Juno News - SHEPHERD： Cults of Victimhood with Mark Milke

00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone. I am Lindsay Shepherd, Investigative Journalism Fellow with True

00:00:12.600 North. And today on the podcast, I have Mark Milkey. Mark Milkey, PhD, is a public policy

00:00:19.200 analyst, keynote speaker, columnist, and author of six books and dozens of studies published

00:00:24.680 across Canada and internationally in the last two decades. Mark's work has been published

00:00:29.640 by think tanks in Canada, the United States, and Europe, including the Fraser Institute,

00:00:34.780 the Montreal Economic Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation,

00:00:39.120 and Brussels-based Center for European Studies. In 2019, he was the lead architect of the United

00:00:45.340 Conservative Party election platform and principal policy advisor to UCP leader Jason Kenney.

00:00:51.480 So Mark's new book is called The Victim Cult, How the Culture of Blame Hurts Everyone and Wrecks

00:00:58.140 Civilizations. His book just came out on Amazon.com and will soon be in bookstores. So Mark, what is

00:01:06.880 a victim cult? Let's start there. And then why don't you take us through the book as well and give us

00:01:11.060 a bit of an outline? Sure. The best way to define a victim cult is really a relentless focus on the

00:01:17.600 past. Perhaps that's the best way to look at it. Look, there have been 113 billion human beings

00:01:24.440 born on the history of this planet, and seven and a half billion of those are alive today.

00:01:30.220 There's no question that people have been victimized in history and are now. So the question,

00:01:35.980 though, is what do you do with that? If you've been a victim, some are, some aren't. Some victim

00:01:41.220 cults, as I call them, are in essence fake. But there's a lot of truth, obviously, and a lot of reason

00:01:46.360 why people feel aggrieved. Because when you have 113 billion people over the lifetime of this planet,

00:01:53.220 there's no doubt that clashes occur and there's some nasty people out there, not to be glib about

00:01:58.560 it. So, but the question is, if you're victimized in reality, but especially when you're not, the

00:02:05.620 question is, well, then what do you do about it? How do you get past it? And especially how does

00:02:09.080 societies get past it? To me, that's kind of the key focus of the book. Because when you look at

00:02:15.600 beyond just the individual level, I mean, I'd say to people when I was writing this book, do you know

00:02:19.880 someone that thinks like a victim? And almost everyone would say yes. And they would tell them

00:02:23.440 about a relative or a friend or something, somebody they work with. But what happens when you multiply

00:02:29.340 that by millions of people, then you literally get victim cults, as I call them. And think about what a

00:02:35.280 cult is, right? You've got a core of people that kind of swirl around a common belief, a common

00:02:42.080 understanding, and almost voraciously so, right? They're committed to it for good or ill. And the

00:02:49.160 danger with that is they can't see anything else. They can only see what they're focused on. And in

00:02:54.200 the case of victims, again, fake or real, what they see is the grievance. And I think it's dangerous

00:03:01.040 for them. And I think it's dangerous for a society at large and even entire nations.

00:03:06.120 Great. And your book, I mean, it's very intergenerational. That's like my first observation

00:03:10.440 of your book. I mean, your book, it goes through so many different time periods. It covers different

00:03:16.160 like wars, genocides. It's not your typical like, oh, college students are victims book. You go into

00:03:22.180 like so much more than that. Indeed. I mean, the genesis for the book,

00:03:27.200 as you know, is I've done some public policy and Aboriginal issues in Canada over the decades,

00:03:33.480 over two decades. And what I noticed was that some, not all, some First Nations leaders

00:03:38.880 got stuck, have become stuck in what I call this victim narrative. And it's not because many,

00:03:46.100 you know, Aboriginal Indigenous people in Canada, especially in the past, have not been victimized.

00:03:51.960 They have been. So there's a lot of truth. And I'm very sympathetic to the claims, if you can put

00:03:58.820 it that way. I'm sympathetic to the argument that, look, some, you know, there has been some terrible

00:04:04.920 tragedies imposed on Indigenous peoples in Canada. So I'm not unsympathetic to where that starts.

00:04:12.520 But what I noticed over doing Aboriginal policy over several years, now two decades, really,

00:04:17.920 is that the attachment, though, to an older grievance or to the blame narrative prevented

00:04:25.240 at least some First Nations leaders, not all, and I've got positive examples in the book of different

00:04:30.080 ones, but it prevented some First Nations leaders from thinking, okay, but are we sure that what

00:04:35.500 happened 100 years ago or 50 years ago is the reason, for example, for poverty today or socioeconomic

00:04:42.360 indicators or outcomes that are, say, less than the average Canadian? Are you really sure

00:04:47.500 that that's the reason is something that happened 50 or 100 years ago? That's the reason for poverty

00:04:53.920 today? I mean, in that particular case, I actually look at the reserve system and say, that to me is

00:04:59.120 more the original sin than anything else. A lot of reserves are in the middle of nowhere. There's no

00:05:04.000 opportunity. It's not like you can bring a university to reserve. It's not like you can bring a cement

00:05:09.100 plant to reserve. I mean, except for a few lucky reserves near opportunities where I grew up in Kelowna. So

00:05:15.060 the West Bank First Nations deserve or the gentleman who wrote the forward for me, Ellis Ross from the

00:05:20.540 Heiser First Nation, unless you're working with natural gas companies on the coast of British 0.85

00:05:24.040 Columbia. A lot of the reasons sometimes people suffer are not necessarily the reasons they think.

00:05:29.660 And what I noticed with some First Nations leaders in Canada is that they were relentlessly focused

00:05:34.960 on what happened in the past and would link that to the present. And we see that time and time again.

00:05:39.820 And that can be quite dangerous because you may misdiagnose what the problem is,

00:05:45.300 why you are in the situation you are today, whether you were victimized or not.

00:05:50.740 Yeah. So you briefly mentioned Ellis Ross. So he is the chief of the Heisla Nation. Was that correct?

00:05:56.480 An elected chief counsellor for the Heiser First Nation before he went into politics. Yes.

00:06:00.240 Yeah. And he wrote the foreword to your book. And you mentioned you saw him speak. So

00:06:05.700 what is it about this particular case that kind of overcomes the victim narrative in your eyes?

00:06:12.660 Sure. What he's want for his nation? Sure. I mean, jumping ahead to kind of

00:06:16.480 how do you get past, you know, victimhood, because it's debilitating, right, for the individual and

00:06:20.820 dangerous for societies. So Ellis in his foreword to the victim cult, talks about he as a council,

00:06:28.520 when he first got on the council at the Heisla First Nation, he started to look back into the

00:06:34.460 archives of the Heisla. And of course, the Heisla First Nation, like many indigenous communities,

00:06:39.680 many Aboriginal communities on the coast and elsewhere in Canada, were really victims of

00:06:44.420 what? Apartheid. I mean, there's no other way to put it, right? You know, the British who I have

00:06:50.760 some sympathy for in terms of running an empire, were nevertheless, like many Canadians early on,

00:06:56.320 racist. There's no two ways about it. And so until 1960, Aboriginal Canadians didn't have the vote.

