The True Current Events Cornerstone

The True Current Events Cornerstone

  

   Why missionaries unleashed are no better than Nazi henchmen.

   March 28th 2004

   Why missionaries suck

   Excerpt from the genocide convention

   Article II

   In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:

   Since Missionaries have done all of these things, and continue to do most of these things even today (supported with your money, donations, and taxes), being a missionary means by definition that genocide is your profession: converting other peoples to Christianity and thus destroying them as an ethnic group, and denying the right of native peoples to exist as what they are, with their own culture, language, religion.
   You say this is history? I'm afraid it is not. Just a few years ago, on a concert tour in Italy, I've seen the missionary owned shops in Assissi (the place of Saint Francis) run by monks who sell the sculptures and other articles the wretched mission Indians must make for them... Read about missionaries today.

   Tahiti.

   Let us see how missionaries - like a contagious disease infecting civilizations - destroy native cultures and the happiness of peoples even without actually killing them...
   (reading this account of missionary conquest for the first time left me almost speechless with rage:)

   IN 1767 THE ENGLISH navigator Wallis discovered the island of Tahiti. His visit was rapidly followed by those of the French explorer de Bougainville, and Captain James Cook... All three captains were overwhelmed by their reception at the hands of the people of Tahiti, and by the gifts showered upon them... When Cook left Tahiti... he wrote in his journal: «I directed my course to the West and we took our final leave of these happy islands and the good people on them.» Some years later he was to write: «It would have been far better for these poor people never to have known us.»
   Captain Bligh of the Bounty - that stem judge of men - was if possible more impressed... «I left these happy islanders with much distress, for the utmost affection, regard and good fellowship was among us during our stay...» A few days later the famous mutiny on the Bounty took place, due to the determination of members of his crew not to return to England but to remain and settle on the islands where they had found so much happiness...
   A counter-attack by the religious orthodoxy of the day was inevitable. In 1795 the London Missionary Society was formed, its immediate attention focused upon the Pacific; two years later a convict ship bound for Australia put the first missionaries ashore on Tahiti. They, too, were overwhelmed by the warmth of their welcome...
   The Tahitians built their houses, fed them, and provided them with servants galore, but after seven years not a convert had been made. Children called upon to line up and repeat over and over again this simple verse in Tahitian did so obligingly and with good grace,

   But another seven years of such attempted indoctrination produced no results, then suddenly the great breakthrough took place. The device which eventually established the unswerving missionary rule is described in a letter to home by one of the brethren, J .M. Orsmond. «All the missionaries were at that time salting pork and distilling spirits... Pomare (the local chief) had a large share...» Orsmond describes the compact by which Pomare, reduced to an alcoholic, would be backed in a war against the other island chiefs on the understanding that his victory would be followed by enforced conversion. Since Pomare was supplied with firearms to be used against his opponents clubs, victory was certain. «The whole nation», Orsmond wrote, «was converted in a day.»
   There followed a reign of terror. Persistent unbelievers were put to death and a penal code was drawn up by the missionaries and enforced by the mission police... it was declared illegal to adorn oneself with flowers, to sing (other than hymns), ... to surf or to dance... Within a quarter of a century the process by which the native culture of Tahiti had been extinguished was exported to every corner of the Pacific, reducing the islanders to the level of the working class of Victorian England.
   ...After their mass conversion it was hoped that the Tahitians might be induced to accept the benefits of civilization by putting them to [servile] work growing sugar cane... The enterprise failed, and Mr Orsmond, believing that «a too bountiful nature ... diminishes men's natural desire to work», ordered all the breadfruit trees to be cut down. By this time the population of Tahiti had been reduced by syphilis, tuberculosis, smallpox, and influenza from the 200,000 estimated by Cook to 18,000. After thirty years of missionary rule, only 6,000 remained.
   Their power base firmly established in Tahiti, the missionaries moved swiftly to the outer islands...
   The methods employed were the same as before. A local chieftain would be baptized, crowned king, presented with a portrait of Queen Victoria, introduced to the bottle, and left to the work of conversion...A moral code of such strictness was then enforced that a man walking with his arm round a woman at night was compelled to carry a lantern in his free hand. On the island of Raiatea a man who forecast the weather... was treated as a witchdoctor and put to death.
   By 1850 the conquest of the Pacific was complete...Once the lives of the Polynesian and Melanesian people had been intertwined with the processes of creation. They seemed under compulsion to decorate everything [such as] the enormously tall prows of their canoes into which they carved such intricate designs... The desire to produce beautiful things has gone... Island dances, reduced to grass-skirts and swaying hips, are for tourist consumption, and the islanders' songs seem lugubrious as if they have never freed themselves of the influence of the gloomy hymn-chanting... [LMl-8]

   California.

