The Nomadic Alternative – Page 57

For, as another wise Chinaman knew, life organized as a battle against the natural order inevitably turns into a battle of man against man:

The mountains and streams were divided with boundaries and enclosures, censuses of the population were made, cities were built and dykes dug. Barriers were erected and weapons forged for defence. Officials with special badges were ordained, who differentiated the people into classes of 'noble' and 'mean', and organized rewards and punishments. Then there arose soldiers and weapons giving rise to war and strife. There was arbitrary murder of the guiltless and punishment and death of the innocent.

The walls of Sumerian cities glinted with metallic brilliance under a bright sun. Nippur was a city "endowed with truth". Even its foundations were of lapis lazuli. It was a place of bright clothing, of washed cleanliness and public sanitation, where the dictates of the elders were obeyed. It was also a police state.

"Its face is an awesome face. Its outside no mighty god can oppose, its inside is full of cries of mutilation and bloodshed. The city is a trap, that serves as a pit and a net against the rebellious gang. It grants not long life to the braggart, allows no evil word to be uttered against the divine judgement."

"I made the Asiatics do the dog-walk", vaunted one Pharaoh. Egyptian bas-reliefs depict armed guards herding old men with nooses about their necks towards a canal full of crocodiles. They are wasp-waisted Arabs, the proud Bedouin of the desert. Elsewhere captives "squealing like apes" are shown penned up in cages, like so many captive birds. Human skulls and hands lie piled in conical heaps as though delicacies in the meat-market. On monuments of Tuthmosis II the king had his likeness carved, blatantly shearing off the heads of prisoners as if they were sheaves of corn or flowers in a field.

They remind me of the commendable but frightening honesty of an ex-Foreign Legionary, angry at the American Government for cold-shouldering the blame for civilian massacres in Vietnam. A soldier, he said, was a trained killer, who enjoyed killing and whom his country hired to kill. "On tue les hommes pour trente ans. Après eo on coupe les roses."