Religion is a Mental Illness

TRIBAL warfare and paybacks were endemic. In "Journey to Horseshoe Bend", anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow described a black-on-black massacre in 1875 in the Finke River area of Central Australia, triggered by a perceived sacrilege:

"The warriors turned their murderous attention to the women and older children and either clubbed or speared them to death. Finally, according to the grim custom of warriors and avengers they broke the limbs of the infants, leaving them to die ‘natural deaths’. The final number of the dead could well have reached the high figure of 80 to 100 men, women and children."

Revenge killings by the victims’ clan involved more than 60 people, with the two exchanges accounting for about 20% of members of the two clans. (When Pauline Hanson, then member for Oxley, quoted this account in 1996, an Aboriginal woman elder replied, "Mrs Hanson should receive a traditional Urgarapul punishment: having her hands and feet crippled.")

Escaped convict William Buckley, who lived for three decades with tribes around Port Phillip, recounted constant raids, ambushes, and small battles, typically involving one to three fatalities. He noted the Watouronga of Geelong in night raids ‘destroyed without mercy men, women and children.’

Historian Geoff Blainey concluded that annual death rates from North-East Arnhem Land and Port Philip, were comparable with countries involved in the two world wars, although Blainey’s estimate could be somewhat on the high side.

Other black-on-black massacres include accounts from anthropologist Bill Stanner of an entire camp massacre, an Aurukun massacre in the early 20th century, Strehlow’s account of the wiping out of the Plenty River local group of Udebatara in Central Australia, and the killing of a large group of men, women and children near Mt Eba, also in Central Australia.

Strehlow’s wife Kathleen Strehlow wrote:

“It would be no exaggeration to say that the system worked as one of sheer terror in the days before the white man came. This terror was instilled from earliest childhood and continued unabated through life until the extremity of old age seemed to guarantee some immunity from the attentions of blood avenger or sorcerer alike for wrongs real or imaginary…children were not exempted from capital punishment for persistent offences against the old tribal code.”

The Murngin (now Yolngu) in NE Arnhem Land during 1920s practiced a deadly warfare that placed it among the world’s most lethal societies. The then-rate for homicides of 330 per 100,000 (which Jarrett suggests could be grossly under-estimated) was 15 times the 2006-07 "very remote national Indigenous rate" of 22, and 300 times the 2006-7 national non-Indigenous rate. That Murngin rate was worse than in Mexico’s present Ciudad Juarez drug capital (300 homicides per 100,000), and more than three times worse than the worst national current rate (Honduras).

Around 1000 A.D., Tahitians from the islands of Ra’iatea, Bora Bora, and Huahine arrived in Hawaii. With their larger statures, they easily overpowered the islands’ inhabitants, descendants of Polynesian settlers that had arrived several hundred years prior.

Although the Tahitians didn’t slaughter the natives, they reduced them to commoners, calling them menehune (an insult meaning “people of small status”) and imposed their own political system and customs on them.