He comprehends his trust, and to the same keeps faithful with a singleness of aim;

And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait for wealth, or honours, or for worldly state, or mild concerns of ordinary life;

But who, if he be called upon to face some awful moment to which Heaven has joined great issues, good or bad for human kind, Is happy as a Lover; and attired with sudden brightness, like a Man inspired.

He to whom neither shape of danger can dismay, nor thought of tender happiness betray; Who, not content that former worth stand fast, looks forward, persevering to the last.

Or if he must fall to sleep without his fame, and leave a dead unprofitable name, finds comfort in himself and in his cause;

And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws His breath in confidence of Heaven’s applause:

This is the happy Warrior; this is he whom every Man in arms should wish to be.

- “The Happy Warrior” by William Wordsworth, 1770-1850

…….

My father is the only one in the faded photograph who still draws breath.

He was a boy of fifteen when the family photo was taken: the day before his eldest brother Bob left forever to serve as the youngest officer on the doomed Canadian destroyer HMCS Athabaska.

My younger father stares soberly into the camera, bearing the same troubled look as every other member of his family, save one: nineteen year old Bob himself, whose easy and gentle smile seems untouched by the war that waits to engulf him.

One of the sailors who survived the Germans’ torpedoing of the Athabaska seven decades ago this evening, on April 29, 1943, described, later, how Bob wore the same confident radiance in the dark and icy waters of the English Channel as men died about him. He recalls how Bob tried leading the ship’s survivors in song to keep their spirits and them alive, as the ship sank and the waters burned with deisel oil.

And in the midst of the carnage, Bob actually gave up his lifejacket to a wounded man.

Last week, I held the old Annett family photograph in my hands as my Dad sipped his scotch and remembered his last memory of brother Bob.

“He could have spent his embarkation leave in town, whooping it up, or seeing his fiancee Elaine. But instead he drove out to see me, his kid brother, and he roused me out of bed and wrestled with me and cheered me up. He was that kind of a guy”.

I gazed at the snapshot and said,

“From the looks of all of you, it’s like you all knew he was going to die”

Dad nodded, and replied softly, and unashamedly awed,

“And look at his smile”

To those accustomed to the sluggish death we like to call peace time, the highest concern one can bestow on another is the admonition to “Be safe”. Even my closest friends tell me that all the time, as if safeguarding one’s own life is some kind of bottom line. It wasn’t for my Uncle Bob, nor is it for anyone like him who discovers the secret of life.

The same people who puzzle over how Bob is the only one smiling in that final photograph are the same ones who comment with regret that Bob died because he gave away his lifejacket, as if it would have been possible for him to do anything else when faced with another man drowning from his wounds.

The desperate selfishness of “everyday” life spares us the chance to be fully human that is thrust so starkly upon on us by war. And so far too many of us go away sad and troubled by the actions of shining lights like my Uncle Bob, never understanding the drama: like the crowd who encountered Jesus on his cross and saw only bloodshed.

How habitually do we struggle to shore up the unsalvageable – our own mortal life – and refuse to live for that one moment when we find our real purpose in life by giving up our life entirely for what is right and necessary.

Perhaps Bob was so radiant in that final family photograph because he knew that his own special moment was approaching; and knowing his own measure and loving what he saw, he knew he would not fail. As for the others in the picture, how could their sadness be anything but their knowledge that they could not share in Bob’s moment?

We do not live in a time of peace, as much as we pretend we do. The war in which we are all now immersed, like all wars, is rapidly clarifying everything with the same simple truth, and choice, given to my Uncle Bob in the cold waters: If we do not act, others will die.

The particular happiness of true warriors is that they can devote every moment to the service of that deed, which is after all, the essential thing. And for those who shrink back from such necessary action, there is no remedy, and no ultimate happiness.

That is why I can’t understand or give consideration any longer to the multitudes of “concerned” but immobilized people who shrink back from doing what is necessary to save not only the lives of children, but our lands and our liberties, now, amidst this final war being waged against humanity by a global machinery of death.

At desperate moments like this, hope does come to us, but always at a great cost.

What does awaken us are living examples of a true man, or woman, who show that we are not measured by our capacity to “Be safe”, but rather, to be True, regardless of the cost.

That is the secret of Bob’s smile, and of my own: a reflection of the special opportunity granted to every human being, which no tyrant can rob from us, and no cataclysm can undo.

Will you seize that noble chance?

Let’s put to rest, first of all, the fallacy that “looming scandals” about child rape and coverup are behind Joseph Ratzinger’s resignation. That’s just the cover story.

Nobody in the church hierarchy is losing much sleep over their standing, canon-law endorsed policy of concealing and protecting child rapists in their ranks. Even the International Criminal Court application about such crimes has been stymied by catholic-run legislators and jurists.

What pronounced the death knell on Pope Benedict was his personal implication in the bribery and money-laundering practices of the Vatican Bank, comically known as The Institute of Religious Works (IOR); and how that dirty connection gave the anti-Ratzinger faction in the College of Cardinals the lever they needed to dump the obstinate German from the papal throne.

We had a whiff of that dump-Rat Boy agenda last year, when “Vatileaks” broke into the news with a ludicrous story of how Ratzinger’s loyal butler Paolo Gabriele disclosed the pope’s dirty secrets to the Italian media. In fact, the damning documents detailing Ratzinger’s secret rewarding of Vatican contracts to his friends and family members originated in the Vatican Secretary of State’s office, which the fall-guy butler could not have had access to.

The Secretary of State and the real power behind the papacy is Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, an old insider who also engineered the sacking of Gotti Tedeschi, head of the Vatican Bank, last May.

Tedeschi had taken seriously the call of the European Parliament for “greater transparency” by the Vatican Bank /IOR, and was about to disclose to Brussels how his bosses had been laundering money for the mob for decades. The last Pope who had tried such a disclosure, John Paul 1, died from poisoning in September, 1978 after less than a month in office.

But even with Tedeschi silenced, the IOR house of cards kept tumbling, as the European Parliament seized from it 300 million Euros fraudulently acquired, and even the American Securities and Exchange Commission declared the IOR’s assets and practices “insecure”. A major Vatican housecleaning was required; or at least, the appearance of one.

It was the pivotal Cardinal Bertone who leaked the pope’s diary and other incriminating papers to a catholic-friendly journalist in Rome last year the same month that Tedeschi was sacked, to prepare the world for Ratzinger’s removal. For it is Bertone who is now reaping the benefits of the papal housecleaning; he is not only a primary contender for the pope’s position but a key player in the IOR.

During my second speaking tour in Rome, in the spring of 2010, I met with several senior Italian senators and officials of the parliamentary Radical Party. They all said the same thing about why Joseph Ratzinger had been made pope, and what awaited him. To quote one of those politicians,

“Nobody becomes pope without a sordid past, because only with such liabilities can he be controlled by the Curia. It’s the same in any big company. Well, Ratzinger made many indiscretions as a Cardinal and made many enemies. His signing letters ordering criminal concealment was just one sin. He was to be the scapegoat for all of the trash that the church knew would surface”

So now, the papal scapegoat is gone, pensioned off to wherever ex-popes end up; and the time for the big face life has arrived.

The idea of applying cosmetic surgery to a decaying facade like the Church of Rome reminds me of Shirley Maclaine trying to look forty at the age of ninety. And yet appearances are everything in show business as well as in religion.

Tarcisio Bertone is about as institutional as you can get, and represents the old Italian crowd of the Curia and are part of the Mob-government-papal clique that run the country and the Roman catholic church. In the words of one of the Roman Senators I spoke with,

“You must understand that in my country, the Mafia and the government and the Vatican are all the same people, and they really have only one concern: protecting their assets.”

