On That Channel in Toronto
I Come to Bury Jack Layton, Not to Praise Him: More Notes on a Journey through this Odd Thing called Canada
I landed in Toronto yesterday after a month abroad, and was surprised to be let back into the country. I sort of secretly hoped that I’d be detained at the airport by the Mounties and charged with treasonous sedition, after my many public broadsides at Lizzie Windsor. But things are never that upfront and honest, here in the Great White North.
Take the recent demise of Jack Layton, for instance.
I wandered tonight through my old haunts from my Toronto street ministry days, twenty years ago, including across Nathan Phillips square, where loads of homeless families used to squat: most of them aboriginal. They’re all gone on now, forced out by politicians like Layton. In their place, I discovered walls and walls full of chalked graffiti praising the just-dead NDP leader in a manner normally reserved for a messiah.
“LAYTON- NATION LIVES ON”
“JACK LAYTON: THE VOICE OF CANADA’S VOICELESS WILL NEVER DIE”
“WE LOVE YOU JACK”
And so on.
OK, so the guy never once replied to my letters or appeals, even when I was stuck in a British Immigration prison. I’m not bearing him much of a grudge, really. He was, after all, a politician.
What I find hugely ironic, and oh so Canadian, is how none of the people adorning the walls of downtown Toronto with their accolades for Layton have ever managed to do the same thing for any of the thousands of aboriginal children killed off by Jack’s United Church of Canada, which he clung to as a self-described “loyal member” to the day he died.
True to his denomination – whose consistency has sometimes been termed “spiritual jello” – Jack himself never once mentioned the Indian residential school atrocities until after Prime Minister Steven Harper did. Jack even claimed that he didn’t think what went on within those deadly walls constituted genocide. I guess, like the Moderator of his church, Layton thought that 50,000 dead kids can be wrong.
Leaving dead Indians aside – and we usually do – one has to admit that honesty about ourselves is not a strong point among Canadians. And Jack Layton and his United Church so perfectly embody White Canada: smiling, concerned, self-congratulatory, and politically correct and involved just so long as certain toes aren’t stepped on and the Great Canadian Myth – that we’re all generally nice, civilized and humanitarian folks – can endure.
It’s this, our sanctimonious untruthfulness, which causes the Americans to hate us so.
On the other hand, during my time on Toronto’s streets as a novice minister, I met some big exceptions to Canadian duplicity, primarily among people who had been at the receiving end of it.
Back in 1991, I seemed to be the only person on staff at the United Church’s Fred Victor Mission who was enthusiastic about the people I was meeting on the hot air grates at the Square. I kept inviting these staffers to accompany me at nights to meet the homeless people they always talked about abstractly, but none of them ever came along. Almost all of these people were staunch United Church and NDP members. They had all the talk, but that was about it.
I was angry at them for awhile, until I saw the real problem was not their hypocrisy but the culture of duplicity in which they lived, as heirs to a Canada ruled so absolutely by those two enormous fraudulences of Crown and Pulpit.
It was that Brit turned Yankee firebrand, Tom Paine, who observed,
“Kings could not exist without priests. First enslave the mind, and the slavery of the body follows as natural as the shadow its object.”
No matter what the politics of a white Canadian, they have universally pulled back from confronting the churches that slaughtered the innocent with impunity, and keep torturing children: even when all the proof of their crime is out there.
Granted, it’s hard to know what to do when the courts, the cops, and the government are all in bed with the Christian wolves in sheep’s clothing, and are doing their best to intimidate and criminalize the victims, and their few allies. But you’d think that such collusion would make more of us stop and question our allegiances: and our tax-paying and church-attending practices.
Sadly, within Canada’s neo-colonial culture that’s so rooted in automatic deference to authority, the psychological power of what’s called the Christian church is still formidable; and yet, it’s also extremely thin on the ground. I’ve seen that power snap and break at moments, like when bunches of us have invaded church services in Toronto and Vancouver, and spoken of the crime to startled parishioners.
If even one Member of Parliament had have had the temerity to call for the law to come down on the churches that raped, sterilized and murdered so many Indian children, those grassroots actions would have kindled a political and even spiritual revolution in Canada unseen since the days of Louis Riel and William Lyon McKenzie.
However, every MP, including Jack Layton, knew the personal consequence of taking such a step, being the oath-bound legal agents of the very foreign power that instigated the residential schools holocaust: the so-called Crown of England.
Standing last night outside Toronto’s City Hall and scanning the orgasm of cheerleading for Layton all over its walls, I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the enthusiastic inscribers knew the words of the Oath of Allegiance that Jack had taken upon entering Canada’s Parliament:
“I swear to bear loyalty and true allegiance to Queen Elizabeth the Second and all her descendents.”
Note that there’s nothing in there about bearing true allegiance to the people of Canada, and to their Constitution and laws.
Jack Layton, and every other M.P., as well as every judge, cop, soldier and civil servant in Canada, is the agent of the Crown, and is bound to do its bidding: not ours. We elect them in our name and pay for all their expenses and goodies, but legally and constitutionally, they are not accountable to us at all.
People overthrew Mr. Ghaddafi recently for running things in that kind of manner in Libya. In any other country, our political system would be considered treasonable, and grounds for ignoring such collaborating lackies, and even overthrowing them altogether. But Canadians would rather labor under tyranny, it seems, than fundamentally upset anything.
That’s why our ludicrous colonial arrangement desperately needs popular figureheads like Jack Layton in place, to convince us sheepeople that there is in fact hope and possibility in such an unrepresentative system. All we need, I keep hearing from the “progressive” deludinoids of the left, is to win another hundred or more seats in Parliament. Then we’ll have our day!
