missionaries

A Polycentric World Rejects the Missionary Mindset

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I recently spoke at an event in Berlin to inaugurate the first issue of the Global Geopolitics peer reviewed journal. For a variety of time and pacing reasons I ended up cutting significant portions of my already-written speech from my actual delivery, so I just wanted to put the entire text here in its original form. When video of the roundtable forum goes up I will add it to the links on my publications tab on this site.

…..

George Santayana in The Birth of Reason once wrote: 

“The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.”

I believe that in diplomacy, especially in multipolar diplomacy, this quote summarizes something of critical importance to understand going forward.

It has become customary to begin these types of speeches with a declaration that Francis Fukuyama was wrong, that history has returned. But this doesn’t go far enough. History never ended or even paused in the first place. What happened was that the hubris of teleology, of ideology as policy, takes root in complacent and decadent elites because it flatters their self-conception as the protagonists of the story. A hangover of the Book of Revelation, human history is held to be some kind of a moral fable leading inexorably to a singular outcome where good and evil are judged by universal standards- with the imperial administrators, of course, as jury. 

And when this Young Earth Creationist version of geopolitics inevitably fails, the prophets of doom descend. Heaven, having failed to arrive, has been replaced by Hell. We are to be tormented in a pit of fire forever for having come up short of our supposedly saintly potential.

This counter- vision is just as ridiculous and idealist as the one in which it replaces. 

The unipolar moment was, ultimately, a freakish occurrence. Other powers like the Mongols and the British came close, but the inability to leave the Eurasian landmass of the former and the continued existence of proper peer rivals in Europe of the latter meant not even they reached the heights that the United States enjoyed for a brief moment after the fall of the Soviet Union. 

And yet we hear constantly from so much of the commentariat that the supposedly reasonable options are either somehow restoring the 1990s consensus by voting the right way in a singular election or to live in a world of perpetual world war. But the first is now materially impossible due to rising capability of other power poles, and the second is so undesirable that only a conspiracy of true ideologues or incompetents would seek to bring it about. Sometimes, when I look at the foreign policy elite on both sides of the Northern Atlantic, I genuinely fear that the second is a very real possibility. Much like how a cult can pivot from a failed prophecy to mass suicide as compensation.

So the question arises: if we understand that 99% of human history was effectively ‘multipolar’, then how do we most constructively learn to be normal again after having bathed in the mentally stultifying lies of a universal human destiny? I would argue that the key lies in seeing things less as multiple poles contesting a shared future and rather as true polycentrism. There is no shared political journey whatsoever. The future will be as divergent as the past was. With strategic foresight this could even be a good thing.

An assumption we have inherited from the discredited liberal international order that should be fought is that to acknowledge political divergence is to embrace a kind of zero-sum expansionism. If one group doesn’t have something, it loses it. All or nothing. But the majority of stable and lasting power politics in diplomatic history is not this at all, it is the creation, maintenance, and navigation of the balance of power. Creating no doubt temporary islands of calm in the chaotic tempest of stormy seas. And the successful balance of powers of history, from Westphalia to the Postwar Era, were all ultimately based on accepting and even affirming different paths of governance. Different religions or ideologies between peers, even rival peers, might color the rhetoric but they would not prevent them from dealing with each other first and foremost as sovereign geographic entities.

Liberal internationalism, in its quest to become the universal arbiter of morality as a kind of Fourth Abrahamic Religion, forgot that once upon a time its greatest asset was that it acknowledged many forms of being. Its rise in political thinking was in reaction to the horrors of the religiously tinged and unrestrained nature of so much of 17th Century warfare, with philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes openly validating the concept of many different kinds of regimes having by necessity to exist with each other. As the philosopher John Gray put it in his book The Two Faces of Liberalism:

“One of the paradoxes that comes with accepting that there are incommensurate values is that tragic conflicts of value can sometimes melt away. If there are many incommensurable ways in which humans can flourish, choices among them need not be tragic.”

And just because liberal internationalism is dying out after decades of hubris and overreach need not mean that liberalism itself will die out. The reality of polycentrism is that the future promises diversity, not uniformity. Russian dreams of being a kind of messianic counter-liberalism are just as delusional as the very thing they claim to be countering as they order the planet away from the accommodation of a Modus Vivendi and into an artificial binary camp inspired by Platonic ideals. But multitudes, not binaries, now reign.