Bertone, or whoever from the victorious ranks of his faction does assume the papal tiria, cannot be expected to do much but maintain the assets and security of the church, and that means by continuing the policies of silence and dissimulation that keeps the cash flowing. But their position is more difficult now in the wake of the enormous rifts developing within the wider church, where Cardinals are facing criminal prosecution for shielding child rapists, and talk of disaffiliating from Rome is widespread among Irish, American and German Bishops.

“We have all the grounds for a second Reformation now. That’s how serious is the crisis. The church will either rid itself of itself or face collapse” said an Italian media commentator recently.

It was easy to despise Joseph Ratzinger: the Hitler Youth raised, reactionary bigot who sacked liberal and independent thinkers in his church as the Cardinal-head of the Vatican Inquisition, and who told American Bishops that purgatory awaited any of them who did not cover up priestly child rape. Even among fellow Cardinals, he was known as “Joe the Rat”.

But Ratzinger was a made to order object of hatred, and put there to play out the oldest game in politics: the venting of popular rage on a disposable figurehead so that the institution itself could proceed unscathed.

I doubt that it’s totally coincidental that Ratzinger was forced out of office so quickly barely ten days after our Common Law court published online hard evidence of the Pope’s involvement in crimes against humanity. Any new Pope will face the same charges, of colluding in a massive criminal conspiracy.

But the real issue is not who or what will replace Joseph Ratzinger as the latest figurehead, but how to displace the Vatican itself as a criminal power unto itself. And that struggle is just commencing.

All of the data indicates that nations at war suffering mortality rates exceeding 25% are permanently traumatized and destroyed, for they are incapable of ever recovering their pre-war integrity. They become for all practical purposes ghost societies. - United States Air Force Manual on War and Counter-Insurgency, Washington, spring 1983

We’ve created a completely new Indian society and we’re the new leaders of it. It’s a done deal. - Wendy Grant-John, government Indian and “chief” of the Musqueam Tribal Council, April 2006

————–

Indigenous nationhood, like Democracy or Christianity, is a wonderful idea; and wonderfully absent, in practice.

None of us have ever actually experienced these ideals – and yet how passionately we pretend to. In truth, we settle for cheap facsimiles of these visions that our various rulers convince us are the Real Deal. And sadly, we’ve believed their lie for so long that even now we teach it to one another, and to our children.

Let me leave aside the matter of Democracy, and Christianity, since I’m sure my gentle readers will need little convincing that marking ten ballots in one’s lifetime and sitting in boredom in a church pew for an hour doesn’t amount to much of anything. But I expect I’ll have tougher sledding when it comes to tackling the fallacy of Indigenous nationhood.

Putting aside political correctness and liberal white guilt – and how hard it is to do so! – if we are to remain on the path of truth and political realism and not slide into murky rhetorical swamps, we must see things as they are and not as we want them to be. And the hard historical truth is that all genuine indigenous nations were historically uprooted and expunged by European colonialism within a few generations of contact.

All of them.

On average, more than 90% of the indigenous people and their nations in the western hemisphere were eventually exterminated by European weapons and diseases, starting with the oldest people, the learned, and the carriers of tradition and authority. The butchery began in 1492 in the Caribbean and ended around 1910 on Canada’s west coast.

Killing off ninety percent of a people means, effectively, killing off all of a people. Recovery and continuity is impossible, especially after the children of the remnant populaces endure the massive brainwashing and cultural re-cloning fondly called Christian Education.

What remains today in the wake of this worst massacre in human history are not even pale imitations of those original nations, but something altogether new: namely, “ab-original” societies, manufactured by the conquering powers of church and state. For ab-original means, according to any dictionary, not of the original group.

Native people, like all of us, have been manufactured.

In none of the hundreds of native groups I’ve worked with over the decades have more than a handful of people known even a smattering of their original languages; nor do they practice their traditional ways, since those ways are gone.

None of them can live off the land, or practice ceremonies and rituals going back centuries. Their attitudes and hopes are the same as everybody else. They all flock into the same malls, buy the same pointless things, and poison their kids at the same fast food dumps as the “whites”. And most of them pay taxes and vote and call themselves Canadians.

But what’s most important, most of these aboriginals acknowledge that their traditional nation is dead and gone.

There are rare exceptions. But native men and women who aren’t caught up in the money-chasing game of aboriginal politics are the first to admit that they are not indigenous, and know nothing of who they are, and were. These people are denied the financial rewards that come to Professional Indians in the political, legal and academic worlds who posture as “First Nations” – a term created by the Canadian government – and who say all the right phrases and wear all the right regalia.

The vast majority of natives who don’t play the Professional Indian game are invisible to the rest of us. I only began to see and come to know them when I became an outcast from my own culture and began to share their alienation. The Professional Indians, contrarily, are the only ones that you are allowed to see.

After all, upon whom has your attention been riveted by the corporate media for many weeks now other than “Chief” Theresa Spence, the $85,000 a year pseudo-hunger striker who is the poster-person of the government-launched dissent-funneling operation known as Idle No More?

Of course, this kind of fraud is nothing new. Conquerors always create their own version of the ones they’ve destroyed. The same thing happened to my former people in the Gaelic Highlands after English bayonets and schools wiped us out after 1745. The British aristocracy invented the kilt and other Scottish niceties in their ab-original version of what they had destroyed. And they put into power the same kind of puppet chieftains like Ms. Spence who posture in Canada under the banner of the impotent “Assembly of First Nations” (AFN).

It’s all part of the deadly symbiosis set up when one culture exterminates another: the conquerors keep tokens of their victims around for their reassurance and consciences; and strangely, over time, they and their conquered learn to depend on and identify with each other.

In truth, that’s because a colonized people are no longer a people, but an appendage – that’s the Latin meaning of “colon” – of the bigger Body Politic of the Conquerors. The remnant ab-originals depend on that Body for their very life and identity. Ask any AFN chief what he or she would do without a pay cheque from Ottawa. Ask Theresa Spence.

In Canada, as in America, the Pale Eaters – otherwise known as white people, since Assimilation means to eat someone – keep chewing up and swallowing ever more of the colonized peoples. They do so literally, by grabbing their children, their future, their lands and resources, and symbolically, by making the colonized perform for them to assuage their guilt and maintain the lie that Genocide didn’t really happen in their country.

That fact strikes home to me with a vengeance whenever the AFN puppets open their mouths and the dead words of the Pale Eaters drop out.

But back to the realists: the mostly poor and dying authentic Indians who are honest about the fact that they have been killed and stripped of everything.

The hundreds of such people whom I work and live with never speak of their traditions, or of “the Elders”, or of “Protocol”, or any of the other Indigenously Correct terms thrown about in the Professional Indian world. They don’t exclude “whites” from their ranks in a false pride of being better, or demand more money from the government. Nor do they cozy up to the christian churches that killed their people and blabber about “healing and reconciliation” with such criminals.

On the contrary, the realists know what is true and they speak about it, which is why they, and not the Professional Indians, have been the ones to occupy churches, and demand that the guilty face judgement and return the bodies of the children they murdered. It has been these unassimilated refugees from a lost world who have forced the Canadian Genocide onto the world stage, while the Professional Indians cower and equivocate and avoid everything until the television cameras show up.

There is no authentic Indian leadership in Canada; how can there be, after all, in the wake of such a cunning arrangement? And so the AFN and other cardboard creations are collapsing, having zero credibility, starting with young native men and women. And that’s why the AFN has had to desperately create publicity stunts like Idle No More, to salvage themselves and the Pale Eaters who for now fund them.

