Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Accidental Genocide of the Andaman Islands

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

In the last episode, we discussed talked mostly about the history of the Andaman islands in general, and not North Sentinel Island specifically. In Part Two, Robert is joined again by Andrew Ti (Yo Is This Racist) to discuss the Sentinel Island in detail.   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. And 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 T, save the day! Still here!

We're doing part two about The Bastards of the Andaman Islands, telling the story of this accidental genocide of an entire people. Hooray! Still fun. I'm jazzed up to get back into this shit, man. Still fun. We are pumped. All right.

In our last episode, we talked mostly about the history of the Earth. We talked mostly about the history of the Andaman Islands in general, and not North Sentinel Island in specific, which is where Jonathan Chow, the American missionary who was shot to death with arrows, for trying to talk to people who did not fucking want to talk. For breaking many laws to try to talk, to proselytize to people, in paraphrasing the quote from the last episode, what was it, one of the devil's last strongholds?

Yeah, one of the devil's last strongholds. Something like that. I 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 the 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 you're like, so much of history is just an accident.

Yeah. Oh, all of it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, 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 this British soldier who, when Hitler rose to power, 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 shit. Yeah. Oh, should have shot Hitler, dog.

Should have shot Hitler, dog? Hey, dog, should have shot Hitler. That's our new T-shirt. Should have shot Hitler, dog. That's good merch. This is a pro shooting Hitler podcast. Wow, bold. Of Hitler's decisions, the one that I unequivocally agree with

is his decision to shoot Hitler. Big fan of that moment. Hiring Hugo Bosses. That wasn't a bad call. I'm going to be honest, that wasn't a bad call either. So, now that we've joked 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 Andamanese people, but not the people of the North Sentinel Island. 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 as like, oh, everyone's dying. We shouldn't let anyone else onto our island. It sounds like that ends badly. Like an actual quarantine. Yeah, it seems like we should quarantine ourselves because something terrible is happening. Not wrong, not wrong.

The next time North Sentinel Island shows up on the historical record after the initial contact in 1858 is 1867, when an Indian merchant ship called the Nineveh 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, He escaped on the lone intact boat, abandoning his passengers and crew to what he was sure would be a massacre. Great captain. Really good captain. Really solid captain.

That is the absolute gem of a loophole of goes down with the ship. Well, the ship's gone. Get in the ship, get in the ship. I got to go down with the ship. Yeah, oh, I'm so sorry. The land turned out to be the deathplace 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 fuck alone. Portman landed with a large group of heavily armed soldiers, along with some prisoners for labor and a few trackers from local tribes that 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 asterisk in history. The survivors. We befriended the survivors of us. Here's another quote from that wonderful article 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, sick and rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents. They'd 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 fuck 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, 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 a speech with these words. Their association with outsiders has brought them nothing but harm, and it is a matter of great regret to meet that such a pleasant race are so rapidly becoming extinct. We could better spare many another. So, he came around and was like, oh this is really fucked up.

We really wiped these people out, this is bad. That's really deciding at the very last day of the school year. Maybe time to fuck up, guys. Yeah, it's like studying for that trigonometry exam the morning before. Oh, you know what? Now I just see the error of my ways.

No, I see the mistakes I made. Jesus. But it is interesting that even a guy like Portman, whose whole thing seems to have been fucking 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 alone.

Yeah, no other British visits were launched to North Sentinel Island during the Empire, so that's good. The Empire learned a lesson from this. 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 may have fucked this up. I'll just go back to, it also had to be because they did the economic projections and they were just not worth it. Sometime during this time, late 1800s, is when it switches over from being the East India Company to the British Raj. So at that point, profit is less of a concern,

not a non-factor. There may have been some genuine humanitarian of the people who came in after the first couple of waves and were like, oh boy, they really fucked this up. Well, at least we cannot fuck this island up. 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 likely that some of why they were left alone was legitimate humanitarian impulse from people in the Empire who were like, oh, this is fucked up. But if they had gold or diamonds there, they would have gotten over the humanitarian. Oh, if there were diamonds on that island,

they would have gotten over the humanitarian issues. Importment, 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 finding diamonds. Like by saying it just got decent soil, but there's no gold or whatever. That's probably part of why they didn't fuck with it more.