If the United States is the premier liberal state, it was not founded as a messianic or missionary power. That came much later. In fact, it originally was done as an experiment not just in political distinction, but in geographic distinction as well. To break with Britain was to break with putting the global empire’s needs over its own growing core. It is less well known today how after allying with France to break away from Britain, and feeling an immense euphoria and vindication with the rise of the French Revolution shortly thereafter, the U.S. turned against France when the new fellow enlightenment republic began to pressure the young nation to join it in waging global war. Indeed, the U.S. Navy itself was originally founded to combat attempts to force ideological solidarity by a once beloved ally. The first naval battles in American history would be against France, the only other enlightenment republic. So much for democratic peace theory.

Today the Trans-Atlantic shoe is on the other foot, with U.S. belligerence towards, of all countries, Denmark. Mercurial shifts in domestic policy cause the mask to fall and unequal relations once referred to as partnerships are now exposed as vassalage networks between an imperial core and subalterns. Denmark, which stood beside the U.S. for so long, who sent its armed forces into Afghanistan at American behest, now gets its thanks in terms of thuggish and short-sighted demands for Greenland. Trans-Atlanticism has a far worse record on both sides of the Atlantic than its biggest defenders would ever admit. Much as communist solidarity in the Cold War could not survive the Sino-Soviet Split, the ideological alliance has been shown time and time again to be the most overrated concept in geopolitical history. The needs of the alliance have also ironically harmed liberalism at home on both sides of the Atlantic, as frank discussions of what the national interest of these different regions have long been buried in exchange for a gargoyle of globalism which yokes vast regions together under the promise of some unproven ultimate ideological or global market based outcome.

And yet the states of Eastern Europe rightly fear Russian power and intentions towards them too. But this is not an either-or choice, it is a challenge. Can European states form an independent bloc that can stand up to both the U.S. and Russia? I would argue yes, but they must drop the ultimate conceit of universalism which they have inherited first from the Age of Discovery and then from the subsequent Victorian periods. No longer in the cockpit of history, they must contend with what they were before Columbus: Asia’s westernmost peninsula. A region like any other. But this could be a liberation rather than a curse. Free of the delusion of being missionaries of global telos, Europeans can now rediscover the imperative virtue of having a specific geographically located interest. They can have, as Phil Cunliffe would say in his excellent book on The National Interest, an actually comprehensible internal debate on what is feasible and what is not. An open contestation between citizens and politicians of what is in their collective best interest. It is something they seem to have forgotten how to do, so reliant on American power to maintain the illusion of continued global tastemakers as they have become. 

They should also be cautious that their first instinct, especially here in Germany if recent history is any guide, could be to become a kind of Saudi Arabia of militant humanism. An exporter of a universalist world view as a “moral conscience” that retains its purity in light of Big Bad America’s descent into overt gangsterism. This would be a massive mistake. Strategic autonomy comes not from posturing and pontification, as domestic politics are likely to change what is ideological fashionable on a whim, but rather it comes from a rooted geographic interest that emphasizes the local- and hence anti-universal- over that of any abstract global cause. People will rally to defend their homes in a way they never would to defend the idea of a global governance that was and will always be used to justify whatever the strongest powers, upon whose whims it relies on, wish to do. 

This brings us to the question of the smaller states in polycentrism. Great powers must learn to live with each other or face ruin. Middle Powers are likely to make huge gains under polycentrism as their freedom of action opens up in their immediate near-abroad, at least so long as they avoid making revisionist bids for hegemony beyond their means. But the future could well be bleak for the smaller nations of the world, or the ones without favorable geographic defenses. Some will have to reach an accord with a dominant regional power. Others risk being contested in clashing spheres of influence. It might be tempting for them to ask that someone save them, but this cannot be guaranteed either. 

I would contend that these countries too must learn to embrace difference and distinction. Even if the great powers hopefully learn to live with each other and put a halt to grand ideological battles, they will almost certainly try to affirm their contested frontiers with projects of ideological dross. Religious and racial chauvinism, clash of civilizations, left vs right, etc. For countries that wish to avoid becoming the playthings of others it becomes doubly important that even if one wishes to reach a subordinate security arrangement with a great power it must combat missionary activity from the outside world lest it risk foreign fueled civil strife at home. 

