https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/paid-ultimate-price-grisly-fate-080000262.html
Yahoo! News
‘He paid the ultimate price’: the grisly fate of the missionary who met the last ‘uncontacted’ tribe
Alex Diggins
Sun, November 19, 2023
It’s a disquieting, immersive investigation into faith [ Your marketing-buzzword for your superstitions, as with any religion ]
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/paid-ultimate-price-grisly-fate-080000262.html
Yahoo! News
‘He paid the ultimate price’: the grisly fate of the missionary who met the last ‘uncontacted’ tribe
Alex Diggins
Sun, November 19, 2023
The group, which is perhaps 200-strong, appears to use only stone-age tools and technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/paid-ultimate-price-grisly-fate-080000262.html
Yahoo! News
‘He paid the ultimate price’: the grisly fate of the missionary who met the last ‘uncontacted’ tribe
Alex Diggins
Sun, November 19, 2023
On the morning of November 17, 2018, on the island of North Sentinel in the Indian Ocean, a man stepped from the sea. He was dressed only in shorts, shouting incomprehensibly and waving his arms violently. A sentry spotted him and warned him away.
The man came closer. His shouting grew more desperate, his gestures wilder. The sentry drew a bead on the man with his bow and arrow. The man stepped closer. The sentry fired.
The stranger in the surf was a 26-year-old American evangelical Christian [ Superstition ] missionary, John Allen Chau
From 8/13/1960 ( from The New York Times newspaper: U.S. Lawyers Give Powers a Defense; Send Outline on Four Points to U-2 Pilot's Counsel Chosen by Soviet ) To 11/17/2018 ( ) is 21280 days
21280 = 10640 + 10640
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/20/1994 ( from the thoughts in my conscious mind, coinciding with United States of America Veterans Affairs hospital psychiatric doctor medical drugs: in non-aviator related duties boots on the ground in Bosnia as Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps captain this day is my US Navy Cross medal date of record ) is 10640 days
From 12/5/1941 ( US Navy battleships USS Oklahoma and USS Arizona and the Pacific Fleet returned to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, as ordered ) To 12/20/1994 ( from the thoughts in my conscious mind, coinciding with United States of America Veterans Affairs hospital psychiatric doctor medical drugs: in non-aviator related duties boots on the ground in Bosnia as Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps captain this day is my US Navy Cross medal date of record ) is 19373 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 11/17/2018 ( ) is 19373 days
From 7/19/1945 ( premiere USA film "Anchors Aweigh" ) To 8/3/1998 ( "Rainbow Six" by Tom Clancy ) is 19373 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 11/17/2018 ( ) is 19373 days
From 5/4/1984 ( premiere USA film "The Bounty" ) To 11/17/2018 ( ) is 12615 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 5/17/2000 ( {puppet-in-chief} Bill Clinton, 42nd President of USA: Commencement Address at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut) is 12615 days
From 5/4/1984 ( premiere USA film "The Bounty" ) To 11/17/2018 ( ) is 12615 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 5/17/2000 ( {puppet-in-chief} Bill Clinton, 42nd President of USA: Memorandum on Strengthening Our Commitment to Service Through Voluntary Opportunities ) is 12615 days
From 6/1/1955 ( premiere USA film "This Island Earth" ) To 11/17/2018 ( ) is 23180 days
23180 = 11590 + 11590
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 7/27/1997 ( premiere USA TV series "Stargate SG-1"::series premiere episode "Children of the Gods" ) is 11590 days
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/paid-ultimate-price-grisly-fate-080000262.html
Yahoo! News
‘He paid the ultimate price’: the grisly fate of the missionary who met the last ‘uncontacted’ tribe
Alex Diggins
Sun, November 19, 2023
On the morning of November 17, 2018, on the island of North Sentinel in the Indian Ocean, a man stepped from the sea. He was dressed only in shorts, shouting incomprehensibly and waving his arms violently. A sentry spotted him and warned him away.
The man came closer. His shouting grew more desperate, his gestures wilder. The sentry drew a bead on the man with his bow and arrow. The man stepped closer. The sentry fired.
The stranger in the surf was a 26-year-old American evangelical Christian missionary, John Allen Chau, who believed he was on a mission from God – "The Great Commission" – to convert the island’s inhabitants. The lookout on the beach was a member of the North Sentinelese, one of the last remaining "uncontacted" tribes in the world.
