“Finally when I was a teenager they let me out, I don't know why. I guess they were done with me. They
just dumped me on the street in Nanaimo and I was homeless for a long time. But one day a relative of
mine spotted me and I got home but most of my family was dead and gone by then.
“For years I've been getting therapy for my problems in Campbell River, but the shrink who's treating me
will never tell me anything. Whenever I ask to see my chart he says no, I can't show that to you, it's
because of national security.
“One day I told him I was going to go to another doctor and he laughed and said, if you try that you'll just get arrested. He kept saying the same thing; my case was about national security.” (100)
Harry Wilson, who discovered the dead body of a young girl at the United Church's Alberni residential school in 1967, was incarcerated in the same Nanaimo Indian Hospital for over a year after he reported the corpse to Principal John Andrews. He was given electric shocks to make him forget. Years later in 1998, when Harry attempted to speak of the incident at a Port Alberni forum, two state- funded natives threatened to kill him if he spoke. (101)
Irene Starr discussed the concealment of children’s remains at a Vancouver Island Anglican school during the June, 1998 IHRAAM Tribunal. In her statement she said, “I saw rows of little skeletons behind the walls of the Alert Bay School when they tore down the old building in 1970. Why would they have buried those bones behind the walls unless they were trying to hide something?” (102)
Such stories abound in hundreds of personal accounts of residential school survivors that make up this report. The cover up continued unabated long after the formal closing of the schools by 1996, and is present even in the court settlement process governing reparations to school survivors.
For example, in a March, 2008 letter to his client, Christie catholic school survivor Trudy Smith, Victoria BC lawyer Scott Hall stated, “... by signing the Acceptance Letter you release Canada and the Church for responsibility for the pain and suffering caused to you by the conduct of their employees or agents while you were at the residential School ... This is final and means that you cannot bring a claim in the future against Canada and the Church ...” (See Figure 130).
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This legal absolving of the guilty for their crime is a structural part of the residential school survivors’ “compensation” program in Canada and another form of concealment of that crime. This charade has been accompanied by even more blatant masking of the wrongdoing by lawyers, including survivors' advocates. The lawyer for survivors Harry Wilson and Dennis Tallio, David Patterson, refused to include in their court statements any mention of the dead children both of them discovered on the grounds of the Alberni residential school.
According to Kevin Annett, who questioned Patterson later,
“He was extremely self-defensive and even threatened to sue Harry and Dennis if they kept pressing him to include their full statement about the dead bodies. Finally, I called him at his office in the fall of 1997 and asked him why he wasn't fulfilling his clients' wishes. Patterson evaded the question for awhile but then finally blurted out in anger, 'Look, I'm not just their lawyer! I'm also an officer of the Court and there are some things I'm not allowed to raise'!” (103)
Sure enough, not one of the thousands of lawsuits eventually filed against the government and the Catholic, Anglican and United Church ever addressed incidents of murder or other criminal acts in the residential schools, confining the litigation to tort or damages related to “physical and sexual abuse” or “neglect of duty of care”. And on two occasions in 1999 and 2002, provincial Supreme Courts explicitly denied the right of native plaintiffs to sue Canada and the Crown of England for genocide, claiming that such a charge was “ultra vires” and beyond the “jurisdictional competence” of their courts. (104)
This institutionalized cover up extends to the Canadian media reportage – such as it is - of residential school crimes. A stark example followed the Globe and Mail headline of April 24, 2007 that confirmed a fifty percent death rate in the schools: “Natives Died in Droves as Ottawa ignored warnings”. But after the government’s TRC concluded its whitewash of the genocide in 2015, the same headline had the words “in Droves” removed and reads in that edited version in today’s internet archives: no doubt to conform to the TRC’s “official” claim of a mere one percent death rate in the Indian schools! (Compare Figures 131 and 132)
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Such an institutional cover up also extends to the police. An entire separate report could be issued
about the long history of concealment and obstruction of justice by the RCMP as the police arm of
the Indian residential school system. But some recent examples will highlight this pattern.
