Freedom to Read
It’s common knowledge, in western democracies, that banning and burning books, and shaming, beating or burning those who read them, signals a nation’s descent into anarchy or tyranny. Book-burning was a common practice of the German Nazi party. Mao’s Red Guards featured it during the Cultural Revolution. And the Khmer Rouge destroyed just about every piece of print material in Cambodia. Anyone in these countries caught with books on the blacklist, or (in Cambodia) anyone caught with any book at all, was in trouble. A book is an old and perfect symbol of free speech, which is essential to democracy, and hated by tyrants and mobs. Books harm no one in themselves, though they can be used to do harm. They are as innocent as stones, and full of useful information for those who know how to read them.
The most popular book in most western democracies is the Bible. It is an extremely hurtful book, spewing hatred for Egyptians, Philistines, Babylonians and other neighbours of the Israelites, even Samaritans. It is sexist and homophobic. Various interpretations of the Bible led to the crusades, the Inquisition, a hundred years of civil war between Protestants and Catholics, and the persecution of God’s chosen people. Millions upon millions died.
Yet Bibles are in the libraries of many citizens of democracies, and the contents of the Bible are read and discussed endlessly, usually without the distraction of marches, protests, and emotive expressions of hurt. This is because liberal humanists, those fifth-columnists of democracy, long ago decided that it was a mistake to try to either ban the bible or force it on people. It was best to let people read and decide for themselves.
Other books that have caused offense and civic unrest over the centuries are similarly accepted: Newton’s Principia (hated by radical feminists), Darwin’s Evolution of the Species (hated by creationists) Jefferson’s, Madison’s et al Constitution of the US (hated by Black Lives Matter and fascists), Marx’s Das Capital, hated by capitalists and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Hitler’s Mein Kampf (hated by everyone but white supremacists), D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (hated by the Moral Majority, who self-identified as Christians), and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (hated by the Ayatollah Khomeini, millions of Muslims, and Michael Ondaatje).
While democracy may have decided to protect books as a matter of self-defence, it has found that decision hard to stick with. A perhaps ludicrously local, but still instructive, example of this difficulty concerns the hapless mayor of the town of Quesnel, in BC’s central interior. He, Ron Paull, is presently being censured by his constituency for reading and talking about a book.
The news was broken by Frank Peebles, editor of the Quesnel Observer:
The outcry centred on the book Grave Error, a collection of curated essays that combine to form a theme of belittling residential school atrocities. This book was being actively distributed by Paull and his wife Pat Morton, including attempts to refer it to other elected officials, as well as School District 28.
Here, in more detail, is what happened. Paull’s wife, Pat Morton, ordered Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools) from Amazon. She read it, and recommended it to friends and her husband. Leaders of the local Lhtako Dene Nation objected, calling the book “hate literature,” and city councillors informed the Mayor that they agreed. They censured him, “for his role in jeopardizing Indigenous relations.” It seems, though, that they cannot legally depose him. On being elected, he assumes certain duties by law, duties that he has carried out faithfully. But he has been booted from the Cariboo Regional District as the city’s representative, and some committees refuse to sit in his presence. Also, an important part of his constituency, the Lhtako, refuse to deal with him. The counsellors, arguing that he is pretty much useless now, are openly after his resignation.
As fellow readers, with tons of books in our possession including all the troublesome ones listed above, we’d like to speak in support of the mayor and his inquisitive wife. It doesn’t matter to us whether Grave Error is important or not. As a book, it is sacrosanct. However, we have to say that the mayor and his wife have actually shown good taste in their reading: Grave Error is important, if only for the history it recounts and the facts it presents and carefully documents.
The essays in the book do not, as Peebles says, “combine to form a theme of belittling residential school atrocities,” whatever that means. Rather, they look for proof that any such atrocities occurred. Peebles might have been stirred, in the case of Grave Error, to step out of his reporting into his editorial role because the book is mainly concerned with attacking people like him. The media are not doing what they’re supposed to do, demanding the facts. They are instead helping to stir up “frenzied mass departures from common sense and rational thinking.”
One of the ironies of the mayor’s situation is that it proves the book’s main point. People are going crazy over what could turn out to be a non-issue, or a minor one.
The book is valuable because it provides historical details on the origins and the history of residential schools; it describes their strengths and weaknesses; it explains their organization; it goes over the claims of various First-Nations individuals who were harmed by them as well as the memories of those who found them good; it describes the process (and the limitations of the process) by which the graves that evidently surround them were discovered; it describes the origin and structure, and recounts the activities, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was set up by government to investigate the schools; and (and this is important) it quotes and cites a great number of sources on these and other matters so that interested readers can check things out for themselves.
With all this, Grave Error is also, as Peebles hints, obnoxious. It does, like Peebles, editorialize on the subject. It participates in the familiar discourse of contemporary democratic debate, revealing a conservative bias. Reasonable citizens (in particular, in our opinion, people who read widely) may sometimes wish such debate and commentary were less founded on conspiracy theories and ad populum arguments, but that too is accepted and protected.
People on the right tend to believe in conspiracies like the “deep state,” populated by latté-sucking, over-educated, socialistic, woke elites who congregate in pizza shops where they abuse children. People on the left counter with conspiracies like the “military-industrial” complex, populated by fascistic, money-bag, patriarchal elites who congregate in isolated mansions where they have sex with underage girls. In some, very limited, cases, these conspiracies have been found to be true.
For the writers of Grave Error, the “hysteria” surrounding the residential schools is the result of “woke-ism.”
