If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
It is not entirely clear what the CBC should have done instead; the author seems to say that aboriginals should have been given more time to digest the news.
How do you report the news more slowly? Note the meaning of the word “news.”
Leaving aside the implied assumption that Indians are helpless forest creatures unable to look after themselves or deal with the real world, necessarily, what both spirits really meant is that the CBC should have kept it secret. In other words, suppress rather than report the news.
This seems an unreasonable deman.
I think the real reason some indigenous people are upset is that the Buffy Sainte-Marie story, following so closely after the revelation that there were no mass graves at residential schools, is getting dangerously close to exposing the whole “First Nations” and “reconciliation” industry as a fraud.
Elon Musk has labelled the CBC “government funded media” on Twitter.
Justin Trudeau has publicly protested. He seems enraged. The CBC has threatened to leave Twitter.
Remarkably, everything Justin Trudeau says about the matter is not only a lie, but the opposite of the truth. It is illustrative of narcissistic gaslighting generally. When you are a convinced liar, it is generally not enough in your own mind to lie. You fear the truth, you generally feel safest getting as far away from it as possible.
You can see such fear in Trudeau’s eyes. Granted, it looks like anger—narcissistic rage—but narcissistic rage is a “fight or flight” response. Narcissists are haunted by their own conscience. It makes them dangerous.
To begin with, of course, the CBC is indeed government funded. This is simply the literal truth, and this is what Trudeau is furious about, and calls an “attack.”
Trudeau blames Pierre Poilievre, leader of the official opposition, for the label. Poilievre did indeed write to Musk requesting this; but Twitter is simultaneously so labelling NPR, PBS, the BBC, New Zealand state TV, Al Jazeera, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It would be odd to expect special treatment for the CBC no matter what Poilievre said.
In the same sentence, Trudeau describes the CBC as an “independent media organization.” Which is exactly what it is not. By insisting that it is, and objecting to the factual statement that it is government funded as an “attack,” Trudeau is admitting in a backhanded way, as narcissists do, that he knows he is in the wrong: he knows there is something deeply wrong with the way the Canadian government is funding and trying to control the media.
He stresses that the CBC delivers “local news and local content,” as if it were some small local operation up against a big impersonal business. But the CBC is the big national operation; and Trudeau is doing everything he can, with Bill C-11, to suppress independent local media and content—the YouTubers.
Trudeau then says that in criticizing the CBC Poilievre is attacking Canadian culture. One common criticisms of the CBC is that it does not promote Canadian culture. Instead, it is all in for multiculturalism, which is to say, foreign culture, and full of “woke” criticism of Canadian culture as racist. Trudeau has actually claimed that Canada has no mainstream culture.
He accuses Poilievre of, in his supposed campaign against Canadians, “running to American billionaires; the tech giants.” That would presumably be Elon Musk, one billionaire, the chief actual opposition to the “tech giants.” And Musk is a Canadian citizen.
Nice try at fomenting anti-American hatred, by the way.
Trudeau ends with accusing the Conservatives of “always defending the tech giants.” It has been the left in the US that has been colluding to an almost Fascist degree with the tech giants. In Canada, the Liberals just gave the green light to a hi-tech merger of Rogers and Shaw. They tend to be in corporate pockets generally. SNC Lavelin? Power Corporation? The Tories, by contrast, are mostly the party of small business.
This is not an honest or a decent man. And he holds the Canadian people in contempt.
The Vatican recently formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery.” I hope they knew they were wasting their breath. Inevitably, the headline is not this, but that “the Catholic Church has not gone far enough.” Nothing will ever go far enough; there will never be either truth or reconciliation. There is a vast grievance industry and special interests to be fed.
The CBC’s premise for saying this is not enough is that the Vatican should have “rescinded” instead of “repudiated” the doctrine. As if this makes any material difference to any Indian. Indeed, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission asked for “repudiation”. But the goalposts move with every step towards reconciliation by the other side.
As the Vatican document explains, the Church cannot rescind the doctrine. It is not a Catholic doctrine. It is a legal theory, in international law, and in the US.
“The legal concept of ‘discovery’ was debated by colonial powers from the sixteenth century onward and found particular expression in the nineteenth century jurisprudence of courts in several countries, according to which the discovery of lands by settlers granted an exclusive right to extinguish, either by purchase or conquest, the title to or possession of those lands by indigenous peoples.”
The Vatican has no control over courts or common law in the US or other countries.
But the “Doctrine of Discovery” had no place in Catholic teaching. To the contrary, as the Vatican document notes,
“In the 1537 Bull Sublimis Deus, Pope Paul III wrote, ‘We define and declare [ ... ] that [, .. ] the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the Christian faith; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.’”
