Canada’s justice minister is considering options raised by the independent adviser on unmarked graves, who says Indigenous leaders want Canada to move on criminalizing residential school denialism.
Kimberly Murray called on lawmakers to consider “legal mechanisms” that could address the practice of denying or minimizing the abuses Indigenous children suffered at residential schools in her interim report released back in June.
One way to do that is by amending the Criminal Code to criminalize such actions, Murray said in a recent interview, noting Ottawa did so last year on the issue of Holocaust denialism.
“We could do the same for Indigenous people,” she said. “Make it an offence to incite hate and promote hate against Indigenous people by … denying that residential (schools) happened or downplaying what happened in the institutions.”
“Everybody in leadership when I speak about this, Indigenous leadership, … all want that amendment to happen in the Criminal Code.”
— CTV News
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Riots broke out in Dublin on Thursday evening, after an Algerian immigrant stabbed a woman and three children outside an Irish-language school earlier in the day. Police arrested more than 30 rioters, some of whom looted shops and lit cars and buses on fire during their rampage through central Dublin. Ireland’s police chief blamed the rioting on a “lunatic, hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology,” which, however true of the property destruction, obscures the tensions that have been building for some time over Ireland’s generous immigration and asylum policies. From April 2022 to April 2023, Ireland, with a population just over 5 million, admitted more than 140,000 immigrants, and the foreign-born share of its population has risen from just over 6% in the mid-’90s to about 20% today. In February, Irish police reported an “exponential” increase in protests in 2023, many of them related to immigration.
Now the Irish government, led by Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, is using the riots as an excuse to renew a push to pass a draconian hate-speech law that would criminalize, among other things, the possession of “hateful” content on personal electronic devices, which police would be empowered to seize and search. Irish police are also reportedly investigating Conor McGregor for a series of high-profile social media posts on Thursday in which the professional fighter criticized government immigration policy and the police response to the stabbing attack.
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The modern Left espoused a radical version of Jeffersonian individualism. Born at Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in 1964, it considered the primary threat to democracy to lie in the great hierarchical institutions like the university, the corporation, and government. The struggle pitted the individual against the machine-like inhumanity of the industrial age. Mario Savio, the movement’s leader, told his comrades: “You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop.”
A remarkable transvaluation has occurred since that idealistic time. In essence, the postmodern establishment Left has reversed the terms of the Jeffersonian ideal. The threat to democracy is now society—a realm of injustice and oppression, in which human wolves perpetually devour the weak. Trump and Musk stand as archetypes of the predator. They represent the authoritarian impulse, and they can manipulate the dull-minded masses, even unto insurgency, by spreading falsehoods and fake news. The pandemic showed them willing to kill with their lies, to undermine the authority of science.
Only a powerful, watchful government, in the hands of the Party of Truth, can impose democracy on a troubled society by controlling the words said, as well as the means of communication that convey them, to the public. A wise guardian class, advised by specialists, must be mobilized to assume control of politics and culture. In this framework, opposition can never be legitimate—it belongs to the Party of Lies. Those who follow Savio’s exhortation and throw themselves on the gears of the great institutions will be ground to pulp—for their own good.