Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Remembrance . . . and Usurpation   [Mark Steyn]

One of the consistent tactics of the post-modern transnational utopian left is to co-opt the national inheritance to undermine that inheritance. On this 90th anniversary of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, Jennifer Lynch, Queen's Counsel, the hack bureaucrat who presides over my tormentors at the Canadian Human Rights Commission, decided to gatecrash the Remembrance Day ceremonies in Ottawa. Or as she puts it:

This year, for the first time, the Canadian Human Rights Commission has the honour of laying a wreath at the National Remembrance Day Ceremony. The wreath will be placed by Chief Commissioner Jennifer Lynch, Q.C, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Well, fine. If you want to commemorate the 60th anniversary of that, why don't you push off and organize your own ceremony? But that's not what Remembrance Day is about - in Ottawa, London or even in the tiny colonial backwater of Grand Turk (where I was yesterday, as the locals made their preparations). November 11th is a day to honor the sacrifice of soldiers of the Queen who fought for their country in brutal bloody wars Commissioner Lynch's self-serving press release can't even be bothered to mention, as Ezra Levant notes.

This is one of the signature techniques of the left: The co-option of historical memory. You still have the same outward dress — the cenotaph, the dignitaries, the poppies, the old stooped veterans — but the meaning of the event is hijacked and inverted. The contamination of Remembrance Day by this ghastly woman is disgusting even by her standards.

By the way, Canada's pseudo-"human rights" bureaucracies are in sustained systemic breach of key aspects of the UN Declaration, including the right to the presumption of innocence and the right to due process. Having been on the receiving end of Commissioner Lynch's "human rights" for the best part of a year, I regard her as, at best, an ahistorical nitwit unfit for public office. But, if she's so eager to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the UN declaration, why doesn't she get her own thug bureaucracy to comply with it?

11/11 12:34 PMShare