00:07:01.720 And there were many other harms done to Aboriginal Canadians in Canada. So Ellis started to look at

00:07:08.100 his own historical records in the Heisla First Nation and saw the same pattern of abuse, of course,

00:07:12.700 and discrimination and apartheid. There's no other way to put it. And he became very angry. But he very

00:07:18.200 quickly figured out that that wasn't going to get the Heisla anywhere. So he started to think of,

00:07:23.840 okay, what could deliver us from the situation we've been in and the poverty that he saw around him?

00:07:30.600 And in his particular case, I think he always had a bit of a business mind and also a forward-looking

00:07:35.820 mind. And so he started, you know, on council and later on when he became an elected chief

00:07:41.300 councillor to really push ahead economic development. And in the case of the Heisla First Nation that

00:07:46.440 have a lot to do with energy development on the coast of British Columbia. So working with natural

00:07:50.580 gas companies and saying, look, there's an opportunity for both of us here, but you can't

00:07:55.920 just come in and develop. We need to be part of this. And as it turns out, now he says, look,

00:08:00.820 he gets complaints from, for example, a single mom who says, you know, I'd like to work seven days a

00:08:04.940 week. I'm only working five days a week. Those are the sorts of complaints he gets now. And they've

00:08:09.500 never looked back, he says. You know, but when he was on council, he had some people that said,

00:08:14.420 you know, you should, you should, in essence, exploit the residential school story. And he said,

00:08:20.180 look, and this is what I heard in Calgary and why I asked him to write the forward. He said, look,

00:08:24.420 my parents have gone to residential schools. He never thought of himself as a victim. They never

00:08:30.100 thought of themselves as a victim. And he rejected that approach because he didn't think it would be

00:08:34.860 helpful. And he honestly didn't feel like a victim. He kind of stood up to himself and recognized

00:08:41.060 that his own problems, and he categorized some in his Calgary speech that I heard, he recognized that

00:08:46.560 his own problems stemmed in large part from his own choices, and that he had choices. And I guess

00:08:52.060 that's a key point when you think about victimization, right? Because again, there, there's no shortage of

00:08:58.000 real victim examples in history or now. But the key thing is, if you get stuck there as a person or a

00:09:03.340 society, in essence, what you're saying is, other people will forever have control over me, and that I have

00:09:10.540 no agency, I have no human agents and no choice in my response. And that's actually very dangerous.

00:09:16.560 Because then you just, you go in a circle, and it's a downward spiral. Whereas I think people

00:09:21.900 that can progress out of the victim cult, you know, and entire societies that can do that somehow find

00:09:27.340 a way to say, I'm not, you know, it's not, it's obviously not positive what happened in the past,

00:09:33.900 but we better find a way to move forward. But yeah, there are lots of examples of that around

00:09:40.260 the world. But you know, I had to start in the book, of course, with looking, okay, what,

00:09:43.160 what's the problem? And the problem really is the victim cult. And I can give some examples of that.

00:09:48.220 Yeah, so I mean, the title of the book is The Victim Cult. And then it says how the culture of blame

00:09:52.780 hurts everyone and wrecks civilizations. So do you want to talk about how does this hurt everyone

00:09:58.780 and wreck civilizations? Sure. I mean, I start the book by looking at real and fake victims. I mean,

00:10:04.880 the fake victims, in one sense, are easy to spark, right? Someone at Yale in 2015,

00:10:09.780 there was a famous event just around Halloween, so just four years ago now at Yale,

00:10:15.920 where the Yale administration sends around an email to students saying, be really careful about

00:10:20.620 the Halloween costumes you wear. Well, a couple of masters at Silliman College,

00:10:27.260 in essence, looked after students at Silliman College. One professor, Erica Christakis, writes an

00:10:33.560 email back to her own students who complained about this very patronizing email from the administration

00:10:38.280 and says, look, you know, this email from the administration is kind of over the top.

00:10:43.440 I pretty much have faith in you as students to do the right thing on Halloween and not wear offensive

00:10:47.800 costumes. That was the tone of her email. This thing exploded in her face, though, because some

00:10:53.460 on campus really thought they were victims of potential Halloween costumes. She was literally,

00:10:59.600 she had to leave campus for a while because of death threats. There was a march of 1,000 students

00:11:04.180 at one point, one-fifth of the undergraduate body at Yale University. There was a march on the

00:11:09.500 president's home at midnight of 200 students, about 200 students one time. Her husband, Erica,

00:11:14.960 Nicholas Christakis, is confronted on campus grounds by students who are basically verbally accosting him

00:11:21.300 and arguing with him, but, you know, it's almost mob-like behavior. And one student in particular of

00:11:26.260 Nicholas Christakis says, you know, this used to be a safe space for me on campus at Yale,

00:11:31.080 and now it's no longer this.

00:11:34.500 Stay quiet! For all Sillman students. Do you understand that? As your position as master,

00:11:40.860 it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Sillman.

00:11:46.260 Step down! If that is what you think about being a master, you should step down! It is not about creating

00:11:51.960 an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It's about creating a home here! You are not doing that!

00:11:59.640 I mean, think about the absurdity of this, right? This is Yale. Everyone that graduates will make six

00:12:04.140 figures for the rest of their life. And I mean, she's shrieking while she's saying this too,

00:12:08.260 like absolutely shrieking. It's a viral video, yeah. Yeah, yeah, this video goes viral across the

00:12:13.860 country and the world. But she thinks of herself as a victim. And so, fake victims are easy to spot.

00:12:21.300 Donald Trump, in 2015 and 2016, a self-proclaimed Manhattan billionaire, thinks of himself as a victim

00:12:27.780 of what? Talk show hosts, of judges, of immigrants. I mean, it's ridiculous. So, the fake victims are easy 1.00

00:12:34.180 to spot. And you would hope that their narrative doesn't go viral, but sometimes it does. The greater

00:12:40.500 danger though, and this is kind of where the historical element of the victim cult comes in.

00:12:44.340 When I started this research, like I said, it started with the thought that some First Nations

00:12:48.580 leaders dwell in this victim narrative. And that's, I think, dangerous for their own First Nations and

00:12:55.140 for Canada in general. But as I started to do the historical research for the book, I saw this as a

00:13:00.840 pattern again and again and again in human history. If you go back to the early Roman Empire, you find

00:13:07.280 pagans that think of themselves as victims of Christians, right? When there's a flood, who do they blame it on?

00:13:12.220 Christians, right? This new breakaway Jewish sect, in essence. Early pagan Romans blame floods on 1.00

00:13:18.620 Christians. Then Christians get into power and they blame their troubles on pagans in Egypt and 0.91

00:13:24.780 trash libraries in Alexandria, Egypt, right? Alexandria being one of the classical centers of knowledge 0.97

00:13:32.060 in antiquity. So, you see this throughout history. I mean, one of the fascinating and dangerous

00:13:37.980 arrivals of a victim cult is from Germany, long before the National Socialists got into power in

00:13:46.740 1933. I focused two chapters on 19th century Germany. Well, one chapter of 19th century Germany

00:13:53.740 and then another one of Adolf Hitler. But the chapter on 19th century Germany, think about this. Most people

00:13:59.280 know, of course, of what happened in 1933 and beyond once Adolf Hitler and the Nazis come into power in

00:14:07.100 Germany. But I don't think most people are aware that this sort of were victims. That was prevalent 0.53

00:14:13.860 in 1933 and beyond. Victims of the world, victims of the Versailles Treaty, as Hitler and Germans claimed.

