Belief in black magic persists in Papua New Guinea

http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/its-2013-and-theyre-burning-witches/558/

by playhard • 13 years ago

94 87 13 years ago

incision3• 13 years ago

Where/how does ritualized abuse/murder originate?

This article talks about PNG, but I recall reading of similar incidents in various parts of Africa while the US has it's own fairly recent history of lynching [0].

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States

yareally• 13 years ago

Probably around the start of civilization since it appears in the old testament to stone people for various crimes[1]. United States also had witch trials in the 1600s in Salem Massachusetts. Europe had theirs with the Catholic Church (sometimes even digging up heretics after they were dead to burn them[2]). Also for many years executions were public display in many European Countries as well as the earlier days of the United States. Pretty much every culture has had some sort of ritualized murder/executions (whether deemed legal by the state/tribe/official body or otherwise).

[1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Actions_punishable_by_death_in_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_wycliffe

lukifer• 13 years ago

Human sacrifice is far more ancient than the modern state, coinciding with primitive religion. As sick as it may be, I think its primary purpose is in-group cohesion, regardless of the religious or political narrative pretext. A cadre who have knowingly committed murder together is one whose members will have strong bonds of loyalty to one another.

laurenia• 13 years ago

You only have to look at the Salem Witch Trials to know that this has been going on for hundreds of years, and probably much longer than that. Any social group eventually develops its leaders and outcasts. Combine that with the human instinct to understand misfortune by casting blame, and you get situations like this.

bdunbar• 13 years ago

Where? Anywhere you find people, you'll find wretched crap like this.

How? As a species we're real good at hurting each other.

mynameishere• 13 years ago

Huh? Most lynchings, both against either whites or blacks, were a result from vigilante justice. It was completely illegal, but a result from accusations of rape or murder, not witchcraft.

incision3• 13 years ago

I said "ritualized abuse/murder" which speaks to the act, not any specific dressing the people committing it have chosen to rationalize it with.

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

> Most lynchings, both against either whites or blacks, were a result from vigilante justice. It was completely illegal, but a result from accusations of rape or murder, not witchcraft.

The fact that the accusations were of rape or murder doesn't make the murder any less ritualized.

vy8vWJlco2• 13 years ago

I understand crowd frenzies (riots, lynchings, witch-hunts) as fear of becoming the focus ("better them than me") and the willingness to be a spectator while not seeing the line between watching to know and enabling an event gone horribly wrong. I'd also like to think only sociopaths are the main actors, but apathy and simple mistakes all add their weight to such events.

dylangs10302• 13 years ago

"She had dragged herself [...] into the clinic, her genitals burned and fused beyond functional repair by the repeated intrusions of red-hot irons."

What? This made me very angry. But how do we combat it if even law officials are aware of it going on and don't do anything to stop it? There's so much corruption, and the government legally acknowledges sorcery and punishment for sorcery as valid.

In order for this to stop, the entire society and way of life would have to change. Is the United Nations looking to do this? It needs to be done.

i386• 13 years ago

The UN isn't a global police force. All it can do its organise sanctions to force the PNG government to do something about it or get nations to contribute to some sort of fund to improve education and policing domestically.

vy8vWJlco2• 13 years ago

Nor should it be a global police force. I think people/countries that don't condone this type of behavior should be more willing to offer refugee status and provide the means to leave such places and situations, but people are pretty hard-mouthed about their borders... At the end of the day, we can't tell people what to do, only offer them alternatives.

derleth2• 13 years ago

> In order for this to stop, the entire society and way of life would have to change. Is the United Nations looking to do this? It needs to be done.

And here I thought "Cultural Imperialism" was a bad thing.

This is a dangerous road down which to tread, especially when the entity doing the treading (the UN) contains members such as Iran, the PRC, and every country that rates "depicting Mohamed" as being worse than "killing Jews".

dylangs10302• 13 years ago

You make a good point; however, I'm not advocating we invade. I'm saying we need to do this as peaceably as possible, but certainly assertively. I'm not a politician, I don't know how it would be done, but would strengthening the economy even more help the situation and modernize perspective or serve to increase class divisions?

hobs• 13 years ago

Cultural Imperialism is bad. Using it as an excuse to stand by in the face of evil because of some sense of moral relativism is arguably a lot worse.

Cushman5• 13 years ago

> What? This made me very angry.

And anger is what made this happen in the first place.

I'm not trying to draw any platitudes or grand truths here. Just... think on that.

pyre2• 13 years ago

The lack of consequences ensures that it keeps happening...

