Geoff Russ: Macdonald's critics don't just hate our first PM. They hate Canada
In many cases, the national holiday of 'Australia Day' has been cancelled, with calls to rename it 'Invasion Day.'
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Like Canada, Australia is increasingly portrayed as a primordially evil settler state that is irredeemable until a sort of bureaucratic cultural revolution takes place.
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Last year, a school field trip in Toronto resulted in students of ' colonizer ' ethnicity being asked to wear blue to set them apart from their classmates.
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It was an inappropriate, if not dehumanizing, decision by the school staff, who should have lost their jobs over it. That is all part of the process of demoralization and alienation.
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This racial division of society is a branch from the same tree that sprouted 'Kill the Boer' in South Africa.
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For context, 'Kill the Boer' is a song that emerged during the apartheid era in resistance to South Africa's white-minority government that ended in 1994.
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The tune was revived in the 2010s by far-left political leader Julius Malema, who routinely accuses the remaining white population of hoarding their wealth and continuing to oppress the country's Black majority.
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Malema has insisted that the title of the song is a metaphor, stating that, 'we've not called for the killing of white people, at least for now.'
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That sort of extreme discourse has not been broached in Canada, and people should not expect mass violence anytime soon. However, the underlying assumptions about the value of 'colonizers' hardly differ from Malema's.
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Take the reaction from the hard-left to the massacre of Israeli citizens by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
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Former Ontario NDP MPP Sarah Jama's first reaction was to issue a statement accusing Israel of apartheid and engaging in 'settler colonialism.'
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Jama made sure to mention that she, too, was 'a politician who is participating in this settler colonial system.'
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The inability to wait until the victims' blood was dry before equivocating was telling.
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Others, such as a lecturer at Langara College in Vancouver, celebrated the ' amazing, brilliant offensive ' as an act of liberation, and have been unapologetic about doing so to this day.
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'Kill the Boer' is not an isolated phenomenon, it is part and parcel of the global decolonial movement.
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Macdonald is being wiped from the public eye for two reasons.
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The first is that he was once commemorated with more monuments in Canada than any other prime minister, and was thus an easy target. Secondly, his efforts created the country that so many people despise.
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It is not so much Macdonald whom they seek to dishonour as it is Canada itself.
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