Hello boys,

I was perusing the Irish Examiner yesterday and noticed that you’ve told reporters that you’re concerned that, thanks to all the corruption in what you call “the church”, there soon may be no priests left in your country.

Well, so what’s so bad about that?

I mean, seriously guys: who ever gave you the right to “represent” me in the first place? I never did. Priests and I never got along, if you recall.

As a matter of fact, I left pretty explicit instructions that nobody was to make a religion out of me after I’d moved on. Didn’t you get them?

No? Well, that’s strange, because I told that scruffy scribe who made an ass out of himself by jotting down what I said all the time: Look, the Sabbath was made for man – man wasn’t made for the Sabbath. And don’t call anyone holy, because only God is holy. You have only one father, and he’s in heaven, right? And certainly not in Rome, of all the godforsaken places.

Okay, I guess nobody told you this stuff, or maybe you don’t read your Bibles, or something. But here it is, guys: I wasn’t bullshitting when I said that the kingdom of heaven is within every person who draws breath. It ain’t in a bloody communion wafer. Every man, woman and child has the gift completely. It wasn’t taught to them in catechism: it’s part of the living fiber of being human.

So where does that leave you guys?  I mean, what the hell do you think you’re doing, anyway, pretending to know me better than I know myself? Or claiming to “represent” me, and the kingdom of love?

Let me correct that word, first of all: it sure as hell ain’t no “kingdom”. No kings are allowed in there; or popes, for that matter. It’s kind of hard for that kind of ego and hierarchy to strut around a dinner table when somebody’s asking you to pass the spuds.

No, that “kingdom” bullshit was another one of those fables you guys cooked up behind my back. My word for God’s way was “a realm of eternity”: a different reality, with nobody on the top or on the bottom.

Do you get it?

Probably not. I tried sneaking into one of your cathedrals the other day and got asked to leave.

When Dad and I yanked the mask off your church bosses and showed the world the kind of filth that you serve, we were doing you all a big favor, you know. It’s too bad you’re too panicked about your pensions right now to see the priceless chance we’re offering you.

I mean, do you really think all those child-raping clerics are standing so naked like they are now, because of some big fluke? Do you really think we’re that impotent?

Uh uh. It’s all in the game plan. And here’s why: this is your big chance, fellows, to come back into the human race.

Your “church” is finished, and die it must. Its stench is so putrid that even I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I mean, forgiveness is one thing, but Jehoshaphat! You guys never seem to learn! So Dad figured, and I had to agree with him, that enough is enough.

For one thing, you’ve all gone a bit batty. Take that guy who calls himself a “cardinal”, Sean Brady: the other day, he actually offered to install glass confession booths in all your churches. I mean, what is that?

I figure this is your chance to find some recovery, boyos. You’ve got to get sane. Do something worthwhile, for a change. Maybe rename yourselves Clergy Anonymous, or something. Live your lives. Find a bit of romance. Go and get laid, if you haven’t already.

You know, after that little crucifixion farce we staged to throw off the Romans, and Mary and the kids and me shipped off to Gaul, Judas came to me and warned me, “You know how people are. Some schmuck is going to start up a big operation called the Yeshua Temple or something, and make a ton of shekels off your name. So go find a lawyer and get yourself copyrighted, pronto.”

Maybe he was right. But hindsight, hell, it’s like prayers: easy.

The point is, all the Temples eventually rot and collapse, from the inside out. Dad and I are just giving yours a little nudge. The only thing you guys should fret about now is, who are you going to be today, and tomorrow, when all the smoke clears?

Just do yourselves, and me, a big favor. Don’t look back at Sodom and Gomorrah. Remember?

Good luck to you,

Yeshua

Yeshua ben Yusuf is a homeless man and a suspected terrorist who dropped out of seminary and was arrested once for disrupting a church service. He has never held a stable job. The authorities are seeking knowledge of his whereabouts.

The first dead Indian baby I ever saw was also the first one I ever baptized.

His name was Albert Gomez. That’s what his mom and dad called him, at least, because he died in the womb and finally emerged the morning I arrived at Port Alberni General Hospital to pretend to console the shattered couple.

As I approached them, Albert was wrapped in his mother’s arms where she lay in the hospital bed, and the dad hovered over the woman and child as if that would protect them. He looked up at me, dry-eyed, without speaking.

The woman was talking quietly to the tiny corpse, stroking and kissing its slicked black hair, over and over. She was the one to finally address me, with an infinite sadness.

“We want him baptized”

Nothing made sense to me. What was I to do: enact a pointless ritual to assure these poor, shattered people that something good would come of the death of their child? Take advantage of their agony by playing a role I didn’t believe in anymore? Speak of God in this godless moment?

Maybe the father sensed my doubt, for he squeezed my arm and reached for his dead son. The mother started crying as he leaned down, but she slowly relinquished her child, and then collapsed in sobs and wailing. The man turned to me and offered over the burden.

The baby was incredibly light, and so cold. Each feature on his body was unmarred, from the soft creases on his face to the tiny flecks of eyelashes and rounded fingernails. As in the life Albert would never have, the perfection of that moment would quickly fade, and perhaps for that reason, his parents wanted it somehow preserved by an act, even a gesture, that would be emblazoned on them like immortality.

“Please …” said the man.

Only to comfort them, I nodded and turned towards the large sink. I ran some water, wet my hand, and touched the icy little forehead.

“Albert Gomez, child of God” I said, “May the love which created you lead you to eternal rest, and bless you and keep you as the perfection that you are. In the name of God the father, the mother, the son, and the Great Spirit. Amen.”

And then I kissed him, and handed him back to his father.

I never cried for Albert, although I have for those many others like him. But my brief time with him marked me like no other moment, simply because the recognition of the futility of human action in the face of death diminished in me at the very instant when it should have been cemented in my heart.

I have no name for what caused such an unexpected easing of the void for me. But it has allowed me, ever since then, to be gently nudged by something, back from oblivion, whenever my own despair and savaging losses prepare to fling me into its pit forever.

What that mystery feels like, now, is another kind of light, a different, emerging reality, beaming slowly just out of sight, below our human horizon. And I feel its dawning warmth on me the closer I approach my own death; and the worse things get for all of us.

And so I will continue to conduct the pointless rituals, and speak the passing words, on the corpses all around me, and I will not wonder on the purpose of it all. For, impossibly, death has never had dominion, and it never shall.

Even after microfilm came along, the secrets were stored in long manila file folders tucked randomly throughout the acres of shelves of at least four different departments of the government of Canada. It was reasoned that no-one would ever bother looking there, even if they did learn of the secrets, which was unlikely.

Occasionally, a zealous or naïve researcher would trip across one piece of the horrifying enigma, and ask questions that would lead nowhere, for there was no answer. How, after all, could Canada have done such horrors – and to live children? There had to be some mistake.

