John Robson: Don't let utopian historical vandals desecrate Canadian history (2024)

Evidently, Canada has a new national slogan: Lest We Remember. Hence the cataloguingby Holly Doan of Blacklock’s Reporter of politicians ignoring Victoria Day, though we found someone to denounce Sir John A. Macdonald as if he’d been Hitler while reopening his Bellevue home. And they tore down Alexander Watson’s statue.

In case you missed the roundup of historical vandalism, the oldest monument of a military person in Canada, outside St. Catharines City Hall since 1886, 19 years after Confederation, was quietly carted off to the memory hole last week.

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The ostensible rationale, expressed by the mayor in language reminiscent of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” if he knew who Orwell was, is that Watson died in the 1885 Battle of Bastoche between Louis Riel’s forces and the Canadian militia. And Official Canada is now sorry we won there, as Jean Chrétien repeatedly regretted democracy beating absolutism at the Plains of Abraham. How can these people be at once so frivolous and so malicious?

Well, see, we’re the first postmodern nation and have no core values. Thus spake Justin Trudeau, who with dreadfully fatuous consistency claimed a genocide on his watch then didn’t step down. Apparently, even being anti-genocide isn’t a core value for us.

It doesn’t seem to be for Hamasniks chanting “From the river to the sea” who’d flunk a quiz about which river, which sea, and how to cleanse the area of you-know-who-but-they-don’t. As those deploring Victoria Day would struggle to say when she reigned, why Sherlock Holmes admired her, or why my mother, history professor and pioneering feminist, wore her sweatshirt captioned “She Wrought Her People Lasting Good.”

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Instead, Victoria’s Manitoba legislature statue was destroyed with impunity in broad daylight due to “the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at school sites in Kamloops in May and in Saskatchewan in June” said the Ministry of Truth’s propaganda arm in 2022. Except no graves of murdered children were found despite millions spent looking. Lest we remember.

We must also forget the premier’s faux courage in insisting the statue would be restored, lest we remember we once believed in real bravery, weigh our current leaders and find them wanting. Far better to smash the balance and hide the bits.

As G.K. Chesterton warned, “all feeble spirits naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job…. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we, and of things done which we could not do.” It’s one thing to mock the Battle of the Somme or Charge of the Light Brigade and quite another to face the guns even knowing “someone had blundered.” So we turn In Flanders Fields into a pacifist manifesto and Canada’s Founding Fathers into Nazis.

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The past is problematic. Macdonald wasn’t as bad as his critics say, and Riel was mad and dangerous by 1885. But the Métis were denied their Lockean inalienable rights and it’s not enough to say we can’t judge our predecessors by our standards. Nor does anyone really believe it; cowardice, treachery and cruelty were always bad, we know it and so did they.

What we really ought to learn from history’s grotesqueries isn’t “different strokes for different folks” or “we’re so much better than them.” It’s that we’d better be humble about our own virtue if giants like Macdonald could go so wrong on some issues.

As Northrop Frye once wrote, “The record of human cruelty and folly is too hideous for anything but the sense of a corrupted will to come near to a diagnosis.” So it’s worse than facile to assume if you’d lived back when you’d have supported Aboriginal rights or abolition. You’re not that great. But Victoria was; under her predecessor, the British abolished their slavery and under her they stamped out the international slave trade. No wonder Trudeau doesn’t want to be compared to real giants, from Winston Churchill to Alfred the Great.

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Thus the final crucial impediment to these mediocrities’ unworthy triumph, which they must therefore throw down the memory hole, is that Canada’s history, warts and all, is far better than most. What can you wholeheartedly cheer even in France’s military or political past? And it’s much worse nearly everywhere else. China has no Edward co*ke.

Our Anglosphere predecessors really did create a free society, defend it against all comers for many centuries and identify and correct its flaws. We rightly cringe at their human frailty, from good deeds left undone to vicious ones celebrated. But it’s still the best we’ve got, or anyone has, and its high points from the Magna Carta to D-Day must be remembered so we don’t fall into the hands of utopian historical vandals who would make us eat dirt and say thanks.

Lest we forget.

National Post

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