   This is what happened in California a little more than a century ago, in the Spanish missions...

   Two centuries earlier the Puritan minister John Robinson had complained to Plymouth's William Bradford that although a group of massacred Indians no doubt «deserved» to be killed, «Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you killed any!» [Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 374f]
   That was probably the only thing the New England Puritans and California's Spanish Catholics would have agreed upon. So, using armed Spanish troops, to capture Indians and herd them into the mission stockades, the Spanish padres did their best to convert the natives before they killed them.
   And kill them they did... At the mission of Nuestra Senora de Loreto, reported the Franciscan chronicler Father Francisco Palou, during the first three years of Franciscan rule 76 children and adults were baptized, while 131 were buried... The same held true at others, from the mission of Santa Rosalia de Mulege, with 48 baptisms and 113 deaths, to the mission of San Ignacio, with 115 baptisms and 293 deaths - all within the same initial three-year period.
   For some missions, such as those of San Jose del Cabo and Santiago de las Coras, no baptism or death statistics were reported, because there were so few survivors [...] that there was no reason for counting [...] And what was done was simply that they brought more natives in, under military force of arms.
   In short, the missions were furnaces of death that sustained their Indian population levels for as long as they did only by driving more and more natives into their confines to compensate for the huge numbers who were being killed once they got there. [...] Thus for example, one survey of life and death in an early Arizona mission has turned up statistics showing that at one time an astonishing 93 percent of the children born within its walls died before the age of ten - and yet the mission's total population did not drastically decline. [SH136f]
   There were various ways in which the mission Indians died. [...] The personal living space for Indians in the missions averaged about seven feet by two feet per person for unmarried captives, who were locked at night into sex-segregated common rooms that contained a single open pit for a toilet. It was perhaps a bit more space than was allotted a captive African in the hold of a slave ship sailing the Middle Passage. [...] Of course, the mission Indians also worked like slaves in the padres' agricultural fields, but they did so with far less than half the caloric intake, on average, commonly provided a black slave in Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia. [SH138]
   As one French visitor commented in the early nineteenth century, after inspecting life in the missions, the relationship between the priest and his flock «would... be different only in name if a slaveholder kept them for labor and rented them out at will...» But, we know now, he would have fed them better. [SH139]
   The padres were also concerned about the continuing catastrophic decline in the number of babies born to their neophyte charges... here is a first-hand account of what happened at mission Santa Cruz when a holy and ascetic padre named Ramon Olbes came to the conclusion that one particular married couple was behaving with excessive sexual inhibition, thereby depriving him of another child to enslave and another soul to offer up to Christ:
   He [Father Olbes] sent for the husband and he asked him why his wife hadn't borne children... they brought an interpreter. This [one] repeated the question of the father to the Indian, who answered that he should ask God. The father asked through the interpreter if he slept with his wife, to which the Indian said yes. Then the father had them placed in a room together so that they would perform coitus in his presence. The Indian refused, but they forced him to show them his penis in order to affirm that he had it in good order... Fr. Olbes asked her if her husband slept with her, and she answered that, yes... He had her enter another room in order to examine her reproductive parts.
   At this point the woman resisted the padre's attempted forced inspection; for that impertinence she received fifty lashes, was «shackled, and locked in the nunnery.» He then gave her a wooden doll and ordered her to carry it with her, «like a recently born child,» wherever she went. [SH141]
   There was, of course, good reason for the Indians to fear the consequences of running away and being caught:

   Some of the run-away men were tied on sticks and beaten with straps. One chief was taken out to the open field and a young calf which had just died was skinned and the chief was sewed into the skin while it was yet warm. He was kept tied to a stake all day, but he died soon and they kept his corpse tied up.
   [SH142]

   Mission today.

   In a host of countries, from Southeast Asia to nearly the whole of South America, in countries such as Malaysia, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, U.S. funded missionary organizations and evangelists continue to bring destruction, unhappiness, and diseases to native peoples such as the MOl, the Maya-Quiche, the Huichol, the Yanomami, the Panare, the Ache even today [LM]. Among the more notorious organizations are the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the New Tribes Mission (N1M), these two «virtually dividing the whole of Latin America, where tribal people remained to be reached, into their spheres of interest.» [LM105].

   Activities like these are supported with funds provided by zealous evangelist organizations in the U.S., such as the «Wycliffe Bible Translators of Arkansas.»
   While openly genocidal campaigns to exterminate the last forest Indians of Southern America began in the 1950's, with governmental support, for example...

   ...the missionaries effect their mopping up efforts from the other end. To learn what missionaries do today let us follow two visits to protestant Missions in Southern America, as recorded by eyewitnesses less than two decades ago, the first leading us to an NTM mission station in Paraguay.