After the first media reporting of an eye witnessed murder in a residential school, in the Vancouver
Sun in December 1995, a spokesman for the RCMP stated publicly “If killings occurred in these schools
it's definitely within our mandate to investigate them.” (Sgt. Paul Willms, “E” Division, Vancouver) But
three months later, after a flurry of more reported killings and the formation of an RCMP “Task
Force” into the schools, the successor to Sgt. W illms, Constable Gerry Peters, said, “We have never
had a mandate to investigate alleged homicides in residential schools.” (105)
On several occasions during this same period, RCMP officials including Willms and Peters refused to investigate reports of killings brought by eyewitnesses to murders at the Alberni school while lying publicly that “nothing had turned up” concerning such murders. Both officers also personally threatened Kevin Annett and warned him of “consequences” if he persisted in making statements to the media about killings of residential school children. (106)
The first eye witnessed killing – of Maisie Shaw by Alberni School Principal Alfred Caldwell, as seen by Harriett Nanahee – triggered the issuing of a falsified death certificate for Maisie by the B.C. Government's Provincial Archives. After stating to Kevin Annett on December 12, 1995 that there existed no death certificate for Maisie Shaw anywhere in the provincial registry, archivist Brian Young contacted Kevin two weeks later – after the Vancouver Sun article reporting her murder had been published – and notified him that a death certificate for Maisie now existed.
Young claimed that the document had “gone missing” after having been entered into the archival system “only just recently”, even though it was dated fifty years earlier: December 26, 1946. The document contains erroneous and highly suspect information.
For example, it claims that Maisie Shaw – whom Harriett Nahanee saw kicked to her death down some stairs by Caldwell - died of heart failure, and that she was buried the next day, the same day the death certificate was signed.
“That never happens” stated Louise, a senior employee at the Alberni funeral home where Maisie 108
was allegedly handled, in a January, 1996 interview with Vancouver Sun journalist Stephen Hume. “We have no record of a Maisie Shaw. And nobody ever dies and is processed in twenty four hours like that. Also, the death certificate would have been entered early in 1947, not 1995, if it was genuine.”
In a subsequent phone call with Kevin Annett on January 20, 1996 in which he described the funeral home employee’s words, Stephen Hume said, “I've seen these fake certificates before. They're easy to cook up ... The girl was probably just stuck in the ground somewhere and then when Harriett's story broke in the press, somebody quickly stuck this fake one in the system.”
Meanwhile, despite Harriett's eyewitness account and thirteen other reports to the RCMP of deaths at the Alberni school, the RCMP continue to falsely claim that “no one was ever reported a killing at the Alberni residential school”, while the United Church alleges that Maisie Shaw died after being “hit by a train.” (107)
For policemen and civil servants to dissimulate so freely and without apparent concern of any consequence indicates that they are being protected and encouraged to do so. The same behavior was present in residential school staff and Principals who routinely tortured and killed children without fear for decades, knowing that the system authorized and exonerated their behavior. This continuity of complicity reflects a systemic evil and not one originating merely from individuals.
That system is evident at the highest level of church and state – and within the institution primarily responsible for the residential school genocide – in the Vatican policy called Crimen Sollicitationas, which has been called a “blueprint for deception and concealment”. (108)
Crimen has been in effect as a governing policy over all Roman clergy since 1929, and over all
Catholics since 1962. It is a papal decree that was only revealed in August, 2003 by the London based
Observer newspaper, obtained through a contact in the Vatican Library archives where it was stored.
Crimen imposes a papal oath of “perpetual secrecy” on all victims of priestly rape and on the rapist,
on pain of excommunication. It also prohibits the reporting of the crime to the police and prevents
the rapist from being tried in a civil court.
Thanks to Crimen, all Catholic clergy – the main perpetrators in this crime - are automatically and
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institutionally protected for any act of rape or violence towards a child. Crimen embodies an enormous, global criminal conspiracy. (109)
The present Pope Francis, Jorge Bergoglio, despite his “reform” rhetoric, has reaffirmed the Crimen policy in speeches to Italian and American Bishops, and in papal pronouncements. Bergoglio’s own role in trafficking children during Argentina’s “dirty wars” while Archbishop of Buenos Aires no doubt gives him a personal motive in continuing Crimen’s policy of silencing and cover up. (110)
In short, since 1929 and undoubtedly before that, every Catholic priest in the world, and in two thirds of Indian residential schools in Canada, knew that he could rape and harm children with impunity and would not face prosecution or reprimand. This papal “law” of official concealment was a green light for pedocides to flock into the already unmonitored and isolated Indian schools, knowing that every staff member and fellow clergyman was obligated to stay silent.
It is significant, in that sense, that the very same year that Crimen was formally adopted by the Vatican, in 1929, the Canadian government surrendered official guardianship over residential school children to the primarily-catholic Principals of those facilities. That is, once that official secrecy and impunity was guaranteed by the church, the government could safely surrender to them the absolute control over the Indian children they and their early missionaries always sought.
