Whaling in Iceland

First, I have gone ahead and added a "whaling" category. There are enough whale-related posts, that I should.

Second, when I went to find whaling songs, most of what came up were wanky "save the whales" crap along with those oh-so-lovely whale songs.

Third, then I hit gold, a five part video, done without comment, of the landing and butchering of the first commercially-taken whale in 22 years in Iceland, on October 22, 2006. Wow! This stuff is fantastic. One thing that is neat is the festive atmosphere around the landing, with families out to celebrate the return of commercial whaling. The other thing that I liked watching is the skill of the whale processing folks. They obviously have preserved their know-how during the moratorium.

Now, people are probably wondering, "why is Keilholtz so into whaling all of a sudden? He does not come from a culture of whalers, he has never eaten the stuff, he is certainly in favor of preserving endangered species...did he not get the whale memo that any killing of whales is evil?"

Well, because we humans have taken too much of certain natural resources, and need to lay off for a little bit in order for the stocks of those resources to recover. This is simple stewardship. However, we have a pernicious strain of environmentalism that is really a form of neo-Puritan religion, which believes that there is a pure state, and that humans, in any of their interractions with it, necessarily destroy it. These people want wilderness preserved for the sake of being wild. Thus, the Arctic Wilderness Preserve, so remote that it can only be of use to a very small number of well-heeled environmentalists, must be protected at astronomical cost to the general population, without any hope of increasing the benefit to that population. No one is going out of their way to increase public use of this land. Oh no, we can't have all these blue collar schlumps out there tramping around on virgin tundra. They might spoil it.

And whaling is their golden fleece, their holy grail. Their aim was the permanent end of whaling, and some of them (the "oh those magnificent creatures" set) were honest about it. Yet most of them claimed that it was about protecting a species from extinction. So, now many whale species have recovered, and Japan is proposing a return to regulated commercial whaling. The Greenpeace crowd is up in arms. The United States has, at one point, threatened Japan with trade sanctions. China can imprison Catholic priests and use them as slave labor or involuntary organ donors, and we are up in arms over whales?

22 years is a long time for an industry to be sidelined. In 22 years, you would presume that no young people would have learned the skills. The neo-Puritans should have won this one...and yet...the skills have been continued.

This year marks another milestone for another branch of neo-Puritanism: the modern anti-smoking movement. It all started in Berkeley thirty years ago, and this year they have passed the 50% mark in the numbers of states that have various smoking bans. They are trumpeting this as a great triumph. And, sure the worst is yet to come (the City of Belmont's proposed ban on all smoking, including in one's own car, in one's own apartment, etc. There is also a proposal to rate all movies that depict any smoking as "R".), but I think we are at just about the peak of this faddish nonsense.

Thirty years is amazing tenacity, fueled by monomaniacs (the real menace to our society) and supported by an underlying ideological grid of secular neo-puritanism, but it has been primarily a cause of baby boomers, and their twilight is beginning. Die Verdammtedaemerung. The Twilight of the Damned.

This whale, one magnificent creature, has given its life for a greater cause. This one whale represents a chink in the armor of Satan's most successful ideology: Puritanism in its various forms.

More than one marine mammal was harpooned on October 21, 2006, but also the apparent inevitability of this strain of neo-Puritanism.

Oh men of the harpoon, we salute you! Long live Iceland! Long live Japan!

Enjoy the video. I have spent too long on this already, and have a painting problem to get back to (I was going to work on it last night, as well as do some whaling blogging, but I went to bed early), but the cause of commercial whaling is too important to neglect.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Posted by erik at February 13, 2007 10:16 AM