January 19, 2009

Canada's Half-Blood Prince

Here's the opening of my new VDARE.com column:

Barack Obama’s inaugural day is upon us…and Obamamania has reached such comic dimensions that I can’t bring myself to think seriously about it.

So let’s step back and consider Obamamania’s closest analog: the extravagant “Trudeaumania” that propelled an obscure law professor to the prime ministership of Canada in the fateful year 1968.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau had only three years’ experience in Parliament. But, much as Obama introduced himself to the public in his 2004 Democratic convention keynote address with 380 words about how he was the offspring of a mixed-race marriage, Trudeau was famously the son of a Francophone father and an Anglophone mother, making him accent-free in both languages.

As Time Magazine burbled in "Man of Tomorrow" on July 5, 1968:

He seemed a man neither of the left nor of the right, but a man for the future. His campaign was based on the simple, unequivocal proposition: ‘One Canada.’ As a bilingual French Canadian, he appears to be the right man to bring the French-and English-speaking peoples closer together.

Trudeau was Canada’s half-blood prince. J.K. Rowling made this term famous in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but this concept out of fantasy has long had a shadowy salience in politics. In the Foreword to my book, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s "Story of Race and Inheritance," the Editor of VDARE.COM, Peter Brimelow, defines a “half-blood prince” as:

An archetypal ambiguous figure in whom the various parts of a deeply-divided society can jointly invest their contradictory hopes. Such figures spring up regularly in conflicted polities.
Of course, under Trudeau, the French and English-speaking peoples of Canada only mod farther apart. But that wasn’t the point of Trudeau’s policy, it was merely the effect.

Trudeaumania didn’t last, but Trudeau did, clinging to power for a decade and a half. In that time, Trudeau fundamentally remade Canada in his own bilingual image—imposing French on English-speaking Canada and allowing Quebec effectively to ban English in French-speaking Canada—and driving the country permanently to the left.

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My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

43 comments:

Anonymous said...

Decent article. You don't seem to know much about Canadian politics or Trudeau, though. A lot of this stuff doesn't reflect the reality of Canada at all.

Anonymous said...

There really is no such thing as a half blood prince. People almost invariably pick a side - the ethnicity that's hipper, that makes them feel special or more oppressed or amongst whose people they're most comfortable.

Anonymous said...

Great article, Steve. Keep embarrassing the editors at the NYT or wherever else in the mainstream for not hiring you.

By the way, the dirtbag William Ayers was just denied entry into Canada by the immigration authorities. Yawn. Another Obama crony at odds with law enforcement. Nothing to see here folks.

Idiocracy is depressing.

Anonymous said...

This might be the first factually accurate article about Canada written by an American ever. Americans have so little exposure to our country that it is inevitable they always get it wrong.

Pierre Trudeau punched his wife in the face and gave her a black eye after the Stones incident (source: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). He then divorced her and stiffed her for alimony, the type of thing you only get away with if you are Prime Minister.

Despite the wifebeating and deadbeating, he is still seen as a near Godlike figure here to the left.

Pierre Trudeau, a socialist, was unelectable in Quebec in the 1960s, save for a few radical ethnic ridings. Throughout his career he represented only 1 riding, a heavily Jewish one. Canadians never directly elected him and he would not have gained a seat had he ran in a french or anglo riding.

The media hype, I was not alive when it happened but it appears to have been on a scale comparable to Obamamania, though how a short, pock marked geek who was a lifelong bachelor became a sex symbol is a bit of a mystery.

His kid Justin just got elected. Let's just say he didn't inherit his father's brains.

Anonymous said...

This article contains a number of points that are widely believed to be true but are nonetheless myths:

1. Trudeau's mother was not an anglophone. She was born of a Scottish father and a French-Canadian mother. She was fluent in both languages but identified as a French-Canadian.

2. Trudeau always identified as a French-Canadian. He never saw himself as a French-English hybrid. This point is made clear in the recent biography Young Trudeau.

3. Trudeau spoke well in English, but not without an accent. He always had trouble writing in English. His application to study in the U.S. was riddled with grammatical errors.

4. As a student at a Catholic college, Trudeau was an intense rightwing nationalist, essentially a fascist in the mold of Franco, Mussolini, and Petain, but the same was true for most of his colleagues. After the war, this same generation migrated to the political left. It's silly to think that his Scottish grandfather explains his ideological development when so many other people of his generation followed the same path.

Anonymous said...

A lot of this stuff doesn't reflect the reality of Canada at all.

