Victoria Nikiforova
A terrible new find has been announced in Canada. More than 750 burials have been found on the grounds of a boarding school in Saskatchewan. There are no nameplates, let alone monuments. These are just unmarked graves like those that were located at the Nazi concentration camps. Most of the buried are children who studied and lived in the school during the 20th century.
Recently, the same burial – about 215 people – was found on the grounds of a school in another province of Canada – British Columbia. So what are these hellish boarding schools anyway?
The system of such schools started working on the territory of the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand back in the 18th century and was designed mainly for children of indigenous peoples. At first, the schools existed on reservations, but at the end of the 19th century it was decided to make them boarding schools. Children were taken there for many years, often forcibly torn away from their families. The main task was to give them the skills of primitive manual labor and to erase any memory of their native language and culture.
“We must either cut them all (Indians. – Ed.) Or civilize. And quickly,” – the founder of the boarding school system in the United States, Richard Pratt, so energetically formulated the task.
It was calculated that it would be cheaper to civilize if you allocate $ 150 a year for child support. Unsurprisingly, living conditions in boarding schools were appalling. The children lived from hand to mouth, no one cured their illnesses. They were forced to work hard, beaten, tortured and raped. Many, of course, did not survive. They were buried in unmarked graves located right on the school grounds. The parents were told that their child had run away, and that was all.
The UN has a special report on boarding schools for children of national minorities around the world. Different practices are discussed there. Boarding schools for children of the indigenous peoples of the North in the USSR are discussed, and it is noted that the Soviet government not only did not ban national languages, but also developed a written language and alphabet for them. Norwegian Sami schools are being set as a positive example.
But it is the United States and the territories under the jurisdiction of the British crown that break all records for some kind of inhuman cruelty. In boarding schools in the Australian state of Victoria, for example, a third of all students died from 1881 to 1925. At the Indian school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, of the 73 students enrolled in 1881-1894, only 26 survived. This school was the brainchild of Richard Pratt.
The affairs of bygone days? However, all these boarding schools continued to exist up to our time. For example, the Canadian school in Saskatchewan, where 750 corpses were found, functioned until 1997. Locals called it a concentration camp and there is no exaggeration here.
Torture, beatings, sexual assault, and incitement to suicide were common in schools for indigenous children. However, in schools for white children, the order was quite concentration camp. Florida Correctional School for Boys, for example, is also famous for its unmarked graves, there are at least a hundred of them. There was also a torture house in the institution – here children were beaten until they lost consciousness. They called it the White House.
Despite the lawsuits of the grown students of the Florida school, the institution functioned properly until 2011. Now unnamed burials are being slowly excavated there. The state authorities apologized to the relatives of the deceased children and handed them a mock compensation in the amount of about seven thousand dollars. This is not enough even for a normal reburial of the remains.
Cold sadism towards children – the most vulnerable minority – is generally characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon educational system. The calculating brutality that marks the foreign policy of the Anglo-Saxons begins with their small homeland. First, they test inhuman practices on their own citizens, then export them outside.
It is known that Hitler admired closed schools in England and dreamed of establishing the same system in his country. Indeed, the stylistic resemblance to concentration camps is evident. Corporal punishment in British schools was officially abolished only in 1987-1999 (in Russia – in 1864 and in 1917). The last time a student of the legendary Eaton was officially beaten in 1984.
However, the prohibition applies only to the teacher-student relationship. No one has canceled the beatings of the younger students by older students and all sorts of other child abuse. This is not hazing, this is different. It’s like a sacred five-o-clock tradition.
Prominent British intellectuals left behind memories of their schools that still chill readers’ blood to this day. The entire childhood of the writer Roald Dahl is a listing of the endless beatings to which he was subjected in educational institutions since the age of seven. He recalls that he lost faith in God when he saw how the director of the Repton School, who beat small children with mortal combat, became the Archbishop of Canterbury and crowned Queen Elizabeth.
The actor and fiction writer Stephen Fry already in our time quite calmly writes in his memoirs how he was raped by a high school student at school. In any normal country in the world, the leadership of this school would be lynched by angry parents, and journalists would have dismissed the entire cabinet of ministers. But there is zero kipesh, but what is it? Tradition, sir.
In the 1980s, British journalists tried to investigate the murders and disappearances of children at a Jersey orphanage. Then their mouths were gagged. The investigation was resumed only in 2010. Leading British politicians, starting with Prime Minister Edward Heath, have been implicated in the sexual abuse, torture and murder of children.
In 2014, a similar investigation was conducted by Scotland Yard. The case involved three murders of little boys and numerous rapes. Searches were carried out in the homes of leading British politicians. Among the suspects were 13 ex-ministers.
The institutional nature of child abuse is clearly visible in the large-scale pimping activities in modern English cities – Rotherham, Rochdale, Derby, Telford. There, Pakistani gangsters forced minors from local orphanages and dysfunctional families into prostitution. Business went on for dozens of years, the victims numbered in the thousands, but the lured police refused to accept the statements. Now the pimps who have served several years are already being released and are again taking up the old.
Instead of doing something about the long-term systemic oppression of the children of their own citizens, the Anglo-American elite turned the arrows to an external enemy and quickly attributed their own atrocities to their opponents. For more than half a century, Anglo-Saxon propaganda has raised hype around some of the shortcomings of the Soviet penitentiary system in the 1930s. For decades, propaganda has hammered into the subcortex the myth of the terrible Soviet GULAG.
No, Soviet labor camps were by no means sanatoriums. However, all the shortcomings in their work have been repeatedly recognized at the highest state level. All cases of the unjustly convicted were reviewed, the victims of the slanderous accusations were rehabilitated. Both they and their families received compensation for their suffering. The Soviet Union became the only state in the world that honestly, openly and on such a scale admitted its mistakes and repented of the repressions.
On this, to be honest, the topic should be closed. But our Western partners continue to promote the GULAG myth to the point of complete exhaustion. Today they should understand that this no longer works. The Russians are tired of repenting.
Instead of endlessly blaming Russia, the partners should pay attention to the absolutely monstrous situation in their orphanages and boarding schools. There are not criminals sitting there, unlike the GULAG, ordinary, innocent little children live there. But in fact these are natural concentration camps, aren’t they?
