Shut Up! Shut Up! Shut Up!

 

Pierre Poilievre is in trouble with the mainstream media for giving a speech to the Frontier Centre. Because the Frontier Centre, in turn, has done radio spots claiming, presumably with data, that those who went to Indian Residential Schools graduated knowing more about Indian culture and language than those who did not attend. This counts as “residential school denial,” and no one is allowed to speak to you ever again if you are guilty of it.

Another example of the growing influence of “cancel culture.” There is an ever-growing list of things you cannot say, and people you must not talk to. 

You must not talk to truckers if they come to call. You must not say the Covid vaccines are ineffective. You must not mention abortion. You must not mention the Nuremberg protocols. You must not question the series of assertions collectively referred to as “climate change.” You must not call people by their birth name—that’s “deadnaming” them. You must not call them a mn if they assert that they are a woman. The list keeps growing.

The critical thing to realize about such extreme censorship: nobody censors lies. Nobody cares if what you say is untrue. Then they are happy to refute it. Nobody cares if you say the Earth is flat, or that the sun goes around the Earth, or that the Chinese discovered America. Only truth needs to be censored, precisely because it cannot be refuted, and people will believe it if they are exposed to it. The more agitated and extreme the censorship, the more certain you can be that whatever is  being silenced is true. This is the golden rule.

As for the Indian Residential Schools specifically, it should stand to reason that an education is an education: one graduates with more knowledge, not less. Even if a school wanted, as is claimed of the residential schools, to actually suppress what you know of your own culture, it would seem to be a nearly impossible task. Memories are durable. You do not forget your first language by learning another—indeed, Latin and other languages have traditionally been taught on the premise that they help you understand English better. 

Moreover, if your intention was to teach Indian students only the mainstream culture, and integrate them into the mainstream, why would you send students to a segregated Indian school, instead of integrating them into the public system? In fact, the residential schools were designed to preserve Indian culture.

Pretty much everything we are told about the Indian residential schools is a lie; which is why any defense of them must be suppressed. There are too many people with vested interests in the lie.

“Deadnaming,” “misgendering,” and “preferred pronouns” are a comparable example. If, by contrast, you happened to mistake the sex of a real woman, or call her by the wrong name, she would probably simply correct you.

It is all denial.

We see something similar with the rash of statue-toppling and public renamings of buildings. It is always the good guys whose statues go down. Nobody is upset if you honour a villain. Egerton Ryerson, who founded the public school system in Ontario, and did his best to advance the interests of the native people, must have his statue removed and his name effaced from the university which, in a sense, he founded. Meantime, across town, nobody comments on the name of George Brown College—although George Brown has no connection to the institution, and was prejudiced against the French, the Catholics, and opposed any formal recognition of native land rights. Sir John A. Macdonald, who fought him over this in defense of the native people, and wanted their enfranchisement as full citizens, gets his statues torn down, supposedly for his treatment of the native people. Despite his great accomplishment, Canada itself. Meanwhile, nobody calls for the removal of the public statues of Louis Riel, guilty of treason, wanting to split the West from Canada and sell it to the States, not to mention murder. Even though, oddly, all the statues of Confederate figures in the US are being torn down on the premise that they were guilty of treason. Yet they, unlike Riel, were never convicted of it, and could not have been—since they were loyal to their states, and the American states were then considered sovereign.

Henry Dundas’s name is similarly being erased from downtown Toronto, supposedly because he supported slavery--although he was a leading figure in the abolition movement. He should have kept his mouth shut and gone along with it, I suppose.

Meanwhile, nobody calls for pulling down the public statues of the Famous Five, in Calgary and Ottawa, and the many other memorials. Although they promoted eugenics and forcible sterilization, and opposed non-white immigration.

And nobody objects to the several public statues of Norman Bethune. Granted, he did some humanitarian work in Spain and China. But why him in particular? Canadians are apparently entirely unaware that he was just one of many medical missionaries Canada sent to the Far East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of them, like Bethune, died there. Many stayed longer, and made greater humanitarian contributions. Many are commemorated in those lands: Scofield, Avison, Hall, et al. Avison even has a memorial in Toronto—donated by Koreans. Yet only Bethune gets honoured here, by Canadians, and by our government.

Bethune was a confirmed Stalinist who worked to put Mao Zedong in power; these are perhaps the two worst mass murderers who ever lived. The others went for Canadian church groups.

That’s the only obvious difference between him and these other missionaries; so apparently that is why he gets honoured, and they don’t.

When did we start shouting people down? When did we turn away from truth?

If I had to pick a date, perhaps the day Henry Morgentaler was given the Order of Canada for breaking Canadian law to abort children, an activity from which he profited personally.

I suspect it all goes back to abortion, and our collective guilt over it. That is when it first became important to shut up.