Montreal City Weblog

Kate 15:13 on 2020-08-31 Permalink Reply  

• Jebediah Pallindrome 15:26 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  Robbie Burns
  Brother Andre
  Polytechnique memorial
  Wilfrid Laurier
  Mihai Eminescu
  John Young
  Copernicus
  Georges-Etienne Cartier
  Emilie Gamelin
  Simon Bolivar
  Salvador Allende
  Chenier
  Irish cholera victims commemorative stone

  I haven’t hearch much argument re these but maybe I is wrong

• Kate 16:51 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  I knew nothing about Mihai Eminescu nor do I know where his memorial is. But Wikipedia has this to say: Due to his conservative nationalistic views, Eminescu was easily adopted as an icon by the Romanian right. […] It has also been revealed that Eminescu demanded strong anti-Jewish legislation on the German model, saying, among other things, that “the Jew does not deserve any rights anywhere in Europe because he is not working.”

• MarcG 16:52 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  Norman Bethune?

• John B 16:56 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  Look up Bethune in China.

• Kate 17:04 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  And those Irish cholera victims! I’ve heard they made a real mess in those fever sheds.

• Jebediah Pallindrome 17:18 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  @Kate – I saw Romanian poet and thought, ‘this should be fine’

  Ruh roh!

  Also yeah good addition @MarcG – I had forgotten Bethune.

  Remarkably, no one seems to ever make a big stink about John Cabot but I don’t think he did much more than sail here.

• Ian 17:29 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  Raoul Wallenberg

• Kate 18:25 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  John B, that statue of Bethune was donated by the Chinese government. What unpopular thing is Bethune supposed to have done?

• John B 19:10 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  It doesn’t look like he was super bad, but he did join up with the Communist Party of China and work as a doctor, I think for the Mao’s army, (my quick Googling is unclear if he was actually in the employ of Mao’s army). He does appear to have been a communist who spent a night chatting it up with Mao in a cave. If we’re looking for blemish-free heroes someone who shared Mao’s beliefs and helped bring him to power would not be appropriate.

  Not that he didn’t do amazing things in his life. He’s just not 100% perfect, (as most people are not).

  I read somewhere recently that Chinese people actually come to Canada to see the Bethune sights. He’s pretty well-known in China, probably more than in Canada.

• Chris 19:40 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  And don’t forget “Mahatma” Gandhi, I believe there’s a bust of him in the eponymous park. His was a racist and slept naked with young girls.

• Michael Black 20:41 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  Have you even read a biography of Gandhi-ji?

  Forty years ago biographies noted his eccentricities. He didn’t have sex with those young women (who were legal age, merely considerably younger than him), and since you seem to imply it, he wasn’t a minister or monk, just religious in his own way.

  His “racism” was passing. Besides, it is dwarfed by the racism of the greater society, the one that he had to campaign against.

  Once India tossed off its chains, other countries looked to Gandhi for inspirstion, if not his nonviolence. That includes the ANC before they went to violence.

  And here’s the fine print. The US pacifists sitting out WWII in prison looked to Gandhi, and that included Jim Peck, George Houser, Bayard Rustin, and James Farmer. Not only did some of them campaign to desegregate the prison dining halls, but after the war they put Gandhi’s work into practice. In work against war, but also against segregation.

  Bayard Rustin went to India in 1948 to learn from Gandhi, except he got there too late, Gandhi had been assassinated.

  They organized and paricipated in the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947 and the original Freedom Ride in 1961.

  They connected Gandhi to the civil rights movement, though I read recently that another big name had actually spent time with Gandhi.

  People tearing down statues react to little factoids and then make their decision. Since all of this happened, he can’t be the evil that you believe enough that you think his statues should come down.

  You should be way more concerned that we have parks named after MLK, Nelson Mandela and Gandhi in the same neighborhood. Presumably because “those people” living there would be most concerned with their lives. But they should be spread out, and in more “valuable” places. It’s no different from putting a Black Lives Matter banner away from downtown. These things matter to all of us.

