The Biggest Lie Of Them All?

One day, one hopes, there will be a "long overdue reckoning" with what began on this weekend, three years ago.

It’s the anniversary of the weekend that the Canadian flag was lowered on Parliament Hill. On the Monday following that weekend in 2021, the flags were lowered on all federal buildings across Canada. They were kept at half-mast for more than five months in what should be understood now as a kind of federally-induced national psychotic episode of riots, statue topplings and the burning and desecration of scores of churches across the country.

St. Jean Baptiste Church in Morinville, one of perhaps 80 churches burned or otherwise desecrated across Canada since the fictitious Kamloops “mass grave” discovery of 2021. Prime Minister Trudeau called the burnings “understandable.”

The hysteria persisted well beyond 2021. It began with the “discovery” of a mass grave in Kamloops that wasn’t discovered, and it persisted in reports of shocking events that never occurred at Marieval, St. Eugene’s, Penalakut, Shubenachadie and on and on.

The Trudeau government instigated it and funded it, and we are now supposed to pretend it never happened. But it did happen, and to an alarming extent much of the legacy news media was complicit in the madness.

Like this, reported without any questioning: “Stories of fathers — they called them, back then, ‘fathers’ — decapitating kids, and little girls digging holes, not knowing what they were digging the holes for. They were burying babies.” And this: “Their bodies were cast into the river, left at the bottom of lakes, tossed like garbage into incinerators.”

It was a kind of madness, and it is a kind of madness.

Thoughtcrime

Several cabinet ministers have openly contemplated the criminalization of remembering what happened, by way of outlawing what has been called “residential school denialism,” a confabulation that obscenely equates the mere notice of 2021’s ghoulish national derangements with Holocaust denial.

On the front page of Friday’s National Post with a turn inside, I mark this anniversary. The story was live online on Thursday, and within the first six hours it had 200,000 views, so I guess that’s a good thing, but I’m weary of all this.

I first reported the lunatic claim of a vast archipelago of residential-school mass graves in 2008. It began with the inventions of the defrocked United Church Minister Kevin Annett. I never imagined a Canadian prime minister would not only subscribe to Annett’s conspiracy theory but promote it to the point of kneeling in an old Catholic cemetery in Saskatchewan, posing for the cameras and pretending it was evidence that Annett was right all along.

We’re past the point of reasoning our way out of this

I’m in rather a dark mood, I’m afraid.

Just this past week, the doors of the Schara Tzedeck synagogue in Vancouver were set ablaze in a night-time attack. Shots were fired at a Jewish girls school in Toronto. Bullet holes were later discovered at a Montreal synagogue and boys school. Banned terrorist organizations are publicly celebrating their successes in mobilizing tens of thousands of Canadians in marches and rallies devoted to the objective of driving the Jews of Israel into the sea.

It is a cliché that what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews, that what happens to the Saturday people will sooner or later engulf the Sunday people. In Canada’s recent history, it happened the other way around.

The antisemitism that has exploded in Canada since last October is sustained by the hegemonic hold of a theory of “settler colonialism” in a post-truth milieu that has enfeebled the ranks of senior federal politicians and the social sciences and humanities faculties of Canada’s universities, right down to elementary school teachers.

We are constantly hectored to understand that Israel is an illegitimate colonial settler state. We are similarly obliged to understand Canada as an illegitimate colonial settler state. It is a totalizing theory. Its current global iteration is neatly captured in this exercise in activist pamphleteering that perfectly captures the totalitarian nature of Palestinianism:

Nearly a third of North American students think the Holocaust was exaggerated or fabricated. Nearly one in five Canadians believe that the deaths of children in residential schools were not due to horribly high mortality rates from infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza, but because they were murdered.

We have descended well past the point where manic devotion to "theory" becomes so unhinged from reality that it mutates into fanaticism, lawlessness and violence. What I mean is not to warn that this will happen. It has happened. It is happening, and it barely warrants notice in the legacy media anymore.

Last Friday, for instance, the openly antisemitic Toronto 4 Palestine grouping descended on Toronto’s Union Station, reportedly shutting it down, but news accounts are scarce. “The Zionist entity of Israel, the core of terrorism for decades,” is to be abolished. “We stand in solidarity to shut down occupation and oppression everywhere.” I see NBC news has a clip. Haven’t found any Canadian mention except a few local reports.

If I’m supposed to make a point here, I’ll put it this way: We can't reason, dialogue, interfaith-workshop or "this is not Canada" our way out of this. Those are peacetime activities, and we have entered a new epoch.

As I’ve put it elsewhere: If ‘narrative’ is all that matters, then at the end of the day the ‘narrative’ that will prevail will be the ‘narrative’ with the loudest voice, the deepest pockets, the shiniest boots and the sharpest knives.

You know, truth is all we’ve got, kids. Truth is the only thing we have. This the last bulwark. This is it. These are the ramparts.

I think I should leave it at that for now.

Some readings and resources.

An entire book of thoughcrime on this subject: Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the truth about residential schools). It’s a collection of essays, some of them very useful. I politely declined to contribute, but don’t take that as a dismissal of the book. There’s some really good work that went into it.

It doesn’t really tell you much about “how the media misled us,” but that doesn’t much matter. For a forensic reconstruction of the news media’s outrageous complicity in fabricating the “narrative” that the Trudeau government imposed on Canada here you go: The Year of the Graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves.

That was my deep-dive National Post contribution. Here’s the Real Story background to that investigation: When White People Lose Their Minds. Here’s how I was punished for writing The Year of the Graves, and here’s the background to who had the story first, and how it never saw the light of day: Some overdue news about the news.

Father Ray de Souza’s latest in the Post: The record corrects on 'unmarked graves' hysteria. Independent researcher Nina Green is the best of the independent researchers. Here’s her website: Indian Residential School Records.

Here’s Frances Widdowson’s magisterial Billy Remembers investigation.

A couple more Real Story backgrounders: The Uncensored Canadaland Collision and You’re either a believer or a heretic.

Sorry this newsletter came so late in the day. Deadlines loom.