And the Rest of It

A lot going on ...

 

An Ontario town is considering bringing a statue of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald back out of storage after it was defaced in 2020 amid a heated debate over the legacy of Canada’s first prime minister.

Wilmot, a small community outside of Waterloo, Ont., has been mired in controversy since 2013 after a group of citizens offered to privately finance the construction of 22 statues of former Canadian leaders. Macdonald was the first statue constructed for the project, known as the Prime Ministers Path. It was first displayed in 2015, moved in 2016 and put into storage after it was splashed with red paint in 2020. Four years later, the town restarted consultations on the value of the project, and in April will hear recommendations about what to do with the statues of Macdonald and other prime ministers.

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Wilmot could become one of the first municipalities to propose re-erecting a statue of Macdonald after tributes to the founding father were vandalized and torn down across the country.

City council member Steven Martin said he views the conversation unfolding in Wilmot as part of a broader pattern across the country.

“When the Prime Ministers are portrayed, they can represent painful times in peoples’ lives, such as the Residential Schools or even Canada turning down ships of Jewish people during World War II who then went on to their deaths,” Martin told National Post in an email. “I believe that across Canada as we deal with our history and rename streets, buildings and other locations, in order to not glorify painful events, then we are dealing with issues in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”

 

I'll just leave this right here:

It was a consequential year in ways both familiar and forgotten. It was the year of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”; of Louis Pasteur first vaccinating a child against rabies; of the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time. The year 1885 was the year of the second Louis Riel rebellion as well as the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was also a year of disease — of a smallpox outbreak that killed thousands. It was the year when empire loyalists demanded revenge for the death of Gen. Gordon in Khartoum. Canada’s international trade was on the block in the midst of a severe recession, and Canada’s treaty with the United States regulating the fisheries was set to expire. It was a year when Macdonald attempted to expand the franchise, to allow women, status Indians and a larger segment of the working class to vote.

Now, Mexico, about that ... :

That’s popular Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum participating recently in some kind of ceremony meant to honor indigenous women. When she was inaugurated last year, she held a public ritual in which indigenous women “cleansed” her. A friend from Central America told me on Friday that based on what his Mexican relatives tell him, he would not be at all surprised if Mexico City reverted to Tenochtitlán, its Aztec name. If that happens, it will be because of the broader de-Christianization and re-indigenization of the country.

Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who defeated the Aztec Empire, is buried in Mexico City, in a small, austere tomb located inside a church. The church discourages photographing the tomb, owing to the sensitivity of Cortés’s legacy. In contemporary Mexico, Cortés is widely despised as the chief villain behind colonialism. AMLO, Sheinbaum’s predecessor in office (they are members of the same left-wing party), heavily leaned in to demonizing Cortés and promoting pre-Christian indigenous culture. This is about left-wing populism.

We should not forget that whatever evils the conquistadores wreaked on the indigenous Mexicans, their defeat of the Aztecs stopped a satanic empire that engaged in ritual human sacrifices in massive numbers. The machinery of systematic mass murder defeated by Cortés and his men was such that humanity would not see anything like it again until the Holocaust.

 

 

What a fix this is:

High-stakes talks between senior delegations from Ukraine and the United States on how to end Kyiv’s three-year war with Moscow opened in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, hours after Russian air defenses shot down 337 Ukrainian drones over Russia.