00:14:20.440 I don't think most people are aware that this sort of victim talk started early on in the 19th century.

00:14:26.200 And in essence, or in truth, in fact, Germans were victims. They were victims of the French who had 0.82

00:14:31.720 occupied parts of southern and western Germany in the late 1700s and early 1800s. And Napoleon was

00:14:38.660 in power at that time. Now, after, you know, kicking Germans out of, sorry, kicking the French out of 0.78

00:14:47.140 Germany in the early 1800s, what you find is what people often are grappling with after they've been

00:14:53.820 victimized. You know, they need to kind of restore their own identity, right? Because they feel they've

00:14:58.720 been violated. And so there's an understandable response about who am I on a personal level, but even

00:15:04.400 entire nations can kind of grapple with us. Well, who are we, right? We've been oppressed for a while

00:15:09.740 here, for decades, in the case of Germans, for other societies, sometimes for centuries. And so there's a 0.62

00:15:15.820 natural attempt to say, okay, who are we? And how can we exert our identity now? So what Germans did, though, 0.97

00:15:23.380 is they sort of romanticized the past. They look back 800 years to Frederick the Great, to Barbarossa,

00:15:29.020 and they wanted to make Germany great again. And again, it's an understandable response, but it was

00:15:35.440 a dangerous reaction in Germany in the early 1800s, because what they did is they focused on a notion

00:15:40.860 of pure culture. And they thought, if only we can be pure again, pure Germans. And they went down this

00:15:46.860 pure culture road a century before they ever got into notions of pure race. And in the early 1800s,

00:15:53.560 they began to read philosophers, and philosophers urged Germans to think of themselves as only

00:15:59.200 authentically German if they were Protestant, if they were Christian. And of course, this excludes Jews, 0.84

00:16:04.340 it excludes the English, right? 19th century Germans didn't care for the English, they didn't care for 0.97

00:16:10.420 British liberalism, and they really saw the collective as much more important than the individual.

00:16:14.760 And this, as they were trying to kind of restore Germany as a great nation, and figure out who

00:16:21.780 they were culturally. So that's a long answer to short question, Lindsay. But it's what I found

00:16:28.400 fascinating about Germany is this is where the problem starts. And Germany's victim cult goes viral 0.95

00:16:34.740 starting in the 19th century, starting with the notion of pure culture and the later pure race.

00:16:39.240 And of course, the Nazis and Adolf Hitler pick up on this in 1933. And we know the results. And the

00:16:45.640 only thing that finally vanquished this mentality of victim thinking from Germany that had been there 0.90

00:16:52.240 for 150 years was, of course, the Second World War, where Germany is utterly and rightly utterly destroyed.

00:16:59.960 That's the only thing that psychologically knocks this very debilitating and dangerous and genocidal

00:17:08.480 belief out of the Germans by 1945, right, by the rest of us combating Nazi Germany.

00:17:16.500 Yeah. And to pick up on this, this idea of pure culture, it's still actually alive today with hurtful

00:17:23.620 effects. So you bring up in a chapter, the case of indigenous children, who in the US and Canada,

00:17:29.940 who are put into foster care, but then there are these kind of claims over, well, you know,

00:17:35.380 the indigenous children can't be living with families of other races, they need to be returned 1.00

00:17:40.800 to their, their tribe, or their, their reservation. Can you talk about that a bit?

00:17:47.300 Sure. And this was, yeah, this was one of the interesting things about culture. I mean,

00:17:51.160 culture is important. All of us have a set of assumptions. If you grew up, lived in two years

00:17:55.520 in Japan, there's things about Japanese culture I like. If you grew up in the West, you have certain

00:17:59.140 assumptions about individualism. If you grew up on a Native American reserve or a Canadian First

00:18:05.100 Nation, you're going to have certain assumptions about how the world should be. And we live with

00:18:10.580 that. And if, and if culture is interfered with in a dramatic way from an outsider, it can upset

00:18:16.180 expectations. And literally, you know, whether it's a small community or entire nation, then all of a

00:18:22.120 sudden your, your world is turned upside down. So cultural damage is real, but it's not exactly

00:18:28.480 the same as a physical damage. But these days people equate the two, and that's the danger. And

00:18:33.400 again, especially with kind of the historical understanding of when people and nations try

00:18:38.460 and recreate a pure culture that in essence never existed, right? Or the purest cultures in the

00:18:43.260 world are not necessarily as tolerant as you think if you go back into history, right? Because they

00:18:47.600 don't really intermesh with other cultures and, and think about other people's viewpoints,

00:18:51.780 right? I mean, you think before the age of mass travel, for example, most people don't really have

00:18:56.240 a great understanding of other cultures except their own. So this throwback to pure culture that 0.97

00:19:01.500 it will save you. No, in essence, what it makes you is an identity isolationist. Now, in the case of

00:19:07.460 a couple of examples in the chapter you mentioned with indigenous children in the United States and

00:19:12.700 Canada, the history to this again is an actual injury that occurred. So in the 1950s and 1960s and

00:19:19.020 1970s, in both Canada and United States, there were times where children were taken away from their

00:19:25.100 indigenous parents. And like in any other sort of child, you know, what do you call it? I mean,

00:19:32.080 when, when children are taken from the home by social service agencies, sometimes there were

00:19:36.260 legitimate reasons, right? There might've been a potential harm to the child or there had been harm to

00:19:40.780 the child. But in the case of indigenous Canadians and Americans, there were also times where they

00:19:46.140 were taken away simply, not only as an emergency precaution, but sometimes there was no chance to

00:19:51.980 get your child back. If you're an Aboriginal parent, you were just assumed unfit, right? And there was no

00:19:58.020 chance to, even if there was a legitimate concern, kind of rebuild that family relationship. And that was

00:20:02.500 a tragedy, of course. And there was no doubt some racism behind that. Now, the danger though is,

00:20:09.260 and there was some US legislation and Canadian policy starting in the 1970s, 1980s that said,

00:20:15.200 this is wrong as it was. We need to be more careful. We need to protect the Aboriginal family.

00:20:20.680 That's fine. That's a good impulse. What happens though, then is more recently,

00:20:26.720 there's a veering off into again, kind of thinking that what any child needs is a dose of their own

00:20:32.920 pure culture. So I use the example from the United States first. I go into Veronica,

00:20:37.900 a child in Oklahoma, whose parents, sorry, the mother is about half Hispanic. The father is from

00:20:47.660 the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. They have a relationship, child is the result, or a coming 0.99

00:20:54.080 child is the result. But the father wants nothing to do with the child. The mother arranges an adoption

00:21:00.220 before the child is born, an adoption of who will become Veronica. She gives the child away after

00:21:08.580 the child is born, after Veronica is born. Four months later, the father changes his mind, says,

00:21:13.720 look, I want Veronica in my life, goes to court. To make a long story short though, it goes to the 0.98

00:21:20.260 court system. He wins. He gets the child back who he's never met. And the adopting family,

00:21:27.280 the parents there also go to court and fight for another two years to get Veronica back.