But all is not lost. True Tragedy, taught the classical Greeks, is but the other side of Farce. And in the case at hand, the farce is best expressed in the game of Who’s Got the Elder that seems to preoccupy all the Professional Indians and their loyal Caucasian wannabees in these last days of collapsing illusions and slipping masks.

Who’s Got the Elder is rampant these days. For instance, last year, when I was asked by some of the Mohawk people around Brantford to help them locate the mass graves of the kids who were murdered by the Anglican Church at the local “residential school”, I was immediately immersed in the game.

Nobody in the three permanent factions among the Grand River Mohawks could agree on exactly who was an “Elder”, since they all had different definitions of the word.

To some of them, it meant “clan mother”; but day by day those who called themselves clan mothers would change, depending on who happened to show up to meetings and who bore a grudge against whom. To others, only certain families were the “true hereditary elders”, but nobody could agree on who those families were. I became confused, very quickly: as confused as all the Mohawks seemed to be.

Most of our gatherings at the Kanata Centre in Brantford were devoted not to the practical job of finding and bringing home the remains of the buried children, but arguing over what they called the “protocol” of how to proceed. But again, there were a dozen different definitions of what protocol actually was. As you’d guess, after a week or so of such endless verbosity, the original purpose of why we had gathered quickly became lost.

I hope you understand that I’m not picking on the Mohawks. To their credit, they have gone further than any other group in trying to bring the forensic evidence of the genocide they faced into the light of day. And naturally, the government operatives and divide and conquer experts were on hand quickly to scuttle everything and discredit me and the project.

But that wasn’t the problem, ultimately. The Mohawks simply got caught up in their own rhetoric and thought they were something they actually aren’t: just like the rest of us.

So what does it all mean?

Actually, a lot, once we drop all our blinders.

The indigenous nations that we all once were have vanished, chewed up by a corporate global machine, and we stand now in need of a new definition that embraces our collective humanity and the natural law that has always been our true bedrock.

We, humanity, are in a final war for survival. But as long as we cling to all the false divisions and labels imposed on us by the rulers, we’ll remain what we are: appendages of a thing that is killing our children, our souls, and our world. And we will all go under, regardless of our political correctness.

Who is an Elder, anyway? I guess we all become one, eventually. And I suppose that I am an Elder, now, after more than twenty years of struggle. But I don’t need anybody to tell me that I am.

Ours is a disappointed age. The End Times did not arrive after all with the close of 2012. But Canadians, at least, have been given a small consolation, of a sort: that is, if you believe their corporate media, who are suddenly raving about a new and supposedly “grassroots aboriginal protest movement” that pundits claim is sweeping the country, and calling itself the quite non-aboriginal name “Idle No More”.

The protests of this mysterious group are undeniably real, as are the hundreds of eager, often non-aboriginal demonstrators who are about as worked up as Canadians can get over anything. But what exactly is this thing called Idle No More, and who runs and pays for it, is anybody’s guess.

These latest, carefully managed demonstrations arrived right out of the blue, as only pre-fabricated dissent can, and has as its poster person an appropriately sympathetic figure: Chief Theresa Spence from the poverty-stricken Attawapiskat reserve in Ontario.

Chief Tess has been conducting a one-woman hunger fast to force Prime Minister Harper to halt his legislation, Bill C-45, that allows the government to sell Indian reservation land without first consulting the local state-funded tribal council “chiefs”.

Wow. Now that’s an issue to go to the barricades over, eh?

Well, maybe for reservation council chiefs like Theresa Spence and her organization, the state-funded “Assembly of First Nations”, who obviously need to improve their bargaining position with Ottawa – and who are most likely the originators of the whole “movement”. But how does any of that help your average poverty-stricken Indians, most of whom live off reservation?

Besides, it’s all bullshit, anyway. Under the Indian Act, the government can already sell off any reservation land they want without first checking with their puppet chiefs, since all reserve land is owned by that fiction called “the Crown”.

Hey! You mean this whole issue is a big fraud and a red herring? Surely not in Canada!

It seems that all those unfortunate Idle No More activists are being seriously lied to, and by the very people under whose banner they’re protesting: that upstart class of native wannabe capitalists who want to profit off the sale of their own peoples’ lands without having the feds interfere.

One such wannabe, “Chief” Ed John from northern B.C., has pocketed millions of dollars since the 1980′s by forcing his own Carrier-Sekani people off their lands and signing illegal deals with Alcan and other mining companies. Ed’s now a senior Canadian official at the United Nations – and a vocal supporter of Idle No More.

Surprised? I hope not. For none of this is new. History is replete with examples of masses of people being conned to fight and die for the interests of various elites, whether they be white or dark-skinned. Such “movements” are always created suddenly from the top-down just as Idle No More has been, trumpeting salvation for those who are duped into being the steam in somebody else’s engine – and who gain nothing at the end of the day.

After all, how exactly will any of my dying aboriginal friends on Vancouver’s mean streets benefit from the defeat of Bill C-45? Or all the moms on reservations who watch their kids decay as the housing and jobs and drugs are dealt out to the friends and family of the local “Chief”? In a word, not one bit.

I don’t doubt Chief Theresa’s sincerity. But she is, after all, the front piece of a machine controlled from elsewhere. And what matters is not figure heads but who and what they represent.

Nevertheless, all protest is good. It gets people moving, even if it is in the wrong direction. And who knows? This “Idle No More” thing is just starting. Movements do morph, and sometimes they escape the clutches of the string-pullers and are transformed from below. But that requires alternative leadership, with a different view, and strategy.

So far, no such alternative has emerged. The Idle No More activists, native and white, are still taking their cues from well-funded aboriginal politicians whose notion of revolt is calling for “more consultation” from the government.

Shit. No wonder the world thinks that Canadians are boring.

The whole farce reminds me of the sudden, solitary visit last year of top Apple, “Grand Chief” Sean Atleo of the Assembly of First Nations, to Vancouver’s downtown east side slums.

Sean walked around the streets for an hour or so, saying hi to all the dying Indians who don’t share his $200,000 a year salary. And then Sean made a big splash with the media with his comment about how his organization – and not all those homeless Indians he’d met, apparently – needed lots more money from Ottawa.

As common law reminds us, Let he who will be deceived, be deceived.

Idle No More is not a very well-crafted deception. After all, how many Indians that you know construct expressions like “Idle No More”? That language sounds more like the kind used by an academic-for-hire trying to sound radical: just like the very term “First Nations”. But if it sounds politically correct and makes folks feel good, that seems to do the trick for most of the placard-waving crowd.

The real grassroots movements that pose a threat to Canada’s colonial regime are never reported in the corporate media or listened to by the authorities. Such genuine movements are normally killed off before they can stagger to their feet. I’ve watched that happen more times than I want to remember, usually among impoverished people who have neither the right connections or funding on their side: simply the truth. And that makes them incomprehensible to many of the people presently engaged in respectable protest.

We built such a grassroots movement on Vancouver’s streets after 2005, consisting entirely of aboriginal survivors of the Christian death camps quaintly called “residential schools” .

Through direct and unannounced occupations of churches and government offices, our movement forced the feds to admit that genocide had happened in the Indian residential schools. We scared the churches responsible like nothing has before then, or since. And we even made Idle No More possible, since Christian Canada knew that, after having its cathedrals and church offices seized by angry residential school survivors, no more could the murderers of Indian children simply ignore the ongoing Canadian genocide.

By 2011, that movement of ours had been destroyed from within and from without by well placed operatives, and it cost the lives of at least six of our best activists and friends: all poor and aboriginal, of course. Our bravest and clearest people were killed, in plain sight, and as a warning to the rest of us. And like all uncontrolled opposition movements bubbling from below, our group was not only stamped out forcibly, but smeared and misrepresented by the media and hired mudslingers at every step.

