
The Last Days of John Allen Chau - joegahona
https://www.outsideonline.com/2400030/john-allen-chau-life-death-north-sentinel
======
elliekelly
Reading the history of Westerners on the islands really broke my heart.
Particularly this paragraph:

> Perhaps no one fell so deeply under the islands’ spell as Maurice Vidal
> Portman, a minor English aristocrat and amateur anthropologist who was made
> Royal Navy officer in charge of the islands in 1879 when he was just 19. For
> two decades, Portman made ceaseless expeditions to find the various Andaman
> tribes, who he would kidnap and transport to Port Blair. Portman was an
> enthusiastic practitioner of “race science,” believing that intelligence
> could be gauged by measuring a subject’s cranium with calipers. Poor science
> cannot explain Portman’s additional recording of the size of islanders’
> penises, breasts, and testicles; his evaluation of their “lustfulness”
> (which he equated with willfulness); and his photographs of naked tribesmen
> in classical poses. But his ambivalence about whether his subjects lived or
> died is explained by the view, common in Europe at the time, that the beings
> before him were so distantly of his species, they were best categorized as
> fauna. “They sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the
> four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents,”
> Portman wrote of six Sentinelese he took to Port Blair. “This expedition was
> not a success. ... We cannot be said to have done anything more than
> increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.”

I cannot even begin to imagine how terrified those people must have been. To
be kidnapped and then poked and prodded by a bunch of instruments you've never
seen before by people you can't communicate with or understand. The way they
were treated was truly barbaric.

~~~
kijin
It almost sounds like an episode of alien abduction. Except the aliens were
white men in a ship, not Martians on a flying saucer. We have indeed fashioned
the villains in our fantasies after our own image.

~~~
pmarreck
Except that none of the
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_abduction_claimants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_abduction_claimants)
would claim that they were fantasizing their experience. But anyway.

------
dm319
I found reading this article gripping and it led to a lot of questions.

My first thought is how casual 'belief' or 'faith' in moderate Christians is
what led JAC down this route. When society believes that not knowing God is a
path to eternal damnation, then is it that surprising if someone with empathy
and ambition makes it their mission to fix?

Obviously there is also a bit of the 'messiah' complex going on there -
probably reinforced by other Christians and IG followers.

I was also thinking about how the dad felt, when he tried to talk his son out
of what he was doing, but couldn't argue against the religious beliefs he'd
previously taught him? At that point, if I were in his shoes, would I hold my
hands up and say my faith had all been a big mistake, it was convenient to
getting me where I am, but it doesn't really make sense. Or maybe I'd take the
tack of 'don't be so extreme - be more moderate', something that really wasn't
going to fly with JAC.

Also, as a father, I can't imagine raising a baby boy, a child, who becomes a
young adult and then watching him take this path. The article made me think
about how a father is a role-model to their children. His father went through
a difficult time with his career and JAC was witness to this. I lead a
stressful, busy life, I wonder what affect that will have on my kids outlook?

~~~
brohee
> bit of the 'messiah' complex

Why not calling it mental illness at this point...

~~~
dm319
You can have a bit of messiah or jesus complex without having mental illness,
and mental illness is a broad term for an entire field of medicine, so it's
not very specific. I don't think we can call it mental illness unless we are
trained psychiatrists and we'd assessed him.

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anm89
I think the effort to say "look, this guy wasn't evil, he was doing what he
thought was right" is totally off course.

Almost no one is intentionally evil. Most people somehow or another justify
whatever they are doing as right. I'd imagine most low level nazi party
members thought they were making a hard decision to do what was right.

He did what he thought was right and luckily he got killed as opposed to
surviving to make contact causing serious damage to the tribe.

