Behind the Bastards

There’s a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a few about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bad guys (and gals) are eternally fascinating. Behind the Bastards dives in past the Cliffs Notes of the worst humans in history and exposes the bizarre realities of their lives. Listeners will learn about the young adult novels that helped Hitler form his monstrous ideology, the founder of Blackwater’s insane quest to build his own Air Force, the bizarre lives of the sons and daughters of dictators and Saddam Hussein’s side career as a trashy romance novelist.

Part Two: The Accidental Genocide of the Andaman Islands

Part Two: The Accidental Genocide of the Andaman Islands

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 11:00

Part Two: The Accidental Genocide of the Andaman Islands

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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV in iHeartRadio this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who's simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that see? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the ******** and I'm. I'm me, the host of this show where we talk about the very worst things that you didn't know, about all the terrible people in history. I really botched that introduction. Andrew tie saved the day. Still here. We're doing Part 2 about the ******** of the Enderman Islands, telling the story of this accidental genocide of an entire people. Hooray. It's still fun. I'm jazzed up to get back into this. Fun we are. Hooked? Alright. In our last episode, we talked mostly about the history of the Andaman Islands in general and not N Sentinel Island in specific, which is where Jonathan Chow, the American missionary, was shot to death with arrows for trying to talk to people who did not ******* want to talk now for breaking many laws to try to numerous laws talk to, to proselytize to people. In paraphrasing the quote from the last episode, what was it that one of the Devil's last strongholds? Yeah, one of the devil's last strongholds, something like that. Tried to wave his Bible at a people who do not have the written word. Yeah. You know, the other thing about that, though, is going back to last episode is a lot of I noticed the historical accounts of this do count on one guy who just miraculously dodged a bunch of arrows and or. And it's you're like, so much of history is just an accident. Yeah. Oh, all of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's just a total crapshoot. I mean, there's that great story about that guy, which has been confirmed by Hitler. But it started with, like, this British soldier who when Hitler rose to power was like, oh, he looks like a young. Dude, that I didn't shoot because I thought he looked confused. And the battle was mostly waning, and I didn't want to, like, kill another human being that day. And then Hitler wrote about it later. Like, yeah, I saw a guy have a gun on me and choose not to shoot. And it's like, Oh well, yeah, that could have really changed some ****. Yeah. I should have shot Hitler. Should have shot Hitler dog. A dog. Should have shot Hitler. That's our new T-shirt. Should have shot Hitler dog. That's good merch. I this is a pro Shooting Hitler podcast. And now bold of Hitler's decisions. The one that I unequivocally agree with is his decision to shoot Hitler. A big fan of that moment. Hiring Hugo bosses. It wasn't a bad call. I'm going to be honest. That wasn't a bad call either. So now that we've talked a little bit about the Nazis, let's talk about the slow Nazis, the British Empire. So I would like to start today by talking about what was going on on North Sentinel Island when the representatives of the British Raj were busy infecting and fondling the genitals of the rest of the anemones people, but not the people of the North Central. Now, before British arrival in the Andamans, there had likely been significant trade between different islands. That's certainly the case with every other. Island chain like this on record. We don't know exactly how the people of North Sentinel Island had interacted with their neighbors prior to 1771. It's possible that the Sentinelese were always aggressive loners for all of history, but it seems likely that the plagues which soon tore through the islands prompted much of their centuries long isolation. And then it was sort of a decision that came like, oh, everyone's dying, we shouldn't let anyone else onto our island. It seems like that ends badly, like an actual quarantine. Yeah, it seems like we should quarantine ourselves because something terrible is happening, not wrong. The next time N Sentinel Island shows up on the historical record after the initial contact in 1858 is 1867, when an Indian merchant ship called the Ninevah wrecks on its coast. During a monsoon, 86 passengers and 20 crew make it to the shore. They spent two days being basically camped out and waiting for rescue, and then on the morning of the third day, the Sentinelese tribe attacked them. Here's how the boats captain described these people. Quote The savages were perfectly naked, with short hair and red painted noses, and were opening their mouth and making sounds like. Are on Aug. Their arrows appeared to be tipped with iron. He escaped on the lone intact boat, abandoning his passengers and crew to what he was sure would be a massacre. Great, really good captain really realized that is the absolute gem of a loophole of goes down with the ship. I got to go down with the ship. So sorry. The land turned out to be the death place this time. You know the rules though. Loophole. Nice. He was eventually picked up by a British Royal Navy vessel. When the Royal Navy got to North Sentinel Island, they found that most of the party had survived and had apparently fought off the