The Religious Reasons for Trudeau's Great Mistake

It's clear from Max and Monique Nemni's book Young Trudeau; Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, Trudeau, and his friends, were plotting in 1942 to set up a terrorist organization to take over Quebec by force and create an independent white, French and Catholic corporatist authoritarian state. We have their explanation, but it doesn't go far enough.[Just in from the Lynch List? Here's a short version.]

Why, Pierre?

Most of the attention generated by the Nemni's book has been at the shocking revelation that Trudeau was a secret revolutionary. That the gifted scion of an anglo-french millionaire should plot revolution against the state during wartime is certainly cause for dismay.

But there has been little clear analysis of why first Trudeau and later the Front de libération du Québec, René Lévesque, and the Parti Québécois would want to separate from Canada. What, precisely, is the advantage to being Maîtres chez nous? And how, precisely, does this advantage translate into law?

There are many roads that lead to the answer to this question, so let's look at the most obvious. A majority in a state can dictate culture to the minority. This is what Lévesque did with the passage of the  Quebec Charter of the French Language (Bill 101), whose goal was, and still is, to make French 'the normal and everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and business' in Quebec at the expense of English.

In short, the reason for acquiring control of the state is to be able to dictate cultural norms.

This is why the Muslim Brotherhood is agitating currently in Egypt. It wants to gain control in order to bring Sharia law and strict Islamic observance to what is currently a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural country. What Trudeau and his friends wanted for Quebec was an authoritarian corporatist regime modeled on that of Portuguese strongman António de Oliveira Salaza in order to bring strict Catholic observance to what was a multi-ethnic province.

Both revolutionary groups wanted or want to increase the power and authority of one culture over that of all the others in the same population. Why they would want to do so may seem obvious—it certainly was to Trudeau and Lévesque—but it isn't; it needs further exploration and explanation.

Why Control matters
I began to address this issue in a post last December entitled Why Grandparents love Grandchildren. In it I argued that the reasons they do is that when they visit their own children they have, for the first time in their lives, a sense of safety and security because they are surrounded by blood kin. Here's how I put it:

When they travel long distances and haul up at their kid's place, they usually stay for a week or two during which they—for the first time in their lives—experience the psychological, and actual, safety of having someone else worry about 'bumps in the night' and other concerns.

This feeling of safety and security in the family is, I believe, the reason why groups in society feel safety and security in the larger family of tribes, cultures and nation states. If, to take one example, we are walking to Church on Easter Sunday, and we meet other families doing the same, for the same reasons, we feel a sense of community and shared experience we would not feel if we encountered groups from other races, in other clothes, speaking other languages, going to other buildings for other reasons.

Christians in Canada today experience this feeling every Sunday since most other Canadians are busy driving past, going shopping, watching football, or playing golf. They find they are now in a minority culture in their own country. Whether they admit it or not, this is unsettling and makes them feel some degree of nervousness and concern.

Just how unsettling it is can be seen back in Egypt where Coptic Christians have been bombed or murdered precisely because they are in the minority. If the Muslim Brotherhood succeeds at taking over the government; Christians there will almost certainly become victims of oppression.

So, you see, being part of a majority not only feels safer, it is safer. Even more so, being able to control the culture and enhance it, increases the feeling of psychological safety. Thus, Bill 101.

We know Trudeau changed his mind and moved away from ethnic nationalism and towards individual rights. Most probably think he dreamed up the idea himself, but it too, like corporatism, is a Catholic philosophy he picked up in his 20's.

Where Did he Get his idea?
Specifically he got the idea from the Christian philosopher Henri Bergson, author of Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Bergson, who incidentally was of Jewish origin, and who won a Nobel prize for literature in 1927, defined two kinds of society: a 'closed society' in which members are bound to each other with obligations, and an 'open society' based on God's love for all mankind. Here's Nemni in Young Trudeau, page 161:

Bergson maintained that the Jewish people . . . still retained the sense of morality and justice that derived from a 'closed society.'  . . . Nevertheless, Bergson maintained, Judaism had progressed almost to the morality of an open society. 'Israel . . . rose so high above the rest of humanity that, sooner or later, it would have been taken as the model.' And that is precisely what Christianity did by becoming the natural successor to Judaism, thereby achieving a qualitative leap for morality and justice. It was only with the advent of Christianity that the idea of universal brotherhood, which implies equal rights and the inviolability of the person, became activated.'

