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Posted on 05/31/2006 5:37:22 PM PDT by fanfan
A new book on the late prime minister's early years casts a deep shadow over Canadians' popular image of the liberal, enlightened statesman, Robert Sibley writes.
Pierre Trudeau confounds us still.
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.
Indeed, the book, which is to be officially released tomorrow, promises to become a cause celebre because it casts a shadow over the popular mythology surrounding Mr. Trudeau, particularly since his death in 2000. It may well force a re-evaluation of his legacy.
The authors intimate this need for such a reconsideration, describing the results of their decade of research and writing as "a voyage of discovery" that led them to a young Mr. Trudeau who "has remained unknown until now."
"Between 1941 and 1944 the young Trudeau espoused with conviction and enthusiasm the very ideological commitments that the post-1950 Trudeau would despise," they write.
Even those involved in the book's production say they were shocked at what it reveals about the man who is widely regarded as a modern father of Confederation.
"I was astounded and appalled by this lengthy and convincing account of Trudeau's intellectual journey to the age of 25, long past the age when these activities can be dismissed as youthful follies," says the book's publisher, Douglas Gibson, a long-time admirer of Canada's 15th prime minister.
Such a reaction is certainly at odds with the prevailing image of the man, who, as prime minister for 16 years, established multiculturalism as a defining concept of the country and pushed through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.
However, 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.
In 1936, at the age of 17, Mr. Trudeau wrote a school essay that portrayed him as someday leading a separatist army to create an independent and Catholic Quebec. In one school essay, he sketches a fantasy of being a revolutionary blowing up "the enemies' munitions factories."
"I will return to Montreal sometime around the year 1976: the time is ripe to declare Quebec's independence. The Maritime provinces join with us, and so does Manitoba. I take command of the troops and lead the army to victory. I now live in a country that is Catholic and canadien."
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."
Nor, it seems, was young Mr. Trudeau enamoured with liberalism. "Liberalism leads to excesses: to unemployment, anarchy," he wrote in jotting down the main ideas of the "first serious book" he'd read, Pour nous grandir by Victor Barbeau.
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."
Mr. Trudeau certainly assimilated Mr. Carrel's lessons on asceticism. In a 1944 essay entitled "Asceticism in a Canoe," Mr. Trudeau quoted Mr. Carrel extensively on the need to push himself physically and mentally. Mr. Trudeau, as Canadians recall, was known for his love of canoeing, for taking pleasure in pushing his body, deliberately seeking privations and trials. But if he absorbed this from Mr. Carrel, did he assimilate other elements of Mr. Carrel's neo-fascism?
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."
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. They point out that the students at Brebeuf, on average 17 or 18 years of age, were well aware of the situation in Europe, particularly after Canada declared war on Nazi Germany in 1939. "Like most other students at Brebeuf, and French Canadians generally, he (Mr. Trudeau) failed to take a stand on the most momentous event of his lifetime."
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.
Indeed, like most Quebecers, Mr. Trudeau was against wartime conscription. But his objection wasn't just passive. Young Trudeau advocated what can only be regarding, considering the circumstances, as treason.
In 1942, Mr. Trudeau gave a speech supporting the anti-conscription candidate Jean Drapeau, the future mayor of Montreal. The speech, say the Nemnis, was "anti-British (and) anti-colonial." He denounced the "military clique" ruling Canada and the "disgusting dishonesty" of the Mackenzie King government in forcing conscription on French Canadians. "And if we are not in a democracy, let the revolution begin without delay."
Rhetoric perhaps, but Mr. Trudeau went on to denounce the Canadian government for even having declared war against Germany in 1939, "at a time when America was not threatened with an invasion, at a time when Hitler had not yet won his staggering victories."
The Nemnis attribute Mr. Trudeau's youthful attitude to the influence of his upbringing and the social environment in which he was raised.
Only after Mr. Trudeau left Quebec and went to study at Harvard in 1944, did he begin to awaken from the dogmatic slumbers of his youth, they say. "Little by little, he would throw off the ideology that had governed him during the most formative period of his life and come to adopt the universal values of liberalism."
The Nemnis themselves have admitted in interviews that as friends of Mr. Trudeau, they were uncertain about revealing everything they discovered. The Nemnis, academics in the fields of political science and linguistics, describe themselves as left-leaning liberals and staunch federalists. Between 1995 and 2000, they edited the pro-federalist magazine Cite libre at the urging of Mr. Trudeau, who was one of the magazine's founders in the 1960s.
"We were his friends and we wondered whether we should reveal this," said Ms. Nemni, who, along with her husband, got Mr. Trudeau's approval for the biography in 1995.
And they wonder why Mr. Trudeau saved the material, considering the damage it could do to his reputation. "We believe that he had failed to face up to the follies of his youth, but was unwilling to cheat with history."
Perhaps so, but after reading Young Trudeau you have to wonder whether there would have been an alternative history to Canada if Mr. Trudeau had retained his youthful views as he got older. Instead of being a father of Confederation, might he have been the father of a new nation?
But then if Canadians had been privy to the past revealed in the Nemnis' biography, Mr. Trudeau might never have become prime minister.
Pierre Trudeau was a communist.
Period.
Canada ping!
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link to Amazon for the book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0771067496/qid=1149120634/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-7609725-7571126?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
Interesting...no customer reviews yet...
Is this any surprise? Commies through and through -- it runs in the blood, especially in ANYTHING French.
also posted over here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1641496/posts
Extra exposure of The Real Trudeau...that works for me!
Are liberals starting their vacations early this year?
Agree, and it appears the author doesn't really know the meaning of "Liberal" as Pierre was just that. Liberal=Communist.
Nailed it!
Trudeau also damaged the relationship between Canada and the US.
Scratch a liberal, find a fascist.
Although I have nothing but contempt for Trudeau, the Canadian version of Bill Clinton, his wife, much younger than he, was the classic ditz. She was a hippie free spirit type and like many other decisions Trudeau made, privately and in politics, she was an abysmal choice.
Trudeau was simply a communist whom the MSM loved for some reason - maybe his 'glamorous' wife? Or maybe they just love all commies. In this day and age of alternative media and the internet, he would have been exposed for what he was.
To this day, many of my Canadian friends look up to him. He was as bad, or worse, than FDR was to America.
Bingo on FDR.
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