On Mar. 27 of this year the National Post published yet another article by Conrad Black challenging the myth that Canada’s historical treatment of the Indigenous was genocidal in intent. It was followed by a contradictory, four column dissertation by one Taylor C. Noakes whose opening paragraph, mentioning Black specifically, avers “there is a gulf between recent scholarship and what the average Canadian thinks they know about Indigenous history.” His article, entitled “Inconvenient truths on Canada’s history,” is indicative of the pathetic state of “recent scholarship.”
Approximately 20 paragraphs into his diatribe, Noakes outlines the logical basis of his argument: “The key issue here is that far too many Canadians have held on to the belief that some cultures and societies are better than others and therefore have a right to impose their will on anyone they deem subpar.”
That “some cultures and societies are better than others” is a simple, inarguable FACT. While I have cited elsewhere a number of courageous individuals of non-Western origins who have railed against the primitive norms of their Cultures, I shall mention here only Ayaan Hirsi Ali who, raised a Somali Muslim, has made it her life’s work to expose the demeaning yet officially mandated status of Women within a number of Islamic autocracies, regimes in which they are little more than the possessions of Men. But according to the brilliant Noakes and “recent scholarship,” all cultural regimes are equally valid!
This brazen untruth is compounded by the ludicrous conclusion that anyone who doesn’t share the Cultural Relativism of the Left will inevitably resort to criminally oppressive behavior. Such is the cynical vision of the species that informs the Left, a vision implicit in the “materialistic determinism” of Marx which reduces us to the mindless products of our irrational impulses, a vision incompatible with the Humanist belief that Man is Morally capable of both Reason and Empathy, a vision from which those on the Left hypocritically, ludicrously, exempt themselves!
In the Ethos espoused by Noakes, should I, out of compassion for the millions of Women oppressed by Islam, speak out on their behalf, I would be guilty of inciting hatred against Muslims. Such “logic,” of course, implicitly banishes all rational, social criticism from the political realm. But that’s the very point, the Left’s devotion to the False God of Inclusiveness making the Facts of History, the Facts of Human Biology, the Facts of Cultural Diversity, no more than what Noakes sarcastically refers to as “inconvenient truths.” Behold, therefore, the inanity of his attempted repudiation of Conrad Black’s contention that Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous was far more complicated than a simple genocide.
Black clearly sees the 16th Century Culture of Canada’s Indians as radically less evolved than that of various other Civilizations. His descriptive use of the term “stone-age” may, as Noakes insists, be an exaggeration. I simply don’t know enough about that era to comment. But Noakes’ attempt to celebrate the wonderful achievements of those he would defend at times verges on the comic. To Black’s contention that they had no “permanent structures,” he gleefully responds that Cartier reported after his 1534-5 meetings with two different tribes, the presence of wooden longhouses. But how, one might ask, do wooden longhouses compare to the Parthenon built approximately 2000 years earlier in Ancient Greece? To Black’s assertion that the Indigenous had no complex tools, Noakes cites the discovery of knives, arrowheads, etc. dating back hundreds of years. But how, one might ask, do these relatively simple tools compare to the printing press which the Chinese had developed in the 9th Century, or indeed to that hand cranked “computer” found at Antikythera, Greece, deemed to be a product of the 2nd Century B.C.? Predictably, Noakes fails to mention that Canada’s Indians had not yet discovered the practical applications of the wheel upon Cartier’s arrival.
Seemingly aware that his attempt to verify the technological sophistication of Canada’s Indigenous had proven less than inspiring, Noakes changes course, asking: “Are people who build sailing ships and stone castles more human than those who build birchbark canoes and pine longhouses?” His implication is that that was in fact the essence of Black’s defense of Western European Civilization. But of course for Black that civilization’s technological achievements were but one aspect of its multitude of intellectual/cultural achievements extending back to the Ancient Greeks who, 2500 years ago, produced a wealth of brilliant speculations on the very nature and meaning of life. Never so much as mentioning the radical gulf between the Western literary/philosophical tradition and the more or less absence of such among Canada’s Indigenous, Noakes points out that many of the tribes encountered by Cartier early in the 16th Century were in fact peaceful, practiced agriculture and traded with each other. While no one is denying such facts, this leads him to conclude that while “Indigenous society and culture was different from European society and culture,” it really “wasn’t any less evolved.” If you are convinced that a culture that produced Socrates and Shakespeare is in no way more “evolved” than the Canadian Indigenous cultures defended by Noakes, I must inform you I have some swampland I am looking to sell at a very reasonable price.
A contentious issue in determining the gravity of the White Man’s Sin in wresting Canada from its Indigenous inhabitants is their population upon his arrival. While Black pins that number at approximately 200,000, Noakes cites recent estimates that range as high as two million. He does however admit that it was shortly thereafter “a fraction of what it had been at the point of contact,” hundreds of thousands of Canada’s Indigenous killed by diseases imported from Western Europe with which their immune systems simply could not cope. If in fact the subsequent Indigenous population of this country was less than a million, less than the population of a small modern city spread sparsely across the almost 6,000 miles of Canada’s vastness, surely those White settlers who might travel weeks without confronting a single native community had every right to assume they weren’t really “taking” most of this land from anybody.
Neither the sparseness of the Indigenous population nor the primitivism of their culture exonerates any of the acts of duplicity or cruelty inflicted upon them by the Colonialists. But as the Left is quite uninterested in the morality of the Individual, tending always, a la Marx, to the indictment of some generalized Stereotype, Noakes’ focus on Indigenous deaths caused by diseases imported from Europe seems intended to incite guilt among all White Canadians. Of course the complexities of human immunology were unknown to the settlers of the 16th Century and the charge that they were in any conscious way responsible for the decimation of the Native population is absurd, yet this fact is never mentioned in an article clearly determined to prove that Western Europeans should never have come to the Americas in the first place.
Would 1996 be considered part of Canada’s history? Since the publication that year of the Royal Commission report on Aboriginal Peoples, according to Black, over four billion dollars, including approximately 100 million from Christian churches, has been allocated to the compensation of the families of those who survived the Residential School system. Not surprisingly, the number who have come forward to claim their just deserts has far exceeded the estimate of our political “experts.” As Black wryly points out: “This colossal slush fund of extravagant reparations has intensified rather than abated the rapacity of the Native victimhood industry.”
Gee, is it possible that members of the Indigenous community might lie in the pursuit of freebies to which they are not really entitled? Is it possible Good and Evil span the perimeters of all human categories, racial and otherwise? Is it possible the Cult of Victimhood relentlessly cultivated by the Left is an open invitation to moral corruption? Is it possible the qualities which led Western Europeans to set out into the darkness of an unknown world 500 years ago are actually among Man’s greatest features? Is it possible the simplistic paradigm informing the Left is an insult to anyone with an IQ of more than 50?