On Jan. 12, True North’s Harrison Faulkner posted a piece on the CBC’s reaction, just a couple of days earlier, to the fact that over 90 Churches have been torched or otherwise vandalized in Canada since 2021. Faulkner was outraged both that the CBC had previously ignored the issue while it was now clearly implying Indigenous hostility towards the Catholic Church was perfectly justified. Among those interviewed was an Indigenous U. of Alberta professor who averred that the fires gave her people a “voice” they would otherwise not have. This is absurd. Both the Canadian government and the Catholic Church have been apologizing for decades now for the often inhumane treatment to which Canada’s Indigenous were submitted in their Residential Schools. They most definitely do not need to burn down churches to acquire a “voice.”
In fairness to the CBC, the Indigenous male interviewed at the beginning of its presentation did say he disapproved of criminal attacks on churches. Yet he also made a number of statements which Harrison Faulkner found politically motivated mistruths, mistruths which the CBC allowed to stand. The charge, for example, that all Indigenous kids were forced to attend Residential schools, was simply false. Apparently no more than one third of them attended those institutions at any given time in our history. By 1950, Faulkner says, 90% of them attended day schools within their own reserves. Moreover while a 1920 amendment to the Indian Act made attendance at Residential Schools mandatory, it made it clear that applied only to those with no access to their own local schools. Even more damaging to the narrative that all Indigenous kids were ripped from the bosom of their families against their wills, is a 1925 statement by a Kamloops priest, Father James McGuire, lamenting that his local Residential School was unable to accommodate the host of Indian families clamoring to have their children admitted. If the schools were the abominations depicted in the Left’s “woke,” anti-colonialist narrative, why were Indigenous families even considering sending their kids there?
No one is suggesting there were not abuses in the institutions in question. But as with its approach to every issue, past and present, the Left’s narrative on Canada’s Residential Schools has been simplistically edited to fit its Ideology. Naturally the CBC implies the unmarked graves found near the Kamloops school are further evidence of Canada’s genocidal past. That neither the contents of those graves or of multiple other such sites throughout the West have been investigated, is not apparently relevant, though various historians have pointed out they likely contain the bodies of thousands of Canadians, both Indigenous and otherwise, who died in various pandemics over the last 250 years. Speaking of such, it is a fact that our first Prime Minister put considerable effort into supplying smallpox vaccines to Indigenous tribes as that disease flared up repeatedly throughout his political life. Strange behavior for a genocidal monster!
I have seen Indians interviewed who expressed gratitude for the education they received in their Residential Schools. Yet while the history of those schools is complicated and the notion of “cultural genocide” is a gross exaggeration which ignores the fact that it was perfectly natural 150 years ago for people like McDonald to see the Indigenous as “savages” who needed to be educated, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [2008-2015] did nothing but stoke Indigenous anger and resentment [i.e., hatred] by uncritically accepting every complaint levied by its angry, resentful witnesses. So also did the CBC piece in question which, while it made a token gesture to the Rule of Law, at the same time implied those who were burning churches were perfectly justified. It is an opinion that has in fact been expressed by our Prime Minister and a host of other Liberals, including his former Principal Secretary, Gerald Butts.
My question is this: Does not the neo-Marxist narrative of the Left, which simplistically divides all of history into a matter of Oppressors and their innocent Victims, implicitly incite a brazen disrespect for the Law among those consigned to the latter category? Is not the grossly Sentimental as opposed to Objective rendering of the facts informing the myth of Canada’s “systemically” genocidal past, significantly responsible for the almost 100 churches that have been burned or otherwise vandalized?
Of course this is only the beginning. Was not the mainstream media’s equally questionable response to the death of George Floyd, a career criminal whom it elevated to the status of a heroic martyr, at least partially responsible for the several deaths and 2 billion dollars in damages perpetrated by BLM and its followers in 2020? Was the oft repeated generalization that all White cops are Racists not responsible for the self-evident decline in public respect for the police, which in turn has led to a significant increase in the danger of their jobs?
On Wed., Jan 17, a Black woman driving her car on N.Y.’s Upper East Side intentionally ran over a police officer attempting to wave her down because the road ahead was closed due to the investigation of a local robbery. Arrested for having fractured both an arm and leg, she was heard to scream after the event: “F*** these cops. He wouldn’t move!” Gee, I wonder where all that hatred came from?
As the poor are also among the Left’s “victimized” classes, they apparently feel entitled to pillage retail outlets almost as a form of sport, stealing not only from multi national conglomerates such as Walmart, but from privately owned stores in their local neighborhoods. But why shouldn’t they when a thinly veiled assumption of the neo-Marxist Left is that Capitalist entrepreneurs are nothing but a collection of greedy, self-serving bastards?
In keeping with their belief that the crimes of the “oppressed” are generally understandable, “progressives” across North America have produced legal protocols which increasingly release the accused with little or no serious repercussions. In Aug. of 2023, Ron DeSantis suspended Monique Worrell, state attorney for Florida’s Ninth Judicial Circuit Court, on the grounds that under her jurisdiction an inordinately high percentage of those charged with crimes, including felonies, were simply allowed to walk away. Of course as DeSantis is the second most hated Republican in the U.S. and Worrell is a woman of color, he was soundly criticized for the move. One case which seemed to support his decision was that of 19 year old Keith Moses who, having been arrested 20 times, was set free to shoot and kill 3 innocent people. Yet an Aug. 10 posting on a website called Popular Information, attempted to exonerate Worrell of any responsibility for the murders. The “logic” of the piece is a perfect example of the lunacy that characterizes the contemporary Left. Its author points out that only 4 of Moses’ arrests were for felonies. Apparently 4 acts of violence are no grounds for assuming that the person in question is in fact prone to violence. Moreover, we are told, only 1 of his 20 arrests took place on Worrell’s watch, which began in 2021. But how does this in any rational way exonerate her department of responsibility for the loss of 3 innocent lives? Also published on Aug. 10, an ABC statement critical of DeSantis suggested the prosecution rates of any State Attorney are in no way an accurate reflection of his/her competence. One wonders what the families of Moses’ 3 victims might have to say about this specious bit of simplistic reasoning.
Thankfully, it is not only “conservatives” who are appalled by the decline of respect for the Rule of Law incited by the sentimentality/stupidity of the Left. On Oct. 2, Blaze media cited the outrage of Chicago Democrat Raymond Lopez who said he could not understand why “innocent people are being hunted down like prey” in his city by criminals who clearly should have been kept behind bars. In the same way, multiple Democrats have expressed outrage at Biden’s trashing of the legal protocols of Immigration which has submitted their Cities and States to crises of an economic, humanitarian and criminal nature, crises which anyone of a rational perspective [i.e., a “conservative”] would have seen as utterly predictable.
Simple, inarguable fact: The neo-Marxist narrative informing the Left’s approach to crime is a gross piece of misinformation which conveniently ignores the Fact of Human Nature out of deference to its simplistic world-view. The notion that the “disenfranchised” are justified in their acts of criminality while decent, hardworking people who have flourished are a bunch of greedy, privileged jerks, is utterly absurd. It entails a double standard which exonerates large sectors of the species of moral responsibility for their behavior, while submitting every sentence spoken by those who have affluence or power to excoriating criticism. It has created a sense of Entitlement which has resulted in massive increases of crime in various “progressive” jurisdictions, while at the same time undermining the values of Merit and Achievement upon which our wonderful though not perfect Western Democracies were founded.