A media-fueled social panic over unmarked graves
quillette.com
quillette.com
Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.
Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?
If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
(C.S. Lewis)
Worth mentioning, the subtext of much of Mere Christianity was Nazism.
2. What does any of that have to do with Nazis? Your comment seems to be a complete non-sequitur.
Later
I'm being coy, because I don't believe most people who deploy this quote have read Mere Christianity, which is ungracious of me (and technically a violation of our guidelines). So: to put it more directly:
Lewis isn't asking people to be skeptical of wrongdoing. The quote is from an essay on forgiveness. That chapter explicitly references the harm Germans inflicted on Poles and Jewish people. Lewis isn't skeptical of that harm (to say the least), and he's not exhorting people towards skepticism of wrongdoing in general.
What he's saying is that you should be careful not to attribute to random people, by dint of their belonging to some specific group, the worst possible harms you can come up with. And he's saying that you shouldn't because it's an impediment to the Christian virtue of forgiveness; to love your neighbor as yourself, you need to love your imputed enemies as yourself, and to do that you have to find a way to forgive them their transgressions against you, and, more immediately, the transgressions of their groups.
I quoted the paragraph immediately following the quote offered (in implicit support of skepticism, as that quote is almost always used). I could just as easily have quoted the paragraph that immediately precedes it:
Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.
Again: when Lewis wrote this, he was talking about the Nazis, the authors of many of the worst crimes in history. Lewis was no Holocaust denier: he was acutely aware of --- and reminds his reader throughout Christian Behavior of --- the wrongdoings he's alluding to. It might be hard to find a more inapposite quote for this story.
I have no idea what happened in the residential schools in Canada, and no opinion about this particular article. But I do have an opinion about the abuse of C.S. Lewis on message boards.
You’ve misread me/my intent, i’m afraid.
However, applying Occam’s razor: GP merely quoted C.S. Lewis, so it would seem to me that the simplest (and most charitable) interpretation is that they understood the quote and we’re not using it in any ironic/sarcastic way.
I find your reaction/response to GP a little confusing, but as best as I can tell: are you thinking they were using the quote in an intentionally ironic way as a means of making a jab at C.S. Lewis’ character/beliefs?
This whole thread has been really confusing, so I’d love to understand where the (apparent) disconnect is between both parties :).
Then, he's not saying that you should, on spec, be skeptical of claims of wrongdoing, or especially generous to mitigating claims. One way you know that's the opposite of his intent is that the essay is framed around the crimes of the Nazis; there is no possible way Lewis is suggesting we should be wary of news stories about the Nazis. Again: Nazism is a backdrop for not just the essay, or Christian Behavior, but really most of Mere Christianity.
This is a thread where really all we have to go on is a story about whether a media claim about wrongdoing is true, or can be mitigated. The quote then reads as an affirmation of the story! The quote would be saying exactly the thing I just said I believe it doesn't say.
But Lewis' quote doesn't apply here at all, unless you not only strip it of its context, but also turn it against that context. Nobody (at least, nobody identified) is reveling in what may have happened at the residential schools, or using it as a device to avoid forgiving any particular person. Our interest in the truth of what happened, and even our skepticism of mitigating claims, is totally independent of our duty to forgive, just as Lewis points out that our willingness to punish (or even kill) transgressors is independent of our duty to forgive them.
I think the whole thing is a lot clearer if you include the paragraph before and after the super-popular "newspaper article" quote.
I'm not clear on how I misread the original intent of the quote! I'm still interested in hearing that. So I'm re-explaining my own original intent in responding to it, but wouldn't want to be construed as doubling down on it.
My personal stake in this discussion is: I think Mere Christianity is pretty neat, and I'm attentive of the ways it gets used in online discussions. I don't know enough about Canadian history to have a stake in the truth of the residential school claims, though note that there is an expert rebuttal of these Quillette claims, from an archeological authority, downthread.
