A stone bust of Queen Elizabeth II has been decapitated in Canada, with its severed head nowhere to be found.
Police in Victoria, British Columbia were called out to the headless stone bust in Beacon Hill Park on Wednesday afternoon, according to local media. No arrests have been made, and the authorities are urging anyone with information on the crime to approach either then or the independent Crime Stoppers charity.
The Queen, who is the head of state in a number of Commonwealth realms including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Bahamas in addition to the United Kingdom, has reigned for a record-breaking 68 years alongside her consort Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
The beheading of the 94-year-old monarch’s statue comes as Philip, a 99-year-old Second World War veteran described by the Queen as “quite simply my strength and stay all these years”, is in hospital, with an “exceptional” visit to his bedside by Prince Charles fueling speculation that he is seriously unwell.
The Queen is not the first cultural icon whose monuments have been damaged in Canada in recent months, however, with the Dominion’s first prime minister, Scotland-born Sir John A MacDonald, having been ripped down and decapitated by Black Lives Matter supporters in August 2020.
“The racist John A. Macdonald statue in Montreal has fallen,” boasted the nobordersmedia group after the attack, posting images of the historic statue, further vandalised after its toppling, on social media.
“It was taken down minutes ago by masked protesters at the end of the #DefundThePolice police demo.”
Statues of the nation-building statesman had previously been taken down by “woke” municipal governments, and another was covered by a black plastic bag and boarded up in the wake of the 2020 toppling.
It is not confirmed that the beheading of the Queen’s statue in Victoria has any link to the iconoclasm which has accompanied the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet the growing culture of vandalism is being fuelled in general by a reluctance of authority figures to actually condemn the attacks, Robert Poll of the UK-based Save Our Statues group told Breitbart London in relation to the destruction of the Elizabeth II bust in Canada.
Mr Poll remarked: “Weak responses to previous instances of criminal vandalism have legitimised statues as targets and emboldened attackers. These are not just attacks on statues – they are attacks on our way of life, the symbols of our culture and values. This is why it’s so important we reclaim our statues and our history from those who would distort its narrative to their ideological ends.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.