
How the Harper Government Committed a Knowledge Massacre - triplesec
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/capt-trevor-greene/science-cuts-canada_b_4534729.html
======
Asparagirl
This phenomenon is certainly not limited to the Harper government, nor to
Canada. Just the other day, Franklin county, North Carolina destroyed boxes of
priceless 19th century records, including court records, by bringing them to
an animal shelter to be burned.

Photo from Twitter:
[http://pic.twitter.com/ZjEPcajo8U](http://pic.twitter.com/ZjEPcajo8U)

Here's the unbelievable part: the local historical society and local
genealogists volunteered to re-house and rescue the records FOR FREE and the
county still said no, refused to let them examine the records, and destroyed
them anyway!

Full story here:
[http://stumblingintheshadowsofgiants.wordpress.com/2013/12/2...](http://stumblingintheshadowsofgiants.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/160-year-
old-documents-intentionally-destroyed-in-franklin-county-n-c/)

~~~
throwaway_yy2Di
Not exactly the "full story" when it omits the facts that support differing
conclusions. That's sort of the opposite of "full story".

Some moderating details:

* Documents were damaged by a mold that is hazardous to health

* State archivist claims the documents were of "low historical value"

* Archivist claims some were confidential, and couldn't be legally released to 3rd party

[http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-
frankli...](http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-franklin-
county-records/13229922/)

~~~
Asparagirl
Those "moderating details" are inane. The Heritage Society was willing to take
the risk of storing and possibly digitizing the documents, some of which were
moldy and some of which were not. Indeed, members of the Heritage Society were
the ones providing the initial manpower (and masks and sanitizer) to clean out
the building basement where they were found, including the broken furniture
and muck. If they're willing to take documents in that condition, having
already seen it first hand, why should the state be paternalistic about it?

Furthermore, some of the records were clearly NOT of limited value:

 _" The following is a description of the early investigation, accounted by
Ms. Torrent of Franklin County Heritage Society; “Immediately we found Chattel
Mortgages from the 1890′s, court dockets from post civil war to prohibition,
delayed birth certificate applications with original supporting documents
(letters from Grandma, bible records, birth certificates, etc), county
receipts on original letterhead from businesses long extinct, poll record
books, original school, road and bridge bonds denoting the building of the
county, law books still in their original paper wrappings, etc., etc. etc. The
list goes on and on. Our original feelings of shock that the records were
there and in such bad condition led to feelings of joy that they were still
there and that someone had thought to retain them for us to discover so many
years later.

Each book or box opened produced a new treasure. A letter, stamped and in the
original envelope, from a Franklin County soldier serving in France during the
First World War asking the court to be sure his sister and his estate was
looked after while he was away. A naturalization paper from the late 1890s for
an immigrant from Russia escaping the tyranny of the Czar. A document from
County Commissioners in the early years of road building requesting another
county repair their road as it entered the county. Lists of county employees
and what their wages were in 1900. A court document paying the court reporter
who took the depositions in the “Sweat Ward” case, (Ward beheaded a man in the
1930s and later became the last man to be lynched in the county). Postcards,
county bills, audits, cancelled checks, newspaper clippings, store ads from
long gone businesses. Boxes and boxes of court cases covering the years of
prohibition, a docket from an individual accused of running a “baudy house”
within the city limits, a photo tucked now and then inside a book, one of the
courthouse unseen since the 1920s. Again, nothing was in any order and many of
the boxes were combinations of records from many decades."_

What an amazing, amazing collection of documents! But sorry, it's all ashes
now.

------
3pt14159
Take this article with a grain of salt. You normally can't quietly and quickly
shut these types of things down. It would be on the CBC and especially
something like this would be very hard to pull off. Here is why:

1\. Obvious environmental concerns about oceans and fisheries.

2\. The conservative base is pro-government regulation of fisheries.

3\. The conservative base is sentimental, and destroying first copies of
anything would piss them off.

