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While you may have a point there about "catalyst for action", what you are suggesting sounds like "It doesn't matter if it's all lies, so long as a conversation was started".
So if some Indigenous woman claims that she was raped, forcibly impregnated, had her baby taken away, and it was sacrificed by the local priest on the altar of the church - that doesn't matter if it's not true, it acted as a catalyst for action and that's the important thing! Because the Catholic Church did Bad Things in the past! Along with the Anglicans, who also operated residential schools, since that was the ideology of the day: give native children a Westernised upbringing so they could fit into mainstream society and be lifted out of primitive superstition and squalour.
Happened to white children as well, there's a long-running similar dispute about mother and baby homes in my country with similar claims of unmarked mass graves. And the movement to send orphan (though often they weren't) British children to new homes in Australia and Canada where they'd become (in time) farmers and settlers but in practice were treated as cheap, disposable labour by the people supposed to be fostering them.
So it's not confined to the Indigenous peoples of the former British Empire/Commonwealth, by any means.
There are certainly grounds to argue about the ideas underpinning that view, and about how indigenous people have been treated badly. But "hey if it's all lies it's okay so long as it's the Indigenous who are telling the lies" is not helping anyone.
And what of the crimes of the Indigenous peoples when they were the ones ruling the lands? I don't think it was all peaceful running around singing with the animals and the trees. Maybe they reaped what they sowed with karma for wars, murders, and massacres? Or is that a case of "one law for me, another for you"?
Honestly I'd love to get an unbiased, clinical review of what exactly the median life outcomes were of receiving a Westernized upbringing through 'the stolen generation' and/or other equivalents versus remaining in remote communities. I've yet to be convinced that the former strategy didn't actually do more good than harm, though it'd be absolute anathema to actually try publish that.
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I think you're being uncharitable by calling this a 'lie'. Evidence for 200 child graves in Kamloops has been found. It's not great evidence, It could easily be incorrect, it is being treated as proof when it absolutely isn't. But it is evidence, it hasn't been invented, and the underlying atrocity to which this evidence refers is (to a greater or lesser extent) certainly true.
And let's make your analogy more representative of what has happened. If someone found a cave full of suspicious looking bone shards and says "hey we just found evidence of 200 babies that were killed in ritualistic sacrifice" and the Catholic Church says "nuh-uh, Thiose shards are probably from a goat or something, we only raped, impregnated, and sacrificed the babies of 50 indigenous women at that site. And besides everyone was doing it back then, it was really trendy." Well in that scenario I'm less bothered about the veracity of the find and more about the underlying atrocity. And if a group of indigenous people want to take mortal offense at what happened I think that's pretty fair. And if they burn down a church or two, well I don't advocate for that (I genuinely, honestly do not think it is a good thing that churches were destroyed over this), but it's hard for me to feel any indignation on behalf of the Church.
By way of example, let's say Andy viciously insults David's wife in an argument and David breaks his nose in response. I don't think that’s a good or right thing to do - you shouldn't be going around breaking people's noses because they upset you. David should probably be arrested. But at the same time it's a completely understandable and predictable response, and I have zero sympathy for Andy. Now replace Andy with the Catholic Church and David with Indigenous people.
I mean this leaves out the important context that the evidence has been debunked by further investigation. And that this is mostly not actual indigenous being upset about it, either.
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That's the precise thing we're arguing over; some are saying that it's not evidence, it's blips on ground-penetrating radar which could be any kind of anomaly, and because the tribespeople won't let the ground be excavated, we have no idea if there are 200 child graves or 60 child graves or 50 gopher holes.
Which is not what you originally said about it not mattering if it was true or not. Suppose Dave breaks Andy's nose because Tom said "Hey, Andy insulted your wife" but Tom is lying because he wants to get Andy in trouble. Is that okay, then? Is Andy still the bad guy?
I want the truth to come out. If there are 200 graves there, I want that to be known. But someone claiming "There are 200 graves but no you can't check, just believe us" isn't good enough when it comes to a claim like this.