The group, which is perhaps 200-strong, appears to use only stone-age tools and technology. They defend their remote island – in the far-flung Andaman archipelago – aggressively. After the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, they shot at a reconnaissance helicopter; and they’ve been known to kill fishermen who've drunkenly washed up on their shores. In 2018, on Chau’s second approach to the community, they killed him – and found themselves at the centre of a global news storm.
Now Chau’s story has been turned into a film, The Mission, produced by National Geographic and directed by American documentarians, Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss. It’s a disquieting, immersive investigation into faith, anthropology and the tug of remoteness and strangeness.
“The paradox of John was that he wasn’t stupid,” explains Moss. “He was very intelligent. He was methodical. We like to think of such people as zealots. But there’s a lot that was normal about him. Still, he concealed a lot.”
In some ways, Chau was a quintessential millennial. Born in 1991 in Scottsboro, Alabama, he grew up to be a keen outdoorsman, taking himself off for weeks-long solo hikes and documenting his adventures compulsively on social media. He even became a brand influencer for a beef jerky company.
Chau came from a moderate Christian family. But gradually, through his school, youth camps and undergraduate degree at Oral Roberts University, a private Christian institution, he fell under the sway of a more radical faith. He first heard about the North Sentinelese in his late teens and, about the same time, began to believe in the evangelical mission of bringing the Gospel to remote, isolated peoples.
“John subscribed to two faiths,” says McBaine. “There was his evangelical Christianity, but also his love of adventure, stories such as Tintin and Robinson Crusoe. He willed himself into being a storybook character, and he paid the ultimate price for it.”
North Sentinel itself has been buried under hundreds of years of mythmaking. In the Victorian era, the Andaman Islands – then part of the British Empire – gave rise to wild tales of cannibalistic pygmies. (In fact, there is no evidence its indigenous tribes ever practised cannibalism.) In the 1890 Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of the Four, the murderer is aided in his plan of revenge by Tonga, a “black cannibal” islander. In the 20th century, the islands developed a new infamy as King Kong’s remote lair: a site of monstrous, animalistic terror.
Yet these stories disguised a darker history. The islands’ British governors, ruling from the provincial capital Port Blair, treated the indigenous peoples with a mix of condescension, fear and morbid fascination. One officer in particular, Maurice Vidal Portman, conducted a series of anthropological expeditions among the Andamanese in the late 1900s, living among some of them. But he also kidnapped children and tribespeople, taking them back to Port Blair and displaying them as curiosities. In the film, there’s an extraordinary archive interview with an Andaman tribesman who describes an evil spirit that steals from the water to eat children – the implication is that this is an ancestral memory of British incursions, translated into folklore.
“There were never any isolated communities on these islands,” Professor Vishvajit Pandya, an Indian anthropologist, tells me. “That’s the biggest myth. This idea that you can go off and discover an ‘uncontacted’ tribe [is] b–llshit. It’s the white man’s burden again and again.”
Pandya is perhaps the most foremost expert on Andaman Island tribes. In the 1980s, he was tasked by the Indian government, who now own the islands, to decide how to deal with its indigenous peoples. His approach – “eyes on, hands off” – has been official policy ever since. Chau broke international law by attempting to contact the North Sentinelese, bribing local fishermen to sneak past coast guard patrols and get him close to shore.
Pandya suspects a wider conspiracy: “How the hell did he get in there? How did he get past the Navy? John had this great romanticism. He saw himself as a great hero bringing the voice of Christ – I mean, get a life! Let’s treat human beings as human beings. This idea that these people live without a sense of history…”
In fact, Pandya points out, there is evidence the North Sentinelese once traded with their neighbours, and they seem to speak a similar language. It was only in the 19th- and 20th-centuries, when outside influence disrupted these historic exchanges, that they retreated and began to treat interlopers with hostility. “They may not be un-contacted, but they are unconquered,” says Pandya. “They have a right to their way of life.”
Still, for Chau, North Sentinel exerted a compulsive pull. “Satan has possession of these people and I am going to save them from eternal hellfire,” he promised in his diary.
Yet his naive, fatal radicalism didn’t develop in isolation. As The Mission makes clear, he was encouraged and sponsored by a vast, wealthy network of missionary organisations. In 2021, America sent out more than 200,000 missionaries – more than any other country. Most go with their families, working in communities which have opened themselves to the outside world. But there are websites, such as the Joshua Project, which map “unreached” people and encourage their conversion.
