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I never said it didn't. I said it makes little difference. If you'll forgive the invoking of Godwin's law, we could have a spirited debate over whether it was 2000 or 4000 jews were shot in some nameless polish town in 1940. While the truth of that question would matter in some sense, the conclusion wouldn't change the nature of the Holocaust, nor the guilt of the Nazis. Same principle.
Not something that I ever claimed.
Also not something that I ever claimed.
Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the death rates in the Residential Schools were no worse than in tribal communities, and the abuse meted out in these Schools was hugely overstated, and that the Church only had the best interests of these poor ignorant savages in their hearts, and every single death was dutifully recorded with a heavy heart and a good Christian burial... Even if we accept all that, the Church was still instrumental in stealing these children away from their parents and expunging their culture and destroying their identities and burying them hundreds of miles from their homes when they died. That alone makes me have zero sympathy for the Church having a handful of cases of arson on their hands.
I'm not saying the arson justified per se, grievance resolution by arson is no way to run a society. I'm just saying I get it. If Scientologists had spirited away my great uncle when he was 6 and buried him in one of their godforsaken compounds I'd probably want to burn down a few buildings too.
Are you as sympathetic to burning down random buildings owned by indigenous Canadians? After all, their ancestors certainly genocided conquered tribes a bunch of times throughout their history and prehistory.
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The sins (genocide) you describe are the sins of every settler society, everywhere (Canada, USA, Australia). In the Canadian instance the government directed the Churches to run these institutions, similar to how Churches were directed to run orphanages and hospitals. The government lacked the efficacy to administer social programs and delegated it to charitable institutions that they could skimp on funding. I feel you are focusing on the churches when if the government had tasked these schools with any other group in these settler societies at this time I find it difficult to believe the exact same crimes would have not occurred. The counterfactual I have mind being some Montreal Atheistic 1920s society given the same task and resources would also have the same native assimilation mindset (it infects the society at large) and their school would have had the same lack of funding, leading to the exact same problems, but the curriculum would have no Theology and more Philosophy.
The Churches set up these schools because the government told to. I think you are accepting the sleight of hand that the Churches are somehow uniquely to blame when the ENTIRE society was broadly convinced of the Imperialistic mindset that created the milieu for these crimes. The Churches were the apparatus to accomplish the aims of the larger settler society, Residential schools were Canadian government policy. The Canadian settler descended people wanted this at that time.
So the while Churches are definitely not innocent, the emphasis on their role and crimes should not diminish the guilt of the government and wider settler society that willed this to happen.
If the Church arson cases don't deserve sympathy, are all Canadian government buildings also fair targets for such treatment? If individuals not connected directly to the crimes are able to be antagonized are members of broad social groups (ie White Canadians) also able to be antagonized?
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“I'm not saying the arson justified per se, grievance resolution by arson is no way to run a society. I'm just saying I get it. If Scientologists had spirited away my great uncle when he was 6 and buried him in one of their godforsaken compounds I'd probably want to burn down a few buildings too.”
I’d say this is argument that is safe to just drop. The problem is the people with their Church’s being burned down aren’t the people who ran the residential schools. Uninvolved people are being hurt. And in general only bad things come from holding people guilty of their ancestors or weakly related people.
And the thing is many people don’t give the same understanding. Trudeau talks about these residence school but when was he compassionate to truckers who had an actual grievance directly from him. Or the right justifies 1/6 because well the FBI did interfere in the election and they were harmed. And I’ll take that justification often. I’m not even sure if the people who did the arson are people who had a connection to harm or more of an antifa group.
There is probably some long posts someone could do on Mexico and similar issues. Where I think even many on the left would need to admit Christian culture was better than Mayan culture. And where the natives and the westerners did a fairly good job of creating one people.
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Well, no, it's not, because in this case we really are disputing the truth of what actually happened, not just quibbling over numbers.
Sure, most people agree that the residential schools were a bad idea.
Since you're so fond of analogies, here's another one: we all (sigma a few contrarians) agree slavery was a bad thing. Your argument is equivalent to saying "Hey, how about that time the U.S. Army rounded up black people in every town in the South and gunned them all down and buried them in mass graves by the side of the road?" And in response to "Really, do you have any evidence this actually happened?" you are going straight to "Well, it doesn't matter so long as we know that at least once the U.S. Army probably killed some black people, and anyway, what are you, a slavery apologist?"
And hopefully you'd go to prison for a very long time if you acted on that desire.
Though of course, hopefully the Scientologists had gone to prison as well. If they hadn't, I'd be getting increasingly sympathetic to the building-burners.
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