tribe with sticks and stones. Now the next Brits to visit the Sentinelese were led by our favorite anthropological pornographer, Maurice Vidal Portman, a few months into the start of his job as officer in charge of the anemones. At age 19, he led an expedition to the island. Now, even at that point, the Sentinelese tribe was infamous for wanting to be left the **** alone. Portman landed with a large group of heavily armed soldiers, along with some prisoners for labor and a few trackers from local tribes the British had befriended. So yeah, Portman had almost certainly photographed those folks. Naked, by the way. Yeah, yeah, British had befriended. It's like the biggest* in history. The survivors we befriended. The survivors of us? Yeah. Here's another quote from that. Wonderful. Called the last island of the savages, the explorers tramped through the jungle, systematically crisscrossing the small island in search of natives. They found a network of pathways and several small villages that looked to have been freshly abandoned, and the skeleton of an aborigine hidden between the buttress roots of a large tree. Portman was impressed by the island's fertile soil and its stately Groves of tropical hardwoods, but he did not encounter a single living soul. The Sentinelese simply melted into the forest when they heard the Europeans approach. Finally, after days, Portman and his men managed to flush out a few stragglers. An elderly couple. And some children. In the interest of science, the adults and four of the children were brought aboard the exploring party schooner and taken back to Port Blair for observation. Unfortunately, Portman later wrote all the captured Sentinelese quote, sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died. So the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presence. They remained in British hands long enough, however, for Portman to note their quote, peculiarly idiotic expression of countenance and manner of behaving. So Portman abducts some old people and kids. Old people die. Kids get sick, too. He gives them gifts, sends them back to the island, probably kills a lot of the North Sentinelese people, probably reinforces their understanding that we should just stay the **** away from, right? Like the absolute best case scenario is that the. Sentinelese people kill those kids before they get too close. That is the best. The best he has locked them into a situation with the best case scenario is child murder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Good. Now, it is worth noting that this was young Maurice Portman. Over the decades he would spend in the Andamans, he watched the Aboriginal population of the island shrink and shrink. By the time he was an old man, it looked very much like the whole people were on their way to extinction. During a trip to London at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, Portman ended his speech with these words, their association. And outsiders has brought them nothing but harm, and it is a matter of great regret to me that such a pleasant race are so rapidly becoming extinct we could better spare many another. So he came around. Yeah. And was like, oh, this is really ****** **. Yeah, we really wiped these people out this bad. I mean, like, that's like really deciding at the very last day of the school year. Like maybe, maybe $10 up, guys. It's yeah, it's like studying for that trigonometry exam the morning before. Yeah, you know what? Now I just see the error of my ways. For what? Yeah, Jesus. But it is interesting that even a guy like Portman, whose whole thing seems to have been ******* with native peoples, eventually came around to the same opinion that the Sentinelese Islanders themselves hold. Which is we ought to just all leave these people, yeah? Umm, yeah. No other British visits were launched in North Sentinel Island during the Empire, so that's good. The Empire learned a lesson from this, like things went so bad in the rest of the islands. They were like, you know what? Maybe we just leave those people alone. Maybe we just let them do their thing. We we may have ****** this up. I just go back to it also had to be because they did the economic projections and they were just like not worth it sometime in the during this time late 1800s when it switches over from being the East India. Company of the British Raj. And so at that point profit is less of a concern. OK, not a non factor. There may have been some genuine humanitarian of like the people who came in after the first couple of waves and we're like, oh boy, they really ****** this up. Yeah, well at least we cannot **** this island. I still, I guess I would argue it's still profit margin, just with slightly different values fed into the front of the machine. I would agree. I think it's possible that I think it's it's likely that some of why they were left alone. It was legitimate humanitarian. Impulse from people in the empire who were like, well this is ****** ** but if if they if they had gold or diamonds there, they would have got there were diamonds on that island. There would have been, they would have gotten over the humanitarian issues and it's possible as much damage as he did to them. He may have saved the island by just walking around on it for a couple of days and not finding diamonds like by saying like it's just got decent soil. But there's no, I didn't see any gold or whatever like. That's probably part of why they didn't **** with it more, so boy, yeah, you know? Unintended consequences, it says. Anyway. So another foreigner did make it ashore on North Sentinel Island in 1896. This was an Indian convict who escaped from the penal colony on a raft. According to that wonderful American scholar article, a search party found his body there some days later, pierced in several places by arrows with his throat cut. No