Oh boy. Yeah, you know. Unintended consequences. 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 gut. No natives were sighted. Cool. It'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 fucking with people who did not want to be fucked 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 buck them. I just state that because we're going to get back to John Chow at some point. I want to note that the British Empire eventually learned the lesson.

Famously. Not good at learning lessons. They liked learning. The 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 a 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 period, and since the plaque contained writing and the Sentinelese don't know what writing is. Hard to imagine. We just wanted to know they were part of India.

Yeah. We 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 a North Sentinel island.

They came with armed policemen and scientists in tow. Their stated goal was to, quote, win the native's 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. Open fire with arrows. Yeah. Now, next, several police officers in padded armor went ashore 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. Amazing. Yeah. 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 garbage. Yeah. They're always garbage that will kill your family. Well, and the only reason they took the coconut, there's coconuts don't grow on North Sentinelisle, but they wash up there. So they know what coconuts are. They know what a coconut is.

And they only took the pots and pans because iron has been washing up on the shore for a long time. Yeah. They've been making it in the arrowheads. Yeah. So they're making these gifts into more arrows to shoot at any other fucking people who come to their islands.

It just feels like some kind of justice, right? Yeah. It's nice. Yeah. That would be one of the only thing we could give them they can want. Here's more arrows to shoot at people with if they come on board.

Oh, I mean, it does feel like a little bit like just, just give them a couple of guns. Give them some, give them a rifle and a diagram. Yeah. This will be faster. I'll figure it out. Yeah. In 1975, King Bowdoin of Belgium, grandson of our

old buddy, Leopold II. Yeah. grandson of Leopold. Oh boy. Oh boy. Bowdoin of Belgium. Went on a cruise of the Andaman 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. Yes. Pretty gross. Yeah.

Yeah. Cool to see that runs in the family. Cool to see that runs in the family. Yeah. 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. Relieved to see land in the morning, the crew's 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 in to loot the boat, and according to the Telegraph, quote, many Sentinelese were killed in battles with these looters. Jesus. Can I ask a question going back a little bit? Yeah.

How did the Andaman Islands weather World War II? I think it was pretty much fine. I guess it's just out of the way enough. I don't think anything really happened there in World War II. Sure. I certainly think the Sentinelese didn't notice. They probably saw some fucking planes flying around

like, what the shit? 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. Yeah.

Fuck that thing. Yeah. Fuck that thing. Look at that. No thank you. Yeah. Yeah. 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 with 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, Yeah. It's a give and take. Patience. It's careful, and these guys clearly care about

trying to make contact in the bet. Like this is almost like a Star Trek sort of thing. You've got very decent advanced scientists who care truly trying to do this in the best way of seeing, is there an ethical way to make contact with people like this? So they're trying to figure that out, and it seems

to be a pretty laudable effort. They went through this for like a decade or so, like more than ten 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 they 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 it was seen as like a good sign. They could have killed everybody there, but they

let us get back on our boat. 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. Four 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 anthropologists, 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 to gesture at the explorers, seemingly trying to indicate no one had 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 waters edge. On the mesh baskets and the iron tipped wooden

adzes 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 it looks 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 about that?

I mean, it was interesting. What's your impression of these people, just by looking at them there? Because that's the only look anybody really gets of them. Yeah, they just seem pretty... I mean, they're, it's like wary, right? They're like, it's very clear.

They're just like, 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. Yeah, she pulls him back to the shore. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it really is. It's just like how, and you know, it's

neither side knows what the fuck to expect. Exactly, exactly. But it's also, it's so, one of the things that's really cool to me is like, they all look pretty healthy. And I'm going to guess those are the younger people that try to be the meaning thing. But like, they seem to be doing all right.

They don't seem to be malnourished people. Also at this point, you're like, they've lived through a couple plagues, essentially, where their ancestors have lived through a couple plagues. And so there is also the thing of like, you know, 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. You know, both from their fights with the salvagers and from the, and their numbers are probably lower. Yeah, of course. 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. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

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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 trip. Every trip on a decade long research project. Exactly. It's kind of a big thing. So first contact was officially made by the director for tribal welfare for the Andaman Islands. And he observed a number of things

because he came back after the video was taken and got actually closer to them and was able to actually get out 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, I hate to try to generalize about a whole tribe from this. One of the things this says to me, there's a lot of speculation of like, what if it's like one asshole man in charge, like forcing everyone to do his bidding and like genetically mutilating the women and stuff. Well, the fact that at least in one observation,

a man was observed being told not to do something by a woman. And that's not a bad sign. It's a sign that this may be one of the more egalitarian kinds of hunter-gatherer tribes. There's not uncommon among those sorts of people. So, I think that's interesting. It was the closest anyone had gotten to a Sentinelese

without dying, possibly in all of history. Anyone from outside the Andamans, 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 Pandit got away, and it was fine. Now, in an interview in 2008 with the author of that American scholar article, Pandit recalled

that they 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 a three-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. The air 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 two-wasted to really notice. When they landed on shore, the Sentinelese murdered them and buried them in sand.