All Nations, the missionary group which supported Chau’s attempt, issued a press release after his death describing him as a martyr. In 2017, Chau took part in a two-week “missionary boot camp” organised by All Nations in which they role-played a first contact scenario. The film shows footage of this play acting: wholesome Americans shouting gibberish and waving sticks at each other in a Kansas City park. It’s bizarre, amusing – and, in light of what happened afterwards, leaves a terrible taste in the mouth.
“Where is the line between faith and madness?” asks McBaine. “Was Chau a martyr – or a suicidal zealot? When you set foot on that island, you’re stepping onto a stage and telling a story about yourself. But you’re not telling the story of the people who live there.”
Do the directors worry their film will encourage further attempts to reach the island? “Even before our film was finished, I’m sure people were already planning on returning,” says Moss. “Like Odysses and the sirens, there is always a call.”
The North Sentinelese face more pressing issues, though. The Andaman Islands are only a few metres above sea level and vulnerable to climate change. And Pandya says that illegal logging is threatening ecosystems and, as in the Amazon, may put loggers into contact with indigenous peoples. In almost all these encounters, the tribespeople come off worse.
But the fate of the North Sentinelese will now always be tied up with Chau’s. His diary shows that on the evening before his death, he was scared of what he might face – but sure of the rightness of his purpose. He wrote: "If God [ Superstition ] is with me, who can be against me?"
Rainbow Six (1998) - Tom Clancy
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, CHAPTER 11
INFRASTRUCTURE
"This will be a catastrophe if Congress lets it go forward. My God, Carol, the caribou, the birds, all the predators. There are polar bears there, and browns, and barren-ground grizzly, and this environment is as delicate as a newborn infant. We can't allow the oil companies to go in there!"
"I know, Kevin," the President's Science Advisor responded, with an emphatic nod
"The damage might never be repaired. The permafrost-there's nothing more delicate on the face of the planet," the president of the Sierra Club said, with further, repetitive emphasis. "We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our children-we owe it to the planet. This bill has to be killed! I don't care what it takes, this bill must die! You must convince the President to withdraw any semblance of support for it. We cannot allow this environmental rape to take place."
"Kevin, we have to be smart about how we do this. The President sees this as a balance-of-payments issue. Domestic oil doesn't force us to spend our money buying oil from other countries. Worse, he believes the oil companies when they say they drill and transport the oil without doing great environmental damage, and that they can fix what damage they do accidentally. "
"That's horseshit, and you know it, Carol." Kevin Mayflower spat out his contempt for the oil companies. Their goddamned pipeline is a bleeding scar on the face of Alaska, an ugly, jagged steel line crossing the most beautiful land on the face of the earth, an affront to Nature Herself and what for? So that people could drive motor vehicles, which further polluted the planet merely because lazy people didn't want to walk to work or ride bicycles or horses. (Mayflower didn't reflect on the fact that he'd flown to Washington to deliver his plea instead of riding one of his Appaloosa horses across the country, and that his rented car had been parked on West Executive Drive.) Everything the oil companies touched, they ruined, he thought. They made it dirty. They sullied the very earth itself, removing what they thought of as a precious resource here, there, and everywhere, whether it was oil or coal, gashing the earth, or poking holes into it, sometimes spilling their liquid treasure because they didn't know and didn't care about the sanctity of the planet, which belonged to everyone, and which needed proper stewardship. The stewardship, of course, required proper guidance, and that was the job of the Sierra Club and similar groups, to tell the people how important the earth was, and how they must respect and treat it. The good news was that the President's Science Advisor did understand, and that she did workin the White House Compound, and did have access to the President.
"Carol, I want you to walk across the street, go into the Oval Office, and tell him what has to be done."
"Kevin, it's not that easy."
"Why the hell not? He's not that much of a dunce, is he?"
"He occasionally has a different point of view, and the oil companies are being very clever about this. Look at their proposal," she said, tapping the report on the table. "They promise to indemnify the entire operation, to put up a billion dollar bond in case something goes wrong for God's sake, Kevin, they even offer to let the Sierra Club be on the council to oversee their environmental protection programs!"