What all these folks stubbornly refuse to learn is that the entire arrangement is a stacked deck, controlled by the clique William Lyon McKenzie derisively called “The Family Compact”: the wealthy elite of church, state and corporation that run Canada as a waterhole and filling station for once the British, then the American, and increasingly Asian empires – all under the tight control of a fictitious thing called the Crown that legally owns all of the land and wealth of our nation.
Jack Layton saw nothing wrong, basically, with that arrangement: he and his party just wanted it played out a bit more “fairly” for those whom it is chewing to pieces.
Well, for some of those, at least. The homeless Indians and slaughtered kids of the residential schools somehow didn’t get included in Jack’s vision of justice, since he had his own church to consider.
Back in 1994, when I exposed how an NDP cabinet minister in B.C. who was also a United Church clergyman – John Cashore – was using his office to protect his church from scandal for their profitable trading in stolen native land, I was asked by an amused “Conflict of Interest Commissioner” why I thought that church and state were somehow separate in Canada.
They’re not at all, of course. And so both of those institutions are thoroughly above the law that the rest of us are expected to follow.
But I don’t expect Canadians to stop that crime from carrying on. Instead, we’ll keep funding and honoring such church-state official whitewashes as our “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, where the very churches – including Jack’s – that ran the Indian residential schools and buried all those kids get to investigate themselves, and tell us all what really happened.
It’s a funny thing, but I always noticed that Jack Layton and Steven Harper always smiled with the same expression.
The Forgiveness Fallacy: Standing by our Painful Truth
Whenever my abusive boyfriend wanted to make up with me, he’d tell me he was sorry for beating me up, and naturally, I’d forgive him. That was just a green light for him to start beating me up all over again.
- Carol M., Vancouver, February 2010By refusing to forgive, I give up my illusions.
- Alice Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence
Harry Wilson is still alive, somehow. He is homeless, starving, plagued by alcoholism and drug addiction, and regularly beaten and robbed on Vancouver’s meanest streets. Yet neither his present suffering, nor his childhood rape and torture by a clergyman with an electric cattle prod, has caused him to collapse, as it has most of his fellow alumni from the death camps called Indian Residential Schools.
None of these others have ever found their voice, but Harry has: and when he speaks of his life, he always ends by saying the same thing:
“I’ll never forgive those bastards for what they did to me.”
Harry Wilson proves to me something I have observed over many years: that the healthiest people are those who have never forgiven what was done to them as a child.
I’ve recently begun to ask counselors and other “helping” professionals why they believe that a traumatized man or woman must forgive if they are to become well. I have yet to receive a clear or logical answer. Rather, it is simply a self-evident and unquestioned assumption that “forgiveness” is indispensable to recovery.
However, when we look beneath this surface conjecture, we find that the exact opposite is true: specifically, that the most basic requirement of recovering from any pain or trauma is to not surrender our capacity to name the wrong and the wrongdoer, and freely express our natural outrage at it. And yet precisely such a surrender and silence is required for us to undertake the gesture of “forgiving”, which in practice is simply the inner resignation and defeat of our being reconciled to our torture at the hands of another.
Anger and the refusal to “let go” of our violation is seen by modern therapists as a hindrance to “moving on”, as if not accommodating to one’s wronged condition is the source of one’s problem. “Forgive and forget, and all will be well” is the unchallengeable secular creed of psychology. The onus, in other words, is placed upon the victim, and not the victimizer, to change.
It is therefore alarming to the extent that so-called “helping” professionals base their methods not upon provable truths but on unquestioned moralism, and specifically, on the underlying assumption that there is something wrong and unhealthy about challenging or confronting one’s abuse and abusers. In this approach, there seems to be endless room for “reconciliation” and “forgiveness”, but just so much time and space allowed for the naming of the full and terrible truth.
More people than I care to remember have told me how their counselors have told them that healing is only possible by moving beyond their past, and learning to accept the injustices and betrayals done to them. They are told over and over that they are somehow damaging or belittling themselves by not forgiving those who harmed them.
In the case of aboriginal survivors of Christian genocide, such a charade of “healing” is an obvious political maneuver by government and church-paid therapists to sideline and prevent lawsuits and even more hazardous responses of the survivors. But the argument is the same, for white or native refugees from childhood rape and torture: the abuser is not responsible for changing, and must ultimately be appeased and placated by being forgiven.
The fact that this attitude is so universal, and that the capacity to “forgive” their torturers is held up as some sort of qualifying morality test for victims, suggests that it arises from something very basic, which I suggest is the collective, fearful memory of parental retaliation: a fear that gives rise to our entire structure of personal and societal morality in western culture.
In a nutshell, that morality states that goodness consists of respecting and obeying constituted authority and one’s elders. By definition, one cannot be “abused” by those in such authority because they are superior to us, and thus, incapable of being in error in relation to us.
The template of such elite-worshiping morality, of course, is the Biblical message that a “rebellious” humanity and all of creation is being punished by an all-wise father-figure “god” because his instructions were disobeyed by our ancestors. Yet the same punishing deity offers us a way back into his graces if we will return to our original unthinking state of obedience through our blind faith in his son Christ – and in those who claim to “represent” him. If we reject this one-time offer, however, we are damned for eternity as amoral and evil people.
In this Christian paradigm, we are all inherently lost and sick souls, but we can become “moral” and well again through obedience to those powerful and threatening figures who know better than us. In short, morality and well being means unflagging obedience and conformity to the very power that harms and endangers us.
To kiss the hand that strikes you makes no sense, at the best of times. But the absolute mandate to do precisely that pervades all of our thinking and social practice, however subtly it is disguised or elaborately it is rationalized. And so it is hardly surprising that the pressure to conform to the unchallengeable interests of authority figures determines virtually every aspect of our lives, from religion to political activism to social and family relationships.
By this scheme, humanity is divided into the dominators and the subjugated. In our western religious-philosophical tradition, one cannot envision anything – and in fact, nothing is allowed to operate in any substantial way – outside the bipolar dynamic between the dominator (abuser) personality and the accommodator (the abused).