natives were sighted. So cool. That's what they do, yeah, the island was left alone for like a century after this point. So the British Empire, perhaps the world's greatest proponents of ******* with people who do not want to be ****** with, decided that the Sentinelese. People had made their desire for solitude so perfectly clear that it would be kind of messed up to try to bug them. I just state that because we're going to get back to John Chow at some point. And I want to note that the British Empire eventually learned the lesson famously not. Not only that, they liked learning. British Empire that invaded Afghanistan three times learned this lesson. So on August 15th, 1947, the British Empire made its largest step towards giving up the empire bit and just being British. They released the Indian subcontinent to independent nationhood. For the first few decades the new Indian government continued the British policy towards the Sentinelese. They left them alone. In 1970 the government sent a surveying party to the island. They found an abandoned native home and set up a stone tablet proclaiming the island to be part of the Republic of India. The party had no contact with the Sentinelese during this. And since the plague. Contained writing and the Sentinelese don't. Yeah, writing is hard to imagine. We just wanted to know they're part of India. Yeah, just got to stick this on the island. I mean, yeah, it's pretty dumb. In 1974, the crew of the documentary man in search of Man managed to talk or bribe their way into landing the North Sentinel Island. They came with armed policemen and scientists in tow. Their stated goal was to quote win the natives friendship by friendly gestures and plenty of gifts. Unfortunately, bribes did not work as well in the Sentinelese as they do on most people in the Sentinelese. Did what they do, yeah, opened fire with arrows now. Next, several police officers in padded armor went to shore and set out gifts, a plastic car, coconuts, a live pig, a doll, and aluminum pots and pans. They then returned to the boat where the film crew and scientists were waiting out of arrow shot. Now, the Sentinelese responded to these gifts by proving to the foreigners that they were not, in fact, out of Arrow shot and shooting the film's director in the thigh with an arrow. The Sentinelese next killed the pig and the doll with their Spears, then buried them in the sand and took the pots and pans and coconuts. Yeah, yeah, that's what you do. Yeah. And it's also, like, the gift thing. You're like. Right. The gifts have never been good. It's just great that some native people finally figured out that these gifts are never yeah, they're always garbage that will kill your your family well, and the only way they took the coconut, there's coconuts don't grow on North Sentinel, but they wash up there so they know what, you know what the coconut is. And they only took the pots and pans because iron has been washing up on the shore for a long time. I've been making it in the arrowheads and so they're making these gifts into more arrows to shoot at any other ******* people who come to their feels like. Some kind of justice, right? It's nice. Yeah. That would be one of the only thing we could give them they can once. Here's more arrows to shoot at people with if they come on board. I mean, it does feel like a little bit like just just give him a couple of guns, give him some, give him a rifle and a diagram. Yeah. Yeah. 1975 King Baudouin of Belgium's grandson of our body Leopold the second yeah grandson of Leopold all boy bout to win of Belgium went on a cruise of the Animan Islands. He spent a night off the coast of North Sentinel Island. Local officials trying to impress the king let him drive in close to the shore so he could see a Sentinelese warrior aim his bow at the boat. The king was reportedly delighted by this. That's pretty gross, right? Yeah, cool to see that runs in the family, to see that runs in the family. In 1981, a Panamanian freighter named the Primrose crashed on the rocks near North Sentinel Island. The crew survived. Here's how the official website for North Sentinel Island describes what happens next. Quote Relief to see land in the morning. The cruise relief turned to apprehension when they saw a group of natives waving weapons at the boat. An urgent distress signal was sent out Wildmen estimate more than 50 carrying various homemade weapons are making two or three wooden boats with the dispatch worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members lives not guaranteed for nearly a week the crew of the primrose. Armed with only flare guns and a few axes, fended off an attack before they were rescued by an Indian Navy tugboat and helicopters. The freighter, which I believe carried cat food, was left off the coast of North Sentinel Island. Salvagers began sailing into loot the boat and according to the Telegraph quote, many Sentinelese were killed in battles with these looters. Jesus, can I ask you a question going back a little bit? How did the Andaman Islands Weather World War Two? I think it was pretty much fine. I mean, it's just out of the way enough. I don't think anything really. Up in there. And World War Two. I'm not aware of it. Sure. I certainly think the Sentinelese didn't notice. They probably saw some ******* planes flying. Yeah, like what the ****? Yeah, but they've been doing that for a while. I guess that's true. Yeah. They probably just figured there's monsters in the sky. **** that thing. Yeah, that's that's that's yeah, **** that thing. Look at that. No, thank you. Now, perhaps sparked by these deaths, the Indian Government sent out its first expedition with the express goal of contacting the Sentinelese people. They sent a team of scientists led by a dude named Pandit and gave him the governor's yacht as an expedition vessel. Unlike