A Belgian student who had no particular loyalty to the Canadian Myth did try to push the envelope once, during the summer of 1995, when she was interning as a research assistant for a Carleton University historian who had access to government records. She doggedly connected the evidence and found that Canada and its American bio-weapon contractors had for years been testing out a race-specific virus that killed only Indians.

The woman imprudently told her boyfriend about it, and unfortunately, he had a brother in law who was an inspector with the RCMP. The Belgian lady vanished, and all her belongings perished in an unexplained house fire.

Just in case of the unforeseen, a cover story had been standing by for some years, but it needed dusting off whenever children went missing or piles of bones appeared where they shouldn’t have. For the experiments have never ceased, and not just concerning deadly pathogens.

It was all part of the labors of Section Y. Long time government insiders in Ottawa used to joke about Section Y, and the oddballs who worked for it, possibly to mask their own fear of its operations.

The man whom we’ll call Dr. Gustav Meyer, of course, never could keep a secret, even after his SS military background was scrubbed as clean as an Aryan’s pedigree after World War Two, and he went to work for the federal health department under the cover of a Royal Canadian Air Force doctor named Bob Armstrong. Meyer loved to mingle with matrons and nabobs at Ottawa gala social functions and answer the inevitable query about his occupation with the remark,

“I tear the wings off helpless little butterflies.”

Gustav Meyer ran Section Y for the Canadian government, and it wasn’t insects he ripped apart.

How Meyer and Section Y found their way to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital on the west coast of Canada is not hard to imagine, considering the number of Indian children imprisoned there, and their cheap availability. They were, in Meyer’s parlance, “virgin targets”: an expression he’d picked up, rather perversely, from his former enemies, just after the immolation of his home town Dresden: a beautiful baroque city of no military significance that 800 RAF bombers wiped out completely one evening in February, 1945, after dubbing it a “virgin target”. Meyer, presumably, wanted some revenge for his 90,000 barbecued family members, friends and neighbors.

Meyer preferred torturing kidnapped Jews and blacks to death in his RCAF laboratories at the Lincoln Park Air Force Base in Calgary, and at the chemical weapons test range in Suffield, Alberta during the 1950’s and ‘60’s, but Indian kids were the next best thing. He found that Indians, for some reason, lasted longer when exposed to various deadly pathogens and chemical agents: findings he described enthusiastically in his bi-monthly reports to the Defense Research Board in Ottawa.

But the SS doctor was under major contract as well with NASA and the US Army, both of whom paid him handsomely to probe the limits of human endurance to pain, and how it affected the brain’s capacity to function in combat. US soldiers guarded his grisly slaughter of "patients" at the Lincoln Park facility, where he'd burn kidnapped children and transients with chemical agents and blowtorches until their flesh peeled away. They all died, of course, save one eyewitness, who lives in hiding today but who wrote about the nightmare.

Dr. Gustav Meyer – "Major Bob Armstrong" – was never arrested or suspected of anything, because he enjoyed the same kind of top security protection as Joseph Mengele, his mentor at Auschwitz, and all the other Nazis who worked for the Americans and at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, where Meyer began his work. He was not a man consumed by fear, which was, after all, his primary research interest.

Meyer set up his torture room at the Nanaimo Indian Hospital in the spring of 1967. He got along well with the local United Church crowd, and was a constant church goer, for the same church funded and helped operate the Nanaimo hospital. Meyer killed dozens of children there.

Thanks to all the Indian children delivered to him by the United Church from its Alberni Indian residential school, Meyer was personally responsible for the slow death by chemical injections and other tortures of the uncle of my friend, whom I’ll call Charlie George, during the spring of 1970, just before Section Y closed down its Nanaimo Indian Hospital operation. The victim was a boy ten years old, and what was left of him was buried in a hill now overgrown with blackberry bushes not far from Vancouver Island University, behind barbed wire fences still patrolled by Canadian soldiers.

None of Charlie George's family ever talked about what happened to him until the dead boy’s sister mentioned it to me in 1999 – the same year I met the survivor of the Lincoln Park holocaust.

And since then, of course, I have not let it lie: much to the chagrin of the government of Canada, which was forced to confirm the existence of "Bob Armstrong", and of Section Y, in 2004.

The year I encountered the truth, in 1999, all of the records of Lincoln Park, and the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, and all other Indian Hospitals, were "officially sealed" by the Canadian government.

“It was the Mounties who were delivering the women to Pickton’s farm to be raped and killed on film. They told me so.” – Annie Parker, Pickton farm survivor, to the author, January 2006

“Ten years from now, nobody will care about any of these horrors you’ve uncovered. The feds will hold an expensive Royal Commission into the Indian residential schools to cover this all up and put everyone back to sleep.” – Vancouver radio host Rafe Mair to the author, May 2000

Despite their generally well deserved reputation for being Lotus eaters, I don’t believe that west coast Canadians are any more brainless or politically native than your average citizen – appearances to the contrary these days.

With a decided lack of fervor as typically Canadian as cold maple syrup, both the federal and the provincial governments are staging dual inquiries into their own crimes this week here in Lotus Land.

After officially exonerating the churches that engineered the slaughter, the feds are pretending to search for 50,000 children chopped up in their “Indian residential schools”; while a former Attorney General who helped derail repeated inquiries into hundreds of missing aboriginal women, Wally Oppal, is heading an investigation into his police buddies who regularly rape and kill women on Vancouver’s streets.

No surprise there. That’s what guilty governments get to do, after all.

I don’t find the process of self-exculpation by the wealthy particularly unexpected or a cause for moral outrage. Shit, the government and their church allies have been hiding all those little brown bodies and shredding evidence from the residential schools for decades now. They’ve even admitted it. Their self-appointed whitewash they call a “truth and reconciliation commission” (TRC) is just the final icing on the cake; or more accurately, the topsoil on the grave.

What does startle me is how so many Canadians, and victims, really and truly believe that the same people who did them such harm and put those innocents in the ground are going to come clean and reveal it all.

I know a lot of the native men and women who will be flocking to Port Alberni tomorrow to stand so hopefully in front of the three trained seals calling themselves “TRC Commissioners”, and will once again walk on razors and rip out their innards in order to tell the government what it already knows – in no small part because I’ve been publishing the truth since 1996.

Many of these survivors first told me of the crime twenty years ago, in the little Port Alberni church called St. Andrew’s United where I let them speak freely about it from my pulpit, and from where the world began to learn that Christian Canada means genocide.

So it’s a very odd feeling to see the same people – those who are still alive – once again speak publicly of murders and mass graves when in the decades since they first spoke thus in my church, and after their stories have spread around the world, not a single person in Canada has ever faced trial for a residential school killing; and not an ounce of soil has been turned at the mass grave behind the Alberni school to bring home the children tossed there by United Church ministers, and Mounties.

I’ve been threatened, harassed and physically attacked by government-paid tribal council goons when I go back to Port Alberni, to the place where it all began for me in 1992; and the TRC, I’ve been told, has a standing policy to bar me from all of its events. So I don’t relish trying to show up at their bullshit forum tomorrow in the town where I lost my own children.

