I have before me the campaign brochure of Halifax mayoralty candidate Matt Whitman.
His number one priority, in this Covid Year, with our local economy & health in the dumper, is “honouring the past“ by “respecting” history and “opposing statue removal”.
That is dogwhistle talk for opposing Black Lives Matters, and Aboriginal Lives Matter, and Acadian/Metis Lives matter and Scottish Lives Matter —- the only lives that still really matter are white anglo saxon protestant lives - like that of Edward Cornwallis.
I am an amateur Nova Scotian historian and I definitely want us to “remember” all Nova Scotian history - the bad as well as the good.
But if “honouring” NS history is to be limited to honouring Edward Cornwallis‘s life over those of his Gaelic and Micmac (sic) victims, than no, I am opposed to it.
If a statue is to remain up honouring the Butcher of Lochaber than why not then erect one to all the metro Halifax barbers who refused to cut the hair of the black kids I went to school with ?
Yet I know first hand, that many Scottish descendants of the people of Lochaber Scotland, now living in Lochaber Nova Scotia, support Matt Whitman’s efforts to keep the statues of Edward Cornwallis up and front and centre.
Unbelievably, their Lochaber Scotland ancestors were among those that Cornwallis’s troops raped and murdered under orders from the English Crown not to take any prisoners !
Google it if you don’t believe me.
Before we condemn rural American voters for being too stupid to realize that a vote for Big City Billionaire Trump is against their own best interests, we must ask why then would Gaelic-Nova Scotian voters in the province of New Scotland also be so intent on honouring one of the butchers of Culledon who then went on to rampage against their own ancestors from the Lochaber region of Inverness-shire ?
"And how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived could not be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline — anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes." - George Orwell (Inside the whale).
ReplyDeleteResist statue removal, citizens bring them down, call those people animals. Dehumanization in a couple steps.