literally every prior visit, these trips were conducted by scientific experts who went out of their way to be careful and respectful. They made many trips and started out just landing on empty sections of beach far out of arrow range and setting out gifts, coconuts, bananas, and pieces of iron. Gradually, the researchers built up a reputation. The Sentinelese, they started coming in closer and having more fruitful contact with these people. It was not a simple process, as this excerpt from the American Scholar article shows. Quote. Sometimes the Sentinelese would make gestures that appeared friendly, waving their hands as the dingies chugged along the lagoon. Sometimes they would make gestures that were probably hostile, turning their backs towards the visitors on Moss and sitting on their haunches as if to defecate. It was not out of character for them to rush out of the jungle and grab gifts, then shower their retreating benefactors with arrows. So there's a lot of it's a give and take patience. It's careful, and these days? Clearly, care about trying to make contact in the bed like this is almost like a Star Trek sort of situation. We've got very decent advanced scientists and who care truly trying to do this in the best way of seeing. Is there an ethical way to make contact with the people like this so that they're trying to figure that out? And it seems to be pretty laudable effort. They went through this for like a decade or so, like more than 10 years of visits like this, very gradual. And during this period of time, Pandit continued to lead expeditions to the island with the gradual goal of opening up communications with the Sentinelese. People and letting them know there was a world out there with indoor plumbing and antibiotics if they wanted any of that stuff. The Sentinelese continued to shoot teams that got too close, but one time when an expedition boat overturned, they didn't murder the crew as the crew struggled to get back on board the boat. So that was seen as like a good sign. They could have killed everybody there, but they let us get back on our boat and that's that's that's a step. That's a step. That's a step to trust. So things got better and some sort of trust developed, but the Sentinelese never quite took up their would be friends on the opportunity to join the world or have any kind of direct contact. At all, on January 4th, 1991, it seemed like all that was about to change. This article ran in a Port Blair newspaper several days later, first friendly contact with Sentinelese. 4 days earlier, a government contact team had paid a visit to North Sentinel, the first such expedition in more than a year. At first, as the anthropologist, constables, and officials approached the beach in the motorized dinghy, they could see no one on shore. Then, finally, a few Sentinelese stepped out from behind some bushes and started a gesture at the explorers, seemingly trying to indicate that they wanted gifts as usual. The dinghy moved down the beach to a safe spot and a crewman jumped out to drop off a bag of coconuts. As usual, the Sentinelese rushed down to grab it, but for the first time ever, the Aborigines brought no weapons with them when they approached the water's edge on the mesh baskets and the iron tipped wooden ads as they sometimes used to chop apart the coconuts. There's actually video of this contact, or the contact right after it, and while the audio isn't super interesting so I don't think we'll play the audio during the podcast. I want to show you because after all this, you should see these people and what this actually looked like. It's pretty interesting. I would recommend everyone at home watch it as well. You can find the video on behindthebastards.com. We'll include a link to it. It's really worth seeing. So, Andrew T before we break for ads, you want to tell me what you saw in that video? Like what you thought she thought about that. I don't know. I mean, it was. Interesting. Which impression of these people just by looking at them there? Because that's the only look anybody really gets up? Yeah, they just seem pretty. I mean, there. It's like wary, right? They're like, it's very clear. They're just like, what? What's happening here? Are we safe? One of the most interesting parts is like, clearly one dude is either braver or more curious and gets pulled back. She pulls him back by. Yeah, it's like. Yeah, it really is. It's just like how and and you know, it's neither side knows what the **** to expect. Exactly. Exactly. But it's also it's so one of things that's really clear to me is like, they all look pretty healthy. And I'm going to guess those are the younger people. Yeah, the meetings. True. But like, they seem to be doing all right. Like they they don't seem to be malnourished people. And also at this point, you're like they've lived through a couple plagues, essentially, where their ancestors have lived through a couple of plagues and so. There is also the thing of like, you know, we, we say like Stone Age immune systems, but that's not strictly true. That's not strictly true with these guys because they have been exposed to something. Yeah, you know, both from their fights with the salvagers and from the. And their numbers are probably lower. Yeah, of course. So but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really interesting video. I recommend you watch it and I recommend that you buy the products and services that we are advertising now. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we hear at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. We're back. We're back. We're back from a great ad break that I hope was as thrilling and delightful to you as first contact with the Sentinelese people would have been to a scientist like Pandit, although he was not there for the very first time that they did this. Oh, sure, you can't be on every you can't be on every trip. Decade long research project. It's kind of a big thing. So first contact was officially made by the director for Tribal Welfare. To the Andaman Islands and he observed a number of things because he came back after the the video was taken and got actually closer to them and was able to actually get into the water and be very near them. He reported a young man with a bow and arrow who aimed his bow at them from close range. But then a woman pushed the arrow down and another man buried the weapons in the sand. And again, it's I I hate to try to generalize about a whole tribe from this. One of the things this says to me is there's a lot of speculation of like, what if it's like one ******* man in charge, like forcing everyone to do his bidding? I'm like, yeah, genitally mutilating the women and stuff like, well, the fact that at least in one observation, a man was observed being told not to do something by a woman and like that, that's not a bad it's a sign that this may be one of the more egalitarian kinds of hunter gatherer tribes, which is not uncommon among those sorts of of people. So I think that's interesting. It was the closest anyone had gotten to a Sentinel leaves without dying, possibly in all of history, anyone from outside the animals, at least. Pandit came back a few days later with another group, and in February he made friendly. Contact again. Several Aborigines actually reached into his canoe for coconuts, which is a big deal. Near the end of the visit, Pandit wound up closer to the Sentinelese than his own men, and things rather suddenly turned ugly. One of the tribesmen pulled out a knife and threatened him, Pandit recalls. He looked, quote, like he was going to cut out my heart. Maybe he thought I was planning to stay on the island. But Pandy ducked away and it was fine. Now, in an interview in 2008 with the author of that American scholar article, Pandit recalled that they've voluntarily came forward to meet us. It was unbelievable. They must have come to a decision. That the time had come, it could not have happened on the spur of the moment, but there was this feeling of sadness also. I did feel it. And there was this feeling that a larger scale of human history, these people who were holding back, holding on, ultimately had to yield. It's like an era in history gone by. So Pandit retired in 1992 and the Indian government pursued further, meeting with the Sentinelese for a while. But it turned out that this much vaunted first friendly contact was something of a false start. The long era of Sentinelese isolation was not over yet. In 1997, the Indian government finally took the hint. And put an end to all further attempts to contact the people of North Sentinel Island. The Indian Navy placed A3 mile exclusion zone around the island. And for more than 20 years, the Sentinelese people were allowed to fade from most of the world's memory. They made the news briefly in 2006 when a fishing boat with two men crashed on their shore. The men aboard had been anchored nearby for the night and likely gotten incredibly drunk. Their anchor had broken and they drifted to shore. Other fishermen had tried to warn them as they floated closer and closer, but they were apparently too wasted to really notice. When they landed on shore, the Sentinelese murdered them and buried them in sand. Like, yeah, fair enough, fair enough. And all the time since the establishment of the exclusion zone, the only contact the Sentinels have had with the outside world has been occasional skirmishes with Scrappers and two close in flights by helicopters. The first was in the wake of those two fisherman's murder. The second came in 2008, after a horrible tsunami hit the Andaman Islands. The Indian government sent a chopper and to look for survivors and predictably, the Sentinelese shot at it with arrows. Yeah, now, at every single stage of the history we've talked about in these podcasts, centuries worth of time, the Sentinelese people have been. Very, very, very, very, very crystal. *** **** clear that they do not want to know the rest of the world. Aside from a few handfuls of coconuts, most of their close contact with the outside has involved violent murder, abduction, and disease. We have learned more about the Sentinelese in the years since the Indian government set up their exclusion zone, but most of it is just scientific information about the time of their migration to the islands. Scientists now think that the ancestors of the tribe first arrived on North Sentinel Island as far back as 65,000 years ago. You'll hear anywhere from like 55 to 65,000 years. So this is an unbroken chain of people from roughly 5 times as long as human civilization has existed, right? Like since we've been building cities 30,000 years before dogs were domesticated, right? These people land in the North Sentinel Island. That's the length of time we're talking about with this culture. Given the rich, bountiful nature of the islands of ecology and the warm climate, it's possible that the only substantial innovations they've needed to make in that time involve learning how to make arrows and knives out of the iron that washes up on their shore, and learning that instant. Violence was the safest way to handle contact with the outside world. Yeah, yeah. Two lessons, two important solid. Yeah. Really got those down. Yeah. Now, John Chow, the young American missionary who died on North Sentinel Island in November of 2018, knew all this. One thing every interview with his friends, family, and fellow missionaries has made very clear is that the Sentinelese people were John's obsession. On November 28th, 2018, Christianity Today published an article titled, what John Allen Chau's Mission Agency wants you to know, the agency that sent him all nations. As a stated mission to