Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism

By Jack D. Forbes and Derrick Jensen

Celebrated American Indian thinker Jack D. Forbes’s Columbus and Other Cannibals was one of the founding texts of the anticivilization movement when it was first published in 1978. His history of terrorism, genocide, and ecocide told from a Native American point of view has inspired America’s most influential activists for decades. Frighteningly, his radical critique of the modern "civilized" lifestyle is more relevant now than ever before.
Identifying the Western compulsion to consume the earth as a sickness, Forbes writes:
"Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. . . . These characteristics all push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in. . . . This is the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions. I call it cannibalism."
This updated edition includes a new chapter by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781583229828

Reviews for Columbus and Other Cannibals

[blake.rosser · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I love the thesis of this book, that modern civilization represents a sick psychosis that infects all of its victims with a greed for power and domination. It's an important point and I agree with it wholeheartedly. An especially poignant aspect of this "illness" is that it infects even the people that it destroys (the poor or otherwise downtrodden), making them into wetiko-wannabes who jump at the first chance to oppress their weaker neighbor, rather than uniting with a common spirit of the exploited to create a better life for everyone.

Unfortunately, that's about all the substance Forbes provides here, and the rest is just examples and slightly different angles of examining the same phenomenon. It comes across as fluff and lost my interest after a while. All of the chapters blend together and I wasn't even sure how Forbes was able to distinguish one from the other in writing it -- the subject seemed exactly the same throughout. A brief survey of the chapter titles corroborates this feeling. Out of 14 chapters, nine of them have the following titles:

Consuming Another's Life: The Wetiko Cannibal Psychosis
Columbus: Cannibal and Hero of Genocide
Deception Brutality, and Greed: The Spread of the Disease
The Structure of the Cannibal's Insanity: Arrogance, Lust, and Materialism
Becoming a Predator: The Process of Corruption
The Matchi Syndrome: Fascination with Evil
Colonialism, Europeanization, and the Destruction of Native Cultures
Savages, Free People, and the Loss of Freedom
Terrorism: A Frequent Aspect of Wetiko Behavior

All of these talk about the same thing, with slightly different emphasis. As a result, the book started out promising but lost me about halfway through. He does make a good point in the last chapter on the interconnectedness of us all. I particularly like the creativity of the statement that we can live without our bodies, but we can't live without the earth/environment (i.e. air, water and heat). Good stuff, just wish there had been more of it.