What Beaulieu’s ground-penetrating radar
scan found were 215 areas that showed soil disturbances such as tree roots,
metal, and stones – but not bodies. One bone and a tooth were discovered, but
she acknowledged at the time that without conducting a proper
forensic investigation no “definitive” conclusions could be
drawn. Nevertheless, the media and the political class were quick to
characterize what had been found as mass graves.
Soon it was claimed that Kamloops Indian
Residential School was implicated in an act of genocide against First
Nation People. Some moral crusaders presented the discovery as integral to the
colonization of Canada by Europeans. From their perspective, the history of
Canada is a story of systematic genocide against the native population. The
Catholic Church, which ran Kamloops and other residential schools for First
Nation children, became the target of media hostility.
The narrative of mass murder was
legitimized by the behavior of the Canadian political class. Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau responded to Beaulieu’s claim by describing it as
a “dark and shameful chapter” in the nation’s history.
On 30 May
last year, the Canadian Government lowered the flag on its buildings
to half-mast. It also created a new holiday to honor “missing children”
and survivors of residential schools.
As
alarmist stories of genocidal behavior escalated, 65 churches were set on fire
and vandalized. The desecration of these places of worship was accepted as a fully justified protest. Both Trudeau and Gerald Butts, a
political consultant and former principal secretary to the prime minister,
described the anti-Christian violence as “understandable”.
Throughout
Canada, statues of the nation’s historical figures were attacked. In Montreal,
the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, was overturned,
his detached bronze head symbolically rolling on the ground. The statue of
Queen Victoria in front of the Manitoba Legislature was knocked down.
Numerous other statues were defaced and vandalized in an orgy of violence
directed at Canada’s historical legacy.
Soon
numerous other unsubstantiated claims were made about the discovery of other
unmarked graves near residential schools. The historian Professor Jacques
Rouillard was one of the few academics who sought to expose the lack of
evidence behind the Kamloops story that had sparked the hysteria. He criticized
media outlets for further hyping things up “by alleging that the bodies
of 215 children had been found, adding that ‘thousands’ of children had ‘gone
missing’ from residential schools and that parents had not been informed.”
Those who pointed out that not one body
had been found in Kamloops were even denounced as genocide deniers. Writing in
The Toronto Star, K.J. McCusker stated that the call for bodies “of
residential schoolchildren is nothing more than a racist rant bordering on
genocide denial”. And he added that “what happened in
residential schools is not about the evidence. This kind of trolling is part of
genocide, as are the actual crimes”. From this perspective, not only is
evidence unimportant, the very demand for it is integral to the furthering of
genocide.
The cavalier use of the term “genocide” to
describe an as-yet unsubstantiated claim about an unmarked mass grave is
disturbing. The hysterical tone adopted by those who are so free with the term
speaks to the moral disintegration of public life in Canada. But it isn’t
confined to the use of “genocide”. The behavior of Catholic
Residential Schools was also likened to a Holocaust. In a statement that
implicitly insults the genuine victims of the Holocaust, one commentator wrote, “It
is hard and painful for me to say that the discovery of the graves of the
children in Kamloops maybe Canada’s Holocaust moment”.
There is something terrifying about the
casual manner with which the memory of the Holocaust is opportunistically
plundered to make a point about the discovery of a soil disturbance. To make
matters worse, the authority of academic historians has been exploited to
legitimate the use of the term “genocide”. In the wake of
Kamloops, a statement issued by the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) stated that
the “history of violence against indigenous peoples fully warrants the
use of the word ‘genocide’.”
In response, a group of historians wrote an open letter criticizing the statement in which
they admonished the CHA for purporting to “promote a single ‘consensus’
history of Canada,” and adding, “with this coercive tactic,
the CHA Council is acting as an activist organization and not as a professional
body of scholars.”
But the reality is there has been little
concerted effort to counter the alarmist campaign designed to rewrite Canada’s
past as a protracted era of genocide. Public figures who ought to know better
have become accomplices of the campaign to shame the country’s past. Instead of
countering the outburst of anti-Catholic sentiment, leaders of the Church opted
for the policy of appeasement.
When Trudeau demanded that the
Pope come to Canada and apologize in person, many church leaders nodded in
agreement. Father Raymond de Souza was one of the few religious figures who
spoke against the groveling Canadian bishops and pointed out that
some of his colleagues had forgotten the meaning of the word sacrilege.
The history of mass hysteria and witch
hunts has shown that unless it is countered, society will fall prey to moral
corruption and decay. Looking at Canada and the behavior of its political
leaders and cultural elite, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it has
become a nation that has lost its way.
Written by:
Frank Furedi is an author and social commentator.
He is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in
Canterbury.
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