MARK MILKE It’s popular these days to cancel historical figures when their views do not exactly mimic our own. For those who practice such deliberate historic amnesia, streets, bridges, and entire neighbourhoods are renamed, or statues removed, to satisfy an Orwellian need to block out what is assumed to be a blot on the human species — men and women who came before us and built Canada. But go down that road, and one can inevitably cancel any figure in history who might have accomplished anything useful despite having error-prone views on some other subject.
Ponder a few examples. One famous Indian activist once advised German Jews, after Kristallnacht, to practice non-violence toward the German SS. He also wrote Adolf Hitler in 1941 to inform him that he, the writer, did not “believe that you are the monster described by your opponents.
” That was Mahatma Gandhi, who was egregiously naive e about Hitler and the Nazis, but was right to demand independence for India from the British. In the early 19th century, progressives assumed that eugenics — the assumption that race was a real “thing” and mattered to outcomes — was scientific. They were wrong.
Eugenics was pseudoscientific nonsense. But many progressives who held that view, the Famous Five suffragists among them, were also active in the early feminist movement to gain the vote and equal rights for women. Early progressives were dead wrong about eugenics, but right to argue women deserved the same rights as .