RE: Remove the Gandhi statue from Richcraft Hall, Nov. 9-15
As a passionate reader of history, I believe one thing that seems to be largely misunderstood in our generation, is the concept that our morals now are not the same as morals generations before. I notice now a trend where we seek to impose our morals on the past, which simply did not have them.
A constant throughout history is the cliquish nature of humanity, the having of an in-group and an out-group, which will often be based along ethnic or racial lines. Let us remember Gandhi, as well as the founders of our country, and most individuals in all of history existed before the word ‘racism’ was in common use. They existed before the very idea that you could be ‘racist,’ was even a notion. If you were to call someone in Gandhi’s time in South Africa a racist, their reaction would be one of confusion. They just would not understand the point you were trying to make.
Calling Gandhi a racist is like calling John F. Kennedy transphobic. It’s a notion that never even occurred to the man, and to pave over all his accomplishments on such a premise, and to tar his name and erase him from history on the basis of opinions he held that don’t meet today’s moral standards, is just silly.
Imposing our standards on history, is to erase nearly everything before the 1960s. Abraham Lincoln said really deplorable things about African Americans, are we to erase him? As he professed in one of his debates, “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”
All right, let’s start demolishing his statues too, shall we? Many of the abolitionists were racists in the United States, thinking the best thing to do would be abolishing slavery and sending all African Americans to Liberia, in order to create a purely white country. It is simple folly to apply our morality to people who never would have conceived it.
I imagine if we take down Gandhi, there are no historical figures that you wouldn’t remove. Samuel de Champlain, George Vancouver, John A. Macdonald—guess what? They were all racists. They accomplished great things in their lives, and you will find statues and memorials to them throughout Canada. Our country would not exist without them. But I guess it’s time we tore them all down.
Gandhi is an imperfect figure in history—he held regressive views. So did most people throughout the arch of history. We are at the point today, where we seem to have a society that is relatively moral, where people get along. Where we engage in peaceful protests instead of violent uprisings, and vote for our leaders. An important question to ask is, how did we get here?
One of the stepping stones along the way was Gandhi. Was Gandhi equivalent to the standards we’d hold people to now? Of course not. Should we remove all statues of him, and stop honouring his accomplishments because of it? No, because if we go down this road, we will have nothing from the past left to honour.
If there are any historical figures whose memories are worth defending, one of them is Gandhi. There are historical figures whose accomplishments far outweigh their misdeeds. Abraham Lincoln was a racist, but because of him, the U.S. no longer has slavery. John A. Macdonald was a bigot, but because of him our country exists, and America didn’t colonize everything west of Ontario.
So please, let’s stop demanding we tear down statues of people with views that don’t add up to today’s, when the reasons we hold today’s views are because of their accomplishments.
