MajorsCorner …..Back at the club

We have returned from our Mexican paradise after three short months to a rainy Victoria and the bosom of my club, the home of homes.

I will not bore you with the monstrous behaviour of my wife’s two cats, Pericles and Bertram, aboard our return flight, other than to remark that I would be far from surprised if the very patient airline (WestJet) banned all cats for the foreseeable future based on our fellow passengers’ reaction to our two. I cannot apologize enough to the chap beside us whose beautiful tropical trousers were soaked by our pair of fiends.
The other day Mr. John Catacomb and I had lunch together at the club; he is one of the reasons I so love being a clubman. Our topics ranged from Charles the Bald to whether we should tear down all statues of historical figures.
On the first, Charles was a grandson of Charlemagne and the youngest son of Louis the Pious. He had a son called Charles the Child and another called Louis the Stammerer. Don’t you love the names? Why, if you sneezed once or twice at court, I should imagine you became the Sneezer. Charles was the Holy Roman Emperor for a while in the ninth century. All marvellous grist for the mill.
As for the statues, I noticed that Oxford was approached by students to pull down the infamous or famous, depending on your stance, Cecil Rhodes memorial, because of his use of slave workers and because he fomented war on behalf of his gold and diamond companies. Ironically one or two of the students are Rhodes scholars, having a free education put in place by the man in question.
Canadians were not far behind our British cousins in wanting the statue of John Macdonald, our Father of Confederation, at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo to be torn down also. Not sure why, probably to do with First Nations or women, it seems most anger nowadays is targeted on these sort of things. Just this morning I noticed that Harvard wants to change its coat of arms because the family that gave so much original money to this storied institution was in the slave trade or at least used slave labour.
Cannot something good come from something bad?
Every rich landowner of those days had slaves of some sort. It was pervasive throughout the world. Those were the times they lived in. Not ours, theirs.
For years, my children used to call me judgmental, and maybe still do, but youngsters today have passed judgment on their targets and God help you if you come to some ancient’s aid. The proof of guilt is in black and white and must be true.
It is. But it was not guilt in those days, it was success. Washington and Jefferson had hundreds of slaves but so did others. When Oklahoma was about to become a state before the American Civil War, it had the choice of being a slave or free state. They voted to become a slave state, led by the first nations of Oklahoma, fully 10 per cent of whose population consisted of black slaves. Indigenous peoples throughout North and South American kept enemy captives slaves as a matter of routine and good management.
In Canada there is a statue of five women on Parliament Hill, and rightly so, because they were responsible for obtaining the vote for their sex. However at least one or two of them were also known to support antisemitism, eugenics and sterilization. No one is perfect, it seems, no one.
Macdonald starved Sitting Bull after he and his followers found sanctuary in Canada from soldiers intent on avenging Custer’s death. The U.S. was furious with Canada for providing a getaway for the wanted men, and since they had a much larger army that Macdonald’s, the PM decided to withhold food as a way of convincing Sitting Bull to return across the border.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, it became known that fifth columnists in Honolulu had helped the Japanese airforce and navy plot the position of ships in the harbour. As a result President Franklin Roosevelt set up internment camps for American citizens of Japanese decent. He then phoned the Canadian PM, Mackenzie King and “suggested” he do the same, and he did.
This country has since apologized to Japanese Canadians, which some people objected to, especially those vets who saw the slaughter in Hong Kong that Japan did not feel the need to acknowledge, and the rape of Nanking.
Who was right and who was wrong?
I am sure in the future we will be blamed for many perceived outrages too many to list here, but lots, that is for sure. I just hope there is not a statue of me to smear with horrible things and perhaps even tear down. No fear there, I think.
Copyright Christopher Dalton 2016