Who Can’t Say What Now?

Here in Winnipeg, a local man by the name of Jamie Sitar has recently opted to take the Social Justice Warrior route in pursuit of his five minutes of fame. He has received assistance along the way to this ignoble end from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, paid for by your taxes and mine.

One cannot walk the SJW path without trampling all over people who usually – I would say always except that I don’t want to commit the basic philosophical fallacy of ruling out an albino crow on the grounds of the ninety-nine regular ones who proceeded him – don’t deserve it. That is the very nature of the road. Its every layer, from the upper pavement down to the subbase, is composed of the crushed human detritus of those who have been deemed insufficiently progressive and enlightened by the self-appointed watchmen of the moral and intellectual hygiene of public discussion.

In this case, the victim is John Sawatzky, the principal of the elementary school that belongs to Calvin Christian, an evangelical collegiate in Transcona that was founded by the Dutch Reformed sixty years ago. He committed what, in the eyes of the progressive Left, is an unpardonable example of crimethink when, earlier this week, he made reference to the last century’s most famous incident of missionary martyrdom in the devotional section of the school’s weekly newsletter.

The incident took place in 1956. Five American missionaries from various evangelical backgrounds and representing various mission agencies – Jim Elliott, Pete Fleming, Nate Saint, Ed McCully and Roger Rouderian – most of whom had been educated at Wheaton College, had been attempting to evangelize the native tribe in Ecuador that they knew only as the Aucas. This was the label that the much larger Quechua people who were their closest neighbours used for them. The reason the missionaries knew them only by this name, and not by the name by which they called themselves, was because this tribe was notoriously and extremely xenophobic and insular even by the standards of tribal societies in general. The missionaries’ evangelistic efforts had begun in the fall of the previous year, when they located their settlements and initiated contact by lowering gifts to them from their airplane. This led to further interaction between the missionaries and the aboriginals that seemed promising, but went south badly on January 8th. That day a party of the natives went to the missionaries’ camp on the bank of the Curaray River and, sending three of their women to the other side of the river, lured Elliot and Fleming into the water where one of the native men attacked them from behind with a spear. Meanwhile, the other three missionaries who were back on the shore were beset by the rest of the party who speared them to death. The incident made international news and the following year Jim Elliott’s widow Elizabeth published her bestseller Through Gates of Splendour which tells the story in detail. In 2005 Nate Saint’s son Steve published End of the Spear, which re-tells and continues the story, recounting the successful evangelism of the tribe, including the conversion of some of the killers themselves. This became the basis of a dramatized motion picture version of the events that was released the following year.

So why has Mr. Sawatzky’s reference to this story, that has been told and re-told, in books, films, and even on the stage, gotten Mr. Sitar’s knickers in a knot?

The following phrase appeared in it “The savage Auca Indians of Ecuador.”

It was the word “savage” in particular that rained on Mr. Sitar’s parade, hurt his precious little feelings, got his dander up and his blood boiling, so much so that he e-mailed a complaint to the principal the next day and brought the matter to the attention of the media.

Was Mr. Sitar upset about the redundancy in the phrase?

The word “Auca” you see, is the Quechua word for “savage.” It was how their closest neighbours, also indigenous South Americans, chose to describe them.

So is Mr. Sitar some sort of grammar policeman, blowing his whistle at the qualification of a noun by an adjective with the same semantic meaning?

Hardly.

Mr. Sitar apparently believes that describing a people group as “savage” is “racist.” Or perhaps he thinks that it is racist for someone from a higher civilization - permanent settlements, rule of law, constitutional government, monotheistic religion, advanced science and technology, etc. – to describe a tribal society as savage. One obvious flaw in that reasoning in this case is that the description of this tribal society as savage originated in the neighbouring tribal society.

It is worth observing that even if we were to grant the presupposition that seems to be assumed by Mr. Sitar – that calling another people group savage is racist – and to apply this consistently, by saying that the Quechua were racist in calling their neighbours the Auca, it can be argued that this is a lesser degree of racism than that which is to be found in this people group’s way of speaking of itself.

