Tag: Nietzsche’s Übermensch

Criminals, rapists and cannibals: Donald Trump and the immigrants

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Way back in 2015, when first campaigning for the presidency, Donald Trump announced he would build a wall on the border with Mexico to keep out:

“…people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

That seems quite tame now, doesn’t it? Warning about rapists have lost their power, especially given Trump’s own personal legal struggles regarding sexual assault. 

So he has turned, dear reader, to our fave subject. Speaking on Right Side Broadcasting Network from Mar-a-Lago, a resort that relies heavily on immigrant labour, he upped the ante on border crossers by calling them cannibals released from mental institutions.

“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know insane asylums. That’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff. Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter?”  

This is not the first time that Trump has quoted Hannibal. At a rally in Iowa in October 3023, he also spoke of people from insane asylums sneaking into the country, and again quoted Hannibal. He added a rather strange endorsement.

“Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he? You know why I like him? Because he said on television on one of the – ‘I love Donald Trump.’ So I love him. I love him. I love him. He said that a long time ago and once he said that he was in my camp, I was in his camp. I don’t care if he was the worst actor, I’d say he was great to me.”

Hannibal Lecter is, of course, not in a position to comment on politics as he is a fictional character born in the mind and the novels of Thomas Harris and born again, we might say, in the films of those books in which Hannibal was played by Brian Cox and then by Anthony Hopkins. Then, in a third coming, Hannibal was rebooted as a Gen-X queer icon in the TV series Hannibal, played by Mads Mikkelsen.

Which of these Hannibals loves, or loved, Donald Trump?

Mads Mikkelsen told CBS News in 2016 that though he could “definitely laugh at some of the stuff [Trump] says, he can also go, ‘Oh my God, did he say that?’ I think he’s a fresh wind for some people.”

Brian Cox called Trump “such a fucking asshole” and “so full of shit.” So Trump is probably not quoting him.

Hopkins, who was born in Wales and became a U.S. citizen in 2000, told The Guardian that he doesn’t care for Trump and explained that he doesn’t vote anyway, because he doesn’t “trust anyone.”

“We’ve never got it right, human beings. We are all a mess, and we’re very early in our evolution.”

Nietzsche wrote of an Übermensch, a super-man who was as superior to ordinary people as they feel themselves to be to pigs. Hannibal clearly sees himself in this role. The mantra of the Übermensch is “Adapt, evolve, become”. But, as Charles Darwin would tell you (if he had not himself become extinct), evolution does not describe a ‘great chain of being’, an evolutionary ladder toward perfection. It is simply about best fitting a niche, surviving a hostile environment while competitors become extinct. The art of evolution is to out-run, out-fight, out-eat the other – to be the last one standing. And the only one eating. Perhaps eating the loser. As Frederick Chilton tells us, “Cannibalism is an act of dominance.”

Early humans seem to have practised cannibalism (according to some palaeontologists), although it may have been more for ritual purposes than for the protein. But in the modern age, protein is king, or at least those who eat the most protein consider themselves therefore superior to nature, and to other humans. Meat is a fetish, an addiction, a way of declaring human, particularly male, supremacy. We confine, torment and slaughter around 80 billion land animals each year (that’s 80,000,000,000) to feed this fetish.

But supremacism does not depend on species – those of another race, another origin, another gender, another age-group may all be dehumanised, objectified like farmed animals, and cannibalism is famously the accusation used to dehumanise colonised people, giving invaders the excuse to enslave or exterminate them. Trump dehumanises immigrants by accusations of cannibalism, just as his political opponents dehumanise him. When American comedian Jon Stewart was asked in 2017 by Late Show host Stephen Colbert to say something nice about then President Donald Trump, he hesitated and eventually blurted, “He’s not a cannibal”. Colbert followed this up a year later suggesting Trump eats human flesh, but only “it’s very well done with some ketchup”.

Consuming the appropriated assets of those considered foreign or inferior is standard operating procedure in human history. In the absence of now largely abandoned concepts of (some) humans being semi-divine creatures, created in the “image of God”, what is to stop the actual consumption of those on the next rung down? As the huge population of humanity consumes the environment, leading to climate change and famine, could cannibalism be the next phase of human evolution?