Even if we somehow disregard the fact that this is the prevailing paradigm of western culture, it remains a common and lingering belief that we must personally forgive a wrong done to us if we are to avoid a crippling resentment and thirst for revenge.
This attitude is especially prevalent in Christian circles, where it’s sanctimoniously espoused that “I forgive not for the sake of another, but for my own sake.” And after all, Jesus himself in various scriptures explicitly seems to condone an absolute forgiving of all those who harm us.
In reality, the word “forgiveness” in Hebrew is not an absolute moral term, but is akin to the word for “repentance”, which means to turn around and walk in a different direction. Jesus was saying, in effect, to simply not be like the person who harmed us, but rather, to be different. This is a radically different thing than saying, be reconciled with one who has harmed you. Indeed, it actually means the opposite: be separated from such a person.
Further, even on the level of the moralistic claim that “forgiving” those who trespass against us grants a psychic cleansing to us, the empirical evidence does not bear this out.
To try to forgive one’s abuser is to deny our most basic common sense and our capacity to freely express our feelings. It is to create the illusion that a wrong is somehow wiped clean by killing in oneself the desire to strike back or seek restitution for our pain.
On the contrary, it’s clear that when we forgive another person, we must not only repress our natural feelings but deny what we know is true for the sake of a supposed settlement with an abuser who invariably shows little or no remorse for his action.
In practice, such a resolution is never achieved, and yet the “forgiver” cannot recognize or acknowledge this simple fact, for he is in even deeper denial about his own condition in the wake of the pseudo-liberation imparted by his “forgiving”.
In effect, the abused person must immerse himself in a permanently dissociated mental state to convince himself that his act of “forgiveness” has both redeemed his abuse and reformed his abuser – neither of which is true.
To demand such a neurotic and dishonest condition in those who have survived abuse and torture is merely to continue that affliction under another name. And yet, paradoxically, this destructive pathology is found most strongly among those people who have suffered most severely, individually and socially, at the hands of others.
I witnessed this last year, when a strange gathering of native people assembled on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to offer to the government of Canada a so-called “Forgiveness Charter” in the name, absurdly, of every survivor of Indian residential schools.
The event was sponsored, predictably, by the very churches that ran the schools, acting through various puppet aboriginal politicians and preachers. But the rally was filled with hundreds of everyday survivors of rape and torture in the residential schools: people who sincerely believed that their unilateral “forgiving” of the government would make everything better.
The very fact that the “Charter” was addressed not to those actually responsible for the schools and their crimes – the churches themselves – spoke much of the actual deceitful and obscuring purpose of the event. Nor did the enormous pretense and travesty of pretending to forgive murderers for a crime on behalf of the silent and murdered victims who have no say in the matter seemed not to occur to anyone at the rally, or to the slavish national media that widely and uncritically reported the event.
Nevertheless, what I described earlier as the innate dread of parental retaliation that so molds our society’s notion of well being and morality was rampantly present at the Forgiveness Charter Rally. Each aboriginal speaker implored his fellow survivors of Christian terror to believe that much harder in Christianity, to love those who had harmed them, and to completely absolve both church and state for all the wrongs they had committed against native people: even the slaughter of children.
The fear in the speakers’ eyes and voices was palpable that day, as was their pitiful hope that their torturers would approve of their words, and stop their reign of terror against native people. I have seen the same look in every battered wife who is convinced that just a bit more love from her will still the blows of her husband. The hopes of the eternal victim, robbed of their own voice and ability to confront and condemn their abuser, are always the same – and are never realized.
What would a genuine healing, geared to the needs of the victims themselves, look like?
If we simply reject any moralistic view or “forgiveness imperative” in dealing with our own pain and trauma, and begin from the first and fundamental necessity of always retaining our capacity to speak freely for ourselves about who and what has caused our affliction, we can avoid the self-defeating pitfalls of silencing ourselves and burying our feelings for the sake of our abusers.
By not worrying about forgiveness, we free ourselves from any illusion about our actual condition, and retain our capacity to speak freely about what we feel and know. What I have observed in trauma healing circles, time and again, is that only when victims have reached such a stage of inner freedom can genuine recovery begin.
My fondest and most inspiring memories of such actual recovery occurred not in a healing circle at all, but at a public protest inside the sanctuary of the main Catholic cathedral in downtown Vancouver just before Easter in 2007, when aboriginal survivors of torture in Catholic residential schools held aloft their banners and signs, and spoke to the congregation of the crimes committed against them by the church.
Men and women who could not enter a catholic church or see a crucifix without becoming nauseous because of the awful memories of their torture as a child, strode bravely and calmly amidst the pews that day and handed leaflets to the dumbstruck crowd. Survivors faced down the threats of policemen and priests and stated their case to them, and then peacefully left the building amidst their own drum beat, laughter, cheers and joyful triumph.
Outside, as we all hugged and congratulated one another, a permanent cloud of despair seemed to lift from the survivors gathered there, and during the following week, not less than five of them stopped drinking and doing drugs, for the first time in many years.
What had caused this incredible healing that day was summed up by one of the victors, a native man named William Combes, when he said later on my radio program,
I thought I was going to crap out and let you all down, but then I saw you all outside and I felt the courage to walk up those steps. Then I was inside with all of you, and you all kept me safe. Just doing the right thing kept me safe. Just speaking the truth to those bastard priests and facing them down made me lose my fear of them. I wasn’t worried anymore about what they thought or might do to me. I could finally lay the blame with them and leave it there. I didn’t need to kill myself with booze anymore because the blame is theirs, the secret is all theirs now, it ain’t mine anymore.
William and the others reminded me on that glorious day that when the battered victims finally speak in their own name, they begin to heal the wrongs by making justice an actual possibility. And such justice, and the equality it breeds, always precedes any possibility of forgiveness, which is the consequence of right action, not the cause.
