Many hundreds of unmarked graves of Indigenous children discovered at Canadian residential schools

[Martin_Hyde]

@thorny_locust

is compatible with either deliberately allowing or deliberately ignoring rape, torture, and starvation.

So you are essentially making the argument, “if someone suffers something to happen, that thing is their goal.” Do you think that is a universal maxim? If so, are you familiar with how absurd that would be in a number of ways? E.x. we have food stamps, which we know will be used fraudulently, since we suffer to allow that, that is an intended goal of the food stamp system. That seems logically deficient.

Did they nevertheless think they were the good guys? Quite possibly. Lots of people seem to be capable of thinking they’re the good guys while torturing children to death, including in ways that their own official creed says are evil. Does that mean that we have to consider them good guys for doing that? No, it most certainly doesn’t.

Uh, I don’t think Pratt or the Canadian politicians were personally torturing any children to death. There was systemic torture and rape of children in an Ohio juvenile facility within the last ten years. Is it fair to say then Governor John Kasich raped children? That seems to be the line of logic you are establishing with your chosen word usage.

As for good buys and bad guys, I don’t do that. I specifically believe that thinking is in the “dumb dumb” school of historical analysis. If all you care about is finding guys to label good and bad, you aren’t much worth a bucket of warm piss as I reckon, in terms of historical analysis.

is an absurd and unnecessary form of excusal. If a kid needs vitamin D, but it’s force fed to them mixed with poison, that is not a positive outcome. If a kid winds up dead, permanently physically damaged, permanently mentally damaged, that is not a positive outcome even if as a side effect they learned how to read. It’s entirely possible to provide vitamin D without mixing it with poison. It’s entirely possible to teach kids how to read without teaching them that everything their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles ever did was evil; and it’s actually easier to do so if they’re not starved, ill, and terrified, let alone dead.

I think you’re struggling to associate this, frankly stupid, analogy of yours to what actually happened here. The larger portion of the students of these schools did survive to adulthood and benefitted undeniably from being educated and literate. A better historical example might be something like Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, it actually did pay serious developmental dividends for the Chinese people. There is danger in being ignorant if you do not recognize that. There is danger in being barbarous if you don’t recognize the unacceptable cost of those programs. That maxim would apply here as well, which is all I have said. If anyone has attempted to “exonerate” someone here I don’t know who, I certainly haven’t. I’m simply advocating rational context and not emotional nonsense. No one here went to one of these schools, and I believe from all we can tell during the worst period of these schools operation virtually none of the men who ran them are alive. We’re talking about history here, properly understanding the context is important. “Exoneration” isn’t a goal, nor should be.

A huge portion of Christian people, maybe. There were plenty of other people prior to pre-modern times who were capable of thinking ‘we’ve got our religion over here, you’ve got yours over there, that’s normal’ and/or ‘over there they call our god X by the name Y and do a different ritual and the god seems to be OK with that.’

True but irrelevant. Christianity has been aggressively about forced conversion and religious violence for the lion’s share of its history, and at a level most would consider “quite common” up until the 19th century and arguably into the early 20th.

There’s a lovely explanation of why some people are terrified of Christianity.

I believe you’ve got some other things in your textbook, too. Certainly there have been Christians throughout history who preferred to practice some of the other ones.

I mean this is a major aside and getting way off topic. But yes–I believe Christianity is a violent and evil religion. I believe the same of Islam and Judaism. I.e. all the major Abrahamic religions. I believe all three religions contain some beautiful philosophies and ideas that can bring out the best of us, but I don’t ignore the worst of them, and in many ways the closer one gets to the orthodox or actual historical forms of these religion, the closer you get to evil, as far as I see it.