Reposted by @arthurjam.bsky.social
Residential school denialism is "part of a willful strategy to create chaos and confusion about the truth so as to block the path to healing, justice, and reconciliation."
Read an excerpt from TRUTH BEFORE RECONCILIATION, out now from @umanitobapress.bsky.social.
canadiandimension.com
Residential school denialism and the backlash against reconciliation
To mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation—and following a gathering of white nationalists near Kamloops, where members of Second Sons Canada displayed a banner invoking residential school ...
![Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime).
We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ybkylffhwhn2an2ic2lxh76k/bafkreifucubotcz54scclzmnpxlnv6x5olf2zb6ow5xufzdyqbflhuzcn4)
