Canada Day, Canada’s Shame

I don’t think throwing cash at damaged people is the answer. It only makes the dysfunction worse. A best fit solution if there is one will require money, but not money as in cash thrown at the damaged to spend on dysfunctional behavior.

Full assimilation is the only answer. Not treating the indigenous as separate and apart from and not wanting to be treated separate and apart from. The indigenous of Canada and all the Americas need to use the Batista Cubans and the Jews as their example on how to exploit the Western system of faux democracy and milk it for all its worth. They can still distinguish themselves as an exclusive subculture within the larger system and use that system to increase their power at the expense of those who don’t belong to power groups.

I do not blame them for not wanting it, but I don’t see any other way for them especially when you consider everything else that’s hitting the fan now and is going to hit the fan in short order.

Of course, I was being sarcastic about learning from the Jews and the Batista Cubans, but the satire has a point. It’s a democracy of power groups, not individuals. If you want power, you have to be part of a mobilized and motivated power group. Otherwise, you’re a casualty.

As far as throwing money at it, I stand by that point and it isn’t satirical sarcasm. Throwing money at dysfunction is a waste of money. The dysfunction must be acknowledged and addressed, otherwise the money just feeds the dysfunction. Like education in America, for example. Making tuition free for all isn’t a viable solution without a total reform or replacement of the current education system. All it would do is just make tuition rates rise even higher and out of control spending by colleges and universities will continue unabated.

Ian is coming up with ideas for alternatives to what we might call mob action to redress some of the grievances and calamities visited on the Native Peoples of Canada — and by extension, the United States of America, as the policies and processes of Native genocide were and are very similar.

1) Stop the genocidal policies and do not allow them to return.
2) Pay abundant compensation to the survivors.
3) Return large tracts of land stolen from the Natives.
4) Demand and get apologies from those institutions (like the Catholic Church) that engineered and implemented genocidal policies toward Natives. (The residential schools were, for example, intentional cultural genocide.)

Assimilation? It’s an interesting issue, one that isn’t easy. Many Natives in Canada are assimilated — and they would rather not be. They would rather be much closer to their tribal cultures, societies and languages than they are. On the other hand, there are plenty of Natives quite happy to assimilate.

The issue is not so much assimilation as it is compulsion: being compelled to assimilate is no good, neither is being compelled to live and die in the wretched conditions and violence of some but not all reservations and reserves.

Ms. Ché is Native and grew up in an almost entirely white suburb in California. When she was a child, she was advised by her mother not to tell anyone she was Native, because in those days it could be terrible for an Indian child among white kids. Just don’t say anything. Her mother was educated through the eighth grade at a Native boarding school which left her deeply scarred the rest of her life, but also provided her with surprising coping skills in a non-Native environment. She was one of the lucky ones in that she didn’t lose her language, nor did she lose most of her Native culture, both of which she passed on to her children. The problem was there was no social or cultural support for Natives in California. The local California tribes supposedly had been exterminated (most were but there were survivors, too.) The various other Native peoples who were relocated to California from other places in the 1940s had very little opportunity to get together with one another for mutual support.

And so coming to New Mexico where Native society is extensive and Native culture is strong was magical for Ms. Ché. It was a whole new world where she found a warm welcome among other Native peoples — and no animosity from Anglos — and where she could flourish as she never could in California.

That’s not to say anything is perfect here. It’s far from that. But I think whatever else happens to redress the crimes committed against Native peoples, it has to start with respect. And in New Mexico, despite many problems, at least there is a consciousness that Natives are owed respect (and a lot else) and mostly get it. Ms. Ché attributes at least some of that to the efforts of a rich white lady from Buffalo: Mabel Dodge Luhan who moved to Taos in the ‘Teens, married an Indian, and advocated for Native rights, land and culture the rest of her life.

It was a start.

Trinity, may I use your phrase ” inculcating the consumerism that creates the slave labor required to amass power and wealth.” ? I think that is the best description I have seen yet of what underlies much of our present predicament.

Ian Welsh, How much can Canada afford? Can Canada afford to do 1. what is right by its’ own native citizens, and 2. continue it’s present generous immigration policies? Are Canada’s communities of immigrants from overseas willing to go along with what you have suggested? I ask, because there is not much evidence of support for native rights in such communities here in the US. Certainly the entire and highly influential Middle European diaspora (Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox) couldn’t care less about native rights, unless to make a rhetorical point once in a while. Has anyone considered the effects of the warming Arctic Ocean? There will surely be increased trade through that ocean, but also a need for more military spending. China has now decided it is a “near Arctic” nation and expects to be included, and, I am afraid, so does our govt. in DC.

@Dan Lynch

The Spanish colonial casta system, but woke! Any proposal for race based reparations inevitably starts to fall apart once you try to get into the specifics of who gets reparations and who doesn’t. Much better to do universal programs that disproportionately help descendants of slaves and the colonized.

This is all entirely academic though. Because few people are actually serious about any of this, in either the US or Canada. The point about reparations talk isn’t to actually seriously consider reparations. It’s to 1. throw a wrench into any up and coming left wing movement by getting it to start infighting over what is a politically divisive and DOA concept (Adolph Reed has written quite a bit about how reparations is cynically deployed in this way), and to 2. virtue signal how enlightened someone is by supporting a thing they know will never come to pass.

