In a Mirror, Darkly: Some Advice to a Holocaust Denier

News item: Ottawa, March 8, 2017 – Canadian Senator Lynn Beyak defends Indian residential schools, claims “they didn't mean to harm anybody”

In a Mirror, Darkly: Some Advice to a Holocaust Denier

by Kevin D. Annett

Senator Lynn Beyak

Ottawa

Dear Lynn,

It's been said that life in the Canadian Senate is so droll that all you can hear is the sound of cud-chewing and pork barreling. So I want to thank you for proving all those cynics wrong. I had no idea that your snug little coterie of hack political appointees could produce a thinker of such unusual originality as yourself!

What a breath of fresh air to actually hear a Canadian politician claim that black really is white, and with such absolute conviction! And to think that I had lost hope in the capacity of any of our leaders here in the Great White North to master Machiavellian realpolitick. Well done, I say!

Senator, I grant you an A plus in terms of effort, but if you allow me, I have some counsel for you concerning the best way to propagate your particular Big Lie. In a word, you're too brash. Subtlety, after all, is always the best way to conceal Group Crime and convince people it never happened: something your Senate colleague Murray “Mister TRC Whitewash” Sinclair knows only too well.

Tone down your hyperbole, first of all. Even the most lily white, Injun-fearing Canuck is going to find it hard to swallow when you claim that your typical child-whacking priest was “only trying to do good” to all them savages. I mean, come on Lynn. Going out on a rhetorical limb like that just allows your self-righteous critics to cut you down with a simple citing of the constant fifty percent death rate among all those brown kids in what you call “residential schools”.

The Big Lie, in short, has to be convincing.

Next point: to the neutral observer, you're acting like a straight man in somebody else's pre-arranged script. I mean, just look at how every aboriginal fat cat is jumping all over your words like a child rapist in heat. You're handing Murray Sinclair, Pat Brazeau and all the other Sultans of Sellout the perfect way to pose as champions of the very people – their fellow Indians – who they've been screwing for years. Is that what you really want?

And as for your claim that the Christian internment camps actually saved rather than took the lives of the brown kids: again, there you go way out on a limb again, without any backup. Why not line up the usual gang of ass-kissing, around-the-fort ab-original “survivors” to publicly endorse your claim and affirm how wonderful life was in the camps? God knows, there are enough of them around. And they don't charge much, either.

Finally, try to toss a few rhetorical crumbs to the beast known as Political Correctness. It's the best way to disarm your critics. Give us a few lines about healing and reconciliation. Us pale Canucks love to hear those words. They make us feel so good about ourselves, which is after all the whole point of the exercise: especially now that we're all part of a convicted criminal conspiracy.

Admittedly, none of these errors may be all that important in the long run considering what a splash you're making in the press and among a whole lot of us pale Canucks. Finally there's emerged a leader who says what all of them down-home churchgoers have felt but, being Canadians, have never said: that the Injuns have just had it too good and are milking us all dry, and shit, may even end up owning the whole frigging place again!

I hope you're considering running for Prime Minister. Or maybe that's what this is all about.

In any event, to really master the art of deception, Lynn, you have to understand the details of what you're trying to spin. Knowing your enemy is the key to winning any battle, after all. So I urge you to look over some of the hard evidence of life and death in your alleged Fun O Rama called Indian residential schools, held in my twenty-year composition entitled Murder by Decree (murderbydecree.com). I wrote it to put a cattle prod up the nether regions of Murray Sinclair, so you should get a kick out of it.

One of the many survivors I quote in my book, Sylvester Green, was on the burial detail of the United Church camp in Edmonton during the 1960's. He must have stuck over a hundred other kids in the ground over the two years he was incarcerated there, before he escaped.

Sylvester told me once that on Christmas Eve he and the other kids were given clean clothes for a change and then paraded in front of a local all-white congregation to sing Christmas carols for all the happy and appreciative Christian folks. Then Sylvester and the other children would be carted back to the camp and rewarded for their singing by getting to choose from among their number which of them would be raped and worse by Reverend Jim Ludford and his buddies. Normally the children had no choice.

I just thought you'd appreciate Sylvester's account of how the system wasn't so bad after all.

Sincerely,

Kevin Annett