[Sca-cooks] Fw: Response to Crusades and cannibalism

[Ana Valdés]

By the way, today on the news, a German cannibal killer who asked through the
newspapers or the Internet to have contact with someone who wanted to die and be
eaten. He got a lot of answers and he chose one, a man. They met, they made love
and cut the man's penis and they tried to eat it "flambé", but they did'nt succed.
At the end they grilled it and they ate it. Afterwards the other man killed
himself and the man who advertized hanged him, emptied his organs and cut him in
pieces. He froze the meat and ate it during a month.
Insanity? Collective madness? The breaking of so many tabues at the same time!

"Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius" wrote:

> Also sprach Phlip:
> >More from Paul Buell,
>
> >  > Chinese sources, by the way too, like
> >>  to point out that enemies and bad guys eat people meat, minced human liver
> >  > being a particular delicacy, if we believe the Zhuangzi (Robber Zhi).
>
> FWIW, the convicted American serial killer and cannibal, Albert Fish,
> executed in the mid 1930's, claimed he got the idea of eating people
> from a friend, one John Davis, who had been a deckhand on the U.S.
> steamer "Tacoma". The claim is that in 1894 Davis took a trip to Hong
> Kong and landed to find the entire country in a state of extreme
> famine, that human meat was available for purchase from most
> butchers, and that children under 14 were liable to be snatched off
> the streets and sold.
>
> Anyway, moving right along, I wonder where the question of insanity
> enters into all this. Obviously some scholars in this field have
> something of a vested interest in proving that cannibalism is either
> nonexistent or an extreme aberration, and not really a cultural
> thing. I'm inclined to accept some of this stuff as evidence that the
> practice is/was a little more widespread than some would like to
> believe; but where do accounts from the obviously deranged fit into
> all this?
>
> I mean, it is quite clear that Fish (BTW, related to the famous old
> American family of statesmen, and originally bearing the given name
> "Hamilton") was insane by just about any standard. Do some other
> accounts of cannibalism under the stress of starvation or other
> duress also need to be re-examined with an eye on their rational
> acceptability? For example, could our Crusader accounts be some kind
> of fantasy, albeit real beliefs of real people? It would be
> comforting to think so, but then some forms of what we now think of
> as insanity did have a way if slipping under the social radar: think
> of Elizabeth Bathory, Gilles de Rais, and the Romanian National Hero,
> Vlad Tepes, who was probably not a cannibal, but there are those who
> feel that that is about the best thing one could say of him.
>
> Just a point to bear in mind while we consider all this...
>
> Adamantius
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