The Orange Tide and the Horrors Beneath Its Surface
The Orwellian non-truth behind the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation
By Michael Melanson
Yesterday was Sept. 30th, 2022, the second annual National Day of Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. It's a day when we see little of the former and none of the latter.
Awash in orange-soaked sentiment from coast to coast to coast Canadians are being asked to 'honour the Survivors' and 'remember the children who never returned home.' Long before then Justice Murray Sinclair steered the Truth and Reconciliation Commission towards being a maudlin pantomime of South Africa's original effort, the notion was circulating that the Indian Residential Schools were some kind of genocide of which living former students were 'Survivors' in a conspicuous attempt to evoke analogies to the Holocaust.
However Canada's, or rather, Sinclair's TRC summed up the residential schools as 'cultural genocide.' There had always been a wish in certain activist circles to indict Canada of unqualified genocide; it was implicit in appropriating the language of the Holocaust. When it was reported on May 27, 2021 that the human remains of 215 children had been found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, proponents moved closer to realizing their wish. Millions of dollars were soon handed out by the Trudeau government for First Nations to conduct their own searches. To date, no bodies have been found by which circumstance Trudeau hasn't suffered accounting for why he let private citizens do their own investigation of what are alleged to be crime scenes.
If you thought the activists, legacy media or politicians would adjust the Truth to the established facts to date, you would be wrong. The genocide narrative spawned a wave of activism that has taken on a life of its own and the freelance acolytes of this political religion have only entrenched their beliefs with even greater hostility to critical examination.
“And so this is very much a moment to reflect,” declares an editorial in today's Winnipeg Free Press, “on the ongoing legacy and intergenerational impact of Canada’s residential school program, and on what needs to be done, by individuals and by society as a whole, to address ongoing denialism regarding residential schools’ impact and advance the necessary process of truth and reconciliation.”
In a further appropriation of the Holocaust anyone who questions any part of the 'impact' or does anything that can be construed as impeding the advancement of truth and reconciliation is now labeled a 'denialist.' If you are presently thinking what you are reading is valid, you are engaging in denialism. What measures might be taken to “address ongoing denialism” are left to the readers' imagination but Orwell's “1984” offers insights. When hallucinatory moralism meets statism, nightmares enter the waking world.
“Drive by an elementary school playground this week if you still question the importance of the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation (note how the Day easily grew to a week),” Niigaan Sinclair gushes triumphantly in the same newspaper. “There, for all to see, are hundreds of kids from all races playing, arguing, and working together — united in orange.”
Feel good about children being taught that Canada committed a genocide. Do not feel any alarm that your children have their respective races. As someone who grew up in a public school system when human equality informed the pedagogy, the return of the popular belief in different races is like hearing the ghost of Hitler say, “I told you so.”
“This isn’t to say this week is easy for Canadians” coos Sinclair. “It’s a time when a lot of misperceptions are corrected and challenging ideas enter. Sometimes this leads to guilt, denial or sadness.”
In 1984, Big Brother wasn't oblivious to the irony of its statements. What Sinclair and the Editors of the Winnipeg Free Press are saying today is much more terrifying in their blindness to their zeal. By reading this, did you just commit a thought-crime?
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Thanks for reading. For more from Michael Melanson read A Funny Thing Happened on the way to The Hague (substack.com)
Denialists may very likely assume the same honored position that suspect communists did during the Red Scare in the US during the 1950s. During the hearings those targeted were asked, "are you now or have you ever been a communist?" Substitute "denialist" for communist, then you get the picture. Goethe once famously said, "there is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." The current debacle we now find ourselves in, proves him right.
Another very articulate and informative article. Thanks for sharing.
Well done. I tried to post this comment yesterday online with the National Post and it was censored.
Day of the new narrative is almost upon us and as some choose to believe in the 'orange tide' of nebulous prognostication it falls to others to stay focused on the facts at hand. There was NO "genocide" in Canada, there are NO unmarked graves or evidence beyond hearsay, there is NO criminal investigation of misdeeds nor murder. Canada has no shame beyond apologist revisionism of history set down in the annals of time. We must stand on guard for thee. If fiction, diversion, inequity and exclusion guide your sense of virtue seeking appeasement... no harm done but to yourself. However, if youth are misled again by government ideology and dogma then we are fooled to repeat our blight in perpetuity without honour.