A Disturbance In The Force

Way worse than I thought. High-society conspirazoids, with more background on the Year of the Graves bedlamers, how urban legends are still urban legends, and how it's a small world after all.

Hi there, subscribers! I have a special treat coming for you - especially the Quebecers who’ve sensibly subscribed to the Real Story. I’m going to make it it available to everyone, not just paying customers. It will be in your inboxes first thing tomorrow morning. It’s a much bigger scandal than I’d expected, so I’m giving it stand-alone treatment rather than the co-produced work that you might have been expecting if you read this paragraph in my last newsletter:

The case in point we were discussing was the roaring bedlam that erupted in response to my Year of the Graves project. Along the same lines as these forays into epistemology, just so you know I’m composing a put-your-feet-up newsletter with a guest writer about the platforming and privileging of well-to-do conspiracy theorists and the mainstreaming of their derangements. Can’t promise, but it should be in your inboxes by Sunday morning. It’ll allow me to shed some further glaring and unwelcome light on how things went so sideways last summer. It will also allow me to make room for a fine writer, one of the smartest guys I know, a founding subscriber to The Real Story and an international expert in conspiracy-mongering. So stay tuned, as they say.

I had well and truly expected and hoped that the Year of the Graves hysterics would be behind me by now but they’re not, and things may well get quite serious in the next day or two, owing to events over the weekend which now involve Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller.

And of course I would never suggest that Miller has joined the pile-on because of that scandal I unearthed involving Miller’s pal Waseem Ramli, Bashar Assad's top man in North America, and how Team Trudeau rewarded Ramli with diplomatic status after his generosity at a Montreal Liberal fundraiser.

But I am going to notice a small circle of extremely unpleasant and profoundly dishonest people who are at the core of all this rumpus-making, which Miller has lately joined.

This newsletter was going to be a Sunday-afternoon thing that you’d want to put up your feet and read. So now it’s a Sunday evening thing, or whenever you happen upon it. What’s coming Monday involves a gobsmacking, taxpayer-bilking deception and the mainstreaming of a gross, homophobic neo-fascist by Quebec’s high society arts-and-culture mongers. We have, as the kids like to say, the receipts. All of them.

As for today:

When I launched the Real Story the intent was to be at least weekly, which is to say once or twice a week, depending on the news cycles in the beats that I ordinarily cover for the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen. It’s the kind of journalism that makes enemies, most of them at least as venal as Marc Miller. The point of the Real Story was to be All The News I Couldn’t Fit Into Print. The past couple of weeks have been right through the looking glass.

You know what I was supposed to be doing today, instead of this? The plan was to roar off on my 1977 Triumph Bonneville T140E to a gathering of vintage bike anoraks with my pal John Reilly, who tells me everyone had a great time even though the bikes there were mostly Yamahas and Hondas and so on and not the British bikes of our preference, but many gloriously-restored specimens anyway. And then I was going to ride over to the synagogue Emanu-El to meet up with my pal Sid Tafler for some tea and cakes with some visitors in town from the Holy Land (not Ireland the other one) who have been doing amazing work with Dror Israel.

I’m doing this instead. But I did promise a newsletter today, and I did promise no paywall, and I’ve promised tomorrow’s blockbuster will be for everyone too, but gimme a break here. You don’t have to make me do this for free. Take up a yearly paid sub if you haven’t already. Thanks.

Now, back to it.

Here’s one thing that happens to be directly related to Year of the Graves, and it’s also directly related to the retreat of democracy around the world over the past 17 years or so, which has pretty well been my beat all this time and it’s made me quite a few enemies, let me tell you. It’s not for nothing that Vladimir Putin has barred me from ever returning to Russia.

If ‘narrative’ is all that matters, then the narrative that will prevail is the narrative with the loudest voice, the deepest pockets, the shiniest boots and the sharpest knives. I was invited to get in those last words in this conversation with my National Post colleagues John Ivison and Sabrina Maddeaux:

You can pretty well set your watch by it: The substitution of knowledge with belief - which so often ends up in the back eddies of what you are not allowed to know swirling around with what you bloody well better believe - almost always ends with a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Is that where Canada is headed? I don’t think so. The overwhelming majority of Canadians are too sensible to allow such a state of affairs to carry on for long, despite the impression you will often get in much of what is known as the “mainstream media.” To say nothing of “social media.”

And then there’s the weird netherworld that lies in between. By which I mean such vanity projects of the idle rich as Canadaland, which has been leading the charge to normalize and propogate the proposition that Year of the Graves should be understood as an instance of something comparable to Holocaust denial.

So why all that devious editing and cutting and splicing of my interview with Canadaland? What was it Jesse Brown didn’t want you to know?

