09.04.2017 09:23 AM

Hey, I know: let’s put David Duke’s name on the side of a school


5 Comments

  1. Gyor says:

    When David Duke founds a country like Canada, sure.

    Which will never happen.

  2. Jim Keegan says:

    It is unfair and wrong to hold the views and comments of people from previous centuries to today’s standards. Macdonald was only voicing the opinion of the vast majority of Canadians at the time. Dare I say that had you been born in 1833, you would very likely have held the same view.

  3. Steve T says:

    It’s a dangerous path to start judging people 150 years ago based on today’s standards. Even more recent history needs to be viewed in the proper context. The eugenics example (Tommy Douglas et al) is the most obvious one, but there are lots of others.

    History is written, and re-written, by what is in vogue at that particular moment. Every generation feels they are the most “enlightened”, and loves to cast dispersions on prior generations. Most often, it’s simply a way to avoid confronting our own modern shortcomings.

    If these folks (who want to remove John A Macdonald’s name from schools) would re-focus their attention on something a bit more pressing, we’d all be a lot better off.

  4. Christian says:

    Yes, John A. said it. But so too did a lot of people back then. Heck, they held similar views about the Irish, blacks, Chinese and just about everyone in every country colonised by a European power. As awful as it is, I don’t think we can hold people of the past (who are also now long dead) to the standards of today. What we can do is try to atone for and fix the mistakes made, learn from what was done and (hopefully) never, ever do it again. If part of atoning is by removing names from buildings then OK go ahead. But if the goal is to completely remove this person from history, eliminating both the good they did and the bad then that is not appropriate and in my view a mistake because how are future generations going to learn? Put the good and the bad on as equal a footing as possible and let the lessons flow from there.

  5. Kevin says:

    Please. John A was then, this is now. People used to believe the earth was flat, too. I can’t change that. But I can help make sure they don’t believe it any more. Frankly, I think a better use of time and money would be to work towards clean water, education, job opportunities, health services and so on, and leave the statue toppling for another time.

Leave a Reply to Steve T Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.