As anthropologist Harold Monroe asks in Cannibal Holocaust, “I wonder who the real cannibals are?”  

And as Hannibal said,

“It’s only cannibalism if we’re equals.”

“There’s something evil in those woods”: SUPERNATURAL Season 1, Episode 2 “Wendigo”

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibals on TV4 Comments

Supernatural is a TV series created by Eric Kripke, first broadcast in 2005. Fifteen seasons later, the final episode (there were 327 in total) aired on November 19, 2020. You could call that a successful series.

The plots follow two brothers, Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) Winchester, who hunt demons, ghosts, monsters, and other supernatural beings. The first two episodes were directed by David Nutter, who later won an Emmy for Game of Thrones.

Sam and Dean’s origin story in the pilot episode shows an idyllic home with a loving mother, doting father, and a demon who drips blood into baby Sam’s mouth, then ties their mom to the ceiling where she bursts into flames. Well, you can’t blame them for being a bit down on supernatural entities.

Dean’s metaphysical mission statement is:

“Killing as many evil sons of bitches as I possibly can.”

In episode 2, the boys come across a Wendigo, normally explained as a human transformed into a monster by the act of cannibalism. They find a love interest in a girl who is looking for her brother, one of a group of campers recently snatched by said Wendigo while playing computer games with friends in their tent in the deep woods (as you do) and reading Joseph Campbell’s book about the hero’s journey

Turns out the Wendigo eats a sounder of people every 23 years, and they find a man who, as a child, was attacked by the monster in 1959 but survived, with massive scars. He tells them:

Well, they finally get around to reading their Dad’s journal – he has a slim leather volume of handwritten notes on every evil thing you could need to know about. They explain the Wendigo to the other campers.

Cultures all over the world believe that eating human flesh gives a person certain abilities: speed, strength, immortality. You eat enough of it, over years you become this less-than-human thing. You’re always hungry.”

You can’t kill a Wendigo with bullets or knives.

Dean attempts to draw the Wendigo away from the others, with the hilarious taunt:

“You want some white meat, bitch?”

The Wendigo is a figure from Algonquin folklore, a spirit who possesses his human victim, giving him an insatiable hunger for human flesh, but the flesh makes him grow larger, and so his appetite can never be satisfied, thus the emaciated form.

The Wendigo is said to have a heart, or whole body, made of ice. The creation of the Wendigo, like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, is a “becoming” which requires the destruction or transformation of lesser beings, just as humans like to believe that the processing of “lower” animals into meat is required for their continued existence. In the television series Hannibal, Lecter is often shown as a dark figure with antlers, a Wendigo, who manifests and wreaks carnage (e.g. the episode “Hassun”).

Margaret Atwood in her lecture on the Wendigo pointed out that, unlike most monsters, the Wendigo offers two different terrors – being eaten by it, but also transforming into it. While all cannibals threaten us with physical dissolution through their digestive tracts, a simple bite from the Wendigo, or being possessed by its spirit during the act of eating human flesh (even if the act is necessary to survive) can destroy one’s will and endanger the whole tribe.

To the First Nations people, the Wendigo represented winter, hunger or selfishness and, particularly in subsistence communities, there is a direct causal link between those things – winter means shortages, which lead to hunger and struggles for resources, and sometimes cannibalism. In times of starvation, we are capable of anything. Cannibalism stories were not uncommon on the American Frontier, and popular culture has often told tales of white-man cannibalism using the Donner Party, Alferd Packer and the Wendigo, sometimes all mixed together, as in Antonia Bird’s Ravenous.

But when the Europeans came with their ships and guns and viruses, those they dispossessed, enslaved, raped, tortured and massacred came to the obvious conclusion that the white man must be possessed by a Wendigo spirit. This Wendigo spirit of ruthless and voracious consumption may be less blatant in the twenty-first century, but is still evident in the exploitation of sweat-shop workers, in human trafficking, and in the intensive factory farming that turns sentient animals into commodities by the billions. Also in the covert sexism and racism in shows like this, that depict “cis-het” white men taking on the world of evil and saving civilisation from the outsiders and aliens that haunt our dreams.