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Suffer the Children: The Tragic Fate of Vulnerable Kids in Canadian Governmental Care

Khalid Elhassan December 14, 2024 13 min

Canada - Children in an Indian Residential School — Children in an Indian Residential School. Encyclopedia Britannica

10. The Spirit Warriors

Leo Tolstoy became a patron of the Doukhobors, or Spirit Warriors. Encyclopedia Britannica

What got the Doukhobors in serious trouble, however, was their penchant for nudity to emulate Adam and Eve, a tendency to swap wives, plus a notion that nobody has any right to worldly goods. The result was centuries of persecution of the Spirit Warriors. Officials especially detested the Doukhobors’ pacifism, which led them to refuse conscription into the Russian military. The persecution’s intensity waxed and waned over the years, and ranged from beatings to imprisonment to exile to death. They nonetheless had some influential supporters, such as Leo Tolstoy, who became a Doukhobor patrion in the nineteenth century. However, even Tolstoy’s patronage could not shield the Spirit Warriors. So they headed to Canada.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.