The polycentric world could be made stable and its worst excesses curbed. But only if the accommodation reached between the powers is one of a Modus Vivendi that explicitly eschews grand ideological projects or the conversion of others along cultural, religious, political or economic universals. Otherwise, whatever benefits there are of returning to the core bedrock of stability- geography and negotiated interest- will be immediately squandered by supremacist factions who are uninterested in long term stability.

All orders are temporary and become obsolete, of course. This is the humility that those of us opposed to treating history as teleology can affirm. But it is worth looking at the results achieved by the most aggressively anti-missionary state in history: The Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan. Founded in an internal coup against a then reigning newly-unified government who saw its primary purpose as increasingly fruitless expansion abroad, the Shogunate knew two things: 1. Spanish and Portuguese missionaries were destabilising society at home and possibly paving the way for future integration as a vassal or colony in their growing empires, and 2. Attempting to displace the Chinese as masters of East Asia by force had been a failure. 

So what did they do? They played to their geographic strengths as a large archipelago and closed the country. They expelled or exterminated the missionaries and invested everything into building a distinct state separate from both the Chinese tribute system and the European empires. Edo, now Tokyo, became the largest city in the world. Infrastructure expanded. The world’s first government mandated national forest preserves were set aside. And above all, a country that had known nothing but war for over a century now would know peace for well over 200 years. The order had its excesses, of course. In time it would become obsolete and in need of replacement. But it still stands as an example of what a country can do when it utilizes its unique geographic gifts to cultivate a specific sense of self-interest separate from the schemes of greater powers and divorced from delusions of being “on the right side of history.”

The context of the Eurozone today is vastly different from 17th Century Japan or 18th Century America, of course, but that is my point: the contexts are always regional and different. In the 21st Century the European states are economically subordinated to U.S. interests in a way that harms their capacity for independent action but so integrated that it will take cautious long term planning to make a pivot away from dollar dependence and security networks. I suspect we will see a variety of paths from different states unfold, and doing so will be a boon to social and political science research if nothing else.

We may have little control over the vast bureaucratic entities of the modern state and the chaos of events, but by purging ourselves of the missionary mentality we could begin the process of making the world more habitable and conducive to diplomacy. Caring about the physical space around us goes far further than caring about abstract universal idealism ever could. The energies of activists and reformers could be spent responding to their actual constituents. Change starts at home.

Every country with remotely natural or defensible borders has now been given the opportunity to find divergent ways to secure their sense of self and security. Many will fail, but the more that embrace localism and anti-universal paths to security, the more viable the non-aligned buffer state becomes. Perhaps more relevant to us social scientists, the more interesting case studies we have to test theories on as well. This would be riding the tiger of polycentrism, in a world of many shrines to different genus loci it is best not to adhere to a universal church. Psychologically, the North Atlantic may be the least prepared region of the world for this shift today, but if they want to avoid future calamities they would be wise to prepare themselves. 

But this quest for reasoned distinction is not alien to the North Atlantic, merely to its moderns. If I may close by quoting at length from George Washington’s “Farewell Address”, which was as good advice for a new and young republic then as it is for those disoriented by the end of unipolarity today:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.

Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? 

In short, reject Baerbockism, embrace circumstantial realism.

Sovereignty and the Missionary Pestilence

/ geotrickster / 1 Comment

There is an interesting legal case brewing in the Pine Ridge Reservation about trying to restrict the activities of an obnoxious white missionary. I suggest reading this for more details. But it kind of sums up a lot of more obscure ideas that I have kept on this blog only and why I am continuously evolving them. Especially given the background of the Pope’s recent apology tour which means nothing while the Spanish/Portuguese version of neoconservatism, The Doctrine of Discovery, remains on the books.

The Iroquois made great sport of burning Jesuits-a group that had been allowed to infiltrate and infest the Huron. I would content this played a part in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy outlasting its Huron and French rivals in addition to their skillful diplomacy.

