Juno News - November 01, 2019


SHEPHERD: Cults of Victimhood with Mark Milke


Episode Stats

Length

56 minutes

Words per Minute

178.9923

Word Count

10,192

Sentence Count

558

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

52


Summary

Mark Milkey is a public policy analyst, keynote speaker, columnist, and author of six books and dozens of studies published across Canada and internationally in the last two decades. His work has been published by think tanks in Canada, the United States, and Europe, including the Fraser Institute, the Montreal Economic Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, and the Brussels-based Center for European Studies. In 2019, he was the lead architect of the United Conservative Party's election platform and principal policy advisor to UCP leader Jason Kenney. His new book is called The Victim Cult: How the Culture of Blame Hurts Everyone and Wrecks Civilizations.


Transcript

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
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
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
00:13:18.620 Christians. Then Christians get into power and they blame their troubles on pagans in Egypt and
00:13:24.780 trash libraries in Alexandria, Egypt, right? Alexandria being one of the classical centers of knowledge
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
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
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
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
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,
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,
00:16:04.340 it excludes the English, right? 19th century Germans didn't care for the English, they didn't care for
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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%
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.
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
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
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,
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,
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,
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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,
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
00:41:43.100 initial welcoming of them, very quickly it turns on them. White Americans turn on them. And in the 1850s,
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
00:46:39.500 Americans to live up to their their ideals from 1776. But maybe we're even seeing Asian Americans become
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.
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.
00:49:26.540 Your other parent was, I don't know, Korean. Does that mean you should be treated as an
00:49:32.620 Asian American, or as a non Asian American? Maybe you're a capitalist. Maybe your religion
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
00:50:01.180 discriminated against by the Tutsis before independence, once the Hutus take over, have a
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
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
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.
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
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
00:53:05.900 Poland. Well, his brothers are killed during the war. They, they join the German army because they're
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
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.