00:21:31.840 Veronica is split between two families over four years, including one, she's in a family for a

00:21:38.320 father and a stepmother she's never met. And this is on the basis of the fact that she's literally got

00:21:43.460 1% Cherokee blood in her, but her Hispanic blood counts for nothing. And this is because of the U.S. 0.96

00:21:50.760 law designed to do the right thing, which is to try and keep families together.

00:21:54.100 But eventually the U.S. Supreme Court says, this is crazy. This is not a family that was split apart

00:21:58.940 by an unjust application of a law. This child was never with her father. Her father initially never

00:22:05.920 wanted her. And now she's given to the Cherokee First Nation and the father because of 1% Cherokee 0.99

00:22:12.200 blood. I mean, this is the craziness where we're starting to divide people on this basis.

00:22:18.780 And how do you, I mean, when you think about it, how do you, how does 1% Cherokee blood trump 50% 0.76

00:22:24.740 Hispanic blood? I mean, the fact that people would even start to have these discussions shows the

00:22:29.160 absurdity, first of all, the concept of race, but also, and I give other examples in the victim cult

00:22:34.680 of where other Aboriginal parents in the United States deliberately gave their children away and

00:22:41.480 not to parents from their own tribal nation, tribal government, you know, as Americans like

00:22:48.700 to refer to their reserves. They deliberately didn't want to give their children over to someone

00:22:54.420 on reserve. And yet those children were dragged back to a reserve that they were not born on,

00:23:00.340 where the parents gave birth far away from. And yet because of certain laws and how the policies

00:23:05.900 are enacted, these children are supposed to be placed only within Native American families.

00:23:10.680 And that also interferes with the choice of the parents. So in essence, what we're saying is

00:23:15.160 Indigenous children are always the property of the reserve, always the property of the collective. 1.00

00:23:21.760 And that's very dangerous in human history as well. We're not treating people again as individuals.

00:23:25.420 And that was the mistake in the 1960s and 1970s, excuse me, and before, when non-Aboriginal Canadians 1.00

00:23:34.040 and non-Indigenous Americans didn't treat Indigenous North Americans as individuals first. Instead,

00:23:41.740 they simply saw them as some collective, which they discriminated against. The same problem is repeating

00:23:46.120 itself now. We're not looking at Indigenous Canadians and Indigenous Americans as individuals first

00:23:52.540 and members of a collective second. Yeah. And I think it's hard when it's coming out of a good

00:23:57.980 intention. Because in Canada, I think we refer to, you know, the taking of Indigenous children as the 0.85

00:24:03.160 Sixties Scoop back then. And I think we're even in talks of reparations for Sixties Scoop victims right

00:24:09.700 now. Is that, are you up to date? I believe, yeah, there are demands for compensation. And again,

00:24:14.760 this is a difficult historical one to sift through. I mean, I assume most of the paper records are gone by now.

00:24:21.080 Patrick Johnston, an historian who came up with the term, a Canadian historian who came up with the

00:24:26.180 term Sixties Scoop originally, fully acknowledges that, you know, some of the

00:24:32.420 takings of Aboriginal children in the 1960s and the 1970s were legitimate, right? If there's dangers on, 1.00

00:24:39.780 if there's dangers from a parent or they're neglectful, it doesn't matter what your heritage is.

00:24:44.860 The government, I think most people are rightly thinking that you should have the children taken

00:24:51.020 from you if you're not a capable parent at that point. Again, the key mistake decades ago was

00:24:57.200 Indigenous parents were not given the chance to reform the families and some of their children

00:25:01.900 were simply adopted out sooner rather than later. And that was part of the tragedy. But I don't know,

00:25:07.000 looking decades later, how you necessarily sift through the compensation issue unless you can prove

00:25:13.900 that really the state was in some way, you know, doing the wrong thing in a particular instance.

00:25:20.500 So I guess, you know, lawyers who will sort through this to figure out, hopefully figure out which

00:25:27.660 cases are legitimate and which cases know, you know, provincial governments were entirely within

00:25:32.240 their rights and duties to separate children, at least temporarily, from their parents who might

00:25:37.240 have been abusive or incapable of caring for the children in the proper way.

00:25:40.900 Right. And here's where I get in the book, in the victim cult, the case of compensation or

00:25:46.400 restoration and restitution. I mean, this is very much a topic alive today, not only Canada,

00:25:52.300 but in the United States. Right. Some black Americans, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, 0.87

00:25:57.080 wrote in this about five years ago in the Atlantic Monthly. And Coates argues that Americans

00:26:01.620 should compensate for slavery. So I address this in the book because liberal democratic nations do,

00:26:07.180 in some cases, try and address past wrongs. Right. If you get your property stolen tomorrow,

00:26:11.900 you can go to court and say, listen, I, Lindsay Shepard, have had my property unjustly taken by the

00:26:18.340 state. I want compensation. And in fact, we have laws and policies that are designed to compensate you

00:26:23.560 should some bureaucracy overstep its bounds here. You're entitled to compensation if they steal your

00:26:29.020 property. We compensate people if they've been unjustly imprisoned, imprisoned, convicted and imprisoned.

00:26:35.120 So there is, there is a precedent for this, but the question is, how far do you go back? And in the

00:26:42.680 book, what I try and suggest in one of the chapters in the victim cult is, okay, let's think about this

00:26:46.740 sensibly. If you or your family, perhaps, right, your parents, maybe your grandparents were treated

00:26:53.220 unjustly by the state, I do think there is some case for compensation. But beyond that, the further you

00:26:59.860 go back, the weaker the case becomes. I mean, think about this in terms of a modern courtroom. If we go

00:27:05.140 to court and try and prove a claim, there are conflicting claims, there are conflicting memories.

00:27:10.340 Memories are faulty. We know this in a court case. It's difficult, it's difficult enough in the present

00:27:15.540 to prove that I've been harmed by, by somebody, or that, you know, I did something wrong, or they did

00:27:22.320 something wrong. And that's why lawyers get paid to, to argue back and forth in court to try and sift

00:27:27.340 through this. And this is what judges and juries have to sift through. But now, add the weight of

00:27:31.980 history. Are we really sure, going back beyond maybe our parents or grandparents, that we can

00:27:37.820 prove who genuinely was at fault? And more importantly, that my situation or your situation

00:27:43.480 today is due to some choice made by someone 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago. But yet you have people

00:27:50.680 that say, my situation today is a result of slavery 200 years ago. Or in the case of Indigenous Canadians, 1.00

00:27:59.640 my situation today, in some cases, is a result of what happened in 1867. I think that week becomes

00:28:06.140 very, very late. And in fact, the danger, again, is that people think that that's the reason they're

00:28:11.620 in a certain situation today, as opposed to maybe their own choices, or maybe some other factor.

