As to the OP:
Personally, I think the Prime Directive is rubbish, and am all for interfering in an overt way if there’s a serious issue. So human sacrifice, rape gangs, cannibalism, etc are all grounds for direct interference. IMO.
They could certainly be described as a protectorate of India. For example if Myanmar was to try and start kidnapping people from the island to make them work on fishing boats then the Indian government would be in their rights to intervene to prevent that. But officially Sentinel Island is regarded as part of India, the island is a part of of the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Just because they don’t patrol there doesn’t mean its not part of India. As such certainly Indian law does apply to Sentinel Island, under International law they could prosecute Sentinelese for murder, or rape or infanticide and I don’t believe any countries would protest, although the trial would certainly get media attention.
The situation is rather similar to Pitcairn island, although the UK had no control over it for hundreds of years they claimed it anyway and as is seen in the 2004 sexual assault trials there, they have asserted their legal authority over the island.
As a few others have pointed out, we know the power structure on the island wants to reject all outside contact, but we have no idea what the individuals want. For all we know, the island is full of individuals who would love nothing more than to get out and join the rest of the world, but the warrior caste wants to preserve their position. I’m not swayed by the “they don’t want us, so leave them alone” argument because we only know what the people in power want, not necessarily the rest of the population. Unfortunately, forcing a confrontation could have terrible consequences. If we can actually send drones to observe them, learn their language, and maybe find a way to give them information without forcing a confrontation, that seems like the least bad option to me.
So the Holocaust in and of itself would have been insufficient reason to go to war with Germany?
At least for the Indian government the case should be clear. If you look to the preamble to the Indian constitution:
The preamble states the resolve to secure certain rights to *all *of India’s citizens. If the Indian government considers the Sentinelese to be Indian citizens (which they certainly do), they have to make sure that they get the benefit of these rights as well.
Beyond that I believe that universal human rights exist. There is a point where violations of these rights become everyone’s business. madsircool’s example should make that qute clear.
ok fair enough but how do you suggest they do that? Put a police / military outpost on the island? Peaceful contact has so far been rebuffed at least by the warrior caste that seems to control the island and no one from outside the island can speak their language. What next?
Well, going by the French Indochina model, one starts by sending in missionaries first. Then you send in military to protect the missionaries. And you’ll have to start out by sending in your own supplies and foodstuff. And alcohol for the troops to drink. In time, maybe after some minor skirmishes and shows of force by both sides, a sort of armistice takes place. And eventually a couple off-duty soldiers meet some of the indigenous females. It’s a coin toss as to whether the soldiers just rape the women or get them drunk on alcohol before having sex with them. And some of the indigenous people will get upset about that. Or upset about the “souvenirs” those foreigners have been stealing/collecting (some anthropologists, sociologists, and linguistics types will be part of the expedition by now) . And some indigenous cranky butts are still upset about the time the soldiers first saw their Most Holiest of Holy Altars to The Great Hairy Thunderer and thought it was a commode and used it accordingly.
And I don’t feel like describing the rest of that model other than to say it’s unlikely to go very well.
I don’t see much harm in observing them by drones or through very long lenses.
Ever? Let us say Hitler had not invaded other countries and proceeded to solve the ‘Jewish question’ by murdering all German Jews in the gas ovens. Would that have been Germany’s business and nothing to do with the rest of the world?
That is a valid question. I wish there were an easy answer that, but I do not have one. What it comes down to is that you have to reconcile two conflicting goals: You want to preserve the culture of the Sentinelese, and at the same time you want to make sure that no person on these islands is suffering from grave violations of their human rights. Unfortunately in order to make sure of the latter you would invariably have to compromise the former.
My solution - and it is not a perfect one - is to treat the islands like the private home of a citizen. That means: Unless you do have a clear indication that something is amiss within its walls you do not go inside just to check.
If you study anything about islands and population control it’s actually pretty far from silly. As noted, infanticide occurred the world over in primitive groups, and even societies held up as civilized, like Ancient Rome, practiced it.
If you don’t have chemical birth control and you don’t have abortions there’s not much left for reliable population control, is there? Or maybe they’re so inbred their fertility is really, really low but given past human history it’s actually more likely to be infanticide than low fertility.
I’d say their practice of shooting at outsiders would be a strong indication of “leave me alone”. In fact, they have been known to kill people who by misadventure find themselves at their island.
I’m not too sure of this “warrior caste” thing being bandied about. We have no clue about their social structure. Having a “caste” implies a certain level of specialization in society that may or may not exist - it may be more of a “militia” situation were all able-bodied men are called to repel “invaders”. We just don’t know.
According to wikipedia what has been observed so far indicates a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with no agriculture and a very low population - it is highly unlikely there is a “warrior caste” supported by the rest of the islanders.
While I find that position repellent I think that, especially in the time frame it occurred, that would have been the international response. Even today, there seems to be an unwritten rule that what a nation does internally to its own people does not warrant intervention, just a lot of hand-wringing, and it’s only when it looks like things will spill over the border than anyone else gives a damn.
Look at North Korea - there are atrocities every bit as horrific as what went on in WWII but no one has proposed invading them for the past half century. Why? Because the crap stays inside the North Korean border.