Like they do. Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. And all the time, since the establishment of the exclusion zone, the only contact the Sentinelese 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 fishermen's murder.

The second came in 2008 after a horrible tsunami hit the Andaman Islands. The Indian government sent a chopper in to look for survivors and predictably, the Sentinelese shot at it with arrows. Yeah. Yeah. Now, at every single stage of the history you've talked about in these podcasts, centuries worth of time,

the Sentinelese people have been very, very, very, very, very crystal goddamn 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've 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 55,000 to 65,000 years. So this is an unbroken chain of people from roughly five times as long as human civilization has existed.

Right. 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 island's ecology and the warm climate, it's possible that the only substantial

innovations they've needed to make in that time involved 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. Two lessons. Two important lessons.

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 Chow's Mission Agency Wants You to Know. The agency that sent him, All Nations, has a stated mission to, quote, Make disciples and train leaders to ignite church planting movements among the neglected peoples of the earth. Oh.

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? Seems like that would be fair. Yeah, it seems like you could charge some of these people in a court of law. What the fuck? Yeah. 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. Sheans. Oh, God.

Yeah, I'm not a religious man. Yeah. My cousin and godmother is a pastor and I respect her greatly. I have no problem with belief. I have a problem with this. Yeah. I will just say it's like this has the, like, it's the practical problem with belief as opposed to the

theoretical. I guess I have no problem with the theoretical problem or the theoretical issue of, you know, religious belief. But, like, what is the actual good that he honestly thinks? Because 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, okay, if you're a Christian, I'm going to try to

look at this from, like, the perspective of a person who believes in a higher power and believes that higher power communicates with the world. One of the first things that happened, he tried to get onto the island a couple of times and the day before he was killed, he failed to get onto 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. Were I a Christian, that would be my message from God to leave. Oh. Like, arrow through the Bible. Oh, maybe they don't need this. Oh, wow. Maybe I'm doing the wrong thing here. I guess I would argue that's how you double doubt on your

belief that this is where Satan lives. And that's clearly what he took out of you. Yeah. But, yeah, okay. I would take that as a message. Yeah, but like the basic level of this stuff, right? It's like, okay, 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 doesn't love these people, but he just needs me to talk to him. Yeah, exactly. You're the instrument of God. But why are you the instrument of God? Like, you were just born into presumably America, I'm going to say, by accident. Yeah.

Like, why are you a 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 man is to get into. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Please don't try again. Check this shot out. Now watch this drive. We're very good with these.

Yeah. We really know how to shoot arrows. I mean, also you're giving him probably one of the first like 90 degree targets he's seen in a while. He nails it. Yeah. Now, Ho 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. Sure. Without help. Yeah.

And again, I have a lot of respect for EMTs, but the EMTB license does not include quarantining yourself. Well, and he's not qualified to do this. Even if you know the theory, right? Yeah. It's not like he has a fucking clean room. No. That he went through.

He still quarantined himself presumably with the shit that is available to a 21st 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 a boat with a local Indian sailor and sailed there. And I am going to assume none of them went through quarantine.

Yeah. Yeah. Unless you had a goddamn like bubble somewhere. Yeah. That took you from your clean room to the Sentinel Island. Nah. Nah. Nah, bro.

