Dear Editor,
The decision has been made. Queen’s University, in Ontario, has decided the name, Sir John A Macdonald, should no longer grace the building that houses the law school of Queen’s University.
Mr. Pardy, a law professor of Queen’s University, wrote, regarding the tearing down of statues, “that only monuments to the likes of Castro, Lenin and Mao have a shot of not having their statues toppled over.”
It is very obvious Mr.Pardy is incapable of comprehending the fact that the people he mentioned were godless Communists, while Macdonald, along with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were godly Fascists!
Consider the legacy of Macdonald who did an excellent job presiding over Canada’s history. Unfortunately, he was also responsible for racist policies towards Indigenous peoples. The children were forcefully removed from their parents, put into residential schools where they were physically, culturally and sexually abused. The primary aim of those schools was to get the Indian out of the child. In the process, more than 4,000 children died and their parents were not even told about this.
Are Canadians really proud of this?
During World War II, millions of Americans, Canadians, Australians, Indians and other countries embarked, as General Eisenhower said, on a crusade to set the world free from racism, bigotry, intolerance, inequality and injustice.
Images of the Battle of Britain, D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge have been firmly ingrained in the Western mind as a war the West had won.
Lest we forget, it was those godless Communists from the Soviet Union who faced the savage fury and might of the Nazi Wehrmacht and who virtually single-handed pushed the Nazis and the Fascists from Catholic Italy back from the Gates of Moscow to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin – a distance of more than 1,000 miles at a staggering loss of 25 million lives. It is estimated that for every Allied soldier killed, the Soviets lost more than 80.
When the dust finally cleared from the scorched earth, the dream of Hitler being the master of Europe had been forever lost. Lest we forget, World War II was an anti-fascist war.
Back to the toppling of statues, people today fail to comprehend that great people whose triumphs in history reached dizzying heights, were also equally guilty of outrageous and unspeakable behaviour.
It was wrong then. It is wrong now.
People are more disturbed by the mob action than the actual reason for the removal of their statues.
There is understandable and justifiable aversion at the sight of people taking matters into their own hands. But taking them down through lawful process gets so controversial that it never gets done and all the skeletons remain in the closets.
Leslie Michael, Maple Ridge
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