00:28:16.040 Again, the clearest example is, look, First Nations reserves, many of them are in the middle of

00:28:22.360 nowhere, not near opportunity. That is more the problem, I think, in many cases than what happened

00:28:28.040 150 years ago. Or to give you another example from the United States, economist Thomas Sowell,

00:28:33.560 who's a black American, one has to say that these days, has argued for years and shown that,

00:28:38.840 for example, black American families were pretty much together in the 1930s, but started to break down

00:28:43.900 in the 1970s and 1980s. And Thomas Sowell, who I quote in The Victim Cult, in essence says, look,

00:28:50.260 you can't blame slavery for family breakdown in the 1970s or 1980s. The two parent families were the

00:28:57.000 norm in the 1930s. And they only started to break down 50 years later. So you really can't blame

00:29:04.520 the evil of slavery on what happened 100 years later. You can blame it on 1890 events, or early

00:29:13.640 19th century events. But even then, you know, you're getting away from slavery. So the question

00:29:19.400 is, you know, what's the cause and effect? But the further you go back into history, I think that

00:29:23.620 the weaker the link is to present circumstances.

00:29:26.520 Yeah, and so related to this idea is that of public apologies, which you give some time to in

00:29:33.820 your book. So Justin Trudeau, you mentioned in his, you know, previous four years of office,

00:29:38.960 he was recently reelected. So he gave eight public apologies for historical wrongdoings. This was

00:29:46.500 obviously before his time. And he had nothing to do with those wrongdoings. So what's with these

00:29:53.080 official public apologies that we're doing here? Right. And even the BBC had a headline a couple

00:29:57.900 years ago saying, has Justin Trudeau apologized too much? Look, on a personal level, apologies can

00:30:03.840 sometimes be very helpful, right? Because if they take the sting out of an offense, you know, then it

00:30:08.940 helps us deal with the initial offense. And forgiveness is a good thing. I'm a little more

00:30:15.680 skeptical, though, of public apologies or government apologies, because I think they're often politicized.

00:30:21.320 And a good example comes from British Columbia to the Silcutin nation. The first chief justice of

00:30:28.800 British Columbia, Justice Begbie, was known as the hanging judge, because I guess he did sentence a lot

00:30:33.880 of people to hang, as happened in the late 19th century. And one famous incident, there were six Silcutin 0.99

00:30:40.760 chiefs sentenced to hang over the course of two years, five in the first year, I think it was 1885,

00:30:46.420 and the second in 1886. Now why did Judge Begbie sentence them to hang? Because the six Silcutin 1.00

00:30:55.900 chiefs had killed and murdered over 20 people who were road building through the territory, or most of

00:31:02.020 them were road building through the territory. Now look, a century later, more than a century later,

00:31:06.520 a century and a half later, this is interpreted as a racist judge who was simply trying to conquer

00:31:12.760 British Columbia, and enforcing British colonial rule, you know, obviously, you know, in a very

00:31:20.280 dramatic way, in an unfair, yeah, tragic way, we would say, or some would say, okay, but that that's

00:31:28.520 these very simplistic view of the situation. As left wing journalist, as one left wing journalist,

00:31:34.400 though, wrote about this, and I quote in the book, and I quote in the victim cult, he points out that

00:31:38.660 Justice Begbie actually was unusual for his time, he actually thought it was wrong for the British to

00:31:44.640 simply go in and take land, he was in favor of her Aboriginal title. He actually sided with the Chinese

00:31:51.920 community in British Columbia against racist laws from white legislators. He said, he sided with women

00:31:57.740 who were often also in British Columbia, on the receiving end of discriminatory legislation. And he often

00:32:04.040 commuted the sentence, the death sentences of indigenous British Columbians at the time, who

00:32:10.820 were three quarters of British Columbia, the British Columbian population, Judge Begbie commuted

00:32:15.680 their sentences more often than not. And that's something he never did for non-Aboriginal offenders.

00:32:20.700 So when Justice Begbie sentenced six Silkootan chiefs to hang for murdering over 20 people, 0.52

00:32:28.120 he didn't do this lightly, and it wasn't part of some racist intent. He was upholding the law in British

00:32:33.420 Columbia at the time. And I think this, you know, one can argue this back and forth. Well, there were

00:32:39.040 20 people in Silkootan territory, and maybe shouldn't have been there. But you can argue back as some

00:32:44.920 would and say, yes, but that doesn't give anybody the right to premeditated murder. And that was

00:32:48.880 obviously Justice Begbie's view at the time. So for Justin Trudeau, our prime minister 150 years later

00:32:55.440 to apologize for this, it's really a simplification, and I would call it a disnification of history.

00:33:00.640 And that's the problem with kind of a victim narrative, is it really takes out the gray from

00:33:09.200 history or the contrary facts and simply politicizes it for present political ends. And I'm not sure it

00:33:15.800 changes anyone's mind. I mean, you either think that Silkootan were right to murder more than 20 0.99

00:33:25.320 people in the 1860s, or you think nothing gives people the right to premeditated murder.

00:33:31.400 Yeah, and what's interesting is, I don't know if you followed this case, but this summer,

00:33:35.240 there was a statue of Begbie in New Westminster. I think it was outside of a post-secondary

00:33:41.620 institution called the Justice Institute of British Columbia. And there's also a street called Begbie

00:33:47.000 Street in New West. But anyway, so the statue of him, they took it down this summer because of these

00:33:52.520 reasons that he's, you know, a racist judge who hung these six chiefs, or hanged. And yeah,

00:33:59.640 there, so I was shocked when I read in your, in your book, this kind of more complicated history,

00:34:03.400 because that was not the narrative. I just looked over the CBC article about that statue removal

00:34:08.520 this morning. And it just is about kind of, yeah, like a whole bunch of Indigenous people cheered

00:34:15.240 when the statue was taken up, because that presence was very hurtful. And I'm just not sure,

00:34:21.240 you know, was this history known? Because, you know, it's a lot more complicated than just,

00:34:26.760 he's a racist, and he needs to disappear. And I suspect it wasn't known, right? And that's why 0.94

00:34:32.200 people cheer when statues come down, because they often don't know the complicated history of that

00:34:36.840 particular person. And statues are another thing I address in the book is, as you know,

00:34:42.120 I mean, I go into this kind of anti Western civilizational modification for motivation for

00:34:47.560 some victim cults. We're really at heart what it is, it's an anti Western kind of animus, which again,

00:34:56.520 simplifies history. I mean, look, no one in the right, in a perfect world, there wouldn't be any wars,

00:35:03.880 and, you know, we'd all be fat and happy and peaceful and prosperous. But that's not human

00:35:09.320 history, when you've had 113 billion people on the history of this planet, and 7 billion now.