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

I don't even want to know on what planet mob lynchings and indignation at the brutalization of a defenseless individual are the same thing, just "anger" -- but I suggest it be nuked from orbit, because one might just as well argue it's sloppy thinking and the resulting stupidity that causes this crap. And by crap I don't mean a group enacting punishment on an individual[1], but the crooked ways in which they arrive at their judgement... because that a mob is angry might be okay, great even; depending on what they're angry at, and how they act on that anger.

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." -- Albert Einstein

"Anger is a gift." -- Rage Against The Machine

[1] notice how even we have that, and that nobody is angry in the process does not help someone who, say, has been framed and is sitting in prison for 20 years. Even if all inmates were excellent to each other all the time, even if the prison food was delicious and varied and healthy, it would still suck, no? How does anger even enter into any of it?

GuiA• 13 years ago

This is horrific.

A good time to remember that if you're reading this, you are in the <0.001% of humans privileged enough to live a life without having to worry about such things on a daily basis.

Compared to things like that, our preoccupations seem so trivial, and I don't know what we can do about it.

CamperBob23• 13 years ago

There are several things you can do about it. Donate to http://ncse.com, http://ffrf.org, http://www.au.org and/or similar orgs in your own country.

Everything from witch-burning to the teaching of Creationist doctrines in public schools is possible because we somehow still consider it not only socially acceptable but desirable to be superstitious in the twenty-first century.

Civilization isn't a gift, and it didn't just happen. We had to build it. The people who are burning witches in New Guinea are not monsters, or aliens, or mutants. They're us, and we're them. The only differences lie in the decisions we make, as individuals and as a culture.

abraininavat• 13 years ago

Cheers for saying it. I'd suggest it's not just superstition, it's ignorance in general, in all its forms. The cure is education.

mc-lovin3• 13 years ago

Those organzations are nothing to do with the persecution of witchcrafit in PNG. Did you even read the article.

If you want to stop these horrific acts of violence, it would be better to give to the Catholic Church since it was a catholic nun who saved the woman in that article.

Your prejudice against religion is as irrational as what you accuse religion as being, since you put your secularist ideology ahead of the facts when you lump completely unrelated phenomena together into the category of "superstition".

pdeuchler2• 13 years ago

How did it not occur to you that equating the burning alive of young women for witch craft with teaching children beliefs (alongside apposing beliefs, no less!) commonly held among billions of people (who do not burn people alive as witches) would be offensive?

Please think before you post next time.

e: phrasing

charonn0• 13 years ago

From the article:

>“I called on the people. I asked, ‘Who here is a Catholic? Come, we will pray the rosary.'"

"And a lot of people came and prayed with me. We prayed the whole rosary.” Angela’s suffering echoed around them through their invocation, the ritual comforts of one belief system colliding with the atrocities of another.< (emphases mine)

This speaks, I think, to your underlying point. Superstition played a role both in perpetrating this crime as well as in squandering an opportunity to put an end to it. Instead of "a lot" of people helping, "a lot" of people prayed.

weavejester• 13 years ago

It is horrific, but let's not exaggerate the issue... If you're in the top 0.001%, you're a multi-millionaire, and persecution is an issue affecting a minority of the world's population, almost by definition, as it's hard to persecute a group that outnumbers you.

MisterBastahrd2• 13 years ago

It's quite easy as long as you have more power than they do.

Alex39173• 13 years ago

In the U.S. we still have the death penalty for witchcraft, it's just not called that anymore. I think they call it drug trafficking now, but if you look at what witchcraft was historically it's basically the exact same thing.

Dylan168077• 13 years ago

The fuck are you talking about?

Cushman5• 13 years ago

Be very careful.

There is a kind of "first-world problem" which is objectively rather trivial: My Xbox Live account got banned. My electric car is cold in the mornings. You know what I mean.

But there are other sorts of problems: I was imprisoned for possession of a controlled substance. My mother refused a life-saving ambulance ride because the debt could cripple our family for a generation. I used to go to sleep hungry every night so that my children could eat, but I just lost my job; I'd kill myself if I had life insurance. Perhaps they take place with the trappings of technology and civility, but these horrors are surely no less so for that they occur in the so-called "first world".

As the wealthy and powerful -- and we are that -- I do believe we have a moral obligation to help the less fortunate everywhere that we find them. But we cannot do that, we cannot even assert our obligation to do that, if we cannot solve or even seem to care about the human misery that lives with our tacit consent just next door. And it is so hard for me to buy that there is nothing we can do about that.