Standing by our own painful truth is as necessary as standing by one another – and as dangerous to a society like ours which is based on domination and abuse. In times like these, just naming what we feel and know is a subversive act, and will become more difficult to do in the face of ever-growing abuses of power and humanity.
Nevertheless, once we unite and confront that and those who are the cause of our torment, there begins to grow something even greater than healing, or forgiveness, and that is transformation.
On one of the last times I ever saw William Combes, he handed me a scrap of paper with a brief poem that read,
I looked for healing, but healing eluded me;
I sought for my God, and for love, but neither could I see.
I discovered my own battered truth, and I found all three.
International Media and Community Advisory from The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS) and Kevin Annett
August 1, 2011
Brussels, Belgium:
1. After more than a year of preparation, a network of community-based Tribunals into Crimes against Humanity will officially convene in Brussels, London, Ottawa and other cities on September 15, 2011, armed with the power to arrest and sentence guilty offenders – including the Pope himself.
Despite efforts by the British government and the Vatican to obstruct the Tribunals, including by deporting and harassing its leading members, survivors of church and state terror will gather in five countries to present evidence and come to a judgement concerning church-sponsored genocide, murder and the continued trafficking in children.
“We have forensic proof now that countless children are buried in mass graves near former church schools, orphanages and sweatshops across Canada, America, England, Ireland and Australia” said ITCCS spokesman Kevin Annett today.
“We intend to share this evidence before the world, and bring indictments against the Roman Catholic and numerous Protestant churches, as well as the Crown of England, for mass murder and the continued trafficking and torture of children.”
To protect its witnesses and encourage local action by survivors and their allies, the ITCCS Executive has decided to decentralize its Tribunal process and extend its work throughout the months following its September 15 commencement.
A complete agenda of this process is listed in Section 2, below.
The accumulated evidence and full proceedings of the Tribunals will be video recorded and compiled into a documentary film, and will be archived in a final Summary Report that will be submitted to the international community no later than January 31, 2012.
Equally important, the Tribunals will bring common law legal judgements against the guilty persons and institutions, including Pope Joseph Ratzinger, and will impose community sentences against them that will be fully enforced by Common Law Peace Officers.
“Our traditions empower us to sentence and jail anyone who threatens our children when the normal authorities refuse to do so” explained ITCCS Elder Jeremiah Jourdain of the Cree Nation.
“Our Tribunal will therefore issue its own arrest and internment warrants, assess financial levies and expropriations against the property and wealth of the churches we find guilty, and order the evictions of these criminals from our lands. We will not allow those responsible for the murder of our people to go unpunished.”
2. Timetable for the ITCCS
Formal Events:
Wednesday, September 7, 2011, 12 noon: Press conference, Parliament Hill, Ottawa, Canada
Thursday, September 15, 12 noon: Formal Opening of the ITCCS Tribunals:
Brussels: outside the European Parliament building
London, Dublin and Ottawa: To be announced
Sunday, September 18 at 11 am local time: Memorial Vigils and Protests at Roman Catholic and other churches in Brussels, London, Dublin, Rome, Ottawa and other cities
- These church actions will continue every Sunday at the same time until October 30
Sunday, October 30, 12 noon: Public Vigil, Exorcism and Protest outside the Vatican, Rome, followed by a 24 hour prayer and fast
- Sympathetic actions at other Catholic churches across the world at the same local time
Monday, October 31, 12 noon: International Press Conference outside the Vatican, St. Peter’s Square, Rome
Tuesday, January 31, 2012, 1 pm: International Conference and Media Event to present the Summary Results of the ITCCS inquiry – Brussels, Belgium (location to be announced)
Speaking-Organizing Tour by Kevin Annett (details to follow)
In Canada: August 28 – September 8
In Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany: September 10-17
In England: September 18 – 28
In Ireland: October 15-23
In France: October 24-28
in Italy/Rome: October 29 – November 2
In Slovenia and Hungary: November 3-8
In the USA: November 10 – December 2
In Canada: December 3 onwards
In Brussels: January 31, 2012
3. Local action
Supporters of the ITCCS campaign and local survivors of church-state terror are encouraged to mount parallel public actions in their communities to coincide with the events listed above.
Most important, people are urged to hold their own public or closed forums during the period September 15, 2011 to January 30, 2012, to give witnesses to these crimes the chance to share their stories and evidence before local ITCCS forums, and have it video recorded for the permanent ITCCS record.
ITCCS staff will assist anyone who plans to hold such events and public actions. For help, contact the ITCCS Secretariat at this email address or by leaving a message at 1-386-323-5774 (USA).
People are also encouraged to book Rev. Kevin Annett as a speaker in their communities during the dates listed above.
4. Biography and background on Kevin Annett, plus additional links
Born 1956, Edmonton, Canada
B.A. (Anthropology), University of B.C., 1983
M.A. (Political Science), UBC, 1986
M.Div. (Theology), Vancouver School of Theology, 1990
Ordained with Honors into United Church of Canada, May 1990
Fired and expelled without cause or due process from United Church, 1997
Established first inquiry into Indian residential schools, Vancouver, Canada (IHRAAM Tribunal), June 1998
Author, Hidden No Longer: Genocide in Canada, Past and Present (2010) and
Unrepentant: Disrobing the Emperor (2011)
Co-producer, award-winning documentary film Unrepentant
Host of internationally syndicated Public Affairs blog radio program Hidden from History
International Consultant to survivors of church torture
UNREPENTANT: KEVIN ANNETT AND CANADA’S GENOCIDE (documentary):
Witness to murder at Indian Residential School
If the World was like Canada: A Realistic Comparison
Newsflash: Nazi Germany Apologizes for the Abuse of its Jews
Berlin, July 11, 1958: (New Order News Agency)
An ebullient Chancellor Herman Goering read Germany’s official Apology to its Jews today in the Reichstag, as part of that nation’s post-war efforts to “bring closure” to the wounds of the past.