Says the proud Canadian, Takahata Yuichi ... without the slightest trace of irony.

--Senor Doug

Anonymous said...

"Takahata Yuichi said...

A lot of this stuff doesn't reflect the reality of Canada at all."

Such as? Specifics?

Anonymous said...

Lame response. You should have specific criticism of his lack of "reality of Canada."

Colby Cosh said...

Seemed pretty accurate to me. My biggest problem was with the suggestion that "Trudeaumania didn't last"; as with JFK's Camelot, its ghost lingers like a fart.

Anonymous said...

"You don't seem to know much about Canadian politics or Trudeau, though. A lot of this stuff doesn't reflect the reality of Canada at all."

Perhaps you should explain how this is the case, Takahata. A sentence or two will do to provide the general gist of what you mean. Otherwise, your disparagement sounds lazy and arrogant.

Anonymous said...

Takahata: What are you talking about? This is an excellent article, which accurately points to the cause of the destruction of Canada. Canada being, at the time of Trudeau, a country consisting of a mix of French-descended people, British-descended people and other whites who had assimilated into that culture, and a smattering of non-whites who weren't really considered Canadian at all.

Now, according to the government, we are all Canadians. I, a white Christian, am somehow the same as a Somalian, Chinese, or East Indian. In reality of course, I have more in common with a founding-stock Maritimer living 6000 km away from me on the East Coast than I do the "new Canadians" who live 3 houses away.

Anonymous said...

I disagree you Mr. Yuichi. Indeed, I'd go as far as to ask just what colour (defiantly with a 'u' in it) is the sky in this Canada of which you say you know about (aboot?)? Steve, as usual, pretty much nails it as far as Canada is concerned. (I hope it wouldn't be considered uncharitable to opine that he probably had some help on Canada from Peter Brimelow.) Now that I'm typing, I will bring up a very minor quibble: the country was already heading down the shining path to "Trudeaupia" before the man himself pirouetted onto the scene and gave his name to it. Lester Pearson (the PM before P.E.T.) got things started and certainly deserves mention when discussing the callous destruction of 'Vimy Ridge Canada'. Then Trudeau came along and put a gentle stroll into warp drive. Thinking about it though, even this can't be considered a genuine quibble - it's, after all, a 500 word article and not a 500 page book. And really? How much Canadian history & politics can an American audience tolerate?

Anonymous said...

Here in Western (English) Canada, I have heard multiple people discussing the similarities between the Obama phenomenon, and what we experienced when Trudeau came to power. The adoration, and belief in the power of biography to transcend reality- this looks familiar, and unsettling.

One consolation is that in the USA, there are term limits. Under the Westminster parliamentary system, the Prime Minister with a majority of seats in the House of Commons has few roadblocks in his path, not even elections for part of his caucus every two years. It doesn't take long to do a lot of damage though.

albertosaurus said...

The first difference that come to my mind is that Trudeau was a bookish self styled intellectual. Trudeau used to name drop the books he was currently reading in interviews.

Reagan dropped Dioclitian's name once in an interview about tax policy. Hillary Clinton we know read Michael Lerner.

Obama as far as I know doesn't reveal who he reads. Trudeau used to be - or pose - as a man of ides.

Anonymous said...

Rarely has such euphoria greeting a completely inexperienced politician resulted in anything good. Its going to get very very bleak, as Sailer implies.

Similar 'new eras' of hope and change - Soviet Russia, 1789 France did not end up well.

Anonymous said...

'Trudeau went through a genuine conversion moment away from French Catholic ethnocentrism to an ideology of post-ethnicity (on, roughly, D-Day).' Really? Or did he just sublimate his ethnocentricity, as many Jews do, by using universalism to promote particularist interests? Multiculturalism was imposed on English Canada, not on the French. Only recently is multiculturalism becoming a Quebecois reality (in Montreal) and they do not like it. Multiculturalism was always meant to be for English Canada. Trudeau hollowed out English Canada. French Canada remains ethnocentric in a way that is legitimated by the state.

Luke Lea said...

Well, Steve, you are certainly staking out a territory all your own!

Dutch Boy said...

Trudeau also did immense damage to the traditional French Canadian Catholic culture. What's left is a nasty ethnocentrism devoid of any principle except "We've got ours - screw you!"

Alan Stewart said...

As a born and bred Canadian I would say that Steve's understanding of Canadian politics and Trudeau is superb. There is only one thing wrong in the article, which I'll mention at the end.

I have been mulling over the Trudeau-Obama similarities too.