I believe this is where the misunderstanding lies. I think the root commenter is implying that that's exactly what the media was trying to do when they chose to push this narrative in the first place. The idea is that the media organizations in the linked article were trying to highlight historical wrongs in an attempt to ensure those wrongs are kept at the forefront of everyone's minds and not forgiven, and that resulted in "a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible", even in the face of a lack of evidence.
The lack of skepticism isn't the point; it's what motivated the lack of skepticism in this case that the root comment was discussing. You can certainly disagree about whether that really was the media organizations' underlying motivation/bias, but I think the original quote is relevant.
And there's lots of stuff like that. I suppose we have implied meaning to appending the original source we got it from: meaning transported from context of source, meaning transported from author, and meaning solely from text.
More generally, on any thread owing to a Quillette article, I think we can do much worse than to have a curious conversation about C.S. Lewis (and, for that matter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer).
One clarification I suppose is that it is unlikely the graves were always unmarked. Most likely they, like many poor people, were buried with wooden crosses which later disintegrated.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-residential-schools-...
"some journalists — in Canada and abroad — mistakenly called the unmarked graves being located "mass graves," inadvertently invoking the horrors of the Holocaust. But the vast majority, following the lead of Indigenous spokespeople, got it right"
The problem with this is that it's impossible to verify - who are "some journalists", and who is the "vast majority"? But anyway, if you google for "215 children bodies found", you'll find that claim plastered all over the Net. First-page search results include CBC itself, BBC, NPR, CNN etc. So this is, at best, misleading.
The other statement that made me go hmph is:
"Denialists, to be clear, do not deny the existence of residential schools or even some of the harms of the IRS system. Rather, they seek to downplay or distort basic IRS facts and question the validity of ongoing research to shake public confidence and undermine truth and reconciliation efforts. "
It is unclear which "basic facts" they claim to be distorted. The article admits that it's not the existence of schools or the abuse that happened in them in general. I've read some of the denialist articles, and the only claims regarding facts of the matter can find there are that no bodies - indeed, no graves! - have actually been verified in this one particular case. That claim is easy to verify.
The article seems to be claiming, in essence, that any skepticism in this regard is inherently wrong, regardless of facts or lack thereof.
We know for a fact that graves existed. We just don't know where some of them are, because they were abandoned.
So, what is being added to the story by saying "this particular discovery of a potential grave location hasn't yet dug up a dead child"?
There's other grave sites where actual bodies were discovered after floods or roadworks, where they've identified what they think are other graves via the same tech.
Those haven't been dug up either, because just randomly digging up graves on an arbitrary schedule to prove to some kook's satisfaction that you have the right to talk about something is absurd.
"I think my grandfather died in France during world war I and is buried somewhere in this field but the records are patchy so even after looking for decades we're still not certain" is something you respond to with empathy, not skepticism and demands for certain proof.
Because the evidence so far can have many explanations, graves being only one among them. The place apparently has a history of agricultural use, too, with several rounds of irrigation works.
It doesn't disprove that those are graves, of course. It's quite plausible that at least some of them are. But I don't feel like, on the balance of probability, it makes sense to make claims about "200+ children bodies", given the evidence we have so far.
> "I think my grandfather died in France during world war I and is buried somewhere in this field but the records are patchy so even after looking for decades we're still not certain" is something you respond to with empathy, not skepticism and demands for certain proof.
Well, for starters, nobody actually claimed to be a relative of some specific person that is ostensibly buried there. Indeed, it seems that there are no claims made of specific people being buried there at all - no names, just "N children". So the more accurate analogy would be "I think someone's grandfather died in WW1 and is buried somewhere in this field, but I don't actually know any of the people involved".
More importantly, if there are bodies there, a crime was committed - and many of the people responsible (if only for negligence allowing it to be committed) are still alive, so their reputation is directly affected by the claim. Organizational responsibility is also at stake; not that I have any love for the Catholic Church, mind you, but I'd rather blame them for the things they actually did.
If and when they dig up the holes, and they do indeed turn out to be graves of children - then I'll join the torches-and-pitchforks mob. But I resent the attempts to goad me into that before the facts are known - and it is exactly what the headlines in the media originally tried to do.
