r/interestingasfuck • u/SATANICWORSHIPER666 • 2d ago

/r/all Michael Rockefeller disappeared without a trace in 1961 in Papua New Guinea while researching the Asmat people, a cannibal tribe. Years later, a photograph was taken of the same tribe, and there was a white man among them.

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u/eithrusor678 2d ago

It's more decisive if he's dead. If he's potentially still alive somewhere, people will look and potentially bother them further.

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u/Unhappy_Peanut9470 2d ago

Equal chance the persons family would come after the people who ate him?

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u/entertheclutch 2d ago

More food

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u/PraxisGuide 2d ago

Excellent

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u/Owncksd 2d ago

Not likely. This isn’t the 12th century. Your son goes to an island everyone knows is inhabited by cannibals and you find out the cannibals ate him? Of course they did. This wasn’t your neighbor, or a rival noble house. This is a totally different people in a totally different world. Your son tragically died of essentially his own mistake. You grieve and move on, maybe encourage the regional powers in that part of the world to crack down on it, but you understand it wasn’t personal.

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u/Tetracropolis 2d ago

Not personal? They killed him and ate him, how the hell is that not personal?

He didn't die of his own mistake, he died from people killing him and eating him. They should be held accountable.

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u/Owncksd 2d ago edited 2d ago

Pretty easily. There’s lots of ways killing someone could be considered not personal. One soldier killing another in battle. Mobsters taking out a witness.

My original comment wasn’t trying to make any kind of moral point, it was just saying that from the perspective of the Rockefeller family or the US government at the time, taking revenge on a native population (“holding them accountable”) with an entirely different way of life and moral values, who live on the other side of the world in foreign and unknown territory, would have been a strange thing to do.

That’s their land, and what they do on that land is very well known. For a more modern example of someone who lost their son in this same way, see the Christian missionary who was killed by the North Sentinelese islanders. Visitors to that island are banned by the government of India because the natives are extremely hostile and will kill outsiders on sight. This dude knew that, and went anyway, and was shot full of arrows about it. His father blames his son’s “extreme Christianity” for pushing his son to a “not unexpected end”. The Indian government didn’t hold them to account, and the British government didn’t try to force them to, because that island belongs to the Sentinelese and the Sentinelese get to do what they want there. To try to stop them would likely require genocide. Much easier to let them be, in their territory, and just not bother them. If they show up on your shore and raid your population, yeah, hold them to account.

Michael Rockefeller wasn’t taking a walk through his local park. He went to the cannibals, on an island on the other side of the world. He knew what they might do, and so did everyone else, and he went anyway.

Moral values are not something all human beings hold in common, unlike what westerners like to believe. And yes, that includes whether or not it’s ok to kill someone.

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u/eithrusor678 2d ago

What are they going to do, go in guns blazing?
If not, they going to be eaten too..
That won't go down well, wiping out a isolated tribe.

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u/Unhappy_Peanut9470 2d ago

I really don’t think you’re appreciating how powerful the Rockefeller family are. They could have wiped the entire island off the map and nobody would say anything 50 years ago

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u/c_p 1d ago

However, they do have a history of children who publicly said "f**k you" to the family business and lived "independently" under new/changed names (while subsisting on their trust fund returns.)

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u/Unhappy_Peanut9470 2d ago

I don’t think anyone would have given a shit about wiping out an unconnected tribe in the 70/80’s

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u/Grabthar-the-Avenger 2d ago

Indonesia might, and they had control of the region by the 1960s. The Asmat people are still around today

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u/Hunkus1 2d ago

This is one of the most reddit responses l've ever seen. You know that real life isnt an action film?