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Idle No More and the First Nations generally have serious grievances most Canadians want to address, but insulting Canada and comparing the father of Confederation to the Führer of the Third Reich is not the route to progress for the native people.

I have often written, here and elsewhere, that the native people have legitimate grievances that must be addressed. But the native people and their leaders will have to understand that whatever the rights and wrongs of their history with the Europeans who came to Canada and their descendants, their advancement now, and their hopes for compensation for past wrongs, depend on the good will and conscientious altruism of the great majority of Canadians composed of those who came, or are descended from those who came here from other continents. (And they found here, contrary to widespread current fables, a native culture which had not discovered the wheel, or knitted fabrics, permanent buildings, or metal tools, and were largely engaged in purposeless inter-tribal wars that featured the torturing to death of prisoners, including women and children.) If the First Nations and their authorized spokespeople persist in defaming the memory of John A. Macdonald by likening him to Hitler, and calling Macdonald a genocidist, a purveyor of hate, a partisan of apartheid, and a racist, they will very seriously damage the legitimate interests they claim to pursue.

John A. Macdonald was a civilized and decent man, as well as a great statesman. He did not consider the so-called Indians (so described because Jacques Cartier and Champlain hopefully thought they were the eastern vanguard of the Indies), to be an inferior people, though he correctly judged that their civilization was comparatively primitive, other than in physical prowess, mastery of the outdoors and certain handicrafts. There is not one shred of historical evidence that justifies comparing him to the Nazi leader who murdered 12 million innocent people in death camps (half of them Jews, which really was genocide), and unleashed aggressive war on Europe from the Pyrenees to Moscow, and from the North Cape to the sands of Egypt, as well as on the high seas, killing tens of millions of combatants and civilians. Nor is there any evidence to justify likening Macdonald to the evil and repulsive apartheid system of Afrikaaner white supremacy in South Africa.