Because there have been similar claims of wrong-doing which turned out to be false and which got the credulous into trouble over jumping the gun:
Should I believe the bare word of anyone who claims on here "Psst, shakenvac is a known embezzler and swindler, take it from me, would I lie to you?" and then ostracise you? Wouldn't you like the chance to exonerate your name? Would you find it acceptable if I said "Well my aunt lost a fortune to a swindler, I hate swindlers, so even if it was untrue I think I was still right to splash your name all over social media as a swindler and warn people about you"?
Some are wrong. Evidence is "a sign or indication of something". Grave-sized GPR returns 6ft under the ground is evidence of graves. Is it strong evidence? not really. You want more certainty? I don't blame you. But fundamentally, the truth of those 200 graves makes little difference, because...
It doesnt really matter if Andy insulted Dave's wife on the 13th October 2022 when we know he has done so every other day for the last 3 years. We know what we need to about Andy's big mouth.
It doesn't really matter if Sir Cliff sexually assaulted man X if it's already proven that he assaulted 24 other men*. We know what we need to about Sir Cliff's perversions.
It doesnt really matter if you accuse me of being a swindler with little basis if I am known and proven to have swindled 50 people. We know what we need to about my swindling tendancies.
And it doesnt really matter whether it was 50 or 200 children died in Kamloops if it is already known that thousands of children were kidnapped, abused, had their identity erased, and ultimately died of neglect by the Church. We know what we need to about the crimes of the Church.
*I know this isn't true, I'm making a point.
Oh holy crap. Ever heard of a thing called "middens"? By your logic, that means that indications of middens are really graves, and it's okay to burn down the buildings of the people who dug those middens because fuck evidence and proof and truth.
At this point, I don't even know how to argue this with you. You seem to be standing firm that you don't care if it's all lies, because it's all in the cause of bashing the Catholic Church. Well, goodnight, goodbye, and good luck to you, and I hope to God you never get into a court case where your fate will be decided on "I don't care what the evidence says, this guy looks sketchy so I say he's guilty and he should go to jail for ten years".
If you want to argue it's all lies, then do so. You are arguing that the 200 graves are lies. Those 200 graves are not "all". they are ~1% of the enormity of the Residential Schools System, for which the church bears serious responsibility, and you have at no point indicated that you dispute the other 99%.
Either Dispute the evils of the Residential Schools, or admit that the Church fucked up.
So it's not about dead bodies, you're engaging in good old-fashioned The Church Is Bad.
Are you protesting the Residential School System in Australia as well? Or the US native reservations? Because the Catholic Church wasn't involved with those.
My own view on this is that the other churches are let off the hook because they've fallen in line with the Zeitgeist and do what they're told around sexual matters, from divorce to LGBT rights. The Catholic Church is the remaining large Western church which officially teaches "no" on the social liberalism, so it's the number one target for white progressives who don't care about the little Indians but do care about "how dare they say that fornication is a sin?"
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I got this in the volunteer-mod queue, and I rated it Neutral. I think your post is bad, but it's bad in a "downvote" sense rather than a "ban" sense i.e. I think you're advocating something that's bad and destructive to society, but I don't think the way in which you're advocating it is especially destructive to this community.
The thing you appear to be advocating is some kind of epistemic hell in which lies are okay if they have the correct political results, and truth-telling is bad if it undermines those results. I think that this burns the commons; it cannot be universalised because common knowledge that the media are lying political liars would zero out the ability of the media to affect politics while also removing the capability to inform the populace of important true things.
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Go figure that despite the apparent mountains of evidence of the Church's sadism and neglect, with confirmed body piles and graves attesting to it, the one story that became international news, drew commentary from the highest levels of Canadian politics, and prompted the very public lowering of national flags in solemn condemnation, might just be a load of bullshit.
Funny that. Is there nothing of interest to mine from this phenomenon? Are you comfortable with that kind of behavioral algorithm being rared to let rip when it comes to a target you have more sympathy for?
This is my same problem with the discourse over policing of minorities in the US. With all the potential cases that could be used as a solid starting point for discussion, why do most of the examples end up looking false, more complicated than their initial appearances indicate, or are fucky in some other way? Meanwhile, videos of black officers joyously beating a kid to death runs the news for about a week and I doubt anybody remembers his name since.
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The truth always matters.