My favorite example of number 2 is people opening meetings by ‘acknowledging’ that they’re on colonized land. Okay…and? You gonna do anything more than that? You gonna, like, give your house to some natives or something? Oh, what’s that, no, you aren’t? So you get to make yourself feel better, but the actual material conditions don’t change in the slightest. It’s about virtue signaling, and about doing performative self-abasement while waxing poetic about things like a nation’s ‘original sin’ (in reality something as nebulous as a nation doesn’t have ‘sins’).

@Ché Pasa

I’m gonna be a blunt dick here, but assimilation is the only future any native tribe ultimately has, whether they do it willingly or not. It varies a bit from tribe to tribe, but basically none of these are real, living cultures anymore, and they haven’t been for a long time. They’re husks. That was my reaction when I visited the Black Hills: a culture that largely only lingers on in the form of traditionally manufactured crafts to be sold to tourists.

If anyone has read the Dune books, what ultimately happens to the Fremen, becoming a tiny remnant catering to tourists on little patches of preserved reservation desert, is directly inspired by the natives of Frank Herbert’s home state, specifically the Quileute (he even wrote a now forgotten novel, Soul Catcher, which was highly sympathetic to natives and their plight).

Look to the Ainu of Japan for the ultimate endgame of any indigenous minority. The majority integrate into the dominant society to the point that they completely lose touch with their heritage, and eventually themselves stop even being aware that they are from a minority lineage. A small minority continue to maintain the ‘old ways’ as a weekend hobby to get money from tourists.

Cultures go extinct, it’s simply a thing that happens. Literally no one identifies as a Pict anymore, as an example. Even what language they spoke is forgotten. They weren’t wiped out, modern Scots share a significant amount of DNA with them. They simply stopped being Picts over time.

@Ian Welsh

You can easily afford to do both reparations and subsidies for the rich and corporations. Not saying you should, but lack of money is never an issue for a monetarily sovereign nation. MMT. Where will the money come from? The same place all money comes from: it’s legislated into existence. Have Parliament pass a budget funding reparations. Done.

I remember one year at Indian Market in Santa Fe a man was going around to some of the booths of Pueblo artists asking where they were from. Cochiti. Pojoaque. San Ildefonso. Places the guy never heard of. He said “Do they look like Indian pueblos?” Meaning Taos pueblo, the only one he’d ever seen a picture of.

The people in the booths would say “They’re where we live. They’re pueblos. They look like pueblos.”

“But like Taos?”

“No. They never did. ”

So the man was confused. Pueblos were supposed to look like it. Like Taos. Surely the native culture must have been destroyed if the pueblos didn’t look like Taos.

What he couldn’t wrap his brain around was that they never did.

I do not believe in special rights or special
punishments, but I believe absolutely in equal rights. A citizen is a citizen is a citizen. Citizens if they are not whole should be made and kept whole. It is what we owe each other. It is what we should want for each other. That does not mean lip service to equal opportunities but more ensuring equal outcomes.
The tie that binds us is our citizenship, but that still allows us plenty of space to respect other identities and allocate resources for, not just first people’s but any of us to explore and express them.

Cultures and societies change, adapt, grow, and diminish. They may become overwhelmed by outside cultures, be absorbed by them, though not necessarily assimilated. Think of the British and Irish or Scottish, or Welsh. The dominant culture may dominate, but it isn’t the sole cultural or social benchmark. It’s one of several or many.

In my example of the man confused by the fact that Native Pueblos in New Mexico don’t “look like” Taos Pueblo — except for Taos, of course — the point is that there was always a variety of Native lifestyles, cultures and languages differed, and how the Natives interacted with newcomers (Spanish, Anglo, etc.) differed as well. Too many Americans — and Canadians too — don’t understand that. Natives live in houses today (HUD houses, the bane of Native society, yet they’re liked by many of their residents.) They drive pickups and cars. Use computers and smart phones. Lifestyles aren’t what they were. On the other hand, many tribes have preserved ceremony and language from the long past, and where ceremony has been lost, new versions of old ceremonies and altogether new ceremonies are developed.

Assimilation is possible but not necessary.

Venezuela vs. Norway — an impoverished poorly educated country with virtually no infrastructure compared to a highly developed well educated country. Gee, I wonder which country had the best economy. Economists making the comparison. Gee, I wonder whether the economists found the best outcome from spending the money on the poor or from handing it over to economists. These the guys that bailed out the financial institutions and helped loot the homeowners here in the U.S.? Inquiring minds want to know.

Also, Venezuela’s the target of years-long intense sanctions by the USA, plus outright theft of oil distributor Citgo in the us and its overseas gold holdings by the Bank of England. Comparing Venezuela and Norway is apples to oranges.

Wow. What a 19th Century White Man’s Burden view of What To Do With The Indians.

From the outset of European invasion/settlement (beginning around 1540 in this area) Natives have been able to keep their ways alive while having relations with the newcomers. Sometimes unpleasant ones, sometimes leading to genocide, but look, the Indians are still here; so are the descendants of the newcomers, and they are still interacting as they have from the beginning. A friend from Taos Pueblo said, referring to the Anglos, Spanish and Natives in Northern New Mexico, “You go back four or five generations, and we’re all related.”

Native cultures are not static and never were. They change and grow or decline, pretty much like any other. Casinos are neither unmitigated good nor evil, but they can generate huge amounts of revenue for tribes — which isn’t always a good thing, either, but it’s better than neglect and abuse from the BIA.