"And be outnumbered there by their own cronies! Be damned if they'll co-opt us that way!" Mayflower snarled. "I won't let anyone from my office be a part of this rape, and that's final!"
"And if you say that out loud, the oil companies will call you an extremist, and marginalize the whole environmental movement-and you can't afford to let that happen, Kevin!"
"The hell I can't. You have to stand and fight for something, Carol. Here is where we stand and fight. We let those polluting bastards drill oil in Prudhoe Bay, but that's it!"
"What will the rest of your board say about this?" Dr. Brightling asked.
"They'll goddamned well say what I goddamned tell them to say!"
"No, Kevin, they won't." Carol leaned back and rubbed her eyes. She'd read the entire report the previous night, and the sad truth was that the oil companies had gotten pretty damned smart about dealing with environmental issues. It was plain business sense. The Exxon Valdez had cost them a ton of money, in addition to the bad public relations. Three pages had been devoted to the changes in tanker safety procedures. Now, ships leaving the huge oil terminal at Valdez, Alaska, were escorted by tugs all the way to the open sea. A total of twenty pollution-control vessels were on constant standby, with a further number in reserve. The navigation systems on every tanker had been upgraded to beyond what nuclear submarines carried; the navigation officers were compelled to test their skills on simulators every six months. It was all hugely expensive, but far less so than another serious spill. A series of commercials proclaimed all of these facts on television-worst of all, the high-end intellectual cable/satellite channels, History, Learning, Discovery, and A&E, for whom the oil companies were also sponsoring new shows on wildlife in the Arctic, never touched upon what the companies did, but there were plenty of pictures of caribou and other animals traversing under the elevated portions of the pipeline. They were getting their message out very skillfully indeed, even to members of the Sierra Club's board, Brightling thought.
What they didn't say, and what both she and Mayflower knew, was that once the oil was safely out of the ground, safely transported through the monster pipeline, safely conveyed over the sea by the newly double hulled supertankers, then it just became more air pollution, out the tailpipes of cars and trucks and the smokestacks of electric power stations. So it really was all a joke, and that joke included Kevin's bitching about hurting the permafrost. At most, what would be seriously damaged? Ten or twenty acres, probably, and the oil companies would make more commercials about how they cleaned that up, as though the polluting end-use of the oil was not an issue at all!
Because to the ignorant Joe Six-pack, sitting there in front of his TV, watching football games, it wasn't an issue, was it? There were a hundred or so million motor vehicles in the United States, and a larger number across the world, and they all polluted the air, and that was the real issue. How did one stop that from poisoning the planet?
Well, there were ways, weren't there? she reflected.
"Kevin, I'll do my best," she promised. "I will advise the President not to support this bill."
The bill was S-1768, submitted and sponsored by both Alaskan senators, whom the oil companies had bought long before, which would authorize the Department of the Interior to auction off the drilling rights into the AAMP area. The money involved would be huge, both for the federal government and for the state of Alaska. Even the Native American tribes up there would look the other way.
The money they got from the oil would buy them lots of snowmobiles with which to chase and shoot the caribou, and motorboats to fish and kill the odd whale, which was part of their racial and cultural heritage. Snowmobiles weren't needed in the modern age of plastic-wrapped USDA Choice Iowa beef, but the Native Americans clung to the end-result of their traditions, if not the traditional methods. It was a depressing truth that even these people had set aside their history and their very gods in homage to a new age of mechanistic worship to oil and its products. Both the Alaskan senators would bring down tribal elders to testify in favor of S-1768, and they would be listened to, since who more than Native Americans knew what it was like to live in harmony with nature? Only today they did it with Ski-Do snowmobiles, Johnson outboard motors, and Winchester hunting rifles… She sighed at the madness of it all.
"Will he listen?" Mayflower asked, getting back to business. Even environmentalists had to live in the real world of politics.
"Honest answer? Probably not," Carol Brightling admitted quietly.
"You know," Kevin observed in a low voice. "There are times when I understand John Wilkes Booth."
"Kevin, I didn't hear that, and you didn't say it. Not here. Not in this building."
"Damn it, Carol, you know how I feel. And you know I'm right. How the hell are we supposed to protect the planet if the idiots who run the world don't give a fuck about the world we live on?"
"What are you going to say? That Homo sapiens is a parasitic species that hurts the earth and the ecosystem'' That we don't belong here?"
"A lot of us don't, and that's a fact."
