Should we forgive Laval and the many other missionaries who’ve since come and gone, and in fact continue largely unabated to this day, foisting their biblical sexual ethics on other cultures? After all, they’ve only been doing their evangelical duties."
This logic reminds me of the same logic as in Eichmann's Trial (the claim that he was just doing his duties/job/orders when he sent Jews to their death in concentration camps). Hannah Arendt called this The Banality of Evil. A kind of "thoughtlessness or incapacity to have independent critical thought." Especially when one looks at the quote above in light of the stories we are hearing of past and ongoing effects of Residential Schools incarceration of First Nations children and still-unresolved murders of hundreds of First Nations women throughout Canada. What is our responsibility as people who did not participate in such oppression and abuse then but are implicit in perpetuating these abuses by washing our hands from seeking true justice and insisting that these things are in the past, extinct, history, etc. There is more to this quote that "softens" the banality of such a logic. Perhaps the author is using this literary technique to incite strong emotions. In the description of the missionary priest Laval's decimation of an entire (French) Polynesian culture, it made me think of Col. Kurtz gone crazy in "Apocalypse Now." Of Cultures Destroyed by Western Sexual Exploitation and Violent Religious Prudery | Bering in Mind, Scientific American Blog Network
