Genocide, Aboriginals and the Trouble With Canada's "Human Rights" Mausoleum
The trouble with the mausoleum is not only what it is--i.e. a shrine to victimhood that pits one group's misery against another's (the Holocaust vs. the Holodomor and all that). It's what it aims to do:
If the Canadian Museum for Human Rights presents the facts about Canada's treatment of aboriginals, it will have done its job, whether or not the stories are labelled as genocide.
The real question is what have Canadians learned from the past and what does the aboriginal experience tell us about human rights?
The CMHR is not a genocide museum, even though a significant portion of its content will deal with the consequences of racism. Its goal is to educate and to motivate visitors to reflect on their attitudes and prejudices in the hope they will become better, more tolerant citizens...
In other words it wants to get inside our heads--and fill 'em full of "human rights" mush. In other other words, it wants to use the concept of "human rights" to push us around for the purposes of empowering the "human rights" industry and its supporters. The real question is: have Canadians learned nothing from George Orwell's 1984?
2 comments:
I have always felt that Jews' original reaction to the horrors of the Holocaust, viz. to found the State of Israel, turning desert and swamp into modern cities and some of the world's most productive farmland, all in the teeth of the Arabs' armed hostility, and against great material and human odds, was the best way they could have stuck their finger in the eye of the Nazi specter and of anti-Semites of all stripes everywhere. When the cry, "Never again!" rang out during this period, it meant something, by gum, as Israel's enemies were to discover in 1948, 1956, and 1967.
Unfortunately, in more recent years, the tendency for Western social, religious, and demographic groups generally--not just for Jews--has been to assert and cling to victim status, even to wallow in it. I think this has been pernicious to the West, Israel included, and does not bode well for our survival as a civilization. Israel, especially, is in a precarious position in this regard, as an exposed outpost of the West in "Apache country."
I'm with you re the wallowing. I think it's time to stop because, ironically, it helps fuel Zionhass, the Jew-hate of our time. What has happened is that Jewry's enemies have harped on the (false) dichotomy: the "good" Jews who were liquidated in the Holocaust and the "bad" Jews, the Zionists of today, who, claim the haters, act just like the Nazis. Then, of course, there are the Holocaust deniers, who see no good Jews anywhere (although if pressed, they'd still prefer the dead ones to the living ones).
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