Tag: Meiwes

Is cannibalism a term of racist abuse?

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News, On cannibals1 Comment

Short answer: yes, and regularly used that way, throughout recorded history.

If you don’t recognise the person in the Tweet, her name is Candace Owens, and she is an American Conservative political commentator, author, activist, and television presenter who has both criticised and supported Donald Trump, attacked Black Lives Matter and been widely condemned for disseminating conspiracy theories, including accusing Israel of genocide. She seems to choose her conspiracies from both extremes of the political crazies – right and left. She has declared Kanye West to be a “dear friend and fellow superhero”.

In the clip above, she is asked by a young woman about Native American “Two Spirit” people – those who might today be called LGBTQIA+, particularly the “T” for “Trans”. The existence of the term and the concept itself would therefore, the questioner argues, go back hundreds or indeed thousands of years, and make nonsense of Owens’ claim that there were no transgender people when she graduated (although it seems she never did), so therefore the population must have has exploded since then. She summarises Owens’ argument: “Trans people are only here because the media is telling people these things”.

Owens does not know the term “Two Spirit” or that there are multiple words referring to the concept in many Native American languages. She answers instead:

“With Two Spirit people, is this like a Native American Tribe? Like high, smoking and talking about your spirit? I’m asking you seriously ’cause I think of Native American tribes talking about their spirits – I know they used to smoke a lot, they used to do drugs, they also were cannibals who used to eat people, so I don’t know if we should be taking our cues from cannibals…”

Owens used the same argument against Colin Kaepernick at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2020, who had spoken of the 1.5 billion acres of land stolen from Indigenous people in the United States, asking “Did cannibalism get lost in Colin’s flowery depiction of Indigenous people?” She referred to Aztec cannibalism, which is generally thought to have taken place in Mesoamerican areas of what is now central Mexico, from 1300 until their society was decimated by the Spanish conquistadors. There is little academic consensus about this – theories range from Marvin Harris who said the flesh of the human sacrifices to the gods was fed to the ruling class due to the shortage of protein in the area, to William Arens who insisted that “there is no firm, substantiable evidence for the socially accepted practice of cannibalism anywhere in the world, at any time in history.” Nonetheless, cannibalism is still depicted as epitomising the uncivilised or, worse, those who have degenerated to savagery. Think of the “troglodytes” in the movie Bone Tomahawk.

the term “cannibalism” itself comes from Christopher Columbus, who named the practice after the Carib tribe of the Caribbean (also named after the Caribs). He claimed the Caribs ate their neighbors, but there is little evidence for this beyond the accusations of rival tribes who, despite never before meeting Europeans, understood that cannibalism was a powerful way to defame enemies. Frank Lestringant examines, in his book Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (1997), the contrasting reports from that period of the “savage” cannibals of the New World and the way they were compared, sometimes favourably, with the horrendous cruelty of European politics of the time, particularly in the writings of Montaigne.

Cannibalism is, therefore, an enduring and popular way to denigrate and vilify another group, to declare them less-than-human and therefore not worthy of respect or consideration. Cannibalism, definitionally, requires both sides of the repast to be human—the eater and eaten. But paradoxically, cannibals deny the anthropocentric particularity of their victims, and are in turn symbolically stripped of humanity due to what is seen as a horrendous contravention of shared ethics, deserving redefinition of the eaters as “inhuman” monsters. This was very useful to Columbus, who was not allowed to take slaves unless they were found to be cannibals, and has been used extensively by colonists to slander other Indigenous people including the people of the Pacific, Africans, and the Aboriginal people of Australia.

Cannibalism is a particularly popular trope for political, racist or queerphobic demonisation. The cannibal is most often depicted as male, but homosexuality, still considered repulsive by some despite its legalisation in most of the world, is often emphasised in the reporting of cases such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Ottis Toole, and Armin Meiwes, as if to impugn their masculinity and erroneously imply that straight men are not potential cannibals.

Accusations that a conspiracy known as “Deep State” was trying to subvert Trump crystallised in groups, accounts and pages linked to QAnon during the 2020 election campaign. The accusations included allegations of devil-worship, child-sex trafficking, torture and cannibalism. The fact-checking website Snopes rebuffed allegations about the existence of a “deep web” video showing Hillary Clinton and her campaign vice-chair raping, torturing and mutilating a little girl to cause the child to release adrenochrome into her bloodstream, before drinking her blood during a Satanic ritual sacrifice. Like characters in the films Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) and Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), and the real-life murderer Ed Gein on whom they were based, they also supposedly excoriated the face to use as a mask. The bestselling QAnon-linked novel The Turner Diaries depicts a race war where white women and girls are constantly threatened and raped by “untamed, cannibalistic” black men, presented as symbolic of nature, and resisted by heroic white men, representing civilisation. Infanticide for cannibalistic feasts is not an original accusation, going back to the blood libels targeting European Jews and the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), the Inquisition’s guide to witch-hunting, which stated that witches would steal the host or wine from the Eucharist ritual to manifest a Christ-child, who would then be tortured, killed and consumed during diabolical feasts.

