, Pitcairn lived with a secret sex culture that defined island life. Adultery was not just routine but pervasive, as was the sexual fondling of infants and socially approved sex games among young children. Incest and prostitution were not unknown. The criminal charges stemmed from a longtime island practice of "breaking in" girls as young as 10.
The legal case had dragged on for eight years and threatened the island�s survival. Sharp divisions existed over Mother England�s fairness in forcing the weight of English law onto a tiny population as isolated and lost in time as Pitcairn�s. Colleen McCullough, the Australian author of The Thorn Birds and wife of a well-known Pitcairn descendant, harshly criticized the British for prosecuting what even the Foreign Office grudgingly conceded was a "cultural trait." She said, "It�s Polynesian to break your girls in at 12."
Typical liberalism: "who are we to judge other cultures? If pedophilia is 'their culture,' who are we to judge? So say the multicultists.
This National Geographic article also deals with these scandals, and the 'cultural differences' rationalization.
As The Narrator says in his essay,
This hedonistic utopia was, ironically, founded by people of low character and no qualms about disloyalty and lack of honor or restraint. It�s not difficult to imagine how well that worked out.
Bligh addressed the temptations to which they had yielded in his published account of the mutiny in 1790, writing:
"It will very naturally be asked, what could be the reason for such a revolt? in answer to which, I can only conjecture that the mutineers had assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheiteans, than they could possibly have in England; which, joined to some female connections, have most probably been the principal cause of the whole transaction.
The women at Otaheite are handsome, mild and chearful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved. The chiefs were so much attached to our people, that they rather encouraged their stay among them than otherwise, and even made them promises of large possessions. Under these, and many other attendant circumstances, equally desirable, it is now perhaps not so much to be wondered at, though scarcely possible to have been foreseen, that a set of sailors, most of them void of connections, should be led away; especially when, in addition to such powerful inducements, they imagined it in their power to fix themselves in the midst of plenty, on the finest island in the world, where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond any thing that can be conceived."
It would appear that the combination of their isolation from civilization and perhaps the character of the founders of this 'utopia', they inevitably degenerated.
An interesting side bit of trivia is the linguistic degeneration. The descendants developed a kind of bastardized English or pidgin dialect:
...an amalgam of 18th-century English and Polynesian that the old-timers still use among themselves. This pidgin language was developed as a way for the English sailors and the Tahitians to communicate, and it features some words I could discern, such as musket (gun), and others I couldn't, such as tin-tola (girlfriend) and wettles (food). Brenda helped translate.
Len: "Nava bin doun Gudgeon fer long time." Brenda: "No one has been down to Gudgeons in a long time."
Len: "Mebe gut sum good side fer clime Down Rope." Brenda: "Maybe there's some good climbing at Down Rope."
Could this be the kind of change we will see in our English language? Will our descendants, if they speak English at all, speak this kind of dumbed-down pidgin dialect?
The Narrator's point is that the mutineers chose their fate; they knowingly decided to abandon their people.
There is no doubt that those outside groups who would wish us harm today have encouraged and cheered on that percentage of us who seek to mutiny against Western Civilization in favor of a multicultural hell. But the fact is it takes a willing participant to be led. And sadly there are not only all-to-willing followers amongst the disloyal, but leaders as well.
In the end we must be careful in our duty of defending the honor or our people, not to deify them or absolve them from the treachery that many of them so willfully engage in.
To be clear, this is not an advocacy of abandoning the resolve to expose the activities of those who might wish us ill, but rather a call for a little more focus on the inward development of the qualities that are needed for the difficult task of preserving and nurturing our people and their civilization back to a safe harbor. We need to once again champion the virtues which established our great societies but which have, of late, fallen out of favor. And part of those virtues was the belief that every man is to, ultimately, be held accountable for his own actions regardless of circumstance or whatever outside influences might have swayed his behavior or actions.
It is indeed a question of character. Some men have poor character and give heed to whatever impulse happens to strike them, while others remain true and honorable no matter how enticing the deceptive voice whispering in their ear is.
There has been a mutiny on the HMS West, and those who remained true to their own have been set adrift. But we must keep hope, for upon reflection of past events we can see the inevitable fate of each group based upon the path they have chosen.''
One or two of the commenters think The Narrator's analogy is not truly apt, because we in the West have not instigated a mutiny; instead we are having it imposed by outsiders against us, or being manipulated into embracing a destruction of our way of life and our people. I suppose there's truth in that, but still, I think the Narrator's point is worth considering, too. But are we to be the mutineers, refusing to follow a derelict captain and a corrupt and oppressive system, or are we the mutiny-resisters? Are our 'leaders' the mutineers against the legitimate order, setting a course to their own misconceived multicult utopia, with unwilling passengers on board?