But yesterday, a desperate man asked me to come.

I’ll call him Arnold. He used to attend my church and help me deliver food to the local Tseshaht reservation’s hungry kids. And in 1968, he saw a little girl get beaten to death at the Alberni residential school by a church matron called Mrs. Frale.

“Everybody wants you there” Arnold told me outright over the phone.

“I know” I replied, wanting to say more.

“But I don’t blame you if you don’t come” he continued. “Ron Hamilton has his people watching for you. They won’t let you speak, he said so.”

After a pause, Arnold said,

“We play along because we’ve been told to. But everybody knows the truth, even if they’re not saying.”

Arnold’s words prompted me to write this piece, and wonder aloud to all of you who so rarely reply to my discourses why it is that we have to keep the lie alive, with such effort and sincerity. When will the truth be given more than a hearing, but be armed with the same power to change and overturn that all the sordid shit now enjoys?

I lost my pulpit and my family for people like Arnold, and in 2010, I was stripped of my decade long radio program at Vancouver Co-op Radio after I gave voice over the airwaves to an eyewitness who saw two RCMP officers bring native women to be killed at serial killer Willie Pickton’s Coquitlam farm.

Two of my friends who voiced the same story were murdered by Vancouver police: Johnny Dawson and Ricky Lavallee.

There’s always a cost for the truth, and the question is always, who will pay it. The truth is costly when it implicates those who can still do us harm, and none of us wants to be the one, naturally, to step on such toes and bring down such wrath upon our own heads.

But there are a few just souls, I think the Bible calls them, who don’t count such a cost, but are more burdened by what will happen to others if they don’t act than by their own fears. Ricky and Johnny were such souls. And I suppose I am one too.

After years of toil and loss, I’ve changed, and I realize now that we are the means of our own justice, and that documenting a crime is often just a way to avoid doing anything to actually stop it. So even if the TRC fiasco was run by survivors themselves and had the power to try and jail the church leaders fiducially responsible for all those residential school deaths, even then, the essential act would be missing. For it is time to undo what bred the thing we call European Genocide, and which continues to rip up and poison our land, and rape and traffic children without fear of penalty.

We can start by ignoring the expensive distractions staged by the government to make us think that the crimes will be uncovered and stopped by them.

Only we can do that, for the simple reason that for every honest cop there are two or three who deal drugs, clobber the homeless, rape women, and protect those who do. And behind every “honest priest” there stands a Vatican policy, enshrined in their self-governing “canon law”, which commands every catholic clergy to conceal child rape in the church, and silence the victim – a policy mirrored in every major Protestant church, as well.

Last night, as I sat despondently and wrestled with my sense that I might let down Arnold, and all the other Port Alberni survivors, I heard from a friend in Wexford, Ireland.

He told me excitedly that he and a few others planned to drag out a known child raping priest from his church this next Sunday, and publicly strip him of his vestments.

“Some of us are scared, Kev” he declared. “But Jesus, who else is gonna defrock that bastard and save the next child?”

Carry it on.

We’ve just spent half a day (perhaps too much) reading a 115-page tome, neither scholarly nor journalistic mais tous les deux, entitled “They Came For The Children.” It’s the interim report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that icon and crowning triumph of Stephen Harper’s Canadian majority government.

It’s good. It is indeed, a jaw-dropper for sleeping Canadians. And it’s great material for the likes of Fats Milloy, the Trent University savant in the field of indigenous atrocity, of Flyin’ Phil Fontaine, the government poster boy and erstwhile chief pooh-bah of the AFN, and legions of Canadian journalists wondering where their next byline is coming from. All three groups in the last few days have been enthusing about Justice Murray Sinclair’s tour de farce.

And in fact, Sinclair (along with Littlechild and Wilson, the whole triumvirate) does tell the truth about the sickening Canadian history of the rez schools. They just don’t tell ENOUGH truth. When they get close to the mark, a curtain seems to drop. Censorship seems to sink in, and we all know why. Big Steve told them to do it that way. It was in their mandate, their rule book.

If we were visiting aliens from Mars or Tahiti, or perhaps Courtenay, B.C., unfamiliar with or perhaps uncaring about the reality of life in the true North, strong and free (as long as you’re white) we would be impressed – and profoundly sickened – with this story – although indeed there is nothing new here that most of us had not known about before, however obliquely.

It’s all here, and lavishly presented. The stark photos of rows and rows of native kids posing glumly with nuns, priests and functionaries in front of institutional-looking buildings reminiscent of churches – in Sandy Bay, or Qualicum or Brantford. It’s well-written, not of course by the Milloys or the Fontaines but by some flack in the PMO, and signed off by those three I have difficulty not calling the Three Stooges of Canadian historical tragedy: Sinclair, Littlechild and Wilson. The Truth and Reconciliation gang who aren’t about to set us free.

They talk endlessly about the atrocities in the rez schools, but always with studied restraint. Let us say it again: repeat, what they say is bad enough, by any normal prison standard, this stuff is enough to make you sick at the whole human race, not just lovely Canada. The starvation, the beatings, the deprivation of family, culture, even language.

They, the Commission, flirt with Dr. Peter Bryce’s 1907 account of 50% mortality, but it’s sluffed over, mentioning only how inhuman Bryce’s idiot boss, Duncan Campbell Scott, was – intent on his wiping out all vestiges of the noble culture his generation sought to extinguish. But the Stooges know their limitations, their mandate. There is not a single mention in 115 pages of the word “rape,’ “sodomy,” “medical experimentation,” “sterilization,” or God help us, the G-word, even in the sanitized academic fashion in which Fats Milloy hints at it.

How could it have been otherwise, according to the reports we’ve received from those hootenany sessions they held in Winnipeg and Inuvik and Halifax. Peter Yellow Quill, an Anishinabe elder from western Manitoba, told in great detail how prospective victims and survivors were coached as to what and how they were to testify, the whole stage-managed, scripted method to ensure that the testimony wouldn’t get out of hand and embarrass the good old churches and, least of all, Harper and his distinguished predecessors dating back to John A, the alcohol-challenged father of our country.

There’s even a straight-faced report of the famous RCMP “investigation” into all this irregularity back in 1995. We know all about that one first hand, because a Mountie Sergeant in Vancouver confided to Kevin Annett behind his hand “if we investigated every case of this kind of sex abuse or atrocity, it would take us for ever.”

And a funny thing happened on their way to cutting-edge scholarship and historical journalism. In the hundreds of footnotes, in which reference is constantly made to learned papers going back to Davin, a colonial creep of the 19th Century, discussing their theories of cultural erasement, and all sorts of contemporary experts on indigenous people, not a single mention is made of Reverend Kevin Annett, the 20 years and 400 pages of scholarship he has devoted to the subject, the internationally award-winning feature film he and Louis Lawless created, the attention he has gained by the academic world in Innsbruck, Slovenia, Norwich, Dublin, Boston and Berkeley. And how he’s never been able to buy a headline in his own country.