The Apology is part of Germany’s Aryan Truth and Reconciliation Commission (ATRC), established this year by the Reich government after criticism of its assimilation policies towards Jews was raised by human rights groups in Switzerland.
“That we are a God-sent nation was proved when Providence granted us victory in the last war” said the aging Chancellor Goering to a hushed and respectful group of Reichstag deputies.
“So we have the magnanimity and greatness to admit that yes, some individual abuses did take place against the Semitic people who were assimilated into our Greater Reich. If such abuses can be proven and verified, we will consider limited compensation. But we admit no wrongdoing. The time for blame is over. We must move on.”
Unsubstantiated rumors of high death rates in the Relocation Centers run by Germany’s SS security forces have circulated in recent years, but are generally discounted by credible authorities and scholars.
“The so-called Jewish Holocaust has been debunked” declared Berlin Gauleiter and renowned historian Dr. Kurt Hofstetter, who also chairs Germany’s ATRC.
“Just look at the statistics. Random abuses don’t constitute genocide. If people died in the Centers, it wasn’t the result of a deliberate state policy, but because of the acts of undisciplined individuals.”
Grand Rabbi Solomon Ascher, the head of Germany’s Jewish Elder’s Council, the National Judenrate, welcomed Chancellor Goering’s Apology after warmly applauding the leader from his seat on the podium next to Goering.
“On behalf of all of our great nation’s Jews, I accept the Chancellor’s Apology. Today, our people’s pain can finally be put to rest. Healing has arrived.”
Meanwhile, a small group of dissident Jews under the leadership of the outlawed terrorist Simon Wiesenthal held an unnoticed protest outside the Reichstag during the Apology, against what they called “the shameful whitewash being perpetrated by the ATRC”.
The group, known as The Friends of the Disappeared (FoD), called for the disinterring of supposed “mass graves” in the former territories of Silesia and Poland where the Semitic Relocation Centers operated during the war.
The Gestapo has conducted a thorough investigation of the claims of the FoD, and found no evidence to support their claims. A Gestapo official warned the Wiesenthal group to “stop making wild and harmful allegations”.
“There are no mass graves of Jews” said the Gestapo official to reporters today.
“Not even a hundred people died in the Relocation Zone, and those who did were victims of natural causes, like tuberculosis.”
The German ATRC has been allocated $68 million Deutsch Marks by Reich authorities to conduct an official investigation into the fate of those in the Relocation Zones. 
The ATRC will hold closed forums where Jews selected by the National Judenrate will be allowed to share their stories before three ATRC Commissioners appointed by the Chancellor’s office. Neither the SS nor the Gestapo will participate in the forums, which will be “purely educational”, to quote the ATRC Chairman Dr. Hofstetter.
“We expect to publish our findings within five years” said Hofstetter. “We have nothing to hide. But neither will our work be a witch hunt.”
In Rome, Pope Pius today applauded the Goering Apology and the ATRC, describing them as “a blessed act of statesmanship and truthfulness. This is a new beginning for Christian Germany.”
Let Them Go, then, to the Garbage Bin of History: Ireland’s Golden Chance
By Kevin D. Annett, with The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (Brussels-London)
By withdrawing its papal “ambassador” to Ireland this week in response to that government’s just efforts to make the Catholic church answerable under the law for its crimes against children, the Vatican has given the Irish a rare opportunity to end the reign of terror of an oppressive medieval institution.
Ironically, this moment also provides Catholics themselves the chance to return their church to what it should be: an actual religious body freed from the special immunities and privileges of a political power, and the corruption such power brings.
There has never been a valid argument for Rome’s fictitious status as a “state”, enjoying all of the privileges but none of the obligations of a nation. But now, the repeated use of that power to commit horrible crimes against children, and others, and then absolve itself and the rapists and killers it shields within its ranks, has made the Vatican a criminal, rogue body under every international standard of law and morality.
Unfortunately, most of the world’s nations are aiding and abetting that rogue body by funding it, and affording it special rights and privileges, in particular that “diplomatic recognition” that effectively places Rome above and beyond the law: “a boys-only club where the members can rape and torture the innocent with impunity”, to quote one American lawyer.
It is for this reason that the Vatican’s petulant severing of diplomatic relations with Ireland yesterday is such a ray of light, and should encourage that nation’s leaders to accept this ending of the special privileges of Rome, and bring about the free and secular society that alone can protect children from gangsters in clerical robes.
Apparently, the scuttlebutt around Dublin is that more than one senior politician is considering precisely such a course of action, following Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s clear declaration in the Dail last week that priests could face prison time if they fail to report the violation and rape of children in their parish.
Unfortunately, as Kenny knows, as long as the Church of Rome retains its legal and diplomatic privileges, enforcing such a law will be difficult, if not impossible. Bringing child-raping priests to justice is frankly unattainable without a fundamental change in the relationship of church and state.
Historically, the Catholic church’s special privileges in Ireland were part of that culture’s defense against the British Empire. But that era is long since past. And many Catholics in Ireland are in fact looking to a national church of their own, free of Rome’s dictates, to recover the traditions and beliefs that were crushed when Roman Christianity imposed itself on the island more than eight centuries ago.
I heard precisely such sentiments when I spoke at University College in Cork last October, and engaged in a public debate with a Vatican spin doctor named Jack Bolero.
There in the traditional heartland of Irish Catholicism, the campus students’ society had organized the debate around a single question: Should the Pope be Arrested? Jack was asked to argue No, and I, delightedly, was given the Yes side.
I won the debate. Nearly two-thirds of the several hundred students gathered for the debate voted at the end of it that yes, Joseph Ratzinger should be detained for questioning about his protecting of rapists in his church.