The purpose of these missionary people, as it always has been since their rise to prominence in the Late Classical Era, is to find the most psychologically diseased and desperate members of a society and elevate them out of their rightful place at the bottom and put them at the top as compliant puppets. To achieve a kind of rule by and for the psychologically frail. This explains its popularity in certain parts of the world where philosophical tradition already paved the way for the disembodied ideal to take precedence over the value-neutral adaptably pragmatic. That or parts of the world with the misfortune to be conquered by those with such idealist hang-ups. Which is also why North Sentinel Island did nothing wrong.

Tribal law will serve as a test case in internal politics here in the U.S. But it also goes to show why even though I take generally pro immigrant views I will never endorse Open Borders nonsense. The ability to regulate who can enter a community and what they can do upon doing so is vital to prevent forced homogenization and to provide protection from trendy fads that claim to be the future. Because I am fine with Central American immigrants does not mean I am fine with all potential groups of people out of some bland statement of common humanity. One day, a group might arise somewhere that is overwhelmingly beholden to some fanatical ideology that demands mass conformity to its doctrine in a way people from Latin America presently do not.

Strong states and societies can keep missionaries (and their fellow travelers like many preachy humanitarian NGOs) out. Only weak societies let themselves be walked over by militant carelords whose stated humility runs part and parcel with their ballooning hubris that they are the vanguard of a new world order bringing enlightenment to those who have yet to bow to them. And if the laws and customs are the same everywhere (the Christian-Muslim-Victorian-liberal dream) where do you go to when the laws become insufferable? Are you complacent enough, even if you support the monoculture, to assume it will always be good to you? Nothing stays the same forever. World history reaches no predetermined and uniform endpoint save perhaps entropy or creative destruction and reboot/recycle. Therefore, world views that promise such a thing can be confidently stated as either lying or deluded. Yet their appeal to the weak and bitter is its own form of self perpetuating power, like a democratized pyramid scheme. Of course, the irony of such totalizing views is that they cannot live without enemies to compare themselves with. But unlike others that can acknowledge this division as natural they cannot, and so their moments of triumph inevitably give way to sectarian division and mutual cancellation…for where go the self righteous when there is no one left to convert? They turn inward and wreak their missionary activities upon each other as the pyramid scheme of conversion must continue. Division always reasserts itself and no belief complex last forever. Even if, as I have written about professionally, they take on changed and more contemporary forms.

The problem is not that they will succeed, for they will not. It is a problem of how much damage they inflict on their doomed quest before they inevitably fail. How many alternatives to monoculture are destroyed or assimilated unnecessarily to sate this lust for mandatory togetherness in service of a project that will fail but make everything more insufferable as it does so anyway? In the end even this comes to naught of course, but living through it in real time is the thing to be avoided.

With the power of sovereignty, however, this problem can be situationally mitigated. This is why Japan didn’t become the Philippines in the age of discovery. Sovereignty itself is a fake concept of course, but one which has more truth to it than any messianic religion or social fad. This is because when it fails it is acknowledged to be lost, and can only be a concept of import when it works. To work it must have both some in group consensus and some external recognition of territorial rootedness. Those things, unlike vague and odious monocultural concepts of salvation, grace, enlightenment, social justice, [Current Year] or ‘the end of history’ can actually exist in a concrete way in the material world. Likewise, the assertion of sovereignty begets other different sovereignties, which, in turn, protects distinctiveness. It should come as no surprise that the most obnoxious missionaries of today-the ones who prey on war refugees and impoverished native communities, come from the United States, a country that has for most of my lifetime held itself up as the universal empire and arbiter of what is right and wrong in the world. It is only by asserting such sovereignty (be at tribal or international level) that one can choose to exclude what seeks to forcibly assimilate.

Thankfully, human tribalism is intrinsic and cannot be defeated by any ideology. But I would much rather live in a society capable of suppressing and interdicting the worst of the carelords. And I support others who wish to do so in their own way as well. In our particularly Anglo-Protestant culture complex this is especially hard. We are every bit as close to the heart of the beast as sane people who live in Saudi Arabia are. But, as I have stated before, I do believe there is a way for the sane to work within our cursed traditions to achieve a far more optimal outcome.

In the meantime, support for tribal sovereignty (and indigenous religion) within the context of U.S. domestic politics remains an imperative someone like myself who follows the ideas of The Black Longhouse must uphold to the utmost.