That doesn’t sound like Idle No More very much, does it? I don’t imagine that many of their spokespeople will end up getting beaten to death by Vancouver cops or terminated with lethal injections in Catholic hospitals, as befell our organizers Bingo Dawson and Billy Combes. The protected and controlled opposition doesn’t run that risk.

But at the end of the day, the truth always does come out, and the little jerk behind the big mask emerges.

Just check out the website of the Assembly of First Nations and trace the corporate donors behind them and their local puppet chiefs, and you’ll begin to see who the real “Idle No More” is: B.C. Hydro, Alcan, Power Corporation, North American Water and Power Alliance, Weyerhauser, and Cameco Uranium – to say nothing of all the Chinese resource consortia that own much of Canada’s (formerly) Great White North.

These companies are the same ones that prop up the Harper Tory government, and such Big Money needs the tribal council chiefs to secure them their control over aboriginal lands and resources, freed of all government restraints. And that’s why the contrived spectacle of a “conflict” between these same tribal elites and Ottawa is but the latest stage show managed from the Prime Minister’s Office, to conceal its complicity, and from corporate board rooms, to grab the water, oil and uranium from under the feet of native nations across Canada, while we’re all focused on the pseudo-political drama called Idle No More.

It’s called the Big Distraction, people. But the very fact of its rapid staging right now means that somebody in charge is worried, and in need of deception. And I’ll wager my next year’s non-existent salary that Canada’s upcoming condemnation in European Human Rights Courts for Genocide is not exactly unrelated to this latest Distraction – and Big Money’s rapid effort to grab what it can from us, while it can.

Stupid No More.

It’s well into the night here in Nanaimo, and although the cold rain beats incessantly at our home, the fire inside is roaring. Carol is asleep next to me on the couch and my stomach is filled and warmed with good cheer. And yet my thoughts are far from my cocoon of peace, as they have been every Christmas Eve for the past nearly two decades.

Her name was Maisie Shaw, and she would have turned eighty this year. Instead, she died a young teenager at the bottom of some concrete stairs an hour’s drive from here, on Christmas Eve in 1946.

A Christian killed Maisie with his angry boot: a man named Reverend Alfred Caldwell, who died peacefully in bed years later after being officially honored as a “true man of God and a servant of the aboriginal community” by his United Church of Canada, and handsomely pensioned.

But on Christmas Eve of 1946, Alfred Caldwell ignored Maisie’s small corpse at the bottom of the stairs, according to the other young girl who saw the murder. He walked away from his crime, and sometime later that night he wished all the still-breathing girls and boys at the Alberni Indian residential school a happy Christmas after they’d sung songs about the gentle newborn named Jesus. And then, later, Alfred Caldwell raped another one of those little children in his room, or two of them at a time, like he did almost every night he was Principal there.

The boot that erased Maisie Shaw wiped out a whole bloodline of unborn souls who would have sprung from her.

Somehow I see their many faces as I gaze just now out my warmth-fogged window, knowing that their spirits will linger among us only as long as someone cares about who they might have been. I even imagine that one or two of their spectral images might tonight visit a reclusive United Church official or Prime Minister with a name not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, and pull back another one of them from the brink of their own selves. But such hope is for fairy tales told in comfortable rooms, and very soon all of their lost and betrayed faces ripple and fade away into the cold night.

What persists for Canadians is not the battered and bloody end of a little girl named Maisie, but the warm fact of our fireplaces and our full stomachs. And so ultimately I understand all the others who feel the fullness of their lives and so must deny the incomprehensible truth of what we have done and the filth that we all sustain.

I have told the world about Maisie Shaw and those like her for seventeen years now, ever since I learned of her fate; and Canada has been changed for it. And yet nothing has really changed.

Accused murderer of both Maisie Shaw and Albert Gray. Principal Rev. Alfred E. Caldwell (Ahousat, 1935-40, Alberni 1944-1953)

For just last month, another clergyman much like Alfred Caldwell got a medal from the Canadian government. His name is Bernard Cameron; and as a catholic priest in Cornwall, Ontario he was officially named in a National Citation as someone who has `”done a lot of good in the community and has made us all very proud”, according to his local Member of Parliament.

Bernard Cameron is also a serial child rapist, as his own victims have declared in public. But like Alfred Caldwell, Berny will never see the inside of a prison, and he will rape children until he dies. Canada and its churches, after all, know how to take care of their own.

If God were alive today, I wonder what would happen to Caldwell, and Berny Cameron, and all the others who officially do good? After all, since it’s the drive to make the world a better place by making other people different that has brought us to where we are today, then I figure that a Supreme Deity might have a different plan in mind besides doing good.

For if God were actually alive today, and not allowing the Caldwells and the Camerons to win all the time, maybe all that stuff attributed to Him or Her in the Bible might start happening. And wouldn’t that be pleasant for all of us, starting with our Official Do-Gooders like Alfred Caldwell and Berny Cameron?

But I wouldn’t hold your breaths.

I hear the Vatican is working overtime these days to have child rapists re-classified as “non-offenders” under psychiatric and statutory laws around the world. And the Harper government recently changed the law in Canada requiring only a one year mandatory sentence for child rape. So I guess Canada’s medal to Berny Cameron isn’t so unusual, after all: most likely, it’s the wave of the future.

Things are probably better this way: Berny Cameron gets his medal and the rest of us keep trying to do good within easy reach of our fireplaces. And Maisie Shaw stays moldering in her unmarked and forgotten grave.

After all, are you prepared for the alternative?

Merry Christmas.

Canadians, especially, seem obsessed with those two words these days, and prattle on about them with the kind of hopeless desperation displayed by parents who keep insisting to their maturing children that there really is a Santa Claus.

Burying the hatchet is always a good thing for those with the bigger hatchet, much as the law is good for the man with property, and terrible for the one without it. But to speak of “reconciliation” as some kind of equally rewarding prospect for all concerned is just so much horse piss.

Take Indians, for example. As a group, they’re clearly holding the smaller tomahawk and will take anything they’re handed: at least, most of the ones I know. They don’t have much choice, after all. But their being reconciled to this big fish-little fish realpolitik called Canada is not the same thing as being happy with the arrangement, as much as they’re expected to do minstrel shows for the Big Massa.

All of us white folks, contrarily, are generally pleased as punch with all this healing and reconciliation talk of hatchet-burying with Indians, since we’re holding the bigger one.

Besides, all of this forced euphoria is just like talking about Santa Claus: a pleasant fairy tale designed to help us digest our turkey dinner and all the goodies that come with it. In truth, reconciliation between historical enemies like White Canada and what’s left of indigenous nations is about as common as a Christmas Eve manifestation of ol’ Saint Nick. How precisely does a lion get along with a lamb, anyway?

I doubt if I’d ever feel reconciled with the people who gang raped me or fed my little sister into a furnace one night along with her newborn baby. Nor would I expect the monsters who did this, or those who protect them, to “reconcile” with me or my slaughtered sibling, even if such a thing was possible, or desirable. What I would want would be to see the bastards go to jail, or a worse place.

Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not like I haven’t tried making up with my torturers, down the years, or offered a hand to those who I’ve wronged. But it’s always rung hollow. Both sides know it’s just for show, never alleviates the wrong or the pain, and is thereby a mere side-stop before the resumption of hostilities.

