I saw an report these days about the Isle Tanna of Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides) - Vanuatu is an Isle group east of Australia with about 83 small Isles with some bigger Isles like Espirito Santo, Tanna, Port Vila etc. -
the report was telling about a strange religious cult in Tanna, where, in the 40ies when the Americans built some military stations there in the war with Japan - the natives got so impressed by the American culture standards, military attitudes & paradas etc. that they started a religion by that
& it goes like this:
they're awaiting for the day when their Messias John will arrive!
well who (the fuck) is John?
Apparently some American soldier called John told the natives, that they, the Americans would return later on & everything would get better then & there - a promise of a leaving soldier which resulted in a new religion like this:
The Tanna people now have celebrations with US- flags - doing American like military parades in a very absurd way - & they' waiting for their Messias John to return.
The holy Americans are high esteemed: "..they saved us from the Japanese & from the missionaries!"
"When Messias John will return he will give us everything like they have - refrigerators, tv's, cell phones, everything, all the riches of their civilization"
"when John returns we will have everything what the white men own!"
this Tanna people new religion also includes, that may John lives meanwhile in that big vulcano on their isle- they're awaiting for the day day, when John (apparently having transmuted from a simple American soldier to a big Tanna God of the Vulcano) - return from there & fulfills the prophecies.
"The day when John will leave the vulcano - the whole world will see it & look then at Tanna"
just an report there:
In John They Trust
"South Pacific villagers worship a mysterious American they call John Frum - believing he'll one day shower their remote island with riches."
Paul Raffaele in Smithsonian Magazine:
John_dancerThis is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. �John promised he�ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,� a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. �Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.�
The island�s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a �cargo cult��many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: �You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.� The locals don�t know where the foreigners� endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.
