On her July 5 podcast Candace Malcolm of Juno News expressed her outrage over the bizarre reaction of both the mainstream media and several academics to the country’s celebration of Canada Day. A common theme, she said, exploited by Global News, the CBC, The Toronto Star, etc., was that Canadians no longer needed to feel ashamed about waving their flag because their endorsement of Leftist politics, as signalled by the election of Carney, entailed a rejection of our country’s past, a past in which only right wing fanatics could take any pride. This peculiar message, of course, while pretending to celebrate Canada, entailed a rejection of everything it has been over the last 150 years! No one expressed this sentiment more clearly than Selam Debs, a Waterloo, Ont. Ethiopian academic obsessed with racism who posted the following on X: “To celebrate Canada Day is to celebrate settler colonialism, genocide, enslavement, oppression, violence, extraction, exploitation and the attempted annihilation of Indigenous peoples …… Along with 250 years of enslavement of Black African peoples.”
As Candace Malcolm points out, Debs’ assessment of Canada’s history, an assessment that informs the dementia of the contemporary Left, is rooted in an utterly biased and demonstrably dishonest reading of history. Simple, inarguable fact: Human Beings are imperfect and no nation’s history is devoid of injustices. But the notion that Canada was self-consciously, systemically racist, genocidal, etc. is absurd and those who say so, if they are in any way affiliated with our institutions of learning, ought to be fired not for disputing my conservative views, but for blatantly lying.
The British and hence their colonies [i.e. Canada] were the first to abolish slavery from their domain early in the 19th Century. The Americans fought a catastrophic civil war in the middle of that century to the same end. I have had Leftist friends argue that the U.S. only engaged in that war to keep the country together. This is absurd. Lincoln and his various enlightened supporters could easily have kept the U.S. together by simply ignoring the South’s addiction to slavery. It would have saved 698,000 American lives! As to Canada’s intolerance of coloured people, why did approximately 30,000 Black Americans escape to the north via the Underground Railroad from 1800 to the completion of the Civil War? Beyond these incontestable historical facts, a rarely mentioned truth that makes Debs’ demonizing of White, Western Civilization particularly hypocritical is that it was Black Africans who, in centuries past, were selling their own people into slavery in the pursuit of a profit. This is not to exonerate Whites who took advantage of the slave trade, but simply to point out that the issue is far more complicated than racists such as Selam Debs would ever admit.
So also is the issue of Canada’s Residential Schools. John A. MacDonald’s assumption that the nation’s Indigenous were “savages” who would benefit from a European Enlightenment education was perfectly understandable given that the idiocy of Post-Modern Relativism was still 100 years in the future. No doubt some who shared MacDonald’s view treated their Indigenous students as little more than animals. No doubt there were abuses within the system. But it seems eminently arguable that the motivation behind the Residential Schools was born of genuine concern for the plight of Canada’s Indians. Over the years I have read several testimonials by Indigenous Canadians celebrating the wonderful quality of life they now enjoy due to the education they received from their “genocidal” instructors!
An honest appraisal of history must inevitably lead one to conclude that Western European Civilization, for all its flaws, in spite of the emergence of monsters such as Hitler, has led the species in its advance towards a more truly “civilized” future. Indeed it was the Ancient Greeks who defined the Dialectical Process whereby such progress might be achieved, a process involving the interaction of multiple points of view from which the most rationally tenable must inevitably emerge. It is a process of course dependent on the right to Free Speech. Yet “intellectuals” such as Selam Debs, you may have noted, don’t really believe in Free Speech, denouncing all who disagree with their vision of Canada as racists, oppressors and genocidal monsters. Yet these same people see themselves as Defenders of Democracy!
One last question: British traders arrived in India in 1608. Britain established its ruling Raj in 1858. But India achieved it independence in 1947 and is now one of the few functioning Democracies in its part of the world. So was British Colonialism a curse to the people of India or a gift? As I have said in previous blogs, in my university days I had two wonderful professors of Asian-Indian extraction who clearly cherished the English literary works they were teaching. The notion that those works were the vehicles of a cultural genocide never came up. It is a complex issue to which there is no simple response. But for the Neo-Marxist Left, it’s indeed very simple. Western Colonialism was rooted in greed and racism and had nothing to do with the accomplishments of a Civilization which was clearly the most evolved of all those on the planet. For me to point out that Canada’s Indigenous never assailed Europe because their canoes could never have made it across the Atlantic, will of course be denounced as flagrantly racist though it is a simple, inarguable FACT!
Inasmuch as we live in a world where various Islamic Theocracies are executing Gays and imprisoning Women for the most ludicrous of reasons, a world in which Communist China is brutally oppressing various religious groups for refusing to abandon their faith, how could any sane person declare White, Western Civilization to be one of history’s greatest cancers? For an answer, please contact Selam Debs.