Riots Reveal Canada's "Repressed Psychotic Nature"
June 17, 2011
"As individuals, white Canadians are marvelously decent and honest, but as a group, we're sniveling, self-duplicitous cowards who shudder at the thought of saying no to the Emperor."
(See Makow comment at end.)
by Kevin Annett
(henrymakow.com)
"The only irredeemable sin of a people is for them to be unaware of their own nature." -- Benjamin Franklin
"There is only one evil worse than violence, and that is cowardice."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
Poor Canada. Just when we had cleaned up that untidy mess of Indian residential schools and aspersion of mass murder that was so damaging our international credit rating, along come some hockey hooligans in Vancouver to make us look bad again to all those fat tourists and offshore investors we so lust after.
The world used to think Canada was an affluent dream world of smiling Mounties, happy Indians and majestic forests hewed by Jolly Pierre the Lumber Jack. But the fantasy is fading, thanks to events like this week's hockey rampage, which wasn't the work of a few atypical hooligans, like the Vancouver Mayor claims, but of very ordinary and typical Canadians.Their rage and violence was an unusually honest depiction of mainstream Canada, and its repressed and psychotic nature.
Yes, I said, our repressed and psychotic nature.
I've always appreciated the Americans for a single virtue that we lack in Canada: their deep realism about themselves and their own history. They don't share our dissociation, and our well-bred capacity to lie to ourselves about ourselves. No American ever seems surprised or shocked when I share with them the murderous facts of genocide in their own land - unlike Canadians.
My fellow Euro-Canadians - the kind of people who overturned cars and smashed windows and bones this week in Vancouver - are deeply angry about themselves and their country, but they cannot say why, or even recognize their own condition. We aren't supposed to get angry and smash things. But I'd say most of us know we're living a lie, that the British notion of "law, order, civility and good government" that supposedly guides our nation is a crock designed to guard the corrupt interests of a very few people, starting with that silly fiction calling itself "the Crown".
As individuals, white Canadians are marvelously decent and honest, but as a group, we're sniveling, self-duplicitous cowards who shudder at the thought of saying no to the Emperor. That's why part of me rejoiced when I saw the smash-up on the streets of Vancouver. Somehow, the mob of Canucks had lost their fear of authority - for a moment.
Of course, the same men and women who rampaged so freely after the hockey game are once again the kind of repressed, tax-paying, dissociated people who keep the whole mess going. And that fact I find more terrible and alarming than all the broken windows and burning cars.
Pierre Berton once wrote too perceptively that your average Canadian has the mind of a Scottish banker and the heart of an Irish saint, and can't decide which person to be. That certainly describes my own family to a tee.
MENTAL FETTERS
My people came to this land in search of a liberty but also a transformation that the Old World could not provide. But the land was vast and strange, too vast really, and in fear we held on to the Old World symbols of authority, Crown and Pulpit, and tried cramming our searching spirits into them. We are forever yearning to break free from that false mold into a new identity, but until then, we must remain utter strangers to ourselves.
I know that can change. I've seen it begin. But as in any deep shock therapy, it will take a few good smash ups before the mental fetters can start to snap enough to let something new start to flow in us.
We've always needed a really good civil war in Canada, and the last ones we tried, in 1837 in the east and then among the Metis sharpshooters of Riel and Dumount, went down to a physical but not a moral defeat. Canadians are actually born rebels. We still carry the heart of a searching mystic, determined to be free of every convention and oppression, to breathe the air of liberty that sweeps across our great and beautiful land. We're just terrified of embracing that heart.
Perhaps when we do so and reclaim our soul, we can relate to the original men and women of this land with something more than a cowardly condescension and a self-serving fear. For the indigenous people have always been our natural blood allies, and they welcomed our first ancestors here not out of pity or ignorance, but because they recognized us as mutual People of the Land.
Frankly, it's time white Canadians had their own "Truth and Reconciliation Commission", but one into themselves: a true Caucasian Healing Circle where we can put away forever our false self-image as nice and proper people.
