Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Dear Mr. Harper, when is now?

This is a few days old (h/t Catfur) but it is worth repeating; and it follows well on Dag's previous post.

George Jonas asks what it means for today's political and religious leaders to apologize for the sins of their forebears, as Stephen Harper recently did to aboriginal Canadians for the residential schools. Can an apology mean anything if it does not come from the one(s) who did the wrong? One rightly doubts if the man apologizing can't see how he is still immersed in the latest version of the sin for which he is apologizing.

It is one sign of the leftist that he keeps playing the same game that he piles abuse on his forebears for playing. For example, we get the "post-colonial" politicos treating "third-world" people as victims in need of an updated white man's burden, in response to all the racism of the past, all so the "guilty party" can remains justified in taking centre stage and not treating all people by the same standards. We get Barak Obama making a career out of promising, in effect, to keep "his" people forever mired in dependency on the welfare state.

Well is Stephen Harper also something along these lines...?
Mr. Harper’s mea culpa for the cultural arrogance of officials riding roughshod over indigenous families under the pretext of “assimilation” shows he would have made a great prime minister 50 or 75 years ago. But lavishly apologizing for past mistakes is one thing. Recognizing present ones is quite another.

A prime minister for our times would recognize that, while he’s saying sorry for residential schools, his entire country is being turned into a residential school. He’d notice the censorious state’s intrusions into contemporary life under the pretext of “public hygiene” or “human rights.” He’d apologize for the cultural arrogance of Canada’s hate- or health-police trying to tell editors what to put into their periodicals, clergymen into their sermons or parents into their mouths.

What about it, Mr. Harper? You’re Prime Minister — any interest in being a great one? Now that you’ve tackled the social engineers of yesterday, will you take on today’s [expletive deleted]?

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