quote, make disciples and train leaders to ignite church planting movements among the neglected peoples of the earth, wouldn't call the Sentinelese neglected? Yeah, when they murder everyone who tries to talk, they're not neglected. They want to be left alone. I also did not realize he was sent by an organization. It seems like it was like almost the venture capital version of a mission thing where he went to them saying I have this goal and they helped him. Those people are accessories to a murder. Yeah, it seems like it, right? It seems like that would be fair. Yeah. Seems like you could charge some of these people in a court of law. What the ****? Make them accessories to genocide maybe? Anyway, they sent their representative, Mary Ho, to talk about John Chow. She called him a very interesting young man and very focused quote since he was about 18 years old. I believe he took a mission trip. And on that mission trip, he really felt a call to be a missionary. Around that time he started researching all the different people groups, and he came across the North Sentinelese people. She says that chow really felt that quote. His life's call was to take the love and goodness of Jesus Christ to the North Sentinelese since then. Every decision he has made has been to prepare himself for his life's call. She insists. Yeah, I'm not a religious man. Yeah, my cousin and godmother is a is a pastor and I respect her greatly. I have no problem with belief. I have a problem with this. Yeah I I I will just say it's like this has the like. It it's the the practical problem with belief as opposed to the theoretical. I guess I have no problem with the theoretical problem of or the theoretical issue of, you know, religious belief, but like what is the actual good that he honestly thinks? Because if if you take the idea that souls in hell are not like you believe in it, fine. But not everyone does like, what are you doing? Like, OK, if you're if you're a Christian, I'm going to try to look at this from the perspective of. A person who believes in a higher power and believes that higher power communicates with the world and has one of the first things that happened. He tried to get on to the island a couple of times, and the day before he was killed, he failed to get on to the island and they shot at him. He was holding his Bible up above his head and hollering by his own description at them, and they shot an arrow through his Bible. Where I, a Christian, that would be my message from God to leave. Ohh, arrow through the oh, maybe they don't. Maybe they don't need this. Oh, wow. Maybe, maybe I'm doing the wrong thing here. I guess I would argue that's how you double down on your belief that this is where Satan lives. And that's clearly, that's clearly what he took out. Yeah, but yeah, OK, I would take that as a message. Like, the basic level of this stuff, right? It's like, OK, so God has a plan for everyone. God loves everyone, but he doesn't love these people because he thinks they're going to go to hell. He loves these people, but he just needs me to talk to. Yeah, exactly. You're the instrument of God. But why are you the instrument of God? What? Like you were just born into presumably, America. I'm going to say, like, by accident. Like, why are you of different instrument than these people? What is so fundamentally wrong with every person who died on that island before you got there? I don't want to. Yeah, it's yeah, yeah. It's it's it's managed to get into whether or not it was a sign from God when the Bible got shot. I'm pretty sure it was a sign from whoever shot at it where they were saying we don't want to kill you, we want you to leave. Please don't try again. Now watch this drive. We are very good with these. Yeah, we really know how to shoot arrows. I mean, also, you're giving them probably one of the first, like 90 degree targets he's seen in awhile. Now, who insisted as well that Chow had been fully vaccinated before he arrived on the island? That he had had some sort of quarantine conducted, and I had to read into this a little bit because they just say he went through a quarantine. From what I've been able to determine, he carried out the quarantine on himself without help. And again. I have a lot of respect for EMT's, but the MTB license does not include quarantining yourself and even qualified to do this even if you know the theory, right? It's like he has a ******* clean room that he went through. He still quarantined himself, presumably with the **** that is available to a 20th 1st century person for not that much money. And then he traveled to India, probably landed in New Delhi, took another flight to the Andaman Islands, hung out with a bunch of his friends in the Andaman Islands, and then got on the boat with a local Indian sailor. And sailed there and I am going to assume none of them went through, yeah, and and yeah, unless you had a ***. **** like bubble somewhere that that took you from your clean room to the to the Sentinel Island. Nah Nah Nah bro. Nah bro now a few days before we recorded this podcast wrote. This podcast at least the Washington Post allowed a guy named Ed Stetzer to publish an opinion column about Chow 's death. Ed 's job is training missionaries to go do exactly what show was trying to do stetzer 's column was titled Slain Missionary John Chau. Prepared much more than we thought, but our missionaries still fools. The article is meant to leave one with the distinct impression that no, they are not. That John Chow was an expert on the North Sentinelese, that he was well qualified for the mission he undertook, that he intended to stay there for years, and that what he did was a profound act of love, undertaken with every possible thought to the safety of the Sentinelese people. Here's the thing. If John Chow had spent most of his life fascinated by these people