4\. Newfoundlanders (man is it hard not to write "Newfies") gave up a shit ton
of prosperity after joining Canada by having the government come in and
regulate their fish stocks. (To be fair, they didn't have much choice. If they
had kept going there would be nothing left in 5 to 10 years. No I'm not
exaggerating it was fucking bad.) For the conservative government to do
something that widely flies in the face of that would be to piss off an entire
province.

5\. The government is under a lot of flack by gutting the census and by
muzzling federal employed scientists, this would make voters across Canada
balk.

6\. Canada is fighting off illegal Chinese and Portuguese fishing boats. These
libraries contain information that is useful if we're ever going to get
reparations from them.

7\. No clear motive for doing so. It isn't like big oil has made a giant spill
and the conservatives are trying to cover up the environmental damage or
anything.

8\. I fail to see this being reported on the CBC, and they would be all over
this.

~~~
jbooth
Those are all good reasons not to do this. But "nobody smart would do that"
doesn't refute the reporting. You could come up with a similar list of common-
sense reasons not to start wars in the middle east but in the US we do that
like every 5 years.

~~~
slurry
Yes, we might call this the "no one would ever fight a land war in Asia"
fallacy.

------
steven2012
If I understand it correctly, Canada had 3 elections in the span of 5 years,
and Harper was elected as the prime minster 3 times in a row. To be more
precise, the Conservatives had 2 minority governments and 1 majority
government, with Harper being the leader of the Conservatives.

Sorry, but just like the Bush era, by voting someone in again and again, and
knowing his agenda, it basically legitimizes anything he does. I think
Canadians already knew who he was and his behavior, and to imagine him getting
voted in 3 times in a row, well, this isn't on Harper, it's on the Canadians
for voting him in.

It's a real shame though that Harper is such a tyrant that he would allow this
destruction of historical data. That's not someone I would want as my leader,
and I hope in the next election his party gets voted out. But for that to
happen there has to be a better alternative, and apparently so far there
hasn't been one.

~~~
cryptoz
It's not quite that simple, though. The Harper government has cheated in most
of those elections - they were caught in 2006 in the In and Out scandal, but
it carried no punishment and so nobody cared. They are also recently (2011)
accused of using robocalls targeted at (elderly/non-conservative) voters,
posing as Elections Canada, and telling voters to go to the incorrect polling
station. This definitely happened, and a few Conservatives are implicated, but
to what extent it affected the elections and to what high level of power the
order came from is being investigated still (by those appointed to Elections
Canada by Stephen Harper).

Canada may have elected the Conservatives - or we may have never voted them in
to power at all. It's tough to tell because they cheat in every election.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_and_Out_scandal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_and_Out_scandal)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_federal_election_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_federal_election_voter_suppression_scandal)

~~~
triplesec
It does appear the Canadian conservatives have been learning from their
brethren to the south: Karl Rove started the worst of such election abuses in
the primaries against McCain in 2000.

------
throwaway_yy2Di
_" Many scientists have compared the war on environmental science to the rise
of fascism in 1930s Europe. Hutchings muses, "you look at the rise of certain
political parties in the 1930s and have to ask how could that happen and how
did they adopt such extreme ideologies so quickly, and how could that happen
in a democracy today?"_

Well of course it's just like the rise of fascism. And the "knowledge
massacre" is, as the word denotes, essentially a genocide.

Thank you, HN.

~~~
cstross
Here, let me jog your memory:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik)

(Apologies, but Godwin's Law seems unavoidable in this context. Yes, here's a
historic example of a no-shit Fascist party who fired lots of academics
because of their ethnicity _or_ their field of expertise and replaced them
with a whole fabricated fake "science" that was ideologically acceptable to
them. Note: burning libraries was _explicitly_ part of the program.)

It's excessive to call Harper's government "fascist" (although Harper has
prior form for hard-right politics:
[http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2011/04/19/0...](http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2011/04/19/03610.html)
), but this is indisputably a tactic used by fascist movements.

~~~
throwaway_yy2Di
Holy shit I just got a reply from Charlie Stross!

