- PRESS RELEASE
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- 1 March 2003, For Immediate Distribution
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- New Study On the Origins of Violence Proves:
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- Ancient Humans Were Peaceful, Modern Violence is Avoidable.
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- First presented to the world in the 1980s, and now, after
9-11, more important than ever for an understanding of the genesis of human
antisocial violence and warfare.
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- A new geographical study on the ancient historical origins
of human violence and warfare, drawing upon global archaeological and anthropological
evidence, has been published presenting substantial proof that our ancient
ancestors were non-violent, and far more social and loving than are most
humans today - moreover, the study points to a dramatic climate change
in the Old World, the drying up of the vast Sahara and Asian Deserts, with
attending famine, starvation and forced migrations which pushed the earliest
humans into violent social patterns, a trauma from which we have not yet
recovered in over 6000 years.
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- The study and book, titled SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins
of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts
of the Old World, by retired professor James DeMeo, Ph.D., is the culmination
of years of library and field research on the subject. Professor DeMeo
undertook the original research as a 7-year dissertation project at the
University of Kansas, which was concluded in 1986. He has since put more
than 10 years of additional research into the subject. His study is unusual
in that it presents the first world maps of human behavior, as developed
from large anthropological, historical and archaeological data bases. In
recent years, DeMeo's findings have been published in World Futures, Pulse
of the Planet, Kyoto Review (Japan) and Emotion (Germany), and presented
to scholarly conferences hosted by the Association for American Geographers,
American Association for the Advancement of Science, and International
Psychohistorical Association, among others.
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- "With very few exceptions, there is no clear and
unambiguous evidence for warfare or social violence on our planet Earth
prior to around 4,000 BC and the earliest evidence appears in specific
locations, from which it firstly arose, and diffused outward over time
to infect nearly every corner of the globe." says DeMeo, who today
directs his own private institute in rural Oregon. "A massive climate
change shook the ancient world, when approximately 6000 years ago vast
areas of lush grassland and forest in the Old World began to quickly dry
out and convert into harsh desert. The vast Sahara Desert, Arabian Desert,
and the giant deserts of the Middle East and Central Asia simply did not
exist prior to c.4000 BC" DeMeo asserts, pointing to numerous studies
in paleoclimatology - the study of ancient climates. "Something happened
around 4000 BC which forced the drying-out of this vast desert region,
which I call Saharasia, and the drier conditions created social and emotional
havoc among developing human agricultural societies in these same regions."
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- DeMeo's maps show spreading centers for the origins of
patriarchal authoritarian cultures within this same Saharasian global region
- male-dominated, child-abusive, sex-repressive cultures with a great emphasis
upon war-making and empire-building. DeMeo points to the work of the controversial
natural scientist Wilhelm Reich to explain the patterns. http://www.orgonelab.org/saharasia.htm
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- "Famine and starvation is a severe trauma from which
survivors rarely escape unscathed. A lot of people die, families are split
apart, and babies and children are often abandoned, and suffer enormously.
Starvation affects surviving children in an emotionally severe manner.
They shrink from the exhausting heat and thirst, emotionally withdraw from
the painful world, and simultaneously suffer a severe stunting of the entire
brain and nervous system due to protein-calorie malnutrition. Even if such
starved children later get all the food and water they want, they are deeply
scarred in an emotional-neurological manner which forever changes their
behavior - specifically, there is an implanted inhibition of any impulse
of a pleasure-seeking, outward-reaching nature, and a discomfort with deeper
forms of body-pleasure, in both maternal-infant or male-female expressions.
Additionally, the child's view of the mother, who could not protect or
feed the child during the famine period, is thereafter colored with suspicion
and anger. These attitudes and behaviors are deeply protoplasmic in nature,
and are passed on to ensuing generations no matter what the climate, by
social institutions which reflect the character structure of the average
individual at any given period of time."
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- As part of his project, DeMeo undertook a cross-cultural
evaluation of Wilhelm Reich's original ideas on human behavior. "Reich
claimed humans became violent from two major causes: firstly from abusive
and neglectful treatment of infants and children, and secondly from the
repression of adolescent heterosexual feelings." This latter consideration,
DeMeo asserts, has gotten nearly no attention from specialists on child-abuse,
given that our society still considers adolescent romance and pre-marital
sex to be a bad thing. "Pre-marital, adolescent sexual romance is
normal among the most peaceful cultures, but is always repressed in violent
warlike cultures. It is an even more precise predictor of social and individual
violence than is child-abuse." Ideas such as these got Reich into
hot water in the 1950s, DeMeo says, and his own work has similarly stirred
up controversy.
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- To test Reich's ideas, DeMeo reviewed social variables
on child-rearing, sexuality, the status of women, and violence, for over
1000 aboriginal cultures from around the world. "The cross-cultural
evidence is very clear about this: the most violent human societies are
those which treat their children in a neglectful and punitive manner, and
which also demand sexual abstinence from their young unmarried people.