   We left before dawn the next day in Riester's Land Rover, and found the missionary camp at the end of a jungle track, along which threatening notices had been posted in the hope of keeping visitors away. Nearer the centre of the camp grimed and dishevelled women squatted round a fire on which a tortoise was being cooked... In the centre of the camp we found a large wooden hut with several male Ayoreos propped against its walls... dazed with apathy and unable or unwilling to speak...
   A commotion began, led by some weeping women, who had broken through to tell us that the camp's water-supply had been cut off as a punishment for some offence, and that many sick children in the camp had been without water for some days. It seemed a matter of urgency to do something to rectify this situation so we went to see the missionary, Mr Depue, whose trim compound was adjacent to the bedraggled camp area... Mr Depue and his family were at lunch when we arrived and we were shown into an anteroom... After Mr Depue had said grace the family rose from the table... and Mr Depue joined us...
   He unhesitatingly confirmed that he had ordered a collective punishment he believed most effective to deal with a case in which two or three children had broken into a store... There was to be no more water until the culprits were found, and brought into his compound there to be publicly thrashed.
   «Would you be administering the thrashing, Mr Depue?» I asked.
   «That is my intention,» he said, «although I should not be averse to supervising the necessary chastisement undertaken by another person. But I'm afraid that's unlikely.»
   He went on to explain... in all the many years he had spent as a missionary he had never heard of a single instance of an Indian punishing a child...
   «And do you still believe that this is a better life?» I asked Mr Depue.
   «Yes," he said. "I cannot describe to you in words how much better it is.»
   «The Ayoreos who left the camp and went to Santa Cruz," I told him, "are living on the women's earnings from prostitution.»
   «There would be little alternative,» he said... «I am only comforted by the knowledge that a soul once truly saved can never be lost.» [LMl19-122]

   Of course a different picture is painted in the many books and leaflets published by the missionary headquarters, intended for readers back home: Missionary descriptions of such operations are often disarmingly simple and direct... God Planted Five Seeds, by Jean Dye Johnson, a classic of its kind, is the account of a young missionary wife... Only once in 213 pages does she refer to Indians, and then in quotes, as if real Indians were to be found only in North America. Otherwise the mission is out to capture 'naked savages', or barbaros...
   Mrs Johnson noted that the householders, 'most of whom owned ranches or farms just out of town were shameless in their desire to get their hands on some Ayoreo who would become a labourer without pay'.
   The use in this passage of the adjective 'shameless' is the single example of implied criticism in this book of the servitude imposed on the Indians. For years Mrs Johnson lived among 'captives' and 'labourers without pay', but the word 'slave' is never used. On a single occasion she expressed regret for the murder of an Indian.

   He (Paul Fleming, founder and head of the NTM) was troubled by the fact that the second search party had killed a savage.

   «Mrs Johnson's concern here is likely to have been less with the death of a savage, which was a matter of frequent occurrence, than with the mission's responsibility for a soul's condemnation to everlasting hell.» [LM123f]
   «Contact work, one learns from a study of the missionary publications, when not undertaken by the missionaries themselves is confined to native 'deacons'. These, in the style of the London Missionary Society's police of old, carry guns. At this time some 850 Ayoreos thus contacted are in NTM camps, and a very large, but unrecorded number have died. Cultural Survival, a US organization not wholly unsympathetic to missionary endeavour, admitted that inmates of an NTM camp... were held against their will. In the legal sense, therefore, they had been kidnapped.» [LM127]
   Missionary accounts of their activities display almost incredible insensitivity. A letter back home from the McClure family, dated March 1979 reads:

   Dear Prayer Partners,
   Early last year we asked you to claim 1978 as the year we contacted the Totobigosode or 'pig people'. The Following is what your prayers have effected.
   It started the 28th December... [on] a site about 200 kilometres from El Faro [...] When the El Faro men were close they started shouting their names, and that they had come in peace. To this the 'pig people' shouted back: 'These men are saying that they have come in peace but what if it is a trick, because they have done this to us long ago.'
   The turning point seemed to come when Cadui, one of the El Faro men, threw his rifle behind him and walked forward... However, they had to wait three days before all the women were rounded up; they were scared to death. One lady was injured when she fell from a tree. [She broke a leg in two places and was obliged to walk back to the mission on it, and subsequently died.] It was a joyous occasion when we arrived at the mission station...
   The El Faro Indians and missionaries are just praising the Lord for his faithfulness in bringing all this about...