I've often wondered, myself, why our society and our era has been so vulnerable to these manipulations. Every generation has its malcontents and traitors and those who want to tear down the existing order. In a healthy age and a strong society, those people are ignored and given no legitimacy; people in general are not led astray by them. Why is our age and why are our people suddenly such easy prey?
We've discussed all kinds of factors: the media and its enormous power, the prosperity of our time which makes us soft and hedonistic, the loss of our Faith, and of course the influence of subversive outsiders whose interests conflict with ours. Ultimately, though, are we all just pawns, or do we have the ability to discern, to reject the manipulation, and to choose for ourselves?
And if we still maintain that this situation was forced on us, by guile and manipulation or by force, then does this amount to a plea of helplessness and an abdication of responsibility? Or are we still strong enough in ourselves to assert our own will and act in our own interests?
In my college anthropology class, we spent some time studying about the Bounty, mainly in the context of the 'Founder effect' as seen in the Pitcairn Islanders, who were the descendants of the Bounty mutineers and the Polynesian men and women who went with them to Pitcairn.
I suppose the story was fascinating to me in that I found it hard to envision how a group of English sailors could simply blend with a group of South Sea Islanders. The two peoples and their ways of life seemed so profoundly different, to me.
What could motivate them to do such a thing?
Here, The Narrator, who blogs at Signals From the Brink, writes a very interesting essay on the HMS Bounty, the mutiny, and the resulting Pitcairn Island society. He makes a novel analogy between the Mutiny and the present Western crisis.
There are various ways of describing and understanding the unfortunate turn many in Western Civilization have taken over the past century. Comparing events to "revolutions" and the course of specific nations to the Titanic striking the iceberg are common (engaged in by this writer as well). But every now and then a new perspective may help better see the possible causations as well as the potential remedies/outcomes to our plight.
"History repeats itself" we are told and sure enough that seems to most often be the case. More than that, specific historical incidents seem to foreshadow events on a greater scale and era.
Such an event is the Mutiny On The Bounty. (I should state that I�m no expert on the subject and that my casual interest in it was sparked by viewing the 1984 film �The Bounty�.)
That mutiny, wherein a group of men from a civilized Western nation, having temporarily grown accustomed to a leisurely life of hedonistic nihilism on a tropic Island, rebel against their commander when faced with returning to a orderly and disciplined, (Western) way of life, has a general theme which can be applied to our current situation.''
It's a fascinating piece. He makes a case that the mutineers acted of their own accord to rebel against the Western (and I would add, Christian) society into which they were born, and to start a new life of 'noble savagery' with their newfound Polynesian companions. As history has shown, the paradise went awry fairly early, as such efforts always do, especially when 'diversity' and culture clashes are built-in.
An overview of the Pitcairn Island history is here, at this Seventh Day Adventist website. The Adventists brought their faith to the mutineers' descendants, and though the article notes that there are only small numbers of Adventists there now, they don't even hint at the troubled nature of the society on Pitcairn, which is dealt with here in a Vanity Fair article. It seems that the Christian veneer of the Islanders was rather skin-deep, and the sexual mores of the people seemed to follow the kind of anything-goes approach to sexuality so admiringly cited by anthropologists like Margaret Mead, who wrote of the casual attitude to sex in the South Seas. From the VF article:
Headlines around the world had focused on the criminal case: Pitcairn�s cloud of vice. But a more dramatic story lay buried in the thousands of pages piled high on a table partly shielding the Privy Council lords from the commoners facing them.
For most of its history, Pitcairn lived with a secret sex culture that defined island life. Adultery was not just routine but pervasive, as was the sexual fondling of infants and socially approved sex games among young children. Incest and prostitution were not unknown. The criminal charges stemmed from a longtime island practice of "breaking in" girls as young as 10.
The legal case had dragged on for eight years and threatened the island�s survival. Sharp divisions existed over Mother England�s fairness in forcing the weight of English law onto a tiny population as isolated and lost in time as Pitcairn�s. Colleen McCullough, the Australian author of The Thorn Birds and wife of a well-known Pitcairn descendant, harshly criticized the British for prosecuting what even the Foreign Office grudgingly conceded was a "cultural trait." She said, "It�s Polynesian to break your girls in at 12."
Typical liberalism: "who are we to judge other cultures? If pedophilia is 'their culture,' who are we to judge? So say the multicultists.
This National Geographic article also deals with these scandals, and the 'cultural differences' rationalization.
As The Narrator says in his essay,
This hedonistic utopia was, ironically, founded by people of low character and no qualms about disloyalty and lack of honor or restraint. It�s not difficult to imagine how well that worked out.
