The Christian Heritage:
Mission: Possible
If You are a Missionary, then Genocide is Your Profession
Oh, how happy a thing had it been,
if you had converted some before you killed any!
John Robinson, Puritan Minister
on a group of massacred Indians, ca. 1630
Are not missionaries those nice and friendly people who, abroad, in some
distant, underdeveloped countries, do good, feed hungry children, and teach
the ignorant, savage, or uneducated population?
Do you really believe this?
Almost certainly you belong to the majority of people who have seen them
walking around with their collecting-boxes, maybe even put some coins into
them. In any case, since the missionary organizations near all have tax
exempt status, if you ever paid taxes, you have indirectly funded them.
What exactly did you support?
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:
a.Killing members of the group;
b.Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c.Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
d.Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e.Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Missionaries have done all of the above, and continue to do most of these
things even today (supported with your money, donations, and taxes).
Since the effects of missionary work, the cultural traditions of a people
being replaced by some form of Christianity, are intentional, this means by
definition that genocide is the missionary profession: converting other
peoples to Christianity and thus destroying them as an ethnical group, and
denying the right of native peoples to exist as what they are, with their
own culture, language, religion. For a variety of reasons a massive
depopulation, in other words the death of a large percentage of the native
population, follows.
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 mission 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 | California | Mission Today
Tahiti.
Let us see how missionaries - like a contagious disease infecting
civilizations - annihilate native cultures, destroy the happiness of
peoples, and depopulate countries even without actively killing them...
(reading this account of missionary conquest for the first time left me
almost speechless with anger:)
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 stern 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,
No te iaha e ridi mei ei Jehove ia oe?
For what is Jehova angry with thee?
No te taata ino wou no to'u hamani ino
Because I am evil and do evil.
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...
[LM1-8]
California.
This is what happened in California a little more than a century ago, in the
Spanish missions...
[T]he 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 Señora de Loreto,
reported the Franciscan chronicler Father Francisco Paloú, 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 Rosaliá de Mulegé, 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 José 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 Olbés 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 Olbés] 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. Olbés 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 Southern
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 Moï, the Maya-Quiché, the Huichol, the Yanomami, the Panaré, the
Aché even today [LM]. Among the more notorious organizations are the Summer
Institute of Linguistics and the New Tribes Mission (NTM), 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 Nhambiquera Indians were mowed down by machine-gun fire
Two tribes of the Patachos were exterminated by giving them
smallpox injections
A favourite method employed on several occasions was to shower
gifts from a plane over a village ... booby trapped with
explosive devices
[LM99]
...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."
[LM119-122]
Of course a different picture is painted in the many colorful 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 bárbaros...
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. Ed.] 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...
Reaching the lost for Christ,
The McClures" [LM127]
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 Aché 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
Asunción... the Mennonites commonly referred to their Indian charges
(German is the language of the [main] colony) as unsere schwartze
arschlöche [1] (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 Caaguazú 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" Aché 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 Aché 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 Achés 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
(jaguar), 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 Achés 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
Achés are the most affectionate and outgoing of the Indian races)
showed us their tame lizards. [LM160ff]
Drawing conclusions.
While some of these examples of missionary activities in history and present
indeed remind me of actual death camps, however, all of them end in the
destruction and depopulation of what once was the home of happy native
cultures. Therefore, regardless of their respective intentions, I cannot see
any relevant difference between missionaries and the Nazi henchmen (except
that in Nazi death camps there were musical instruments).
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 Arschlöcher, (not that it really matters).
[2](Note included 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 speciality of Asunción. 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.
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