Both of them received great support from the ethnic majority in the belief that they as leaders would "take care of" or "handle" the ethnic minority to which they belonged. English Canadians responded to Trudeau's absolute hatred and contempt for Quebec separatism and Quebec nationalism. Evidenced for example to his complete opposition to any special constitutional status for Quebec. This at a time when the Conservative Party was supporting a "two nations" policy which would give Quebec constitutional "special status" -- greatly enhanced powers that no other province would have.
Barack Obama is seen as someone who can reconcile blacks to the polity without any risk that he, like a Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, would use the levers of government as tools of racial revenge. Obama, as Steve indicates, is expected to allow enough affirmative action to satisfy blacks without going hog wild about it.

Neither had any knowledge of, or apparent interest in, economics.

Both were constitutional law professors, who desired to use the courts to move the country to the Left, knowing that their leftier agenda could never win through democratic means. Obama just has to nominate liberal judges. When Trudeau came to power there was no entrenched list of rights that twisted into tools of social engineering by liberal judges. So Trudeau had to create one. There was a convention at the time that any constitutional changes had to be approved by all provinces. That made constituional change different to achieve. After a few failed attempts to negotiate a reform Trudeau decided to ignore the convention and push through an entrenched Charter of Rights, a move of dubious constitutionality itself that created a constitutional crisis.

It worked. The Charter has been a superb instrument for the left and in my opinion has been much more harmful to Canada than official bilingualism.

Both were charismatic figures and when on form brilliant and powerful speakers.
---------------------------------
The one error is the implication that Trudeau privately liked Quebec's French-only Act and "allowed" it to exist as part of a general French power agenda. Trudeau hated Bill 101. There was nothing he could do about it however. Actually there was one thing he could have done. He could have used a section of the constitution that allowed disallowance of provincial laws. This provision hadn't been used since 1943 and the general belief was that the provision was in effect unusable because of the general political consensus recognizing province's powers within their constitutional domain. I mention all this because it has been reported that Trudeau seriously considered disallowing Bill 101, which would have created Canada's biggest constitutional crisis. The important point is that Trudeau was the only politician in Canada who would have had the guts to even consider using disallowance.

VDare is a very appropriate place for this article as Peter Brimelow's book is the best treatment of the politics of this era.

Toral
NWOR is here: http://notweighingourmerits.blogspot.com/

Alan Stewart said...

Geez I forgot a similarity.

Both had incredibly unusually swift ascents to power.

Let's just sum it up for Trudeau again:

1963--Supports the New Democratic Party and virulently attacks the Liberal Party's position on the main issue in the election -- the Liberals supported allowing nuclear weapons in Bomarc missiles to be stationed in Canada.
1965 -- Recruited to join Liberal Party.
1965 -- Elected as Member of Parliament
1967 -- Becomes Minister of Justice
1968 -- Elected Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada
1968 -- Elected Prime Minister

Toral
http://notweighingourmerits.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

But English Canada was permanently damaged by him and has never recovered.

Good. Canada was originally a French speaking nation. Let the Anglos go to the US where they belong, and take the Maritimes and Newfoundland with them if they want.

Anonymous said...

Peter Frost said: 1. Trudeau's mother was not an anglophone. She was born of a Scottish father and a French-Canadian mother. She was fluent in both languages but identified as a French-Canadian.

But doesn't being fluent in English make you an Anglophone? Or is the term used like Hispanic is here (where some people are categorized as such even though they may not speak Spanish but have some sort of heritage from a Hispanophonic country)

Anonymous said...

I visited Montreal about eight year ago for the first time. I sat down in a small park with a statue of Robert Burns. It looked like it had once been a well cared-for park, but was now seedy and ill-kept.

An old man sat down next to me on a bench, whom I instantly viewed as likely a French-speaker, because he was muscular, burly, with a big bald head and blunt features. He looked exactly like pictures I had seen of Jean Genet.

I feared he was going to rant against English-speakers, which I assumed I looked like. Instead, he began by telling me that this was once a beautiful park, but the young French Canadians had ruined it. They were lazy, knew nothing of Canada's past, and their politicians spent tax money on welfare, not keeping up parks, he said.

I had come to see a business acquaintance, a Russian Jew who had immigrated to Canada in the early 1990s and worked in Montreal for an NGO. His son had just graduated from a good Canadian architecture school, but there was no work for him. My acquaintance said nobody was building anything in Montreal because of the uncertainty about the province's future.

The most memorable line I heard at today's inauguration in Washington was from a souvenir vendor near the Capitol: "Get your Obama T-shirts, five dollars." (then, jocularly) "We take food stamps too."