Nah, bro. Now, a few days before I 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 Chow was trying to do. Stetzer's column was titled, slain missionary John Chow prepared much more than we thought, but are 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 for 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 Goodhart in 2000, nearly 20 years before Chow's own journey. And if he read that fantastic article, he knows not just most of the history that I've talked about outside of Portman's pornographic pictures, I'm going to 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 a good Christian, whatever, like surely you have to have that knowledge of how innocent are you supposed to be? Exactly. So 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 Andamanese 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, the Jarawa responded to the Indian government's peaceful overtures, also conducted by Pandit. Eventually they gave 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 Andamans to see the Jarawa, because now this uncontacted tribe in the late 90s is working up. Suddenly it's a tourist attraction. 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 people's 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 a half Andamanese prostitute and her pimp was a con man. But that goes to show you there were probably some people who managed to actually probably some

trafficking and stuff. Hard to imagine it not happening. Anyway, as you might guess, the Jarawa's 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 Gethyn 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 the tour guides are telling the Jarawa, because you're on the other side of the table for me. Oh, sure, sure.

It might be hard to work out. All right, where's the food? Okay. 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. Share it amongst yourselves. Turn around. Share it with everyone. Share your name.

So that's what contact has meant for the Jarawa. It's 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 a seven week travel ban on tourist use of the highway that 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 Jarawa tribe in two major waves and that they are down to just a few

hundred 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 Bo were once one of the great Andamanese, a group of ten tribes who numbered 5,000 in 1858 when the

British first welcomed them into the empire. Today, 52 total great Andamanese tribes people remain. The last member of the Bo tribe, who were believed to have lived in the Andaman 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 four or five hundred 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, about what they would say if they could speak to the entire world. Leave us the fuck alone.

I hope that's fair. I mean, the thing with missionaries too, it's just like, oh, we don't need to keep harboring on this, but it's like the absolute wrong message will be received and you're like, yeah, we have to save these people. Yeah. No, they're fine.

And even if they're not, they've made their choice. And it's shoot anyone who comes close. Oh, good for them, I guess. Treat them like you do the yard of a person who lives in rural Oklahoma and stay the fuck away because they'll murder you if you work 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'd shoot me. Or if I broke into their land or whatever. Like, we get it. Yeah. Treat the Sentinelese like a random homeowner in

Texas. Yeah. Just exercising their second amendment rights. So. Oh, fuck. Yeah. As usual with the behind the bastards recording, my main reaction is fuck.

Fuck. 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 like question the very underpinning of their beliefs.

Yeah. That you're like, the fuck are you going to do? Oh, I don't, I don't know what we can 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 them more iron.

Maybe send them nice arrows. Yeah. We 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 is. Right.

Like a good ass arrow. Couple of compound bows. Why not? I was 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. Yeah.

If you have a disease standpoint, you can make a drone clean pretty easily. Yeah. Whatever, they might destroy the drone somehow. Yeah. Or like if it 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. Or less ethical. Yeah. We're less ethical.

Yeah. Just leave them alone. Just leave them the fuck alone. And if you have to study them, do it with like, you know, 40, 64 X lens from a plane. Yeah. 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. Yeah. I get the desire to want to know what's it like on that island. Yeah. 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. And you're not saving anyone. You're not saving anyone.

Yeah. Oh, Christ's sake. Yeah. So. Woo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Pretty good. Pretty good episode. I mean, the Guardian video is so disgusting. We were like, of course. Yeah. This is like what it's like when civilization, you know, 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. Yeah. Look at Amazon. Yeah. But like, it is several veneers of propriety removed from like, 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 basis 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 them, you'd hope most of them would be horrified. We'd be like, oh, I didn't think it was going to be like this. So we just get to like walk through a village and see how they lived or something.

I doubt it though. Maybe, I don't know, maybe. When you see 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, yeah, yeah. You're not throwing bread on the stage. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew, you want to plug some pluggables. Yeah.

I mean, just 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 sketch fest in January of 2019, assuming we, in any way you like to define it, are still around then. Yeah.

You never know. Yeah. You know, dissolution of the United States, anything could happen. Anything could happen. So listen to Andrew's podcast. Listen to more of my podcast. If you're listening to this from the Andaman Islands.

What's up? Reach out to us on Twitter. Yeah. I'm at I write okay. If enough of you do something, I can probably con my bosses of just sending me out there for a live show. Which would be sick as hell. Gotta have to.

Yeah. Live show. If you're on North Sentinel Island and have Twitter somehow. Yep. Well, they are on Twitter. Of course. They're on Twitter, of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. I'm Robert. This has been Behind the Bastards. You can find us online at BehindTheBastards.com. Find us on social media at At Bastards 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 Bastards. T-public. Check us out.

We get some of the money from stuff like that, which I will use to buy narcotics. I love about 40% of you. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

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