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I
have never been in favour of the missionary, although I might myself have been
inaccurately accused from time to time of being one (however infrequently this accusation
has been launched, it is because of my once fairly fervent defence of the rights
of indigenous people against the depredations being made of them in their
traditional lands by invading technologists, with their giant dams, reservoirs,
roads, engineering, piles of money, and so on).
For this reason I feel it impossible to really
feel any sorrow over the death of the American Pentecostal missionary who was so
recently killed by a remote tribe on India’s Andaman islands in the Bay of
Bengal. He knew he wasn’t welcome when he set foot on their land: in my view he
got no more nor less than his just desserts.
To tell you the truth, I would wish
that all Pentecostal and most other missionaries, especially Christians, would
meet a similar fate. I have chosen Christians for particular imprecation,
because they are our lot, if I may use a colloquial expression. They are the
guys and gels down at our local churches who are raising money to finance their
onslaught on the beliefs of perfectly innocent people who follow different
beliefs and practices from themselves. Simply for that, and for no other
reason, these missionaries are sallying out around the world when they would be
better advised to stay at home working to stop their own parishioners from destroying
Earth’s life support systems, which, if continued is it is going on now, in the
next few decades will have undermined the possibility of a prosperous, settled
style of human life almost anywhere on Earth. One cannot separate this result
from the cause, which is that fundamental to our Judeo-Christian belief system
is the concept of mankind at the centre of everything, controlling all life for
his or her own purposes. There is a task
for them, if ever there was one. They should get their God, whoever she is and
wherever she might be --- allow me to fantasize for the moment that she really
exists somewhere ---- to be busy with that one.
Of course, it is not only Christian
missionaries who are objectionable. As we have seen recently, during the
uprisings around the world, any religion that worships a God, or several Gods, or
even as in some places several Hundreds of Gods, can follow the same destructive
purposes, with exactly the same appalling results for human and other forms of
life on the Earth. (Exhibit A: the total pollution of the Sacred River Ganges
by its perfervid Hindu adherents, who wash, piss, crap, in it, and send the
bodies of their family members off into the river on a burning pyre, there to
be absorbed by the waters, sometimes accompanied --- although the practice is
now illegal, it still exists --- by an adoring widow, strapped into the fire in
the hope of achieving a glorious death). I recently saw a film sbout the
religions of India made by a friend who once made an excellent film about the
Indian workers in the market gardens of British Columbia: and it can definitely
be said, on the evidence from that film, that the Hindu religionists are
barking mad, ready to kill and maim at the tip of a hat anyone with whom they
disagree!
The Moslem variety of religion can be even
more disastrous than that of our Christian fanatics. One could hardly expect anything else from a
people who are flinging themselves on to the ground five times a day in
prostration before their Boss Up There. When given the reins of government, as
recently they seized them in Iraq and Syria, they have imposed the most
inhumanly brutal government it is possible to imagine, killing and hacking
merrily for all manner of unexceptional human actions that in most civilized
countries would deserve hardly a slap on the hand. These religious warriors keep the distaff
side of the human race under cover-all subjection, and lop off hands, heads,
breasts, lips or scalps as their inhumane laws dictate. (This sounds like a
root-and-branch attack on all Islam; but I am perfectly aware that most Moslems
are peaceable people who can hardly deny that these outlying cesspools exist as
a result of their religion. Maybe the cesspools would cease to exist if they
would stop flinging themselves to earth five times a day, and admit the right
of others to exist.)
And they are not the only ones: in
Burma there is a Buddhist monk known as
the Venerable W, who has whipped up his fervent followers to murder and pillage
among anyone who professes a different faith from this own, especially those of
the Muslim faith. This is odd because this religion, Buddhism, is generally
supposed to be among the most non-violent of all the major religions. Non-violent
my eye: look at what has happened in Indo-China in the last 50 years, nothing
but slaughter and more slaughter.
I once had an amusing contretemps
with the board of a Jesuit publication whose editor, having previously worked
for a leftist magazine for which I wrote from time to time, asked me to write a
review of the widely-heralded British film, The
Mission, on which were engaged such major talents as Robert Bolt, writer,
Roland Joffé, director, and Robert de Niro, Jeremy Irons, Ray McNally, Liam
Neeson and Aidan Quinn, stars. This was an account of the establishment of a
mission station by the Spanish Jesuits among the Guarani of Paraguay. I used
the occasion to denounce the whole idea of missionaries, and to compare the
film to a wonderful film by Jules Dassin, his second made in France after his
banishment from the United States because of the McCarthy-ite blacklist. It was in the making of this film that Dassin
first met Merlina Mercouri, the smouldering Greek actress who played the role
of Mary Magdalena in the film, later became Dassin’s wife, and even later a
minister of culture in the Greek government, whose untimely death brought an
estimated 300,000 people into the streets of Athens for her funeral.
