"What If?" Genocide & Its Deniers

Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 10:30:32 -0700
From: Michael Posluns <mposluns@accglobal.net>
Organization: The StillWaters Group
To: "fnr_pubpol@yorku.ca" <fnr_pubpol@yorku.ca>, "sfp-net@chebucto.ns.ca" <sfp-net@chebucto.ns.ca>, John Shafer <wy430@victoria.tc.ca>,
Precedence: bulk
Return-Path: <sfp-net-mml-owner@chebucto.ns.ca>

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I am forwarding the following note from John Shafer which
consists of an excerpt from a book by Dr. Roland Chrisjohn on the
role of residential schools in the destruction of First Nations
cultures in Canada.

I hope and pray that the search for a Jewish renewal will include
our role in states whose historic policies have -- by whatever
term one chooses -- included the wholesale destruction of their
original peoples.

I also hope and pray that Science for Peace will mature into an
intellectual movement which addresses complex and difficult
historic tendencies such as the tendency of Great Powers to
continue to destroy small nations.

mp
-- 
Michael W. Posluns,
The StillWaters Group,
First Nations Relations & Public Policy.

Please note new address:  mposluns@accglobal.net

Phone 416 656-8613
Fax   416 656-2715

36 Lauder Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario,
M6H 3E3.

We offer Canadian parliamentary debates by topics and bills.
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To: Michael Posluns <MPosluns@accglobal.net>
Subject: What if...? (fwd)
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here's something on the topic as well. js


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1998 18:06:43 PST8PDT
Subject: What if...?

>From "The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian REsidential 
School Experience in Canada" by Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young 
with Michael Maraum. Theytus Books Ltd. Penticton, B.C. 1997

                           EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

What if the Holocaust had never stopped?

What if no liberating armies invaded the terriroty stormed over by 
the draconian State? No compassionate throng broke down the doors to 
dungeons to free those imprisoned within? No collective outcry of 
humanity arose as stories on the State's abuses were recounted? And 
no Court of World Opinion seized the State's leaders and held them in 
judgment as their misdeeds were chronicled? What if none of this 
happened?

What if, instead, with the passage of time the World came to accept 
the State's actions as the rightful and lawful policies of a 
sovereign nation having to deal with creatures that were less than 
fully human? And, what if, curbing some of the more glaring 
malignancies of its genocidal excesses, the State increasingly became 
prominent as both a resource for industrial powers and as an 
industrial power in its own right? What if the State could depend 
upon the discretion of other nations, engaged in their own local 
outrages, to wink at its past, so that the lie told to and accepted 
by other nations was one the State could tell itself and its 'real' 
citizens without fear of contradiction? What if the men who conceived, 
fashioned, implemented, and operated the machinery of destruction 
grew old and venerable and acclaimed, hailed as 'Fathers' of their 
country and men of insight and renown?

What if the Holocaust had never stopped, so that for the State's 
victims, there was no vindication, no validation, no justice, but 
instead the dawning realization that this was how things were going 
to be? What if those who resisted were crushed, so that others, tired 
of resisting, simply prayed that the 'next' adjustment to what 
remained of their ways of life would be the one that, somehow, they 
would be able to learn to live with? What if some learned to hate who 
they were, or to deny it out of fear, while others embraced the 
State's image of them, emulating as far as possible the State's 
principles and accepting its judgment about their own families, 
friends and neighbors? And what if others could find no option other 
than to accept the slow, lingering death the State had mapped out for 
them, or even to speed themselves along to their State-desired end?

What if?

Then you would have Canada's [and the U.S. and elsewhere where there 
are Indigenous Peoples] treatment of the North American Aboriginal 
population in general, and the Indian REsidential School Experience 
in particular.

And here and now we are going to prove it to you. "

transcribed by Jim Craven


 James Craven             
 Dept. of Economics,Clark College
 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd. Vancouver, WA. 98663
 jcraven@clark.edu; Tel: (360) 992-2283 Fax: 992-2863
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards Indians; their land and 
property shall never be taken from them without their consent." 
(Northwest Ordinance, 1787, Ratified by Congress 1789)

"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor 
and could not have existed had not labor first existed. Labor is the superior of
capital and deserves much the higher consideration." (Abraham Lincoln)

*My Employer  has no association with My Private and Protected Opinion*
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



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