Considering the preponderant influence of Roman Catholicism in the civil service and government of Canada, this collusion between the Canadian state and the primarily catholic-run residential school system is hardly surprising. That influence ensured that the original Jesuit model for the residential schools, the so-called Durieu system, was copied by the government and other churches.
But that leverage also arose from the Vatican’s traditional monopoly over Quebec society and its strategic voting bloc that has ensured, for example, that every Prime Minister since 1968, save one, has been a Roman Catholic, despite the minority status of the latter in the Canadian population.
In general, this stranglehold of monarchical and papal absolutism over the legal, political and cultural life of Canada down the centuries has made official dissembling by the ruling elite not only easy but
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the norm when it comes to the crimes of church and state. There is no independent judiciary or watch dog agency in Canada, no structural “checks and balances” or accountability available at least formally to citizens of a constitutional Republic. The old colonial system of one man governance is embodied in Canada’s official “head of state”, the crown-appointed Governor General, and in the fact that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada is also a member of the Executive inner circle known as the Privy Council.
Two historic incidents illustrate this link between absolutism and genocide, and its concealment:
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- Within two years of the defeat of the 1837 rebellion that tried winning democracy in both English and French Canada, and to suppress free thought and dissent, the British Crown granted total authority over education, including the right to establish the first Indian residential schools, to the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches;
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- The same day that the government’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC) issued its careful whitewash of the residential schools atrocities, in May of 2015, Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley MacLachlan publicly endorsed the TRC report despite its unlawful procedures, obstruction of justice and blatant concealment of evidence.
The Hindu philosopher Krishnamurti said that it takes only one man to commit a crime but an entire community to conceal it. Canada has proved that time and again when it comes to its own homegrown genocide. The ready cooperation of all levels of Canadian society with this crime and its obfuscation is ultimately a reflection of a political body whose neo-feudalist absolutism and unaccountability allow fraud to become an operative principle.
This malaise of endemic silence across Canada is perhaps best summarized by a recent remark of a local television programming director on Vancouver Island, who cancelled a scheduled interview with Kevin Annett with the remark, “the program airs at all different times of day and the content with Kevin could be quite disturbing. Asking that you consider someone else.” (February 15, 2016)
Fashioning the Deceptive Narrative and the Language of Normative Genocide
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Pope Francis this week canonized the 18th century missionary Junipero Serra, who led the conquest and enslavement of California Indians, and who caused the death of thousands of them on church mission plantations. In proclaiming Serra an official saint of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope declared “We are inspired by his zeal”. – Turtle Island News, September 25, 2015
The policy of the Dominion aims at a concentration of Indians upon Reserves with a view of weaning them by degrees from savage life, and of gradually leading them to adopt habits of peace, honesty and industry. – Report on Indian Reserves, Department of the Interior, Ottawa, Vol. 2, p. 58 (1868)
All men must die. The Indians obeyed the mandate perhaps a little earlier than otherwise they might. The diseases that were introduced not only killed many but made the living diseased and their women barren. This is the real and sole cause of their disappearance. Their death was of little consequence; politically, it does not seem they were intended to set the world on fire. Our ultimate service to them was to improve their breed by crossing their survivors with a superior race, as we are now doing. – Dr. John Helmcken, Speaker of the British Columbia Legislature and Hudson’s Bay Company director, from his book Reminiscences (1898)
The so-called ill treatment and torture in our detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere by the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed, were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on their detainees. We did everything possible to make the inmates’ stay with us livable and humane. – Rudolf Hoess, SS Commandant at Auschitz, at his trial in 1945
The abuses done to students at our Indian residential schools were almost benign in nature, and generally random. They were not the result of a deliberate policy but rather the isolated acts of certain individuals. – Brian Thorpe, Secretary of the British Columbia Conference of the United Church of Canada, March 3, 1996
Institutionalized criminality is rarely if ever considered a crime by its participants, who see their system as benign and necessary, and rationalize their involvement in it with a special language designed to legitimate and normalize that system. Missionaries “save” the savages, who are
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“civilized” or “assimilated” rather than exterminated. Death camps inmates are “relocated” or “processed”; enemy soldiers are “pacified”, not killed; and victims of genocide are “abused”.
Every system of oppression requires such a doublethink language and an accompanying deceptive narrative to justify itself and ensure the continued loyalty of its members. Nowhere was this truer than in the European effort to subordinate the world to its Christendom, or Universal Christian Empire, by which all of humanity had to come under the rule of the Roman papacy, or perish.
