Castanet

Happy belated birthday, Canada! It was late getting here but for your 150th, we decided to get you the hottest toy in North America right now: a public existential crisis about your racist history. I know it's not as flashy as the United States having a convulsive meltdown over monuments to the Confederate generals who fought to preserve a brutal and terrifying society premised on chattel slavery. But trust me: Sir John A. Macdonald creates more than enough historical discomfort to go around.

Here is the situation: John A. Macdonald is one of the greatest statesmen in Canadian history. He managed to unite four divergent colonies together into a thoroughly modern liberal state that simultaneously preserved and advanced Victorian Britain's most sophisticated traditions of constitutional monarchy. He was a profound political thinker whose federal framework enabled peaceful coexistence between French and English and created one of the crown jewels of the international liberal order. Without him, there would be no Canada. Full stop.

He also did all this in order to create a rigidly hierarchical white nation, a "kingdom of the Northern races" that would be free from the racial degeneracy and vastly superior to the mongrel mob democracy that had nearly destroyed the United States. (He was also a Confederate sympathizer and shockingly racist even by the standards of his time.) In pursuit of this national dream he deliberately starved the First Nations of the Prairies into submission and established the residential school system to best facilitate their assimilation into the Canadian project or else ensure their elimination as an obstacle to it.

article here: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/j55a ... -macdonald

j watson wrote:http://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-our-society-is-under-attack-from-vilifying-john-a-to-antifa

Interesting read. I was surprised about this assertion (my bold):
The effort to demote Macdonald on the $10 bill, and the clamour to take his name off schools and highways and buildings, is the personification of the cheeky and outrageous effort to delegitimize the entire European presence in this country. It is dismally unsurprising that the initial effort to portray Macdonald as a genocidist by self-serving native myth-makers, seconded by addled judges, has now been taken up by our underworked, over-pensioned teachers’ unions, who bear the chief responsibility for reducing the collective IQ of this country in the last 40 years. Macdonald was the principal creator of the only trans-continental, bicultural parliamentary confederation in the history of the world, one of the chief authors of co-operation between French and English-speaking Canadians, the man who assured the right to vote for native people, and someone who had many allies in the native community, such as Crowfoot, the Blackfoot chief who supported Macdonald in the Metis disturbances.

It seems borne out here:
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/20 ... f_all.html

The new criticism that Macdonald was a racist is really about the present, not the past. Today, large numbers of Canadians are, justifiably, disgusted by the botch we have made in our relations with aboriginals and are outraged by the appalling treatment, including sexual abuse, of native students in residential schools.

In effect, Macdonald is now a scapegoat so that guilt for misdeeds done in one way or other by all Canadians can be transferred to him alone. He does fit that role. He did make mistakes. He did say things that are now shocking but back then were everyday comments — as did Winston Churchill about the people of India and as did Tommy Douglas about euthanasia, which he once advocated. Best of all, he died long ago.

The truth is, though, that for his time, Macdonald was unusually liberal-minded. Among his lifelong friends were Indians and Métis. He wasn’t in the least afraid to tell the truth about relations between native people and whites, as in: “We must remember they are the original owners of the soil of which they have been dispossessed by the covetousness or ambition of our ancestors.”

Most remarkably, he got MPs to agree to the most imaginative reform of his time: any Indian could gain the vote while retaining all his privileges, such as freedom from taxes. Unhappily, Laurier cancelled this reform, with the measure not restored until John Diefenbaker did so in 1960, which was far too late to make any difference.

Interesting, huh?

Very much so, rustled. Thank you.

j watson wrote:Very much so, rustled. Thank you.

Thanks for sharing the Black piece. Very interesting stuff.

Conrad Black has written quite a bit on this subject. Well worth reading:

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad- ... lp-natives

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad- ... t-genocide

Many Canadians are quite outraged at this proposed idea and even suggest that their history is being erased. The irony here is that if anything has been erased, it's the dark legacy of people like John A. Macdonald and the policies of genocide they helped create, which have been essentially ignored by Canada's education system.

