In Aug. of 2018 the City Council of Victoria B.C. had a statue of Sir John A. MacDonald removed from the premises of City Hall. Only one council member had voted against the measure. In Aug. of 2020, as the police stood by and watched, a mob in Montreal tore down a statue of MacDonald that had stood in Place du Canada for 120 years. These actions would appear to be the product of his failure to meet the standards of the compassionate, egalitarian, 21st Century Left! Of course Sir John A. was not privy to the moral/intellectual relativism so fundamental to that enlightened perspective. He looked at his Civilization’s past with its variety of cultural achievements, philosophical, literary, architectural, etc., and judged it to be unarguably superior to the Civilizations of America’s Indigenous. At the same time, unfamiliar with the 21st Century Determinism endorsed by Jared Diamond and others, he assumed the Cultures produced by those peoples to be not a product of their Environment but of who they were as human beings. And so, based on what appeared to him to be the Empirical Evidence, he referred to them as primitives.
Of course in the demented world of the contemporary West, this makes him a Racist. But the Deterministic notion that the Principles and Values espoused by a people have nothing to do with who they are is arguable at best and, I would contend, ultimately absurd. As is the Relativism which avers that all world-views are equally valid. Yet as contentious as are the ideas upon which MacDonald’s reputation is being desecrated, what is utterly disgusting is that they are being applied to one born 205 years ago into a world in which they had next to no credibility whatsoever. MacDonald’s legacy, as is indeed the entire history of Western Man, is being flushed down the toilet for its failure to meet an intellectually feeble set of Ideals which have only come into vogue in the recent past. Such is the lack of historical context, the ideological arrogance and pervasive irrationality that has come to characterize the narrative of the contemporary Left.
MacDonald was a genuine progressive in his time, indeed the first leader of a Western nation to promote Female suffrage. Residential Schools, founded in 1834, were at least in part a response to the willingness of many Indigenous to be acclimated to their new reality. Fully supportive of those schools, MacDonald was in no way opposed to granting Indians citizenship and indeed voting rights. Of course the many abuses which ultimately came to mar the Residential System are a major focus of Reconciliation committees obsessed with crimes of a racial nature. But to our first Prime Minister the obvious purpose of the schools was educational rather than genocidal, and the Left’s attempt to pin Residential School abuses on his apparent racism are rendered utterly absurd by the fact that he died in 1891 whereas mandatory Indigenous attendance at those schools began only in 1894. In his lifetime, that is, no one was forcing Canada’s Indians to submit themselves to what would ultimately become a seriously corrupt regime.
For the British, Canada was as much a burden as a source of wealth. For many Americans it seemed like a domain ripe for the picking. MacDonald was very much the Father of this country, his promotion of the trans-continental railroad uniting a disparate collection of political entities which very easily could have evolved otherwise. The contemporary effort to discredit him, to denounce a seemingly good man by submitting him to criteria which he would have found utterly baffling, is typical of the inflexible self-righteousness that has come to characterize the Left. That the young throughout the Western World are more than willing to join in such attempts to vilify the Icons of their cultural past with no regard for context is an indication of just how successful our Academics have been in churning out several generations of graduates utterly incapable of distinguishing Truth from Neo-Marxist drivel.