Page 94 - The Perpetrations of Captain Kaga

Recounting the Binary Neeks

“But why did you call me? Why didn’t you notify Galactic
Headquarters?”
“For a very good reason: do you remember Colonel Snempfar?”
The name took Kaga back many years, to his and Lugo’s student
days at the PKU Academy on Radnelac III. Their instructor in
Elementary Sociogenics was a distinguished looking Terran who had
joined the PKU in his middle years, during the manpower shortage
caused by the Exploration Explosion. As a result, his understanding
of and commitment to PKU goals and philosophy were not perfect.
But his good nature and forgiving disposition endeared him to all the
students, particularly the humanoids among them. Although he had
no practical experience administering PKU field missions, he was an
excellent armchair anthropologist and historian.
Kaga could still remember Snempfar’s last lecture of the course.
After congratulating the students on their accomplishments in
learning, he turned to one of his pet topics, cultural diffusion. “The
history of planet Earth,” he had said, “is blemished not merely by war
and famine, greed and intolerance, politics and superstition. No:
among the few unheralded sins of past civilization, one that looms
the largest— in my eyes, at least—is the irrational fear and distrust of
extra-cultural information. Untold oppression and misery have
resulted from man’s inability to share—either as donor or recipient—
his possessions, be they physical or intellectual, across cultural
boundaries.”
“In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christian missionaries
from the high-technology nations spread throughout the nonliterate
areas of Earth trying, by force and persuasion, to convert local
populations to their type of religious belief and practice. With what
success? we should ask, since this was the greatest proselytizing
attempt ever made before our own time. Many nominal Christians
sprang into existence, and by this ‘body count’ did the missionaries
measure their success. But what of the content of this religion, its
theology? In almost every case it was either discarded or subtly but
effectively changed back to coincide with a group’s original animist
beliefs. Again, in almost every case, the need for a Christian-type
theology did not exist, and for better or worse, diffusion did not truly
occur.”

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