Indeed, his 400 pages, unlike this 115, didn’t cost the Canadian taxpayers a cent, compared with the $68 million tab for this slim volume. And we thought Canadians were thrifty.

But a host of people – Canadian politicians and newsmakers, university professors, working stiffs and yes, native people, even beyond the cloistered space of the federally payroll-challenged chiefs and tribal councils, and especially the nouveau politicians in the AFN – believe and have already said so – that Sinclair and Co. have done a valuable job here, that there will be a new awakening in national consciousness, that education, public awareness and all sorts of goodies (like compensation) will follow, and in a generation or three, healing will take place.

We believe otherwise. We believe this grandstanding minimalization of what one honest scholar in the University of Lethbridge has called “the most re-engineered civilization in history,” can have a result that is far worse than having done nothing at all. Because we’re all led to believe that some great epiphany has happened, while in fact not a damned thing of consequence will take place. The Indian Act will remain in force (because Harper has so announced in the last month) with all it’s medieval control. The Crown will still dictate land use, and parliamentary procedure, and Canada’s archaic legal system, and something called Westminster will continue as our de facto head of stazte.

And long live the Doctrine of Discovery, the Papal bulls and the religious bullshit.

That’s of course exactly what would have happened anyway, had Reverend Kevin Annett not blown the whistle on church and government – and their minions like the RCMP – 20 years ago, he who has paid the piper for his insubordination ever since.

No wonder they don’t mention him. “Kevin Annett and the Canadian Genocide,” the theme of his books, film and international lectures, would shake up this format too much. He talks straight medicine. This is a placebo.

And it’s swallowed, hook, line and sinker, by earnest seekers after truth like Rodney Clifton, writing in the faithful Winnipeg Free Press, who works for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg, and among other things believes that ol’ Murray is being too tough on the government when he uses the G-word, even in a nice way, like talking about obliterating a culture.

T’aint so, says Rodney, and he knows because he was there. Of course, he was there at a rez school, he says, in a supervisory capacity, which says a lot, because it was sort of Murray Sinclair’s schtick as well. And Rodney says, shucks, a lot of those nuns and other people were pretty kind, and he recalls one occasion when a kid was sick they made him feel better. And apparently, Rodney didn’t see any murders or rape incidents so it must be exageration. And Murray shouldn’t have used the G-word.

“I know things in the rez schools were harsh,” says Rodney. “But I have never seen good evidence of one child dying a preventable death.”

How about the 75,000 unpreventable ones, Rod? Do the math. If 150,000 kids were rounded up by the Musical Ride Boys, and 75,000 never went home – which everybody seems to admit, even Harper and the Stooges – what happened to them? Did they all become nuns or priests or Mounties?

Nobody’s ever touched that one – even Fats Milloy of Flyin’ Phil Fontaine. We’ve spent $68 million trying to find out. Don’t expect the TRC to come up with an answer.

Sarah J. Miller is the pseudonym of an award-winning syndicated journalist. In her words,

“I’m assuming an uncharacteristic anonymity in this case because of threats made against me if I proceeded with an investigative piece about Reverend Annett. Such warnings actually perked my curiosity about the man and the shit storm surrounding him.”

I had been prepared to distrust the quiet, intense man who sat across from me, not only because most people I know expected me to.

Zealots of any variety are sowers of unhappiness, and from most of what I had read about him, Reverend Kevin Annett is a latter day John Brown, seeking the downfall of all of official society in his determined quest for justice for the violated. And frankly, I just don’t like clergy persons, including the defrocked brand, for “once a black robe, always a black robe”, from my experience.

And yet the man before me didn’t match my prejudice, especially when he began to speak. He does so calmly and gently, with a confident logic based on hard and compelling evidence garnered from years of research.

Rumors to the contrary, Kevin Annett is neither crazy, nor a charlatan. He is someone, rather, who bears a shocking truth that most Canadians, understandably, do not want to hear.

My pleasant surprise at the man’s unexpected demeanor and the intelligent clarity of his words made me realize right off the bat that everything I had been told and fearfully warned about Kevin Annett was unfounded: a fact that made me want to learn more.

A second look at my subject reminded me of the Vietnam veterans I had come to know during my fledgling days as a greenhorn reporter: someone bearing the kind of war-weariness and “thousand yard gaze” that says more than words ever can.

Kevin talks like a battlefield veteran, with regular references to fallen buddies and unrelenting attacks. But his aura is not weighted down by any kind of post traumatic reactions that I can see, despite the brutal personal savaging he has been put through over the years. He is not a bitter or a vengeful man, although he has enough cause to be.

My own positive vibe from the quietly graying man with an irrepressible smile made the professional journalist in me play hard ball with him.

“So why do people call you crazy?” I asked him provocatively, nudging my pocket recorder towards him.

He smiled.

“I guess it must seem crazy to take on the government of Canada and its churches”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“Well, that wasn’t my original plan. Don’t forget, the United Church went after me first”

“That cost you your family” I offered.

His deep brown eyes showed a brush of sadness for the first time, and he nodded.

“Was it worth it?”

“Not for me, or my daughters” he replied. “But for a hell of a lot of other people, it was”

I stared at the documents spread before me, showing how half of the children at Alberta Indian residential schools had died in one school term; and at a Canadian law from 1933 allowing any Indian to be sexually sterilized.

“Why did nobody know about all this?” I asked him, holding up a document.

“They did” he replied laconically, gesturing to a photocopied article from a November 15, 1907 issue of The Ottawa Citizen that described the enormous death rate in the Indian schools.

“But the churches are acknowledging this now …” I said.

“No, they’re not” Kevin replied, his eyes suddenly hard. “They’ve been forced by us to admit that children died, but they claim it wasn’t from deliberate intent. Like, 50,000 deaths were somehow accidental”

“They murdered them, is that your line?”

“There’s lots of ways to kill off Indians. The preferred method in the rez schools was deliberate exposure to TB and smallpox.”

I felt a strange vexation just then, an angry unacceptance that must have been obvious to my interviewee, for he smiled again as he saw my expression.

“So what do you want?” I exclaimed, trying to sound calm.

“Something that won’t happen in this country. Justice”

“Meaning?”

“Prison terms for church officials. A war crimes trial. Returning the children’s remains, first of all, for a proper burial”

I’d read all of that from his websites, and I knew he was alone in demanding such things. All of Canada, it seems, is content with issuing an apology for what is undeniable genocide – including the aboriginal chiefs. I asked Kevin why he thought that was.

“It’s convenient. Canadians will bear any amount of corruption or murder rather than face anything unpleasant, or controversial. And as for the national chiefs, well …”

Again, that ironic smile, and the piercing turn of phrase.

“There’s always been Around the Fort Natives. You know, the AFN”

The conversation was frustrating me. I wanted to know more about the man, and what allowed him to endure what he has.

“You’re not a very well liked guy” I said.