The original claim made by the people who did the survey was that they think they've found graves of children who went to the school.
You're talking about people overreacting and making things up in foreign newspapers, then making an argument based on stuff that you've just claimed isn't true.
And it appears intended to distract from the fact that we know for a fact there are graves and we know for a fact there were crimes. But by laser focussing and saying, this particular potential grave has not been proved to be a grave to my satisfaction, you get to cast doubt on all the known graves and known crimes.
I'm not repeating the argument that the bodies must be dug out because there was a crime (although I also don't see how it is invalid, because this discovery is combined with oral sources which do claim some very serious crimes).
What I'm saying is that if this is all true, then there are people responsible for it, who would be rightly held to account - if not legally, then in court of public opinion. So when newspapers publish articles that strongly imply that it's all definitive when it actually isn't, someone's reputation is ruined.
> you get to cast doubt on all the known graves and known crimes.
Here's the thing, though. Every denialist article I've looked at trying to figure out what exactly they claim - and there were like 5 - clearly spelled out that, yes, there was plenty of abuse in those schools in general, and that said abuse did result in dead children. On the other hand, almost every article criticizing them makes the same claim you do - that them casting doubt on the claims made in this particular case casts doubt on the whole thing, somehow. All disclaimers are ignored.
This looks like a classic strawman to me, not a good-faith attempt at fair discourse.
Except of course they did deny it was happening and very slowly retreated further and further as more and more proof mounted, only giving up when their lies are totally destroyed in the court of public opinion while still being shrilly outraged at every new "lie" or "exagerration" from the people who were right all along. Things that in future they'll deny believing when its convenient and then bring up again later.
So the climate or Holocaust victims are never allowed to make a single mistake, or its a media fueled panic, while the deniers get to construct their own reality as they please, again and again, and it's rude to point that out to them, because they're just being skeptical about children's graves for purely scientific reasons.
A local paper (in the US) interviewed survivors/graduates on “Indian” schools. The administrators sent kids home as soon as they were sick.
So there were no graveyards, even when lots of student were dying (Spanish flu).
In the late 19th century up to about 1910, there were much higher rates of Aboriginal kids dying than normal, and it was mostly due to tuberculosis. It would 'set loose' at a residential school and mortality rates were high.
There were investigations and it was a 'big social issue' even 100 years ago.
Since about WW2, the rates of death at res schools have been fairly consistent with those in the general population.
The term 'genocide' may apply in the context of the government wishing to 'educate' Aboriginals purely in the Western sense and to suppress their culture, but the world folds all to nicely into 'killing' the children etc which is how the word is used in popular imagination.
The 'narrative managers' in the press are keenly aware of the power of their words, and that they will be misinterpreted, to great effect.
The factual reality of Residential Schools is absolutely worth of consideration, it's a serious issue, but it's also deeply misrepresented in the press.
"If it was just a virus, particularly in the early days of medicine, this would be a scandal created out of thin air."
I wouldn't entirely want to make the claim that 'because it's tuberculosis' fully exonerates the schools, but I'll bet $100 that tuberculosis at other remote boarding schools (non-aboriginal kids) would have somewhere near the same effect in most places during that era, where as you hint 'medicine was a mess'.
But either way, you're hinting at 'the distortion of information' begin presented by the narrative driven press, which is sad, because it's a serious issue.
What was the fatality rate at Eton during this time?
There's a whole bunch of people in this discussion thread who are clearly not Canadian and clearly not informed about this, who seem to believe they're railing against appropriating an issue for political points, by appropriating one of our most shameful national issues (and implicitly denying it, however artfully) in order to make political points.
Sending kids to boarding school where mostly people learned to speak English and do basic math - is not the same as sending kids to camps to kill them.
The liars want to have us believe they're essentially or historically the same thing, when there's no truth there at all.
This false fact pattern is being amplified on both sides of the border.
My local American newspaper is trying very hard to tell horror stories about local Indian schools.