Honestly, I don't see the parallel at all. GoC isn't trying to rewrite
science: it's closing scientific institutions (minor ones) as part of budget
cuts. Certainly it's not doing so out of a nationalist campaign against
scientists of a specific _race_ , which is what defines fascism (isn't it?).
Arguably it's a politicization of science, if it's intended to suppress
climate science; but that has nothing to do with fascism, it's just bad
policy.

~~~
slurry
I'm not going to get into the fascism vs. not-at-all-fascism debate.

But there is something like nationalism at work here. You have the self-
appointed champions of "real Canada" (Harper's base in the landlocked
provinces) systematically undermining the knowledge and cultural capital of
the Alien Other (the "weird" provinces that touch salt water, which for
various reasons are all not quite "real Canada).

It's probably not fascism. But it's more than just bad policy. It's bad policy
that consistently works out to the detriment of non-favored geographic,
linguistic, and yes sometimes ethnic groups.

~~~
cstross
Yes, this. It's the equivalent of red state/blue state culture war politics in
the USA, turned up to 8 or 9 (if not 11). It's also destroying _research
libraries_ that provide exhaustive raw data going back decades or centuries on
_the natural environment_.

If you view Harper's constituents as the resource extraction industries, the
destruction of this information is useful to them insofar as it deprives their
opponents (the science-backed environmental lobby) of ammunition with which to
oppose environment-degrading policies. With these libraries gone, much
information is forever lost that could otherwise be used to build a coherent
policy case opposing, e.g. tar sand extraction or other resource extraction
businesses on environmental grounds.

Note that Stephen Harper is a member of an evangelical fundamentalist church
that opposes environmentalism and denies anthropogenic climate change:

[http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/03/26/Harper-Evangelical-
Miss...](http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/03/26/Harper-Evangelical-Mission/)

Whether what's at work is misguided tribalism, business-centric anti-
environmentalism, religious fundamentalism, or something else, I hope everyone
on HN can agree that _destroying research libraries_ isn't a good foundation
for evidence-based policy making in governance.

------
dobbsbob
Herr Harper also had coast guard bases eliminated that only cost a paltry
amount per year and instead blew $20 million on his new weird ministry of
religious freedom office nobody wants.

------
vfclists
Sounds like the 21st century equivalent of book burning?

Control over knowledge and its dissemination is the primary weapon in the
arsenal of the state. Military hardware comes after.

~~~
sixthloginorso
Could be, given that book burning was always more of a symbolic act to
intimidate the supporters of the ideas contained in the book rather than just
the act of destroying information. What could the purpose of burning records
of environmental research centers and monitoring stations possibly be, for
what's pocket change to a first world Government?

I have just read this, not being from Canada, but this Harper fellow seems to
have an internal war with the institutions of the State in charge of the
monitoring and protection of the environment and a budget deficit, so he went
forth and dismembered the one in charge of water, despite what his advisers
said, and what's common sense nowadays, that water ecology is in danger world
wide after heavy abuse.

~~~
ecocentrik
There are countless historical examples of the burning of books and cultural
artifacts to suppress ideology and culture. The Catholic Church was a constant
destroyer and perverter of opposition cultures for political power. A few
examples are: Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities, the Spanish Inquisition,
the conquest of the new world...

The total destruction of information is an act of political conquest. It
eliminates the ability to use that information to form an opposition in the
future and it delegitimizes any current opposition.

I'm seeing at least two other mentions in Canadian press:

[http://o.canada.com/technology/environment/harper-
government...](http://o.canada.com/technology/environment/harper-government-
cutting-more-than-100-million-related-to-protection-of-water/)

[http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/12/09/Dismantling-Fishery-
Librar...](http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/12/09/Dismantling-Fishery-Library/)

------
danso
So whatever happened to calling the government to get a quote on record about
this? Is "trust but verify" not known at HuffPo? Or is Canada on an extended
holiday?

~~~
gaius
The former.

------
draq
So data and information are irreversibly lost? In the Age of Internet?

~~~
pjc50
In some ways, it's even easier for information to be lost in the digital age;
_unless it 's in regular use_, it can end up on crumbling tapes in an obsolete
format that cannot be understood. There are various underfunded efforts to
recover and transcribe old NASA data that suffer from this.

