Memoricide

The debate which followed the accidental Parliamentary celebration of a 98-year-old veteran of the Nazi Waffen SS 14th Grenadier Division reveals a political class which is hopelessly immature.

Conservative MPs, who happily applauded along with the rest, insinuated that the Liberal Party is sympathetic to the early 20th century German ideology of Nazism – a clownish accusation. The obvious absurdity of this claim is matched only by the irony that elements of the Liberal Party have been levelling the same baseless insinuation against the Conservative Party for years.

Truth matters little when the jokers in suits want to score cheap political points. Our political discourse is sliding ever closer to the surreal reality show of American politics, where a debate moderator recently asked Republican candidates which competitor they wanted to “vote off the island”.

The smoke and bells of the circus obscured the significance of the event, namely a widespread historical illiteracy resulting from the steady chipping away at the elementary and high school history curriculum. Through no great fault of their own, most citizens, particularly younger generations, receive little formal instruction in national or international history. They are cursed to live in an eternal present tense.

During my education in public schools from the mid 2000s to the late 2010s, I learned little about Canadian history, apart from tidbits on the canoe-making process of the coastal indigenous peoples. Everything I know about our national story is self-taught.

And forget about the Reformation, Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval Europe, the Age of Discovery, the Crusades, and the Renaissance, which were all unceremoniously ignored. There was, however, an optional Social Justice class, in which I provoked the wrath of my woke classmates and teacher in numerous discussion circles, and was reluctantly handed an A+ for participation and coursework.

The destruction of a people’s history is known as “memoricide”. The Conservative and Liberal Parties are both complicit in this ongoing process.

The Liberals cater to a fanatical element of the Left which seeks to topple statues, cancel expressions of patriotism, remove old books from libraries, and teach our children that national history is reducible to “systemic racism”. We have seen this phenomenon locally, with the closing and “decolonizing” of the third floor of the Royal BC Museum, and more recently our local library’s discarding of a large number of old Canadian history books.

While the Conservative Party nominally opposes the woke rewriting of Canadian history, they nevertheless endorse unrestricted free markets and free trade, which erase memory on a more insidious level. The spread of multinationals threatens historic Canadian industries and family businesses, while big box stores and chains erase the local character of organic communities.

Patriots of all political leanings should oppose memoricide, whether it comes in the form of a woke rewriting of a school textbook, the replacement of a local café with a McDonald’s, or the toppling of a statue of a great Canadian. The radicals and philistines erasing our history are powerless against the grassroots efforts of concerned citizens.

Editor’s note: My bi-monthly Counter Current column is originally published in the Islands Marketplace paper (islandsmarketplace.com/issue.pdf).