Richard Sawchuck was a demented eleven year old nearly twice my size who loved to chuck rocks at my head in the school yard for no particular reason, or spit gob all over the back of my head on the school bus each morning. The other kids would watch my ordeal and do nothing, or turn away with the kind of sick, vacant look of your standard not-so-innocent bystander. But after a week of Richard’s assaults I finally picked up a fallen tree branch one morning and smashed him over the head with it, which stopped him cold.

Nevertheless, my counter-attack caused both of us to be hauled in front of our Principal at Frontenac Elementary. The scowling custodian demanded that we shake hands and make up.

Richard grabbed my hand and squeezed it as hard as he could, and even while he mouthed an apology to me, his eyes blazed with the fire of vengeance. I said nothing to him, knowing that I would never trust him; but I shook his hand because I was expected to. And sure enough, Richard Sawchuck caught me the next day in an alley near my home, and I lost a tooth and some blood for it.

Richard and I have both moved on from that particular battlefield, of course, but only because of time and circumstance. Many other adversaries have taken his place. And with all the forgiveness and understanding in the world on my part, the blows have never slowed.

You can blame me, I suppose, for the conflict, which is the fool’s or the coward’s explanation. But all of that warfare with strangers aside, it’s the struggles closer to home that are in truth even more impossible for us to mend, for the simple reason that we are beings of love.

Our human heart, after all, is so infinitely gentle that one good whack at it will drive it into hiding for years, and sometimes for an entire lifetime. Like the Mohawk legend of Thunder Boy who is gifted to earth people until the moment that he encounters an angry word or a hand raised against him, and then must return to the heavens, our actual radiance endures in this world for about as long as the morning dew. And then, beaten or banished by stupidity, it flies away somewhere, never to find recovery.

Being an incurable romantic, which I suspect is another form of early onset dementia, I nevertheless still seek out the exiled radiance in every soul I meet, and I do see its traces in many of us, like the ghostly tail of sub-atomic particles.

An echo of our Eden-self resounds in some form in all men and women, fueling our best moments, and allowing us to somehow persevere in hell. But such a wispy spirit is woefully unable to construct the kind of active recovering and reclaiming that Official Lies call healing and reconciliation: words that are really just a politician’s ploy and a lawyer’s invention, not a living force to remake our rapidly decomposing world.

Coming apart as we are as a culture, it is preferable in these last days to leave all the blabber of reconciliation to the slogan-mongers and accept ourselves for who and what we are, as all dying people must. The heart outwears its sheath, and even love must rest, said Byron. This is not a time for more lies.

Whoever he was, the Just Soul called Yeshua had no need to overcome his murder and return in glory from the grave to his sad followers, in order to be One of God. For his life and sacrifice alone were enough to reconcile our hopes with the light he reflected from each one of us.

It is enough to be sifted and measured every day, in the heat of unreconciled warfare, and find in it all a reason to go on. If I am not healed, it is because I never was meant to be, but rather continue on that long journey not to recovery, but to transformation.

So grow up, Canada. Learn to face your end, and all that you have done to cause it. There are no cheap answers or apologies. There is just a final accounting, and the long arm of retribution and justice that reaches, yes, even you, for the purposes of heaven and earth and all of their people.

HURT ME WITH THE TRUTH

BUT NEVER KILL ME WITH A LIE

I was held in the Nanaimo Indian Hospital when I was a child, for seven years. I was used like a guinea pig in experiments. Lots of Indian kids died in there.

- Joan Morris, Songhees Nation, at a lecture at Malaspina College (VIU) in the spring of 2004

Just south of the VIU campus stands an overgrown piece of land behind stern barbed wire fencing: the site of the former Nanaimo Indian Hospital, run by the United Church of Canada and the federal government for over a half century.

According to Joan Morris and other Indians, this ground holds the remains of children who were killed after grisly medical experiments were conducted there for decades by military doctors.

This past week, Joan Morris’ testimony is helping to place Nanaimo in the news at international human rights forums in Europe.

Last Monday, the first evidence of crimes of genocide against native people in Canada went online , thanks to a Common Law court set up by lawyers and human rights activists in Belgium, Ireland and seven other nations. And in the docket of that court are testimonies of survivors of the infamous Nanaimo Indian Hospital (NIH), adjacent to the VIU campus.

I first met Joan Morris in the fall of 2003 and at her request, helped arrange a public forum on campus where she told her story to a small, shocked audience.

“My mother and I were both imprisoned in the Hospital in the 1960′s” she described.

“They gave me these horrible tasting drinks that made me sick. My cousin Nancy Joe had them too and she died later of cancer when she was only twenty two. I can’t remember a lot of things, but when I was older, when I went to a doctor in Victoria, he told me all the bones in my feet had been broken, and my uterus had been damaged. I know a lot of other Indians kids in there never survived. They were hauling out little bodies on that metal gurney practically every morning”

Documents held at Indian Affairs archives confirm that the Nanaimo Indian Hospital was funded jointly by the United Church of Canada, whose missionary doctors brought children to the facility, and the federal Department of Health. It officially closed in the mid 1970′s and has been a “training facility” for the Canadian military since the 1980′s.

Although some of the original buildings of the NIH were still standing when Joan Morris gave her talk at the former Malaspina College in 2004, within a few months of Joan’s talks, those buildings were bulldozed and destroyed.

And since, in the fall of 1999, Ottawa “officially sealed” all records of Indian hospitals across Canada held at its National Archives, a cover up of what went on at NIH seems to be in effect.

Esther Morris, a distant relative of Joan, was sterilized in her teenage years and had bones and a kidney removed when she was incarceretd at NIH during the 1960′s.

“The government came to my mom when I was five and told her I had tuberculosis, which was nonsense. I never had it. But they took me away and I was at the hospital for years. I lost track of time. I was strapped down in a weird device so I could never lie back or stand up, just held like that for months. I lost the use of my legs. These doctors kept studying me and giving me shots that made me sick. Later, I learned I couldn’t have children”

Nanaimo wasn’t the only place where such horrors were inflicted on local Indians.

Sarah Modeste of the Cowichan Nation was sterilized at the King’s Daughters Clinic in Duncan, BC in the early 1950′s by Dr. James Goodbrand. As Sarah describes on the online Common Law Court proceedings (itccs.org, November 5),

“Dr. Goodbrand said to me, ‘If you marry Freddy, I’ll have to do an operation on you’ … But Goodbrand delivered my first baby and afterwards I was all bruised and hurting inside. Later I learned I’d been sterilized … Goodbrand told me he was being paid $300 by the government for every Indian woman he sterilized”

Involuntary sterilizations and medical experiments are outlawed under international law, and are defined as crimes against humanity. Yet Canada and its churches have never been thus charged before any tribunal; and not a single person has ever been brought to trial in Canada for these crimes, or for the death of a child in these facilities and residential schools, where half the children never returned.

In the words of Joan Morris,

“All those little kids on the gurney are buried on the grounds of the hospital. My cousin Nanacy said she saw them being put in the ground, in the foliage up towards the mountains. I wish they’d be given a final rest”

Joan’s story has recently been removed from You Tube, without explanation.

As much as Canada has ignored and covered up its legacy of genocide, the world is not ignoring it any longer. The International Common Law Court of Justice, based in Brussels, has issued a Public Summons to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the heads of the United, Catholic and Anglican churches to answer these charges. So far, none of them have replied.

Nevertheless, the Court’s Prosecutor’s Office has commenced its case against Canada, which can be followed online at itccs.org .

If Canada and its churches are found guilty for crimes against humanity, Canadians are obliged under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to not pay their taxes, lest they be found guilty of colluding in criminal actions.

The lost children of the Nanaimo Indian Hospital may receive justice yet.

