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Present-day genocide and cultural extermination

The crimes committed by today's missionaries (mainly the evangelical kinds like the Baptists, but also established Churches like the Catholic and mainstream Protestant ones) are too numerous to relate. Only a few such cases are mentioned below.
ARE not missionaries those nice and friendly people who, abroad, in some distant, underdeveloped countries, do good, feed hungry children, and teach the ignorant, savage, or uneducated population?

Do you really believe this?
...since the missionary organizations near all have tax exempt status, if you ever paid taxes, you have indirectly funded them.
What exactly did you support?

Excerpt from the genocide convention:

Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
MISSIONARIES have done all of the above, and continue to do most of these things even today (supported with your money, donations, and taxes).

Since the effects of missionary work, the cultural traditions of a people being replaced by some form of Christianity, are intentional, this means by definition that genocide is the missionary profession: converting other peoples to Christianity and thus destroying them as an ethnical group, and denying the right of native peoples to exist as what they are, with their own culture, language, religion. For a variety of reasons a massive depopulation, in other words the death of a large percentage of the native population, follows.

Mission today.
IN A HOST OF COUNTRIES, from Southeast Asia to nearly the whole of Southern America, in countries such as Malaysia, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, U.S. funded missionary organizations and evangelists continue to bring destruction, unhappiness, and diseases to native peoples such as the Moï, the Maya-Quiché, the Huichol, the Yanomami, the Panaré, the Aché even today [LM]. Among the more notorious organizations are the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the New Tribes Mission (NTM), these two "virtually dividing the whole of Latin America, where tribal people remained to be reached, into their spheres of interest." [LM105].

Activities like these are supported with funds provided by zealous evangelist organizations in the U.S., such as the "Wycliffe Bible Translators of Arkansas."

[LM] N.Lewis, The Missionaries, New York: McGraw-Hill 1988.
From: Mission: Possible - If You are a Missionary, then Genocide is Your Profession page from The Christian Heritage

Americas

While openly genocidal campaigns to exterminate the last forest Indians of Southern America began in the 1950's, with governmental support, for example...
  • The Nhambiquera Indians were mowed down by machine-gun fire
  • Two tribes of the Patachos were exterminated by giving them smallpox injections
  • A favourite method employed on several occasions was to shower gifts from a plane over a village ... booby trapped with explosive devices
    • [LM99]
    ...the missionaries effect their mopping up efforts from the other end.
    [LM] N.Lewis, The Missionaries, New York: McGraw-Hill 1988.
    From: Mission: Possible at The Christian Heritage

    The New Tribes Mission (NTM): operating wherever there are still unconverted indigenous people

    This agency, spreading the Good News in South America and elswhere,

    ...is one of many fundamentalist christian missions that is trying to peddle its message to vulnerable groups, in this case the remaining tribal peoples of the world. It sets itself the ambitious and frightening target of continuing with this "until the last tribe is reached". It is active in nineteen countries.
    The role of a missionary is to infiltrate a tribe, and convince or coerce them into rejecting their own indigenous spiritual beliefs in favour of the christian church. Many times much more than this is lost, as people are 'educated' by missionaries, or missionary activity is the harbinger of further economic development. Indigenous people find themselves suddenly brought in to the global economy with a bump, totally exploitable and the bottom of a pile.
    Abuse, genocide and round-ups of indigenous people who are unwilling to convert:
    Sporadic stories of abuse from the NTM have been emerging for years, despite the fact that most of their activities take place well hidden from outside scrutiny. Many stories have come from the rainforests of South America where the missionaries found that the only ways to convert nomadic communities was to force them into camps, or reservations, driving out into the forest to roundup those who do not come.
    These mission procedures to round-up and capture non-Christian South American people for conversion are referred to as manhunts.
    Once again, Christianity colludes with dictators and causes genocide by introducing diseases (purposefully as always):
    In Paraguay, the NTM acted in collusion with the dictator Stroessner, for who the policy of settlement camps and conversion fitted in nicely with his plans for opening up the forest to mining and logging interests.
    The NTM are also accused of killing many more people, for example the Ayoreo, also of Paraguay, by bringing western diseases into the area.
    From: New Tribes Mission

    This is the same New Tribes Mission which the Venezuelan president Chavez banned from his country, accusing them of spying for the US government and of mistreating the native Indians horribly:

    "They will leave Venezuela," said the president. "They are agents of imperialist penetration. They gather sensitive and strategic information and are exploiting the Indians. So they will leave, and I don't care two hoots about the international consequences that this decision could bring."
    ..."I have seen reports and videos on the activity of these New Tribes. We don't want them here; we all form part of an old tribe," Chávez quipped.
    The Venezuelan government changed the highly controversial celebration of Columbus Day (which had led to the Christian genocide of the Natives of the Americas) into Day of Indigenous Resistance. Chavez is the same person that fundy televangelist Pat Robertson wanted assassinated.
    The controversial group [NTM] has been accused of prospecting for strategic minerals on behalf of transnational corporations and of the forced acculturation and conversion of indigenous people.
    From: NTM Missionaries Kicked Out