The people in question call themselves the Waoroni. In their own language their self-appellation is the word for “people”, as in, “human beings.” They called themselves this in order to distinguish the members of their tribe from those they derogatorily called the “Cowodi”, which included everyone outside their tribe, all of whom they looked upon as subhuman. This is, by the way, by no means atypical of the way tribal societies refer to themselves and their neighbours. The great irony is that the politically correct demand that we call each ethnos only by its own name for itself requires that we adopt a host of names that enshrine concepts of ethnic supremacy and are therefore more “racist” than mere derogatory slurs.

This illustrates an important truth which can be readily observed by anyone with eyes to see. The phenomena in the real world that most closely match the meaning that the word racism suggests to most people – the belief that one’s own people group is superior to all others on the one hand and a contemptuous view of other people groups on the other – is much stronger, far more intense, and much more likely to express itself in a violent way in societies that exist on the tribal level than in societies that have a higher civilization. In other words, the people the anti-colonialists and anti-imperialists usually see as the victims of racism are in fact far more racist than the people these same ideologues usually see as the perpetrators of racism. Indeed, this must inevitably be the case. For a society to advance beyond tribalism and build a higher civilization, requires that it engage in a much larger exchange of goods and ideas with other societies than ever exists at the tribal level. This in turn requires that to some degree or another, a concept of a common humanity be held by all the participants in this exchange.

This leads me to a further irony about the anti-racist ideologues themselves. Keep in mind that anti-racist is not the same thing as non-racist. Someone who does not subscribe to any sort of racialist ideology, belong to any organization devoted to such ideology, speak in slurs about other groups, or treat members of other groups unfairly in his personal interactions with them, can reasonably be described as a non-racist. An anti-racist, however, is someone who believes that he has the duty to seek out “racists”, call them out publicly, and, in many cases, drive them out of society, ruining their careers, reputations, social standing, sometimes marriages, and lives in the process. The people whom anti-racists target are not necessarily people committed to an explicit racialist ideology. Anyone who is skeptical of the one-world project, the latter days revival of King Nimrod’s Babel project (“Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” Genesis 11:4) by eliminating what boundaries remain between nations, societies, and civilizations, and who believes that such things as national borders, laws protecting the same, and privileges of citizenship are indispensable to civilized order is likely to be condemned by the anti-racists. The anti-racists profess to believe that these views are a regressive hold-over from tribalism and a roadblock in the way of progress towards their one-world utopia. It is this latter aspect that explains their irrational and intense hostility towards anyone they perceive as racist. The irony, however, is that if anything is a holdover from tribalism it is their own perspective. The one-world project is essentially a white liberal project. Its ideal, despite its ancient antecedent, is not an ideal universally held, by all peoples in all times, but is rather a white liberal ideal. If a sense of tribal superiority has survived among white Europeans in Western Civilization it is most obviously to be found, not among the handful of clowns who like to dress up in Schutzstaffel uniforms and celebrate every April 20th, but among the liberal antiracists, an almost exclusively white club, who regard this ideal of theirs, held almost exclusively by whites, to be superior to the sense of the importance of national loyalty and belonging that can be found in every people group of the world and which is the true ideal. The anti-racists are the true white supremacists.

However, by articulating this response to such people I have committed the grievous error of granting them and their position a respectability that it does not deserve. In reality, such people are just bullies who take full advantage of “sound-byte reporting”, an activist media, a debased moral, intellectual, cultural, and spiritual climate, and the other depravities of the age, to impose their will upon those they perceive to be vulnerable to such tactics. If you do not think the principal of Calvin Christian Elementary School to fall into such a category check out the “Respect for Human Dignity and Diversity Policy” of his employer, especially sections 12 and 13. Undoubtedly, the school adapted this policy with the idea that it would serve as a sort of protection against false accusations of discrimination in this perverse age of Human Rights Commissions. This is foolish because it does the exact opposite – it signals fear and vulnerability to the predatory enforcers of diversity.

