Know a Civilization by Whom It Honours
by Jonathon Van Maren, The European Conservative:
The pantheon of old heroes is being cleared to make room for icons of the Sexual Revolution.
This month, I’ve been working out of the Brussels office of this publication. I walk to work each morning from an apartment near the Palace of Justice, past a profusion of statuary—royalty, doctors, diplomats, artists. Most have long since been forgotten by those who pass by, but I’ve tried to read the often-faded names and descriptions at the base of each. One of my favourite things about European cities is the forgotten men of marble and stone that stand tall over traffic, a testament to G.K. Chesterton’s admonition that our traditions are a “democracy of the dead.”
Statues have been a hot topic since the eruption of iconoclasm triggered by the George Floyd riots, which began in the U.S. but swiftly spread across the Western world. In the UK, London’s Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square was graffitied; the statue of Queen Victoria in Leeds was vandalized; her statue was also toppled in front of the Manitoba legislature in Canada, as was a bronze statue of Queen Elizabeth II. In the U.S., statues of the Founding Fathers were targeted and, confusingly, a Wisconsin statue of anti-slavery activist Col. Hans Christian Heg, who died fighting for the Union in the U.S. Civil War, was dragged away from the statehouse, decapitated, and tossed into a lake.
There were hundreds of similar incidents, in which historical illiterates decided they knew just enough to topple and destroy our society’s silent witnesses. I suspect one of the reasons they do this is because they cannot suppress a secret and entirely accurate suspicion that these stern watchers would have held them in utter contempt. Plenty has been written about the statue-smashers, but my morning walks have frequently had me considering another point. It is true that the tearing down of statues is symbolic of decline. It is conversely true that we can learn much about a society by whom it chooses to honour.
For example, Canadian columnist and assisted suicide enthusiast André Pierre Picard, a vocal advocate of offering lethal injections to desperate Canadians suffering from mental illness, was recently awarded the Order of Canada, Canada’s second-most prestigious award, for “his dedication to advancing public health understanding and practices.” Euthanasia accounted for 4.1% of recorded Canadian deaths in 2022. Picard’s analysis: “We have a good MAiD system. It’s served people well.” By “served” he means “gave them lethal injections”; by “good,” he means that this is being done effectively and on a mass scale.
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