It felt like they were raping me all over again, but this time they were calling it healing and reconciliation.
– Sylvester G., aboriginal torture victim, after attending Canada’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” hearing in Vancouver, 2011

Torture is the perfect crime … in the vast majority of cases, only the victim pays.
- Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People by John Conroy

I have worked for many years with torture victims who are never called that, but rather are known and labeled as “survivors of abuse”. So why is this misnomer so commonly used?

Torture is a criminal act under the law; abuse is not. And so while it may profit the torturers known as church and state to moderate and minimize their crime with doublespeak, it is, contrarily, a matter of life and death for the tortured to know their condition for what it is, and to call it so. But for them to do so is a direct challenge to not only the torturers but to we not so innocent bystanders.

In The Forgiveness Fallacy, I asked why it is that our culture tolerates the rape,  torture and even murder of children by so easily forgiving those responsible – especially when they occupy positions of “authority”. The answer: we are conditioned from childhood to remain battered victims by enabling our torturers at every step. Forgiveness, I concluded, is a tool fashioned from the perspective of the torturer, since absolution is expected to flow essentially in one direction: from the violated to the violator.

The devastating consequence of doing so, and of respecting those who harm us when none of their behavior has changed, was demonstrated in the closing paragraphs of my Forgiveness piece, where I described a recent, grotesque incident at the government’s stage-managed “Truth and Reconciliation” (TRC) hearings in Victoria, B.C.

The ones who raped and killed brown skinned children, or who protected those who did, received front row seats at this supposed “healing event”, and all the time they needed to publicly exculpate themselves. They were white men adorned with crosses who elbowed out the ones whom they had crucified. Those who somehow survived church torture got to sit behind the church leaders, and were limited to ten minutes to “share” their agony in the presence of those responsible for it.

Some of the victims took offense, to their credit. They called the church men liars, to their face – until, at least, they were silenced by “one of their own”: a trained seal named Murray Sinclair, who as top ab-original TRC Commissioner told the residential school survivors to shut up and “show respect” to the criminals.

After his command, one old native woman broke down and sobbed openly, “like she had just seen someone die”, to quote an onlooker. But the other victims kept their tears to themselves, crushed inside, their wounds open and flowing, like the silent accomplices they were taught and are expected to be.

One should recall that this debacle is occurring in a country where it is more of a crime under the law to possess six or more marijuana plants than it is to rape a child. The law, and Murray Sinclair, are speaking the same message: children are expendable.

And thus, the spectacle of a supposed “inquiry” into crimes against children needs to be understood for what it really is in a nation like Canada : not a process that has anything to do with actual truth or recovery, but in reality,  deliberate psychological torture aimed at those who know the truth and may speak it, in order to disable them. This method is well known in counter-insurgency manuals issued during warfare.

Every aspect of the “truth and reconciliation commission hearings” seems designed to psychologically disable and re-traumatize survivors of church torture, by denigrating them, restricting and censoring their statements, and brazenly reasserting the authority of their torturers right in their face. The harsh effectiveness of this assault is evident in the continual tendency for the suicide rate among aboriginal families to climb whenever the TRC events come to their community.

In Canada, and wherever eyewitnesses to church and state pose a threat to the evasion of justice by the powerful, this kind of re-traumatizing is a sure-fire method deployed against those who are veterans of the oldest war in human history: that staged by Christendom – the corporation of the roman catholic church – against its perceived enemies.

The Vatican officially sanctioned the use of physical torture against non-catholics in the year 1252, to “destroy the body that the soul may live”, to quote one of the three “philosophical fathers” of Catholicism, Thomas Aquinas. The practice has never stopped, and not just against “heretics”.

Why the church so deliberately rapes and tortures children seems at first glance as morally perplexing as why it is allowed to do so by governments and courts. But in truth, such violence flows naturally from Christendom’s core “Original Sin” belief in the corrupt and debased nature of every newborn child, indeed of Creation itself: a belief upon which our society arose.

To suggest that our very innocence is in fact the source of all evil in us and the world creates an irresolvable psychosis within every believing Christian that breeds the kind of self-hatred that transfers itself onto anything innocent, beginning with our own childhood and capacity to practice empathy.

Is it small wonder, then, that the culture of Christendom has bred such violence, rape, and wars of extermination for centuries? Or that children have been seen in the European world as a permanent and unmanageable threat to society, by the simple fact they refute the very tenets of Christendom by being so innocent and untainted?

It is natural, then, that such little “heretics” can be assaulted and killed with impunity and clear conscience, since they are in the same category of the damned as any real or potential “enemies of the faith”.

As unacceptable a notion as this may be to some, the raw statistics of the continual enormity of child rape and torture bears it out.

The fact that church-sanctioned torture of children is so rationalized and legitimated by every level of our culture, and that “child abuse” is a non-issue in practice for most people and health professionals, is even more proof of the unconscious hatred that western culture holds for childhood. It is why, in fact, the sacrifice of children is unrelenting.

Very soon in my work as a therapist with victims of childhood torture, I realized that the whole notion of “survivors of abuse” was inaccurate and did not reflect what people endured. I began to refer to the “survivors” as veterans of warfare, and significantly, when I did so in healing circles, people began to sit up, gain confidence and speak more clearly about what they had suffered.

I can only conclude that something in my designation of them as veterans rather than survivors or victims touched honestly on how they felt about themselves, and what they had gone through. And the fact that they had all indeed been through a hellish battle and bore all the same psychological traits as combat veterans allowed many of them to begin naming their torturers and what they represented rather than dwelling on their own personal agony.

If it is true that “For any veteran, the war never ends”, it is equally the case that the knowledge of why one has fought and suffered equips veterans with a moral fortitude and psychic strength to endure their own suffering, even in the face of massive Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

For instance, those survivors of Indian boarding school tortures who have read the laws and church edicts allowing them to be incarcerated at a tender age are far more capable of discussing their torture than those who act from a victimized, uninformed belief that their suffering was somehow their own fault or the result of bad circumstances. As one veteran put it to me,

“I always blamed my parents for being locked up in that hellhole, until I read in your book that it was a federal law to do that to every Indian kid. Then I didn’t have to hate my folks anymore. I could put the blame where it belonged.”

It is therefore hardly surprising that the government and church funded system of “therapy” for these same survivors discourages such knowledge of the historical reasons and the systemic context of their suffering, and prescribes an individualistic, a-historical counseling model that places sole responsibility for recovery on the victim. As one survivor describes it, “It’s like we’re told we suffered a crime, but we’re not allowed to name the criminal, and if we do, we’re victimized all over again.”

This system, I would argue, is part of a wider process of social and collective denial of responsibility for the torture itself on the part of the guilty mainstream society.

In his book Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, John Conroy describes nine characteristic reactions to torture by those responsible for it. These nine features could be an exact description of the attitude and responses of mainstream Canada – or any culture that wiped out another – to the reality of their own home-grown genocide.

1.     First and foremost, the torture is denied: “It never happened – those are just wild conspiracy stories”.
2.     Next, when the fact of torture can no longer be refuted, the extent of the torture is minimized: “It’s not as bad as they’re making out. Only a few people were harmed.”
3.     As part of this trivialization of the crime, the victims themselves are disparaged and dehumanized: “They were criminals or unruly elements who needed to be treated that way.”
4.     The torture, which is never called that, is portrayed as being a necessary act of defense that was some kind of prior societal norm: “We had no other way of dealing with those people; and besides, everybody was abusing children back then”
5.     When the fate of the tortured is exposed in all its ugliness, those who take up the cause of the victims are attacked as “aiding the enemies of society” and causing needless social disruption that is “impeding healing”.
6.     Another defense is that the torture is over and done with, and whoever raises it is “needlessly raking up the past and causing pain”.
7.     A commonly employed “Bad Apples Defense” claims that only individuals acting alone, without authority, caused the torture; and that no higher authority or institution can be blamed or held accountable today.
8.     A final justification of the torture is that far worse things happen in other places, and that relatively speaking, the victims are not so badly off and are not really suffering.
9.     The final defense is that the victims themselves will “heal” and recover from the “abuse”, provided the torture is forgotten and the guilty are unconditionally “forgiven”.

