Intellectual Honesty is a crime in any Totalitarian Country

The title of this post is not mine.  It is a quote from George Orwell.  Orwell, probably more than any other author, tried to warn us about what was coming if we continue down the same path.  We did not listen and now telling the truth is a crime.  In Canada telling the truth is quickly becoming the only criminal offense that carries any punishment.

You don’t even need to go to court to be found guilty.  A BC teacher just lost his job for telling the truth about residential schools.  Residential schools were boarding schools for native children run usually by churches at the request of the Canadian government.  The Canadian government was concerned that the natives were not assimilating and were not sending their children to school.  They rightfully identified this to be a serious future problem and their solution was residential schools.

Residential schools are a political hot button in Canada and as such no one is allowed to tell the truth about residential schools.  Every Canadian is obligated to believe that the government seized any native child they could find and confined them in residential schools where they were abused and eventually killed.

The problem with that narrative is that it is almost completely a lie.  I know this because I did my own research.  When residential schools first hit the news I was working in a remote area of northern BC.  It was a camp job and one of the cooks in the camp was native.  When the media started publishing stories of abuse our cook told me a very different story.

The cook is metis.  Metis is a strange definition in Canada.  Metis are the children of white fur traders and their native brides.  When the treaties were signed people had to declare if they were Native or Metis.  Canada was so woke more than 100 years ago that you got to pick your race.  Anyone who declared themselves to be Metis was not considered native even if they had more native blood than people who declared themselves to be native.

Metis are not covered by the treaties and usually do not live on the reserves.  Metis were not eligible to send their children to residential schools.  The cook told me that she was jealous when all of her friends from the reserve got to go to the residential school when she could not.  This statement was completely at odds with what the media was telling me (go figure).  Why would our cook want to go to the residential school when she saw her friends forcefully seized only to return later in a body bag?  Obviously her friends returned every summer and told her what the schools were like.

This serious disconnect motivated me to do my own research.  I found once again that the media was telling half-truths.  Some children were seized by the government but these were children were removed for neglect.  Most native children attended residential schools because their parents signed consent forms.  I don’t know if this involved coercion or if it was just concerned parents who wanted their children to get an education.

“It is usually known that newspapers do not say the truth, but it is also known that they cannot tell whoppers.”

George Orwell

It is also true that more than 3000 children died in the residential schools.  But this was over 130 years and the BC teacher is absolutely correct, almost all of them died of disease.  The big killer was tuberculosis (TB).  TB was not just a problem in residential schools.  It was endemic and killed children everywhere in Canada during this period.  There is no reason to believe that more children died in the schools than would have died back home on the reserve.

The teacher, Jim McMurtry, was telling the truth and the principal knows that.  He was fired anyway because as a Canadian teacher it is not his job to teach students the truth.

 “Regardless of his intent he left students with the impression some or all of the deaths could be contributed [sic] to ‘natural causes’ and that the deaths could not be called murder or cultural genocide,” the documents said. His comments were “contrary to the school’s message of condolences and reconciliation.”

Canadian public schools are not in the business of education.  Their mandate is indoctrination.  If schools start prioritizing truth Justin Trudeau and his clown car cabinet will never be elected again.

Lies about the residential schools are so powerful that even when they are disproven they persist.  A few years ago a group announced that ground penetrating radar had identified a mass grave on the grounds of the former residential school in Kamloops BC.  The media hyped this as proof of genocide.  Archeologists were hired to exhume and identify the bodies so that they could be returned to their families.  When the “grave” was dug up no bodies were found.  The ground penetrating radar operators admitted what they saw was likely tree roots.

This was just another media hyped lie that was quickly glossed over.  The mass grave was fictions yet that did not stop a native activist from invoking it during his criminal contempt trial.  His defense was that he could not be guilty because he helped plant 215 trees to memorialize the 215 fictitious victims of the Kamloops School.  Our collective white guilt was supposed to be so great that we could not convict him of any crime.

I was not surprised that a criminal would lie to avoid punishment.  I was, however, surprised that the judge would not let him get away with it.  The judge cut him off stating that no bodies were found but this is where the story becomes quintessential Canadian.  The media did not know how to cover a case where the truth was told in a Canadian court room.  I would guess that they discussed not covering it at all but in the end they decided to start the story with a disclaimer.

CONTENT WARNING: This story has content about the Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS). Please read with care.

The media warned Canadians that they were about to be exposed to the truth because they know how unsettling the truth can be to most Canadians.

Some abuse undoubtedly occurred in the residential schools.  For 130 years we ran a system were poor children were separated from their parents.  Parents who were unable to check in on them.  A system like this is bound to attract some very undesirable people.  But the abuse was obviously not wide spread or systematic.  If it was Natives would never have signed consent forms.  In the end residential schools were probably the wrong thing done for the right reasons but we are not allowed to have an honest conversation about that.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.

George Orwell

We are not allowed to have honest conversation about anything in Canada.  Canada is a tower of lies.  Justin Trudeau’s Canada takes lies to a ridiculously extent.  We now live in a country where teachers are fired for telling the truth and disclaimers have to be put on any accidental truthful disclosures by judiciary.  2 plus 2 will always equal 4 but in Canada it is illegal to say that.  Canada is no longer free.  Canadians have been imprisoned by lies and our captor is the king lies.