There are still serious problems of poverty in Indian Country. Not so much material poverty — though that’s a problem, too — as a kind of despair not solely over what’s been lost but also over the fact that for too many on the rez, there’s no way forward at all. Yes, most Natives don’t live on reservations (or the pueblos in NM). At first they were taken away against their will, but now it’s more a matter of choice. Or something more complicated.

I think we have different ideas of what “assimilation” is. In my view it is loss of all distinctly Native cultural/spiritual ties and adoption of the culture of the dominant society. I know some Natives who are that assimilated. But most of those I know aren’t and don’t want to be.

No, the Irish were not a nation when the British invaded and settled. They were a collection of tribes, living on an island, usually fighting among themselves, and in some ways they still are. If anything, the British invented the nation of Ireland. But the Irish speak English and drink tea and go to the cinema, don’t they? Nevertheless, they’re Irish, not English.

It’s not that different with Native Americans, except that there’s no universal singular identity among them. And that’s more a problem for Anglos than it is for Natives.

There Hugh goes, propagating American imperialist’s slander against China again. There are not millions of Uighur imprisoned in Xinjiang. Even the training center, which never received anything best millions of Uighurs ( there are only 12 million Uighurs total) have been shut down and their trainees released to society. If there were, there would be millions of refugees flooding the neighboring countries, not a handful of xenophobic extremists and US MIC associated fabulists.

Here are the people Hugh supports. People who attacked thousands of Uighurs and Han people’s until recently. Same as the head choppers in Syria and Chechen terrorists who executed civilians in movie theaters. This is what Hugh’s ” humanitarian intervention” supports.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=32huiOc9ruo

https://thegrayzone.com/?s=Uighur

Well said Astrid. The Grayzone have done a great job of tracing most of these claims back to one man, who appears to be a Christian fundamentalist.

It is amazing that for western governments and media that have a track record of consistently lying to sensitise their population against a foreign enemy, is consistently believed.

As for “ We were built on conquest and genocide. I have little patience for constant self-whipping over the fact; it is what is and most people still alive today had nothing to do with it.”.

There is a pattern. The people alive today are responsible for not facing up to the crimes of the past, but also not facing up to the crimes of the present, with many supporting, or at best indifferent to their governments present actions around the world. Most people in the west choose to avert their eyes and in a deep way feel that mistakes may have been made but evil was not intentional. So no one owns the crimes of the present let alone the past.

So Astrid can attack any and all with all manner of ad hominem, and yet I’m the one who gets thrown into moderation? That’s fair. If you can’t be fair in your own backyard, how can you admonish unfairness anywhere? Astrid is skilled at what it’s doing. What it’s doing is by design. It’s a strategy to drown independent, objective, critical analysis and create a consensus around false and erroneous conclusions. Knowledgable doesn’t equal intelligent. It’s what you do with that knowledge that matters.

(Plague Species trolls by going out of his way to point out irrelevant physical and potentially identifying details about commenters he dislikes, in a manner that almost certainly is intended to unnerve and silence them. He also accused them of things that have no evidentiary basis in their comments. Usually this happens to anyone who questions the narrative in his head about how all the really bad things in this world are caused by Donald Trump and China, such as mentioning that Donald Trump has peacefully left the White House or that the Chinese government has not fired a bullet against any American in the last half century, which is not something you can say for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Columbia, or any police department in the USA.

I respond to Hugh’s lie against China on this thread with evidence debunking his specific slander and point out Hugh’s history repeatedly debunked false accusations against Russia, China , and other countries unacceptable to the current USA regime. I’ve never seen him respond to me about the evidence I provided. He just slinks away to resurface on other threads with the same lies again and again.

Others can decide if these are the same but I’m very sorry to be feeding the troll(s) again and will try to do better from now on.)

Nihil, I answered your questions in my comment. I then asked a question about how reparations might possibly be most effectively administered. Maybe I would better informed about whatever reparations I might receive from the nations which stole all of my own ancestors generational wealth?

As Astrid shows with her dismissal of Uighurs, Anglos are far from the only racists on the planet.

Cash won’t help any, particularly if it comes in the form of welfare cheques. Rich countries have heaped cash over poor countries for decades, but the inequality chasm goes on widening.

In the case of countries, the only thing that helps is if the poor country gets (or takes) its right to do what it pleases, in the economical field. That is, is not punished for doing it. This was what made some of the poor countries of the 19th century rich. And this is what is making China rich today.

So some kind of benign neglect may perhaps help, also in the case of minorities within nations? Perhaps coupled with scholarships for those who want to try something new?

It’s racist against Uighurs to dismiss their majority support of the Chinese government, to economically sanction and boycott their local industry based on debunked lies, and have the NED support East Turkistan separatists who want to force Uighur women back in their homes and commit genocide against non-Uighurs.

It is racist to not even read and acknowledge evidence, and at least make a good faith attempt to debunk the evidence if it is false, just because Hugh wants to feel good about himself and how he’s standing up for a people that he probably didn’t even know about until the NED decided to use it against the Chinese government.

Hugh comes from the grand tradition of white men knowing what’s best for brown people, even though they can’t even find those brown people on the map.

@Mary Bennett, please do feel free to share my phrase. Share it far and wide, maybe it will help, but probably not.

@Geof

There’s always something inherently absurd about notions of national, collective guilt and responsibility. Particularly for things that happened before anyone alive today was even born.

