If You Are Going to Accuse An Entire Nation of Genocide

 ... you should probably back it up with hard evidence:

On May 27th the one-year anniversary of Chief Rosanne Casimir’s press release announcing that the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, had been found by ground-penetrating radar (GPR) in the apple orchard at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, the New York Post published an article entitled, ‘Biggest fake news story in Canada’: Kamloops mass grave debunked by academics.

On the previous day, Canada’s National Post had published a piece by veteran journalist Terry Glavin, The year of the graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves.

These two stories are nothing less than a 180-degree course reversal in the sensationalist narrative about unmarked graves and secret burials at former Indian Residential Schools that readers in the West – post-George Floyd – had been thoroughly primed to accept. ...

There were a number of pivotal articles which eventually led to the reversal of the media narrative. One of the first, In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found, was published in January in the Dorchester Review. Historian Jacques Rouillard questioned the premature rush to judgment after Chief Casimir’s announcement:

“Based on the preliminary assessment and before any remains were found or any credible report made, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately referred to ‘a dark and shameful chapter’ in Canadian history.” ...

Another important inflection point occurred in March 2022, when Conrad Black wrote in the National Post about the lack of evidence concerning these alleged secret burials:

“This charge began with the revelation …of this secret burial …“oral histories” of six-year-old children being taken from their beds at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in the dead of night to bury fellow students in the apple orchard. Stories such as these have been circulating for decades, and were amplified by less precise allegations about mysterious unmarked graves near the locations of other residential schools.” ...

At the very least, Canadians deserve a discourse that allows experts to put forward evidence and arguments as to why they feel the narrative truth around Canada’s residential school legacy and the related stories of unmarked graves seem not only at odds with the facts, but a shamefully tangled mass of contradiction and postmodern obfuscation. ...

It is demanded that we uncritically accept the “personal memories” of residential school “survivors,” but reject the stories of residential school staff, which we are told are “neither informed nor objective.”

 

People believed the accounts of mass starvation of the Ukrainians by Stalin because Gareth Jones did the work Walter Duranty refused to do.

Nazi war criminals were punished because of the records, personal accounts and photographs exhibited and heard at the Nuremberg trials.

People were horrified by the killing fields in Cambodia after seeing the bodies the communist Khmer Rouge didn't bother to hide.

Televised scenes of brutality at Tienanmen Square left no one in doubt who was responsible for the deaths of students and other civilians (but no one seemed to care enough to stop trading with China).

North Korean defectors have testified about the Kim dynasty's concentration camps.

Yet narratives as shifting as the ground where student allegedly lay unmourned are lumped in with these atrocities?

Why?