In August of 2021, a statue of Sir John A. McDonald situated in the heart of my hometown, Hamilton, Ontario, was toppled by a group of angry Indigenous Canadians who no doubt resented his repeated references to them as “savages” and his government’s foundation of the Residential School system. Since then, the city has chosen to keep the statue in storage, clearly unwilling to offend the victims of his arrogant racism. But was McDonald a “racist,” or simply a man of common sense? Was it not an inarguable fact to him that a Civilization which had produced Socrates, Shakespeare, the Enlightenment, and a host of wonderful technological advancements, was by any sane standard infinitely more advanced than that of the Indigenous of the Americas? Is not the Left’s repudiation of this belief as an expression of White Supremacism, an implicit denial of Man’s nature as an Intelligent Being?
Four years ago, New Zealand cut funding to an annual high school festival celebrating the works of Shakespeare. Critics of the event condemned it as an expression of British Imperialism and suggested a greater focus on the country’s Maori cultural heritage. Here in Canada, apparently, the Bard is no longer considered essential reading in many secondary and post- secondary literary programs. The “logic” behind such developments was perhaps best expressed by New Zealand’s former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who, in the aftermath of Queen Elizabeth’s death, said she hoped her country would soon become a Republic, thereby symbolically severing all ties with its British heritage!
Shakespeare is among the greatest of literary geniuses. His New Zealand critics’ indictment of the “paternalistic” nature of his works utterly ignores the host of courageous, intelligent Females they portray. Indeed the world of Shakespeare represents the complexities of the Human Condition in a manner seemingly beyond the capacity of most creative artists, including those of Maori extraction! Equally important, of course, is the aesthetic brilliance of his words. But just as those given to Identity Politics tend to ignore our nature as Intelligent Beings, so also they cast aside our appreciation of Beauty as just another White, Western eccentricity! To those on the woke Left, it seems, we’re just animals with delusions of grandeur!
In 2020, motivated by the same woke sentiments cited above, Denver’s Art Museum decided to cancel the name of Christopher Columbus from its collections. Pre-Columbian art was henceforth to be known as Art of the Ancient Americas and to include far more examples of Mayan and Aztec artefacts than previously admitted. Once again the intellectual and aesthetic quality of European Culture was being vilified due to the ugly, colonialist proclivities of monsters such as Columbus! And yet on Mar. 1 of 2025, Canada’s wonderful National Post published an extensive article by Nigel Biggar in which he exposed the conveniently ignored facts behind the Left’s truly inane denunciation of “Western Imperialism.” The article was entitled: “In defense of the British Empire.”
Rife with historical references, Biggar’s essay cannot be fully explored here. What it validates unequivocally, however, is that our species’ history is a never ending tale of belligerent attacks by one group or another on both their immediate neighbors and those well beyond their borders. These onslaughts, of course, often led to prolonged periods of occupation and oppression. In 711 A.D., North African Muslims invaded the Iberian Peninsula and controlled much of what we now know as Portugal and Spain throughout the balance of the century. Indeed they were not totally expelled until 1492! In the Americas, various tribes were constantly abusing their neighbors, enslaving them and in some cases cannibalizing them! These are historical facts. And yet in the narrative endorsed by the contemporary Left, Western Europe’s colonialist exploits are amongst the most horrific ventures in all of history. The irony of this assessment is that it equates Success with Evil! The British, apparently, came to utterly dominate the Indigenous of North America not because they were infinitely more evolved in every way, but because they were Oppressive Monsters. Canada’s Residential Schools, admittedly flawed, were not designed to bless their students with the ability to flourish in the Modern World, but to simply destroy their Traditional Cultures. Such are the gross simplifications informing the Left’s loathing for Western Civilization!
How, one wonders, would “intellectuals” given to demonizing the very system that produced them, make out in Soviet Russia or Communist China? In the latter, 13 million Uyghurs are presently being persecuted for failing to bow before their communist masters. The ultimate Irony of the Left’s constant criticism of our White, Western Democracies is that, for all of their imperfections, they are and always have been amongst the most truly free, life-affirming, humane and progressive regimes in all of history. If they were not, most of our contemporary “intellectuals” would no doubt be in jail!
“Imperialism” and “Colonialism”