Leftists, like all totalitarian revolutionaries, view their moment in the sun as Year One. Everything else that came before is relevant only to the extent it can be bent to the will of the new state. In this, they are starkly different from America’s Founders, who considered history the best guide to shaping a governing system that would constrain men’s worst instincts and channel their best ones. Nowhere is this ignorance more clear than in the left’s approach to slavery, with Toronto, Canada, as the latest example.

A centerpiece of the left’s attack on Western culture is that Westerners were enslavers, a sin so grave that it erases every benefit they’ve brought to mankind. This line of thinking is used most effectively against America because America held onto slavery longer than England and other nations in its Commonwealth. (Leftists ignore all the other countries that engaged in the African slave trade, including their indulging in the most ferocious cruelty.) This narrative, of course, ignores three core facts:

One. Slavery has existed throughout human history and appeared in all societies, regardless of skin color.

Two. Slavery ended only because white Westerners realized that, although the Bible acknowledges the slavery that existed when it was written, it states moral principles that are incompatible with slavery.

Three. The African slave trade worked only because Africans enthusiastically participated in it. Westerners never penetrated into Africa’s center. Instead, the slaves they shipped overseas arrived at the trading ports because African tribesman delivered their captive enemies to those ports. Without African complicity, there would have been no slave trade.

Image: The slave trade in Africa in 1893, long after Westerners had bowed out. Public domain.

For leftists, though, with their narrow fund of knowledge, those three facts do not exist. The only thing that exists is that white men from the Anglosphere traded in and owned slaves. (Mind you, I’m not condoning these men’s acts. But they were creatures of their time, living by the only rules known to them. And again, they were not alone.)

With that leftist mindset, the step you take to consolidate your culture and political power is to purify your world by ridding itself of all mentions of those evil white slavers. For example, if you’re a Democrat administration in America, you destroy a historical sculpture in the Arlington National Cemetery that was created by an ardent abolitionist to bind the nation’s wounds after the Civil War.

Or you could do what they did in Toronto, which is remove the existing name of a world-famous location to erase all mention of someone allegedly connected to the slave trade. And then, because you’re an ignorant leftist, you rename it in honor of a distant African tribe that was renowned for providing captive Africans for sale to the West:

Toronto city council voted unanimously on Thursday to change the name of Toronto’s world famous Yonge-Dundas Square to “Sankofa Square” to distance it from Henry Dundas’ purported connection to the transatlantic slave trade.

The word used by the City of Toronto, True North has learned, originated from a tribe known for its role in the slave trade.

While Dundas was, in fact, an abolitionist, the Akan people of Ghana, from whom the word “sankofa” comes, were active participants in the slave trade and imported slaves to develop their own economy.

Ronald Reagan famously said, “The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” Or, as the old saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In this case, it creates dangerously ignorant people who erase the culture that abolished slavery and enthusiastically replace it with the culture that fed slavery its slaves.