Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 20, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba LATE on June 3, 1989, the Chinese govern- ment sent in troops and tanks to disperse about 100,000 unarmed pro-democracy pro- testers in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, many of whom were students. When the demonstrators at- tempted to confront the soldiers, the troops fired upon them. An estimated 8,000 or so protesters (perhaps less) were killed in what became known as “the Tiananmen Square Massacre”— outside of China, that is. In a blatant denial of eye-witness testimony and film and photographic evidence, the Chinese gov- ernment rewrote the story of Tiananmen Square. In its version, only about 300 demonstrators were killed by soldiers who were defending them- selves in what was labelled a “counter-revolu- tionary rebellion” or “riot.” All broadcasts about the massacre were halted and numerous Chinese and foreign journalists were expelled from the country. In a May 2014 CBC interview, Rowena He, who has written about the massacre and is now a senior research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, explained that the “government version of events was promoted through an elaborate ‘Patriotic Education Campaign,’ which included a revision of all school books.” This is only one of many official efforts to rewrite history and impose what Adolph Hitler in his book Mein Kampf called the “Big Lie.” He pointed out that “a definite factor in getting a lie believed is the size of the lie, for the broad mass of the people in its primitive simplicity of heart more readily falls victim to a big lie than to a small one.” Or, as George Orwell put it in his 1949 dysto- pian novel, 1984: “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” Psychological studies that go back to the 1970s have proved time and again that the manipulative propaganda techniques used by the Nazis, Sovi- ets, Chinese government and others, indeed, have had the desired effect: the more you repeat a lie, the more likely it is that people will eventually doubt what they thought was the truth and accept the falsehood. Psychologists call this the “illusory truth effect.” The current master of the Big Lie is, of course, Donald Trump, who is about to serve a second term as U.S. president. Inhabiting an alternative reality of his own bitter design where up is down and black is white, Trump (now bolstered by his sidekick, X CEO Elon Musk) routinely lies and spreads misinformation; most recently about the Los Angeles wildfires for which he falsely claimed that Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom put concerns about environmental poli- cies over public safety. In the past four years or so, among a litany of lies Trump has continually repeated, two of his biggest and most damaging have been his insistence that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him and that the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden as president — which he incited and encouraged “violence against his perceived oppo- nents” in the words of special counsel Jack Smith — was a “peaceful” demonstration. No matter that the mob using pipes, bats and bear spray seriously injured approximately 140 police officers. In the immediate aftermath, many Republican politicians condemned the riot and Trump’s role in it. Yet within a short time, a majority of them, accepting Trump’s lies and the wild conspiracy theories spread on social media — that the attack was orchestrated by the FBI or paid “crisis ac- tors” — now maintain that there was no insurrec- tion. Further, that the more than 1,200 individuals charged with committing federal crimes, and the 500 or so who have been incarcerated, should be considered “political prisoners.” Expect Trump to pardon a majority of them soon after he becomes president — an act sup- ported by at least 70 per cent of Republicans. In a classic example of the illusory truth effect and manipulation right out of 1984, several polls taken in the past two years indicate that about 40 per cent of Americans believe “too much has been made of Jan. 6 and believe that it is time to move on.” This is despite the fact that congressional investigations, police testimony and videos easily accessible on mainstream media websites and YouTube, show Trump’s incendiary actions and the violence perpetuated by the attackers. It would not be at all surprising if at some point during the next four years the U.S. federal de- partment of education (assuming Trump doesn’t abolish it) or Republican state departments of education try to whitewash the Jan. 6 insurrec- tion much like Chinese government has wiped the Tiananmen Square from the historical record. Among the bits of wisdom you can find on the internet is a statement wrongly attributed to actor Morgan Freeman. Nevertheless, it is applicable to the perpet- uation of the Big Lie in the U.S. and those who obediently believe whatever Trump tells them: “The definition of stupidity is knowing the truth, seeing evidence of the truth, but still believing the lies.” That’s where we are now. Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context. THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 MONDAY JANUARY 20, 2025 Ideas, Issues, Insights Perpetuating the ‘Big Lie’ by erasing history Residential schools: considering intentions and consequences LIKE many Manitobans, I have been thinking about the legacy left by the late Murray Sinclair. He was an honourable man, a statesman, a leader, a visionary. Someone who worked his whole life to bring meaning to the notion of reconciliation — not just the bridging of the gap between people, but the building of meaningful human connections that support that bridge and make it real. His wisdom was revealed in the kindness of his remarks on substantive issues, even when those issues were contentious or when he disagreed. Sinclair’s contributions, including the Truth and Reconciliation report itself, have not always been used to promote the kind of reconciliation that he seemed to wish to see. For some, discussing the history of residential schools elicits the kind of vitriol that Murray Sinclair himself studiously avoided. He refused to call the intent of residential school policy a genocide. Instead, the TRC report referred to that policy as a cultural genocide. As a means of forced assimilation, which it undoubtedly was. Recently, a private member’s bill was intro- duced in Parliament which seemed to suggest that anyone not prepared to call residential schooling