And I'm not actually trying to say this was not an 'aboriginal specific' issue.
I think the issue with them was real, but decontextualized and misrepresented by the press, which is the focus of the article.
The press drives narratives and will ignore context if necessary.
Sadly, if you stray away from the press, most independent outlets are full if inanity and made up facts, it's very hard to get factual stuff, meaning any individual truth seeker has to become a kind of 'independent journalist' - it's very hard. I think most people end up down rabbit holes of misinformation, which is worse than the 'generally factual but biased' press.
List of stuff he points out: https://thenetworkstate.com/if-the-news-is-fake-imagine-hist...
It's hard to see that as an innocent mistake; rather, it seems in this case HE is distorting the facts to fit HIS narrative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
The words "suspected" and "potential" are doing a lot of work there.
A comment about January 6th
A comment about Kyle Rittenhouse
A comment about COVID
At least COVID is somewhat relevant to Canada.
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such." These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly. This happened in Canada regardless of whether or not there's graves in these sites, but "oh yeah where's the dead kids bodies already" is in my opinion kind of a horrible point of view given light of the necessarily slow paced process that's happening to uncover the truth.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-eml%C3%BA...
There were major revelations about a century ago that Aboriginal children were dying at higher rates than otherwise, mostly due to tuberculosis, which spread rapidly at the shcools over a century ago - it was a 'huge controversy' even in 1922 - when the government commissioned an investigation into the situation. [1]
Also, note (same reference) that deaths from aboriginal kids since WW2/1945 is basically the same as death of kids from the general population overall, which abnegates some idea of even accidental physical genocidal acts due to systematic oppression. These facts, which adds nuance to the situation, create a more realistic dynamic to the historical situation than your choice of words (similar to those in the press) would imply. Hence - misrepresentation and hyperbole.
Residential School history matters, factually.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
It's stupid enough that I have to even explain this that I left Canada. I don't want anything to do with people who do this.
Good luck with the economy eh?
Make a retarded comment and condescend people who reply. Got it!
There was an extensive piece by the National Post documents some of the examples, it's bad. [1]
Ironically, even many of the aboriginal leaders themselves were purposefully misrepresented. In some cases, these were just regular graves that lost their headstones and relevant documentation, there was not discovery etc..
Consider this: when the population at large derives a completely false intuition for a set of events - the media is lying.
Some media 'misrepresents' the 2020 election by just repeating Trump's lies without questioning them, and though this might be hard for some to swallow, much of the real data behind police aggression etc. is hidden and misrepresented in light of emotional charges and BLM protests.
It's a really sad state of affairs but the MSM ('all sides') narratives are so strong, that almost every issue is quite strongly misrepresented due to 'sidedness' and/or attempt to create false impressions.
Double paradox is that most of the MSM is actually 'fairl factual' and if you go off the beaten path into YouTube and alt sources, there are some good voices, but most of it is 10x worse. Most 'independent thinkers' are not getting at the truth, just being led even further astray. It's sad.
It's really hard to consume information these days.
Edit: for a good exercise, pay attention to news about Ukraine right now. While I absolutely support their effort basically in every way and am repulsed by Putin's 'useful idiots' all over the web - we are engaging in a bit of misrepresentation ourselves (pro-Ukrainian propaganda), which is what happens during wartime. Ukraine is a bit of a mess of a country, a lot of corruption - but that will be suppressed at least for now, where we 'need' the public to be engaged in a way that's a bit more easy to swallow. This soft-propaganda is of a different nature than the ideological narratives in much of the press. 2 years after Ukraine/Russian war is over (hopefully soon, and Russia is kicked out of Ukraine) you'll see a lot more press about the conflicts of interest etc. within the Ukrainian government etc..
[1] https://nationalpost.com/opinion/the-year-of-the-graves-how-...
Another is relayed to January 6th protests. A friend today, a conservative DeSantis supporter, told me that he knew that on January 6th, the protestors killed several police officers.
