The ONLY country with any, real or imaginary ‘right’, to intervene or force contact, would be India, to my mind. (Any other country interfering would create a huge international incident, I think!)
You’re talking about a country where they have been totally unable to stop child marriage, organ stealing, mutilation of children for begging purposes, the selling of children into slavery, bondage or worse, the mutilation and murder of brides who don’t measure up, village justices sentencing a family’s daughters to be raped as punishment for the actions of their brother! And infanticide! Such stories appear daily in Indian newspapers. And while the average Indian is perhaps outraged, they have yet to force change.
You really believe this country is going to intervene because of human rights abuses? I find that highly unlikely.
And just because infanticide has occurred at other times, in other places, does not justify the conclusion being jumped to here, about it’s application at this time, on this island. But it certainly reveals exactly why forced intervention on the pretext of possible human rights violations cannot be trusted to the likes of people willing to leap to such ridiculous conclusions based on absolutely zero evidence.
The OP used the word “if” twice and “would” four times. They clearly aren’t saying infanticide is happening and we must stop it. They’re asking, IF something bad, of which one example was infanticide, WOULD that be reason to intervene.
Did you miss where several people asserted that infanticide is likely because the population is stable? And, oh, because it’s happened at other times. In other places.
I recognize the hypothetical. I also recognise people jumping to unbiased conclusions on zero evidence.
Persons willing to make such leaps should never be trusted to decide if contact should be ‘forced’ upon any group.
I suggest the unfortunate term is used to reference a kind of unshakeable sense of cultural supremacy that was common to British colonialists. It suggests the natives are infantile or more akin to animals than “normal” people.
Absolutely not, and I never said that it was. However it was you, who asserted that we should not help the Sentinelese even if they were suffering from violations of their human rights unless we first “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.” I took that to mean that you do not want us to interfere with the “poor savages” as long as we have problems of our own. Why do you think so? Assuming there *was * a problem on Sentinel Island and assuming we *could *help (I happen to doubt it, but we are dealing with the hypothetical here), why wouldn’t we?
Not sure I get that one. Is it the good and egalitarian people, who would contemplate interference or the cultural supremacists or both?
See - I am aware that many cultures - especially us Europeans - have a history of looking down upon other cultures as “inferior” and using that as a justification for all kinds of intrusion. I have no wish to in any way support such a mindset. I just believe that to be concerned about the human rights situation of people in other parts of the world you do not have to be a supremacist of any kind. In fact I feel that not wanting to be supremacist sometimes is an all too convenient explanation for why you keep looking the other way.
Everytime someone mentions “white man’s burden” my response is to bring up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was created well after the end of colonisation and has been signed by plenty of “not white” countries including Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Liberia and this was in 1948. That document is one that many cultures agree on, it can’t be claimed to be imperialist or advocating white supremacy.
Both according to the UDHR and the laws of India we would be justified in intervening to enforce international law and Indian law on Sentinel Island However I realise it’s not that simple or clear cut since enforcing laws would involve deaths due to resistance and deaths due to introduced diseases that they have no resistance to.
Personally I do think we should study without being observed if we can and that their society is worth preserving, we should give them as much benefit of the doubt as we can.
I think the first step would be to treat these guys like we treat almost any foreign nation - send a delegation and establish an embassy. In this case, it might be two anthropologists and a tent with a phone. But basically we approach them and say “Hi, the rest of the world exists. We’d like your permission to stay here and learn about you, and you may ask us questions about the rest of the world. You agree that we have diplomatic immunity, and we agree that we have no power to compel you to do things.”
This approach works for foreign nations, even many that we disagree with, and seems like the best way to let the natives have control over their lives. They are not denied information about the outside world, but are also not forced to change.
Look at embassies around the world, and you’ll generally see walls, gates and armed guards. Securing an embassy is standard operating procedure.
My suggestion that it could be two anthropologists and a phone wasn’t to say that security would not be a consideration, just that the embassy need not be of the scale that we’d expect from interactions of large nations. It would be serving different functions than the US embassy in the UK, but would still be an embassy for the basic purposes.
As for language, we’re not going to learn that except through contact with them. I’ll leave it to the experts to design the details of the best first-contact scenario, but a policy of no contact ever seems unfair to them. People on an island will never develop modern technology and medicine, no matter how long you give them to do it. They don’t have the resources and there’s lots of reason to suggest that trade (both of ideas and goods) was a major component of the technology we do have.
As the thread wanders (careens) into the absurd, here’s another contribution.
[absurd] Suppose they ARE sacrificing children to their moon god. “Oh my gosh, that’s terrible!!!”
OUR god and the human rights declaration say they must be stopped. As pointed out previously, trade sanctions and diplomatic isolation ain’t gonna work. What about the possibility that they are worshiping the real god and he/she/it requires sacrifice? We, the great and good, have been doing it wrong all along and will rot in hell for denying the sacrifice. [/absurd]
Well it’s certainly possible that they are the last followers of the one true and ancient god. And it’s possible that their human sacrifices are indeed what has held off the global apocalypse. As a true agnostic, I feel that’s an important thing to take into consideration before we send in the vodka & porn toting robot.
How are they going to build an embassy building without the construction workers being slaughtered? And sailors hauling in the material, and the inevitable hookers for the ambassador, and …
How about some pre-fab modular units such as these?
Maybe boats would be a better “embassy building” for the first few meetings? Or even a series of visits from helicopter with ground-based structures waiting until some things can be ironed out first.
As for being slaughtered, this is the real world, not Avatar. Again, I’d leave it up to the experts to design the first contact scenario, because I would not want to see casualties if we can manage it, but I have no fundamental problem with a company of armed marines to establish security. Even with a language barrier, they’re going to figure out that they can’t fight us off and it’s not like we’re conquistadors who would shoot them for sport.
Let’s look at it from the other end, though. How would you like to have to tell them someday “It’s shame your mother died in childbirth and your father from an infection. We cure those all the time, but we didn’t want to disrupt your culture.”
