Today's newsletter is brought to you by the letter 'F.' Fuerdai & Fish Wars, Neo-Fascist Fanboys, Fact-Finding & Friends Far & Near.
Bonus: About that Global Affairs apparatchik who showed up for Russia Day fun, caviar & vodka at the Kremlin's embassy in Ottawa last Friday. Also some deep inside for paying subscribers, at the end.
I’ll work this backwards. I’m going to run it this way to deal with some seriously unfinished business, and then get into telling you things you didn’t know and may find quite astonishing, much of which is in my National Post column today. So let’s get to it.
Friends Far and Near & Fact-Finding, First.
I’ve been quite chuffed with all the comrades who have called to ask how I’m holding up. Calls from my colleagues in the journalism racket, especially. The truth of it: It’s exhausting, but maybe not so brave and scary to step out into the cool and the dark. It’s exhausting, but more of us should try it. I’m talking about the gates of hell opening up in reaction to my Year of the Graves inquiry, of course.
I’ve also heard chatter along the lines of, ‘well, why aren’t these journalists coming out publicly?’ I want to put that to rest here. Some have, like the CBC’s Natasha Fatah, for instance, and what she’s had to endure from the flying monkeys on Twitter has been absolutely obscene. Nobody needs to go through grief like that, least of all those journalists with kids to feed and mortgages to pay and bosses who’d prefer they’d just mind their manners and not cause trouble.
But among my defenders there’s one who has been especially amazing, and remember, this isn’t just a story about me or about Year of the Graves. It’s about the awful things that can happen when you insist that the truth will be discovered in the clutter of material from the known world - and then the facts you find end up defying a rigid, politically incendiary establishment “narrative.”
It’s about the many assaults on the various conventions and disciplines that civilized societies have relied upon to produce and advance knowledge over the past 300 years or so. The old rules of the journalism trade, the main one being the first question to consider - is this true? - are just a small part of what we’re losing.
You’ll want a strong defence, and to that purpose, in my case, Christopher Dummitt is NORAD. He’s a professor of Canadian history at Trent University, and host of the Canadian history podcast 1867 & All That. Here’s Christopher, in an essay titled Terry Glavin's critics are shredding their own credibility:
It would be one thing if this were a one-off, but it’s not. The furor over Glavin’s piece is just one of many such incidents, in which blue-check Twitter accounts insist they know better; that their moral and higher truth is worth more than any literal truth.
Again and again, everyday Canadians are being told by mainstream institutions that the experts know better. And time after time, the mask slips, only to reveal the naked self-interest or political partisanship that lies underneath. Canada’s chattering class lost their minds when the trucker convoy took over Ottawa, for example, but seemed to have little negative to say when gangs of activists tore down statues and burned churches in the summer of 2021.
. . . But who would dare to admit this? The consequences — as Glavin is now discovering — are just too severe.
My critics now apparently include the Canadian Archaeological Association, the Society for American Archaeology, the Canadian Association for Biological Anthropology and the Canadian Permafrost Association. It seems some university faculty heads have also signed onto their statement, which accuses me of “residential schools denialism.”
Which is weird, since I haven’t “denied” anything about residential schools, and the statement attributes to me motives I do not harbour, and equates Year of the Graves with the New York Post’s treatment. Which is really bizarre. As I’ve pointed out, for whatever its value the New York Post effort repeated the same falsehood that the New York Times started with a year ago (Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada) which the T’kemlups never claimed, which is when things went crazy, which I’m catching heck for pointing out in Year of the Graves.
So, what the hell? Look a bit closer and you’ll notice that the CAA statement equating me with a genocide denier relies on the utterly discreditable Sean Carleton’s definition of this thing called “residential schools denialism,” and you should also notice that the CAA statement isn’t quite what it says on the tin.
It’s signed by the board of directors of the CAA. I have no reason to believe that the CAA membership has any idea what’s going on. You don’t even have to be an archaeologist or even an archaeology student to be a CAA member. The organization is open to “individuals of the general public of any country,” and I’m sure they’re mostly very nice people.
