The Macdonald Monument, honoring Canada's first prime minister, stood in Place du Canada (that's Dominion Square for us old-school types) for 125 years - until this weekend. The mob has now torn Sir John A Macdonald from his handsome baldachin, and, as he hit the ground, they had the additional joy of beheading him:
Where were the coppers? Ah, well. Like Jerry Falwell Jr, they prefer to stand to one side and watch. As I wrote when the vandals came for another Macdonald statue two years ago:
This is not an assault on historical figures; this is an assault on history itself - on the very idea that ancient societies have a past, or roots, or historical continuity, or anything other than the fashions of the moment...
Even if you accept every slur hurled at McKinley, Macdonald, Smuts and whoever's next, the cure is worse than the disease. To demolish the past means to live in a dictatorship of the present tense. To hell with that.
Antifa/BLM/Black Bloc/F**kwitsRUs is an evil movement, and no serious person would wish to live in a society built by such grunting moronic goons. You know that, I know that, we all know that - even those politicians who pretend not to, such as Kamala Harris (see this weekend's Steyn Show). Like her running mate, she fawns on them cynically, assuming she can harness the mob while taking the precaution (like Democrat mayors across America) of ramping up her personal security.
I would support any politician who pledged to destroy Antifa, but such opposition as exists to the March of the Morons is fainthearted, and inclined to negotiate, like the execrable Mitch McConnell did when he mused that he would be happy to rename US military bases named after Confederate generals. As I said when this got going, unless you're prepared to surrender everything, surrender nothing - because the end goal here is your entire civilizational inheritance.
~For a contrasting approach, you've heard me praise that globalist metrosexual dinky boy Emanuel Macron for his firm stand on this stuff, at least when compared with other western leaders: Every statue, every street name is a part of our history; so we're not changing a single name, or taking down a single statue.
And with that smack of firm metrosexual dinkiness the statue problem went away in France, save for the occasional Mohammedan church desecration.
One advantage the French politicians have is that they're not so in thrall to the multiculti diversity fetishization, which is generally of anglophone devising. So they don't have as many advisers with internal polling showing that speaking out against looting Macy's risks being positioning you as the new Bull Connor. The French political class is less mired in passive self-loathing, being generally in favor of Frenchness Frenchily applied. So I was interested to see that in my own deranged Dominion, likewise the most robust statements on the toppling of Sir John have come from the francophones. François Legault, the Premier of Quebec:
Quoique l'on puisse penser de John A. MacDonald, détruire un monument ainsi est inacceptable.
Il faut combattre le racisme, mais saccager des pans de notre histoire n'est pas la solution.
Le vandalisme n'a pas sa place dans notre démocratie et la statue doit être restaurée.
Which means:
Whatever one might think of John A. MacDonald, destroying a monument in this way is unacceptable.
We must fight racism, but trashing parts of our history is not the answer.
Vandalism has no place in our democracy and the statue must be restored.
Same with M Legault's colleague, Martin Koskinen of Quebec's ruling party:
La statue doit être restaurée. Ces gestes de provocation ne peuvent être tolérés dans une démocratie.
"The statue must be restored. These acts of provocation cannot be tolerated in a democracy." Quebec francophones have no regard for Sir John, as he's the guy who said, "A British subject I was born and a British subject I shall die", which is as pithy a distillation of their enduring woes as any other. Sir John's sovereign Queen Victoria was so distraught by the death of her first Canadian prime minister that she raised his widow to a peeress in her own right as Baroness Macdonald. Which is reason enough surely to rename British Columbia's capital city.
But, if only to fuel their own grievances, Quebec's leaders take history seriously enough to despise the obnoxiousness on display these last three months: "These men of the day before yesterday are not as us. Therefore they must be destroyed." Sir John A Macdonald is an indispensable part of Canada's and Quebec's and the British Empire's history. It's traditional to end the preceding sentence with the rhetorical flourish "whether you like it or not" - but who gives a crap whether you like it or not? We're in this mess because of the weaponization of every halfwit North American undergraduate's response to any reasoned argument for the last quarter-century: "What you're saying makes me very uncomfortable..." The university's acceptance of that as some kind of dispositive logic has certainly contributed to the narcissism on the streets these last three months.
So I thank M Legault and his colleagues. Meanwhile, from Canada's corrupt federal government, grifting along as the nation slides off the cliff, there is only silence; Justin is face down in the Kiwi polish, and it's mammies chirping.
~South of the border? As I wrote three weeks ago:
The phony-baloney polls are tightening...When they get to four, Trump wins: That's a cautious estimate of closeted Trump support based on last time round. Given four years of industrial-strength denigration of Trump's voters by media, academe, showbiz and all other cultural levers, it would not be un-cautious to estimate the undercount at five per cent.
In the RealClearPolitics average of polls from battleground states, Biden is up 2.7 per cent. Which means Trump is ahead. So he is on course for another narrow victory, followed by four years of subversion from the Dems, the Deep State and half his own party. The Legault statement in Quebec acknowledges that the choice between Sir John A Macdonald and a Hobbesian hellhole should not be all that difficult. Biden, Harris et al have made their #BLM bed, and should be forced to lie in it for the next two months - in hopes of making non-insane "progressives" confront that same choice and widen Trump's victory.
~It was a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with a summer-farewell edition of The Mark Steyn Show complete with "Rule, Britannia!" and music for the nude beach. Tal Bachman's column wondered whether it is time for the United States to disunite. Our Saturday movie date recalled Alec Guinness, and our Sunday song selection was a musical celebration of Kenosha (sort of). We also presented a Last Call special saluting ChiCom-19 victims from a Japanese comedy legend to the Star Wars Pink Shorts Boom Guy. If you were too busy decapitating prime ministers this weekend, I hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
Last Call and The Mark Steyn Show are made with the support of members of The Mark Steyn Club. For more on the Steyn Club, see here.