  

   The following is the description of a visit to a Mennonite mission station, an offshoot of a Mennonite missionary colony in Paraguay, where about three hundred Ache Indians were supposed to live.
   The Mennonite colony enjoys some degree of autonomy, and to go there permission had to be obtained at the Mennonite headquarters in Asuncion... the Mennonites commonly referred to their Indian charges (German is the language of the [main] colony) as unsere schwartze arschloche [l] (our black arseholes). The North American evangelists, primmer by nature, prefer the description «savages», «naked savages» - or in the case of those who resist contact, «treacherous savages» - all of which terms are repeated endlessly in their publications...
   Two days later the permission to visit the Mennonite colony came through... Halfway between Coronel and Caaguazù a notice proclaimed that we were entering the National Guayaki Reserve...
   We found ourselves quite suddenly in a wide clearing at the end of which, from its size and style, was clearly the mission house... The first thing I noticed, apart from the presence of several Indian women in near rags mooching about in the neighbourhood of the huts, was the smell of human excrement. A white man in mechanic's overalls had been tinkering with a piece of machinery and now he straightened himself and came forward, with a look of suppressed anger. This was Mr Jim Stolz, the missionary-in-chief... Mrs Stolz now came out of the house. She invited us into the house... A moment before several hefty-looking young Americans had appeared as if from nowhere, and were closing in on us, and, a little nervous at the way things might develop, I warned Donald to get away and take what photographs he could while I engaged Mr Stolz... He agreed that no «wild» Ache were to be found anywhere in the vicinity, and those recently arrived had come from a long way away. What made them come? I asked and Mr Stolz said, «Maybe they heard this was a good place to be in.»
   There were many enslaved children in the neighbourhood... «It's the smart thing to own an Ache round here,» he said... It was hard to believe that Indians would have faced these terrible hazards to reach what had been frequently described as a death camp.
   Donald was anxious to photograph Aches playing their musical instruments; their flutes and above all a species of one-string fiddle... Mr Stolz said flatly that there were no musical instruments of any kind on the reservation. Did the Indians perform any traditional ceremonies? I asked. No, he said, none. Were there any chiefs? No. Any medicine-men? Absolutely not...
   At this point I decided to ask Mr Stolz what was the function of the mission and he replied that it was to bring salvation to those who were in a state of sin... He had a problem with their language, he added, but at least he knew that they believed in three gods: the tiger Gaguar), the alligator, and the grandfather. «This makes things difficult... It's hard to get across the idea they can be redeemed from sin by a tiger's son nailed to a cross. None of these Indians can make the admission, because they do not know what to admit.»
   I now joined Donald at his photography, noticing that several young missionaries, not in evidence before, had come on the scene. We investigated small huts in the immediate area of the mission house. These averaged some 15ft square and it was difficult to imagine how as many as three hundred Indians could have been sheltered in them. We saw about thirty-five Aches in all... There were a half-dozen boys between eight and twelve years of age, and two girls in this age-bracket, all with the distended stomachs and decayed teeth suggestive of malnutrition...
   There appeared to be no sanitary arrangements in the camp area, which smelt vilely as a result.
   If there had ever in fact been three hundred Indians - and presuming women were not compelled to work with their menfolk on the farms - men would have outnumbered women 15 to 1. There were no young girls... Where had all the girl children gone? [2]
   About half the Indian adults were lying on the ground in their huts in what seemed a condition of total apathy, giving no evidence of awareness of our presence as we came and went. There were gaps of up to six inches between the planks from which the walls of the huts were made, and, as these had failed to exclude the torrential rain, the floors had turned to mud, over which an occasional board had been laid. We saw no signs of food anywhere in the huts - no scraps or leftovers.
   Outside, little boys with distended stomachs under their filthy shirts who came running up to stroke our hands and caress our fingers (the Aches are the most affectionate and outgoing of the Indian races) showed us their tame lizards. [LMI60ff]

   Conclusion.

   Since we have now seen examples of missionary activities in history and in the present, some of which indeed remind me of actual death camps, but all of which end in the destruction and depopulation of what once was the home of happy native cultures, I cannot see any relevant difference between missionaries and the Nazi henchmen.
   As long as operations like these can claim tax-exempt status, your money and taxes support these activities.

   Notes.

   [1] Error of the English author of the quote: correct German would be unsere schwarzen Arschlocher, if that is of interest.
   [2] (Note in the original text:) It has been alleged that young girls from Cecilio Baez, and girl victims of manhunts in other parts of Paraguay, were sent to child brothels reported a specialty of Asuncion. In December 1977 the Washington Post published a harrowing account of such establishments catering for the «sexual depravity among high government officials».

   References

   [LM] N.Lewis, The Missionaries, New York: McGraw-Hill 1988.
   [SH] D.E.Stannard, American Holocaust. Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, New York: Oxford University 1992.

   Compiled by Kelsos

   This is really part 2. It was found on the internet about eight years ago, but isn't anymore. So I thought it was time to put it back up. If someone wants further credit for compiling and writing it, I'll be happy to do so. Great job, guys. :)

   Amos

  

  

  

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