and by North Sentinel Island, if he really did prepare for this as hard as other missionaries claim he did, then I have to assume he did at least as much research as I did. Right. This podcast. Which means that if he wasn't a complete reckless hack, he read the single best article ever written about the Sentinelese people, the last island of the savages, published by Adam Goodheart in 2000, nearly 20 years before Chaos Own Journey. And if he read that fantastic article, he knows not just most of the history that I've talked about outside of Portland. Pornographic pictures. I guess maybe he wasn't reading about that stuff. I mean, he might have. He might have. If you allegedly are supposed to be interacting with the world, even if you are good Christian. Whatever, like. Surely you have to have that knowledge of how innocent are you supposed to be exactly. So he he he would have been aware of a lot of this. And if he had read that fantastic article that I keep talking about, then he would have read the part where it talks about the Jarawa tribe. Now. The Jarawa are another native anemones tribe in the islands, and until the early 1970s they were in the same boat as the Sentinelese, isolated, refusing all contact and murdering anyone who strayed into their territory. Unlike the Sentinelese, Jarawa responded to the Indian. Governments peaceful overtures also conducted by Pandit. Eventually they give up their centuries long defense and started taking trips into modern villages. This really started to happen in earnest in the late 1990s quote. As they grew bolder, they became more of a nuisance, stealing things from villagers sleeping in Bush police stations, even recently boarding public buses, much to the other passengers alarm. Not long ago several were found to have chest infections that appeared to be viral pneumonia. The Andaman administration was at a loss over what to do as long as it had been the civilized people who were sending contact parties to the Jarawa. Everything had been simple enough. Now that the Jarawa themselves were sending contact parties into civilization, matters had taken a most unpleasant term. Now Westerners started traveling to the Indians to see the Jarawa because now this uncontacted driving late 90s is working up. Suddenly it's a tourist attraction. Yeah, yeah, see, you can see some savages for yourself. We're over racism, so we won't call them savages, we'll call them natives or whatever. But you're doing the same thing as Portman was doing. You're ogling these peoples naked flesh. In 1998 some German backpackers were caught trying to pay to have sex with what they believed was a young Jarawa girl. Thankfully she was well, I know, but thankfully she was 1/2 Andamanese. Prostitute near Pimp was a con man. But that goes to show you, there were probably some people who managed to actually, yeah, yeah, probably some trafficking and stuff. Hard to imagine it not happening anyway. As you might guess, the draw was first contact with world civilization was not filled with positive benefits for them. John Chow would have known this. If he did his homework, he would have found a Guardian article written by Gethin Chamberlain in 2012. It included a video titled Andaman Islanders forced to dance for tourists. I'm going to read a quote from that article. The Jarawa tribe have lived in peace in the Andaman Islands for thousands of years now. Tour companies run safaris through their jungle every day and wealthy tourists pay police to make the women, usually naked, dance for their amusement. This footage, filmed by a tourist, shows Jarawa women being told to dance by an off camera police officer. So we're going to watch this next and I'm going to read the in English or actually, Andrew, why don't you read in English what tour guides are telling the truth? Because you're on the other side of the table for me and hard to work out. Alright, where's the food? OK. I've given it to you, you eat it. I've given you food. You eat it, you should eat it. Share it with everyone. You eat what I've given to you. The vehicle that will come behind us will give you more shared amongst yourselves. Turn around. Share it with everyone. Kelly? What's your name? So that's what the ******* stomach? Yeah, that's what contact is meant for. The drawer is now rich. I'm going to guess mostly European and American people are making them dance for food. Yeah, yeah, pretty gross. Survival International, an organization that deals with trying to protect groups like this, notes that the outrage over this video caused A7 week travel ban on tourist use of the highway. Runs through Jarawa territory, but the organization claims that demand was just too high, in essence, for the local authorities to not want tourists traveling through the area. They note that measles has ravaged the drawer tribe in two major waves and that they are down to just a few 100 survivors. On many days, the tourists traveling through Jarawa territory outnumber the tribe itself. The Jarawa are doing better than many of the tribes that decided to enter the modern world earlier, right the bow were once one of the Great Andamanese, a group of 10 tribes who numbered 5000 and 1858 when the British. First, welcome them into the empire. Today, 52 total Great Andamanese tribes people remain. The last member of the Boat Tribe, who are believed to have lived in the Animan Islands for over 65,000 years, died in 2010. We don't know how many sentinelese remain low estimates say barely more than a dozen but their island is so dense and so little is known about its interior that as many as 4 or 500 people may still remain. The current reaction of the evangelical community suggests that John Chow is being portrayed by many as a martyr and a hero someone to emulate if that is the case. He will not be the last Westerner to try to preach the gospel