He didn't need a speech writer for that one.

Anonymous said...

Don't forget that it was Corporate Canada who really put Trudeau in power. The Canadian economic elite, like those of Mexico, are hardly laissez-faire free-market self-made types full of business acumen. Rather they were, and still are, the captains of protected industries supported by government bailouts. Trudeau was a blessing for them, and a curse for Canadian small businessmen.

Anonymous said...

Excellent piece by Steve. He neglects to mention one group who significantly influenced PET.

"The findings of the Supreme Court were reiterated in the Federal Court of Canada decision in Canada (Human Rights Commission) v. Winnicki. The case concerned the application for an interlocutory injunction against Mr. Winnicki to stop him from posting alleged hate messages pending a final determination by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.[...]

Both Justices Dickson and de Montigny made reference to the 1965 report of the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada (no hyperlink available). The Special Committee, which was chaired by Maxwell Cohen, included among its membership Pierre Trudeau."

http://www.chrc-ccdp.ca/proactive_initiatives/hoi_hsi/qa_qr/page1-en.asp

DJ

Anonymous said...

I'd add that in reading Obama's policybook the similarities to the Liberal Party of Canada are inescapable. It would be more accurate than not to say he wants to turn American into Canada.

Anonymous said...

We're taking cues from Canada now? Thanks Steve, now I know how pathetic we have really become.

Anonymous said...

"But doesn't being fluent in English make you an Anglophone?"

No. An Anglophone is someone whose mother tongue is English, i.e., the first language he or she learned to speak.

The more I read Steve's article, the more I have to shake my head in disagreement, although I'm sure many of my fellow Canadians will agree with it.

If Trudeau had lost to the Conservative's Robert Stanfield, Canada would have pretty much ended up the same way. By the 1960s, the differences between the two main parties were essentially cosmetic. In fact, the Progressive Conservatives were sometimes further to the left than the Liberals were. It was the Conservatives (under Diefenbaker)who first pushed for expansion of the Canada Pension Plan (and who hectored the Liberals for being stingy). It was the Conservatives (again under Diefenbaker) who first sought to transfer political power to the courts (through a Bill of Rights). And it was the Conservatives (again under Diefenbaker) who eliminated ethnic and geographic discrimination from Canadian immigration policy.

As a general principle, it is easier for the Conservative Party to move leftward than for the Liberal Party. The Conservative voting base is largely dominated by WASPs who are too nice to fight back. In contrast, the Liberal Party has usually been afraid to move too far left because of resistance from its own voters (particularly Catholics and working-class ethnics). Typically, the Liberals wait for the Conservatives to make the first move ... and then go further.

Anonymous said...

"No. An Anglophone is someone whose mother tongue is English, i.e., the first language he or she learned to speak."

Huh? I was born in Poland; spoke Polish until age 8; then came to USA. I'm fluent in English but not Polish but by your definition I'm a Polophone? Your head is way up your ass (that's vernacular english) Mr. Frost.

Anonymous said...

Well, dictionary.com offers:


1. an English-speaking person, esp. a native speaker of English.
–adjective
2. of or pertaining to speakers of English.


So, I think Frost is not far from the mark.

Anonymous said...

I am a non-white Canadian, a product of Trudeau's legacy, if you will. Do you guys hate me?

Anonymous said...

For half-blood princes, never mind Trudeau and Obama. (Trudeaubama?) Consider Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Both were the sons of Virginia-stock mothers, with paternal roots in the Northeast. That, at least as much as tariff politics or the expansion of diversity-- excuse me, slavery-- could explain Lincoln's blind obsession with Unionism.

Mike Courtman said...

Canadian rockers Rush wrote a song called 'The Trees' in the 70s, that had very libertarian-sounding lyrics and which some say was inspired by the Quebec separatism issue.

Here's the lyrics with a slight change to the second to last line:

"There is unrest in the forest,
There is trouble with the trees,
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas.

The trouble with the maples,
(And they're quite convinced they're right)
They say the oaks are just too lofty
And they grab up all the light.
But the oaks can't help their feelings
If they like the way they're made.
And they wonder why the maples
Can't be happy in their shade.

There is trouble in the forest,
And the creatures all have fled,
As the maples scream "Oppression!"
And the oaks just shake their heads

So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights.
"The oaks are just too greedy;
We will make them give us light."
Now there's no more oak oppression,
For they passed a noble law,
And Trudeau keeps all the trees equal
By hatchet, axe, and saw.

