Quote:
Originally Posted by elly63
You should watch Ben Shapiro videos...
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Ben Shapiro? It doesn't really help to counteract the insanity on the far left with a dose of insanity from the far right.
Let me add my voice to the chorus of disagreement about this. It's obvious that this movement in Canada is inspired by the move to pull down statues celebrating Confederate generals in the U.S. south, which I do fully agree with.
But Sir John A and General Lee clearly represent two very, very different things. The Civil War was entirely about protecting the right to own black people at a time when the consensus in the West had already declared slavery to be wrong (this isn't a frivolous point--not only is Egypt not pulling down ancient statues of slave-owning rulers, they're restoring them, and Christians give a pass to a deity who explicitly endorsed slavery, because while he may be omniscient and eternal, it
was 2000 years ago, so...), and those statues were put up in the 20th century as part of the campaign of terror inflicted on former slaves. Sir John A's sins are despicable from a modern perspective, but telling the House of Commons that Chinese-origin people shouldn't have the vote due to fears of encroachment on the British racial and cultural traditions in Canada in the 19th century is not the same class of thing as owning people.
Both are dehumanizing and racist. But in the 19th century no nations were comfortable with large movements of people from comparatively more foreign cultures into their midst. I mean, the Irish and Italians had it bad enough moving here and to the U.S.
A snapshot of a Google search on Sir John A Macdonald just now:
Stories like this popping up for the Star and the CBC, and those letters at that link for the Globe and Mail being against removing John A's name from schools, tends to suggest that the Ontario teachers might be backing themselves into a corner on this one.