But back to Owens and her dismissal of “two-spirit” people as being the drug-fueled fantasies of cannibals. The term “Two-spirit” refers to persons who identify as having both masculine and feminine spirits, and is used by some Indigenous people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity. The wider use of the term is attributed to Elder Myra Laramee, who proposed its use during the Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference, held in Winnipeg in 1990. The term is a translation of the Anishinaabemowin term niizh manidoowag, meaning two spirits. It seems obvious that we all have some masculine and feminine features within our complex personalities, and it is useful, if poetic, to call these “spirits”. It explains motives, desires, emotions that may roil and confuse and sometimes contradict each other. It has little to do with gustatory preferences, except that some who feel they need to buttress their masculinity may insist on eating other animals to prove some dubious suppositions of human superiority, often including over other people they may consider less than human. “Real men”, they earnestly insist, don’t eat quiche; they eat lumps of meat, rare or even raw.

As do cannibals, very often. And with the flesh may come the spirit, allowing two spirits to co-exist, mingle, join within the cannibal’s body. Armin Meiwes told an interviewer that

“It’s not about killing or butchering. It is about entering into a relationship… My desire has always been to find a “brother” whom I could assimilate into myself.”

The nature or existence of ‘spirit’ is an eternal debate that will not be finalised in a Q&A session, particularly by a speaker who seems to know nothing about it. But it can only be obscured further by unfounded accusations about cannibalism, particularly by those who still happily chow down on their fellow mammals.

50 ways to eat your lover: GRIMM LOVE (Martin Weisz, 2006)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal documentaries, Cannibal films5 Comments

You may remember Armin Meiwes (pronounced like the Sinatra song “I did it Meiwes”). Meiwes was a German computer technician who was into “vorephilia” (sexual attraction to eating, or being eaten by, another human). He advertised in 2001 on a fetish website called The Cannibal Café for “a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed”. The only reply that seemed sincere was from a man named Jürgen Brandes, who was not really well-built or 18-30, but hey, eaters can’t be choosers.

The real Brandes and Meiwes

The Meiwes case was covered in somewhat sensational terms (they kept comparing him to Hannibal Lecter, which was patently absurd) in this “copycat killers” documentary. It was also retold in a more light-hearted way in the first episode of the Australian television show Rake.

This film is not a documentary but a fictional retelling of Meiwes’ story, with the names changed, to protect whom – the non-existent?  

The movie seems to need a narrator, so it makes up a fictional PhD student, Katie Armstrong (Keri Russell, who was also a student in Felicity, but a Russian spy in The Americans).

Katie is an American studying criminal psychology, who finds herself inexplicably drawn to an uncanny murder case for her thesis. Why would someone study cannibalism for a PhD thesis (I ask myself that every time I apply for an extension to my submission date). Well, Katie feels that she is “searching for something to fill that dark hole inside of her”. Same – but I use chips (“fries” for my American readers). She wants (and dreams of) “someone who can see inside of you”. Yes, cannibals can surely do that.

Anyway, Katie chooses to research the notorious German cannibal Oliver Hartwin (based on Meiwes) and his dead lover Simon Grombeck (based on Brandes), who had volunteered to let Oliver murder and eat him, an obsession that haunted him his whole life.

“Oliver Hartwin wanted to eat someone. Simon Grombeck wanted to be eaten. They were a perfect match.”

Katie becomes obsessed with the case. Sitting in the lecture theatre, the professor announces that “many cannibals have been diagnosed with schizophrenia” – but the sanity defence is too glib for her. “Why them and not us?” she wonders to her friends.

“It’s natural to wonder what separates us from them. What matters is what makes us the same.”