to the Sentinelese people at the risk of committing that classic colonizer mistake and thinking. I know the thoughts of an entire group of people. I do want to try to speak for the Sentinelese on one matter because I think that they've been very clear about this. What they would say if they could speak to the entire world, leave us the **** alone. That's fair. I mean, the thing with missionaries, too, it's just like, like, we don't need to keep harping on this, but it's like, yeah, the absolute wrong message will be received and you're like, yeah, we have to save these people. They're fine, and even if they're not, they've made their choice and it's shoot anyone who comes close. Time, I guess. Treat them like you do the yard of a person who lives in rural Oklahoma and stay the **** away because they'll murder you if you hang on to their land. Yeah, like it's very easy. We do it in the South all the time. I grew up understanding that if I broke into the wrong person's house, they shoot me if I broke into their land or whatever. Like we get it. Treat the Sentinelese like a random homeowner in Texas. Don't exercise Second Amendment rights. So **** yeah, as as usual with the behind the ******** recording, my main reaction is. **** I mean, this one's like, I guess a little because it is like. So much born of sort of ignorance that you can't argue about. Yeah, like there is. Just like, how could you possibly stop this without having people, unlike, question the very underpinning of their beliefs that you're like, the **** you're going to do? Oh, I don't. I don't know what we could do other than try to educate other people to maybe understand that. Like, these people have made their desire clear, I guess. Send them more iron. Yeah, give more iron. Give me some air. Maybe send them nice arrows. You make great arrows in the future. Yeah, you might as well drop some. They'll figure it out. Yeah, they'll know what an arrow, right? Like a good *** arrow? Couple of compound bows? Why? It's like it's only a matter of time before. We just are sending drones into places like that, right? I mean, honestly, if you're going to contact them, that seems more ethical than people from disease standpoint. You can make a drone clean, pretty. Yeah, whatever. They might destroy the drone somehow, but whatever looks like a bird and just stay high up in the air. Yeah, they'll assume it's an animal, I assume. Anyway, I feel like, yeah, we're more ethical with these people than, like, when they film like a planet Earth episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're less ethical. Yeah, just leave him alone. Just leave him the **** alone. And if you. Basically have to study them, do it with like, you know, a ******* 4064X lens from a plane. And I fully support that because it's cool as hell. I understand the intrigue. Yeah, someone who has spent a lot of his life exploring and going to places and wanting to see different cultures. I get the desire to want to know what's it like on that and what are their lives like? What is their culture like? Totally understand, totally feel that curiosity myself. Don't go to their island, yeah. Yeah, you're not saving anyone. You're not saving anyone, for Christ's sake. Yeah. So yeah. Yep. Yep, Yep. Yep. Pretty good. Pretty good. The Guardian video is so disgusting. We were like horse. Yeah. This is like what it's like when civilization, you know, and and it's a little fascinating to see because clearly that means there's a market for still treating people as subhuman. Oh yeah. There's never not a market for that. Amazon. Yeah. But, like, it it is several veneers of propriety removed from like, it's they're not even trying to hide it. Yeah. And it's it's so it's like disgusting in a way that you're like, right. Our basest instincts will be with us forever. And I I have to hope that most of the people on a journey like that. I know it's probably not the case, but most of you hope most of them would be horrified, would be like, oh, I didn't think it was going to be like this. I thought we just get to, like, walk through a village and see how they lived or something. I doubt it, though. Maybe people dancing for food. Yeah. You're the bad guy. Yeah, if you're part of a thing that makes people dance for food. And it's not like a ballet even where that's, I mean, it's not that direct, you know? Yeah. Throwing bread on the stage. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew, you want to plug some pluggable? Not that this is much more sunnier. Much more sunny yo, is this racist? Is my podcast. And yeah, if you're in San Francisco, we will be at San Francisco Sketchfest in January of 2019, assuming we in any way you like to define it. Still around then? Yeah, and I never know. You know, dissolution of the United States. Anything could happen. Anything could happen. So listen to Andrews podcast. Listen to more of my podcast. If you're listening to this from the Andaman Islands, reach out to us on Twitter. I met, I write. OK, if enough of you do something, I can probably con my bosses and just sending me out there for a live show which would be sick as hell live show if you're on North Sentinel Island and have Twitter somehow. Twitter. They're they're on Twitter, of course. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm Robert. This has been behind the ********. You can find usonlinebehindthebastards.com. Find us on social media at at ******** pod. You can find T-shirts, phone cases, insulin needles. Do we sell insulin needles? We do not. What other kind of needles do we sell? Heroin needles. Heroin needles. All sorts of great branded content on T public behind the ********. Teepublic, check us out. We get some of the money from stuff like that. Which I will. Used to buy narcotics. I love about 40% of you. 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