Obamamania and Trudeaumania

Canadian blogger I, Ectomorph delivers one of his patented six-mile long sentences containing an instructive analogy between Obamamania and the rise to power in Canada in 1968 of that quintessential '68er, Liberal Party prime minister Pierre Trudeau (who, it turns out, had the kind of past appropriate for the title of Jonah Goldberg's book):

"If there is anything that can compare to [Obamamania], it would have to be Trudeaumania, which I am not really old enough to remember (I'm now old enough that I look rather fondly on anything I'm not old enough to remember) but which -- as I've later learned -- involved an attractive young politician who by dint of birth bridged the two solitudes of his country but also had a slightly mysterious and more radical past [see below for details] that he seemed willing to shelve away for the sake of winning power -- power that, as he campaigned for office, the candidate somewhat vaguely promised to exercise in a way that would be excitingly different than it had ever been exercised before by the old boring men who had occupied the office since time immemorial, and (in particular) in keeping with the youthful idealism of the upcoming generation. What this meant nobody knew, but it made no difference."

Somewhat like Obama, Trudeau had a Francophone father and an Anglophone mother. He spoke without an accent in either language. Subsequent Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was also bilingual from the nursery, so Canada has been ruled by Prime Ministers brought up in bilingual households for over half of the last four decades, even though only something like 3% of Canadians grow up that way. Not surprisingly, the new bilingual Canadian state that Trudeau established has been very, very good to Canadians who are bilingual.

Also like Obama, for part of his life, Trudeau didn't identify with his mother's people, and in fact was radically opposed to them.

What was Trudeau's buried past? From the Amazon write-up of Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919-1944, a biography by Max and Monique Nemni, who were the editors of the political magazine founded by Trudeau.

This book shines a light of devastating clarity on French-Canadian society in the 1930s and 1940s, when young elites were raised to be pro-fascist, and democratic and liberal were terms of criticism. The model leaders to be admired were good Catholic dictators like Mussolini, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain, and especially Pétain, collaborator with the Nazis in Vichy France. There were even demonstrations against Jews who were demonstrating against what the Nazis were doing in Germany.

Trudeau, far from being the rebel that other biographers have claimed, embraced this ideology. At his elite school, Brébeuf, he was a model student, the editor of the school magazine, and admired by the staff and his fellow students. But the fascist ideas and the people he admired – even when the war was going on, as late as 1944 – included extremists so terrible that at the war’s end they were shot. And then there’s his manifesto and his plan to stage a revolution against les Anglais.

This is astonishing material – and it’s all demonstrably true – based on personal papers of Trudeau that the authors were allowed to access after his death.What they have found has astounded and distressed them, but they both agree that the truth must be published.

From the back cover of the book (here's the Wikipedia write-up on it), which was written by admirers of Trudeau, with his cooperation. During WWII, Trudeau felt that:

"democracy was bad and that fascism -- as represented by Mussolini and Pétain -- was good. Thus, even as a young man of twenty-three, Trudeau was ignoring the war in Europe and plotting a revolution to take Quebec out of Canada. The picture that emerges is of a Quebec elite that was raised to be pro-fascist, and where Nazi atrocities were dismissed as English (Canadian) propaganda."

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