Repugnant as North Korea’s policies may be in many areas, I disagree with the “every bit as horrific as what went on in WWII”. That said, I would like to point out that military intervention is not the only way the global community can interfere with the affairs of one country. Boycotts and trade sanctions can put significant pressure on a country. You may say that the sanctions imposed on North Korea are due to the threat it poses to its neighbors. But the same has been done to the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and that was not due to anything “spilling over the border”.
The fact that we do not always send an army when we find someone’s human rights being violated may simply be due to the realization that a war may not be very effective in improving the situation.
I’m not sure that’s entirely true. In North Korea’s case, a large part of the reason we don’t intervene is concerns about the artillery pointed at Seoul and the fact that we’re not entirely sure what China would do. If those things didn’t exist, there’d probably be a lot of people concerned about “sticking our nose where it doesn’t belong”, but people would probably be a lot more adamant about at ending the human rights violations.
At the moment, it’s a “… at what cost?” situation. I used to be really pro-rescue North Korea until some people told me about the complexities of the situation. It’s not an almost zero cost invasion the way trying to invade a much less technologically advanced and less politically guaranteed group of people is.
I think people are using “warrior caste” as a quick, hypothetical example of a social structure where the members who are resisting outside contact do not necessarily represent the wishes or best interests of the rest of the group. Not making the claim that it’s actually what’s going on, necessarily.
Suppose it was decided that intervention was necessary, and that the intervening parties had the legal right to intervene.
How would it be done? This is likely about more than just cultural intervention. It’s known that they would attack anyone coming onto the island. Do we kill them if they do? It seems like any kind of forcible intervention would involve violence which would very likely lead to death or at least injury.
How should they be approached? How many are we willing to kill? How much of the population can be ethically killed if, for example, they have a rape culture? Maybe kill the men since they’re all rapists? What if the women also fight us, not understanding that we’re trying to help?
How big is the population? Would intervention require some kind of ongoing military occupation, at least for a period of time?
You do all realize that we are talking about “The White Man’s Burden” here, right?
Every atrocity listed as a potential justification for interferences comes to mind because it happens elsewhere, often in “civilized” countries, or did until relatively recently. Maybe not cannibalism, I’d have to look that up.
If the Sentinelese are being abused by a small group within their country, that is shameful and I think we should help them, right after we wipe out child abuse, sexual assault, childhood diseases, and, what the hell, war in our own countries and those of our political and economic allies. Then we can help out the poor savages of Sentinel.
(And we don’t know that they don’t have some form of chemical birth control, such as abortifacients, or a “some highly rigid system of taboos about sex”, such as engaging in procreative sex rarely and using other methods for pleasure.)
True, we don’t know that, but based on our knowledge of thousands of other human cultures, societies, tribes, nations, and other groupings it is most likely they don’t have chemical birth control, and sex taboos are far from 100% reliable. Based on what the rest of the world has done through history I’d say infanticide is probably more likely than a lot of other explanations, even as horrifying as we find that.
Of course, I would be happy to be wrong on that one (as long as the alternative isn’t even worse).
In other words, you consider every one who contemplates interfering with the affairs of the Sentinelese a white supremacist? I disagree. If you believe in the existence of universal human rights (I do - do you?), then what difference does ethnicity make? Or geography?
The argument that we should only try to do something about human rights violations on Sentinel Island (if there were any) or any other non-“white” place in the world *after *we have eradicated all such violations at home does not make sense to me. That sounds like we should not try to talk Eritreans out of the practise of genital mutilation of little girls as long as we have not achieved gender equality in our own country.
Right – it’s quite unlikely that they’re a monolithic society. It’s quite possible that some individuals would want help, were it available, or want to leave the society, were it possible. If we find out that this is so, in my view the moral thing to do is to make those possibilities available, if it can be done in an ethical fashion. Something like a clear message spread somehow that “if you want to leave, come to this beach at this time and you will be picked up” rather than social workers going into the society.
If we thought Eritreans might be practicing FGM, on a scale far smaller than that known to be going on in our own countries, it would be kind of weird to make their possible habits a priority for our action.
The Sentinelese are already in diplomatic and trade isolation, so intervention by force is all there is. To address a human rights crisis that is both tiny and imaginary.
If they have plants or animals, they most likely do have abortifacients. I doubt there has been any environment in this world with no toxic plant or animal. These could be manipulated to medical effect, as they have been elsewhere.
Furthermore, sex taboos - or birth control - do not need to be 100% effective to have the desire effect, limiting the population to a sustainable level.
As MrDibble indicated above, we have more evidence for infertility than infanticide in this case.
And - though I really do not want to highjack this thread - where does that knowledge of thousands of other human cultures come from? Other humans with strong cultural bias of their own. Watch movies with captions on and note when the captions state “[foreign language spoken]” or “[native language spoken]” *. When Europeans speak, it’s “foreign”; when non-European, especially sub-Saharan Africans and NAI, it “native” or “tribal”. With that kind of bias drawing no attention, I cannot believe that the assumptions and interpretations of anthropologists from the same culture, especially earlier ones from a more openly racist time, are without bias.
- I am, obviously, speaking from a U.S perspective.
That is not a valid comparison on two points. To “talk out of” is not the same as forcing one’s presence and values on another culture, and, though unpleasant and unfair, 79% of pay and the housework is not quite on par with genital mutilation, now is it?
As for your first question, no, I am certain many good and egalitarian people would contemplate interference, and that that cultural supremacists of all flavors would do so.