Geoff Russ: People who hate our institutions do not belong in them
Whether it is the Oxford Union or an art gallery in Winnipeg, neither should be abandoned to the anti-civilisational left.
If you hate an institution and whoever built it, why run it?
Until Tuesday, George Abaraonye was the president-elect of the Oxford Union, the fabled debating society at Oxford. A coalition of Union members, including a sizable contingent of alumni, voted to remove him from his imminent position, and for good reason.
In September, Abaraonye dragged the Oxford Union into the worst sort of disrepute. He had revelled in the shooting of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, and screenshots showed he gloated, “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f---ing go… got shot loool” in messages to friends.
People were shocked, alumni were outraged, and donors threatened to withhold future funds if Abaraonye was not removed. Even though the former president-elect is gone, he managed to harm an institution he never truly cared for, valuing it only as a platform to damage it.
During the fight to remove Abaraonye, it was revealed that he ran for president of the Oxford Union for one simple reason: he hates it, a motive revealed by his own texts. Across the West, he and many more people have infiltrated storied institutions that they despise, capturing them to punish their founders and audiences.
The best local museums, most reliable archives, and your favourite art galleries are mostly run by people who do not respect those who nurtured them into what they are. They inherited excellence, then sneer at it.
In the case of the Oxford Union, the alumni still had a cultural muscle memory of what the debating society should be, a respected forum for a dignified clash of ideas whose legacy is greater than any one man’s ego. That will not always be the case as those alumni are replaced by a modern cadre of nihilists who place no value on English history and have no respect for English civilisation. If stewards forget the purpose, the institution forgets itself.
If a similar corps of upstanding people exists in Canada to protect institutions from bad actors, they have not yet shown their faces or raised their voices.
Consider the situation in Winnipeg.
The administrators of the University of Manitoba’s art collection have embarked on a quest to cleanse their holdings of paintings deemed “problematic”. University curators replaced them with contemporary pieces that are neither tested nor proven worthy of displacing their historic counterparts.
Meanwhile, the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s head of collections openly daydreamed about the fate of their so-called “colonial” art.
“The future will tell whether we burn them down, or whether we store them away … or whether we bring them out and use them for discussion.”
What sort of custodian of art would even flirt with the idea of throwing the visual history of our country into an incinerator?
It sends a contemptuous signal to Canadians that their inheritance, existence and legitimacy are up for debate, both morally and historically. Rather than being remembered as an integral part of Canadian history and identity, the colonial era is treated as a grim original sin, akin to an invasive foreign country whose legacies must be discarded or destroyed. Erasing the past does nothing to redeem the present, but it certainly impoverishes it.
All of it is learned behaviour, picked up by years of observing the tendencies of American leftists, who have found great success attacking the Founding Fathers.
At Monticello and the Jefferson Memorial, redesigned “interpretive lenses” have almost completely narrowed down Thomas Jefferson’s legacy to slavery alone. During the summer, City Journal reported that the National Park Service had formulated a plot to twist the Jefferson Memorial from a tribute to his ideas into a punitive sermon.
Visitors to Jefferson’s former home at Monticello have found that the exhibits and literature on offer are more akin to a prosecutor’s brief. These are not examples of a fair and balanced revision to outdated narratives.
In Kingston, Sir John A. Macdonald’s more modest historic residence, Bellevue House, has been similarly ‘decolonised’ by federal agencies, reducing Macdonald to a symbol for all the ills associated with residential schools
The change at Bellevue House was a maddening yet predictable end to the attempt at erasing Macdonald’s place in the Canadian pantheon.
Leslie Weir, head of Library and Archives Canada, ordered the deletion of a large tranche of records from the digital archives for “outdated” information, akin to a digital book burning. LAC even removed Macdonald’s title as the “first among equals” on the list of prime ministers.
To quote biographer Richard Gwyn, Macdonald was “the man who made us”, and to so viciously castigate him over a century after his death is a demoralisation campaign. This country is not better for his reduced stature, it is weaker and more forgetful.
People who have no respect for the great men of history, who seek to burn paintings and denigrate the world’s greatest universities, should be nowhere near positions of authority. However, they are there, and George Abaraonye’s removal as president-elect of the Oxford Union was an exception. It proved guardianship still matters when guardians show up.
There is no similar way to clear out the bad actors from the universities and galleries of Winnipeg, or the national archives in Ottawa. So build one. Organise, run slates, win boards, write mission-lock bylaws, condition donations on governance, and litigate when necessary.
The conservative political factions in Canada, Britain, and the United States have been the loudest critics of these anti-civilisational campaigns, yet all their rhetoric is not followed up by action.
Political power is only the first step. Entering positions of authority in universities, museums and other institutions is far more important. They cannot be abandoned in favour of a pure populist migration to the trades and small business, for this will only accelerate and calcify the left’s takeover of our society’s pillars.
There have to be people from the right as CEOs, board chairs, and directors, and it can be done. The outsourcing of culture to rivals who despise you has to end. Our countries will be in far better shape if people who respect, and even revere places like Monticello, the Oxford Union, and others are overseeing them.
Take back the institutions, or lose the civilisation that built them.
Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Spectator Australia.
