This happened when China called on the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the cultural genocide of indigenous people in Canada. Jiang Duan, a senior Chinese official to the UN said, "historically Canada robbed the indigenous people of the land, killed them and eradicated their culture.”

Prime Minister Trudeau attempted to deflect attention from Canada’s crimes by saying that the country accepts its responsibility while China is not recognising there is a problem. “that is why Canadians and people from around the world are speaking up for people like the Uyghurs."

To refocus world attention away from Canada’s crimes against indigenous people, Trudeau raised the issue of the alleged Uyghur oppression in China, and in the process, negated the pain and sufferings of its indigenous people and exposed the historical “willed amnesia” and inhumanity of western leaders.

Historian David Harvey in New Imperialism (2003) argues, “the most powerful myth of modernity, is the belief there has been a radical break with the past.” Modernity, he argues, “is the story of new beginnings and ‘creative destruction, of “starting over and willed amnesia.”

However, this ‘willed amnesia’ becomes a problem when reality surfaces, like the recent revelations of thousands of indigenous children’s who have suffered systematic rape violence and torture in British Columbia, part of Canadian governmental policy based on “enforced assimilation”. Or when the US on its mission to export “democracy and human rights” tries to cover up the abuses in Iraq’s Abu Gharaib prison.

Anyone exposing this “willed amnesia” as Julian Assange did, will be incarcerated and tortured as Assange has been without any criminal charges against him.

A book documenting the genocide of indigenous people in America titled Red Nation Rising (2021) states that the Indian Health Service “sterilized between 25 and 50 percent of all Native women between the years 1970 and 1976.”

The authors of the book argue that the genocide of indigenous people had less to do with race and more about a land grab. While this is true, one cannot underestimate how racist ideas played a major part in justifying imperialism and genocide in the colonies. Edward Said points out in his book Orientalism (1978) that centuries of western literature, media, and government policies depicted other languages, religions, and cultures as savage and inferior, justifying imperialism and the ‘civilising mission.’

While Prime Minister Trudeau shamefully stands at the UN, highlighting western leaders concern for “Muslim suffering” in Xinjiang, his willed amnesia ignores the US’s genocidal war on terror aimed at Muslims.

Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire in The U.S. and the UK Committed Genocide Against the Iraqi People argues "both countries have committed genocide against the Iraq people between 1990/2012, killing 3.3 million including 750,000 Iraqi children through sanctions and war, not including subsequent wars by US and NATO, against Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, and their attempted and well- funded efforts through a proxy war to destroy Syria, is criminal.”