Such cultures also emphasize highly compulsive forms of marriage, with
a reduced status for women, and a lot of strong-man political or religious
bosses who order everyone around at the point of a spear."
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- DeMeo does not pull punches about our own society. "Americans
are not as violent as the most extremely violent cultures around the world,
but we certainly are not as peaceful as the most peaceful societies. Unfortunately,
our culture appears to be going towards increased social violence."
He points to the general failure of parents and sex-education programs
to say much of anything positive about sexual pleasure, with the great
emphasis upon "abstinence education", as a major cause for the
growing violence in our schools. "Our young people should be warmly
romancing each other, dancing and singing together, making love and enjoying
what should be the happiest time of their lives. Instead, we start our
children off with a lot of hidden cruelty in the hospital birth, with incubator-isolation,
denial the mother's breast, time-table feedings, circumcision and so forth.
Later, it is compulsory schooling, obedience-training and so-called 'tough
love'. Then comes the biggest lie, the 'sex-can-kill' hypothesis stemming
from modern AIDS hysteria, a disease for which young adolescents and teens
have virtually a zero risk." DeMeo injects an additional controversy
into his work, by siding with dissenting scientists who reject the "infectious-HIV"
hypothesis of AIDS, and he points to various studies supporting this criticism
(such as those by Prof. Peter Duesberg, the retrovirus specialist at the
University of California at Berkeley, and by the larger "Group for
the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV Hypothesis of AIDS").
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- "We give potent and dangerous psycho-drugs like
Ritalin to perhaps 10% of the livelier kids, which is a major scandal in
this country, to squash them into conformity with our obedience-demanding
school system, or to the irrational "quiet child" demands for
of their families. Then we give them inaccurate and superstitious lies
about the supposed dangerousness of their sexuality, which for that age
group is of burning interest, and unrealistically expect them to behave
in a loving and calm manner. We still define a 'good child' as the one
who is quiet and obedient, who does not have any sexual expression - but
our entire society is constructed like a social pressure cooker in which
an enormous inner tension has built up. Social violence, suicide and drug
abuse erupts from that high-pressure situation, in a very predictable manner.
And overseas, in the more violence-prone nations characterized by political
dictatorships and religious fundamentalism, the problem is even worse."
The roots of modern violence are similar to the ancient roots of violence,
DeMeo says: "It is all in the treatment of babies and children, and
in our sexual attitudes and behavior. If we would end institutional violence
towards babies and children in the hospitals, making gentle home birth
and midwifery more widely available, ending practices such as circumcision,
allowing more freedom and even student-democracy in the schools, emphasizing
'hearts over heads', if we could be more tolerant of adolescent romance
and premarital sex - giving kids a real education about contraceptives
and love instead of a false education of abstinence and AIDS hysteria -
and also eliminate compulsiveness in our marriages, then social violence
would gradually melt away. Ending the better-known forms of child-trauma
and abuse, such as pedophilia and beating of children, is vitally important
but by itself is simply insufficient."
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- DeMeo again points to the cross-cultural evidence to
support his, and Reich's, controversial positions. "If this theory
was wrong, there would have been no positive support from the cross-cultural
evidence, and no patterns on my world maps. Instead, the cross-cultural
review demonstrated a 95% positive correlation between the many variables,
at a high level of statistical significance." DeMeo's World Behavior
Map which was also prepared from cross-cultural data, appears strikingly
similar to a world climate map, with the harshest desert areas of the Old
World characterized by extreme patriarchal authoritarian culture. The geographical
patterns, he asserts, are imbedded in the same data found in every university
library.
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- "These data were gathered by hundreds of anthropologists
who engaged in field work and published their studies over the last 100
years. The data was then coded by a team under the direction of George
Peter Murdock at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1960s. I took the
data and made maps from them, and the maps demonstrated the Saharasian
patterns which can be clearly seen. This finding has therefore been subjected
to a triple-blind control procedure, which virtually insures the pattern
is real and not some methodological quirk or accident. My later review
of archaeological and historical patterns demonstrated the same Saharasian
pattern extended back in time to around 4000 BC, which was the starting
point for both the vast Saharasian desert belt, and the very first persisting
and geographically-significant child-abusive, sex-repressive, and violent
patriarchal authoritarian societies. The drying up of the Saharasian desert
belt was the cause of a vast epoch of generations-long famine, migration
and land-abandonment, leading to the appearance of warlike patriarchal
authoritarian culture. The process started firstly in Arabia and Central
Asia, spreading outwards over several thousand years to eventually encompass
nearly the entire world."
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- DeMeo believes his findings provide conclusive proof
for other social theorists who have long argued for peaceful social conditions
among the earliest humans. "The 'Garden of Eden' myths, which exist
in the historical literature of many Old World cultures, appear to be factually
rooted in this early period of socially-cooperative and peaceful social
conditions, when the Saharasia was green and fruitful. Then came the devastating
climate change towards aridity, which formed the vast Saharasian desert
belt, and humans were literally cast 'out of the garden'. The rest is history."