I do not know what we do either. These systems did not arrive by any happy accident; powerful men willed it to be so, and undoing their careful work will not be easy. But I do know that if it seems powerful men stand to benefit from the status quo, we should treat any feeling of powerlessness we may have been told to experience with a certain skepticism.

glurgh2• 13 years ago

0.001% of the global population is 70k people. Most people on the planet do not live under the immediate daily threat of sectarian violence.

joshfraser• 13 years ago

I think you mean 7 millon

nemo• 13 years ago

In Papua New Guinea the prion based disease, Kuru, transmitted by cannibalism was last reported in 2005. There is still cannibalism among the Korowai tribe. Papua New Guinea has many corners that are a far, far different place from the modern Western world.

rsync• 13 years ago

Go ahead and peruse wikipedia for "prion diseases" ... it's a fascinating subject with some very scary subtopics. Of particular note:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia

... and the account of one patient who valiantly struggled to prolong his life in the face of this disease.

codezero• 13 years ago

Yes, let's go tell these backwards people their antiquated superstitions are ridiculous. Emphasis on their... our own antiquated superstitions are completely OK.

jlgreco8• 13 years ago

Who said that?

fiatmoney• 13 years ago

To be fair, the US was imprisoning witches as recently as 30 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse

prawn• 13 years ago

Belief in a lot of ridiculous stuff persists and is very mainstream depending on your stance on general religious belief. It's hardly isolated to PNG.

I read an article recently about suggestions that the Japanese PM wasn't moving into the prime ministerial home because it had a macabre history and was thought to be haunted by ghosts. The official response was a denial, but there seemed to be comments from other politicians suggesting that this was not a ridiculous position to hold.

Kekeli• 13 years ago

Gruesome video of witch burning in Africa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qYhmf-boE&bpctr=1369466...

Warning:Content is very Graphic

Fundlab• 13 years ago

This was quite depressing to say the least. The fact that one is so helpless against the hivemind and unable to defend oneself against such mob-driven attacks makes me shrivel

Hyrum_Graff• 13 years ago

I lived in Papua New Guinea for over two years, teaching in a school not far from a mining town. Sorcery was just a part of daily life. I remember a kid telling me he would be off school for a week as he had to go back to his village. When I asked him why he explained that one of his wantok's had been killed by a sorcerer and he was going back to the village for payback.

Payback in general was very common. A kid was run over in our town and it was all the police could do to stop the driver from being massacred by the kid's family with bush-knives. It was lucky that most of our policemen were from outside of the district so they had a disconnect from the local community. We were advised that if we were ever driving and by accident ran over a dog or a pig, we should get to the nearest police station as fast as possible, to protect ourselves from payback.

What shocked me about the article was the torture that was described. I'd never heard of this kind of thing back in 2000. Payback was usually brutal but quick, whether it be retribution against a sorcerer or anyone else. I do have to wonder where the concept of torturing victims has come from, as this seems to be a fairly new development.

Muzza• 13 years ago

I just want to take this moment to point out to all the good little leftists of HN that we can learn so much from tribal life in Papua New Guinea: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/06/jared-diamond-...

Julianhearn• 13 years ago

Sounds like guantanamo bay

"Two days earlier she had tried to rescue Angela (not her real name), an accused witch, when she was first seized by a gang of merciless inquisitors looking for someone to blame for the recent deaths of two young men. They had stripped their quarry naked, blindfolded her, berated her with accusations and slashed her with bush knives (machetes). The “dock” for her trial was a rusty length of corrugated roofing, upon which she was displayed trussed and helpless."

wildgift2• 13 years ago

What's with that headline. The real story seems to be that they are out of control of their environment. It's been heavily invaded by modern society, which is extracting natural resources. As people are harmed by modernity, they can't figure out the reasons.

There are people in the US like this, too. Look at the lunatics in the Westboro Baptist Church.

Or the Tea Party for that matter.

Nux• 13 years ago

Take a good read, people. This is who we are.

Just different manifestations of the same problems, at a more archaic level.

I felt disgusted reading the article, but before pointing the finger look what's happening in OUR "modern" society:

- fanatic belief in all sorts of superstitions and stuff (christianity, islam etc)

- mass savage violence (war) against each other, even when above belief forbids (love your neighbour, don't kill your neighbour etc)

- incredible abuse against our mothers, sisters and daughters (rape, gang rape, FGM, murder, beatings etc); not to mention abuse against children!

- mass scale butchering of other species so we can be a race of fucking obese creatures

That's how fucking elevated we are.

Our only hope, if any, is a good education.

yannis• 13 years ago

I am amazed as to how similar the word "sanguma" is to the Zulu word for a traditional healer (and also an area of witch burning) "sangoma". Anyone can offer some enlightenment on the linguistics?

Belief in black magic persists in Papua New Guinea

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