“That wouldn’t have happened a few years ago, but people are fed up with the Catholic church now” one of the organizers said to me later over a pint in the local pub.
“We can have our faith without having a pope. That’s what even the old people are saying around town.”
The papacy, of course, is not one man, but an enormous global corporation with annual revenue in the hundreds of billions of dollars, thanks in part to the special financial “concordats” that nations, including Ireland, still maintain with Rome.
The real test of the sincerity of Enda Kenny’s words, and the resolve of the Irish people for spiritual sovereignty, will be whether these concordats are ended, and the vast wealth and lands stolen by the Vatican from people around the world are returned to them.
The Vatican is the source of some of the bloodiest conquests and wars in human history, and not just against children. Within the ranks of our International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS) are members of indigenous nations in Canada, America, Australia and elsewhere whose children were massacred in Jesuit-established Indian “boarding schools”. And growing evidence indicates that the Vatican is deeply involved in present day baby trafficking networks through lucrative child adoption agencies run with church subsidies.
All of these victims have the same interest to see the Vatican de-fanged and brought under the rule of law as do the people of Ireland. That is why what the Irish and their government do now to end forever papal immunity and Rome’s control over the life of their nation is of vital importance to the entire world.
Taoiseach Kenny can stay true to the hopes of his people by ending the diplomatic status of the Vatican in Ireland; licensing all clergy as public servants answerable to the people and not the church; and canceling the tax exempt status of the church along with Dublin’s financial concordat with Rome.
At the end of the Cork debate, an elderly woman came up to me with a deep scowl on her face, and barked,
“Every one of them damned priests should be castrated!”
I’ll settle for emasculating the chief rapist: Rome.
What Accompanies Me
Dear everyone,
Remembering and living again our pristine moments is part of what keeps us human. Here’s one of mine. Enjoy!
Kevin
They had become more than the streets where I came of age, but a transport pad to that time when the world welcomed me and I it.
The lane that had felt my feet ten thousand times was new to me that evening, filled with a swelling joy that was imbued with more than nostalgia.
It was dusk, and I was searching for a place to roll out my blanket both unseen and comfortable. It was still not a neighborhood that received wanderers with anything more than suspicion, as dusty blinds lifted slightly and gazed on my fifty five years like a huge, doubting eyelid from the large and elegant homes. My pace quickened as it sought the nearby forest, and solitude.
But the joy struck me again, and involuntarily I stopped and stood outside the corroding mansion with a roof shaped like a German army helmet that my twelve year old mind had once convinced itself was haunted. This was the spot where I had discovered girls, and kissed one, on that Halloween so long ago.
Charlie Eliot had arranged the outing, swelled in his hormonal confidence that Pauline and Rachel would be forthcoming that night.
We had all met outside the dark dwelling after the sun was down, beneath the glow of the same Victorian-style street lamp that still stands there. I hadn’t bothered to don a costume, despite the date, nor had our two pubescent prospects, but Charlie was adorned in something he declared represented a “Carnaby Street swinger”, complete with a striped jacket and bowler hat. We all gazed at him with vague embarrassment, but not for long, for we were young.
Pauline had deep brown eyes that stayed on me as we all wondered what to do next.
“Let’s try trick or treating!” offered Rachel, smiling with oversize braces at Charlie, but not at me.
“We’re too old” I said, trying to catch her attention, for she was the cuter of the two.
“Ah, they won’t notice” Charlie offered, striding towards the house we’d been warned to avoid.
“I don’t got a bag …” Rachel was saying as she ran after him.
I turned to Pauline, and saw her russet orbs still fastened on mine, and she smiled for the first time. Her gaze was neither shy nor inviting. She seemed fascinated.
“Um, uh, what do you wanna do?” I remember saying to her awkwardly.
She shrugged calmly, and turned her head slightly as her long dark hair spilled across her shoulders. My heart hung there, like a swallow poised to fly.
“This is fine” she said quietly.
And it was.
We didn’t notice where our friends went. The haunted house sported a thick, low hedge made for our two novice hearts that welcomed us as we settled in to it, leaving a deep furrow in the bush. Her arm and then body rested against me, and she let out a little chuckle.
She made it easy for me to like her more than I had expected to, for I had never been adored before, my every word hung upon, my expression and gestures followed so carefully by Pauline’s soft gaze. It became natural to draw closer to her, and then to touch her, in the safety of our hedge.
Her kiss parted the waves and welcomed me to delight, and she laughed aloud with a deep happiness that surprised both of us, I think. Again and again we met like that, each time softer and more perfect than before, and soon we became a wave that soared and rippled past the moment to a distant shore in time where we would always stand and remember that moment with tearful thankfulness.
Our enchantment broke suddenly and forever on the rocks of Charlie’s harsh exclamation, pummeled at us through the darkness,
“Caught you!”
The garish laughter of our two erstwhile companions brought both of us to our feet, but we held on to one another’s hands even as Charlie continued his stupid comments and a light went on in the spectral home, and we all ran for it down the street as an adult yelled something at us.
And so all these years later, the tears spilled forth from me like my bliss of that distant night as I stood in front of the hedge, still there, and I traced its gnarled form with my hand, trying once more to touch Pauline.
We never kissed again after that night, and six months later she and her family moved away forever to Smithers.
But the indentation remains in the hedge, undiminished by the years, just as memory holds a small part of us forever young and enthralled.
Sleep came easy to me that night, even on the cold skin of the forest, for I had come home.
In the Sleep Room
I was wondering today why it is that we are all insane.
Years ago, I paid my way through college by working as an orderly in the campus hospital’s nuthouse; and of course later, I dealt for years with church congregations. So I know a lot about crazy people, and the societies they create.
Rather than a peculiarity, life was oddly familiar on the university psych ward, whose inhabitants – whether the patients or the hospital staff – spun about themselves a self-sustaining, insular and utterly dissociated little world that, like society at large, resisted change or even study.