The Canadian genocide, as one expression of this imperial purpose, was devised and expressed from the beginning as an essentially religious enterprise, with its own built in theological language and rationale. It was implicitly understood that no traditional indigenous person or nation could be allowed to survive outside of Christendom and its “white” nation.
Each conquering nation applied this imperative differently. To the early Catholic missionaries with their eyes on quick profit, “converting the savage” meant “Whatever is required for the Faith and the Fur Trade”, to quote Jesuit leader Jean de Brebeuf. To the later Dominion of Canada with its halo of Anglo-Saxon benevolence, the Indians were to be “Canadianized and Christianized”, to quote the declared aim of the government-created United Church of Canada in 1925.
Regardless of the approach to genocide or the parlance employed, the aim was ultimately the same, namely – in modern terminology – to “assimilate” any Indians who survived their own conquest into the body politic of Christendom. Every approach shared the same deceptive narrative that painted genocide as a sacred quest and an act of charity towards lesser beings. (111)
The remarkable aspect of the language of normative genocide is that the double meaning within its words not only shrouds the murderous intent and nature of the crime, but convinces members of the genocidal nation that no such crime occurred. Three good examples of this phenomenon can be found in the continually misleading use by the Canadian media, church and state of the terms “abuse”, “reconciliation” and “apology” in the wake of the residential schools atrocity.
In reality, this trio of terms quickly became a bulwark against the possibility of truth entering into the “official” discourse surrounding the crime. Their deceptive nomenclature appeared at the very beginning of this discourse, when in the spring of 1990 state-funded “chief” Phil Fontaine of the
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government created Assembly of First Nations (AFN) referred in the media to his “abuse” in a Manitoba residential school. After this staged statement, “abuse” became the operating and accepted term to cover all of the wrongdoing within Indian residential schools, even when those wrongs included killings, torture and clear crimes against humanity.
“This use of the meaningless word ‘abuse’ was deliberate, and part of the government’s legal strategy to contain the inevitable litigation from the victims within tort law rather than criminal law. As mere ‘abuse’, anything that had happened to children was defined as tort ‘damage’ rather than a criminal act; rape, murder and torture could then be ‘compensated’ like one would do over damages to a broken window. This deception was all designed to protect the churches and government from any legal consequence for their crime. Control the language and you control the outcome.” (112)
Significantly, Phil Fontaine’s use of the benign and vacuous term “abuse” in relation to residential schools and the uniform adoption of this word by the media and academia thereafter occurred in direct response to the launching of the first lawsuit by a residential school survivor named Nora Bernard, a former internee of the catholic-run Shubanacadie school in Nova Scotia. Bernard acted on her own, and in the fall of 1989 opened her own discourse into the residential school era with what her legal Statement of Claim called the “deliberate murder of our people”. Fontaine’s rapid public response was an obvious government counter-spin to contain the issue. (113)
This state-sponsored damage control became even more obvious when the second term in the Obfuscating Trilogy, “reconciliation”, appeared quickly on the heels of Fontaine’s statement. Even before details of the residential school crimes were elaborated, politicians and editorial columnists across Canada began parroting the same call for a process of “healing and reconciliation”. The two terms quickly became synonymous in any discourse around residential schools, even when in practice they turned out to be mutually antagonistic.
In the words of the late Delmar Johnny who led a movement of survivors of the catholic Kuper island school, “You couldn’t speak about your residential school experience without hearing that word ‘reconciliation’ all the time, from your doctor, the cops, the newspapers. You can’t heal without being reconciled, that was the line we got from the beginning. It never made any sense to me. How am I
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supposed to be reconciled with the people who destroyed my life and my brother’s life?” (114)
The meaning of “reconciliation” is in reality the exact opposite of its vernacular usage and understanding, as “the end of a disagreement and the return to friendly relations” (Oxford Dictionary, 2002). Even such a common understanding of the word is absurd when applied to the conquest of Indians by Europeans; genocide was hardly a mere “disagreement”, and nothing has been especially “friendly” in aboriginal and white relations.
In reality, the word “reconciliation” is derived from the Latin term “reconcilia” which means to re- establish the domination and control of a ruler over his subjects. It is a term implying resignation and defeat before the inevitability of a conquest, as in, “be reconciled to your fate”.