“That depends who you talk to”

“Look, Kevin, you can’t get a job. You’re a pariah. You’re castigated every day over the internet with some new smear. I think you called yourself a social leper, in your film. Most polite society avoids you like the plague. A lot of powerful players seem determined to shut you up.”

He said nothing as I uttered the obvious.

“So tell me. What’s it like to be banned?”

He smiled at my reference to South African apartheid.

“Seriously” I continued.

He took a moment, and then muttered,

“Very lonely”

Kevin looked out the window at the puffy clouds hovering over Vancouver’s north shore mountains.

“For a long time, I expected a Hollywood ending to all this” he continued frankly. “You know, I’d be vindicated, all the assholes would go to jail after admitting everything, and all my friends would recover. I had to wake up to the way things are. It’s been a long process”

“Waking up?”

“Yeah, to what we’re really a part of. To how these crimes never stop, they just shift location. To how I’m going to go through this shit until the day I die.”

“How does that feel?”

He gave me a long, penetrating stare.

“Indescribable”

“Try”

He shook his head sadly. The room grew very silent.

“I interviewed Leonard Peltier a few times” I offered, trying to break the log jam. “He said it didn’t matter that he was in prison, because everywhere’s a prison for him and his people.”

“That’s about it” Kevin replied, nodding. “But he has the advantage of being an obvious target. I’m a white guy, a former church insider. My imprisonment isn’t so obvious.”

“Oh, I don’t know” I shot back. “Your case is broadcasted all over the world.”

“That really hasn’t helped me, not practically. Anybody who gets too close to me is eliminated, especially if they have pull”

“What do you mean, eliminated?”

“Killed off, if they’re aboriginal. Scared off or bought off, if they’re white”

Kevin proceeded to list off an impressive array of names of lawyers, scholars, and even politicians who had once sponsored his work or come to his aid, and then inexplicably dropped away from his campaign. What I’d been told by a confidential source in the RCMP confirmed a lot of what he was claiming.

“I’ve been told you’re definitely on the fed’s shit list” I ventured.

“You should try telling your newspaper colleagues that, because they won’t believe me”

I shook my head and leaned towards him to emphasize my point.

“It’s not that they don’t believe you, Reverend. They can’t do anything about it, and they know when to avoid a story.”

“No shit”

“There’s just no percentage in backing a whistle blower and giving him a lot of exposure, not unless their target is about to crack. Trust me, I’ve interviewed enough of them” I said.

“So what’s the usual outcome?” he asked me.

“For somebody like you? Exactly what you’re going through” I proclaimed.

He pondered for a minute, and then said,

“The thing is, I’ve already beaten them. I feel like I’ve won”

“Won what?”

“I survived all they could throw at me. I brought out this truth and forced them to respond. I did the right thing and I helped save lives. That’s enough of a victory.”

I doubted he believed what he was saying, knowing something of his character. I told him so.

“So tell me what you really think” I said to him.

“Okay. I feel like I’ve been smashed into the ground and nothing is ever going to stop those fuckers from raping and killing more children whenever the hell they want. I feel stupid for having even tried taking them on. Some days, it’s like, I made a big fucking mistake. I wish I could go back and make a different choice. But I can’t. I’m stuck with my choice, and I’ve got to make the best of it.”

“But in your film you said you’d do it all over again if you had to”

“Of course I would”

“Then, I don’t get it …”

“Neither do I” he said curtly.

After laughing together, I asked him,

“So David didn’t beat Goliath this time?”

“I don’t think he ever does. Maybe it’s not about beating him, but ignoring him”

“How do we do that?”

“Stop paying him taxes and voting for him, for starters. Stop buying his useless shit and going to his bloody churches”

“Are people doing that?” I asked.

“I think so. Here and there. I’m hoping we reach a critical mass of non-cooperation before it’s too late for all of us”

“Did you used to preach like this?” I asked him.

“Not at first. I was trying to be a minister, at first. But yeah, eventually.”

“Do you miss that old life?”

There’s a long pause in our conversation then, for Kevin couldn’t reply. I thought he was going to break down, for the tears welled up in his eyes, and he looked away, embarrassed. I remember turning off the recorder respectfully.

At the time, his reply mattered to me, but it’s strangely unimportant to me now, maybe because it’s so obvious.

I have never been able to say how much of a person’s life I’ve been able to accurately represent in my writing, and whether what I call a story is not just my own yarn, seeking an echo somewhere.

What I can say is how completely shaken I was by my encounter with Kevin Annett. Beyond and beneath all the words and the deep resonation of his character, he left me with a sense of heroic tragedy that I have rarely encountered, even amidst wars and revolutions. The term “lonely courage” says something of the man and his nobility, but there is much more to him and his quest. I would dare to call it an epic.

Kevin was the one to excuse himself, after speaking to me for a few hours. A friend of his needed help of a sort he wasn’t free to describe, but he did allude that the fellow was homeless and without a friend – except, of course, Kevin himself.

I am an agnostic, and rarely do I hold out hope for anything like salvation to pull us from the hell we’ve created for ourselves. But I have indeed met someone I can genuinely claim is a man of god: banned from our midst, to be where he is meant to be, as one despised and feared by those who know him not, and shunned by those who should know better, and yet beloved by the lost and neglected ones; and thus, by all of who and what he is, making a new chance for the rest of us possible.

Nevertheless, outside their crumbling home they’ve proudly erected a “Mitt Romney” election sign.

“We always bin good Republicans” explains Terry, who like most Americans is open and welcoming to strangers: even a nosy Canuck on a bike. “We got to turn the country ‘round.”

I asked him how Mitt would do that.

“He’s one of us” Terry replied, puffing on a remnant of a butt. “Not like that coon in the white house.”

I inquired of Terry whether he knew that Mitt Romney wants to cancel the food stamp program and medicare, and encourage landlords to foreclose on people who can’t pay their rent.

Terry shrugged.

“Whatever’ll help the economy”

I looked at his hovel, and then at him. He didn’t seem to figure himself or his family into the picture.

Terry isn’t that unusual. He reminds me a lot of the stumbling aboriginal woman I once handed a leaflet to outside Vancouver’s Catholic cathedral as she tried hurrying into its morning mass.

“What you got against the church?” she bellowed at me.

“Well, it caused the death of a lot of your people …”

“Ah, bullshit!” she exclaimed. “We was all savages back then!”

I expected to dislike what I encountered this month in Florida, awash as it is in the gyrations of Republican politicians in heat as they hustle votes for the upcoming Primary from people like Terry. But it was all too familiar to me.

The beaches here are empty, except for Canadians and other odd sorts who dare to dip into the Atlantic at this time of year. The Gulf Stream must have a problem, for the ocean is colder than a banker’s heart. But the locals still act like every day’s a pause before summer, and they see the world laconically, like Yankees do, as either right or wrong.

I blame the Puritans for that, but I admire their simplicity.