    NTM and Mennonite missions in South America

    To learn what missionaries do today let us follow two visits to protestant Missions in Southern America, as recorded by eyewitnesses less than two decades ago, the first leading us to an NTM mission station in Paraguay. [Link]
    NTM mission station in Paraguay

    WE LEFT before dawn the next day in Riester's Land Rover, and found the missionary camp at the end of a jungle track, along which threatening notices had been posted in the hope of keeping visitors away. Nearer the centre of the camp grimed and dishevelled women squatted round a fire on which a tortoise was being cooked... In the centre of the camp we found a large wooden hut with several male Ayoreos propped against its walls... dazed with apathy and unable or unwilling to speak...

    A commotion began, led by some weeping women, who had broken through to tell us that the camp's water-supply had been cut off as a punishment for some offence, and that many sick children in the camp had been without water for some days. It seemed a matter of urgency to do something to rectify this situation so we went to see the missionary, Mr Depue, whose trim compound was adjacent to the bedraggled camp area... Mr Depue and his family were at lunch when we arrived and we were shown into an anteroom... After Mr Depue had said grace the family rose from the table... and Mr Depue joined us...

    He unhesitatingly confirmed that he had ordered a collective punishment he believed most effective to deal with a case in which two or three children had broken into a store... There was to be no more water until the culprits were found, and brought into his compound there to be publicly thrashed.

    "Would you be administering the thrashing, Mr Depue?" I asked.

    "That is my intention," he said, "although I should not be averse to supervising the necessary chastisement undertaken by another person. But I'm afraid that's unlikely."

    He went on to explain... in all the many years he had spent as a missionary he had never heard of a single instance of an Indian punishing a child...

    "And do you still believe that this is a better life?" I asked Mr Depue.
    "Yes," he said. "I cannot describe to you in words how much better it is."
    "The Ayoreos who left the camp and went to Santa Cruz," I told him, "are living on the women's earnings from prostitution."
    "There would be little alternative," he said..."I am only comforted by the knowledge that a soul once truly saved can never be lost." [LM119-122]
    Of course a different picture is painted in the many colorful books and leaflets published by the missionary headquarters, intended for readers back home: "Missionary descriptions of such operations are often disarmingly simple and direct... God Planted Five Seeds, by Jean Dye Johnson, a classic of its kind, is the account of a young missionary wife... Only once in 213 pages does she refer to Indians, and then in quotes, as if real Indians were to be found only in North America. Otherwise the mission is out to capture 'naked savages', or bárbaros...

    Mrs Johnson noted that the householders, 'most of whom owned ranches or farms just out of town were shameless in their desire to get their hands on some Ayoreo who would become a labourer without pay'.

    The use in this passage of the adjective 'shameless' is the single example of implied criticism in this book of the servitude imposed on the Indians. For years Mrs Johnson lived among 'captives' and 'labourers without pay', but the word 'slave' is never used. On a single occasion she expressed regret for the murder of an Indian.
    He (Paul Fleming, founder and head of the NTM) was troubled by the fact that the second search party had killed a savage.
    Mrs Johnson's concern here is likely to have been less with the death of a savage, which was a matter of frequent occurrence, than with the mission's responsibility for a soul's condemnation to everlasting hell." [LM123f] "Contact work, one learns from a study of the missionary publications, when not undertaken by the missionaries themselves is confined to native 'deacons'. These, in the style of the London Missionary Society's police of old, carry guns. At this time some 850 Ayoreos thus contacted are in NTM camps, and a very large, but unrecorded number have died. Cultural Survival, a US organization not wholly unsympathetic to missionary endeavour, admitted that inmates of an NTM camp... were held against their will. In the legal sense, therefore, they had been kidnapped." [LM127] Missionary accounts of their activities display almost incredible insensitivity. A letter back home from the McClure family, dated March 1979 reads:
    Dear Prayer Partners,

    Early last year we asked you to claim 1978 as the year we contacted the Totobigosode or 'pig people'. The Following is what your prayers have effected.
    It started the 28th December... [on] a site about 200 kilometres from El Faro [...] When the El Faro men were close they started shouting their names, and that they had come in peace. To this the 'pig people' shouted back, 'These men are saying that they have come in peace but what if it is a trick, because they have done this to us long ago.'
    The turning point seemed to come when Cadui, one of the El Faro men, threw his rifle behind him and walked forward... However, they had to wait three days before all the women were rounded up; they were scared to death. One lady was injured when she fell from a tree. [She broke a leg in two places and was obliged to walk back to the mission on it, and subsequently died. Ed.] It was a joyous occasion when we arrived at the mission station...
    The El Faro Indians and missionaries are just praising the Lord for his faithfulness in bringing all this about...

    Reaching the lost for Christ,

    The McClures [LM127]
    From: Mission: Possible at The Christian Heritage,
    where [LM] references N.Lewis, The Missionaries, New York: McGraw-Hill 1988.