This is, as we know now, absolutely false. It was based on a rumor, and once the reporting caught up, it turned out to be false.
Similarly I’m sure there will be Canadians who know that there were these mass unmarked child graves at schools. But again: totally false.
I think the big misstatement of the media here was the unrelated natural causes death of an officer (from essentially a stroke) on January 7th - but law enforcement lives were lost due to January 6th.
Ultimately Officer Smith chose to take his own life; no one made that choice for him. He may have been appalled or traumatized or whatever, but ultimately he's the one who did it. Doesn't make it any less tragic, but it's extremely tenuous absent additional evidence to lay blame at anyone but he himself.
If there was some evidence that he was subject to unique abuse and was personally targeted on that day, then maybe there might be some merit. But of the officers who were there, he experienced roughly what the other officers did, and he was the only one to commit suicide.
> Dr. Jonathan Arden, the former Chief Medical Examiner of the District of Columbia was hired by Smith's widow as part of her lawsuit to have her husband's suicide ruled "in the line of duty". His report stated that the "acute, precipitating event that caused the death of Officer Smith was his occupational exposure to the traumatic events he suffered on January 6, 2021".[1]
1. unarmed 2. black
(edit: I see now someone made the above point a few minutes before i finished typing my message, but I suppose that goes to show how widespread this myth is)
Conservatives get the brunt of blame for "conspiracy theories" and "disinformation" these days, and while I won't deny it doesn't happen (like it has for years), the left has just as much, if not more that I hear every day, but they never realize or take accountability for it because they have the popular narrative that runs all major corporations and the greater internet.
It's quite likely that if he were the one gunned down, and not the other way around, the people who did so would have walked, too.
I'm still unaware of that. Do you have a reference?
At this point in time, shots had been fired, Rittenhouse shot and killed a man, and was identified by the crowd as an active shooter. Huber was trying to disarm Rittenhouse, when he was shot and killed. This happened in front of Grosskreutz, who at this point had every reason to believe that Rittenhouse was an active shooter (And was then shot and injured by Rittenhouse).
Since in an active shooter situation, both the 'good guy with a gun' and 'the good guy without a gun' can't sit around and wait for eight months for a jury trial to find the active shooter to actually be innocent, both Huber and Grosskreutz reacted rather reasonably.
It seems to me that legally, nobody, except maybe Rosenbaum (Who was dead by the time of the events of the second confrontation) was in the wrong in that whole situation. It's all 'good guys with a gun' shooting at eachother because sweet fuckin' Jesus, nobody ever has all the facts about who was justified about killing whom when there's a public gunfight happening.
You're saying that after he was an active shooter, people were chasing him because they thought he was an active shooter? If so, I don't think that no one knows this, I think no one cares.
-----
edit: The statement you made was "the people [Rittenhouse] shot were under the impression that they were trying to stop an active shooter." I asked for a reference. You begin and end the reply to that request by saying that the first person he shot wasn't under the impression he was an active shooter.
My problem is the deception. I am a proud left-winger, and I think Quillette is trash. I'm disturbed that people are intentionally trying to cloud the facts about issues to score political points. When you say that the people Rittenhouse shot were under the impression that he was an active shooter, and somebody looks that up and finds out that it is untrue, they'll think that people who hold the same opinions as you are liars. That affects me, and the things that I believe in.
The Q article has exactly two complaints about the facts reported by the media:
1. The media claimed bodies were unearthed, when in fact only scans were taken.
2. The media claimed there were mass graves, when in fact scans only detected masses of individual graves.
However, in "social-panic" style, conservatives are taking these two quibbles over terminology and turning them into an Alex Jones-esque conspiracy to deny the graves existence altogether.
Note also the subtle racism in the article, where they compare a hypothetical instant-response to the murder of white children to the "very odd" response of the first nation people. The implication being that first nations people are incompetent, uncaring, or untrustworthy by not immediately doing a certain kind of investigation.
This is not a "quibble." It's a major falsehood.
It can also be used in a figurative sense, which in this case is almost certainly true.
