Pallister's Partial Apostasy

 

Brian Pallister; Globe & Mail

There are continuing calls for Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister to resign for saying, on Canada Day, “The people who came here to this country before it was a country, and since, didn't come here to destroy anything. They came here to build.”

“Those remarks,” the CBC explains, “were quickly characterized by scholars as ahistorical and insensitive.”

Pallister has since apologized. His indigenous affairs minister has resigned, saying “Inappropriate words and actions can be very damaging.” The chosen replacement, himself Metis, almost immediately had to apologize for saying the Indian residential schools were started with good intentions.

Pallister’s comments were not just inoffensive, but conciliatory. He was spreading oil on troubled waters, after a destructive riot on Canada Day, as a leader should. They were also obviously true. Why, after all, would anyone cross an ocean, or cross a country, just to destroy something?

Why the dramatic attack? The modern elite demands extreme ideological conformity, and conformity to statements and concepts that are obviously untrue, precisely because they feel endangered. They have to be sure they can trust anyone in a position of power to protect their joint position. They need this sort of public oath of loyalty.

They are unlikely, over time, to keep getting it; they keep raising the ante. At this point, if people start talking openly about the matter of the residential schools and Canada’s history of indigenous relations, their prior claims of genocide will fall apart. If people start talking openly about human sexuality, their claims about gender will fall apart. At that point, the entire elite gets discredited, and falls.

If they have not by this point, they are inevitably going to overplay their hand. They are in too deep. There is a house of cards here, and the remarkable thing is that it has not collapsed already. 

Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of the end in the school board meetings in the US, in which many parents are challenging critical race theory in the schools. 

I guess this can go a few different ways: a forward march into totalitarianism to preserve the privilege of the elites; a revolution, in which they are swept out for a more democratic society in the tradition of the French or American revolutions; or first the one, some dreadful holocaust, and then the other.