Nemni then goes on to link that idea with the Canadian constitution:

It seems irresistible to conclude that Trudeau in turn 'activated' these underlying concepts through the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which he bequeathed to Canadians along with the patriation of the Constitution in 1982.

This passage, and others in the book, puts the stake through the concept of the separation of church and state because it shows it was a religious concept, specifically a Catholic religious concept, that motivated Trudeau and that provided the philosophy underlying the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Trudeau, the dedicated Jesuit scholar merely transferred his allegiance from one strand of Catholicism to another.

But was he right?
If Trudeau made the right decision, then we, as Canadians, have also made the right decision. If you can legislate individual rights in society, there should be no problem, eh?

Actually, there are two problems with the individual rights concept. The first is an internal contradiction and the second, external.

The internal contradiction is that if you raise individual rights to the ultimate level, as the Charter does, you also have to provide a way for an individual to protect those rights and you have to say those rights include the individual's property. Individual rights can't be protected by the state for the same reason prices on individual goods can't be set by the state (Adam Smith). To defend individual rights you have to allow the individual the right to defend them.

This could be done in Canada in the Charter by including the right to concealed carry of weapons and the right to own property. Neither are in the Charter.

The external contradiction is that when any group in society attacks the individuals in an 'open society' around it, that group will succeed. It will succeed because groups acting together have more power than individuals acting separately. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia is a case in point. They were a minority in the revolution, but they were tightly organized.

This is why the Muslim Brotherhood is going to be the likely winner, eventually, in the Egyptian unrest.

What it means for us
When you set up contradictions in society (or anything really), you initiate a dynamic that then starts to play itself out. The contradictions I've just described create a situation that enhances the power of groups at the expense of individuals. Because every individual is defenceless and most are unattached to each other, any group of individuals which tightly organizes itself and acts together will be able to disproportionately effect the total population.

In effect the combination of individual human rights plus multiculturalism turns Canada into something like a giant Petri dish into which any self-propagating organism can flourish. It then, through immigration, invites in a host of potential groups to replicate themselves. The Americans, by way of contrast, have individual rights backed up by the right to carry which means the unorganized have a greater ability to combat loosely organized ethnic groups.

So what's the answer, both to the contradictions I've mentioned and to the dynamic we now see playing itself out in the country?

If we go back to first principles, to the one I mentioned earlier about family, we can see that individuals feel safe, and are safe, with blood relatives, or failing that, with other families that are part of the same culture. Where you have a uniform culture you have the maximum personal liberty because fewer laws are necessary to restrain or suppress dissent and division. Where you have a mixed culture, and especially where the divisions are between large groups in that culture, you have the potential of civil war. This currently is Canada's future.

This observation should clarify our thinking in moving forward, therefore:

1. We need to support Quebec succession so that Quebec culture can flourish in a uniquely French-speaking context.
2. We also need separation for our own good so that traditional English Common Law culture can be reestablished in the Rest of Canada.
3. And finally, we need to either a) amend the constitution to add the right to bear arms and the right to property, or b) to abolish the constitution and leave Parliament as the supreme law giving authority in the country.

Trudeau made a great mistake when he turned away from ethnic nationalism and so did we when we opposed Quebec separation. We'd be a lot better off today had Trudeau stuck to his original plan and worked with Lévesque rather than against him.

Trudeau was wrong about society, wrong about culture, wrong about human rights and wrong about law. He was really a religious prophet who mesmerized a country and then set it on the path to ruin at the hands of other, stronger, societies.