It matters a lot if 50 or 200 children died in Kamloops of natural causes, and not in greater numbers than would have happened elsewhere, or if they died because they were starved, abused, or murdered. The first would be a tragedy and you can certainly condemn the church for taking them from their homes in the first place, but claiming that the people who ran the schools were literally mass-murdering children is a crime of much greater enormity. "The Church did bad and misguided things in the past in less enlightened times" is not the same as "The Church conspired to commit genocide out of sheer evilness." You don't get to claim the latter (and use it to justify retribution) and then say it doesn't really matter which is true.
I never said it didn't. I said it makes little difference. If you'll forgive the invoking of Godwin's law, we could have a spirited debate over whether it was 2000 or 4000 jews were shot in some nameless polish town in 1940. While the truth of that question would matter in some sense, the conclusion wouldn't change the nature of the Holocaust, nor the guilt of the Nazis. Same principle.
Not something that I ever claimed.
Also not something that I ever claimed.
Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the death rates in the Residential Schools were no worse than in tribal communities, and the abuse meted out in these Schools was hugely overstated, and that the Church only had the best interests of these poor ignorant savages in their hearts, and every single death was dutifully recorded with a heavy heart and a good Christian burial... Even if we accept all that, the Church was still instrumental in stealing these children away from their parents and expunging their culture and destroying their identities and burying them hundreds of miles from their homes when they died. That alone makes me have zero sympathy for the Church having a handful of cases of arson on their hands.
I'm not saying the arson justified per se, grievance resolution by arson is no way to run a society. I'm just saying I get it. If Scientologists had spirited away my great uncle when he was 6 and buried him in one of their godforsaken compounds I'd probably want to burn down a few buildings too.
Are you as sympathetic to burning down random buildings owned by indigenous Canadians? After all, their ancestors certainly genocided conquered tribes a bunch of times throughout their history and prehistory.
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The sins (genocide) you describe are the sins of every settler society, everywhere (Canada, USA, Australia). In the Canadian instance the government directed the Churches to run these institutions, similar to how Churches were directed to run orphanages and hospitals. The government lacked the efficacy to administer social programs and delegated it to charitable institutions that they could skimp on funding. I feel you are focusing on the churches when if the government had tasked these schools with any other group in these settler societies at this time I find it difficult to believe the exact same crimes would have not occurred. The counterfactual I have mind being some Montreal Atheistic 1920s society given the same task and resources would also have the same native assimilation mindset (it infects the society at large) and their school would have had the same lack of funding, leading to the exact same problems, but the curriculum would have no Theology and more Philosophy.
The Churches set up these schools because the government told to. I think you are accepting the sleight of hand that the Churches are somehow uniquely to blame when the ENTIRE society was broadly convinced of the Imperialistic mindset that created the milieu for these crimes. The Churches were the apparatus to accomplish the aims of the larger settler society, Residential schools were Canadian government policy. The Canadian settler descended people wanted this at that time.
So the while Churches are definitely not innocent, the emphasis on their role and crimes should not diminish the guilt of the government and wider settler society that willed this to happen.
If the Church arson cases don't deserve sympathy, are all Canadian government buildings also fair targets for such treatment? If individuals not connected directly to the crimes are able to be antagonized are members of broad social groups (ie White Canadians) also able to be antagonized?
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“I'm not saying the arson justified per se, grievance resolution by arson is no way to run a society. I'm just saying I get it. If Scientologists had spirited away my great uncle when he was 6 and buried him in one of their godforsaken compounds I'd probably want to burn down a few buildings too.”
I’d say this is argument that is safe to just drop. The problem is the people with their Church’s being burned down aren’t the people who ran the residential schools. Uninvolved people are being hurt. And in general only bad things come from holding people guilty of their ancestors or weakly related people.
And the thing is many people don’t give the same understanding. Trudeau talks about these residence school but when was he compassionate to truckers who had an actual grievance directly from him. Or the right justifies 1/6 because well the FBI did interfere in the election and they were harmed. And I’ll take that justification often. I’m not even sure if the people who did the arson are people who had a connection to harm or more of an antifa group.
There is probably some long posts someone could do on Mexico and similar issues. Where I think even many on the left would need to admit Christian culture was better than Mayan culture. And where the natives and the westerners did a fairly good job of creating one people.
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Well, no, it's not, because in this case we really are disputing the truth of what actually happened, not just quibbling over numbers.