On the ward, I found that I had to remain a perpetual outsider to understand what was going on around me: a skill that served me well in later years, when I confronted far greater madness. For cleaning up and processing feces-covered patients, helping drug and manage them, and listening to their elaborate mental concoctions for hours each day gave me some real insights into the nature of institutionalized insanity, and how convincing it can all be.
The day I started working on the chronic ward of the University of British Columbia’s psychiatric hospital, the head nurse was knocked out cold by the enraged fist of an enormous guy they’d just carted in from Riverview hospital: high as a kite and not the kind of gentleman to be told off, like Big Nurse tried doing.
Violence is unusual in a nuthouse, not simply because everyone is drugged to the nines. Like in any workplace, everything is so completely and mind-numbingly routinized that the assembly line of meds, meals, television and outings leaves no room, or energy, for a completely spontaneous and willful act like striking out at it all.
So, the reaction of my co-workers to the sight of Big Nurse lying unconscious and bloody on the floor of her station, as her drooling assailant smiled down at us, was interesting. Nobody moved. The unpredictable had happened.
As I smiled nervously back at the assaulter, I thought at first that our collective numbness arose from fear, and a natural desire to stay clear of the guy’s sizable fists. But then I saw the genuine confusion on everyone’s faces. Nobody had expected this, even though we had all been trained to expect it.
The procedure had broken down, and without it, we were helpless.
Fortunately, our numbness was dispelled by the arrival of other orderlies from the adjoining ward, who immediately tackled the guy and shook us back to our senses.
Later that night, scribbling my report of the incident in the duty log, I wrote in the margins,
The machine must function without thinking, or individual will, for it to fulfill its purpose of managing the crowd predictably.
The others on staff knew I was training for the ministry, and so I suppose they grew accustomed to such theological musings in the log book.
I’m no fan of Sigmund Freud, but he did hit it on the nail when he observed that the natural instincts of any person must be suppressed for society to function as a mass of managed individuals: a suppression that breeds “civilized” mankind’s basic neurotic condition. Society, in short, makes us all crazy: or more exactly, massively dissociated.
Hardly accidental, or even merely consequential, our insanity is a necessity. For without being dissociated, we couldn’t dwell for a day in what we call civilization.
Since it’s our basic operating principle, let’s examine this thing called dissociation.
Don’t look to psychology for a definition, since like all sciences, it tends to examine and classify the tiny scales of a dragon while ignoring the Beast in its totality. We need to know what dissociation means not just for one person but for an entire culture.
A dissociated person cannot relate and integrate a normal feeling, observation or occurrence with the rest of her being. In effect, that person’s thinking is like a component on an assembly line.
As an example, I recently showed a family member hard and incontrovertible proof that her church was responsible for the death of many thousands of children in their Indian boarding schools. That person acted confused at first, and eventually acknowledged the truth of what I showed her and expressed her horror. And yet the next Sunday, she attended that same church and gave her usual offering to sustain it.
Her mind, in effect, was not capable of integrating a new and unsettling truth in order to allow a change in her behavior. What she knew could not be related to her daily pattern of life.
Psychology likes to treat such dissociation as some kind of individual mental illness resulting from a trauma, ignoring the fact that any large organization, let alone a compartmentalized, consumptionist society like ours, structurally requires such a mentality in its workers for the system to function efficiently.
No hierarchical institution can operate without precisely this dissociated condition among its members, for the simple reason that organizational and administrative cohesion rests on the suppression of unpredictable human responses which might threaten the functioning of what is in effect an enormous machine.
A rational, feeling person who integrates thought and action is potentially unpredictable, and may refuse, for example, to obey an order from above him in the chain of command – and the machine’s operations would then come to a halt. But a person whose senses and thoughts can never possibly affect his behavior will not threaten the automatic life of the machine. Hierarchy therefore abhors an integrated personality because of its essential unpredictability.
To give this idea flesh, in my first year as an ordained clergyman in the United Church of Canada, I attempted to withdraw from its clergy pension plan as a matter of personal choice and faith, following the advice of Jesus not to accumulate security or wealth in this world. I was informed by the head officer of the church that I did not have the right to do so. My attempt to integrate my beliefs with my life-practice, in short, was an unacceptable disruption in the eyes of the church. If I was to remain a “competent” employee, I would have to segregate my conscience from my behavior, in a classic dissociated manner.
I eventually saw the Machine Wisdom behind the church’s response to my attempt at integration: for only a dissociated clergyman who did not link all of his faith with all of his life would be capable of operating competently in a religious culture that preaches one set of values on Sunday, and then lives exactly the opposite values throughout the week: and expects its followers to do the same.
As statistics show, clergy are particularly neurotic individuals who are especially prone to fixations, behavioral disorders, alcohol abuse, divorce and violent obsessions causing the routine abuse of children. This erratic condition is caused by the extreme dissociation imposed on clerics by the severity with which they must daily sacrifice their personal values and faith to the quite opposite standards of a religious corporation.
At the risk of seeming trite, let me say that, if society in general requires its members to go crazy, the church demands that its clergy become Satanic: literally, “the Adversary” of all in themselves that they once held sacred and inviolable.
Again, there is nothing surprising or unusual in such a terrible requirement, from the perspective of the structural necessities of a hierarchical institution.
Looking back, my entry into the insanity of a modern psychiatric ward was just the proper training for the church ministry, since the management rather than the curing of brutalized people by maintaining them in a permanently dissociated state is the core aim of both psychiatry and religion.
It’s small wonder, accordingly, that the power of the secular priesthood of psychiatrists as well as the religious priesthood is traditionally unchallengeable in our culture. For both of these cults claim to have the answer to social and personal happiness, as defined by the neurotic requirements of modern civilization and its organized repression of natural human impulses.