The film is based on a Kazantzakis novel, and is
centred on a Turkish-occupied Greek village soon after the First World War. A
group of desperate, starving people who have been expelled from another village
and are wandering the countryside, stop in the hills and appeal to the villagers below them for help,
but although the younger members want to help, the elders, worried that it
might cost them something, and upset their Turkish overlords, will not hear of it. The principals in the Passion play that they
are preparing, are especially imbued with the Christian message of the
characters they are playing, from Jesus
on down, but the elders are inflexible.
The young man playing Jesus decides he must take
matters into his own hands, but he is shot in the church by the character
playing Judas, and thereafter the younger players invade the armoury, and take
to the barricades against the authorities in a vain but heroic effort to defend the
Christian tenets of charity and compassion. As Bosley Crowther, of the New York
Times wrote in a favorable review, “Mr. Dassin
has constructed a film that is as brutally realistic as the bare, dried-out
Cretan town and the stony hills in which it was photographed. It abounds in a
daring sort of candor and relentless driving toward its points of allegorical
contact in a succession of searching and searing episodes….Dassin has made his picture so
truly and sympathetically that it could be a documentary of an occurrence in
life.”
I entirely concur with that judgment:
the film was so powerful that I still remember its effect after more than half
a century has passed. But my comparing The
Mission unfavourably with the leftist-tinged film by Dassin did not sit well
with the editors of the Jesuit magazine, who, after pondering the matter most
seriously, finally agreed to print my review, if I would agree to their
printing alongside it a review more acceptable to their general outlook on
mission work. Why not? I asked, and so they did. But I never heard from them
again: they did not hire me for more work.
If any of my readers would like to pursue
the question of missionaries and their effects in South America, I can
recommend a couple of books that state
the case.
The great English travel writer and
shit-disturber Norman Lewis in 1988 wrote a definitive book about their methods
and effects called The Missionaries,
published by Secker in the UK, by McGraw in the US. But 20 years before, an
article of his "Genocide in Brazil", published in
the Sunday Times led to the
creation of the organisation Survival
International dedicated to the
protection of first peoples around the world. Lewis later said of this article
that it was "the most worthwhile of all my endeavours."
Another great writer --- I’ve never
understood why he didn’t get the Nobel Prize, this one --- who approached the
same subject through fiction was Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord, published by Viking Books in a
paperback in 1991, copyright 1965. A missionary descends into the South
American jungle to contact a remote Indian tribe, only to find a drunken North
Dakota Indian has found his way into the jungle ahead of him, with hilarious
results. This was also made into a feature film in 1991, directed and written
by Hector Babenco, also the director of the unforgettable Kiss of the Spider Woman, and starring Tom Berenger, Daryl Hannah,
Tom Waits and Kathy Bates Anyone with an interest in nature should read some of
Peter Matthiessen’s eleven fictional
works, as well as his 22 non-fictional, scientific-cum-travel books. Among the
fiction I can strongly recommend Far
Tortuga, a wonderful dialect account of some fishermen descending along the
Caribbean coastline of Central America; and the superb trilogy called Killing Mr. Watson, an account of the
killing of an early settler deep in the Florida Everglades, seen from three
different points of view. This is a writer
who doesn’t try to flatter his readers by making it easy for them: you have to
stick at it for a while, but eventually you find yourself, much to your
surprise, sucked into the centre of a whole imaginative world. One of the most
revealing books about human nature I have ever read is Matthiessen’s Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons
in the Stone age (1982). This is a study of some New Guinea villages two years after they were
first contacted from outside. In 1978 he wrote his signature work The Snow Leopard, an account of trying
to track down the elusive animal in the Himalayas; in 1983, a complete change of
subject, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,
is a defence of Leonard Pelletier who has been held for decades in a US prison
for a murder he almost assuredly did not commit in the Pine Ridge Indian
reservation during the 1970s disturbances there; also a very stimulating book,
his last The End of the Earth: Voyage to Antarctica (2003) tells us a great
deal about the influences that are paramount on weather patterns around the Earth.
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