History is often ugly. Shitty things happened. If I could go back in time and prevent shitty things, I happily would. But I can’t. Both the victims and the perpetrators of past crimes are no longer alive. That’s the end of it. The only responsibilities anyone alive now has is to try and rectify current existing problems.

Things are even more ridiculous for those of us whose immigrant ancestors post-date most or even all of the atrocities in question. My Anglo-Dutch-Irish ancestors didn’t even come over until at least well into the second half of the 19th century (the Anglo part didn’t come over until after WW2 when she married my GI grandfather). My lineage had fuckall to do with either colonialism or slavery, and I don’t appreciate being expected to abase myself for my ‘white guilt’.

Regarding Uyghurs, I have no idea what is actually going on with them. And neither does either Astrid nor Hugh and Plague Species. The Chinese are certainly doing *something* to them. At minimum reducation camps are a thing, and the CCP itself has admitted to doing stuff like embedding Party members into Uyghur households. Does it constitute genocide? No, not remotely, and to say it does is idiotic hyperbole (incidentally, it’s also idiotic to describe Israel’s crimes against Palestine as genocide. Genocide isn’t killing a few hundred people every couple years. Ethnic cleansing, yes, genocide, no). If it’s intended to be genocide, it’s an incredibly inept, ineffectual one.

The larger issue is China being in Xinjiang in the first place. The only reason Beijing is there at all is because it’s planned to be a crucial part of the Belt and Road trade routes. China is only there for the same reason it’s in Tibet: it judges that it has a strategic need to directly control the region. Otherwise it wouldn’t cost them anything to just let the Uighurs have their sparsely populated desert. Chinese presence in Xinjiang is inherently colonialism, regardless of how bad their treatment of the Uyghurs is or is not.

Honestly, if Canada did nothing, it’d be much better than what Canada has done historically. Canada, historically, has worked in opposition to First Nations, often running roughshod over us.

In design, every Canadian agency that has anything to do with First Nations is designed to either extract rents/profit out of us and/or our lands, or erode claims, treaties, and rights.

This has in overall effect has worked to radicalize First Nations. We’ll endure this humiliation for the time being but we’re also preparing to take back our own destinies. We’re working to take back our self-determination, and this has been an on-going process that has taken a number of years to bring about.

Eventually, Canada will witness a number of First Nations announce new united governments. These will not be pliant Indian Reserve Chiefs and Councils that Canada can replace upon a whim. These governments will replace individual Chief and Councils, and unite populations, reserves, claims, and titles. These united governments will be announced as being the new structure to replace the Indian Act for the nations that announce them.

First Nations are done asking Canada for permission. We’ll do as we must from now on.

As I think about the couple of comments upthread about how the Indian Nations should just assimilate and get it overwith already . . . a question has occurred to me.

Why would Indian people want to assimilate into the culture and civilization which causes global warming and the sixth mass extinction?

Two or three decades ago it was fashionable for westerners and their governments, with a little help from the media, to “care” about Tibet and regularly denounce the evil Chinese commies for oppressing Tibetans.

Fast forward to today and “caring” about the Uyghurs is all the rage.

Why do trolls like Plague Species and American exceptionalists like Hugh “care” so much about the Uyghurs while letting ongoing American and Western wars on Muslim majority countries, that have to date killed and displaced tens of millions of people, slide without comment?

Why do they not “care” about Tibetans, has “the CCP’s” Tibet policy changed since it was cool to “care” about what happens there?

No, of course not. They are simply parroting Western media propaganda. That’s all there is to it. Thanks to a lifetime of absorbing by osmosis American media propaganda they believe the west, and particularly the USA, has a right to dictate, by coercion and force if necessary, to the rest of the world how it should conduct its affairs.

They don’t question, or fact check, the latest claims about the official enemy du jour. Whether the claims are logical or coherent matter not a bit to people like Plague Species and Hugh. They don’t even recognize the rank hypocrisy of the most murderous and human rights abusing state of the post-1945 era lecturing others on matters of human decency.

As American government and media propaganda shifts its attention from the USSR to Russia, from Tibet to Xinjiang, from Darfur to Syria from Iraq to Iran…Hugh and Plague Species “coincidentally” discover which oppressed foreigners they should “care” about next.

They will be heartened to learn, I’m sure, that the government of Israel has also discovered that it deeply “cares” about Uyghur Muslims in China.

It’s especially bizarre to hear people like the aforementioned duo express outrage at Trump or racism in America. If they just go along with whatever their media of choice tells them to think, do they really care or are they just reacting like trained seals to the latest mass media driven propaganda campaigns and confusing defense of their egos with defense of principles they genuinely care about?

I’m sure they love their families and they may even be kind and considerate people in real life. But their hyperbolic “caring” for the oppressed and downtrodden, whether at home or abroad, is fueled more by media and ego than by genuine concern.

Well! . . . look at this recent footage of a fire raging on top of the ocean after a Gulf of Mexico oil or maybe gas pipeline ruptured.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/ockfm0/the_ocean_is_on_fire_in_the_gulf_of_mexico_after/

This is quite an . . . umm . . . achievement. You have to admit that it would never have occurred to any of the Indian Nations to start a fire on the surface of the ocean.

The Uighurs illustrate the hypocrisy and double standards of China-apologists and defenders. Oppress and abuse a small minority in Canada or the US –bad. Do so in China and the only bad is in noticing it.

