Killing in war

Malinowski on Trobiand Isles, 1917/1918 (Source)

Hundred years ago the First World War (1914-1918) had just ended. Then it was called the Great War. It was one of the cruellest wars ever in number of victims. How many people died because of this war is not known and figures vary from about 10 till 20 million people dead. Let’s say that 15 million people died because of this war, half of them being soldiers, half of them being civilians. In those days – it was in 1917 or 1918 – the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski had a conversation with a cannibal on the Trobriand Islands. This is what Malinowski tell us about it:

“I remember talking to an old cannibal who from missionary and administrator had heard news of the Great War raging then in Europe. What he was most curious to know was how we Europeans managed to eat such enormous quantities of human flesh, as the casualties of a battle seemed to imply. When I told him indignantly that Europeans do not eat their slain foes, he looked at me with real horror and asked me what sort of barbarians we were to kill without any real object.” (Source)

I think that the cannibal was right.