Mitt Romney knows his audience, and he speaks in simple language, like any successful politician does. He may be a Mormon and a bland sort of bloke who tells shitty jokes, but he’s the favored son down here because of his pigment, at least among folks like Terry.

Meanwhile, down the street from Terry is a big housing complex filled entirely with black families who are just as destitute as he is.

I tried biking in there to see what people thought of the Republican Primary, but before I’d advanced a dozen yards two young dudes approached me suspiciously, and asked me where the fuck I thought I was going.

“Just looking” I replied.

“Lookin’? You lookin’?” one of them said, reaching for something in his pocket.

“Naw” I answered, and sped away quite rapidly.

I didn’t see a Mitt Romney sign anywhere in that particular black ghetto, or any election signs, for that matter.

Frazzled, I biked along a nearby drainage ditch surrounded by the lush tropical foliage that’s everywhere, and watched the alligator turtles slither their prehistoric tails in the garbage-covered slough. I stopped to get a closer look, and imbibe the humid quiet, when a cop car drove bumpily towards me along the grass, its light flashing.

“Hey” said the young cop as he approached me, his hand on his holster.

“Hi” I replied.

“You live heah?”

“Well, I’m visiting my Dad, in there” I replied, pointing to the senior’s complex across the slough.

“Canadan?” he said, grimacing, as I nodded. “You better watch youself ‘round heah”

He must have known that Canadians listen attentively when a cop speaks, for he simply nodded goodbye and left after the opaque warning.

I gave a couple of sermons while I was in Florida, in local churches whose ministers are buggering off somewhere. The pew crowd seemed to like me, especially when I ventured into politics; not because they agreed with me, but because they’re Americans. Speaking your mind is as much a religion down here as obeying the law is in Canada.

After one of the services, an older white man came up to me and remarked,

“What you said about the Seminoles, hiding in the Everglades to survive. They did that to a lot of our people, you know. Wiped ‘em out mostly, then stuck’ em in those camps, like in Canada.”

“Are you native?” I asked him, curious.

“Scots Irish. The original savages” he smiled.

I asked him how he was going to vote in the Primary.

“Thought I’d write my own name on the ballot” he answered. “I can do a better job than any of those jokers.”

He saw me smile, and added,

“I’m serious. It’s time the people ran this country.”

We were conversing over coffee in the church hall, in the small Gulf resort town called Bradenton. The place is miniscule, but even here, there’s a local Occupy group that’s planning to sit in at City Hall next week.

If you believe every network on the television, life in America these days is about choosing between a rich white guy and a rich semi-black guy who are basically saying the same thing. You’re either a Republican or a Democrat. There is nothing else, and no room for you, as a partisan of either team, to offer criticism of your All Star, or suggest another possibility. That’s what’s Primary: getting behind your Team.

But shut off the Sleep Machine, and step out under the heavens, and you realize that what everybody on the ground is really saying without words is that they know the entire Game is already over; they just don’t know what to do about the score.

Even Terry.

Just before I peddled away from the guy’s place in relative disgust, Terry surprised me. The man stepped towards me, holding on tightly to one of his youngest daughter’s scrubby little hands, and he shook his head and remarked,

“Not that I trust any of ‘em. They just is all we got.”

Rise like lions, after slumber, in unvanquishable number; Shake your chains to earth like dew, which in sleep had fallen on you. You are many; they are few.
- Percy Shelley, 1815

Dear friends,
Recently, I was told that your months-old invitation to me to preach to your congregation on February 5 has been withdrawn because of the alleged protests of two unidentified “native men”, who claim that I, a Euro-Canadian, am not competent and have no right to speak about the genocide inflicted by my people on aboriginal children.
I’ll leave aside, for the moment, the perplexing question of how two unnamed people who are not from your congregation can unilaterally censor and ban a guest preacher on the basis of innuendo and hearsay – especially within a liberal church that prides itself on its progressiveness. Let’s look instead at the heart of the accusation against me, which is that I am “trying to speak for native people”, to quote one of these faceless, alleged critics.
It’s not a new charge, but like all lies, it’s one devoid of any substance.
A man who confronts the rape of women isn’t trying to speak for victims: he’s attempting to stop and uproot male supremacy and violence. I don’t have to be a Jew, and certainly am not trying to be one, when I investigate and condemn Hitler’s slaughter of European Jewry. And America’s civil rights movement would have failed had not those from the white society stood arm in arm with black people and defeated Jim Crow laws.
Frankly, it’s only when those from the guilty culture open the lid on their own crimes that the latter have any hope of being dealt with: a truth that the Nuremberg indictments proved to posterity.
Despite my having been adopted into and given a name by elders of three indigenous nations, and my authorization by these elders of the Mohawks, the Anishnabe and the Squamish nations to investigate and speak publicly about the murder of their relatives in Christian internment camps, I have never tried nor claimed to speak for or represent native people, or the survivors of our home-grown genocide. For almost twenty years, I have done the opposite, and that is, to expose and confront the crimes of my own people, and my former denomination.
Since 1993, I’ve done so relentlessly, without pay or recognition, and in the face of enormous personal loss and unrelenting attacks by church and state.
I’ve personally interviewed over a thousand survivors of the residential schools holocaust, published their stories in books and film, brought their cases to court, counseled and stood by those native men and women when their own “leaders” refused to do so, presided at their funerals, and created a public storm aimed at mainstream Canada, all so that the survivors themselves could find their own voice and win justice on their own terms.
Anyone who has witnessed my work up close, or who follows my story, knows this to be true.
Sometimes, I’ve been accused of being “crazy” for doing this work, and daring to show that children died at the hands of publicly-funded Catholic and Protestant churches. Since none of the many documents, eyewitness testimonies, and forensic remains from Indian residential school graves that I’ve publicized are imagined, and since this evidence clearly confirms what I’ve been claiming, I’ll leave it to you to decide who is the one being “delusional” when my critics deny these realities, and choose instead to try to discredit me with name calling.
In truth, my most recent critics who contacted you are not among those who have witnessed firsthand what I have uncovered and who I am. Like those who stand to lose by my exposure of mainstream North America’s crimes against humanity, they seek to disparage me from a distance, using rumor, innuendo and outright lies to convince unsuspecting people that I am an unstable, nefarious creature, out to profit from and exploit battered residential school survivors – without ever offering any evidence.
Again, this is not a recent slander. It was actually cooked up in the summer of 1998 by David Iverson, a national officer with the United Church of Canada, along with Inspector Peter Montague of the “E” Division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver, who launched the dirty tricks campaign against me which is still in operation, as we can see from the recent fiasco at your church.
This black ops campaign to discredit me began after I had brought to light the complicity of government-funded aboriginal chiefs in the present-day sexual trafficking of their native children: “chiefs” who are indispensable to the Canadian government in signing away the lands and resources of their own people.
The homogenous thing called “Indians” is a colonial invention, and not all native people stand against the genocidal actions of church and state on this continent. Some, indeed, profit very well by their allegiance to the very system that slaughtered and imprisons their people. That’s always how the European scheme of Divide and Conquer has worked.
So it isn’t too much of a surprise when state-funded, affluent native politicians, who as children often helped abuse and discipline their fellow students in residential schools, come out so strongly against me and my efforts to expose the real story of these crimes. For in any North American equivalent of a Nuremberg Tribunal, these aboriginals, as well as “white” church and government officials, will be standing in the dock of judgment.
These collaborating Indians, including the Assembly of First Nations and other puppet groups, will have to explain at such a Tribunal why they never indicted Canada and Christendom for the slaughter of their own people – and why they personally profited off that slaughter, and the selling off and desecration of their peoples’ ancestral lands.
To quote one of my sponsors, elder Bill Squire of the sovereign Mohawk Nation of the Grand River in Brantford, Ontario:

It’s not the whites who are the big problem anymore, but our own leaders. The chiefs and band councils have not once helped us bring home the kids murdered at residential school for a proper burial. They are never there when we’re in front of the bulldozers, trying to save what’s left of our land. They’re paid by the feds to sit there and do nothing. The time for that is over.

Your precipitous action in suddenly excluding me from your midst will have an impact beyond simply censoring an inconvenient truth. For, as an adopted member of Bill Squire’s Grand River Mohawk community, I do not speak and act alone, but operate under the protection of that nation, as was affirmed publicly last year when I was given by them the name Rawennatshani, “He who warns the people with a strong and wise voice”. And so your decision to censor and stop my efforts to share the truth of the holocaust made against the Mohawk people is also directed against their nation, who are an affiliated part of our global campaign known as The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State. (www.itccs.org)
If we are to ever end the terrible legacy of racism and genocide, we must surrender the false divisions and labels that separate humanity, and discover again the common ground that unites us all. We, the settler nations who planned and committed the biggest genocide in human history, and who still conceal it, are precisely the ones who must take responsibility for it. That is my purpose, and the intention of our International Tribunal.
Unfortunately, your action in censoring this topic from your church because of an anonymous complaint is setting back any serious effort to hold our culture accountable under moral and international law. You have indeed avoided such accountability under the guise of a dubious “political correctness” – an absurd fallacy, really – that claims that only Indians can address this issue.
I have welcomed a broad-based aboriginal involvement in my work and our campaign from the beginning. Unfortunately, none of the “professionals” in the native world – Indian lawyers, academics, and politicians – have readily taken up this invitation, and challenge. On the contrary, these largely government-paid aboriginal elites have shied away from seriously confronting church and state for their crimes, or standing with the residential school survivors themselves. When these professionals begin to do so, I will take their remarks and criticisms of me and my work more seriously.
Until then, I urge you to take the hard but necessary step of looking at the evidence of deliberate genocide by your culture, and religion, and undergo the spiritual and social transformation that alone can bring about justice and genuine recovery from this horrible legacy.
I welcome you in this effort, for in truth, it is an exciting opportunity for we as the heirs of a dark tradition to cast off that legacy, and reinvent ourselves according to the Great Law of Peace: specifically, through the Two Row Wampum Treaty of Equality to share the land in harmony, that was offered by the indigenous nations to our ancestors when they first arrived on this continent.
As one who has been commissioned by the Onkwehon:we (Mohawk) and Haudenosonee (Iroquois) nations to share this Great Law with my own people, I offer it to you today in friendship, and I invite you to step out of the past, towards a new allegiance, and a new identity.
Sincerely,
Rev. Kevin D. Annett – Eagle Strong Voice

By Kevin D. Annett

Ricky Lavallie is dead.

He was a 51 year old native man, and was the sole witness to the murder by three Vancouver policemen of another key aboriginal activist in our network, Johnny Bingo Dawson.

The sudden death of Ricky Lavallie on January 3 has wiped out the last of my original core supporters among urban native people in Vancouver and Winnipeg. Our original nucleus of the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared (FRD) has been extinguished.

In barely two years, all of our strongest activists, and those who forced the missing residential schools children into national and world consciousness, have died: Chief Louis Daniels, Elder Phillipa Ryan, Johnny Bingo Dawson, William Combes, Harry Wilson, and now Ricky Lavallie.

These deaths follow on the earlier, equally sudden demise of key eyewitnesses to murders in Indian residential schools: Archie Frank, Willie Sport, Joe Sylvester, Virginia Baptiste, Nora Bernard, and Harriet Nahanee.

These witnesses, and the dead native leaders of our FRD, were instrumental in publicly naming the churches and government of Canada as being guilty of crimes against humanity. And they have all paid the ultimate price for doing so.

I charge these religious and state organizations with their murders.

I charge the E Division of the RCMP with complicity in these deaths, along with the head officers of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

In the case of Ricky Lavallie, I charge the Vancouver Police Department with complicity in his death. For I have two separate videotaped testimonies of Ricky from last August, in which he states that a Vancouver police sergeant threatened him with imprisonment and death if he continued to speak about his witnessing of the deadly beating of Bingo Dawson by the same sergeant and two other Vancouver cops on December 6, 2009.

I have written the following obituary and tribute to my friend Ricky, for his steadfast courage and devotion to the missing children. I hope and pray, as always, that some of the spirit of such a brave soul will pass into us, and help us all awaken from complicity.
Let us see and name the murders still happening, and bring down those responsible.
Otherwise, how are we any better than they are?
……………………………………………………………………..

Ricky Lavallie: May 20, 1960- January 3, 2012

His tears flowed so easily whenever he remembered how his five year old brother was killed by a catholic priest bearing an electric cattle prod at the Portage la Prairie residential school in 1968. He carried the terror of that day with him at every moment, for he refused to numbly forget. But nevertheless, Ricky Lavallie was always at my side at every rally and vigil outside churches across Vancouver, and he never wavered.

I lost more than a friend in Ricky, but a brother warrior: one who could have created the usual excuses of most people to stay away from all of our righteous confrontations with cops and priests down the years, as we battled impossibly for disclosure and justice. Rick more than anyone had enough cause to hide, but he never did.

I once marched with Ricky and only eight other people down one of Vancouver’s busiest streets during rush hour traffic, bearing the banner that he clung to like his memories: “All the Children Need a Proper Burial”.

As passersby gawked at our little army, and cars lurched to a stop to let us pass, I turned to Ricky and said,

“How are we doing, Rick?”

He smiled, which was rare, and shouted cheerfully,

“We’re doing great!”

Ricky was the one who walked with me to the front of a church sanctuary during a busy mass, as we occupied the main catholic cathedral in Vancouver on Palm Sunday in 2007. I recall how he gazed solidly at the priest who was berating and threatening us, and said quietly to the red faced idiot,

“When are you gonna give me back my brother’s body?”