My point isn’t that ‘we’ ‘need’ to ‘do anything’ with them. They’ll gradually assimilate on their own, because there’s little incentive not to. These are declining cultures. I’m not happy about it, I’m merely observing.

Wow. Perfect example of late 19th Century/early 20th Century beliefs among the genociders. And it was true at that time Native society was on a steep decline, not only in North America but in many parts of the world almost always due to colonial/settler policies of supression, genocide and extermination. “These cultures are declining. They won’t be here 20-30-50 years hence. The survivors, if there are any, will be assimilated. End of discussion.” You can find similar thoughts and beliefs in text books as recently as the 1960s. It was certain among the academic classes that Native society and culture and most Native peoples would shortly be… gone. (I have an 80+ year old friend in California who sincerely believes that Natives are almost all gone, their societies extinct, and the few pitiful survivors all live in gross poverty on wretched and god-forsaken reservations. It’s not true. Not even close. But no amount of argument or contrary evidence will convince him otherwise. This is what he was taught in school in Iowa, and this is what he believes. End of discussion.)

The fact is that despite every effort of the dominant colonial/settler society to make Native culture and society disappear, it was unsuccessful. Not all tribes and Native nations are still here, but many are, and they don’t intend to disappear. They don’t intend to be assimilated and absorbed into the dominant culture, either.

That doesn’t mean they won’t make use of it. And this may be some of where the confusion lies. Natives are not monolithic, they don’t all do and look and behave the same way, they mostly don’t live on reservations, they are spread throughout the dominant society, most do not live the way their ancestors lived (but then, their ancestors didn’t necessarily live the way their ancestors lived), and most are quite capable of using elements of the dominant society for their own purposes. And at the same time, they are able to maintain social and cultural elements special to themselves and their people. My goodness, how can they do it when obviously, they are “assimilated” — or they don’t exist at all?

How does any minority do it? Hm?

Not all do, not all will. That doesn’t mean those who do and continue to don’t exist now or won’t exist in the future.

The logic of the “disappearing Indian” is antiquated and is now absurd.

Uighur extremism is a teeny portion of the overall populace. Maybe 10,000 jihadis, maybe 10% of the Uighur population is supportive of separatism. Furthermore, it’s not an organic movement but one fueled by Saudi money and ideology, Turkish logistics support and training, and US backing. To say that the Chinese should leave ( and abandon Han, Mongols, and other ethnicities that constitutes about half of Xinjiang’s population to ETIM, a terrorist group that has killed many Uighur and Han people) makes as much sense as saying the US needs to leave Nevada (and let it become a client state of China) because of the Bundys.

In Iran the condition of womens rights is abysmal. In China when Xi proclaims that nothing shall stand in the way of his belt and road, a million perceived uppity Uyghurs wind up in camps with the rest being techno surveilled. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International gives both Venezuela and Columbia poor marks. Of course India has its caste system. I don’t know why so many Canadian native kids had to die. Hell, if you get off the plane smelling of liquor at the Riyadh airport the odds are you’re going to prison. Imagine being a woman in that place caught drunk driving.

Not to be outdone, the hypocrisy of the American governments take on “human rights” is about as legendary as its stance on “liberal democracy”, at least when dealing with other nations.

Why can’t this hypocrisy be seen as being fueled by personal power interests, with all else being part of intentionally deceiving and/or rationalization campaigns driven by all of the respective PTBs?

I saw the video of a very old looking Dianne Feinstein condescending to school children about their climate change concerns, arrogantly telling them that there’s no money for green deals and that she’s “been doing this a long time”. Her Tahoe vacation house is up for sale for $41 million. Whatever pathology she’s got, seems to be at the root of all of these various problems.

First of all and the best I can tell, the Grayzone has a mixed reputation, somewhere between Huff Po and the Epoch Times.

Secondly, Trump did call for sanctions against China for human rights abuses against the Uyghurs, and then Biden reiterated the same in spite of his Chinese “norms” comment. With guys like that, one usually demands that somebody show them the money. As in, what’s in it for them, their investigative agencies, and most news outlets all saying the same thing? What’s the motive? There always has to be a motive for there to be a crime, right?

In other news, the masks I got at Costco were reputedly made by Uyghurs. But that’s according the Daily Caller, which has a reputation somewhere between Breitbart and the Epoch Times.

It sure was a lot easer when Walter Cronkite would say “And that’s the way it is” and you knew damned well that that was the way it was. Today I get most of my news from Dusty Smith, who I suspect is either high and/or drunk during most of his Youtube broadcasts, although he always does seem to back up everything he opines about with actual videos.

So anybody know why all the Canadian native children died?

If you want to be a cynic all around, why repeat MSM lies? Why repeat their lies for them for free? At least get them to pay you a good hourly consulting fee for repeating their official line.

Do you have any evidence that The Gray Zone got a major story wrong and didn’t issue a proper correction?
No, because I’ll need to book my flight to Urumqi first, which’ll have to be after I’m done with my Chinese language, undercover reporting, spycraft and tech surveillance classes. Getting actual eyewitness reporting from on the ground is the only way we’ll know for sure. We’ll discuss this again in several years, if I’m able to return.

Otherwise it just sounds like another baseless drive by smear + dismissal.
How do I know that disregarding a widely held opinion by many credible-sounding experts and reporters and all their videos isn’t just another baseless drive by smear + dismissal? Uh oh. Sounds like a standoff to me.