"Maybe so, but what do you do about it?"
"I don't know," Mayflower had to admit.
Some of us know, Carol Brightling thought, looking up into his sad eyes. But are you ready for that one, Kevin? She thought he was, but recruitment was always a troublesome step, even for true believers
Rainbow Six (1998) - Tom Clancy
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, CHAPTER 24
Brightling looked at the electronic key and smiled. This was the last major hurdle for the Project. This would be the home of nearly all of his people. A similar but much smaller structure in Brazil had been finished two months earlier, but that one barely accommodated a hundred people. This one could house three thousand - somewhat crowded, but comfortably even so-for some months, and that was about right. After the first couple of months, he could sustain his medical research efforts here with his best people - most of them not briefed in on the Project, but worthy of life even so because that work was heading in some unexpectedly promising directions. So promising that he wondered how long he himself might live here. Fifty years? A hundred? A thousand, perhaps? Who could say now?
Olympus, he'd call it, Brightling decided on the spot. The home of the gods, for that was exactly what he expected it to be. From here they could watch the world, study it, enjoy it, appreciate it. He would use the call-sign OLYMPUS-1 on his portable radio. From here he'd be able to fly all over the world with picked companions, to observe and learn how the ecology was supposed to work. For twenty years or so, they'd be able to use communications satellites no telling how long they'd last, and after that they'd be stuck with long-wire radio systems. That was an inconvenience for the future, but launching his own replacement satellites was just too difficult in terms of manpower and resources, and besides, satellite launchers polluted like nothing else humankind had ever invented.
Brightling wondered how long his people would choose to live here. Some would scatter quickly, probably drive all over America, setting up their own enclaves, reporting back by satellite at first. Others would go to Africa-that seemed likely to be the most popular destination. Still others to Brazil and the rain forest study area. Perhaps some of the primitive tribes down there would be spared the Shiva exposure, and his people would study them as well and how Primitive Man lived in a pristine physical environment, living in full harmony with Nature. They'd study them as they were, a unique species worthy of protection and too backward to be a danger to the environment. Might some African tribes survive as well? His people didn't think so. The African countries allowed their primitives to interface too readily with city folk, and the cities would be the focal centers of death for every nation on earth-especially when Vaccine-A was distributed. Thousands of liters of it would be produced, flown all over the world, and then distributed, ostensibly to preserve life, but really to take it… slowly, of course.
Progress was going well. Back at his corporate headquarters the fictional documentation for -A was already fully formulated. It had been supposedly tested on over a thousand monkeys who were then exposed to Shiva, and only two of them had become symptomatic, and only one of those had died over the nineteen month trial that existed only on paper and computer memories. They hadn't yet approached the FDA for human trials, because that wasn't necessary-but when Shiva started appearing all over the world, Horizon Corporation would announce that it had been working quietly on hemorrhagic fever vaccines ever since the Iranian attack on America, and faced with a global emergency and a fully documented treatment modality, the FDA would have no choice but to approve human use, and so officially bless the Project's goal of global human extermination. Not so much the elimination, John Brightling thought more precisely, as the culling back of the most dangerous species on the planet, which would allow Nature to restore Herself, with just enough human stewards to watch and study and appreciate the process. In a thousand or so years, there might be a million or so humans, but that was a small number in the great scheme of things, and the people would be properly educated to understand and respect nature instead of destroying her. The goal of the Project wasn't to end the world. It was to build a new one, a new world in the shape that Nature Herself intended. On that he would put his own name for all eternity. John Brightling, the man who saved the planet.
IMDb
The Bounty (1984)
Quotes
Captain Greetham: [at the trial] So, it did began at the ceremony?
Lt. William Bligh: No, sir. Not at the ceremony. No, it was just Fletcher Christian and the native girl.
Captain Greetham: And you didn't understand the depth of the emotion between them?
Lt. William Bligh: Yes, I realize that now. No, I assumed it was just youthful passion.
Admiral Hood: It takes more than an infatuated youth to make a mutiny. It takes a discontented crew.
Lt. William Bligh: The crew were anything but discontent, sir. Fletcher Christian corrupted them.
Captain Greetham: Yes, but what made them so easy to corrupt?
Lt. William Bligh: I don't know. It was the place itself.
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 2:42 PM Pacific-time USA Sunday 11/19/2023