He is the embodiment of evil to me, not because he wanted to be evil but
because he was too stupid or intellectually dishonest to realize that what he
thought was right was deeply damaging to other people. In this sense he puts
himself in the company of most horrendous people in history.

~~~
obituary_latte
Brutal. Can it really be classified as evil without intention to do harm,
though? It seems to me that true evil can only be if the actor knows and
intends harm. Classifying ignorance as evil seems disingenuous - ignorance can
be not only a symptom of laziness or some other self-imposed decision but also
a result of circumstances out of ones control. Being a victim of circumstance
does not IMO precipitate being evil.

~~~
elbrian
Would you consider attempting to convince an entire civilization to bend to
your (lord's) will, against their own (as expressed on several occasions,
spanning several decades), to be a harmful act?

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roca
Not a bad write-up but one thing that's conspicuously missing is anything
about Lynda, John's mother, who apparently was the most devout of the family.
Isn't _her_ influence in his life likely to be as or more important than his
father's? My guess is that the author had access to Patrick but not Lynda and
shaped the narrative accordingly; if true, that would be unfortunate.

------
dawhizkid
I feel like I have the opposite problem. I don’t actually have many strong
beliefs that guide my life, which leads to “drifting” and lack of
intentionality.

The most fulfilled people in life are probably wired more like JAC than
anything else. Like if he applied that level of belief to a startup as he did
to his faith I imagine he’d be wildly successful by now.

~~~
Ididntdothis
I also sometimes envy people who totally identify with something be it
religion, business or something else. It must be nice to have full conviction
following a path but obviously this can also go wrong.

------
pinguo
This article completely glosses over Chau's selfishness, he exposed the
Sentinelese to outside pathogens that they have no immunity to and could have
killed all of them, that might currently be killing them for all we know. He
possibly wiped out a stone age community of real people.

~~~
ch_123
The article makes multiple references to the fact that he could have infected
the islanders, I'm not sure what led you to this conclusion.

~~~
kijin
The article also mentions that he immunized himself against a dozen diseases
-- probably in addition to the vaccines that most Americans get in their
childhood -- and quarantined himself for a while, too. He was definitely aware
of the risk and tried to minimize it. Not sure whether that was enough,
though. If the North Sentinelese have been isolated since the end of the last
ice age, they could be vulnerable to something that outsiders don't even care
about, like our normal gut flora.

~~~
msds
Well, specifically it said he "attempted to immunize himself against 13
diseases", which isn't equivalent to actually doing that. Furthermore, I get
the sense that his isolation was primarily to avoid the authorities ("he
stayed not at the Lalaji but secretly—and illegally", use of the word
"safehouse"), and not due to biological concerns. If anything, that was a
second order benefit in his mind - "The benefit of that is that I was
essentially in quarantine"...

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xrd
Reading this makes me want to look at what constitutes fanaticism in my own
life. His life looks like a study in someone who fell into a true believer
mindset and it led to his death.

But, I'm haunted by the parallels of En-mei, who turned out to be no less
subject to the stress of finding a mate than those of us in the more modern
world. If there is a hidden message there that is trying to say that we are
all fanatics like JAC, well, it's an interesting thought.

~~~
dm319
I think the message is we all just want to get laid...

Joking aside, we might be fanatic about some things, but if we knew of an
incredibly violent group of programmers using notepad, I think I'd pass up
attempting to teach them vim.

~~~
vorpalhex
"Have you heard the good word of emacs?"

~~~
xrd
Coincidence that Stallman has all the letters of Satan? I doubt it!

------
1PlayerOne
What an astounding success! Job well done, mission accomplished, RIP.

What I don't understand is the dismay felt by readers for the loss of this
ignorant and closed mind man. Most men lives life of quiet desperation. There
is no meaning but that which we make and this (to me) foolish man live the
life that he wanted.

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rolltiide
Im glad someone took the time to write this

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pmarreck
Many dreamers die while following their dreams; this does not mean dreaming is
wrong.

~~~
loriverkutya
In this case the dream was making a bunch of people sick and kill them.

Hitler also had a dream. Sadly he was not killed fast enough.

So before you die following your dream, you should run a sanity check on it.

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aj7
I read the abstract, anyway.

