In
1952, zoologists observed Macaca Fuscata monkeys risk starvation in the island
of Koshima, Japan, because they couldn’t clean the dirt off sweet potatoes
they found on the ground.
Some
monkeys were taught to wash them in creeks and ponds. That helped them,
but not enough to influence the others, until all monkeys, close-by and distant
on other islands,
almost simultaneously learned how to wash the potatoes in 1958, because the number of the
learning monkeys had grown enough to motivate all the others.
The hypothetical
monkey that completed the number to make the difference was symbolically
called “the 100th monkey”.
Many
people ignore, ridicule or persecute a man (or woman, of course. "He or she", "his or
her", or its worse yet "their" substitute, "men and women" are not only
politically correct, but cultural abominations) who insists with warnings or exhortations.
Mostly, they will heed him only when he is the “100th monkey”.
Many
who persist in exposing unpleasant matters like our public schooling system, a
danger or our decaying morals, may end up demonized like senator Joe McCarthy in
his anti-communist efforts.
He was not
preceded by the symbolic 99 that would have made him the convincing 100th monkey.
His defects and blunders doomed him to failure anyhow, and the monkeys
were on the other side, but armed with the “ad hominem” accusations typical
of lynch mobs and other contemptible fanatics.
For
instance, some leftists would now accuse me of defending McCarthy because I
condemn their bigotry. The same as branding a conservative as “sexist / racist
/ Euro-white male / anti-abortionist / Judeo-Christian / homophobe".
In
1997, a group of scholars published in France “The livre noir du communisme »
(“The black book of communism”), with undisputable documentation of how over
100 million people had been murdered since 1917 for not supporting communism
or socialism.
I was in Paris on business and experienced a surprising
knee-jerk overreaction by local leftists against the book.
Some of them
called the non Socialists "human garbage to be disposed of".
Later,
I saw only a German and an Italian translation of that book, until Harvard
University Press published the English version in November 1999.
It got a
silence treatment and similar postmodernist detractors like those I met in
France.
Anyone can order the book and judge by himself.
Someone
said, “Not even God can change the past”. Postmodernists (or
"deconstructionists") are trying to change the past.
It might depend on which side the 100th monkey will
take.
Merely
for completing the number after the 99th, or for the morality and
justice of his stand?
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