Mr. Sitar is quoted by the CBC as having said of Mr. Sawatzky’s language that it “is inappropriate and racist and ethnocentric”, which, if that had been all he had said, I would probably not have bothered to type this essay. It would be merely his expression of his wrong-headed opinion and I couldn’t care less what he thinks about anything. The CBC, however, then quoted him as saying “You can’t say this.”

Oh really?

Well, perhaps it may be “ethnocentric” on my part to adhere strongly to old Saxon notions of freedom, but frankly, in the words of Rhett Butler, I don’t give a damn. The moment someone says “you can’t say this” or “you can’t say that” my gut response is to say exactly what they say you can’t say. Where, exactly, do people like this derive their assumed authority to tell other Canadians what they can and cannot say?

The answer is they don’t derive it legitimately from anywhere. Therefore it is usurped authority, the ancient term for which is tyranny.

The CBC, every time it manufactures a racial incident, likes to call upon one of the self-appointed experts on diversity, race, and hate. They have many to choose from because this type keeps popping up all over our country like some particularly noxious form of toadstool. In this case they called upon Ry Moran, the director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the organization that produced a study of the Indian Residential Schools for the government a few years back which, despite its claim to be scientific, gives every impression, to me at least, of having started with its conclusion and worked towards it, suppressed whatever contrary evidence that it could, and where it could not, buried it in a report so long that most people, especially politicians, could not be bothered to read it but just jump to the conclusion. Whatever one thinks of the Residential Schools – and I unapologetically declare my opinion to be the opposite of whatever the TRC thinks – they had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what happened in Ecuador in 1956. Yet Moran, who like most professional anti-racists – look up pictures of Richard Warman, Evan Balgord, Bernie Farber, Helmut-Harry Loewen, Harry Abrams, and Kurt Phillips the recently doxxed figure behind the Nosferatu persona at AntiRacist Canada some time and note the conspicuous homogeneity in skin colour – appears to be lily-white, uses the schools to argue that the word to which objection is being made belongs to “a very problematic and longstanding narrative that frankly has no place in society anymore”. Which is just a more pedantic way of saying “you can’t say this.”

Perhaps the real problem that people like Mr. Sitar and Mr. Moran have with what Mr. Sawatzky wrote, has less to do with the word “savage” – amusingly the CBC article consistently uses the word “Auca” in reference to the tribe even when speaking in the writer’s own voice – than with what Mr. Elliott, et. al, were in Ecuador to do. After the above quotation from Moran the article goes on to say:

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 recommendations include calls to action for faith communities to proactively recognize Indigenous spirituality as being legitimate in its own right, he added.

In other words, the TRC is ordering Christians to abandon their belief that Jesus Christ is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” Who is the only way to God. Since Jesus Christ Himself was the one Who said this abandoning this belief is not an option for us. Any Christian leader that follows through on the TRC’s call to action thereby commits an act of apostasy.

As for Mr. Sawatzky, the same day he received Mr. Sitar’s complaint, he made an apology which is quoted in the CBC article:

I could have found a more helpful way to describe the event I shared, and again apologize to those who may have been unintentionally hurt by such descriptions.

Quod onus stercoris!

There was nothing wrong with what Mr. Sawatzky had originally said, the tribe which murdered the missionaries certainly deserved to be called “savage”, nobody who has demanded an apology from him deserves one, and issuing the apology has not done him any good since the CBC reported the whole story the next day paving the way for him to be bombarded with the kind of harassment that the SJW mob culture excels in.

The lesson to be learned from all this is to never give in to these sort of demands. When you give bullies what they want you only invite more bullying, not just of yourself, but of others as well. These kind of bullies have gotten away with this sort of bullying for so long, only because far too few of us have been willing to stand up to them, to say what they say we can’t say, and refuse to apologize for it.

Lord haste the day when once again we can say whatever we think in Canada. With the possible sole exception of “you can’t say this.”