Cheers and Jeers, Not Tears for Dead Missionaries

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North Sentinal Island (Creative Commons A-NC-SA) Credit: Christian Caron

‘Come in and meet our Gods,

This is not your day.’

~Korpiklaani

North Sentinel Island is a place most people never heard of before this week. I recall finding out about it about ten years ago when I saw an article and some photos about a helicopter being driven away by the impressively long range arrows of the inhabitants (known by us, if surely not themselves, as the Sentinelese). I had forgotten about it for quite some time until I was reminded this week of the place because of the death of missionary John Allen Chau.

One thing that makes me overjoyed is that the overall reaction of people, if the internet is any judge, is one of overwhelming hostility to this man and his mission. Had this story came to news prominence in, say, 2004 or about, no doubt reactions would be split 50/50 in the American media as we were still in a mindless post 9/11 fervor where rallying around the flag also meant rallying around the cross for many. And no doubt the people who recognized that such a person would deserve their death would have still treaded on eggshells disproportionately. This was, after all, the time of the Bush administration- evangelical alliance’s height before a countless barrage of sex scandals and their total inability to not make asses of themselves caused the growing brand of theologically inclined social reactionaries to start crawling back under the rock from whence they had first emerged in the 80s.

But not today. John Allen Chau is clearly and rightly seen by most people as anywhere from dangerously deranged to downright evil. His attempt to contact a tribe that has kept the outside world at an arms length for tens of thousands of years was a monstrous breach of any sense of remotely logical ethics, if for no reason than the very real danger a man of globalized world’s bodily pathogens coming into contact with an isolated people who are likely to have very few immunities to anything he might be carrying. To put it succinctly, he very well could have committed unintentional genocide of an entire culture just so that he could spread his religion. A culture, by the way, that no one off of the island can even communicate with.

This is the first and obvious take away from this situation. Sure, the Indian government wants to protect people from the tribe, who have clearly taken an isolationist stance since they were first invaded by a small British exploration force in the Victorian era, but they also want to protect the community from literal biological death. It has happened enough (and often at the hands of missionaries themselves) in human history that this should be a no-brainer. While it is clearly irregular for a group of humans to still be so isolated, its uniqueness also argues in favor of protecting them. They might survive in situations were many of the rest of us would not. And to maintain constant habitation of one place for so long clearly implies they want for little and are clearly doing something right. I am no romantic primitivist, I know far too much of history for that, but what works works in each ecological niche. And part of appreciating human diversity is appreciating that individuals and groups alike also have the right to opt out if they so desire.

But this is where I stop giving you the typical arguments you can find anywhere, and were I go into territory many commentators won’t. This is where I get mean. Because Chau was not a misguided but good hearted man, or even just a criminally negligent man (though he certainly was that too), but a bad man. The kind of man we should discourage from even showing their faces in a remotely self-respecting society, much less other societies.

Even if it were not for the obvious biohazards of the situation, I would still laugh and cheer at the death of John Allen Chau and people like him. Not only do I believe that the Sentinelese acted in self defense, I also believe that they did the world itself a favor. Be it tribal, rural, or urban, human society has had enough Chau’s in the past two thousand years. Such people are the lowest level of scum to be found on this planet. If you doubt me you need only be aware that according to the diary his own family released that he wrote, he referred to North Sentinel Island, possibly the most stable and by some metrics successful society on Earth still around today, as ‘Satan’s Last Stronghold.’  Yup. Swell guy.

Christianity and Islam, those two incestuous brothers of trying to take a Jewish ethno-cult and turn it into a universal global religion, are by far the biggest two ideological scourges on this planet. Both past and present. The reason they are so uniformly prone to aggressive expansion, thought policing, and being unable to rest while The Pagan Other still lurks ominously in their fever dreams is because they have only one absolute god, who they also maintain is the god of everyone. And the only way to get closer to said god, of course, is to kowtow to their theologians who have only the correct interpretations. In its most diseased sects they can also stress that pure belief, rather than community or being useful to society, is the most noble of goals.