For example, the papal Inquisition often employed the term to describe the sentences imposed on “heretics” and other enemies of the Roman church. According to medieval historian Henry Charles Lea, a record from the Spanish papal court in 1549 describes how three men who were accused of Lutheranism were “reconciled to the church through a loss of property”. Other religious dissidents “were subjected to reconciliation for Judaism and committed to the galleys as slaves”. (115)
Catholicism inherited this understanding and practice of “reconciliation” from its parent body, the Imperial Roman Empire. For beginning in the first century it was the practice of Emperors to parade those captured chieftains who had rebelled against Rome through the Forum, and to have them kneel in supplication before the Emperor and beg his forgiveness. The rebel leaders were then ritually strangled to death in an elaborate public ceremony known as the “reconcilia”. Imperial records make continual reference to this “act of reconciliation”. (116)
Understood in this light, the “reconciliation” between white Canada and its aboriginal victims becomes much clearer: not as an act of friendly, mutual recovery but of a reassertion of Canadian authority and domination over Indians who had dared to accuse and sue their tormentors of church and state. The very fact that not one person has ever gone to trial in Canada for the death of any of the 50,000 and more Indian children killed in residential schools proves that these deaths are not considered a crime. The real crime is to reveal what happened, and such rebellion must be
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“reconciled” through the public humiliation and admission of wrong by the rebel, not the rulers.
And that is indeed what has happened in Canada throughout the entire process surrounding the residential schools exposure, and of subsequent litigation, “compensation” and “apology”: school survivors have been publicly humiliated and re-subordinated as subjects of the Crown by legally absolving their torturers in writing from all wrongdoing in exchange for a few token dollars and a pat on the head.
By openly flouting domestic and international law through this arranged pardoning of themselves of proven criminal wrongdoing, and by establishing the terms of reparations and self-indemnification, the Canadian government has imposed its own “Reconcilia” on its subject peoples under the familiar guise of benevolence.
As part of this process whereby Christian Canada re-imposed its authority over aboriginal people, the government justified itself through a formal “apology” to residential school survivors in parliament on July 8, 2008. Once again, this word has a double, contradictory meaning: both an expression of regret, and a defense of one’s actions.
A classic “apologia” was a written vindication of a scholar’s work or ideas, or in court, of a legal argument. Under the law, a statement of “apology” is part of a legal settlement whereby the “apologist” is released from all obligations towards an injured party through the apology. In reality, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was saying publicly to every residential school survivor, “It’s unfortunate what you suffered but we were justified in doing it, we are not at fault, and the matter is hereby officially resolved.” (117)
By accepting the Harper apology on “behalf” of the consulted survivors whom they had never consulted, the AFN chiefs and other subordinated Indians completed this ancient process and ritual of Reconcilia by showing that native nations had once again accepted the supremacy of the Crown and Canadian laws, as in the government-run “treaty” process where the “Crown” is recognized as the true owner of the land.
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Ultimately, even without such recent “apologetic” measures by their own government, Canadians – like all citizens of a genocidal regime – had already been raised with and conditioned by a carefully modified definition of the crime designed to normalize it and prevent legal action against the institutions responsible. This modification occurred quite deliberately at the United Nations, and was engineered by American and Canadian diplomats during 1946 prior to the adoption of the final version of the Genocide Convention in 1947.
Indeed, this historic re-conceptualization of Genocide both under the law and in the popular consciousness has been a key factor in creating the present culture of normalized genocide in Canada; a culture that has allowed the concealment and continuation of the crime.
Redefining Genocide: The Ultimate Deceptive Lens
By genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. – Raphael Lemkin, 1944
Genocide means any of the following acts with the intent to destroy ... a national, ethnic, racial or
religious group. – United Nations Convention on the Crime of Genocide, 1948
A Polish Jewish refugee named Raphael Lemkin lost over fifty members of his family in Nazi death
camps during the Second World War. After fleeing to America in 1943, Lemkin, a jurist, helped draft
the Nuremburg Declaration and post-war human rights conventions, including the much-quoted but
rarely-enacted United Nations Convention on the Crime of Genocide (1948).
Lemkin had a very broad notion of the crime. In his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, he wrote,
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. (118)
To Lemkin, anything that a conquering group does to the conquered which tries to cause their eventual demise is genocide, including the banning of their language, disrupting their normal family patterns, or placing children of the conquered group in the homes of others so that the children forget who they are.
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Obviously, this kind of sweeping sense of the crime created huge potential problems for the very nations that conquered Nazi Germany, including Canada and the United States, who for centuries had been doing just such eradication against indigenous nations across their own continent. And so not surprisingly, Lemkin’s broad understanding of genocide never survived post-war political realities. Thanks to pressure brought by Canadian and American diplomats at the United Nations, genocide was fundamentally redefined in two ways: 1. it constituted not simply actions, but intentions, and 2. it meant primarily the physical killing of a people. This new understanding of genocide de-emphasized those aspects of the crime that might indict western governments and their partner churches, including for what was occurring at that very time in Indian boarding schools in both Canada and the United States, as well as in Australia, South Africa and many other settler states.
