OCTOBER 2004
by Barry Stagg
John Kerry's battle to become United States President is comparable to a Canadian election held even before Kerry served his four month long tour of duty in Vietnam. It was June 1968 when Pierre Trudeau won his first election as Canada's Liberal prime minister.
In 1968, the war of record was World War II, then over for twenty-three years. In 2004, the Vietnam War is the American historical war of record, although it ended thirty years ago. Of course , the ongoing war being waged against the Islamist Jihadists looms large, as it must and should.
The Kerry presidential campaign obligates him to answer for two essentially irreconcilable positions he has forcefully and publicly held. Kerry touts himself as a decorated Vietnam war hero, immodestly so. He is less willing to highlight his strident anti-war cult status, attained after his tour of duty. Kerry's infamous 1971 testimony before the U.S. Senate stated that the American military forces were systematically perpetrating war crimes in Vietnam. This rash claim now justifiably haunts him as he seeks to become commander-in-chief. In the harsh realities of populist politics, which is the very essence of any presidential campaign, Kerry's profound contradictions seem destined to defeat him.
Some peculiar distinctions between the Canadian and American experiences emerge. Kerry's agonizing efforts to reconcile his contradictory actions are in notable contrast to Trudeau's ascendancy in 1968. The year he won a landslide victory was just twenty-three years after World War II ended in 1945. The Cold War divisions of Europe, imposed after the war, were in full and malevolent flower. Yet, Trudeau seemingly had nothing to answer for in relationship to his sheltered non-contributions to the Allied war effort. Trudeau's own words from his memoirs speak for him: "A French Canadian in Montreal in the early 1940's did not automatically believe this was a just war". Apparently, he did not deign to inform his adoring public of these personal sentiments, dripping as they were with the lubrication of calculation, before they flocked to the polls to elect him in June of 1968.
It seems that, unlike Kerry, Trudeau was careful to keep his anti- war sentiments to himself or at least keep them heavily obscured while his status as an elected politician hung in the balance. Kerry at least had the courage of his convictions in 1971 leading him to his now lamented Congressional testimony.
Trudeau was certainly of military age when the war began in 1939. He was then 20 years old. By 1940, he was in law school at the University of Montreal. In the fall of 1944, after D-Day, he entered Harvard Law School. His pursuit of physical fitness is part of his self-promoted legend. He was fit for duty but he did not serve.
Esther Delisle, a Quebec historian, has stirred up an elitist hornet's nest in Quebec with books on establishment anti-Semitism and most significantly, on the gaping historical void concerning the Quebecois elite and their activity during World War II. Her book, "Myths, Memories and Lies" tells how some of the provincial elite supported Nazi collaborator Marshall Petain and his Vichy French government which administered Nazi-occupied France during the war.
In comments on the notable Quebec nationalist, Andre Laurendeau, Delisle characterized their attitude this way: "Laurendeau and his friends supported Marshall Petain and his National Revolution and did not want to fight against him." Trudeau's professed doubt about World War II being a "just war" are better appreciated in the context of the pro-Vichy, anti-British, anti-Allied sentiment of Quebec nationalists during the war.
Long before Trudeau came to power, even before he grew up, a true intellectual giant of the 20th century, Malcolm Muggeridge penned a damning expose of Soviet Russia in his 1934 book "Winter in Moscow". His description of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin has broader application: "He could become and remain, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat because he so utterly hated and despised the proletariat. Product of a Jesuit seminary; homebred Napoleon content with domestic conquest; ...he had the sense to see that the only purpose of the Revolution was to make someone Tzar, and, seeing this, to make himself Tzar".
For Canada in 2004, all of this amounts to thirty-six years of living under the dead weight of bureaucratic expansionism introduced by war-avoider Trudeau and perpetuated by the lesser men who followed him. It is easier to explain a number of Canadian elitist contortions concerning the current war against the Jihadists when they are viewed in the context of a Canada shaped by a political leader who succeeded by completely obscuring the issue of his very loyalty to the Allied cause. His silence was in direct relation to the unimpeachably just cause of Canadians fighting the horrible but ultimately successful war against the genocidal Nazis of continental Europe. Sophism, omission, lacuna and shrewd political calculation replaced the plain truth.
Kerry, in the American style, spoke aloud and will be judged on his self-contradictions. Trudeau and his concealed sentiments are the essence of a stilted form of Canadianism firmly entrenched today.
Back to the 2004 Index
Boswarlos Review
Learned Links
Barry Stagg Law
Firm