It is a given amongst those who think about such things that indigenous pepples should be allowed to be, well, indigenous, without outside influence making them less, well, indigenous. As if being indigenous itself carries with it a certain Edenesque virtue of being unsullied by the serpent of The European Male's protuberant Culture. You see, those poor indigenous pepples had their rights 'violated' when the Dutch East India company or the Britich West Indies corporation or the Portugese Investor's Club and Indian Killers association, or the Spanich Roiyal Explorers and Gold Fetishist's Sewing Circle dry-docked their creaking and mouldy ships onto the shores of the virgin territories untouched by the Gospel and the Greedy Hand of a Mercantile God-fearing group of nasty non-natives.
Those pepples were socially, culturally and physically RAPED by pepples with swords, muskets and ships. And, we are led to believe by those who think about such things, instead of whether the sequel to Hellboy the movie might be better than the first or whether Korean manga are up to the standard's set by Japanese versions of Disney classics, that the virginal territories (amongst which were places named 'Virginia' or in reference to the Holy Mother, supposedly a 'virgin' herself, by the invaders, tee-hee) were previously unsullied by strife, warfare, torture, deprivation, disease and slavery.

When the Chinese Maoist Communists got bored with depredating their own tiny country, they took a little vacation into a garden spot of the universe known as Tibet, where everybody was happy and free and nice and kind and dressed and fed well and worshipped their God in their own way in peace and serenity and just generally a non-threatening manner that shouldn't have bothered anyone. Nobody starved or was unhappy or went unclothed or lacked medical care or education or anything. Men and women and children and animals lived in harmony and sang and danced all day long in perfect glee, until...
the BIG BAD MAOIST Chinese came tromping into this paradise and turned it all to pucky. Those who think about such things, instead of what colour to change their follicles to this season or whether a maltese cross makes a better necklace charm than a crucifix, would have us believe that everything was cool in Tibet until it was screwed up by bad people.

The history of Tibet shows various levels of intervention by a great number of outside cultures, including the Buddhists, and the Britich and the Russians, with a few very uninteresting events precipitated by the Tibetans themselves, including the invasion of indigenous pepples, war against co-culturists, and the enslavement of various pepples including those a bit lower in caste than the ruling class. If you get bored some day, look up how the Dalai Lama is chosen. Not necessarily an exercise in democracy or freedom of choice.

So, while the White European Male's protuberant Merchantile Culture may be said to have 'violated' the indigenous pepple's rights, and the Non-white Non-European Male's protuberant Totalitarian Cultural Revolution may have 'violated' the indigenous pepple's cultures, these were not 'virginal', 'pristine', or 'unspoiled' areas that existed in an Edenesque stasis, untouched by the vagaries and vicissitudes of human stupidity and tendency. Those pepples were capable of stupidity and ignorance and inhumanity without help from the heavily-armed and heavily-shipped outside world.

When Amurricans and other 'Coalition Forces' first wandered into the Middle East back during 'Desert Shield', they were amazed to find themselves on a slightly different planet. Kuwait and Saudi and Iraq did not meet their Western expectations, which could have been easily dispelled with a flip through a few back issues of National Geographic
or a few hours spent watching PBS. They ran into people who dressed in recognizable manners, drove vehicles they knew the names of, and used appliances that could be found in any American home. They also ran into people who had odd cultural habits, strange religions and cuisine that was completely outside their experience.

You would have thought that some time between the end of "Desert Storm" and the beginning of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" that someones in the Pentagon would have begun an acculturation program that would teach recruits to pull their heads out of their cableland behinds and learn something about the countries they were going to go "liberate". Yet, when our boys and girls piled into Afghanistan to make the Taliban pay for their sins, and when our troops and troopettes tromped into Iraq to make the world safe for Kurds again, they went in wide-eyed and ooing and awing. C'mon, Pentagon, a few Google clicks could have saved a lot of embarrassment.

Anyway, there are a lot of little cultures in those parts of the world that have been doing their own things for hundreds of years, including indigenous cultures that the invading Muslims (don't remember that? look it up!) have spent a lot of time over the decades trying to obliterate (Saddam whatshisface doesn't count. He wasn't a Muslim. His efforts at obliteration, particularly the Marsh Arabs, were for non-religious reasons). There are even odd enclaves of putative Christians hidden in corner pockets of Baghdad and Kurdistan and the Afghani hills. These Christians are in many ways unlike any the Coalition forces have encountered before. And some of them, like the Muslims, practice bizarre customs that predate both Christ and that other fellow, pagan customs, mean customs, like Genital Mutilation.

Freedom, to truly mean anything, has to apply to human beings regardless of the previously contrictedness of their "culture". Human rights transcend religion, although religious freedom (hmm, oxymoron?) should have place, if the religion allows human rights to exist. Human rights transcend cultural freedom, because one rarely has a choice which culture one is born into. Human rights transcend politics because political expediency will trade a right for many in exhange for a privilege for a few any time.

Is the cessation of the systematic and wholesale (the WHO estimates that 3 million girls will be effected this year) torture and mutilation of young people and babies something worth fighting for?

When Afghanistan was "freed" there were apparently orphaned boys whose status had prevented the Taliban from allowing them to fully achieve their rites of passage as members of a banned Islamic sect. When a contingent of Turkich soldiers happened to wander into that part of the country, their Chaplain chap decided that these boys deserved to enjoy their new "religious freedom". Thus, dozens of boys and young men in their teens and early twenties were circumcised in a big joyous ceremony. Chris Kristopherson once wrote that "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose". I don't think those boys would have agreed.