00:35:15.080 Not only will mistakes occur, but empires are going to clash. So the question is,

00:35:18.520 what do you do with that? I mean, one of the interesting things is, on this point,

00:35:23.320 one, it was in Hong Kong a few years ago. And there were three things, I met politicians and

00:35:29.000 civil servants and business people in Hong Kong, and to a person, they don't see themselves as

00:35:33.880 booked as victims of the British, for example. In fact, and everybody, I think, knows this now with

00:35:38.520 the protests going on in Hong Kong. At the time, when I was there in 2013, all of these people I met,

00:35:45.400 said there were three things we want to keep in Hong Kong, easily the regime in Beijing. They said,

00:35:50.920 capitalism, the rule of law, and our anti-corruption efforts. And they were afraid of losing all of

00:35:56.280 that to the morass that is China and the rulers in Beijing, where corruption is rife in the courts 0.58

00:36:04.840 and in business and in politics, where capitalism is really crony capitalism. And they really valued

00:36:12.600 those three items in a way that I'd never heard here. And so one has to be careful. I mean, when empires

00:36:17.880 clash, civilizations clash, and they always do, do you simply throw out the baby with the bathwater,

00:36:23.160 to use the famous cliche, or do as Hong Kong residents recognize, say, actually, the rule of

00:36:27.800 law is a good idea. Capitalism is what has lifted up billions out of poverty over the last 70 years

00:36:33.880 in particular, and protected Hong Kong from what was going on in China. I mean, but these are things

00:36:39.560 people have to think through. But if you simply think of yourself or your culture or your society

00:36:43.720 as a victim, there's no nuance. Everything is black and white. And I address this in the introduction

00:36:50.520 as well. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet dissident, once said,

00:36:57.000 it's really tempting to think of oneself as pure, and this is a danger, and one's culture is pure,

00:37:05.160 and that the problem is always somewhere else, someone else. And if only we get rid of them,

00:37:10.920 because they're evil, then we shall be, you know, restored to whatever, our natural,

00:37:18.600 pure environment, or all shall be well. And Solzhenitsyn was very wise. He understood human

00:37:24.680 beings, and the real problem is not necessarily, it's not often, the division between societies or

00:37:31.160 nations or civilizations. The division that matters is within our own human hearts. So good and evil are

00:37:37.640 in each human heart. And Solzhenitsyn pointed to that and said, be really careful about thinking

00:37:42.520 if you stamp out that other person, that you will get rid of evil, because the evil is still in your

00:37:47.400 own heart. And this is a person who was in Soviet gulags and Soviet concentration camps,

00:37:54.920 and saw evil up close. And the temptation was always to think that the problem was in the other person,

00:38:00.360 instead of understanding that it's much deeper than that. And one has to be very, very wary. And this is

00:38:05.880 the problem. And this is, we can understand, again, the reaction when one is a victim,

00:38:10.840 and one wants to lash out. But the danger in doing so is that brings up the worst parts of our own

00:38:17.160 nature, and we lash out and blame. I mean, at the very beginning of the victim cult, they start with

00:38:23.000 the Genesis creation narrative, right? Cain and Abel. So for your listeners who are not familiar with

00:38:28.840 the Cain and Abel creation story, the narrative, Cain and Abel sacrifice the fruit of their labor,

00:38:37.640 really, to God in Genesis, in the first book of Genesis. And what God does is he rejects Cain's,

00:38:45.880 because it's vegetables, and apparently that wasn't a good sacrifice, and he accepts Abel's.

00:38:50.040 Now, Cain is mad as heck about this. And in one sense, you can say, well, it's unfair. How does

00:38:57.720 Cain know that he couldn't sacrifice vegetables? There's no indication in the Genesis creation myth

00:39:03.320 that God ever told Cain, you have to, you know, bring me a lamb or something. And so we can even

00:39:07.560 sympathize with victims. We can sympathize with Cain and say, maybe God treats you unfairly. But what

00:39:12.520 does Cain do then? He never addresses the source of his problem, which is the deity, God. He never talks

00:39:18.440 back to him. And we have other examples in the Old Testament where people talk back to God,

00:39:23.000 and actually win an argument. People forget this, right? Cain never does that. Instead,

00:39:28.040 he looks for someone to blame. This is what I mean by the culture of blame wrecks civilizations and

00:39:33.640 wrecks communities. Cain looks around, and who does he see? The closest person that he can blame

00:39:38.680 is his own brother Abel. And he murders Abel in a field, and God comes back to him later and says,

00:39:44.540 what have you done? And Cain basically lips off God. And he has to live for the rest of his life

00:39:50.700 with the knowledge that he murdered his own brother, his mother's son. And so this is the

00:39:55.100 problem with thinking like a victim. Even if one is a victim, if you dwell on that and become bitter,

00:40:01.020 it's debilitating. And in some cases can turn murderous and genocidal. And it's a bit heavy,

00:40:05.980 but that's a lot of what the victim cult is about. I try and go into these warnings to people.

00:40:11.580 This is very dangerous for you personally, but it's also dangerous for your civilization.

00:40:16.300 Well, then let's go into, we mentioned one success story at the start of the interview

00:40:22.060 with Ellis Ross of the Heisland Nation, but there's also one other notable success story we could focus

00:40:27.980 on here of a group of people overcoming the victim narrative. And that's the story of the East Asians.

00:40:35.420 Is that correct?

00:40:36.060 Right. So put yourself back in 1850 or 1840. I looked up historical examples, excuse me,

00:40:44.780 historical examples from California and from the rest of the United States. There was some

00:40:50.380 great historical research done on early Asian Americans. The first Chinese person to actually

00:40:55.900 reach or Chinese people to reach the American shores were three sailors in the 1830s where their

00:41:02.380 ship docks, their captain takes off to go marry someone, alope with someone, and they're stranded

00:41:06.940 there. Eventually, I guess they make their way back to China. The next person in the United States was 0.75

00:41:12.060 Afong Moy. She's literally a museum exhibit in New York and the Northeast United States in the 1830s.

00:41:19.580 People are watching her use chopsticks, for example. I mean, this is how

00:41:24.700 early Asian Americans were treated and viewed. I mean, as an oddity, of course. I mean, 1.00

00:41:28.460 there just weren't many of them in the United States, which was very white and very Protestant

00:41:32.780 at this point. But the real way of immigration starts in the late 1840s in California with Chinese

00:41:38.620 Americans and later Japanese Americans about two or three decades later. And while there's some 0.61

00:41:43.100 initial welcoming of them, very quickly it turns on them. White Americans turn on them. And in the 1850s, 0.94

00:41:50.700 you get a governor in California, John Engler, who says the republic really is for one race only,

00:41:58.140 and that's whites. What do Asian Americans do? Immediately, the Chinese Americans do the proper 1.00

00:42:03.820 thing, which is ferociously fight back. They go to court. They lobby legislators. There's one famous

00:42:11.420 example of a letter from one Chinese immigrant to the United States in California in the 1850s,

00:42:17.420 when the governor says this republic is for one race only. This very intelligent Chinese American

00:42:24.220 writes a letter saying, Governor Engler, this is false and extreme, and you know it.

00:42:29.740 So right away, they begin pushing back. And this begins to bear fruit in some cases and not others.

00:42:35.820 Chinese and Japanese Americans, though, suffered through a century of discrimination.

00:42:40.460 But basically, it was a fourfold strategy. One was what I just mentioned, a pushback strategy

00:42:45.260 almost from day one, where they go to court, they lobby politicians, and in very sort of,

00:42:53.740 in environments that are not helpful to them, right? Many of them can't vote, they're not citizens,

00:42:59.260 unless they're born in the United States, their children are born in the United States. So it's 0.76

00:43:02.780 very difficult to fight back. Nonetheless, they do. So that's strategy number one. Strategy number two,

00:43:07.980 so they don't think of themselves as victims from the get go. They say, we're going to fight back.

