https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/02/25/everybody-almost-has-a-last-stand-n1428214
There’s an old joke about the housewife who calls her husband on his cell phone during the evening commute. “Be careful, Dear,” she says. “The news says there’s a wrong-way driver on the Beltway.” “A wrong-way driver?” the husband shouts. “There are thousands of them!”
This came to mind while enjoying Michael Walsh’s superb book Last Stands: Why Soldiers Fight When All Is Lost. Freedom-loving men will fight to the death for all they hold sacred, and Michael’s book is adorned by a moving memoir of his father, a Marine officer during the terrible American retreat from the Chosin Reservoir. The book is enormously popular, and deservedly so.
But I should like to add a footnote to the story: Everybody (almost) eventually fights to the death. As Franz Rosenzweig noted in The Star of Redemption, every tribe sends its young men out to fight for its survival until one day they are defeated and the tribe is extinguished. That’s why nearly 150,000 languages have been spoken on Planet Earth since the dawn of man, and only a couple of thousand are left. Extinction is the norm.
Small neolithic peoples who encounter modernity are dying today. The BBC reported earlier this week:
The last male member of the Juma indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon has died after falling ill with Covid-19.
Aruká’s death last week is the latest blow to the group whose numbers were reduced from around 15,000 in the early 20th Century to only six people in the 1990s.
Aruká was the last surviving male of the group, but as BBC News Brazil’s Juliana Gragnani reports, his grandchildren have taken an unusual step to ensure his legacy is preserved.
Aruká’s exact age is not known but he was estimated to be between 86 and 90 years old. During his life, Aruká witnessed the decline of the thousands-strong Juma community which once fished, hunted and planted lands in the southern region of Amazonas state.
Following a series of massacres carried out by rubber tappers and the spread of deadly diseases, the Juma’s numbers dwindled until Aruká’s family was the only one left.