Bligh addressed the temptations to which they had yielded in his published account of the mutiny in 1790, writing:
"It will very naturally be asked, what could be the reason for such a revolt? in answer to which, I can only conjecture that the mutineers had assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheiteans, than they could possibly have in England; which, joined to some female connections, have most probably been the principal cause of the whole transaction.
The women at Otaheite are handsome, mild and chearful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved. The chiefs were so much attached to our people, that they rather encouraged their stay among them than otherwise, and even made them promises of large possessions. Under these, and many other attendant circumstances, equally desirable, it is now perhaps not so much to be wondered at, though scarcely possible to have been foreseen, that a set of sailors, most of them void of connections, should be led away; especially when, in addition to such powerful inducements, they imagined it in their power to fix themselves in the midst of plenty, on the finest island in the world, where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond any thing that can be conceived."
It would appear that the combination of their isolation from civilization and perhaps the character of the founders of this 'utopia', they inevitably degenerated.
An interesting side bit of trivia is the linguistic degeneration. The descendants developed a kind of bastardized English or pidgin dialect:
...an amalgam of 18th-century English and Polynesian that the old-timers still use among themselves. This pidgin language was developed as a way for the English sailors and the Tahitians to communicate, and it features some words I could discern, such as musket (gun), and others I couldn't, such as tin-tola (girlfriend) and wettles (food). Brenda helped translate.
Len: "Nava bin doun Gudgeon fer long time." Brenda: "No one has been down to Gudgeons in a long time."
Len: "Mebe gut sum good side fer clime Down Rope." Brenda: "Maybe there's some good climbing at Down Rope."
Could this be the kind of change we will see in our English language? Will our descendants, if they speak English at all, speak this kind of dumbed-down pidgin dialect?
The Narrator's point is that the mutineers chose their fate; they knowingly decided to abandon their people.
There is no doubt that those outside groups who would wish us harm today have encouraged and cheered on that percentage of us who seek to mutiny against Western Civilization in favor of a multicultural hell. But the fact is it takes a willing participant to be led. And sadly there are not only all-to-willing followers amongst the disloyal, but leaders as well.
In the end we must be careful in our duty of defending the honor or our people, not to deify them or absolve them from the treachery that many of them so willfully engage in.
To be clear, this is not an advocacy of abandoning the resolve to expose the activities of those who might wish us ill, but rather a call for a little more focus on the inward development of the qualities that are needed for the difficult task of preserving and nurturing our people and their civilization back to a safe harbor. We need to once again champion the virtues which established our great societies but which have, of late, fallen out of favor. And part of those virtues was the belief that every man is to, ultimately, be held accountable for his own actions regardless of circumstance or whatever outside influences might have swayed his behavior or actions.
It is indeed a question of character. Some men have poor character and give heed to whatever impulse happens to strike them, while others remain true and honorable no matter how enticing the deceptive voice whispering in their ear is.
There has been a mutiny on the HMS West, and those who remained true to their own have been set adrift. But we must keep hope, for upon reflection of past events we can see the inevitable fate of each group based upon the path they have chosen.''
One or two of the commenters think The Narrator's analogy is not truly apt, because we in the West have not instigated a mutiny; instead we are having it imposed by outsiders against us, or being manipulated into embracing a destruction of our way of life and our people. I suppose there's truth in that, but still, I think the Narrator's point is worth considering, too. But are we to be the mutineers, refusing to follow a derelict captain and a corrupt and oppressive system, or are we the mutiny-resisters? Are our 'leaders' the mutineers against the legitimate order, setting a course to their own misconceived multicult utopia, with unwilling passengers on board?
I've often wondered, myself, why our society and our era has been so vulnerable to these manipulations. Every generation has its malcontents and traitors and those who want to tear down the existing order. In a healthy age and a strong society, those people are ignored and given no legitimacy; people in general are not led astray by them. Why is our age and why are our people suddenly such easy prey?
We've discussed all kinds of factors: the media and its enormous power, the prosperity of our time which makes us soft and hedonistic, the loss of our Faith, and of course the influence of subversive outsiders whose interests conflict with ours. Ultimately, though, are we all just pawns, or do we have the ability to discern, to reject the manipulation, and to choose for ourselves?
And if we still maintain that this situation was forced on us, by guile and manipulation or by force, then does this amount to a plea of helplessness and an abdication of responsibility? Or are we still strong enough in ourselves to assert our own will and act in our own interests?
Labels: Death Of The West, History, Libertinism, Moral Relativism, Multiculturalism, Utopianism, Western Decline