Which the CBC report does not explain. It does not quote from the document; it ignores it. And it does not, as journalistic ethics require, include a spokesman for both sides, if there is some controvery over the Vatican’s statement.
This is rather like asking a politician “When did you stop beating your wife?” Then, if he answer that he never beat her, condemning him for refusing to answer.
It is anti-Catholic hate speech. Our tax dollars at work.
Sadly, the statement has given Pope Francis another opportunity to say something idiotic: “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.”
Of course one culture can be superior to another; why would one suppose otherwise? What is his argument? And if it is never legitimate to coerce others, police forces and parenting are immoral.
In last night’s news, the CBC reported on the decision to give priority to vaccinating “pregnant individuals,” who are apparently at higher risk from COVID. Throughout the story, both anchor and interviewee persisted in referring to “pregnant individuals” or “pregnant persons,” never “women” or “mothers.”
It strikes me as dehumanizing: as though the only salient fact about those mentioned here is being pregnant. As though they were no more than nondescript biological sacks.
But I suppose more importantly, it is an open denial of objective reality. It is fantastically dangerous when an entire society becomes psychotic.
Someone wise once said we should never attribute to malice what can be explained by ordinary human incompetence.
Clinging desperately to that principle, I am stunned by the journalistic incompetence of this report by the CBC.
To begin with, this is not news. Some average Canadian is upset by a piece of unsolicited mail? Dog bites man. First rule of journalism broken.
Second, any news story is supposed to include both sides of a controversy. Second rule of journalism broken. The piece should quote Epoch Times in response to the woman’s charges. It should also quote an expert who thinks the virus originated in the Wuhan lab. There are many. I believe this has become the majority opinion among the experts.
Certainly, the assertion by the average Canadian featured that “we know scientifically that’s just not true” needed to be challenged. It was objectively false.
The CBC narrator later says Epoch Times claims the virus was developed as a bioweapon. This is objectively false as well. The Epoch Times did not say this; it only referred to it as a possibility. Fake news.
The anonymous average Canadian interviewee is quoted calling the Epoch Times “racist,” without this being challenged.
The Epoch Times is here being highly critical of the Chinese Communist Party. The Epoch Times is owned and run by a group of Chinese Americans. Same race.
The Epoch Times is affiliated in some way with Falun Gong. The CBC refers to them as “a dissident group that has locked horns with the Chinese Communist Party.” It might be debatable to what extent and in what way the Falun Gong has been persecuted in China—organ harvesting or no organ harvesting—there is no question that they are being persecuted. And the is no question the dispute began with the CCP attacking Falun Gong, not vice versa, in violation of the principle of freedom of religion which we consider a human right. Speaking of them as having “locked horns” with the CCP, is like referring to the German Jews having “locked horns” with Hitler. This is not a conflict in which a moral person can be neutral. Much less support, as the CBC does here, the Chinese Communists.
Can you imagine them having supported the Soviet government against Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn, declaring the latter racists? The difference in treatment of Russian Communist governments and Chinese Communist governments indeed suggests racism—on the part of the CBC.
It interviews an unidentified woman saying that, because the Epoch Times “always has the same position on a particular issue,” “that’s not journalism. Is it propaganda?” Cleverly worded, perhaps, so the CBC cannot be sued. But by this standard, The Economist magazine is also propaganda, not journalism. It has a consistent position on free markets. Essentially all magazines or newspapers have consistent editorial positions: it is the usual reason for starting a journal, and the usual reason for subscribing to one. In a word, it is journalism.
This is at the same time an example of the simplest and most easily recognized of all logical fallacies: an ad hominem argument. Not the sort of thing a professional journalistic outlet should ever be guilty of; the sort of thing a professional journalistic outlet should be educating the public out of. The reporting of the Epoch Times, like any reporting, must be evaluated on its merits.
The narrator’s arch concluding comment: ““If people don’t like it, they can always drop it in the recycling bin.”
The tragedy is, Canadians cannot do the same with the CBC. We are forced to pay for it, even if we are not forced to watch it.
The CBC coverage of the Iranian missile attacks on two bases in Iraq amounted to misinformation—“fake news.” The host referred to it as an “escalation,” indeed a “dangerous escalation.” She marveled at how accurate the strikes were and that they had gotten through American anti-missile protections. “What,” she asked her expert commentator, “gave the Iranians the confidence to do this?”
This amounts to an example of the principle that, when someone has committed themselves to lying, they tend to say the opposite of the truth. The Iranian response was more like the minimum needed to save face. There were no casualties; not a sign of accuracy. And that is all they had to go on at that point. As to getting through American defenses, these bases were hastily equipped to fight guerillas with IEDs. It seems improbable that there would have been some “iron dome” set up to shoot down incoming missiles.