And a final rationale, not mentioned by Conroy, is that the tortures inflicted on people were legal acts and orders which had to be obeyed because they were “the law”. I like to call that one the “Nazis’ Nuremburg Defense”.

In such a mainstream climate of systemic denial, where the guilty institutions effectively justify their crimes and absolve themselves from all wrongdoing – as is occurring in Canada – the torture victims have no means to actually recover from their trauma, since every level of society is telling them that their ordeal was not actual torture but simply “abuse”, and may even have been necessary at the time.

In other words, from the victims’ experience and in truth the torturer is still unrepentant and in charge, and can therefore safely strike at them again at any moment. Indeed, a dominant culture’s denial of its own deeds seems designed to maintain the torture survivor in a prolonged state of fear and dysfunction, precisely as if the torture is continuing – which in a basic sense, it is.

Must Torture Continue? Giving up Child Sacrifice and Repression

Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one’s parents, and nowhere of a commandment that calls for honoring of the child.
– Alice Miller

Years ago, I spoke at a gathering of clergymen and women who seemed passionately concerned about “helping” aboriginal people recover from the devastation we have inflicted on them, even though these clergy were members of the very church that caused the crime. Eventually, I suggested to the Christians in the room that it would be far more productive for them to hold therapy circles for themselves and their fellow church members, starting with the church officials, since it was all of them who were responsible for the wrong.

In the dumbfounded silence that followed my words, I added,

“After all, what does it say about us as a people that we can cause the death and torture of so many children in the name of God, and never be held responsible for it? And that we never hold ourselves responsible? Shouldn’t that be treated as indicating a profound moral, spiritual and mental illness?”

None of them responded, and the topic was quickly changed. I was never asked back.

Aristotle said that to know any phenomenon, we must first understand its nature: its behavior is then predictable. When we finally recognize that the nature of Judeao-Christian culture is to dominate and subjugate innocence, and specifically childhood, the epidemic of unrelenting child abuse and torture in our midst will be seen as something much more than episodic and abnormal. On the contrary, child sacrifice has remained a template of western civilization, emblazoned in the archetypal image of the slow torture to death on a cross of God’s only child, Jesus.

Must it remain so? This is the heart of the matter, an insight and a problem with no easy answer, and perhaps no answer at all.

I say no answer because of the observed reality that no active empathy exists for torture victims on the part of those who would normally care. The victims becomes nullified and reduced to people without rights or even humanity, functionally dead in the eyes of the world: ones to be avoided at all costs.

Any rape survivor, political prisoner or whistleblower who has been demonized by official society understands exactly what I’m referring to.

The Romans can share some of the blame for this, for they invented the “win-lose” concept of end game: there can be only one victor, who is deified, and one loser, who is condemned for all eternity. This worldview was encompassed in a saying – “Woe to the Vanquished” – which has molded all western thought and practice for millennia.

Under Roman, and then church, law and custom, whoever was conquered, either in war or peace, lost all legal status and was declared “res nullius” – literally, reduced to a state of non-existence, or ex-communicato … one made mute. And thus from birth each one of us has been conditioned to avert our eyes and our hearts from, and to help silence, those who are targeted for destruction, or who have survived brutalization. Such people, who are the casualties of the powerful, have not simply been defiled, but been made invisible and of no account.

Since neither women nor children had any status in the Graeco-Roman tradition, childhood in the western world, like slavery, has always amounted to being in a state of nullification comparable to the condition of a victim of war, or of any conquest.

Indeed, the subjugation of each person’s innocence at a tender age is a precondition for their admission into society as a functional slave; and that subjugation is always forcible and destructive. The fact that most people psychologically adapt themselves to their forced subordination and nullification does not for an instant make the violence and torture any less real.

The key, then, to genuine recovery from such a regime of institutionalized repression is to foster an active in-subordination in the very place where each of us has been subordinated: in our very self-conception.

We have noted how people who struggle in daily, unalleviated conditions of systemic violence and unrelenting trauma rapidly become psychologically and functionally dissociated because of society’s requirement that they repress their own pain and experience to protect the guilty. That is, the battered ones come to reflect the operational insanity of the culture and persons who destroyed them. Learning to function as a sort of dead soul in this toxic wasteland of enshrined injustice is what “helping professionals” like to call “healing and closure”.

Naturally, any focus on the need to undo such subordination by refusing to adapt to this torture of innocence is a direct threat to not only such pseudo-therapy but those responsible for the torture, and the crime. And yet it is precisely such a challenge that the tortured themselves need to mount, simply by never surrendering their own voice, and truth: a fact that makes their pain and condition inherently political, and perhaps even revolutionary.

Within the aboriginal and sexual violence healing circles I have served for many years, when the veterans of torture reach such a point of discovery in their own recovery, many of them shrink from the next obvious step of seeing their trauma as a political and a social reality that must be dealt with collectively. The limits of “personal therapy” are reached, and a deeper and riskier response is required by everyone.

This next step could be called a form of group or transpersonal recovery that seeks to name and uncover the social roots of repression and suffering, and actually end the institutional practices that cause child torture.

How we go about such a monumental, generations-long undertaking is the subject for another article. But one taste of the nature of this type of collective recovery is found in proposals put forward by residential school veterans themselves, when they are asked “What would real healing be for you?” Their answer in many cases is the same: “Shutting down the church that hurt me and killed my friends”, “Putting the Pope and the Queen on trial” or “Getting back the land they stole from us”.

These goals, while hardly acceptable or achievable to mainstream Canada and its psychologists, are precisely what is needed in a genuine transpersonal or collective recovery program for victims of genocide.

By definition, such a radical program is an obvious political challenge to the status quo. If it is to be viable, such collective therapy must be linked to a broader movement to dis-establish a society that spawns and rests upon child torture and genocide, and create one where freedom and joy are the norm. How else, indeed, can we not simply mitigate the effects of our war against children and childhood, but abolish it altogether?

On May 26, 2011, his descendent, author and publicist Kevin Annett, was arrested without charge and detained for a day in an immigration prison at Stansted airport in London. Kevin was expelled from England after being searched, photographed and fingerprinted, despite having breached no law and committed no offense except to publicly criticize the Church and Crown of England.

Kevin Annett will be returning to England this September.

______________________

The old walls that hosted his broadsheets are all gone now, as is the shit-covered pillory that held the old man in a vise for anyone to pummel with garbage. But I felt Peter’s grim defiance the day I stood near to the spot at Charing Cross where the state and the church tried to break him; and I sensed, too, the fire in him that flamed his disobedience, and still reaches out to me.

Peter Annett was unlike any of the humanist philosophers of his time, for not only did he challenge fat Anglican bishops with reason and common sense, but he did so loudly and insolently, in the streets, by directly appealing to the hungry masses so feared by the British aristocracy. Peter called on the poor people of England to break their mental subservience to Crown and Pulpit, and figure everything out for themselves – a call that won him the eternal hatred of both Whitehall and Westminster.

All doctrines founded on fear and fraud shall be confounded by the authority of truth. We will bring to light the hidden works of darkness and drive falsity to the bottomless pit.