She studies the men’s childhoods: Simon was smitten by guilt about his mother’s suicide after she was told he was “playing doctor” with another boy. Oliver was left with an overbearing mother when the father moved out, then bullied at school and finding solace in an imaginary friend ‘Franky’. Katie goes to find Oliver’s house in Rotenburg, which is not far from where the Brothers Grimm wrote those tales that filled our childhood nightmares with monsters and cannibals. She finds and breaks in to Oliver’s house, taking endless photos, but each click is interspersed with flashbacks of Oliver with his mother and with Franky; Simon with his boyfriend and computer full of images of death, and requests to male prostitutes to “bite my thing! Bite it off!” (spoiler: it can’t be done). Are these actual flashbacks or Katie’s fantasies and rationalisations? It doesn’t really matter, because the sequence of email exchanges and the steps leading up to the slaughter are all well documented in the case of Meiwes and reproduced here.

Katie wants to understand Oliver.

“Was he so afraid to be alone? Was it his need to feel whole that drove him? Or was it just his desire for flesh, to devour something dear.”

Oliver makes a figure of a man out of something – maybe pork? He cuts off the penis and eats it voraciously, and feeds the rest to his work colleagues.

When one asks for the recipe, he smiles and says “It’s a family secret”. I was immediately reminded of Hannibal Lecter replying to the same request: “If I tell you, I’m afraid you won’t even try it”.

We see Oliver and Simon meet on the website “Cannibal Cantina”. Simon is searching for someone to butcher him.  Oliver is looking for instructions on how to butcher a human, such as:

“a cage to prevent the human animal from too much movement, which only serves to lessen the quality of the meat… For best results prior to slaughter, the animal should be stunned senseless.”

We see them at a table, Simon refusing food, but drinking water to flush his system, and swallowing pills to achieve the stun.

He drinks cough medicine (BREToN, which according to Google is Tulobuterol Hydrochloride and is for “asthma exacerbation”, although the website does rather hilariously say:

“Breton Syrup may also be used for purposes not listed here”

Two bottles of that, a fistful of sleeping tablets washed down with a bottle of schnapps, and Simon is good to go. But can Oliver do it?

Well, of course he can, as Katie finds out when she contacts a cannibal website and requests a copy of Oliver’s video, which she thought was only in the hands of the police. We see the slaughter, we see Katie weeping and whimpering as she watches.

She’s been studying this case for her PhD, which takes three years (plus extensions). What did she expect?

The assumption behind movies like this is that cannibalism is disgusting, monstrous behaviour, and so we need to find explanations. But when Oliver as a child watches a woman slicing up a pig, do we ask about her pathologies?

No, we assume she is doing something normal, and Oliver has been warped into doing the same to a human. Look up slaughterhouses on Youtube and you’ll see the same thing happening, and it happens some 70 billion times a year. Just – to other animals.

But what is so sacred about humans that the deliberate killing of a pig, who wanted to live, is just ‘butchering’, while assisting Simon to fulfil his fondest wishes – to commit suicide and be eaten – is monstrous? Is it just a throwback to the old belief about being “made in the image of God”? Feel free to let me know.

When Meiwes (Oliver) started to run out of meat, he couldn’t bring himself to shop at the supermarket, so he advertised for another willing victim. But this one called the cops.

The film was supposed to be released in Germany under the name Rohtenburg, a pun on Rotenburg, where Meiwes lived, and roh, meaning “raw”. However, it was banned by a German court in March 2006 for infringing the personal rights of Armin Meiwes. It was released throughout the rest of the world, but not in Germany until three years later.

The film achieved only 37% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is very slow moving, the sombre music gets a bit annoying (the Craig Armstrong piece from Romeo and Juliet is beautiful, but Romeo and Juliet is not really a cannibal story – Titus Andronicus might have worked better), and the fact that everyone in Germany speaks to everyone else in perfect English but with German accents (including train announcements) gets irritating. Why can’t audiences read subtitles?

Trigger warning, the real Meiwes: This website claims it has actual leaked stills from Meiwes’ video. If you don’t like pictures of chopped up humans, maybe skip the link. They look fake to me, but this Reddit reader swears they are real.

Meiwes is still in jail in Germany, not for cannibalism, which is still not a crime, but for murder, which is pretty absurd since Brandes wanted to die, and was in fact obsessed with being slaughtered and eaten. If anything, Meiwes is guilty of assisting a suicide. We know so much about the case because Meiwes was very open in describing what happened. He believed, and still believes, that he did nothing wrong. It seems that the only thing Meiwes can see as a moral failing is not the fact that he ate human meat, but that he ate meat. He is now a Greenie and a vegetarian:

Bavaria Radio reported that another inmate said Meiwes has sworn off meat in his new role as an environmentalist. “He finds the idea of factory farming as distasteful as his crime was,” said the convict. “He now sticks to vegetarian dishes.”

You can watch the Director’s commentary here, and a documentary about the real case here.

Complete listing of my Hannibal blogs can be found at this link.