a genocide should be charged with a crime. Criminalizing the views of people with dif- ferent views on the intent and consequences of residential schooling hardly seems to capture the spirit of reconciliation — or honest discussion for that matter. Some people do not seem to want to reconcile the difference between the stated goals of residential schools and the consequences of its implementation. Instead, we commit to a refrain that undermines a genuine discussion. The word genocide, coined by a Jewish lawyer from Poland in 1944, referred to the systematic killing of millions of Jewish people in what we now call the Holocaust. Genocide refers to a plan to eradicate a whole people based on ethnic and religious divides, as a matter of policy. Committing genocide originally meant killing people — not the culture, the language, the heri- tage, but the people themselves. Even the oft-quoted words of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald referencing the “killing of the Indian in the child” logically and linguisti- cally means forced assimilation. It was not a call to murder Indigenous children. There was no intent to kill, maim or starve residential school students. Inexcusable things happened and while it may have been the consequences of callous indifference or ignorance, or even individual mal- ice — it was not government policy. No reading of the signed treaties, the 1884 In- dian Act, or the educational policy implemented through residential schools, suggests that it was a genocide. The fact is, as the TRC report makes clear, the approach that the government pursed was already in practice in the schools established by religious orders across the country. The religious schools began with the dual pur- pose of education and indoctrination. The prin- cipal intent was to impose a particular religious worldview, but it was also to provide the language and the skills Indigenous people would need to ensure their integration and assimilation into the world they would experience beyond the confines of their own community. Two things can be true at once: the intention of the residential school policy was understandable, but the consequences were destructive. The par- liamentary debate at the time and the correspon- dence of the bureaucracy, often expressed a clear intent to make Indigenous children like other citizens in dress, demeanour and language. The goal was to provide the language, trade and em- ployment skills that they would need to function in the new reality. Federal financial and bureaucratic support for residential schools was a clear, deliberate, attempt to ensure the assimilation of Indigenous people into the colonists’ world. It undoubtedly included denying them the right to speak their language. And it was initially carried out, with brutal effi- ciency, by largely religious staff. It bears noting, however, that much of the brutality disguised as correction in residential schools was standard practice in private and public schools at the time. Even caning and the use of the strap as means of student punishment were used regularly in public schools as a means of student punishment until the 1960s. In my rural school, all 25 of my Grade 5 classmates were strapped because a single classmate was not paying attention during roll call — and no one objected. The fact is corporal punishment was not com- pletely banned in all schools until the Supreme Court of Canada outlawed the practice in 2004. And, while the ban on the use of Indigenous languages was more targeted and was enforced from the very beginning of the residential school period, it was not substantially different, in effect, from the 1921 Education Act amendments in Manitoba. That Act banned the teaching or speaking of minority languages — including German, Polish, Ukrainian, Icelandic and Hebrew — in favour of English in all public schools. For non-English speaking people, the impact of that 1921 Educa- tion Act was similar — it meant forced assimi- lation — and the loss of language and culture by government fiat. An example of the impact of the 1921 Act was felt many years later, in 1956, by my six-year-old schoolmate from a francophone family when he was strapped because he could not count to 10 in English at the teacher’s command. The criticism directed at anyone who even suggests that residential schools were developed with good, but misguided intentions and not mur- derous intent, is unwarranted. The denial that some of the people who promot- ed and worked in residential schools truly wished the best for their students is unfair and not sup- ported by the facts. No one who has read the TRC reports could defend such a position. The TRC report includes many requests from the institu- tions themselves, and from bureaucrats, for more funding and more staffing and more humanity in the conduct of residential schools. Murray Sinclair himself acknowledged that fact in a letter published in the Calgary Herald in 2010. He said: “While the TRC heard many experiences of unspeakable abuse, we have been heartened by testimonies which affirm the ded- ication and compassion of committed educators who sought to nurture the children in their care. These experiences must also be heard…” The Truth and Reconciliation Commission report(s) are indeed a faithful telling of our col- lective history around the policy of forced assimi- lation, one that sparked the creation of residential schools and industrial schools across the country. Understanding history requires us to consider more than just a set of facts. It requires us to think about what people of an era thought and be- lieved to be true. It requires us to consider what they considered acceptable behaviour, viewed from their generation, not our own. In a speech to Yale graduates in 1962, John F. Kennedy said that every generation has its problems and crosses to bear, but he noted, “Its problems are not our problems. Their age is not our age. As every past generation has had to dis- enthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.” The unfortunate and tragic history of residen- tial schools is a history that needs to be discussed without unnecessary virtue signalling and scold- ing from people on one side of the story or the other. It needs to be discussed, as it was written, by the Hon. Murray Sinclair. Jerry Storie lives in, and sometimes writes from, Winnipeg. ALLAN LEVINE JOSE LUIS MAGANA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES Rioters scale a wall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. JERRY STORIE ;