Thus did my ancestor proclaim his devotion in print, just weeks before he was thrown into Newgate prison where more than half of the inmates died in their chains.

The hidden works of darkness …

One year ago, I was scheduled to speak publicly about that same darkness not a mile from where Peter Annett lay in prison when I too was locked away by the fiction called the Crown of England and its very real police state. I thought a lot about Peter as I sat through a long night in a small immigration prison cell at Stansted airport, and the cries and wailing of the other detainees echoed all around me.

The uniformed drones of the private company that had arrested me in the name of the British Border Agency, Reliance Security, had stripped me of my belongings, so I lacked pen or paper that night; but in my mind I composed a dialogue with Peter to stave off my panic. I asked him to tell me how he had survived. And from somewhere, I heard a voice tell me,

I cannot explain how I endured, except to say that this will of mine that some call courage comes from knowing what it is, this truth that I love and these lies that I hate; and thus knowing, I am  resolved that I will never silence my mind or my tongue, or allow them ever to be stilled. In the face of this government’s resolve to torture and suppress us, my own unswerving determination is called greatness by some. But in the face of such monstrous tyranny, I call it simple necessity.

In 1761, Peter Annett was denounced by the shadowy spies known as Watchmen, a private army paid by the Bishop of London: thugs and murderers who lurked in the taverns and halls where free thinkers like Peter denounced religious fraud and oppression. In 2012, London boasts a much greater throng of Watchmen in the more than four million police television cameras that record every movement of once-free citizens who are now under permanent siege by “their” government.

Months before my own arrest at Stansted airport, I stood outside Lambeth Palace in a peaceful demonstration against the criminal called Pope Benedict, and a policeman approached me and said,

“Mr. Annett, we have seen you at these protests before and so we’re presenting you with this notice. It informs you that you may be detained for Fixated Threat Assessment if you attend any future events like this one.”

He meant, if you come to another protest we’ll stick you in a mental hospital and charge you with a form of mental illness called “Fixation”. And so, dissent has become not only an official crime but an act of insanity. That is a law now in England.

And yet in fact, this is not a new law, but a resurrection of a very old medieval edict that declared that any protest against the King or the Church was innately seditious and punishable without appeal. Those presumed guilty were whisked away to secret tribunals called Star Chamber courts, identical to the five Fixated Threat Assessment Centers in London where dissidents are imprisoned simply for dissenting.

The land of my ancestors has reverted to a place of fear and tyranny. And that is exactly why I am returning there this September, to speak freely and publicly as is my birthright, and to organize the victims of church and state terror.

I have been warned not to do so. But remember: the fear that the Crown and Church try to generate in us is but an enormous smokescreen to hide their own guilt and culpability in the longest reign of murder in human history. If we lose sight of this simple fact, we diminish our own capacity to overcome that legacy and stop the terror.

I love my English homeland: a place to where my French Huguenot ancestors fled from church terror in 1572 in order to establish a liberty of conscience and faith unknowable under Catholicism. The England of common law, of revolutionary ferment down the ages, is one of the rivers in my soul that cannot be dammed or diverted by the travesty called Empire and Christendom. For those evils were the acts of greedy men bent on rape and conquest, who had to crush the English commons and its people long before they inflicted the same war of terror on the indigenous nations or Negro humanity.

It is to that other England of the Commons that I turn when I get up to speak about genocide of aboriginals, and the trafficking in children by British elites and Catholic Bishops. Like Peter Annett, I look to the sleeping mass of people for our ultimate answer to these crimes. For as another persecuted rebel, Percy Shelley, cried out after the Peterloo Massacre of working people in Manchester in1817,

Rise like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number; Shake your chains to earth like dew, which in sleep had fallen on you: Ye are many – they are few.

Peter Annett knew all about the “99 percent” long before the modern movement by that name, for it was to them, the dormant giant called the people, to whom he appealed to his last breath. And he knew that the spark that might awaken them can only be lit by a personal example, by continual public action in the face of one’s enemy, in which personal courage and integrity finds a broader stream in which to swim, and where we encounter other solitary, struggling souls.

I have learned the same hard-won lesson over the years, and if anything the recent persecution has sharpened and quickened the learning for me and growing numbers of others. So I don’t fear the path ahead. Instead, as we descend ever more quickly into a new social and political ice age, what is vital is that we search again for the vision of the world as it is, under the Natural Law where all things are in common, and no-one is above another – and restore that world while we still can.

From English soil arose one soul who for me embodies this vision with the same direct courage as did my ancestor Peter: a poor man from Wigan named Gerrard Winstanley.  During the English Civil War that put an end to papal and royal oppressors, Winstanley and a hundred other men and women established the Diggers movement of 1649 that claimed all land as common. And just outside of London, they began to till the earth as a free and radical “community in resistance”.

Like all just souls, they were crushed by the weapons and hired thugs of the wealthy. But in his appeal to other poor people, Winstanley’s words are an answer to the British police state of 2012, and the decaying social order that has spawned it:

The Creator Reason made the Earth a common treasury for all creatures, and not one word was spoken then, that one branch of mankind should rule over another. And the reason is this, that every man and woman is a perfect creature of himself, and the same spirit dwells in each one equal, making none less or greater than another …

And yet selfish imagination did set up one man to teach and rule over another, depriving him of the earth’s fruits, and thereby killing the spirit by placing one into bondage, and another set on high. And thereupon the earth that is one garden is now hedged into enclosures and property, and this creation given to all as a common storehouse is bought and sold, and placed in the hands of a few, dishonoring the Creator, as if he delighted in the comforts of some and rejoicing in the misery and poverty of others …

But when once again this fallen state is abolished and all land is returned to its natural state as a common possession, and men become as they were born, free and equal, then this war of all against all will cease, and warfare and misery will end, for none will own while others languish with nothing.

Echoing Jesus himself, who saw that only when the last became first, and the first last, would justice come to mankind, Winstanley envisioned an England that must come to be if the crimes born of greed and conquest are ever to be undone – and if the police state set up to protect the wealth and power of the few is to be disestablished in favor of a Republic of Equals.

I guess that’s what pillory and prison really is all about, in a place like England: a way to hold back the future. It’s why we aren’t allowed to freely think, or protest a child rapist in Rome, or demonstrate in public more than once without being called crazy. For one day, the illusion churned up by religion, politicians and “crowned heads” may shimmer and fade, and the land and life stolen from us by a few will be seen for what it truly is: limitless, inalienable, and undivided.

Nothing has really changed since 1761, or 1649, in the land called England. Freedom is still subversion, and free souls must learn to be forever bold as well as wise. But everything can and will change, in the twinkle of an eye, for that’s the way revolutions manifest in history – like a stealthy mole that pokes up unexpectedly, to quote good old Karl Marx.

Just shortly before Peter Annett died alone and in poverty in 1769, one of his neighbors wrote about him,

He emerged from prison broken in body and in health, but still sharp and alive in his spirit, his mind as lucid as ever. He seemed to me like a man fulfilled.

I understand why.

Dear fellow Diggers and Dreamers: take heart today, and know that all we need in the difficult days to come is the capacity to live as if this alone is real: that the world is a common garden undivided and owned by none, and is given to everyone with the free love of a gentle mother called Creation, who wants us all to be happy and free and unafraid – and to reclaim what is ours by birthright.

Carry it on.

“Everyone that gets an authority into his hands tyrannizes over others; as many husbands, parents, masters, magistrates, that live after the flesh do carry themselves like oppressing lords over such as are under them, not knowing that their wives, children, servants, subjects are their fellow creatures, and hath an equal privilege to share them in the blessing of liberty.”

“Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?”

Gerrard Winstanley, 1649