00:43:11.740 Then also, you see that Asian Americans, Japanese Americans, and Chinese Americans

00:43:19.180 are highly entrepreneurial in some cases because they have to. They're prevented from joining many

00:43:24.060 occupations. They can't become lawyers. They can't become doctors in some cases. So in essence,

00:43:28.940 they're forced to become entrepreneurs. And some of them, though, also early Chinese Americans,

00:43:33.580 early Chinese immigrants to the United States, bring these skills directly from China, where 0.59

00:43:40.300 there's not a culture of entrepreneurship, or it's not encouraged, and they are entrepreneurs.

00:43:44.860 So America is already benefiting from early Chinese immigration, and they use these skills in America.

00:43:49.820 That helps them succeed in America right away, but over time as well. Another factor for Chinese, 1.00

00:43:55.660 and Japanese Americans, I'd say in particular, is that they're focused on integration in America.

00:44:00.700 There was heavy discrimination, for example, against Chinese and Japanese Americans among labor

00:44:05.100 unions. Labor unions were racist like other white Americans at the time. They wouldn't let Japanese 1.00

00:44:10.700 Americans join. There was a famous labor leader of Japanese Americans who set up his own labor

00:44:17.100 organization, but kept trying to incorporate it into American labor organizations, and they kept rejecting

00:44:25.020 it, but he kept trying. So there's this focus on trying to integrate into the United States.

00:44:30.060 They didn't want to set them apart. Japanese and Chinese Americans did not want to set themselves 1.00

00:44:35.180 apart from mainstream America, because that would have been giving into the racists. And this,

00:44:40.540 by the way, is very different than today, where people are often again retreating to pure cultural

00:44:44.700 silos, which I think is tragic, because again, it goes against the, I think, the Martin Luther King

00:44:50.780 goal of integration, and the early Japanese and Chinese American goal of integration. And then lastly,

00:44:56.620 what's fascinating is when I'm looking at the research, and I'm looking at how Chinese and

00:45:02.300 Japanese Americans fought back, but also early successes. By the 1920s, you look at education

00:45:09.180 and the results, and you see that Chinese and Japanese Americans, who are the bulk of Asian Americans at

00:45:14.460 this point in American history, are already attending school and graduating from university at rates much

00:45:24.700 higher than white Americans. And it's because of the emphasis on education. So Asian Americans,

00:45:30.860 early Asian Americans, despite being handicapped by prejudice in the political system, and the courts which

00:45:38.300 back it up, and horrific legislation, and of course, in the case of the Japanese Americans in the 1940s,

00:45:44.140 put into internment camps, despite these really horrific, discriminatory, prejudicial actions against

00:45:52.620 Asian Americans, they're already succeeding by the 1920s and by the 1930s, because of their strategy to really 0.99

00:46:00.540 push back consistently, because of their entrepreneurial orientation, and part again,

00:46:07.580 because sometimes they have to because also they focus on that, because of the desire for integration

00:46:13.500 and their focus on that. And eventually, this pays off. And lastly, because of their focus on education.

00:46:18.540 So these four elements are really what have helped East Asians succeed in the United States. And frankly,

00:46:26.060 it forced America as a country, as a republic to live up to its founding ideals, which is really the

00:46:31.500 tremendous positive, you know, aspect of all that happened, is that Asian Americans finally got other 0.99

00:46:39.500 Americans to live up to their their ideals from 1776. But maybe we're even seeing Asian Americans become 1.00

00:46:47.740 victims of their own success, because we we've heard of court action against Harvard, because they're now

00:46:53.420 discriminating against Asians, because Asians are doing so well and getting admitted in such large

00:46:58.780 numbers that Harvard would like less diversity in terms of less Asians. Right. So right. 1.00

00:47:05.900 Talking about victimhood. Yeah, well, thank you for bringing that up, Lindsay. You're right.

00:47:09.660 This is another part of the victim cult, right? Point in the irony. And one of the problems of victim

00:47:14.460 cults is, is what? They don't look at you as an individual, right? They simply say, well,

00:47:19.340 you're a part of the tribe that once oppressed my tribe. And so everybody becomes part of a

00:47:23.740 collective again. And this has been the problem in human history. We don't look at people as

00:47:27.500 individuals. Now, in a liberal democracy, the vision of Martin Luther King, we're supposed to

00:47:32.460 look at people as individuals, we're supposed to look at their character. But what's happened,

00:47:36.380 and this is the problem with, I would say, not actual liberalism, not classical liberalism,

00:47:42.300 but what's, this is the problem with modern progressives who have abandoned the liberal

00:47:46.780 vision of Martin Luther King. And they have again, since the 1960s, started to look at people

00:47:51.980 as part of a collective. So you're black American or white American or Asian American or indigenous,

00:47:58.460 and people look at you as that first, not as individual. And universities like Harvard,

00:48:03.740 again, out of a good place, they say, well, black Americans are not attending at the rate that we'd

00:48:08.780 like them to. But what do they do? They discriminate against Asian Americans with,

00:48:13.100 what is it, a personality, not a personality test. It's a kind of a, I think they call it a holistic

00:48:18.620 test. Well, this is reminiscent of the 1920s, where Harvard didn't like the fact that there were

00:48:24.460 too many Jews attending, where there was a greater proportion of Jews, about 30% in Harvard,

00:48:29.660 far higher than the proportion of the population. And Harvard at this point is very waspy. It's very

00:48:34.620 white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and mostly male. And so they designed another holistic test,

00:48:39.820 or did the first holistic test in the 1920s, to cut down on the number of Jews attending Harvard,

00:48:45.100 and tragically, it's successful. They repeat this 90 years later. Again, in this particular case,

00:48:50.940 unlike the 1920s, Harvard thinks it's acting out of a good motive, and I guess it is.

00:48:57.180 But the end result is that Asian Americans are kept away from attending Harvard in a proportion

00:49:01.740 they otherwise would. So in the book, I chronicle this as a great irony, where we've come full

00:49:07.660 circle in a negative way, where again, people are being treated as part of their collective,

00:49:13.500 which is crazy. I mean, if you're an Asian American, I mean, I give an example in the book.

00:49:20.860 Maybe your parents are, maybe one of your parents was British, you know, with a pale face. 1.00

00:49:26.540 Your other parent was, I don't know, Korean. Does that mean you should be treated as an 1.00

00:49:32.620 Asian American, or as a non Asian American? Maybe you're a capitalist. Maybe your religion 0.79

00:49:39.180 is Buddhism. Like what's your primary identity as a person? I mean, this is this is why it's

00:49:44.380 far more important to look at people as individuals and treat them as individuals in law and policy,

00:49:49.740 rather than artificially look at people as and say, well, I'm sorry, you're the wrong,

00:49:53.820 you're the wrong collective part of the wrong collective today. I mean, one of the things,

00:49:57.340 you know, in the book that I do is I look at the tragedy of Rwanda, where Hutus who were 1.00

00:50:01.180 discriminated against by the Tutsis before independence, once the Hutus take over, have a 0.99

00:50:06.620 program of discrimination against the Tutsis and really a propaganda campaign against the minority

00:50:11.180 Tutsis. And we know where they got that got to in 1994. But back to a more positive result.

