Rest in peace, John Allen Chau, a Christian missionary killed while attempting to share the Good News with an uncontacted people known as the Sentineli, habitants of North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal.
With the news of Chau’s death I thought back to Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, standard reading for young and impressionable minds, wherein the authors assert, insensibly, the pacific character of non-Western people from whom Westerners have much to learn about peace and prosperity. On the “rarity of warfare,” readers are informed that “much has been written on the theoretical importance of hunting for shaping the supposedly competitive and aggressive nature of the human species,” however, “most anthropologists are unconvinced by these arguments.” Would most anthropologists be convinced by the arrows that perforated Chau?
Tragic as Chau’s fate was, it was to be expected, and, from what we can glean from his final journal entries, Chau himself anticipated his demise. Yet he persisted.
But death was too good for Chau, according to progressives.
Chau, writes a Bernie Sanders fan and member of the faculty of engineering at Imperial College, “illegally tried to contact a tribe who want to be left alone on some narcissistic ‘mission’. The tribespeople have nothing to be forgiven for.” It was, of course, unnecessary as it was inappropriate for Chau’s family to extend forgiveness to those who had a moral right to murder their son.
What Chau did, wrote Heather Hughson on Twitter, “goes beyond arrogance . . . it was attempted genocide, and he knew it.” Hughson holds a Ph.D. in political science from McGill University, and a master’s degree in comparative politics from the prestigious London School of Economics and Political Science.
Self-described “refugee storyteller” Josh Shahryar made clear the progressive dependence on “menace,” namely the menace of Western civilization, for moral legitimacy. “Oh god. This story makes me so angry. The fucking nerve and audacity of this asshole. This is not a tragedy…” Chau was, according to Shahryar, “a genocidal asshole and I wish worse had happened to him. Death just is not enough.” Shahryar’s work has appeared in The Guardian, The Daily Beast and on “Frontline” on PBS.
Claims of attempted genocide are predicated on the idea that Chau may have, had he made contact, introduced disease among the primitives. On the other hand, Americans who object to how tuberculosis, among other diseases, has made a resurgence in the United States as a result of Third World immigration to the U.S. are condemned as racists by many of these same critics.
The tribe that killed Chau, Shahryar says, has “chosen deliberately to not reach back and to keep living on THEIR land in THEIR way.” Shahryar argues that people have a right to defend their land and their way of life, but there is a catch—only non-Western people may exercise this right.
African and Middle Eastern people have a “right” to invade the lands of the Christian Europe, because they, like the Latin American “carvanners” at the southern U.S. border, are owed their manifest destiny from their Western oppressors, wherever those oppressors may call home. Not even the Germans, who have lived along the Rhine since before the birth of Christ, can claim any right to resist the hordes that now besiege them.
But something is happening now in Tijuana that progressives are having a hard time explaining away in the media, something that harks back to North Sentinel Island.
The residents of Tijuana have been outright hostile in their reception of the “migrant” caravan. Not with open arms, but with signs reading “Fuera Invasores” (Out Invaders) have would-be border crossers been greeted. Tijuaneros, like the Sentineli—and like sensible Americans—do not take kindly to uninvited guests in their lands disrupting their way of life.
Americans (or, specifically, white Americans and those nonwhites naïve enough to be patriotic) are the “real” invaders. As such, they are compelled to invite the innumerable unwashed masses of the world to live among them to atone for the historical grievances induced by western conquest.
All of this brings to mind a scene from “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”
To Sitting Bull’s complaint that the lands taken from his people by Anglo settlers are sacred, bequeathed to them by the Great Spirit, Colonel Nelson Miles, played by Shaun Johnston, replies with candor:
No matter what your legends say, you didn’t sprout from the plains like the spring grasses. And you didn’t coalesce out of the ether. You came out of the Minnesota woodlands armed to the teeth and set upon your fellow man. You massacred the Kiowa, the Omaha, the Ponca, the Oto, and the Pawnee without mercy.
Sitting Bull’s retort would bring a smile to the face of any campus Marxist. “And who gave us the guns and powder to kill our enemies? And who traded weapons to the Chippewa and others who drove us from our home?” Yet Nelson would not be outgunned:
Chief Sitting Bull, the proposition that you were a peaceable people before the appearance of the white man is the most fanciful legend of all. You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent. You conquered those tribes, lusting for their game and their lands, just as we have now conquered you for no less noble a cause.
There is no ethical, moral, historical, economic, or spiritual argument to convince progressives that Americans have a right to defend their land and their way of life by restricting immigration. To them more immigration is always better, less is always racist. Strength, therefore, is the only answer on the border.
The world Westerners inhabit may seem vastly different from that of the Sentineli, but at the most fundamental level, very little about essential human needs and desires differs between the two. The imperative of societal security, that perhaps impelled the Sentineli to kill Chau, and the Tijuaneros to reject the caravanners, is reflected in President Trump’s proclamation to close the Mexican border and authorize lethal force against the wretched refuse now laying siege to our national boundaries. As legions of foreigners attempt to force their way onto our political island, Americans should remember that they reserve the same right as the Sentineli to defend themselves.
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