Also, did you never ask yourself where are the video evidence of Xinjiang oppression, as we’ve seen for Gaza, Kashmir, and Columbia?
You provide video evidence of Zinjiang non-oppression first. Otherwise, I’m here to figure out why the native children died under the watch of the Catholic church.

If you want to be a cynic all around, why repeat MSM lies?
Okay, I hereby take back what I said about the Uyghurs. Not too long ago I thought they were just a buncha diehard Chinese Nintendo fans (Wii-gurs, get it?). Big media is after all, owned by just a handful of giant corporations in the pocket of other giant corporations.

I’m actually only a cynic about certain types of people, and certain other people under certain types of circumstances. Everybody else is usually pretty cool, mostly.

Ms. Ché’s cousin was a scholar and Native linguist who wrote a definitive dictionary of their tribe’s language and taught the language to young people until his passing last year. It’s true that Elders fluent in Native languages are passing quickly — last year was terrible, so many Elder speakers lost to the COVID — but many tribes and Native nations have maintained the language and have extensive teaching facilities in local schools, camps, online and by other means. Some Native languages have faded out, it’s true, but others are strong and growing.

The thing that gets me is that some people (perhaps with an agenda?) look at one end of the spectrum and assume or confidently state “that’s all there is,” and it’s bullshit.

As a side note, in New Mexico, in addition to English and Spanish, we hear Native languages all the time. Primarily Navajo (Diné) but not exclusively. Hopi and Tewa too. Not just among people we know but also on the radio and on television. Many, maybe most Natives in this region speak or understand their own languages, English, and Spanish, and it’s not such a big deal, not like it is with Anglos who still resist learning or speaking any language but English. If you learn when you’re young, it’s easy to be multi-lingual. When you’re older, it’s harder, but it’s not impossible at all.

Because of the multiplicity of Indigenous languages in the Americas before colonization by Europeans, I’m sure many, if not most, of the First Peoples in this land spoke and understood a variety of languages and considered it quite natural to do so. For whatever reason, the Anglo and Spanish colonizers and settlers did not. They insisted that only their own languages be learned and spoken and tried to force Natives to speak and understand only English or only Spanish, and luckily by now many people understand what an idiotic policy that was and is.

No, not every kid in Native societies is learning their own language, but more are than was the case not that long ago.

Whenever I Google, Duckduckgo, or Bing: “proof of Uyghur repression” + videos, I find many personal testimonies. What’s the motive for all these people making up these lies?

Also, Google and YouTube clearly hard or soft censor a lot of this content. I had a really hard time finding a lot of videos I’ve seen with actual interview footage. That’s why I linked to Bilibili even though it’s not a site I usually use.

Plague Species wrote:

Settler society and individuals continue to acrue the benefits of that theft, and the ongoing repression.

Yes, all the down and out homeless need to cough up. Afterall, they are part of Settler Society. Same goes for all the Settler Society folks living on the margins. You need to cough up. Pay for your sins. You murdered the Native Americans afterall and stole their land. Now it’s time to pay even if you can’t.

–

And there it is, the bombastic white straw argument. Usually it’s “well we can’t all give all the land back where would we go whaaaa! so therefore nothing can be done case closed”.

At least you wrapped a little faux homeless concern in with it.

I have never heard an Indigenous person float anything like this, but it’s the default spew from most settlers.

https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/trojan-horse-the-national-endowment-for-democracy

The notion that the funds for restitution and restoration of what was stolen from the Native Peoples of North America has to come out of someone else’s pocket is nonsense.

It DOESN’T have to, but it does. That’s the way THIS system works. Let me know when another system materializes. IN THIS system, the wealthy elite pay for nothing. Instead, they get everything. What is and what should and could be are two entirely different things.

Willy,

Because Chinese industrial power and companies have become powerful enough to challenge the US backed multinationals that profited greatly from China’s”rise” but are now threatened by its “arrival”. It’s also a good opportunity for the MIC to fearmonger and sell their overpriced and nearly useless weapons. Sure there are a lot of companies that still want to continue normal relationships with China, but right now the sanctions aren’t really affecting them much and they’re a much more diffuse interest group. Think about why universal public healthcare is not available despite been proven to be more effective and far cheaper than the US system. That’s one instance of a small portion of the event holding the rest of us hostage. Even if most Americans and American corporate interests want to normalize (they may not, since corporate interests are nowadays more about rentiering than growth) with China, the MIC and the blob will do everything it can to keep China down or at least as Murika’s enemy du jour.

The Blob has been on a warpath for 30 years, it started tentatively in the Balkans and Horn of Africa, then Iraq and Afghanistan, then was supposed to isolate and weaken Russia and China by either turning (Ukraine) or destroying (Syria) their allies. The fact that they destabilized and destroyed lives for terms of tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of people doesn’t bother the blob in DC. I’ve interacted with some of these people, not on China but just socially and occasionally for work. The way they abstract flesh and blood people into”adversary”, “asset”, “advantage”, “setbacks” is chilling. The fury that the week credentialed preppies of The Gray Zone tear into the Blob is an anger I feel. I understand the need for policy makers to have some detachment from their subjects, but often what I see is no understanding and not really masked contempt of their subjects as people. I grew up with this cohort and most are nice people who want to do good things with their lives. That they’re mostly serving Manon in someway (so am I, really, just not nearly as directly) and don’t fully realize it or do realize it but feel like they have no other choice, is really sad.