• Chris 22:07 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  Michael, you have read too much into my two little sentences. My own personal view is that celebrating/remembering people who made major contributions should not be predicated on those people being perfect, because no one is. Gandhi and Macdonald were not perfect, but they made major and important contributions. We should celebrate their achievements while also remembering their failings.

  Just as some have a hate-on for Macdonald, some have a hate-on for Gandhi. This summer his statues have been vandalized in London, Washington, Amsterdam, etc. His statues have been torn down in Ghana and elsewhere. Spend a little time googling “gandhi statue”.

  Do you really think Gandhi sleeping with 18 year olds decades younger than him would survive today with #MeToo? With the power imbalance between them? Was it real consent? And his “passing” racism? He was a 20th century man, some would say he should have known better than 19th century Macdonald. For many, he just wasn’t perfect enough, and therefore must be cancelled.

• Douglas 22:58 on 2020-08-31 Permalink

  Ghandi said “black people are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals”.

  So Ghandi was a racist. Why are we allowing racists to have statues placed and worshipped? We should take those statues of racists down and turn and plowshare it.

  Or are we okay with racists because they did something we like and approve of?

  Those youths with pseudo educations need to actually pick up books and read, instead of existing in their bubbles and thinking themselves woke and smart.

• Ian 08:14 on 2020-09-01 Permalink

  Michael Black, for all that Western thinkers took as inspiration from Gandhi, he is also largely responsible for the insane violence that took place during partition of 1947. Perhaps you have not heard of the Death Trains. My wife’s grandfather was there, as part of the international peacekeeping force, made effectively powerless they watched as up to 2 million people died in the violence surrounding partition. To a not insignificant extent the philosophy behind partition is what led to the current state of extreme Hindu Nationalism.

  As far as Norman Bethune is concerned, while Mao is certainly a problematic character, Bethune was a selfless & highly principled person who first served in the Spanish Civil War and then later in China during the Manchurian War with Japan. His contributions to surgery and field medicine go well beyond the two years he spent in China, but regardless, he is considered a hero of the Chinese people, not some mere Maoist functionary as John B implies.

• Ephraim 08:42 on 2020-09-01 Permalink

  @Ian – I’m sure there are plenty of people upset that Wallenberg saved Jews. Even he isn’t free of someone hating him.

• Meezly 09:37 on 2020-09-01 Permalink

  “Gandhi and Macdonald were not perfect, but they made major and important contributions. We should celebrate their achievements while also remembering their failings.”

  Of course no leader is 100% perfect. They were a product of their times and may have had political beliefs that are now wrong. Uh huh fine. I just kind of draw the line at leaders who, y’know, had some genocidal leanings. I would think that is enough to question their major contributions. Esp. when those contributions were made to benefit only specific groups of people at the expense of many people’s lives.

• JaneyB 12:10 on 2020-09-01 Permalink

  Maybe we should stick to public art (eg: no notables). Sometimes people hate it but that’s about it.

• Ian 21:04 on 2020-09-01 Permalink

  Honestly, monuments are some of the most boring public art we can have – that’s why when there are sculptures to commemorate anything we almost never have statues anymore. Maybe this is a quaint artifact of the past that we should just let go of when it becomes cringy.
  For those who cry “HISTORY”, we have a Nelson’s column in Montreal but I am certain that very, very few people know who Lord Nelson was let alone why there is a column let alone why in fact he is important to the history of Montreal. At least some generic art sculpture would be prettier and more visually interesting.

• Kate 23:06 on 2020-09-01 Permalink

  There are nice carvings of ships around the base of our Nelson’s column, and I like the fact that Montreal’s is older than London’s, although not as old as Glasgow’s. Wikipedia also informs me our Nelson’s Column is the oldest monument in the city and oldest war monument in Canada.

  This Le Devoir article (which I link in an item above) mentions how in 1963 the FLQ blew up Wolfe’s column on the Plains of Abraham and a statue of Queen Victoria in Quebec City similar to ours in Victoria Square, but they never got around to blowing up our Nelson’s Column like the Irish did with the one in Dublin.