You cannot reason with people who hate your existence.
It was reported last week that the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada
plaques and commemorations honouring Sir John A. Macdonald.
The reason given was that Canada’s first prime minister was too “
” to be worth the headache. This is not borne out by the evidence, with surveys consistently
Macdonald to be among the most
prime ministers in our history.
However, these bureaucrats have no time for what Canadians think or feel. Appeasing people who wish Canada did not exist is a greater priority.
Canadians are a far more patriotic people than they typically get credit for. Unfortunately, their leaders are often complacent and meek when it comes to defending national identity with any measure of backbone or pride.
The exception is during elections, when both Liberals and Conservatives bang the patriot drum for votes. With the April election far in the rearview mirror, there is fresh space for anti-Canadian organizers to resume their campaign of undermining national pride from within.
Who makes up this faction? Among them are radical decolonization groups, academic zealots, professional activists and elected politicians who are fellow travellers to the cause. What unites them is a fierce antipathy for Canada and Canadians.
The moratorium on honours for Macdonald is the latest victory in their campaign to demoralize and unmoor the population from their history, and bludgeon them into believing they are no more than party to an evil, artificial project.
According to the anti-Canadians, for this is the best way to collectively describe them, Canada is not a legitimate country. It is “
,” or “
”.
A pan-Canadian identity is usually denied. At best, it is described as the “
” as if to identify as a Canadian is an exercise in self-gaslighting.
Within this worldview, the settler and the colonizer will always be considered a sort of invasive species that is a natural antagonist to the Indigenous people.
When monuments to national figures like Macdonald are brought down, critics often decry it as an
. It is a noble objective to try to have a rational debate about history and its merits, but it is ultimately a waste of energy with these ideologues.
Those who toppled Macdonald do not want to erase history, they want to see Canada torn down, and Canadians rendered spiritually hollow. It is far from a solely Canadian phenomenon.
In Australia, a country with whom Canada shares common heritage, monuments to figures like James Cook have been hacked down, and the
with the slogan “the colony will fall” in spray paint.
In many cases, the national holiday of “Australia Day” has been cancelled, with calls to
it “Invasion Day.”
Like Canada, Australia is increasingly portrayed as a primordially evil settler state that is irredeemable until a sort of bureaucratic cultural revolution takes place.
Last year, a school field trip in Toronto resulted in students of “
” ethnicity being asked to wear blue to set them apart from their classmates.
It was an inappropriate, if not dehumanizing, decision by the school staff, who should have lost their jobs over it. That is all part of the process of demoralization and alienation.
This racial division of society is a branch from the same tree that sprouted “Kill the Boer” in South Africa.
For context, “Kill the Boer” is a song
during the apartheid era in resistance to South Africa’s white-minority government that ended in 1994.
The tune was
in the 2010s by far-left political leader Julius Malema, who routinely accuses the remaining white population of hoarding their wealth and continuing to oppress the country’s Black majority.
Malema has insisted that the title of the song is a metaphor,
“we’ve not called for the killing of white people, at least for now.”
That sort of extreme discourse has not been broached in Canada, and people should not expect mass violence anytime soon. However, the underlying assumptions about the value of “colonizers” hardly differ from Malema’s.
Take the reaction from the hard-left to the massacre of Israeli citizens by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
Former Ontario NDP MPP Sarah Jama’s first reaction was to
a statement accusing Israel of apartheid and engaging in “settler colonialism.”
Jama made sure to mention that she, too, was “a politician who is participating in this settler colonial system.”
The inability to wait until the victims’ blood was dry before equivocating was telling.
Others, such as a lecturer at Langara College in Vancouver, celebrated the “
” as an act of liberation, and have been unapologetic about doing so to this day.
“Kill the Boer” is not an isolated phenomenon, it is part and parcel of the global decolonial movement.
Macdonald is being wiped from the public eye for two reasons.
The first is that he was once commemorated with more monuments in Canada than any other prime minister, and was thus an easy target. Secondly, his efforts created the country that so many people despise.
It is not so much Macdonald whom they seek to dishonour as it is Canada itself.
A debate in the liberal tradition about erasing history is of no use here, for they have no willingness to listen.
For our bureaucrats to try to appease them is nothing short of disgraceful.
National Post