00:50:17.020 Look, we've got examples of where Asian Americans or, you know, Jewish Americans say, listen,

00:50:26.060 we're not going to put up with this, and we're going to succeed. And we're going to succeed because

00:50:30.060 we're going to force this republic or in the case of Canada, we're going to force everyone else around 0.99

00:50:35.740 us to live up to their ideals, and they do. And that's the most part of positive part of this is

00:50:40.540 they actually believed in human agency, whether it's Jewish American or Jewish Canadian or Asian

00:50:47.180 Americans or Asian Canadians, whether it's Ellis Ross and the highs of the First Nation. They look 0.98

00:50:52.060 at themselves and look at others as individuals first and part of a collective second and say,

00:50:55.820 how can we get past the wrongs that have happened in the past? And not to be glib about it, but one

00:51:02.460 has to do that. Because if you only focus on the past, again, you're caught in this whirlpool of

00:51:08.540 trying to resurrect something that may not have been ideal in the first place,

00:51:15.420 but certainly won't help you today in the modern world.

00:51:19.180 All right. Maybe as a last question. So your last chapter, it's called Two Wars and Two Families,

00:51:25.260 A Personal Reflection. So you talk a bit about your personal connection to the notion of victimhood.

00:51:30.620 So do you want to just briefly touch on that before we wrap it up here?

00:51:33.740 Sure. So one of my grandparents, Lydia, who's three years old in 1915, 1914, rather,

00:51:44.780 her and her parents, and I think she had like 10 some siblings, want to leave for Canada. They end up

00:51:50.380 getting, they end up leaving Ukraine where, you know, she would have been on a farm with some fruit trees

00:51:55.580 and, and, you know, some animals. They end up going to Latvia in July 1914. They're almost ready to leave

00:52:02.060 for Canada to the land of opportunity. Turns out there, somebody has some eye disease, so they have

00:52:07.740 to stay around for two weeks. At the end of that two weeks, they don't get to leave for Canada because

00:52:13.660 war has broken out. It turns out to be the first world war. They have to go back to Ukraine. 1.00

00:52:18.540 As the war goes on, they have to leave for Siberia because Ukrainians don't like Germans. They think

00:52:25.340 they're going to be disloyal. They think they're going to be a fifth column. In Siberia, five years later,

00:52:29.820 in 1920, the Bolsheviks, the communists take over, the forced to flee again. My grandmother, as it turns

00:52:36.460 out throughout 13 years before they finally get to Canada in 1927, was a victim multiple times over.

00:52:42.700 She never learned how to read. My grandfather, who she met when she came to Canada later,

00:52:49.580 is also a victim when you, when I think back about it. He comes to Canada. He tells his mother and his

00:52:55.340 father to bring the entire family over. And my, my grandmother, great-grandmother, being stubborn 0.95

00:53:00.540 German, says, no, you know, I was born in Poland. My children are born in Poland. I'm going to die in 0.96

00:53:05.900 Poland. Well, his brothers are killed during the war. They, they join the German army because they're 0.99

00:53:11.180 Germans in a section of Poland that's German. Um, either enthusiastically, we don't know, or

00:53:16.780 reluctantly drafted, we don't know. We know that his brothers died in the war. Um, this is a tragedy

00:53:22.060 for my grandfather and his family. And as his, his mother, my great-grandmother eventually comes

00:53:26.300 over to Canada anyway. And he says to my grandmother, um, if only you'd, you'd come over when, um, when I

00:53:32.300 asked you to, but he was never a bitter man. Um, he never let this sour him. Neither my grandmother

00:53:37.660 nor my grandfather look back to those, those days and let it, let it handicap their ability to, um,

00:53:44.060 to thrive in Canada. And my point in this chapter, the last chapter of the book is I think actually

00:53:48.860 my grandfather's choices, my grandmother's choices had a lot more to do with their success

00:53:53.500 or failure in Canada. He was a small time house builder in Kelowna back when it was nothing but

00:53:58.620 a blue collar town with maybe 15,000 people in the 1950s, 1960s. That's how he made his living.

00:54:03.980 He'd build a house. He'd sell it. He owned a lot of property at one point, I guess, in Kelowna,

00:54:08.140 which wasn't worth much, but he, you know, he sold it in bits and bits. He probably could have

00:54:12.060 been a very wealthy man. There's a college now there. There's apartment buildings. Uh,

00:54:16.060 there's a school, uh, his own choices led to his fortune or not, but he was a modest person

00:54:21.580 with modest ambitions. He never wanted to be rich and that's fine. My point in this chapter though,

00:54:26.140 is he could have looked back and said, I was a victim of this or a victim of that. And in fact,

00:54:31.180 he was, as was my grandmother. She never learned how to read, but I never remember either one of

00:54:36.300 them being bitter. Instead of what I remember is they simply kind of got on with life.

00:54:41.100 And I remember there say, I lived in, in Kelowna until the 1990s and until they passed away in 1996

00:54:47.180 and 1997. And what I remember from my grandparents more than anything else throughout their entire

00:54:52.220 life is not only did they not complain about what happened to them, uh, and their lives. I remember

00:54:57.820 they always planted gardens. So I remember red roses. They had some beautiful red roses in the,

00:55:02.540 in the front of their house and in, in the lawn out there on the lawn, surrounding the lawn rather.

00:55:07.740 And in the back of their house, they had fruits and vegetables. And some of them were the exact

00:55:13.020 same fruits and vegetables that my grandmother in particular would have remembered from her time

00:55:17.500 as an early child in Ukraine. And so this to me is the possibility. This is what's positive.

00:55:24.460 If you can, we can't really stop people from becoming victims, ourselves or others. That's

00:55:30.140 the tragedy of, of, of life, unfortunately. But because I remember my grandmother and the fruit

00:55:37.340 and vegetables that she planted in that back garden and how her and my grandfather tended those until 0.62

00:55:41.580 their very last days. I think I, in the back of her mind, maybe she was trying to bring the best

00:55:46.940 from her past from Ukraine. She remembered, you know, the sweet smells of these flowers and, um,

00:55:53.900 and the sight of them, the red roses, and also, uh, the corn, uh, and the rhubarb and, uh, the peaches,

00:56:01.180 the sweet taste of a peach. This is what she brought from her past, not the best, not the worst, but the

00:56:06.140 best. So to me, that's the story, the positive story of the victim cult is, um, but if you can move

00:56:12.220 past that, if a society can move past that, uh, there really is potential to flourish.

00:56:18.140 I think that's a lovely note to end this interview on. So thank you so much, Mark. Um,

00:56:23.260 remember, um, Mark's book is called the victim cult. It's now on amazon.com. I'm sure, um, our

00:56:29.580 listeners interest is piqued now and, um, it'll be in bookstores very soon. Um, so thanks again,

00:56:37.020 Mark. Can anyone, can we find you on social media anywhere? You can find me on LinkedIn and Facebook

00:56:42.620 and Twitter and markmilkey.com. Thank you, Lindsay. Yeah. Thank you. See you later.

Juno News - November 01, 2019

SHEPHERD： Cults of Victimhood with Mark Milke

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