The book gets to this argument early, on p. 21, in connection establishing whether or not there actually are graves around the Kamloops residential school. Sarah Beaulieu, the SFU anthropologist who handled the ground-penetrating radar, spoke only about “probable burials,” “targets of interest,” and “multiple signatures that present like burials.” She deviated from science to talk about a human tooth found in the vicinity — the tooth soon proven to not be human — and a human rib said to have been found there but packed off by an unidentified tourist. Finally, she reiterated the testimony of local elders to the effect that “children as young as six years old were awakened in the night to dig holes for burials.”
Only when pressured, by the RCMP, who are legally required to investigate any claims of murder, torture, child abuse, mysterious deaths and undocumented human remains, did she state clearly that digging up corpses would be the only real evidence of actual graves. At that point her department ordered her, along with all of its members, to shut up. The book comments:
These constraints [of the SFU department] on academic discussion are not just pertinent to the discipline of archaeology. They are linked to wider developments in the academy, which concern how universities have been captured by what Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay call “reified postmodernism (known colloquially as “woke-ism).”
Postmodernism, the academic theory to which Grave Error attributes the strange actions of Beaulieu and her department, is an abstruse academic theory. But “woke-ism” is familiar to millions of North Americans. It’s connected to Black Lives Matter, a campus movement that wants people to wake up about slavery, racism, and police brutality, and that regards western culture as systemically racist. BLM protests quickly broke out of the ivory tower and incorporated other victim-causes; western culture was not just racist but systemically sexist, classist, homophobic, and prejudiced against the disabled, sick and fat-accepting. One of BLM’s guiding principles is solidarity with the indigenous peoples of “Turtle Island.”
The right (with which the publishers of the book and all its writers are openly affiliated) quickly attached the term “left” to the woke, and began using the term in a pejorative way. To the right, “the woke” indicates people who are obsessed to the point of madness with the problems of victims and the politics of identity. The woke, as the right sees them, hope to solve the problems of poor people, women and other victims by toppling statues of the glorious dead, lobbying and protesting to defund police, insisting on the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools, redacting Dr. Suess, boycotting the showing of Woody Allen movies and the speeches of Jordan Peterson, banning the plays of Shakespeare in schools or at least attaching “trigger warnings” to them so that students can flee the classroom for the safe room where counselling and distraction (Lego and play-dough) are available.
So, for the writers of this book, it is the frenzied woke who, in the case of the residential schools, accept the fact, without any evidence but victim testimony, that they were a plot by John A. Macdonald to destroy indigenous cultures. They accept this fact even though indigenous leaders themselves demanded the schools be included in treaties so that their children could learn to speak English or French and study the history and science of the settlers. The woke believe that all residential school students were forcibly removed from their parents, even though RCMP reports that a miniscule number of them actually were. The woke believe that there are thousands of unmarked graves, even mass graves, surrounding the schools, even though Beaulieu admitted that there was no actual evidence of this. The woke accept the accusation of government-inflicted genocide, even though the International Criminal Court rejected the residential-school case pending real evidence.
Finally, the woke are willing, in their frenzy, to betray rule of law and freedom of speech. Woke politicians set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) named for Nelson Mandela’s, but that commission is more of a Wayne-and-Schuster parody. The leaders of the Canadian committee are almost entirely indigenous, and so do not represent the sides to be reconciled as Mandela’s did. No power was granted to subpoena witnesses — whereby any surviving perpetrators of the murders, genocide, scientific experiments, and tortures said to have happened in the schools would be forced to face any surviving students (and vice-versa), and be cross-examined. Standard law-court procedures for collecting testimony and establishing truth were required in South Africa, but not in Canada. Indeed, the book suggests that the RCMP were ordered, by the Prime Minister (Justin Trudeau) to back off their investigation of accusations murders and rumours of undocumented corpses, and leave that investigation to the TRC and local band councils. They decided not to exhume. Mandela’s committee did not exhume corpses, but kept a careful record of the dead and, after the committee wound up its deliberations, police investigations continued with mass graves being opened so that forensic anthropologists can study the corpses to determine identity and cause of death.
For Grave Error, the TRC is a giant and expensive scam. Its massive $60-million, 3500-page report is said to be a compendium of mere hearsay, and its summary (as some independent legal experts have actually said) is biased, peppered with unsupported generalizations and full of “incendiary claims that go well beyond the evidence.”
There are, of course, contradictions in the book’s explanation of the woke’s residential-school frenzy. If the woke are left, what’s Stephen Harper (and his government and supporters) doing among them, apologizing for the school atrocities and paying out reparations? If the indigenous peoples are swept up in the woke frenzy, crying about abuse, lost culture, and forced assimilation, and parading their pain, how can they be said at the same time to be capitalizing on the issue? Are the woke smarter than the book makes them out to be? If the intentions of the Macdonald government that set up the schools, and subsequent governments of all stripes that funded and monitored them, were good, why can’t the intentions of the governments that set up the TRC also be good?
It is characteristic of political debate that the two sides express contempt for one another, and claim for themselves the mantle of “common sense.” The book is condescending in this way, not acknowledging the stresses on politicians who are paid to act, not just think, and who in acting must reconcile disagreeing factions in difficult situations. Also not accepting the struggles of First Nations, who clearly are victims of conquest, and who present a convincing case for actually having been victimized.
Here’s Conrad Black, affirming the need for residential schools without, he seems to think, condescension:
There was undoubtedly a good deal of condescension and implicit disparagement of the absence of a written language in the rudimentary native cultures and of their languishing in a Stione Age economy as the time of the arrival of Europeans . . . . But official intentions were benign.
If Peebles had been able to take a cursory look at the book, in the course of covering the protest parades with their drumming and chanting, and the long and packed municipal meetings with their outrage, testimonials of abuse and recounting of stories of torture, murder and genocide, he may have come across Black’s statement in the book’s preface, and experienced a justifiable disgust.
This is no reason to summarily pan the book, though, without at the same time putting in an admiring word for the mayor — a politician who takes issues seriously enough to actually read about them.