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- Saharasia also contains DeMeo's personal observations
from Egypt, Israel and other parts of Saharasia from the 1980s, demonstrating
a harsh clash of cultures regarding female status and sexuality, which
have been much freer and open in the West (including in Israel) than in
any of the Muslim, "Saharasian" nations. While the book was written
before the 9-11 terror events, it helps us to better understand the great
anxiety which is created when these two forms of cultures interact, and
the immense quantities of destructive aggression and sadistic outbursting
which are present in those world regions where women and sexuality are
dramatically smashed down, religious and political authority is absolute,
and where violations of social taboos regarding sexuality, however slight,
are likely to provoke a death sentence, for the sake of "family honor".
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- http://www.orgonelab.org/PressRelease1.htm
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- For more information, contact:
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- James DeMeo, Ph.D., Director of Research Orgone Biophysical
Research Lab PO Box 1148, Ashland, Oregon 97520 USA Tel/Fax: 541-552-0118
Email: demeo@mind.net
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- http://www.orgonelab.org/PressRelease1.htm (full text
with graphics at above website)
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- SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression,
Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World, by James
DeMeo. Natural Energy Works, PO Box 1148, Ashland, Oregon 97520 USA 1998,
454 pages, 100+ Maps & Illustrations Full Citations & Index Softcover
$34. ISBN: 0-962-1855-5-8
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- Copyright 2003 All Rights Reserved
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- Comment
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- By Alfred Lehmberg
AlienView.net
2-28-3
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- I wish I could just push a *button* and insure an opportunity
for every sentient being on the -planet- to understand what a watershed
document this is! The good Doctor DeMeo has the "dead-lock nut"
on it when he says "violence [terror, misery, injustice, poverty]
is avoidable." It is all too, -so-, avoidable.
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- My own humble (and very amateur) research and (high profile)
experience over the last three decades has given the same indication point
for point right on down the line! By extrapolation we -can- live (in comparison)
in an Eden-like utopia if women are allowed to rise in positions of authority
equal to men. My own father pointed it out to me three decades ago, and
I was in strident denial of it for -years-. "...Things would be better
off for -everybody- if more of 'them' were in charge..." he said to
me once, grudgingly. Real irony here.
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- Most men I'd discuss this with (one on one) would agree
with me that that is so. I mean look at -any- country that treats their
women worth a tinker's damn and that is going to be the more -successful-
country -- obvious as the obligatory nose on a fatuous face. Most (western
civilization) women (in a group or singly)? They don't want to hear it,
want to avoid talking about it, and get irritated if pressed about it.
About this subject? They don't want to hear that they are *superior* (...men
-love- to hear it.).
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- Why? I think because they know that -that- is the genesis
of their nine thousand year persecution we're realy just coming out of
this century. Verily! Female inferiority is a -myth- designed to mask
relative -male- inferiority! The shocking truth revealed!
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- As to any of my brothers out there in the readership
that are wondering if I'm a (so called) "scented nancy boy" or
"raving butt-pirate" to harbor such strange convictions, let
me make the obligatory assurances. Status as a retired Army officer and
decorated *war hero* ensures that I'm likely, with -most- of you, to rip
off your literary head and use your debating throat for a toilet... this
for being offensive to the homosexual community, in that manner, in the
first place, and for in -any- way trying to justify the aforementioned
MYTH in the second. Moreover, I'd really have to question -your- manhood,
and otherwise speculate on -your- security with it if you feel you have
to waste fallacious time questioning -mine-. Especially given the obviousness
of my rational contention, the common sense embraced by it, and the -demonstrated-
efficacy of it. Get used to it, boys.
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- For the girls? Sorry for blowing your cover, ladies,
but time grows short. We've got to get on with this. We have to -prevail-
in a very real "War against women" precipitated presently by
fundamentalist Islam (and to a lesser degree fundamentalist Christianity),
or it's a long painful slide back to 1350 AD.
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- Our acceptance of facts like this is going to smooth
the transition we are accelerating towards. It will ensure that we triumph
over adversity and weather a catastrophe. It'll have us inhabiting a living
ring in the asteroid belt, eventually! Hell, it'll make the saucers come
down, patient reader. It'll make the -saucers- come down! We could make
our own Eden and enter (if not, create!) a galactic community at the same
time. We'd have a -point-, and we would have a -place-.
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- Equality! It's a -future-!
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- For AlienViews, read on!
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- Lehmberg@snowhill.com ~~Ö~~ EXPLORE "AlienViews"
at: http://www.alienview.net
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- "I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite.
What others see from afar, I leave far behind me." - Giordano Bruno,
scourged by the scabrously specious scurrilous.
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