I’ll tell you. He didn’t want you to hear me going after him for his own crackpot elisions involving the deranged conspiracy theories concocted by Kevin Annett, the defrocked United Church minister whose vicious exploitation of residential-school survivors I played a role in exposing back in 2008. What Brown didn’t want you to know was that as recently as last July - after that “mass grave” story out of Kamloops caused so many white people to lose their damn minds - Brown was holding up Annett’s vast and complex conspiracy theory about a national archipelago of secret mass graves at residential schools as “anything but a legend.”

I undertook that exercise in 2008 order to disabuse white people - not least Noam Chomsky, if you don’t mind - who had been stupid enough to take Annett seriously. And I gave full credit to Jorge Barrera, then of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, for having disabused Indigenous people who should have known better than to have believed Annett, whose most recent incarnation is as some sort of QAnon Anti-Vax freeman-on-the-land emissary from something he calls the Republic of Kanata.

In Year of the Graves I also credit Barrera, now with the CBC’s Indigenous unit in Ottawa, for his efforts to tell the true story about that Catholic cemetery at Marieval in Saskatchewan where Trudeau so famously took a knee with a Teddy Bear last summer. That story, like so many others, has pretty well vanished down the memory hole in all the shouting about Year of the Graves.

You would think Brown would have known that Annett’s crazy stories about mass graves and bodies stuffed into the walls of residential schools and Indigenous leaders running a pedophile ring out of the posh Vancouver Club was a lunatic conspiracy theory by now, right? You would think that last year, weeks after Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc chief Roseanne Casimir stated plainly, “This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites,” Brown would have been aware of that, right?

[A digression: I have never questioned or challenged anything Chief Casimir has said, or anything said by any of the local chiefs directly involved in last summer’s “discoveries,” and I’ve never disputed the proposition that residential schools constituted “cultural genocide.” Just to be clear].

Of course Brown knew. Did it make any difference? Here’s Brown with his buddy the real-life, actually-existing Uyghur genocide denier Andray Domise, on July 21, 2021, on Canadaland. It’s mostly a bunch of apologetics for Harsha “burn it all down” Walia during last summer’s church-burning frenzies (the small world in the subhead of this newsletter - I’ll come to that below).

Here’s Domise in that July 21, 2021 Canadaland segment: “In the wake of the facts that thousands of remains of Indigenous children who were buried in mass graves and in unmarked graves were found on properties that were used to service residential schools . . .”

Brown: “It will be thousands. It’s not thousands yet.”

Then some more banging on about whether the wave of church arsons was understandable, some asides traducing me for having wondered out loud about whether Canada’s avante-garde would be so undisturbed if these sacrileges were committed against synagogues or mosques, then Brown again: “We need to deal with what is still being uncovered in these mass graves.”

In that same podcast last July, Brown referred explicitly to my impudence in exposing Kevin Annett’s insane stories about pedophile rings and conspiracies involving prime ministers and the pope in coverups of mass graves containing thousands of murdered residential-school children. “I want to get back to Terry Glavin here and I want to hold him accountable,” Brown told Domise. “I don’t know if he’s addressed those comments he made in 2009 [it was 2008, and not just “comments”] since this has been revealed to be anything but an urban legend. And his role in residential schools denialism is a problem.”

I may be wrong, but so far as I am aware that is the first time my name was associated with the faddish “residential schools denialism” thing that’s been making the rounds, which Crown-Indigenous relations minister Marc Miller has championed on at least three occasions in recent weeks, at least once at my expense.

Here’s the thing. No amount of fact-checking will do.

Just ask anyone who has done even the most cursory research on antisemitism: Conspiracy theories never seem to die. Antisemitism isn’t just a vile bigotry. It’s a conspiracy theory that refuses to die. It’s most recent iterations are usually occluded in what is known as “anti-Zionism.” I’ve made quite a few enemies over the years for merely noticing this, and they’ve popped up a lot lately, calling me a “residential schools denier.”

The terrific researchers at the Bitter Winter project, only two weeks ago, explored this strange zombie-like nature of conspiracy theories in a wild ride under this headline: New conspiracy theorists have revamped an old story about Freemasonry, the Illuminati,and Satanists, accusing among others Pope Francis and Queen Elizabeth.

And guess who shows up? Our old friend Kevin Annett, who you will be amused to learn has lately seen to it that his “International Tribunal Into Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS)” has managed to convict Pope Francis of “having presided over Satanic rituals of human sacrifice and rape of minor girls and boys.”

Lurid conspirazoid schematics swirling around secret mass graves reach back farther than the QAnon cultists. Farther back than Kevin Annett’s insanities. Farther back than the Satanic Ritual Abuse freakouts of the 1990s. They really took off in the 1920s, but their origins are even older than that.