So do you really believe everyone in Canada read that and thought "Oh, they're using the word in a figurative sense! Never mind."
If something is, by definition, in the earth and a story says it was "unearthed" it's sorta reasonable to believe it was dug up.
Possible graves. How many were unambiguously confirmed? And how many would we expect from normal high-at-the-time child mortality?
But if/when they are confirmed, then its not a big deal because it's just some of the graves that you know exist?
Do you see the contradiction here?
You seem determined to downplay these graves, but the kettle logic of "these graves don't exist and also they do exist and we all know about them but they aren't a problem" undermines your argument.
And some people still overreact and try to cover it up and whitewash it.
The US Civil war being about slavery still seems to be considered an eleborate hoax to some people.
And they do the same "yes well the centuries of slavery, death, rape and murder is all true, and well established historical fact obviously, but <minor historical innaccuracy>! So basically they're overreacting and undermining our great nation by talking about stuff that happened." and it's cringe in both cases.
A popular Facebook post claimed that Joe Biden said that several police officers died during the attack, which could be the source of the lie.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jan/19/facebook-p...
This.
we are truly in an age of perpetual unfounded social panic. thanks twitter.
as with most other problems, more educated people, especially regarding science, math and specifically statistics could help prevent these foolishnesses.
My thinking was that "smart" people are busier and outsource their thinking in other aspects to media they can trust. If that media lies to them, they are smart, so they don't want to admit they were wrong. They are too smart to be fooled! But I don't know if that explanation holds up.
[1] By other metrics I mean, I live in a West Coast coastal city, in a rich neighborhood, work in tech, educated, etc. By all measurements I should be like others, but I'm not.
What if I told you that every single one of them tells themselves the exact same thing? You wouldn't believe me of course. But then, neither would they believe you.
You probably believe as much nonsense as they do, but you've only noticed what is actually a very small non-overlapping slice of the very large overlapping collection of nonsense beliefs you share with them.
good observation and i completely see your point, but are those people really educated in a scientific sense (and know their confidence intervals) or did they just finish their liberal arts degree and learn some french words?
This decently sums it up: https://www.piratewires.com/p/neurotic?s=r
… if you’re vaccinated.
We can all tell you weren't actually listening to the experts you so detest because that wasn't their stated rationale. The rationale was "flatten the curve" -- some hospitals were two doubling periods away from having parking lots full of people slowly dying for want of ventilators. That's what the lockdowns were about. Making sure we never overwhelmed the medical infrastructure.
Subsequent R-control measures were about making sure it stayed that way. As better options for keeping the hospitals safely under-capacity appeared -- first vaccines, and then simply the fact that subsequent variants sent a smaller fraction of the infected to ventilators -- the measures were relaxed. As was appropriate.
What's amazing are the number people who continue to stick to Trump's initial February 2020 "ignore it and it will go away like magic" alternate reality, even though the man himself abandoned it in March 2020.
and now it's gone! look at that.
at some point, even if only years after the fact, one must reconcile the reality of the situation with the narrative they were sold on, and ask themselves if the two line up at all. how many Republican-voting Americans today still believe the Iraq invasion was ever really truly about weapons of mass destruction, or that the entire incursion was righteous in any way? how many Republican-voting Americans have any love left for the 43rd President at all, despite their fervor at the time?
Not that I don't believe you, but why don't surgeons get bacterial illnesses from mask use? Did you regularly wash your mask?
>yet somehow never caught covid
I wonder if that has something to do with the mask you wore?
>the Sturgis Rally being nearby was supposed to make us (Rapid City, SD) a superspreader disease nexus
Are we in the same reality? The spike in cases made national news.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/09/02/covid-s...
yeah it's almost like the whole cloth mask phenomenon was total bullshit!
cases "surged", deaths didn't. the Civic Center was never used.
"Could" is doing a lot of work there. I think, empirically, you will find the opposite relationship.
Could you be more specific?
Wikipedia itself is awfully untrustworthy, though - look what they're doing with the "recession" page today.