Communist Canada Cleanses Its History
John A. Macdonald was Canada’s first prime minister. In view of his essential role in forging the country’s original constitution and solidifying its status as a unified nation independent of its powerful southern neighbor, he is often and justifiably regarded as Canada’s closest approximation to a founding father. Naturally, then, he and his legacy are being airbrushed from Communist Canada’s revisionist history.
You see, it turns out that Sir John A. was not perfect. In fact, he was so imperfect that back in his day, people didn’t even know about the glories of multiculturalism and the evils of Euro-hegemony. Thus, in an attempt to assimilate a perpetual underclass that seemed doomed to permanent failure, and prepare them for employment and normal life in a modern industrial society, Macdonald, along with much of the political mainstream of his time, backed a plan — which continued for generations — to remove native Canadian children from their families on the reserves and have them raised in “residential schools” operated by various Christian churches throughout the country.
Sadly, many of these residential schools were poorly run, and in some schools there was widespread abuse of children. Today, of course, in the era of social justice egalitarianism of the “Get Whitey” variety, the very concept of trying to assimilate children of non-Western heritage into a society that was quickly leaving them behind would be judged inherently unjust, regardless of the actual methods and results. But in that pre-progressive, rapidly changing era, many leading lights, some of them no doubt operating under sincerely hopeful motives, thought this scheme might be a way to prevent a miniature catastrophe from playing itself out among Canada’s native population.
The schools were a failure, and the catastrophe has indeed happened; and, with the benefit of hindsight, part of the blame for the current miserable and isolated state of the native Canadian population may be placed at the feet of over-zealous Christian social reformers, including John A. Macdonald, hoping they could work a cultural miracle if only they could control the whole process through government compulsion — such compulsion being the chief cause of most of the educational and social catastrophes of our time, as I explain at length in my book, The Case Against Public Education.
So, to clarify, I am not here to defend the residential schools. Nor am I here to reinvent Macdonald as an angelic or heroic figure. And that last point, in fact, is exactly the issue. I am not here to reinvent Canada’s history. But the neo-Marxist social justice warriors of today most surely are. To that effect, they are seeking to remove the nation’s first prime minister, its “founding father,” and one of its most substantial and accomplished, not to say visionary, leaders, from Canada’s history — or rather, to “revise” his traditionally honored role into one of disgrace and evil.
A statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, has been removed from the front steps of Victoria City Hall.
The monument was taken down, wrapped in foam and strapped to a flat-bed truck on Saturday morning to be placed in storage.
City council voted to remove the statue as a gesture of reconciliation earlier this week.
“Reconciliation.” In proper English, this is revisionist history, i.e., the dishonest and ignorant cherry-picking of the past and its consequential figures in search of alternative realities that suit a politically correct agenda of the moment.
One person, Reuben Rose-Redwood, who was on hand to cheer the banishment of the single most important politician ever to represent Victoria, made the following observation, obviously oblivious to the sickening irony oozing out of the sentiment:
“Macdonald … was one of the leading architects of the residential schools which instigated the cultural genocide of Indigenous people in this country,” said Rose-Redwood.
“We’re here to say there’s no honour in cultural genocide and it’s time for the statue to go.”
“There’s no honour in cultural genocide,” say the social justice warriors, as they congratulate themselves on intimidating an entire country’s population into apologizing for their ancestors having been flawed humans, and agreeing to cleanse those ancestors, including one of the very greatest of them, from the nation’s historical narrative.
Sir John A. Macdonald united leaders from across the widest territorial divide imaginable, and an equally wide divide in customs and attitudes, to achieve the British North America Act, which resulted in Confederation in 1967. He was largely responsible for the development of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Canada’s first transcontinental railroad. He essentially created the Conservative Party that has continued, in varied forms, as one of Canada’s two major parties throughout the nation’s history. He served as prime minister for nineteen years, the second-longest-serving PM.
He was also a heavy drinker, was regarded as somewhat unscrupulous, and frequently favored excessive federal government authority, resisting provincial demands for more autonomy. He made some decisions that a sober historical analysis, from a classical liberal point of view, would have to judge as terrible. But it is not far-fetched to say that without him, Canada itself, in many of its best senses, might not exist at all today.
If you are a progressive revisionist, however, the man’s accomplishments, and his legitimate, long-established place of honor in the growth of the one of the world longest-lasting democracies and (in spite of a sparse population and a dominant superpower neighbor) leading economies, deserve to be ignored, unlearned, erased, in favor of redefining him — and, symbolically, the entire pioneering era of which he was a leading figure — as nothing but a monster of culturally-genocidal racism.
“We realized it’s going to be many years of reconciliation,” said Mayor Lisa Helps.
“One of the things we heard very clearly from the Indigenous family members is that coming to city hall to do this work, and walking past John A. Macdonald every time, feels contradictory.”
Change a name or two, and there is no reason in the world why the exact same sentence could not (and will not) be spoken as justification for condemning any number of political, cultural, and religious figures to the ash heap of history. “One of the things we heard very clearly from the Muslim family members is that coming to the hospital to do this work, and walking past a statue of the Virgin Mary every time, feels contradictory.”
Katie Hooper, executive director of the Esquimalt Nation, applauded the decision.
“Removing this statue is an important step in the city’s reconciliation journey, and is a symbol of progress towards and end to discrimination and oppression,” Hooper wrote in a letter to Helps.
Reconciliation, you see, is a “journey,” and will take “many years,” because it is not about addressing a specific wrong and undoing it. Reconciliation is about creating permanent victim status which can be used as a bludgeon to destroy historical hegemony. In today’s fashionable morality-speak, it is about the systematic “cultural genocide” of a nation, at the hands of an ideology-driven coalition of activists and their sniveling bootlickers in the political class.
A plaque to replace the statue has been installed explaining the monument’s removal.
“We will keep the public informed as the Witness Reconciliation Program unfolds, and as we find a way to recontextualize Macdonald in an appropriate way,” it reads.
Macdonald — the founder of Canada — needs recontextualizing before his likeness or name may be acceptable in the public square again. Recontextualizing is “people’s history” talk, and of course it means rewriting a man’s legacy with a view to characterizing him as all the worst things with which he was ever associated, while carefully and deliberately sweeping away all the significant achievements that, to the neo-Marxists, represent nothing but white Euro-aggression. The neo-Marxists naturally ignore how easy it would be to play this game both ways, and indeed how easy it would be to nullify one’s own personal existence, using the very same reasoning and methods.
Lest you imagine this is just one isolated progressive stronghold, with an unusually large native population to cater to, I note that this trend toward recontextualizing — that is, raping and murdering the legacy of — John A. Macdonald, runs right across the country, indeed wherever neo-Marxist ignoramuses and social justice thugs may be found.
In August, an elementary teachers’ union in Ontario called for Macdonald’s name to be removed from their schools.
Three months before that, the Canadian Historical Association voted to strip Macdonald’s name from one of its top writing prizes.
The nation John A. Macdonald created continues its rapid descent, which I have chronicled intermittently here in Limbo, into what I call, without an ounce of irony — and very soon without an ounce of hyperbole — into Communist Canada.