This, which could be argued is the true invention of virtue signaling as ideology, has to have been the worst idea any human has yet had. It has delivered no measurable or material positives while also giving many negatives, especially in regards to the destruction or near destruction of numerous cultures of people and artwork. Including literally all of the Americas. Pagan gods could be ruthless, but it was an honest ruthlessness that didn’t pretend also to be your Very Concerned and Loving David Koresh like Father. Gods across the polytheistic world were adopted in each other pantheons or merged together all the time. People of various personality and professional persuasions had their own gods and cults far better suited to their interests of choice than one bland, homogenizing, and yes dare I say, neoliberal, omnigod who was to be all things to everyone at once. Despite the many artistic accomplishments of Christian and Muslim artists once the initial fires of fanatic faith burned out (leaving the craving for culture in its wake) these achievements still remained at periodic risk due to revivalist and reformist movements who often re-awakened the latent puritanism of the original dark days of the faith. From Calvinism in the 17th Century to Wahhabiism in the 18th Century and ISIS and Pentecostalism today, all of us who live within majority Abrahamic societies must live in fear of the worst messianic instincts of our foolish fellow citizens who follow such ideologies rising up in periodic resurgences of insanity. All of us who deviate from their norm in thought, sexuality, or creed must always stand on guard to protect the precious innovation that is secularism simply because such people exist.

But lest I go over previous treated ground on a sad cultural legacy of monotheism and fanaticism and how it still lives with us today, I want to specifically mention the sheer entitlement of the modern American Christian missionary and why they, as a class, are never to be mourned when they die doing such ridiculous cultural invasions as that of Chau on North Sentinel Island.

While I started this essay with an expression of happiness at the overall attitude toward this fool’s death exhibited by the public, there are, of course, dissenters. Almost all of whom are evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in America and (probably also) Western Africa and enclaves in Latin America. I’m not going to drive up any of the traffic of these fool websites and commentators, but I can sum up what I have found.

There is a near universal consensus by such types that they are a persecuted people. They point to people being mean about their fellow traveler online and how the Indian government will not prosecute (someone even called the police for this ‘murder’-the American police no less-these people are beyond parody). They try to draw a connection between the Modi government of India and this totally excluded and autonomous island. But lets be real, a fundamental aspect of Christianity has been and probably will always be crying ‘persecution!’ They do it when they are the majority community who sets all the standards, they do it when they are the *only* people around and then subdivide into numerous warring sects for they apparently cannot even exist without sectarian strife. They do it when someone they are oppressing merely complains about their being oppressed, they do it when they see something they disagree with, and they do it when people don’t buy shitty chicken sandwiches from a chain restaurant. Their societies have enslaved and exterminated too many to tell and yet the deaths of those at the hands of societies that resist is somehow an attack on all of them and a great tragedy. And naturally, if you point this out they say ‘not all Christians!’ For a people so eager to generalize all of the planet that exists outside of their yoke, they are remarkably adamant that you never generalize them.

Foolish ‘secular humanist’ types can also follow this trope by lamenting the loss of life, as if pacifism ever got anyone anywhere. But a humanist is just a secular Christian when it comes to values so the point still stands. History is not a teleology with a heroic endgame or moral platitude that triumphs, its a mass of cycles of chaos and circumstances alone determines who stands and falls. But on those rare moments when a choice can be made…just shoot the fucking missionary.

When we see such events as Chau’s misguided adventure and death we should not hesitate to be as mean about it as possible. We should celebrate such victories as many of us would be better off had our societies resisted the missionary as well. He had it coming. That empty-headed smile he shows in his selfies is a testament to the bland mediocrities who often crawl through this planet with designs of ‘saving’ the world from divergent thought. He is the photogenic Christian version of those smiling jihadist selfies of those wreaking devastation on the culture and people of the Iraqi/Syrian border but bourgeois and socially acceptable. The policies of the 17th Century Tokugawa Shogunate and 19th Century Kingdom of Madagascar to remove the Christian population as harbingers of a coming colonialism and as a matter of national security were not misguided, but correct. Religious freedom can only work under either polytheism or secularism, which means the freedoms of those who don’t believe in freedom must be curtailed. Knowing this its about time to make the profession of missionary as extinct as that of court eunuch, foot binder, or witch hunter.

For a Finnish musical take on this topic from the correct perspective which I quoted at the top, see: