Genocide

Abel lived in a small village in the forest. Its inhabitants lived there with nothing but their bodies, feeding on what the forest provided. The children learned to live together by playing and bathing in the nearby river.

Beyond the forest there was a huge population crammed into villages so vast that they were lost on the horizon. Unhappy and ever-hungry men lived there. One day they discovered the little village in the forest and its naked inhabitants. They took pity on these primitive men and women, and offered them second-hand clothes that were out of fashion and therefore unsaleable. They discovered traces of gold in the river, so they set up a mine upstream to give the villagers honest work. There was no shortage of work: a ton of rubble had to be excavated to obtain a gram of gold.

A revolt broke out when the children were forced to work. And so, in the name of morality, of the market and of work, a court judgment authorized the enslavement or killing of those who opposed the inexorable march of progress.

The revolt was crushed and put down bloodily by the hungry men. Only a handful of villagers, a few families, remained and hid deep in the forest.