And it is hard to see how the attack showed any growth in Iranian confidence. Everyone could see they were obliged to do something, or lose face.
Then I switched to RT—the Russian government propaganda channel. Just for comparison. Russia is supposedly an erstwhile ally of Iran; they have recently been conducting joint military exercises. And they have no free press.
Yet Russian Television told it straight.
That’s a pretty damning indictment of our mainstream media, and our taxpayer-funded network.
What can explain this?
There is an inevitable temptation in news to sensationalize. That could account for the talk of World War Three being imminent. But RT would have the same temptation. And that cannot explain the bit about the missiles being so accurate and getting through the US defenses.
It has to be anti-Americanism of an extreme, even unprincipled, sort.
World distribution of haplogroup X. Results for the Americas are Indians only.
CBC, The Nature of Things, and David Suzuki are suddenly in trouble for making a documentary about the “Solutrean hypothesis.” Briefly, the “Solutrean hypothesis” suggests that the Americas might have been first settled by people coming from Europe, across the ice sheet during the last ice age.
The problem, apparently, is that this theory has recently been embraced by “white supremacists.”
It is fun to see David Suzuki and the CBC being raked over the greenhouse-gas-rich coals: it is nice to see the left devouring itself. Which seems to be happening increasingly often. But something also smells funny. The National Post piece on the controversy explains the hypothesis is “so toxic, and so discredited among mainstream researchers that documentary director Robin Bicknell said she could barely find anyone willing to go on camera even just to say it was wrong.”
That does not sound right, does it? There is no problem in finding scientists who will explain why we know that the earth is not flat, that the sun does not orbit the earth, or that Nazi race theories were bunk. No problem at all. The only reason scientists might be reluctant to go on camera saying the theory is wrong is that it is very likely to be true. Only then do they face a problem—and otherwise academics love publicity. If they admit it is quite likely to be true, they will be accused of white supremacy, and their career is over. But if they say it is false, and in a couple of years it is generally accepted as correct, their career is over. Nobody wants to be the first to stick their bearded turtleneck out.
This is what you get when you politicize science.
But who is most guilty of that? A few hundred “white supremacists,” whatever that apparently infinitely malleable term currently means? Or the huge number on the left, apparently a majority of us all, and including the Canadian establishment, who maintain that there is some great political, legal, and moral significance to whose ancestors arrived in North America first?
Now it seems they risk being hoist on their own flint-knapped arrowheads, and they of course do not like it.
I am not qualified to evaluate the theory myself, but this fear factor alone makes me think it must be true.
Let’s look, though, at the arguments the article gives that it is not true:
“There is, for example, no evidence of Solutrean seafaring, and no evidence of their cave art in North America, which would be unusual for a people known for the elaborately painted Cave of Altamira in Spain.”
Absence of evidence is of course not evidence of absence. Given the vast area and low pre-Columbian populations, finding anything in particular from the period is a needle in a haystack proposition. People were searching for a century or more before they turned up the first Viking site at L’Anse-aux-Meadows. Vessels, needing to be light, would presumably be made of light wood and hides. It is unlikely any wood and hides would survive for 20 millennia. Nevertheless, this new theory comes amid a generally growing realization among archaeologists that remote human ancestors were far more able and eager seafarers than we previously believed. They made it over sea to Australia 50,000 years ago. Polynesians made it island by island all across the Pacific. Someone populated islands in the Mediterranean 80,000 years ago.
Cave art? Presumably, if the Solutreans came across on the edges of the ice sheet, they were getting their living from the sea. In Suzuki’s words, they were “lured by the neverending bounty of the sea.” Accordingly, they would probably have stayed at least at first, perhaps at last near the sea coast when they arrived. Sea levels are substantially higher now than they were 20,000 years ago; any cave art the left is likely to be underwater- perhaps 50 miles out from shore.
Accordingly, needles may well yet be found in this almost entirely unexamined haystack.
The documentary notes significant European genetic markers in Canadian Indians. Indeed, whether or not the Solutrean hypothesis is true, this large element of European genetic material in the Indians of eastern Canada must still somehow be accounted for. It is important new data—we did not know about this until we sequenced the human genome, and it seems to defy the traditional theory of arrival from Asia, and no contact before Leif Erickson.
However, the article counters,
“According to Moreno-Mayar, …, there is another more plausible way to account for the presence of the relevant genetic marker, which was found in three of forty teeth analyzed. This marker, known as haplogroup X, was picked up by the ancestors of Native Americans as they encountered Ancient North Eurasians on their migration northeast towards Siberia, and eventually North America.”