I’ve never heard of the Canadian Permafrost Association. Fair play to them, but I don’t know why their opinion about a 5,500-word exposition of last summer’s tabloid-fright media manipulation and hysterical error, which had nothing to do with the permafrost, should count for anything.
I’d never heard of the Canadian Association for Biological Anthropology either. But that’s because it was called the Canadian Association of Physical Anthropology until it rebranded and reorganized itself last year after some sort of consciousness-raising exercise. When you go looking for what the CABA is or has become you’ll find only a “mission statement” that describes the CABA as “multidisciplinary, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences,. More than half the mission statement is given over to an elaborate Statement of Respect for Diversity and Inclusion. The CABA statement of concurrence with the board of directors of the CAA was signed by the CABA’s Standing Committee on Residential School Graves.
As for the Society of American Archaeology signing on or co-authoring the CAA statement, the SAA has undergone tumultuous upheavals of its own over the past little while involving procedural formulations to deal with “egregious and proven unethical behavior”. The SAA has expended a good bit of its energies lately figuring out how to “promote actively anti-racist practices,” in light of the George Floyd uproars and everything.
In any event, the SAA’s concurrence with the CAA statement is signed only by SAA president Deborah Nichols, who has contributed chapters to volumes about the Aztec economy and social violence in the pre-Hispanic American southwest, about which I have no opinion for her to challenge. She teaches at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College, which ranks down at the bottom (52 out of 55) in the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings.
I don’t know where these people find the time to do any actual archaeology. But by all means, they should keep digging, if only to prove Christopher Dummitt’s point about the faddish conniption-having that “saps at the trust in our institutions.”
See? I told you it was exhausting. Now I want to draw your attention to a splendid editorial, the National Post View published this week under the headline: Residential school horrors need no embellishment: Dismissing Terry Glavin’s basic reporting as 'denialism' only fuels cynicism.
The editors say enough kind things about me but the important thing is what the editorial points out about the necessity of actual journalism. So do please read it. The irony to focus on here is this paragraph:
Glavin’s essay wasn’t even about the residential schools legacy. It was about the news media’s sensationalistic mishandling of that sequence of reported “discoveries” last summer, beginning with the shocking error about a “mass grave” in Kamloops.
So let’s do try to remember that. It was my refusal to submit to a substitution of what we know with what we’re supposed to believe that made people so angry. I could have written 5,500 words about any number of things. I happened to write about the way the news media and the Trudeau government behaved in “the discourse” about residential schools.
More Fanboys for a Neo-Fascist
Maybe that’s not a very nice thing to say about François Lévesque at Le Devoir or Bill Brownstein at the Montreal Gazette, but crikey, the sycophancy is very strong with these guys.
Real Story subscribers got the scoop and the whole story in Monday’s newsletter, in a guest post by my pal Fred Litwin, who knows more about Oliver Stone’s fabrications, and probably more about the vast underworld of JFK conspiracy theories, than anyone, anywhere. Not just Canada.
Among other things Fred pointed out: Vladimir Putin’s chief apologist and propagandist in the western world was being fêted by the posh and fancy of Quebec City society, and nobody seemed to care, or even notice. Putin’s terror machine continues to slaughter thousands of people and smash Ukraine to bits, and his war is pushing as many as a billion people around the world in the direction of famine owing to the war’s disruptions in grain production. And along comes this homophobic has-been Hollywood gargoyle whose adoration of Putin, at the very least, should have been understood and publicly shamed for the indecency that it is.
Then there’s Stone’s dangerous conspiracy theories. The fashion for conspiracies and imaginary plots has pretty much destroyed the Republican Party in the United States, and it’s brought America to the brink of its demise as a democracy. And yet Stone was officially and formally welcomed to Quebec City and celebrated with retrospectives and indulged as a “controversial” but courageous artist. Until Fred’s essay showed up here in the Real Story, no proper attention was paid by anyone at all, in either the Francophone or the Anglophone Press.