This history has barely been included in public school curriculum, simple as that. And it's only been in the last couple of years that our governments have taken notice, promising to start integrating lessons about residential schools into primary and secondary-level education.

That pledge was prompted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which published 94 calls to action back in 2015. The ETFO is urging another very necessary step toward reconciliation in requesting the name of one of the founding fathers of the residential school system be stripped from Ontario schools.


http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/opinion/rem ... -1.4268975

maryjane48 wrote:Many Canadians are quite outraged at this proposed idea and even suggest that their history is being erased. The irony here is that if anything has been erased, it's the dark legacy of people like John A. Macdonald and the policies of genocide they helped create, which have been essentially ignored by Canada's education system.

This history has barely been included in public school curriculum, simple as that. And it's only been in the last couple of years that our governments have taken notice, promising to start integrating lessons about residential schools into primary and secondary-level education.

That pledge was prompted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which published 94 calls to action back in 2015. The ETFO is urging another very necessary step toward reconciliation in requesting the name of one of the founding fathers of the residential school system be stripped from Ontario schools.


http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/opinion/rem ... -1.4268975

Let's hope they teach the full truth about John A. Macdonald, the full truth about the policies he was responsible for (including the incredibly progressive ones for his time, like ensuring First Nations could vote), and not just the parts people with an agenda want our children to hear.

It seems to me any sensible person even remotely capable of looking at the whole picture would realize these activists are stringing up the wrong guy. The more these activists behave like a willfully blind and hateful lynch mob, the more they become a hypocritical caricature of precisely the kind of unenlightened person they rail against.

Pretty disgusting when it's the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario we're hearing this biased agenda-driven nonsense from, isn't it?

1967, a Maclean’s cover story told the tragic tale of Chanie Wenjack, an Indigenous boy who died after running away from his residential school in northern Ontario. Gord Downie has explained that this story is the inspiration for his new project. The frontman of the Tragically Hip worked with Toronto illustrator Jeff Lemire on Secret Path, which includes an album, graphic novel and animated film. We have republished that cover story below in its original form, in which Chanie’s teachers misnamed him Charlie.

rustled wrote:
Pretty disgusting when it's the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario we're hearing this biased agenda-driven nonsense from, isn't it?

It is Rustled. It totally is. I was cruising through Youtube last night watching some Piers Morgan videos and stumbled on this one. This "tear down the statues" nonsense is hitting the UK now too, and some lunatics are going after Lord Nelson and Churchill! Can you believe that?? Naturally, Piers is not amused:



His reaction is the same as most people, horrified at just how dense these people that want to erase history truly are.

I think he sums it up pretty well. She fully admits flawed heroes come in all colours. (I'd say all heroes are flawed, particularly if we look at their actions entirely without context, as the EFTO is doing.) Yet these folk only want to tear down the statues of white flawed heroes.

In the U.S., the excuse is "because they're rallying points for white supremacists". Well, they're obviously a rallying point for all kinds of stupidity.

IMO, tearing down statues of flawed heroes is an empty gesture intended to placate people who enjoy making a spectacle of their own ignorance, and going along with it only promotes more ignorance.

maryjane48 wrote:1967, a Maclean’s cover story told the tragic tale of Chanie Wenjack, an Indigenous boy who died after running away from his residential school in northern Ontario. Gord Downie has explained that this story is the inspiration for his new project. The frontman of the Tragically Hip worked with Toronto illustrator Jeff Lemire on Secret Path, which includes an album, graphic novel and animated film. We have republished that cover story below in its original form, in which Chanie’s teachers misnamed him Charlie.

Wow, Gord Downer . Bhawawawa. He's worse than Bono with a lot less talent.

We have republished that cover story below in its original form, in which Chanie’s teachers misnamed him Charlie. Oh, the humanity.

Tell me, why is Gordie's opinion more important than anyone else's?