I've suggested the idea whenever I speak to my fellow white Canadians, and nobody seems to know what the hell I'm talking about, any more than they can accept the fact that under the toxic influence of Religion and Empire, our people slaughtered and rampaged against the Indians as brutally as any Conquistador.
We cannot yet accept what we did to get this land, and what we acquiesce to, to keep it. Not really. It's still an abstraction. For how else could we pretend to apologize for the worst slaughter in human history? How else, indeed, do dissociated people act?
All of this absurdity screamed out at us during the Vancouver hockey riots the other night, as is proper: for hockey is our national pulse, a gliding ballet of courage and skill that we alone brought to the world, a beauty born anew in countless small towns and backyard lots where kids learn the art that only we know how to do best.
Like in any family torn apart by its own psychosis, Canadians express their paradox and grapple towards the light we have lost in the midst of that which is most sacred to us.We are not a lost and angry mob. We are a proud and noble people who have forgotten who we are. For we long to fly again across that majestic, pure ice which is Kanata, a land of eternal promise and freedom where all the wrongs and all the blood can be washed clean.
---
Makow comment: I have a different take on the riots. They stem from the mass hysteria built up over the Stanley Cup Finals by the mass media, which stems in turn from the elite's need to provide distraction, and the masses' need to fill the gaping spiritual vacuum in their lives by identifying with a cause. When the Vancouver Canucks were ignominiously defeated, their fans were deprived of necessary validation and the whole empty sham was exposed. Staring their own vacuity in the face, they exploded in violence.
---
Read the truth of genocide in Canada and globally at:
www.itccs.org
www.hiddennolonger.com
www.hiddenfromhistory.org
Kevin can be reached at hiddenfromhistory1@gmail.com or kevin_annett@hotmail.com .
Julian Lee said (June 21, 2011):
I liked parts of the article but was sad sensing the wholesale (and typical) rejection of his own Canadian spiritual heritage.
"I've suggested the idea whenever I speak to my fellow white Canadians, and nobody seems to know what the hell I'm talking about,"
Maybe they don't share his enthusiasm to utterly reject what they are, and have been?
"any more than they can accept the fact that under the toxic influence of Religion and Empire, our people slaughtered and rampaged against the Indians as brutally as any Conquistador."
The Native Indians had religions, too. And their own version of empire. As to "slaughter and rampage" -- it was either them or us, our fathers or their fathers. For White men who feel guilt rather than gratitude for their fathers' and mothers' sacrifices to win a place and substance for their children, it is good to consult the American Indian writer David Yeagley. http://www.badeagle.com/category/columns/ He has a rather contemptuous attitude toward such sniveling, apologetic sons of sacrificing fathers (and mothers). He says that a warrior respects another warrior, and that our fathers won the battle fair and square.
Apparently this writer's ancestors never did anything good. But what about that "heart of an Irish saint" he ascribes to Canadians? Where did that come from? Or is that something born only last Tuesday? No, that heart of the saint shined even more brightly in our Canadian and U.S. ancestors than today, in a charitable attitude toward one another and the Indians, too. Had it been Indians with the technical advantage, White men would have received far less compassionate treatment than we gave to them. They would have wiped us out, not set aside lands for us. But we did have Irish saints whispering to us all the while.
It's time to learn to love your forefathers. Pulpits, gatherings, songs -- decency -- are good. (The Christian religion of your ancestors was good.) And so is spine. Religion seemed to give both. Turning over cars and lighting fires is cheap stuff by comparison to gathering in a church and worshipping God, or to storming a banking citadel for the sake of your kin's need today. And how easy it is to visualize our 'evil' hymn-singing fathers doing both, and not just silly car burnings, but turning a bank and board room inside out, with fires.
On one hand I see the writer decrying the lack of fierceness in modern Canadians. On the other hand he condemns his own ancestors' very fierceness, though engaged for his own weal, while disrespecting their religion. It's a puzzlement an Indian like David Yeagley can't comprehend. Want Canadians to be more fierce? Then they need to be more like their fathers & mothers and the natives, too: They need living Religion.