Before we were banned from the airwaves of the former “Vancouver Co-op Radio” – now a muzzled subsidiary of the corporate Pattison Media Group – Ricky regularly regaled our listeners with life on the streets, his time in the death camp called residential school, and with his latest song, strummed out on a three strong guitar we kept lying around the studio. But his best moments were with his fellow survivors of church torture, when they faltered on the air and broke down in the flood of dark remembrances that he carried and endured so nobly.

“That’s okay, we’ll get those bastards” he’d say softly to a man or woman amidst their sobs, placing a large and tender arm around them. And then he’d shout into the microphone,

“Screw those churches!”

We did get those bastards, again and again, and Ricky showed me in the flesh how and why his kind are inheriting the earth. He was the kind of man who no bribe and no threat could stop: and so, even now, he hasn’t been stopped.

Ricky’s great joy, of course, was that he was a central character in our documentary film Unrepentant. Just to know that his story and that of his brother were now known to millions of people around the world seemed to make up for all that he had lost. Whenever he saw me on the grimy streets of East Hastings he’d lumber over to me and ask for another few copies of our film.

“They can’t ignore us anymore, right?” he’d exclaim.

The last time I ever saw Ricky was in October, during the Occupy Vancouver encampment. My friend spent his days there leafleting mostly indifferent occupiers about the residential schools genocide, and he never stopped talking about his murdered brother to anyone who would listen.

From there, one day, he led a dozen people on a Sunday morning to the same cathedral he had helped occupy that bright Sunday in 2007, and he stood almost alone in the face of dozens of burly Knights of Columbus and the usual brutal phalanx of cops who try so pathetically to guard the church from Judgement.

Ricky Lavallie left the world in such a spirit, as he had lived: resolute and unbroken and truthful, despite his scars, and his deep fears.

It’s never enough to write about another fallen hero, or to remember him, or even to continue on in the sacred work he died for. The long sadness, the lengthening shadow of aloneness among we fewer and fewer veterans of this campaign, is never lessened by the bright light of their example. But somehow we carry on anyway, like Ricky, remembering, as he always did, all of the little ones who suffered and died, and the ones who will tomorrow if we let go of our banner, or our memories.

Ricky Lavallie. He is present.

Ricky Lavallie (left) with Siyam ©Kiapilano™ and Kevin Annett (right)

Remembering the Canadian Holocaust

]]> http://kevinannett.com/2012/01/23/is-it-nothing-to-you-another-hero-falls-ricky-lavallie-1960-2012/feed/ 0 http://kevinannett.com/2012/01/05/waking-up-to-what-we-are-and-what-we-can-be-thoughts-on-this-week%e2%80%99s-latest-panic/ http://kevinannett.com/2012/01/05/waking-up-to-what-we-are-and-what-we-can-be-thoughts-on-this-week%e2%80%99s-latest-panic/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:27:32 +0000 admin http://kevinannett.com/?p=131

When our adversary loses his liberties, it’s called justice. When we lose ours, it’s called dictatorship.  – Ammon Henacy

I’ve been advised by people apparently in the know that America officially became a police state this past week, with the passing of President Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Meanwhile, across the waters, friends in Ireland have just denounced in righteous indignation the convening of “secret courts” of the Roman Catholic Church to investigate itself for raping children, and silence in-house stool pigeons in the process.

Well now, that’s all a big surprise.

I guess the outraged internet commentators who tremble and bemoan the repercussions of the NDAA have never heard about that great liberator Abraham Lincoln’s “emergency measure” laws during the U.S. civil war, whereby he shut down opposition newspapers, jailed dissenters without trial or habeas corpus, and ran the country like a one man fief.

And what’s so new about there being one law for us, and another for child-killing priests? Secret church courts? Yeah, I’ve been there.

I often think that the degree of our moral outrage at injustice is directly proportional to the degree of our own ignorance and naivety about the kind of culture we live in, and loyally maintain: one that has been built on and thrives upon the crushing oppression of all sorts of people by both church and state, here at home and abroad.

The only problem these days, it seems, is that such an iron hand is now starting to descend on the lives of certain privileged, bourgeois, dare I say “white” folks: a fact that’s supposed to get us all concerned. I mean, we can’t have our rights violated now, can we?

I’ve seen friends killed by cops, thrown from their homes, blacklisted into suicide and legally robbed of everything by official agents of law and order. Most of these people were dark skinned, or poor, or simply alone. And all during their torture, nobody complained about how their fate marked the commencing of totalitarianism in our midst.

Ah, but those were just isolated individuals, you might reply. These new police state laws affect everybody. Well listen up, dummy: how did you think those laws we now face were able to come about, except by what was happening first to all of my friends, while you all stood by and looked the other way? They were the trial runs, the test cases. And now it’s your turn.

If not poetic justice, you could call it historical inevitability.

I helped make this present sorry mess happen, too, of course. I was only shaken out of some of my own complicity when I experienced the big boot of church tyrants who tried and sentenced me to public execution in a secret ecclesiastical court that no law could touch. The Attorney General for British Columbia even said so, in a letter to me: “The internal disciplinary processes of the United Church are outside the jurisdiction of this department (read: the law)”. I told the world about that particular tyranny, and nobody cared, starting with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and every lawyer in sight.

I don’t carry much of a grudge anymore about all that cruelty, regardless of how it destroyed my life, because it opened my eyes. It put me on a higher and necessary path and purpose. So I counsel all of today’s chicken littles who see the sky crashing down on their little world at the hands of that evil Mr. Obama to realize that Big Brother is actually giving all of you a rare gift, and an opportunity: to know how the rest of us live.

Be that as it may, another advantage of all this unusual honesty by the state in so openly declaring its monstrous nature is that it puts more and more of us in the same boat. Our ranks are swelling with some very pissed off people. Like any naked act of terror, the NDAA and other such assaults is creating a new generation of freedom fighters where once resided mere bubble headed techno serfs. So I thank Obama, really, for his efforts at sharpening the minds and the love of liberty in so many erstwhile complicit Americans.

As for his counterparts in the hierarchy of that even more ancient tyranny called Roman Catholicism, all those pathetic priestly turds are the best thing that’s happened for secular humanism and free thinking since the days of Martin Luther. I hear that some of the Irish are so outraged at these secret church courts that they’re planning on invading their sessions and trashing them, and putting the child-raping priests on trial in common law courts of their own making.

And being Irish, you can bet your brogans they’ll do it, too.

Man, I love tyranny. I love repressive laws. They’re the whip that awakens a slumbering humanity, and forces us to know what matters, and what we must do.

One of the guys that made the American Revolution and its Republic, and whose words would undoubtedly qualify him for arrest and secret trial by the present U.S. government, was good old Thomas Paine. Battling exactly the same tyranny that grips America today, and facing the same odds as we do, Tom Paine exhorted the stumbling and weary veterans at Valley Forge with these words, born of misery and oppression:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly …

And …

An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. For such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing. I love the man who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. So if there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.

Now is the time, friends. Take strength from the blows, walk not in fear, especially of one another, and stand as one now, in our great company of ancestors who were not those of timid disposition.

Are we not ready?