    A Mennonite missionary station in Paraguay

    The following is the description of a visit to a Mennonite mission station, an offshoot of a Mennonite missionary colony in Paraguay, where about three hundred Aché Indians were supposed to live.
    THE MENNONITE colony enjoys some degree of autonomy, and to go there permission had to be obtained at the Mennonite headquarters in Asunción... the Mennonites commonly referred to their Indian charges (German is the language of the [main] colony) as unsere schwartze arschlöche [1] (our black arseholes). The North American evangelists, primmer by nature, prefer the description "savages", "naked savages" - or in the case of those who resist contact, "treacherous savages" - all of which terms are repeated endlessly in their publications...

    Two days later the permission to visit the Mennonite colony came through... Halfway between Coronel and Caaguazú a notice proclaimed that we were entering the National Guayaki Reserve...

    We found ourselves quite suddenly in a wide clearing at the end of which, from its size and style, was clearly the mission house... The first thing I noticed, apart from the presence of several Indian women in near rags mooching about in the neighbourhood of the huts, was the smell of human excrement. A white man in mechanic's overalls had been tinkering with a piece of machinery and now he straightened himself and came forward, with a look of suppressed anger. This was Mr Jim Stolz, the missionary-in-chief... Mrs Stolz now came out of the house. She invited us into the house... A moment before several hefty-looking young Americans had appeared as if from nowhere, and were closing in on us, and, a little nervous at the way things might develop, I warned Donald to get away and take what photographs he could while I engaged Mr Stolz... He agreed that no "wild" Aché were to be found anywhere in the vicinity, and those recently arrived had come from a long way away. What made them come? I asked and Mr Stolz said, "Maybe they heard this was a good place to be in."

    There were many enslaved children in the neighbourhood... "It's the smart thing to own an Aché round here," he said... It was hard to believe that Indians would have faced these terrible hazards to reach what had been frequently described as a death camp.

    Donald was anxious to photograph Achés playing their musical instruments; their flutes and above all a species of one-string fiddle... Mr Stolz said flatly that there were no musical instruments of any kind on the reservation. Did the Indians perform any traditional ceremonies? I asked. No, he said, none. Were there any chiefs? No. Any medicine-men? Absolutely not...

    At this point I decided to ask Mr Stolz what was the function of the mission and he replied that it was to bring salvation to those who were in a state of sin... He had a problem with their language, he added, but at least he knew that they believed in three gods: the tiger (jaguar), the alligator, and the grandfather. "This makes things difficult... It's hard to get across the idea they can be redeemed from sin by a tiger's son nailed to a cross. None of these Indians can make the admission, because they do not know what to admit."

    I now joined Donald at his photography, noticing that several young missionaries, not in evidence before, had come on the scene. We investigated small huts in the immediate area of the mission house. These averaged some 15ft square and it was difficult to imagine how as many as three hundred Indians could have been sheltered in them. We saw about thirty-five Achés in all... There were a half-dozen boys between eight and twelve years of age, and two girls in this age-bracket, all with the distended stomachs and decayed teeth suggestive of malnutrition...

    There appeared to be no sanitary arrangements in the camp area, which smelt vilely as a result.

    If there had ever in fact been three hundred Indians - and presuming women were not compelled to work with their menfolk on the farms - men would have outnumbered women 15 to 1. There were no young girls... Where had all the girl children gone? [2]

    About half the Indian adults were lying on the ground in their huts in what seemed a condition of total apathy, giving no evidence of awareness of our presence as we came and went. There were gaps of up to six inches between the planks from which the walls of the huts were made, and, as these had failed to exclude the torrential rain, the floors had turned to mud, over which an occasional board had been laid. We saw no signs of food anywhere in the huts - no scraps or leftovers.

    Outside, little boys with distended stomachs under their filthy shirts who came running up to stroke our hands and caress our fingers (the Achés are the most affectionate and outgoing of the Indian races) showed us their tame lizards. [LM160ff]
    Notes
    [1] Error of the English author of the quote: correct German would be unsere schwarzen Arschlöcher, (not that it really matters).
    [2] (Note included in the original text:) It has been alleged that young girls from Cecilio Baez, and girl victims of manhunts in other parts of Paraguay, were sent to child brothels reported a speciality of Asunción. In December 1977 the Washington Post published a harrowing account of such establishments catering for the "sexual depravity among high government officials".
    From: Mission: Possible at The Christian Heritage,
    where [LM] references N.Lewis, The Missionaries, New York: McGraw-Hill 1988.

    Conclusion.
    While some of these examples of missionary activities in history and present indeed remind me of actual death camps, however, all of them end in the destruction and depopulation of what once was the home of happy native cultures. Therefore, regardless of their respective intentions, I cannot see any relevant difference between missionaries and the Nazi henchmen (except that in Nazi death camps there were musical instruments). As long as operations like these can claim tax-exempt status, your money and taxes support these activities.
    From: Mission: Possible at The Christian Heritage

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