Zombie Apocalypse Now!
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More controversial y, Guy R. McPherson in Going Dark 78 argues that the Earth may no longer be a habitat for humans beyond the 2030’s and that near-term human extinction will occur because of self-reinforcing feedback loops in the global climate system. Col apse will include the catastrophic meltdown of around 440 nuclear power plants destroying most organisms, as shutting down nuclear power plants requires 1-2 decades of “careful planning.”
McPherson is an “extreme” example of an eco-col apse theorist, but he has made a plausible cause for human extinction, as I argue in chapter 3. However, many other scientists and theorists have expressed alarm that the “compounding crises,”79 “shock of history,”80
75 Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (Allen and Unwin, Crow’s Nest, New South Wales, 2010).
76 As above, p. 31.
77 As above p. viii.
78 Guy R. McPherson, Going Dark (Publish America, Baltimore, 2013).
79 Will Steffen and David Griggs, “Compounding Crises: Climate Change in a Complex World,” in P. Christoff (ed.) Four Degrees of Global Warming: Australia in a How World (Routledge, London and New York, 2014), pp. 121-138; A. J. McMichael, “Health Impacts in Australia in a Four Degree World,” as above, pp. 155-171.
80 Dominique Venner, The Shock of History (Arktos, London, 2015).
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and “converging catastrophes”81 including the climate change crisis, energy scarcity, food and water insecurity, biodiversity destruction, economic insecurity, international terrorism and militarization, threaten us with civilization col apse, if present trends continue.
general conclusion: In chapter 3, I argue that a civilization col apse because of the environment is inevitable. This will lead to a great die-off of the bulk of humanity in waves of hyper-violence, as environmentalists implicitly acknowledge. Rather than fruitlessly hoping that this tsunami of blood does not occur, those who want to survive need to fight fire with fire and embrace the way of the neo-barbarian. Our salvation will be via weaponry and the cultivation of individual toughness. These books are the self-help books for a journey to hell.
There are some other excellent books taking a similar type of personal transformative approach to the zombie apocalypse, the impending col apse of civilization. Forrest Griffin former light heavyweight champion of the ufc (Ultimate Fighting Championship) has Be Ready When Shit Goes Down: A Survival Guide to the Apocalypse, 82
which is a big-balled approach to survivalism, stacked full of jokes; which is not to say that I agree with the twisted sentiment in all of these jokes, just with the freedom to make them. Who would have thought that teotwawki could be so much fun?
On the other hand, The Disaster Diaries by Sam Sheridan83
traces this mixed martial artist’s attempt to master a wide-range of survival skil s, from knife fighting to wilderness skil s, to deal with various doomsday threats. The final chapter of the book though says that the evidence is against The Walking Dead world of dog-eat-dog. Hurricane Katrina’s reports of human savagery were false; the extent of violence and social breakdown in the aftermath of 81 Guil aume Faye, Convergence of Catastrophes (Arktos, London, 2012).
82 Forest Griffin and Erich Krauss, Be Ready When the Shit Goes Down: A Survival Guide to the Apocalypse (itbooks, HarperCollins, New York, 2011).
83 Sam Sheridan, The Disaster Diaries: One Man’s Quest to Learn Everything Necessary to Survive the Apocalypse (Penguin Books, New York, 2013).
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Haiti’s earthquake, were exaggerated. Contrary to Sheridan, this book defends the social Darwinist, dog-eat-dog view of humanity, and maintains that humans are even more degenerate than conventional y thought.84 However, Sheridan does say that “man is wolf to man”, “when the resources run low, when people are starving, they start eating each other.” Nevertheless, even though “long-term, grid down teotwawki is different to a normal disaster,” it is unlikely he believes. After al , predictions of the apocalypse or even “col apse”
are as old as recorded history, and haven’t all such predictions been wrong? Wel , no, they haven’t – all past civilizations did col apse. Shit real y does happen and does not merely hit the proverbial fan, but often buries it. The question to be investigated in chapter 3 is: why should techno-industrial civilization be any different?
84 Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door (Three Rivers Press, New York, 2006).
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2
Listen up, maggots! You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.
You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
-Tyler Durden, Fight Club (1999)
There exists no man who is not an enemy.
-Kanti I, King of Egypt, (C 2500 BC), Teachings.85
Most men are bad.
-Bias of Priene, (C 600 BC, Maxims) 86
Civilization is a thin varnish, built up painful y over centuries; when it is removed, you discover egotistical, violent, and cruel human beings. Take a normal person and put him out in the cold, the rain, amid hunger and thirst, take away his comfort and habits, his television, beer, booze, cigarettes, and other drugs, and you will soon see the savage within. [...]And if you think fraternity and social bond are still there after decades of consumerist, hedonist, narcissist, egocentric culture, you are in for a big surprise.
A society that encourages immediate satisfaction of our basest desires and whims can only, in a crisis situation, transform itself into a horde of violent psychopaths.
-Piero San Giorgio87
The human race will be the cancer of the planet.
-Julian Huxley (1887-1975)88
How many people there are could be described as mere channels for food, producers of excrement, fillers of latrines, for they have no purpose in this world; they practice no virtue whatsoever; all that remains after them is a full latrine.
-Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) (attributed to)89
85 Quoted from A.R. Pratt, The Darkside: Thoughts on the Futility of Life from the Ancient Greeks to the Present (Citadel Press Books/Carol Publishing Group, New York, 1994), p. 4.
86 As above p. 7.
87 Piero San Giorgio, Survive the Economic Col apse: A Practical Guide (Radix/Washington Summit Publishers, Whitefish, 2013), p. 171.
88 Quoted from Pratt, as above, p. 230.
89 K. Krul , Leonardo da Vinci (Puffin Books, New York, 2005), p. 39.
Lord of the Zombies
It was the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535-c.
475 bc), who held that “fire” (energy?) was the primordial substance of the universe and that all things were in perpetual flux, who also said: “Those unmindful when they hear, for all they make of their intelligence, may be regarded as the walking dead.”90
The idea here is that the “unmindful,” those who live their lives as unenlightened sleepwalkers, might just as well be the “walking dead,”
what we today would call “zombies.”
Contemporary zombie popular culture has also drawn a direct connection between “us” and zombies.91 George Romero’s film Dawn of the Dead (2004), set in a shopping mal , has a scene where Peter says to Stephen regarding the zombies outside: “They’re us. That’s al .” Robert Kirkman in his graphic novel The Walking Dead # 24
expresses the same sentiment: “we are the walking dead.” amc’s The Walking Dead extends the theme running through Romero’s films and many other zombie flicks, that humans are their worst enemies and that human hubris and selfishness will lead to our ultimate destruction.92
90 Heraclitus, Fragment 3, cited from Dale Jacquette, “Zombie Gladiators,” in Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammed (eds), Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead (Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, 2010), pp.105-118, cited p. 105.
91 Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History (University of C
hicago Press, Chicago, 2015).
92 C. D. Evans, “They’re Us”: Infectious Trauma and the Zombie Apocalypse (PhD Thesis, University of Arkansas, May 2009).
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Hol ywood zombies, born in George Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (1968) are reanimated bodies, “a living body that has died and come back to life,” due to various causes, typical y naturalistic.93 Matt Mogk in Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Zombies,94 says that a zombie is a “scientific monster,” “a relentlessly aggressive, reanimated human corpse driven by a biological infection.” That definition rules out a supernatural/magic cause for zombieism. In the Afro-Caribbean voodoo concept of zombieism, the zombie was usual y a living person, controlled by the “magic” of a sorcerer. Early “zombie” movies including White Zombie (1932), Revolt of the Zombies (1936), King of the Zombies (1941), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), did not have zombies as cannibals, eating human flesh and brains, but were people under a spel , who usual y were able to break the spell in the end. Thus, the Mogk definition, whilst working perfectly fine for most of modern culture, needs fine-tuning; the biological agent could have a supernatural/magic origin (indirect cause) or supernatural/demonic forces may directly cause the zombieism. In the TV series Supernatural, Dean and Sam Winchester face “zombies” of two types; those raised from the dead by necromancy, magicians or by demons, and humans infected by the Croatoan zombie virus, demonical y created. Hence, zombies can have a supernatural cause, and at least in the world of fiction, and supernatural y caused zombies get over the problem of how the dead reanimate.
In Dead Snow (2009), zombies are reanimated by pure evil. Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead 2 (1987) and now concluded tv version, Ash vs Evil Dead (2015-2018), starring Bruce Campbell (of Burn Notice fame), featured necromantic reanimation by demonic possession, produced by an ancient reborn evil. The possessed have many zombie-like elements (although zombologist purists will not classify these ghouls as “zombies”) and they are not destroyed by 93 David Wang, “5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actual y Happen,”
October 29, 2007, at http://www.cracked.com/article_15643_5-scientific-reasons-zombie-apocalypse-could-actual y-happen.html.
94 Matt Mogk, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (Gallery Books, New York, 2011).
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head shots. Wel , maybe they are. In the 2015-2018 TV series, Ash vs.
Evil Dead, head shots, which completely blow the head away, stop these ghouls, although only blowing away say half a head, will not.
Ash’s trusty chain saw arm weapon though, beheads and minces these demon spawn and stops their evil. At least, we hope so.
In hbo’s now concluded Game of Thrones, there were White Walkers in the tv show and “Others” in George R.R Martin’s books, which are an ancient, mystical race, hostile to humans. In the distant past, in a bitterly cold winter lasting a generation, known as the “Long Night,” White Walkers invaded the southern regions of men and cut down all in their path. The human and animal dead were reanimated as Wights. Wights, either human or animal, are the near-mindless minions of White Walkers, the dead magical y reanimated. Unlike conventional zombies, decapitated corpses still attack, and limbs, which are slashed off, can still move. Fire is the principal weapon used to destroy Wights, while dragonglass weapons—obsidian—a form of volcanic glass, is the only weapon able to kill White Walkers, which in the hasty ending of the series in season 8, the Battle of Winterfell (2019), occurred too easily. When White Walkers are stabbed or slashed by dragonglass weapons they freeze up and fall apart. Wights can use basic weapons, unlike most zombies. Once again, zombologist professors would not see Wights as zombies, and perhaps not even quasi-zombies, but both creatures share common attributes, and have their fan base.
The zombie idea has been in human culture in various forms for thousands of years. For example, in The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100
bce), Ishtar was in a rage from perceived insults from Gilgamesh, whom she wanted as her husband. Gilgamesh rejected her, reciting a long list of her previous lovers and all the harm and horrors that she brought on them. Ishtar, pissed off with this rejection, returned to the heavens and requested of her father Anu, who possessed the “Bull of Heaven,” to kill Gilgamesh or she would carry out this threat: I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the doorposts, and leave the doors flat down, 49
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And will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!95
To cut to the chase, she gets the Bull of Heaven to attempt to destroy the Earth, but Gilgamesh and the wild man Enkidu, kill the Bull of Heaven. Which goes to show that people have been speaking bull for thousands of years.
The Old Testament has one quasi-zombie passage: Zechariah 14: 12-13: “This is the plague with which the Lord will strike all the nations that fought against Jerusalem: Their flesh will rot while they are standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. On that day people will be stricken by the Lord with great panic. They will seize each other by the hand and attack one another.” The flesh rotting, while people attack, is zombie-like, although there is no mention that the dudes “that fought against Jerusalem” are the walking dead, but no doubt when all that mayhem goes down, they may have wished that they were. At least in the hard fairy tale world of religion.
In the New Testament, Revelation 9:6 states: “During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.” This is some distance from even quasi-zombiedom, but is still an interesting deviation: those unable to die may still deteriorate, perhaps becoming as decayed as zombies. This is much like, I suppose, the traitorous new class who now fill our universities, and seem never to disintegrate, but become increasingly putrid over time, feasting and festering on the public purse.
In European folklore and superstition, the idea of the dead returning to haunt, hunt and prey upon the living was common, although ghosts, demons and vampires had pride of place in the pantheon of terror. For example, archeologists in Bulgaria have uncovered two skeletons dated from the Middle Ages, which were found pierced through the chest with iron rods, presumably to keep 95 The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet VI, cited at http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/
mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab6.htm.
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them from turning into vampires.96 The skeletons were discovered in an archeological dig in the Bulgarian Black Sea town of Sozopol.
According to Bulgaria’s national museum chief, Bozhidar Dimitrov, this was a common practice in some Bulgarian vil ages up until the first decade of the 20th century. It was considered that people regarded as bad during their lifetime might return after death as vampires to suck the blood of the living in the night, unless stabbed in the chest with an iron rod or wooden stake, to pin them in their graves. About 100 such “vampire” corpses have been discovered in Bulgaria, and there are many other similar finds in central and Western Europe.
This practice may be revived in the ruins of the West, in the near future, to pin down forever our brood of blood suckers of the new class.
Ancient Greeks believed that the dead could rise from their graves as “revenants,” being in a state of neither living nor dead, arising to harm the living. In a cemetery known as “Passo Marinaro,” near the Greek coastal town of Kamarina in south-eastern Sicily, used for graves from the fifth to the third centuries bce, one individual’s head and feet were completely covered by large amphora fragments (a large two-handled ceramic vessel), used to pin the individual in the grave. A second individual was a child buried with five large stones on the top of its body.97
The Norse draugr or “again-walker” is a reanimated corpse with superhuman strength, who may guard treasure burie
d with it, or seek revenge over those who wronged them in life.98 They slay victims through various means, including flesh eating. The draugr can drive the sane, insane, and was thought to have magical powers such as shape-changing, increasing their size and being able to see into the future.99 Unlike the modern zombie, the draugr can, shades of Freddie 96 R. Nuwer, “Vampire Grave” in Bulgaria Holds a Skeleton with a Stake through its Heart,” October 13, 2014, at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/vampire-grave-bulgaria-holds-skeleton-stake-through-its-heart-180953004/.
97 C. L. S. Weaver, “Walking Dead and Vengeful Spirits,” Popular Archaeology, vol. 19, Summer, 2015.
98 Hilda Ellis-Davidson, The Road to Hel (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1943).
99 Ellis-Davidson, as above, p. 163.
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Krueger, enter the dreams of the living. Anticipating zombies, in the Norse Eyrbyggja Saga, a shepherd killed by a draugr arises from the dead the next night as a draugr.100 Unlike the modern zombie, the draugr is general y immune to weapons wielded by ordinary men, but in the Grettir’s Saga and Eyrbyggja Saga, a hero can fight the draugr back to the grave.101
The Germanic nachzehrer eats already dead bodies, but a living person is not transformed into a nachzehrer by being bitten by one.
The nachzehrer arises after death, typical y the death of a suicide. It is destroyed by placing a coin in its mouth (good luck with that one) and then beheading it.102 Both of these European creatures of terror can be contrasted with the jiangshi, a reanimated corpse in Chinese folklore. It moves with outstretched arms seeking the life force of the living. The corpse is stiff and moves by hopping.103 No doubt the present vampire and zombie cults stir up deep racial memories of fear and dark forces from our past that the thin wal s of civilization have only precariously held at bay.
In contemporary culture, the zombie apocalypse is viewed through the conceptual framework of science, rather than traditional folklore and superstition. Max Brooks in his best-selling book The Zombie Survival Guide 104 is one leading source of information about Hol ywood zombies. Zombieism arises from a virus, simply named solanum. The origin of solanum is a mystery; perhaps it arose as a genetic engineering experiment gone wrong (compare to the T-virus in the Resident Evil series). Nevertheless, solanum uses cel s from the human frontal lobe for replication, destroying the cel s in the process.