“So we can indeed call those folk barbarians by the rules of reason but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism.” (“Nous les pouvons donc bien appeler barbares eu égard aux règles de la raison, mais non pas eu égard à nous, qui les sur-passons en toute sorte de barbarité.”)
—Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Of Cannibals
And that was before ‘the Enlightenment’, the guillotine, colonialism, the genocide of the red Indians, the Atlantic slave trade and the plantations, the American civil war, the Russian gulag, the British gulag in Kenya, the Holocaust, the two world wars,
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