You don’t need actors or much of a budget to pull off the Uighur genocide story. Just a few liars and malcontents as you will find in any population, give them money and logistical support and an unquestioning media. Make sure all the editors rush their bright young things or “stars” aka embedded spooks who will write up any lie told by their unnamed sources, to publish the unvetted sensational claims. Then cite to each other’s unvetted stories as vetting, while strenuously ignoring actual footage and reporting countering their narrative as fake news, old news, or no news.

Just look at the blackout on the Assange prosecution and OPCW faked chemical attack stories. Once the PTB had a compliant media that’s in the control of a few deep state tied billionaires and killed off the few independent agencies that got the Iraq WMD story right, they can use it to spin their stories ( which might even occasionally be truthful) on any topic they like.

Just pay off a few Uighurs who will lie for money, are motivated by Saudi funded fundamentalism and Turkey funded Turkic nationalism, or who just hate China or fellow Uighurs for whatever reason, then have a totally uncredentialed analyst make eyepoping claims based on misreading Chinese reports and finding camps on Google maps, and they’re ready to go.

I once worked in an office for a large manufacturing company. I’d occasionally visit an in-law who also worked there as a shop floor assembler. His job looked like easy money. Low stress, not mentally or physically taxing, with good pay and union benefits. I asked him how he got so lucky. He pointed and said “I used to work over there.” I looked over there and saw dozens of guys working their asses off doing an obviously very difficult job. “Most guys only last a year over there. And it’s hard to transfer out. I want to retire from this company. So I found a way to get away from over there, and now I’m here.”

It’s not hard to imagine a reporter interviewing employees, getting two completely different attitudes. Reporter #1 interviews my in-law who says “It’s a pretty good job for a pretty good company”. Reporter #2 interviews somebody from “over there” who says: “It’s a goddamn hellhole. Not only do they work you to death, they psychologically torture you by surrounding you with all these losers doing easy jobs with no way to transfer.”

Make sense? Why call thousands of people liars when it risks making you look like yet another loud and proud conspiracy theorist to be ignored? Concerning the Uyghurs, why not just state the plausibly obvious? Depending on how they’re being managed on an individual level, some Uyghurs don’t mind their situation, while others hate it. And then the PTB, media or otherwise, are free to cherry pick whatever opinions they wish proclaiming that to be the whole truth.

Black and white thinking with one side always right and the other side always wrong will come back to bite you. Such thinking will always be used skillfully by those whose highest competency involves doing exactly that.

Just because the CCP elites outfoxed the greedy American capitalist elites to where now the student is surpassing the master, doesn’t mean they aren’t themselves, every bit as authoritarian-elite as any other concentration of elite power has ever been in all of human history. I say that every concentration of unchecked power always winds up the same way – self-serving and oblivious to their masses. And they’ll always cherry pick whatever facts to keep things that way.

My time is extremely limited. People need to tease me with their very best right from the get go to get me to invest precious time slogging through hour long videos and reads. Been there done that. Too many times, whenever I’ve raised questions and concerns about such videos and reads, I’ve been met with idiotic shaming just because my cognitive bias and closure needs don’t precisely align with their own. Those kinds of neurosis I can do without.

But since you claim to prefer the company of MAGAs over liberals (however the hell you define them both), maybe amusing myself at your expense henceforth is showing promise as an efficient way to spend my free time?

Plague Species wrote:

I have never heard an Indigenous person float anything like this, but it’s the default spew from most settlers.

Engage in Asian Hate much? Smearing American Koreans with the “Settler” label is a form of prejudice and thus a hate crime in some circles.
Who gets the “Settler” label versus who doesn’t? Anyone who is an American citizen who has less than 7% Native American DNA?

–

Now the Strawmen are Gish-Galloping.

I was speaking with a friend last night about the whole Landback thing, and he said, a fellow at his work had said, “Time to get serious about this. Start with giving all the crown (gov owned) land back.”

And that, to me, is a very logical place to start.

And that, to me, is a very logical place to start.

Go ahead, start then already. Calling us Settlers is not a start. It’s a deflection. Should you “start” manifest, it won’t fyi, make sure that land is used productively considering the topic of the latest post. It begs the question, is operating a casino on First Nations land productive, let alone constructive? Is tar sands oil production productive and constructive? Fleecing tourists with sh*t no one needs and playing “Indian,” is that productive and constructive? Or is it undignified and pathetic?

@Willy

Grayzone is pretty variable in quality, though to ever compare it to Epoch Times is pretty hyperbolic. Basically, Max Blumenthal has variable credibility (he’s good on the GOP and on Israel, not so much on much else), Ben Norton has zero credibility (the episode where he destroyed an ex-pat living in Hong Kong’s life by smearing him as a foreign agent provocateur is a particular low point. Norton wasn’t even doing new reporting, just regurgitating other people’s work), and Aaron Mate has high credibility, except on Syria, where he seems to be mostly just trusting in his colleagues narrative and following along with it. I’d encourage anyone to watch the interview he did with Robert Ford. Ford ultimately comes across as filled with imperial hubris, but he kind of also makes a fool of Mate and severely undermines the narrative that the US intentionally supplied and funded jihadists for the purposes of destroying Syria. Syria was more complex than that, and its dismemberment was ultimately a Turkish, Qatari, and (to a lesser extent) Saudi project, with the US attempting to counter balance these and to pressure Assad to negotiate his own loss of power by supplying, yes, ‘moderate rebels’ (who really did exist, and still do to a very limited extent).