To answer my first question, we are all insane because the God of Commerce needs it that way.
How do we get better? Stay tuned.
The Times that Try our Souls: A Rallying Call
by Kevin D. Annett
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 …
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, Valley Forge, December 23, 1776
It is a neighborhood that has known unending sorrow and struggle. Smallpox and fire swept away its original inhabitants in a generation. Later, thousands of jobless men faced the clubs and machine guns of the Canadian army here in 1938. Today, its many aboriginal residents crowd its streets, scrounging for food, dodging brutal cops and murderous pimps and drug dealers.
This has been my congregation and community for decades, in what is called the downtown east side of Vancouver.
I returned to those streets last week, after months away, and saw fewer of the old, familiar faces; for, as always, more people have vanished from our neighborhood, either chased off or murdered, as has the little hope left among the survivors of an unending war.
Life in Oppenheimer Park mirrors so exactly my own situation nowadays, which I’ve been advised not to mention, since it will, to quote a friend, “just scare people off.” But it’s the worst of times that measures everything, beginning with our real story and character, and I would not deny any of you the chance to know the simple truth – even if you’re not that interested.
Those of us who feel the unanswered agony and know the truth of what is befalling our people are in a Valley Forge moment, for our supplies and ammunition are exhausted, the nights are bitter and unending, and more of us are deserting the battle every day.
Thomas Paine emerged at such a moment, long ago, to rouse the near-dead spirits of a nation trying to be born, when he wrote some pamphlets that saved the American Revolution, entitled Common Sense. Thousands of desperate men and women read his words, and found their purpose again.
Tom Paine was an unemployed corset maker from England who wasn’t even American. He hated kings and privilege and tyranny, and coming to America, his heart was won by the ordinary rebels who defied the biggest empire in history. Benjamin Franklin said that Tom Paine “knew not despair, and infused our people with the meaning of why they instinctively took up arms against England.”
Enlisting as a common solider in the Continental Army, Tom knew the bloodshed and defeat of the early battles against impossible odds, saw the dissolution of the Army, and gathered with the few remaining die-hard veterans at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania at Christmas in 1776. And it was there, in the pit of defeat and starvation when everyone expected capitulation, that Thomas Paine salvaged the soul of the revolution.
Such a moment faces us, and it’s to souls like Paine that I turn now for hope.
In The American Crisis, which General Washington ordered read to all of the army that remained, Tom Paine wrote,
by Kevin D. Annett
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.
And in closing, speaking to those who shirked from further conflict, Paine declared,
If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.
I need not tell any of you of the crimes and the tyranny we face, for you know it well. Each day we are bombarded by another wrong dressed like law, while those who slaughtered innocent children absolve themselves and mask their crimes behind florid talk of “reconciliation and healing”. We know of the mass graves, the children who are still trafficked and killed, the land that is still raped and stolen. We know what the times demand.
And yet our natural response to such a great violence is to flinch from it, to seek another way to win justice than grappling directly with ancient and murderous institutions armed with all of the money and means of the world.
Who are we, after all? Who am I, that I should judge or contend with popes and rulers, even though the blood on their hands is clear and undeniable?
But I know the truth, and if I were to refuse my own capacity to stop the suffering bred by these men and their institutions, I would be no better than they.
As Tom Paine observed about the Imperial enemy of his time,
There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both.
And yet I thank God, that I fear not. I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and can see the way out of it.
So, too, can we see the truth in our day, and that is that the supposed power of child-raping and justice-killing institutions like the Vatican is but a bluff, and that their power is waning and collapsing under the impact of the truth, as spoken by those who have survived the war inflicted on them.
When I walked down the streets of Vancouver’s skid row last week, one of the few Indian residential school survivors who has persisted, an older man named Frank Ermineskin, hurried up to me, beaming.
“I hear the bastards booted you out of England!” he exclaimed, grabbing my hand joyfully.
Before I could answer, he added triumphantly,
“They are scared shitless of us!”
I nodded, and then looked around at the desolate neighborhood. Frank seemed to read my thoughts, and said quietly,
“It’s ‘cause of men like you that I keep going, Kev … We’ll get them.”
Frank’s words were not idle compliment, but hard realism. He knows too well the impossibility of rallying those under constant fire, like so many of the survivors of crimes of church and state. But he, like me, carries on simply by holding himself in constant readiness, regardless of our situation, as an example and inspiration for those who will one day step out from history’s shadows and reclaim what has been stolen from them.
Things are no better off for me, or Frank, if you judge by appearances. Devoid of money, or means, stripped of our networks and communication, and under a constant barrage of smears and assaults, we are tempted daily to look at our lives and think the villains have won, once again.
But our hearts tell us different. For we have witnessed those with nothing force those with everything to admit the truth, and quake with fear.
Our only real enemy are the illusions spun by our own fears, and our refusal to finally break from our mental slavery and dependence on rulers who have nothing to offer but more trauma, and more lies.
So, to unlearn the long habits of mental slavery, we are today fashioning an entirely new framework to conduct our battle against this planetary enemy: one that is spiritual and political in nature.
In what is called Canada, we have established the idea and the practice of a free Republic called Kanata, breaking our ties with the Crown and the Vatican and reclaiming the land. For only in the courts of such a new Republic will those who inflicted genocide be brought to justice.
Around the world, we have created a network of people determined to bring to public trial and community sentencing those who continue to rape and murder children and defile justice and the earth; and, in the process, to reinvent what it means to be human.
This is part of the great victory that is emerging from the present Valley Forge moment, when in the individual embers of our lives, the fire may seem to wane and even die. Each of us, alone, is so very vulnerable; but beyond our personal suffering, there stands the indestructible truth that no power can halt, or dissolve.
I welcome the days to come. I expect your presence alongside me, and Frank, and so many other, hopeful hearts.