The centuries-old efforts by every European and North American government and their churches to wipe out indigenous peoples’ language, identity and nationhood clearly fell under Lemkin’s original definition of genocide. But more than post-war political expediency prompted this kind of revision of Lemkin’s understanding of genocide. Because that crime emerged from the very religious and philosophical fabric of European culture, and commenced specifically with the rise of Christian Empire, or Christendom, in the fourth century, “western” culture as a whole was indicted by the Lemkin understanding of genocide.
To quote author Richard Rubenstein, The culture that made the (Nazi) death camps possible was not only indigenous to the West but was an outcome ... of its fundamental religious tradition that insists upon the dichotomous division of mankind into the elect and the reprobate. (119)
The “religious tradition” Rubenstein refers to emerged from a Greco-Judeao-Christian culture that equated one’s religious faith with the conquest and destruction of other people. Its two main roots are in the Hebrew Bible and Greek philosophy, both of which were foundational in the formation of the Roman Catholic church and the culture it spawned, and that formed the United Nations.
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Lemkin had originally defined genocide as any act that caused the eventual destruction of a people, including efforts to eradicate a peoples’ language, culture or nationhood, as well as displacing them from their homeland: a definition that could easily be applied to North Americans’ treatment of aboriginal peoples. Armed with this broad view, Lemkin wrote an initial “Draft Declaration” in October, 1946, and won sponsorship for it in the Economic and Social Council of the U.N. from Cuba, India and Panama. It also won initial support from the United States, which in hindsight appeared to be a way for that nation to situate itself on the sub-committee in order to re-write the Draft that had been produced by the Legal Committee of the U.N. General Assembly.
Sometime between October of 1946 and the final approval of the new version of the Draft in the General Assembly on December 11th of that year, the sub-committee altered the definition of genocide provided by Lemkin to make it inapplicable to crimes occurring domestically in North America and other countries, and to shift the emphasis in the U.N. document’s definition of genocide away from the action itself to its intentionality. The chairman of the sub-committee, Charles Fahy, was a lawyer for the U.S. State Department and the American delegate to the U.N. One of his first acts, according to Lemkin, was to try to change the word “genocide” to the more legally vague term “extermination”: an attempt that failed. (120)
As Lemkin describes in his unpublished work Totally Unofficial Man: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, in the wake of his failed attempt, Fahy dispatched the Canadian U.N. delegate, Dana Wilgress, to try to win over Lemkin to the United States position that a revised version of the Convention was needed: one that de-emphasized cultural genocide and left ambiguous the application of the Convention to national legal systems.
In short, Canada and the United States – and by then with the support of Great Britain – wanted to make the Convention not only inapplicable to their nations and to their own acts of genocide, but have it remain a general statement that could not be implemented in their own domestic legal and political systems.
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One of the ways they eventually ensured such immunity was by a legal formalism that shifted the focus in the definition of genocide from an action to an intention; a redefinition that created enormous ambiguity and gave any criminal regime a huge loophole through which to escape prosecution. For example, in Lemkin’s original opening sentence in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), he stated simply and boldly,
By genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.
But in the final Genocide Convention, passed by the U.N. General Assembly, Lemkin’s statement was altered to read,
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
Lemkin’s original definition automatically condemns any practitioner of certain acts. But the revised
U.N. Convention only allows such prosecution if it can first be established that there was an intention
to commit those acts. And yet how can the intent of genocidal regimes to wipe out certain groups
ever be established beyond any reasonable doubt? Clearly, it is much more difficult to ascertain intent
than results.
Thanks to the pressure brought by these “Big Three” nations (USA, England, Canada), this loophole became part of the redefinition of genocide that protected these three nations and others from prosecution for their genocide of foreign or indigenous peoples. The final debate on the Genocide Convention defeated Lemkin’s position and excluded most of his definitions of cultural genocide from the final draft, in order to narrow the notion of genocide to a primarily physical destruction. In addition, it left it up to each individual nation to decide whether or not to enact enabling legislation to allow the Convention to be applied to crimes within their own borders: precisely like asking the accused criminal whether or not he’s willing to be prosecuted.
In justifying its actions, the Canadian delegation wrote unconvincingly in a September, 1948 External Affairs publication:
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