Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Remains.

So, to sum up:

1. Over the last few decades, Catholic “special educational” institutions the world over have been exposed at best (at *best*) as safehouses and private gardens for pedophiles, and at worst as infanticide factories where the mothers of neglected-to-death babies were also enslaved for years, most famously in Ireland but really in every country where the Catholic Church has any presence at all. (Germany’s own pedophile scandal hit in those halcyon days of 2021 and caused a large number of lapsed Catholics to actually strike their names from the Church’s rolls, which in this country means the government finally stopped giving the Church taxes on those peoples’ behalf.)

2. In the wake of George Flloyd, and on the back of decades of First Nations activism and many scandals within Canada itself (such as multiple reservations being so horribly mismanaged they didn’t, and probably still don’t, have reliable access to potable water), some activists and academics revived Canada’s longstanding conversation over its own Christian-run “residential schools”, the last of which closed down less than thirty years ago. It’s notable that the State allowed the Catholic Church to run more than half of these, in a country that also had policies discriminating against Catholics into the 1960s that effectively barred them from becoming public servants or working in large private companies (except within the province of Quebec, of course, where there weren’t enough Protestants to staff the required positions).

3. These activists and academics gathered some anecdotes and made inferences based on the Catholic Church’s horrible track record in other countries, and began speculating quite…forcefully…on the probable existence of mass graves in Canadian residential schools on a scope and scale of the Irish “mother-and-baby homes” aka infanticide factories. As part of their speculative research, they organised ground-penetrating radar of residential school grounds which indeed showed that those grounds were not uniform.

4. The Canadian government, at the same time it was classifying protesters against COVID restrictions as domestic terrorists, took the foregoing speculations and hypotheses and dubious evidence as dispositive, and publicly toyed with the idea of criminalising any public or private statements against the existence of mass graves in residential schools in an analogy to Holocaust denial, which itself was only made illegal (at least in the context of “promoting antisemitism”) in Canada in 2022 on the same wave of woke religious fanaticism.

5. Wherever these putative “mass graves” have been actually excavated, no evidence for any human remains has been identified. Not one single time. And as this process has gone on, the claims have been walked back from “mass graves” to “unmarked graves”, some of which may well exist, possibly because any original markings had at some point been removed or worn away without having been replaced.

I am no friend at all of the Church (Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise), and I am certainly not a “conservative Catholic”, but I admit to raising a bit of a skeptical eyebrow when the government demands, on pain of imprisonment, that I have to affirm belief in facts which are not in evidence simply because they affirm a general narrative that is currently in-vogue with a bunch of people drunk on their own sense of righteousness.

Notwithstanding the dubious justness of their own cause, they don’t seem to understand that one day the winds will shift again, and the positions they insist are true today will one day be vilified as calumny. It would be wise if, at such a time, those villains did not have a precedent of having been thrown in prison for saying things the governing regime insisted (based on very little evidence) were false. It seems to me plainly obvious that dismantling our hard-won norms of free speech, giving all-too-human governments the power to arbitrate what is true, is simply a terrible idea destined to backfire and redound to the detriment of everyone, very much including its proponents.

But perhaps that makes me a “right-wing extremist”, after all.