After Stone arrived in Quebec he was treated to exactly the kind of fawning attention he craves, with the exception of a decidedly not-servile portrait written by Isabelle Hachey in La Presse. As things turned out last night, the highbrow ex-CBC animateur Jean-François Lépine found at least a couple of occasions to be cheeky with Stone, according to this Journal de Quebec account, and the Journal’s Cedric Belanger had a go at him earlier in the day about his bromance with Putin. “I am not his friend. I am not his friend,” Stone insisted. Which may even be true. But what is also obvious is he would damn well want to be. He did ask Putin to be his daughter’s godfather, after all.
In Le Devoir, Lévesque shambles along with the usual tripe about Stone as a figure controversée, and asks a series of questions along the lines of, ‘Tell us Mr. Stone, just how fascinating a person are you?’ About half the “article” consists of Stone’s verbatim responses.
Then there’s Bill Brownstein at the Montreal Gazette. Here’s his lede: There have been few more talented filmmakers over the last half-century than Oliver Stone. And few more controversial, either. Right away you can tell what’s coming: Exhibitionist brown-nosing. Actually you can tell from the headline, which refers to Stone’s “JFK theories.” Right. JFK theories.
Backstory: On May 18, Fred sent a personal email to Brownstein about Stone’s upcoming visit to Quebec. Fred introduces himself, lets Brownstein in on his exhaustive research and his books, tells Brownstein he’s spent months debunking the ridiculous claims in Stone’s new faux-documentary JFK Revisited, gives Brownstein his telephone number and ends with this caution: “Oliver Stone should not get away scot-free with showing his current nonsense.”
This sort of thing is what a reporter dreams about: easy shift, great story. Brownstein wrote back: “Hi Fred, Wasn’t planning on covering. But if there’s a change, will keep you in mind, Bill.” Bill never got back to Fred. Stone got off scot-free.
There will be more about all that below the paywall. And there will be more below the paywall about this, too:
Fuerdai and Fish Wars
Here’s the lede paragraph from my column in today’s National Post: The Chinese have a word for them. They’re known as the fuerdai. They’re the immensely powerful and gluttonous Communist Party elites of the second generation, the children of Mao Zedong’s ruling class. . .
It’s a column about what may be a looming Canada-U.S. salmon war on the west coast, but it’s really about the wholly out of touch, clueless and creepy Fort Pearson fuerdai in Ottawa. Full marks to the Globe and Mail’s Stephen Chase & Bob Fife for scooping everyone with the initial story, which was about a Global Affairs bigshot who thought it would be okay to have fun and caviar and vodka at the Russian embassy - a lot like the high-society coddling of Oliver Stone in Quebec, when you think about it
What interested me was the bigshot in question was Paul Heinbecker’s kid. Heinbecker Senior is a fixture in the Libeal foreign policy establishment, and he has another kid occupying a top Global Affairs post. Then there’s the old China palm-greaser Peter Harder, whose son got a gig at the embassy in Beijing, and former Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his son-in-law at the Canada-China Business Council, and Jean Charest and his kid, who heads up the Canada Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong.
The point is, the fix was in for these people from the beginning. Justin Trudeau won his place in the Prime Minister’s Office by saying he was done with the old guard. That wasn’t true. As soon as he was elected, it was the Disco Era again. I wrote about that in October, 2015, while it was happening. Here.
What’s this got to do with fish?
Foreign Affairs tends to hive itself off into its own little box with its own cossetted bureaucrats and chin-stokers and “experts,” but Foreign Affairs touches on everything. The days of the old “Foreign Office” are dead and gone. “Foreign Affairs” touches on trade, refugees, capital flows, immigration, housing, monetary policy, military policy, housing, and housing and housing. And fisheries, and the fuerdais’ inattention to the U.S. pillaging of B.C.’s chinook salmon stocks is scandalous.
I mean, look at this photograph a friend and subscriber sent, taken at a supermarket in Victoria:
F-f-f-f-finally:
Some inside story on where my journalism appears, where it might appear, where it didn’t this week, where it doesn’t anymore and why. And how Brownstein’s pleasant encounter with Stone travelled in a strange westward arc, through the Postmedia chain.
But only for paying customers. Journalism isn’t free. Take up a paying sub. Thanks. Deeply appreciated.