Unfortunately, this explanation is not nearly as plausible. The problem is that haplogroup X is found concentrated in the northeast section of North America. This theory makes it go all the way around the world to get there, leaving no traces anywhere else long the way. No traces of the haplogroup in modern Siberia, anywhere in East Asia, in Central Asia, in Central or South America, or in Western North America. All areas these people would have to transit, presumably mating on the way. That’s like going from Toronto to Oshawa via Edmonton. Without ever stopping for gas.
World distribution of haplogroup R, even more common in Canadian Indians than haplogroup X. (Results for the Americas are Indians only)
The National Post article does not mention it, but according to Wikipedia, the ultimate disproof of the Solutrean hypothesis is a recently discovered skeleton:
“In 2014, the autosomal DNA of a male infant from a 12,500-year-old deposit in Montana was sequenced. The DNA was taken from a skeleton referred to as Anzick-1. The skeleton was found in close association with several Clovis artifacts. Comparisons showed strong affinities with DNA from Siberian sites, and virtually ruled out any close affinity of Anzick-1 with European sources (see the "Solutrean hypothesis"). The DNA of the Anzick-1 sample showed strong affinities with sampled Native American populations, which indicated that the samples derive from an ancient population that lived in or near Siberia, the Upper Palaeolithic Mal'ta population.”
It is hard for this layman to see why this is relevant; it looks a lot like a red herring. If they are saying that this corpse matches genetically with Siberia and with modern Indians, they are also saying that it cannot account for the European haplogroup found in modern Indians. The discovery apparently shows that this particular skeleton, far away from the East Coast, far away from where the Solutrians are supposed to have lived, and far away from the modern Indian groups with the haplogroup X chromosome, and dating to a time after the Beringia land bridge, knew how to craft Clovis points. But this is nothing we did not already know, without seeing the skeleton, and does not affect the Solutrean hypothesis, formed with this background knowledge. It seems significant only if you accept what seems to be the current weird orthodoxy on the left, that culture is a genetic trait, and nobody can “appropriate” anything from another culture. So if one non-Solutrian could make such points, however much later, it cannot have come from the Solutrians.
So: if you find someone who eats pizza and is not Italian, that proves pizzas are not originally Italian and there were never Italians in contact with them? Really?
If there were a betting market in this, I would put down money that, in another ten or twenty years, the Solutrian hypothesis will be in all the school texts.
Those on the left may not really want to argue that this invalidates any special aboriginal claims to North American land. But by all means.
Canadian conservatives tend to be anti-culture, anti-arts. This is a dreadful mistake. Shelley was right in saying that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world; the pen really is mightier than the sword. The culture wars will, inevitably, be won in the culture. All politicians are ever able to do, unless they are themselves, like Ronald Reagan, artists, is rush to the front of the mob and pretend they are leading. Leave the culture on the other side, and the right will always lose.
Nor is there any unwritten rule that artists are always going to be leftists. They are not. In the early years of the twentieth century, the finest English poetic voices were on the right: TS Eliot and WB Yeats. Jack Kerouac was a Taft Republican. Even supposedly counter-cultural figures from the Sixties have revealed that they merely felt obliged to keep to themselves essentially right-wing views: Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, and so forth.
So we should all shut up about shutting up the CBC. We need the CBC. We need it desperately in a country like Canada, not so much because we are threatened with assimilation by American culture, but because we are threatened, by a challenging geography, with regional, centrifugal forces. We need a megaphone to speak for Canada united.
On top of that, there is the issue of international branding. People outside France buy French products largely because “France” means something as a brand. So does “Japan,” or “Germany.” Canada too means something as a brand, but it is just good sense to advertise. A CBC concentrated entirely on Canadian culture and focused outward as well as inward, with the new fora of international cable and the Internet out there, would do this. It would also project “soft power” that might stand us in good stead in case of international conflict.
Wince all you want about exempting the arts from the free market. It works; and the arts have rarely, anywhere, been part of the free market. This is an exception to the general rule. We have seen government tinkering work in the remarkable growth of the Canadian popular music industry, unfairly subsidized, no doubt, in market terms, by Cancon rules. CBC radio, which unlike TV is all Canadian content, has also genuinely done a lot for Canadian culture.
Nor would this cost much—less and less with the growth of technology. The French auteurs used to talk of the ideal of a “camera-stylo”—a cinema that could be as intimate and personal as a writer’s pen. We have that now: everybody carries a video camera in their pocket, complete with means of instant transmission.
Foreign content.
The trick is to require that CBC broadcast only Canadian content, with a clear mandate for national unity and promotion of the Canadian brand. No shows from the US or Britain. Besides serving no national interest, such shows put the CBC in direct and unfair competition with private broadcasters. Bureaucratic bloat could be avoided by enforcing a budget requirement that limited percentages available for anything off-air.
And no money for anything the least bit “multicultural.” Canadian culture must belong to all Canadians.
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