More than a decade after Annett’s insane claims were being lauded by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Agence France-Press was obliged to publish this fact-checking inquiry in 2019: No, it is not true that Kanien’keha:ka residential schoolchildren were executed and dumped into a mass grave to resolve an overcrowding problem at the Mohawk Institute in 1943, and no, their remains were not found in a mass grave in 2008. There was no mass grave. Period. Sorry.

Only two months before the howling headlines about the Kamloops mass-grave-that-wasn’t (and which Chief Casimir never claimed, it’s important to remember) prompted Prime Justin Trudeau to lower the flags on Parliament Hill and on all federal building across Canada, keeping them lowered for months on end, Reuters was obliged to publish this fact-check: No, Queen Elizabeth did not kidnap ten children from the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 1964 after luring them to a picnic.

Sorry, but Her Majesty was nowhere near Kamloops in 1964, and no children were kidnapped. Even USA Today had to go to the trouble, two months after last year’s banner-headline Kamloops Mass Grave Shock circled the world, to again fact-check and debunk the same crazy story about the Great Royal Kidnap Caper.

The day after the Brown-Domise cuddle on Canadaland, Brown publicly attacked me by referring to my story about Annett’s indecencies with a “See, you said there were no graves” insult on Twitter.

(I never said there were “no graves,” by the way. And for all the shouting about Year of the Graves I haven’t even doubted that burials may yet be discovered at Kamloops, for that matter).

Anyway, all this is what Brown cut and chopped from that Canadaland interview I subjected myself to. I could only bother myself to listen to Brown’s version of my encounter with him once, right through. The unedited version is here if you’re interested, but just to give you an idea, here’s some of what Real Story subscriber Blair King found, and some of the unanswered questions he put to Brown. Blair is a scientist who is way smarter and has a stronger stomach than me:

Explain how an entire section of discussion can be lost with the tape spliced so Mr. Glavin is portrayed as being irrationally angry in response to your calming tones because 4 minutes of talk disappears. His reaction to one question is presented as if it was to your calm words. . . It is almost as if by carefully editing the audio Mr. Brown managed to give an entirely different flavour as to what happened in the discussion. . . as for the time stamps in the tweet they are simply wrong with respect to the original tape. . . Try listening to the fifteen seconds of the podcast from 17:30-17:45 and see where you find it in the unedited tape. . . In one case four minutes of back and forth disappear and are presented as an angry response to a calm question. . . It was petulant, [Brown] interrupted constantly, he interjected and he swore at his guest. . .

Now here’s a funny thing.

Of course Brown was right out the gate a year ago, going to great lengths to accuse me of “residential schools denialism.” And of course Marc Miller, the federal cabinet minister I embarrassed for being so chummy with a Baathist diplomat terrorizing Syrian refugees in Montreal, will be happy to traffic in the same calumny.

And of course the clownish Sean Carleton (who appears to have co-invented and co-defined the “residential schools denialism” construction) will want to apply it to me, since he confronted me on social media last summer for merely having taken exception to the proposition that burning churches was “understandable” and maybe it would have been better for Harsha Walia to shut her big yapper for once.

Incidentally, remember what I said about the back eddies of what you are not allowed to know swirling around with what you bloody well better believe? That’s what “residential schools denialism” is for: We will lie about what you really believe, you will be punished for saying what you really know, we will tell you what you bloody well better believe.

Carleton composed an entire mini-essay last summer defending Harsha Walia for her “burn it all down” response to the actual and not metaphorical or figurative church burnings that were cheered on so loudly in Canada’s bourgeois radical-chic circles (just so you know, Carleton’s appeal to the thinking of anarchist intellectual Mikhail Bakunin would get him laughed out of any respectable first-year course on the subject).

And of course Walia and the zealots in her weird little fan club would be interested in saying crazy things about me. Remember that huge project I undertook for the National Post immediately prior to Year of the Graves, The Curious Case of Khaled Barakat? He’s the guy who showed up in Vancouver about 20 years ago, the guy Israeli intelligence agencies call a leading member in the profoundly antisemitic terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Before Walia somehow managed to land her short stint with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, she was best known for her vanity-project activist groupuscule, No One Is Illegal. According to Samidoun, the PFLP proxy the Israelis listed as a terrorist organization last year (and four days later shows up as a federally-registered non-profit corporation in Canada, hilariously) Barakat was a founding member of Walia’s No One Is Illegal project.

So there are quite a few people who are mad at me, and there’s no conspiracy here. It’s just the way things work with the frivolous preoccupations of the radical-chic bourgeoisie.

It’s a small world after all, and for a really deep dive into the posh set’s indulgence of bigtime conspiracy theorists on the taxpayer’s dime, read tomorrow’s newsletter.

And remember. Journalism isn’t free.