Tea at Trianon: Canada’s Mass Graves Scandal

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Canada’s Mass Graves Scandal

From Mercator:

A four-week excavation near the Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba, Canada, has uncovered no human remains. It is the third excavation of a residential school site supposedly containing mass graves of Indigenous children that has turned up no results. The schools were run by religious groups from the 1840s to the 1960s, after which time they were taken over by Canada’s now-defunct residential school system. The last one closed in 1996.

Canada's latest discovery, or lack thereof, calls into serious question one of the biggest media feeding frenzies of the modern era. Starting in 2021, Canada came under the grip of a great moral panic over the so-called residential school gravesite scandal. Ground-penetrating radar had allegedly uncovered the remains of more than 1,000 people at the sites three former residential schools that housed and educated Indigenous children. (Read more.)