In Canadian law hate speech against the living is a crime, so why is it acceptable to express hatred for the dead, in speech and writings?
The minute you die, your obituary can legally be riddled with hateful innuendo, if not outright condemnation. Your obitus (death, in Latin), if you're from a white colonial background, is an occasion for legal abuse and character assassination. So be "obitu-wary", if you've ever stuck your neck out for a traditional cause: yesterday's hero is today's "racist", "eugenicist" or trans-phobic.
The name of a former hero might be erased from schools, government buildings, theatres, streets and parks, by people who feel "triggered" or "hurt" by this person's existence. If that's not an expression of hate, what is it?
Take, in Victoria BC, the names on schools built in the early 20th century, such as Frank Hobbs, Margaret Jenkins, Elizabeth Buckley and Edward Milne. Probably most people in the third decade of the 21st century don't know who these figures were, but that won't stop their names being systemically erased from schools and streets. (They were educators, councillors, and humanitarians who had emigrated from England, Scotland and Wales respectively.)
The outgoing Council of Victoria BC has de-platformed Canada's first Prime Minister: Sir John A. Macdonald has been exiled-in-effigy, his statue shipped in a box right out of town because a group of aboriginals decided to hate him.
Name-blanking is one of history's time-honoured ways of hating figures who have fallen from fickle grace, and this Systemic Erase-ism is reaching epidemic proportions in Canada. Even the very plants in our gardens and the birds in our skies are threatened with scientific re-classification, if named after "colonial" specimen collectors. (The AUDUBAN movement?)
We do have to wonder why it's slander to hate-speak about the living but not the dead, who can no longer defend themselves. It's up to the fair-minded historian without a tribal identity-agenda to do it for them. And it's up to the ordinary citizen to resist the knee-jerk Systemic Erase-ism which is meant to re-arrange the past.
