by Robert Sibley, The Ottawa Citizen
Pierre Trudeau is the archetype of the modern "enlightened," "free-thinking," "progressive" "liberal" politician--the guy that the likes of John Kerry has spent his whole life trying to emulate. And yet, . . .
A new biography of the former prime minister, whom Canadians have long been taught to regard as a great liberal politician, reveals that as a youth and young man, Mr. Trudeau was an anti-Semite, admired fascist dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini, promoted revolution and longed for an independent and Catholic Quebec that would be home only to francophones.
"We discovered a Trudeau who was remarkably different from what we and everyone else had assumed," authors Max and Monique Nemni write in their book, Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919-1944.
. . . the Nemnis' book draws on Mr. Trudeau's own writings to demonstrate that in the late 1930s, as a student at the Jesuit-run College Jean-de-Brebeuf, Mr. Trudeau ardently embraced the chauvinist francophone nationalism. . . . Mr. Trudeau's youthful fantasy of war and revolution "hardly suggests that he was impregnated with the culture of federalism, of democracy, or of pluralism" that he advocated as prime minister of Canada in the 1970s, the Nemnis say.
Mr. Trudeau also demonstrated a distinct lack of multicultural credentials in his youth. He wrote a one-act comedy of manners in 1938 that "was intended to bring out the difference between dishonest and profiteering Jews and honest but too naive French Canadians." The play was selected by the college to mark its 10th anniversary and was "a great success."
One book Mr. Trudeau particularly admired was by Alex Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912, and, in 1941, returned to Nazi-occupied Europe to become a star in the collaborationist Vichy regime led by Henri Petain. In L'homme, cet inconnu, published in 1935, Mr. Carrel denounced democracy as foolish and harmful.
"The equality of rights is an illusion. The feeble-minded and the man of genius must not be equal before the law. ... The sexes are not equal."
Young Mr. Trudeau regarded it as the "perfect" book that needed "to be assimilated entirely." . . . As a first-year law student at the Universite de Montreal in the fall of 1940, Mr. Trudeau wrote notes on the defects of democracy: "Ignorance, credulity, intolerance, hatred for superiority, the cult of incompetence, and excess of equality, versatility, the passions of the crowd, the envy of individuals."
That might explain some of the more non-democratic features of the Canadian constitution.
The Nemnis also explode the myth that Mr. Trudeau's lack of support for the war effort in the 1940s was due to his ignorance of the situation. . . .
In short; he was rooting for the bad guys in a John murtha sort of way.
The Nemnis sum up Mr. Trudeau's schooling at Brebeuf, saying: "It must now be obvious that, contrary to a well-established myth that he cultivated, as did others, we nowhere could discover the young man rowing against the current." Mr. Trudeau, in short, was a conformist."
There's a bigger issue here than just the political history of the Great White North, and whether they ought to be naming high schools after this guy. Why is it that if you really dig deeply into the personality of an "enlightened," "free-thinking," "progressive" "liberal" person, you tend to find that they're contemptuous of their fellow men, conformist as all hell, and hostile to religion in general and, often as not, Jews in particular? Or am I overgeneralizing here? Discuss.