Sure, most people agree that the residential schools were a bad idea.
Since you're so fond of analogies, here's another one: we all (sigma a few contrarians) agree slavery was a bad thing. Your argument is equivalent to saying "Hey, how about that time the U.S. Army rounded up black people in every town in the South and gunned them all down and buried them in mass graves by the side of the road?" And in response to "Really, do you have any evidence this actually happened?" you are going straight to "Well, it doesn't matter so long as we know that at least once the U.S. Army probably killed some black people, and anyway, what are you, a slavery apologist?"
And hopefully you'd go to prison for a very long time if you acted on that desire.
Though of course, hopefully the Scientologists had gone to prison as well. If they hadn't, I'd be getting increasingly sympathetic to the building-burners.
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Can you clearly state what you think the Church did bad? Kid dying of disease and being buried doesn’t strike me as bad. The mass grave thing seems to be a desire to associate this with far worse things. Are you accusing the church of executions? Otherwise why does this matter.
Complicit in the abduction of children by the Canadian Government, subjected them to emotional and physical abuse, often looked after them pretty poorly, and as a result many children died of preventable diseases. and of course, the whole point of the exercise was to expunge their culture from them. Which is, uh, bad.
I mean, is it really that difficult to see where the natives are coming from?
I think if I kidnapped your child, took him half a world away to learn Swahili and African culture and have that dumb Christianity beaten out of him, and then sent you a letter saying 'Sorry, young Mswati (that was his new name) died of malaria.' I think you'd probably feel a tad aggrieved.
We do this every single day in America. What do you think schools in America do? Expunge bad culture teach good culture. The deaths honestly just sound like poor people deaths.
I’m fairly certain the people upset about this incident are the same people shoving pride and blm flags down people’s throats. The problem here just seems to be Christians = bad.
I have no issue with teaching poor people higher culture. Perhaps, I’m not being fair here but I don’t see anything obviously wrong with taking an outgroup and trying to incorporate them into your civilization.
Whether the conditions were particularly bad I don’t know. Would take a lot of study to differentiate.
We used to that. Do you have children in school? We're homeschooling, now.
The view now is that previous attempts to inculcate native peoples with the mindset and skills necessary for survival in western civilization is genocide.
I don't know what definition of genocide was available to them at the time.
I suspect the alternative was a more immediate form of genocide.
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They weren't Poor People deaths though were they? They were Ward of the Church deaths. When you steal children away from their parents you get to take responsibility for what happens to them.
it was hardly """just""" that. If they had managed to do so without kidnapping, abuse, beatings, and deaths by neglect they'd have far less of a case to answer today, eh?
Bad compared to conditions back at the tribe? Probably unknowable. They were certainly worse than they could have been. And like I said, when you steal children away from their parents you get to take responsibility for what happens to them. If you find that too burdensome feel free to not do it. Or engage in apologism for those that did.
I disagree. I don’t think you would be responsible for every death. You would have resources and technology level of the time and place. I would agree they are responsible for deaths from beatings (murder is a crime) or from neglect (if they withheld food). I’m not entirely sure of the exact time period for this but if they died of 19th century diseases or I believe it included the time period of the Spanish flu (which did kill younger people) then they were not responsible.
There is a bit of cultural relativism going on here. I don’t believe that is true and we have forgotten this. I think it’s a good thing to provide these children with a better education. Something feels wrong to me with NOT trying to educate these kids because of who their parents were.
Certainly if this happened today you would have a standard of basically zero deaths. But that is because we solved a lot of disease.
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Well, there you have it. You don't even know if these schools had worse or better conditions for the children than they would have had at home, yet you're willing to blame the church for the deaths.
Perfection is never an option nor a reasonable standard.
OK, suppose the state finds a cult who rape their children and sacrifice half of them to dark gods on their 16th birthday. The state takes all the children away to a group home, where a few of them die of ordinary accidents. Do you blame the state? It's the same principle.
'better' is always an option. 'better than shit' is certainly a reasonable standard.
I would disagree; constraints exist. And for obvious reasons, it cannot be a standard.
"Shit" here is rather poorly defined. You've already admitted that you don't know if the conditions the children were subject to were better or worse than they would have had at home.
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