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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 27, 2005
Shameful episodes
A friend called my attention to a subhead over a minor article in another newspaper's Canadian budget coverage this week: "Commemorative programs to ensure Canadians never forget shameful episodes." Apparently there is so much surplus money floating around Ottawa that $25 million can now be set aside for the previously unimaginable purpose of making Canadians feel worse about themselves. This friend shares my droll sense of humour. He immediately proposed that we privatize this "worthwhile Canadian initiative" by setting specific days of the year aside to commemorate "shameful episodes" in the lives of our other friends. The possibilities could easily consume an idle morning. Why don't we every June 22nd commemorate the day Gaufridus (not his real name) got himself kicked out of Pauper's Pub after making himself a nuisance to some blonde at the bar? Or on Aug. 10th the moment when Ludovicus discovered that his parking brake had not been engaged as his Volkswagen sledged into the front grill of the Cadillac belonging to his employer. Or set aside Sept. 12th to remember when Iuliana told the spectacularly funny joke about her companion being "raptured" only to find that her audience consisted of stone-faced born-again Christians. We needn't stop at incidents of inconsequential personal humiliation. Crimes more poignant have been committed by many of us. Why not Dec. 3rd to commemorate the day the jilted and despairing Aemilia had an abortion? Or give Feb. 27th to the day Iosephus shot his father after that father had goaded him into a psychopathic rage? They are acts like these latter which are more truly shameful. Always there were reasons causes explanations for why the criminal did what he did -- and these reasons will never be good enough. Yet what happened happened and the past is the past -- we must pray for God's mercy. The shameful episodes in Canadian history the commemoration of which our government proposes to fund with my money are for the most part truly shameful. To take one example the day in 1939 that the S.S. St. Louis bound from Hamburg with 930 Jewish refugees aboard was refused landing in the Canadian port of Halifax. It wasn't the only shameful episode involving just that ship. The authorities at Havana had already sent gunboats to chase it away. President Roosevelt ignored an eloquently pleading telegram on their behalf and even those with American quota numbers were refused landing as the ship sailed hopelessly along the Florida coast. Finally Britain France Belgium and the Netherlands agreed to take in these poor defenceless people. But those who landed on the Continent soon wound up back in Nazi hands. What we did at Halifax cannot be excused any more than the history of slavery can be excused by arguing that mores and manners were different in those days. What begins to explain less proceeds to explain more: there was open anti-Semitism in Canada. It wasn't just the government refusing to admit Jews. This was before the world knew that the Holocaust would happen but that too is slight extenuation. The world had already been fully apprised of Hitler's attitude towards the "Jewish race". And Canada is not excused because the Americans and Cubans were equally guilty. I don't want to leave any doubt that the incident fully merited the description shameful . Nor have I any desire to bury the history of human infamy out of human sight. We cannot grow towards holiness or even decency without realizing fully the monstrous things our ancestors have done and which we remain capable of doing. So perhaps it is good that a plaque be put at an appropriate location in Halifax harbour recalling the day and what happened on it. And let the incident stand in the full history which we teach our children. But spreading money among special interest groups for purposes like this is invidious. It is to invite special pleading. It is to use events from the past to set one group against another today: for the moment we appoint an official victim group we have implied another group is the official perpetrator. It is done to advance a very nasty multicultural ideology in which the government sets itself up as the broker between rival ethnic claimants to victimhood. It would be better to do nothing than to do this. If we have sins for which to atone let us atone for them as Canadians. Let us not think we can balance books by doling blood money to the people who cry loudest. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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