02/04/2022
Earlier: The Fulford File: Fake News Frenzy — Remember the Great Black Church Burning Hoax?
Jared Taylor has a video, with transcript and image called Kamloops: Greatest Hate Hoax Ever? on Amren.com.
What he’s saying is that the whole story of the Canadian Residential Schools (free boarding schools for Indian children from isolated communities in the 19th and 20th centuries) is a lie.
There were no "mass graves" and no particularly large mass deaths.
This is one of the more interesting narrative collapses I’ve seen.
The 200 body-sized "mass grave" at a former Native Residential School was detected by LIDAR-style techniques that likely just found tree roots. "Zero" actual bodies have been unearthed … https://t.co/QC7Wv4cdh3
— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) January 17, 2022
Many Indians old enough to have gone to these schools in the 20th century enjoyed them. Declan Leary covered the same ground in the American Conservative in July of 2021, pointing out that while we knew some children died at school, this was a false narrative:
In recent weeks, nine Canadian churches, both Catholic and Anglican, have been subjected to arson attacks. Many more have been otherwise vandalized to varying degrees. The popular narrative, broadcast by an astonishingly credulous media, is that previously unknown mass graves of children were discovered just this summer on the grounds of Indian residential schools and, in a rash of grief and righteous anger, indigenous protestors swept across the nation desecrating churches.
It is very important to note that the entire story is made up. First, we have always known that many children died in the residential schools, which were active through the 19th and 20th centuries. Child mortality was relatively high during that period to begin with; Indian mortality overall was astronomically high; and the Church-run schools for native children were systemically underfunded by the government, resulting in subpar facilities and inadequate medical care. Second, the sites almost certainly include the graves of Christian adults from the neighboring communities, as Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation admitted with respect to the Marieval Indian Residential School, where an estimated 751 burials were detected by radar last month. The “mass graves” of public hysteria are, in fact, the ordered and intentional burial sites of people we always knew were dead, and who died of more or less natural causes. In more literate times, we might have called that a cemetery.
People die, and when they die, you put them in the ground. There is nothing inherently scandalous about this.
[The Meaning of the Native Graves They're good, actually, July 8, 2021]
See, for a typical reaction, The American Conservative Does the Unthinkable and Defends the Unmarked Indigenous Graves as ‘Good, Actually,’ Relevant, July 9, 2021. Leary isn’t defending people dying, he’s defending free compulsory education for Indians. In the same period, fee-paying English boarding schools — the model for Hogwarts — used to suffer cholera epidemics.
If you've ever read Kipling’s Stalky & Co., based on Kipling’s real-life boarding school, you may remember the headmaster being cheered, much against his will, by the whole school for risking his life to save a boy from diphtheria, after which he has to social distance.
The whole imaginary controversy has the same "blood libel" aspect as the false narrative of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and more particularly, the "Black Church Burning" hoax of the 90s.
Black reporter Gary Fields, right, who spent his career writing about racial issues, wrote a number of stories about black churches that had caught fire, and caused a national panic.
Michelle Malkin described this in 2015 as:
the embarrassing 1996 media malpractice of former USA Today reporter Gary Fields, who manufactured a purported epidemic of racist church-burnings in the South with 61 hysterical stories. A typical and familiar headline: “Arson at Black Churches Echoes Bigotry of Past.” The NAACP jumped onboard and demanded that then-Attorney General Janet Reno investigate. President Clinton fanned the flames; panels were formed; federal spending programs were passed. But a year later, Fields’ own paper was forced to admit that “analysis of the 64 fires since 1995 shows only four can be conclusively shown to be racially motivated.”
Several of the crimes had been committed by black suspects; a significant number of the black churches were in fact white churches; and the Chicken Littles had obscured numerous complex motives including mental illness, vandalism and concealment of theft.
The hoax was exposed by conservative science journalist Michael Fumento:
Who was burning down black churches?
Steve Sailer explained in a 2013 post
white-racists-are-burning-down-black-churches-in-Alabama quasi-hoax that was a huge respectable story in the 1990s? (What happened then was this: there are a lot of churches in America, many of them closed most of the week, more than a few of them more or less abandoned. And every year hundreds of churches across the country catch fire, more than a few due to arson. Whether this arson is for more functional reasons [e.g., nobody around most of the time], or because churches attract firebugs for psychological reasons [flames of hell?], or because some financially failing ministers unleash a little Protestant Lightning to collect fire insurance, is unknown. What happened was that the national media started paying selective attention to black churches being subject to arson, and soon we had a national crisis on our hands.
What we’re talking about is black dysfunction being mistaken for white racism. Black churches are more likely to be poorer, thus less likely to have sprinklers. (The best thing you can do to protect your own church from fire is install sprinklers.)
They’re also in black neighborhoods, which means black teenagers. And finally, if they have black pastors and congregations, they’re more likely to commit arson fraud — which is what Steve meant by the expression "Protestant lightning" [Pastor, others arrested in arson, Amarillo Globe News, November 8, 1999].
But no one who fell for the black church burning hoax lost their job, and neither did the black reporter who pushed it.
No one who fell for the imaginary Kamloops graves will lose their jobs, and if they catch the people who burned down Canadian churches, they'll be treated leniently, because it’s the opposite of what liberals call a hate crime — because it’s directed against white Christians.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.