There's a reason why Trump crowing "FAKE NEWS" is so effective. The urge to deny things which make us uncomfortable is immense. Avoiding it and pretending like it's not real is a coping mechanism that everybody uses - even if we know that doing this only makes shit worse.
Let me tell you about the one example that I keeps rolling over and over in mind. Way back in 2018, Nora Loreto made the one tweet that got her blacklisted from mainstream media and painted a target on herself for angry white assholes to rage against non-stop. It was the Humboldt crash tweet.
For context - the Humboldt bus crash was an accident in Saskatchewan where a transport truck wiped out a bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos, a junior A ice hockey team. 16 people were killed and 13 more were injured in the crash. It was a horrific and tragic accident.
But, Loreto was bang on in her assessment. Her comment was exactly right - the whiteness and maleness of the victims - the fact that this was a junior hockey team - absolutely 100% impacted the response, and it's mind boggling how people refuse to acknowledge this fact. But people are assholes, and will wallow in their own decrepitude basically forever if allowed. And often, if not allowed too.
Anyways - the reason why this is sticks out in my mind so much is that the deranged Humboldt bus tweet avengers have not let up after half a decade - despite what has happened in the intervening period. It was the same year of that tweet that Canada entered into a moment of introspection after the discovery of about 200 unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The unmarked graves of children stolen from their families and communities to have the Indian forced out of them so they could become good God fearing cheap farm labour.
That wasn't the only one. The Kamloops discovery was through the use of ground-penetrating radar, a non-invasive approach that allows a search to be made without disturbing the interred remains. This approach would be used on additional residential school sites and they started finding new batches of the unmarked graves of children every other month for a couple years. Sometimes only a dozen or so, but one of them had several hundred.
These findings did not lead to the same sort of national mourning that the Humboldt bus crash did. In fact, there was a concerted effort to discredit the findings - to cast doubt on whether there were any bodies under the earth. Despite the fact that we knew these bodies were there - we had a Truth and Reconcilliation Committee review the records showing that thousands of Indigenous children died in these residential schools. There was just a nation-wide effort to "Fake News" it all - to flush away the uncomfortable fact of Canada's century long genocide.
Incidentally, some people say that this isn't "ancient history" since the residential schools were in operation into the 1990s. That's a flawed understanding of what happened. We phased out residential schools not because they were genocide factories, but they just didn't fit into the modern world. Training cheap farm labour in the 1990s? What happened instead is we just shifted where we were putting the children we stole from Indigenous communities.
In Canada, 53.8% of children in foster care are Indigenous, but account for only 7.7% of the child population according to Census 2021.
Those weren't the only relevant stories to break since 2018. In 2022, we found out about Hockey Canada's approach to dealing with sexual assault allegations. Apparently, Hockey Canada was taking part of the money they collected from hockey families across the country and putting millions of dollars away into multiple slush funds - which were mainly used to settle claims against junior hockey players of sexual assault. One specific case also happened in 2018 - where a group of championship junior hockey players gang raped a woman they got passing-put drunk. the assault was reported to the police, which closed the case - and were forced to re-open it after news that Hockey Canada paid out millions in hush money over it. Charges have only just been laid this week - five years after the fact.
Now to be clear - I am most certainly not trying to suggest that the Humboldt Broncos were rapists or villains of any sort. They were and are just a hockey team - and there is not even the barest suggestion that they were monsters of any sort. But the revelations from the fallout of the Hockey Canada scandal was that hockey itself as a sport in Canada has some very severe cultural problems. Whether it is the stubborn persistence of long since banned hazing rituals or just the deeply seated culture of misogyny and homophobia, the utterly garbage moral cesspit that is hockey culture was finally getting spoken about in public. And one of the key findings of this introspection was that Canadian culture treats young hockey players like little gods free to act upon their worst impulses with impunity.
But Hockey (with a capital H) is a core aspect of the identity of a lot of Canadians - so the denial was there and the moment of actually talking about it came and went and we're all now just hoping that things have all been fixed so we never have to think about it again.
And yet - even while the Hockey Canada scandal was at its peak in the news cycle - there were assholes whining about the Humboldt crash tweet. Completely oblivious to the things they have denied so hard.
That denial is just core to how we as human beings behave. Of course we deny genocide when we're complicit in it. It's the crime of crimes - only monsters do it, and we're not monsters - therefore genocide cannot be happening and cannot have happened. Of course we deny wrongdoing by the people who represent out values and beliefs. If those people can engage in criminal behaviour, that would reflect negatively on the things we cherish and have incorporated into our identity. And it all just happens to us without our noticing. I've pointed out these examples because they are obvious to me - because I'm not in the group that's caught up in it. I have never ever liked hockey - even from before I knew about the types of people the sport attracts. Because it's easy to see this stuff from the outside - because the reflex to deny these things isn't there. I probably have a lot of things about which I am in denial myself. But that's the thing about denial this deep - you have denied it so much, sometimes you cannot even see it anymore.
As to the timing of this post - is it because the first charge in the 2018 gang rape was announced and this is relevant again? Or am I referencing something else - another bout of genocide denialism and the reflexive defense of the guys who wave the flag of Our Team?
Yes.
EDIT - to add: No word from Hockey Canada about the criminal sexual assault charges being laid on someone they protected with a secret slush fund payout. There's all that change and accountability we got promised in order to woo back sponsors and repair their image. But again - so much of the tastemakers in Canuckistan have hockey as a core part of their identity - so this is going to slide. Only to be noted by obscure and unread blogs like mine.
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