A story from Canada this week highlights a cross-border issue that is burning especially brightly in the southern U.S. But to the Canadian example first where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was engaged in another burst of social re-engineering, something young Justin excels in, just as his father did before him.
Trudeau renamed a building across from Parliament Hill in the Canadian capitol of Ottawa on Wednesday. The Victorian brownstone has been known as the Langevin Block for about a century. It houses the prime minister’s office and you can usually spot a black, armored SUV parked at the side of the building. That’s about as extensive as security remains in Canada: it is the vehicle that brings the PM across the street for afternoon Question Period and home to his official residence about 10 minutes away at 24 Sussex.
This week, Trudeau “renamed” the edifice “The Office of the Prime Minister & Privy Council.” No, I’m not kidding. There wasn’t a contest either. That was apparently Trudeau’s brainchild. So why’d they change the name? Seems that Hector Langevin, the personality behind the original name, was no long politically acceptable in Liberal Canada. Though he was a father of Canadian confederation, he supported residential schools for what we now call “indigenous peoples.” The object of the residential schools was outright assimilation of natives into Canada’s overwhelmingly English culture. You would not have found a prominent politician or statesman in the late 19th century or for most of the next century who opposed the concept.
The world has changed so dramatically and so completely in the last 40 years, that it is increasingly difficult to find historical figures that measure up to our changing demands of political acceptability. Notions of approved sexuality have changed the most with homosexuality transitioning from it being illegal in most democratic countries 50 years ago to becoming not only a potent political force but also an admired sexual lifestyle.
To understand how quickly sexual mores are changing, consider that former president Barack Obama was opposed to same-sex marriage when he was a presidential candidate in 2008 and a virtual propagandist for LGBT causes eight years later.
Which brings us to the historical revisionism in the U.S. The removal of a Confederate monuments throughout the South is not just an unfortunate bit of urban planning; it is a historical desecration that is just as odious and dangerous as Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s penchant for having political opponents airbrushed out of photographs and stricken from the historical record as if they had never existed. It is vandalism really, when these trucks show up on the middle of the night in cities like New Orleans and remove monuments to Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee. Whether you think Lee was a great man or not — and I do think so — he was nonetheless an historical man who left a large imprint on the world in which he lived. I won’t even bother with the nonsense that he fought for a society that is not worth our consideration, much less our contemplation, today.
What makes the current age so all-consumingly arrogant that it believes it can dismiss the past with a wave of its hand? There is much in history that remains ugly and unfortunate; just as the current age is replete with murder, mayhem and injustice. But if we started censoring the news by filtering the negative from the positive, there would be very little to report.
I have been a Civil War reenactor for over a decade. I suppose my favorite battlefield will always be Gettysburg, not only because it was the first one I ever visited but because that field of honor is all about the shared heroism of soldiers from North and South as much as it is about national reconciliation. As you tour that battlefield, you will see literally thousands of monuments, some as large as small apartment buildings and others as diminutive as a gravestone; they honor the courage and achievements of extraordinary men on both sides of the war. They must remain untouched in their quest to remember the lives — great and small — of so many who gave “that last full measure of devotion.”
So please, hands off this history, damanable revisionists. Otherwise you will have to deal with the wrath of the citizens of a glorious historical city in the bucolic splendour of southern Pennsylvania who both know and appreciate their history.