Grayzone is in the orbit of what I call the Moon of Alabama crowd (though, hilariously, b of MOA seems to kind of hate them. He’s correctly pointed out that Blumenthal, Norton, and Khalek were all supporters of the Syrian revolution before, for whatever reason, they found it convenient to turn against it. Which would be defensible if they acknowledged this and said their opinions changed, but instead they tried to purge the internet of their past positions). The stance of sites like MOA is basically a kind of inverted or nega version of American exceptionalism, where nothing can happen anywhere in the world without it being a CIA engineered plot. In this thinking no else has any agency, and domestic factors don’t exist. The citizens of other countries are basically just idiot children, sitting around waiting for a white man from Langley to organize them into a ‘fake color revolution’.

(It was MOA’s de facto support for the Myanmar coup and the way it instantly jumped to claiming opposition to it was foreign engineered that finally drove me to jump off the bandwagon. b only has one tool, a hammer, and everything is a nail to him).

Now TGZ’s Myanmar story did raise my eyebrows. I know local conditions and geopolitics gets complicated, but that is a place where being reflectively anti-imperialist can get you in trouble and lose credibility.

I have heard Max mention in recent interviews that he supported the anti-Assadists before the Jihadis stepped in. My impression is that they are pro leftist movements in any country, but once US or its allies step in, they prefer the local despot to whatever the US wants to install.

Aaron mentioned of his latest visit that he talked to people who were anti-Assadists until they saw what the “moderate rebels” were doing. In addition, TGZ broke the OPCW fake gas attack story. It seems pretty reasonable for them to change sides and recognize that Assad is the less bad side. They don’t talk about the negatives of the Assad regime but they don’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, just that it’s much better for most Syrians than the US proffered alternative.

You talk about complexity of Syria but neglect to mention the Syria was allied to Russia and hosts millions of Palestinian refugees. This wasn’t just a Turkey and Gulf Arab project with grudging US involvement. It has Israel’s fingerprints all over it. Given TGZ’s position on Israel and Palestinians, it seems pretty obvious why they were sympathetic to an intact Syrian state, versus what US and it’s allies wanted to do.

You talk about complexity of Syria but neglect to mention the Syria was allied to Russia and hosts millions of Palestinian refugees.

https://syriaaccountability.org/updates/2015/01/09/implications-of-the-cia-torture-report-for-syria/

Assad is a scumbag and the CIA is a malevolent, evil organization that serves as global enforcer for the wealthy elite and their multi-national corporations.

I have no dog in this fight whatsoever. They’re ALL scumbags who deserve equal opprobrium. Assad gassing his own people may well be false, but we know for a fact he abused his own people, those he determined to be enemies, by virtue of the fact Syria was the go-to torturer for victims of rendition. He also was happy to abuse and torture for hire those who were not his people. And then the snake he was dancing with bit him. Boo f*cking hoo.

For Syrians, the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s summary of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, commonly known as the “CIA Torture Report,” are not surprising. They have long known about the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program to their country, which resulted in the CIA sending several suspected terrorists to Syria, despite well-founded knowledge of the Assad regime’s widespread use of torture.

A 2013 report by the Open Society Justice Initiative found Syria to be “one of the most common destinations for rendered suspects” with deplorable detention conditions and practices. Nine men – some of whom remain unaccounted for – were extraordinarily rendered to Syria through the program, including Maher Arar, a dual Canadian and Syrian citizen detained by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in New York City in 2002.

Instead of being handed over to Canadian officials, Arar was accused of ties to Al-Qaeda and sent to Syria where he claims that he was immediately arrested, blindfolded, and sent to a detention center. Repeatedly beaten and tortured, he remained in captivity for over a year. Canada later apologized and settled out of court with Arar, but both Canada and the U.S. continue to insist that Arar’s case was one of deportation and not extraordinary rendition. Since the CIA Torture Report was released, Arar has been active on Twitter, calling for the U.S. to address its moral culpability for the torture violations rather than merely acknowledging their occurrence.

Soredemos,

Going to have to strongly disagree. Firstly, it sounds like you don’t actually find TGZ not credible, you just did not like their angle. Missing a minor detail about the avatar for isn’t false, though it’s a bit surprising that their local informants didn’t fill them in on the information.

His identity might be known amongst going Kong activists, but it’s a false representation of what he is. He had multiple identities and was assuming the roles of being a local and bring a Mainlanders, when he was neither.

He was coordinating these protests against the Hong Kong government. Protests that by
August of 2020, were becoming violent and destructive. There are videos of them beating and intimidating Mainlanders, the police, people who disagrees with them. Why is he entitled to anonymity when he was lying to the public about his identity and encouraging violent sedition against his host city?

As for whether he is a CIA agent or not. I suspect not directly, but I’ve seen this play out way to many times in Latin America and in the Ukraine. What he was doing is not harmless. People have gotten hurt. And he’s not entitled to stay in a city whose government he wants to overthrow.

I think this is a consistent stand for me. I would not tolerate Russian or Chinese agents supporting Occupy or BLM ( to state two movements that I actually support) or QANON. If I was actually a Chinese agent, if I previously worked for CGTN or Xinhua, and especially if I was regularly providing high visibility support to anti-US movements, I would have no grounds to complain if I was exposed as such.