Geographical bad-luck

I came across probably one of the most depressing stories I've read in a long while today.

With everything going on at the moment you would have thought it would be about the latest Brexit insult to our intelligence, Russian cyber-warfare or perhaps The Trump crime gang deciding that killing endangered animals for fun is cool again, nope, moronic as these certainly are, it's not them. It was a story tucked away on the BBC site about an indigenous tribe of people in Sumatra who after resisting for decades have finally been forced to adopt Islam. This harmless and perfectly happy group of around 60 families were bullied and eventually bussed en-mass to a nearby town to get their "appropriate" Islamic clothing and prayer mats. One of the spokesmen for the theocratic thugs that facilitated this "conversion" was quoted as saying,

"For now we are focusing on the children. It's easier to convert them - their mind isn't filled with other things. With the older ones it's harder,"

Of course, these people had their own animistic beliefs, appropriately evolved for the environment they live in, no more incredible or less likely than the ones they're being replaced with. Now, their Abrahamic overlords have imposed an alien belief system imported from a different place and time, a medieval mash-up of tribal, misogynistic nonsense that, like every religiously oppressed native community before them will fuck them up for generations and until all knowledge of their past tradition is erased from the cultural consciousness. This kind of involuntary assimilation is, I believe, a form of intellectual slavery, as immoral in many ways as the North-Atlantic slave trade. No longer will the men of the tribe be able to hunt the wild pigs that frequent their local habitat and no longer will the girls of the tribe be able to wear appropriate cloths without shame, physical prohibitions to go alongside the intellectual ones.

Of course, it isn't just Muslims that persist in this keenness to indoctrinate, dominate and bully, Christians missionaries have been doing exactly the same for centuries. We only need look to populations of native peoples in places like North-America, Africa and South-America (the only "growth" areas for Christianity) to see how that pans-out. Even here today, in our own UK school system this desire to "indoctrinate" children is as strong as ever. Fortunately in the "West", this primitive instinct for conformity has been watered down by years of secular philosophy and the limiting of religious excesses through anti-discrimination and equality law, but, we need to stay on our toes and remind ourselves, through case-studies and examples like this, of how people with these philosophies behave when they're in-charge.