Anonymous said...

Takahata Yuichi: ...the reality of Canada...

TY - go here:

Explosive, super-secret Toronto demography report
spengler.atimes.net

It appears that the city of Toronto is now effectively Muslim.

PS: You don't have a nom de guerre of "Colonel Sun", do you?

Anonymous said...

"I was born in Poland; spoke Polish until age 8; then came to USA. I'm fluent in English but not Polish but by your definition I'm a Polophone? Your head is way up your ass (that's vernacular english) Mr. Frost."

I don't know about other countries, but that is the definition used in Canada. Our last prime minister (Paul Martin) is identified as a Francophone, even though he seems to speak more fluently in English than in French.

Anonymous said...

"Anonymous said...

I am a non-white Canadian, a product of Trudeau's legacy, if you will. Do you guys hate me?"

You, personally? I don't know. I don't know you.

If we required YOU to accept strangers in your house and treat them as members of your family, would you hate US? Would you be right to do so?

Anonymous said...

4. As a student at a Catholic college, Trudeau was an intense rightwing nationalist, essentially a fascist in the mold of Franco, Mussolini, and Petain, but the same was true for most of his colleagues. After the war, this same generation migrated to the political left.

So there wasn't really any "transformation" at all, it was just ethnopolitics all the way. Sort of like a Black Panthers, to Jesse Jackson, to Obama "transformation."

What a joke. How much longer are people supposed to buy this?

I am a non-white Canadian, a product of Trudeau's legacy, if you will. Do you guys hate me?

No, just your vast, soon to be overwhelming numbers. Make sense?

Anonymous said...

Trudeau represented the decline of the British Empire. His abject cowardice during WWII should have disqualified him from public office, but did not.

Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau wrote an essay: "Exhaustion and Fulfillment: The Ascetic in a Canoe" in 1944. His contemporaries and betters with more courage and sense of duty and citizenship were fighting in Europe at that time. His gutless evasion was never held against him by the Canadian electorate.

Not only did most Canadians not censure him, but he became a favorite of American opinion makers. Trudeau and his behavior have not only been accepted, but applauded.

Anonymous said...

Damn, even the threads about Canadian politics are better in America.

Anonymous said...

Lucius Vorenus said...

Explosive, super-secret Toronto demography report spengler.atimes.net

It appears that the city of Toronto is now effectively Muslim.


I was on a site dedicated to discussing minorities and a Pole mentioned that he was moving back to Poland after 18 years. In passing he mentioned that Montreal was completely overrun with Arabs. It seems that Canada acts like part of the EU. and we seem to be 40 years behind them since the Detroit Metro Area is now being overrun by Arab Muslims too.

Anonymous said...

"Reg Cæsar said...

For half-blood princes, never mind Trudeau and Obama. (Trudeaubama?) Consider Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Both were the sons of Virginia-stock mothers, with paternal roots in the Northeast. That, at least as much as tariff politics or the expansion of diversity-- excuse me, slavery-- could explain Lincoln's blind obsession with Unionism."

An interesting point. Looking at Lincoln's monomaniacal prosecution of a war against his own countryment, one can perhaps detect a strain, inherited from his father's people, of that manichean calvinism characteristic of the puritans. If Thomas Lincoln had been of Quaker stock instead, we might have spared ourselves a lot of trouble.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Anon: An interesting point. Looking at Lincoln's monomaniacal prosecution of a war against his own countryment, one can perhaps detect a strain, inherited from his father's people, of that manichean calvinism characteristic of the puritans. If Thomas Lincoln had been of Quaker stock instead, we might have spared ourselves a lot of trouble.

Of what stock was Thomas Lincoln?

Anonymous said...

Thomas Lincoln was a barely-literate, Virginia-born Baptist, three generations separated from his last New England ancestor. "His people" were backwoods farmers.

Furthermore:

"After fifteen years of painstaking research, David S. Keiser discovered that the maternal grandparents of the President's own grandfather, Enoch and Rebecca FLOWER, were Quakers at the time of their marriage in 1713. (10) Additionally, each pair of Enoch's and Rebecca's parents had been married in Quaker Meetings either in Pennsylvania or in England. This means that Abraham Lincoln's paternal great grandfather, John Lincoln (1716-1788), married into a family that was Quaker on both sides." (10) David S. Keiser, "Quaker Ancestors for Lincoln," Lincoln Herald 63 (1961): 134-37."

Don't worry, though: as I'm sure you're aware, uninformed trashing of Puritans is quite safe.