Quotulatiousness

August 21, 2022

David McCullough, RIP

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte remembers the late David McCullough:

David McCullough speaking at Emory University, 25 April, 2007.
Photo by Brett Weinstein via Wikimedia Commons.

David McCullough died August 7 at the age of 89. He won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman, National Book Awards for The Path Between the Seas, about the building of the Panama Canal, and Mornings on Horseback, a biography of young Theodore Roosevelt, as well as two Francis Parkman prizes (The Path, Truman) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also enjoyed a prominent career as a broadcaster and several of his books were transformed into important television events, most notably HBO’s John Adams.

I read him closely over the years. Studied him, even. After finishing his major biographies — books that can’t fail to impress for their prodigious research and literary grace — I went back to his early work to trace how long it took him to develop into a master of narrative historical writing. I started at the beginning, The Johnstown Flood (1968), and was stunned to find that he was all there from page one. He had total command of his material and his story at the outset.

I wouldn’t call him a favorite writer. McCullough tended to play safe. He had a somewhat rosy view of American history: “I want to bring to life the best that can be found in the story of why we are the way we are and how we got to where we are.” He was so busy bringing the best to life that he seldom challenged his readers with the worst: truly repellant individuals or unredeemed national failure.

His subjects tended to be public-spirited men of noble character and hard-earned wisdom. He felt comfortable in their company. “It’s like picking a roommate,” he once said, explaining why he dropped the idea of a biography of Pablo Picasso. “After all, you’re going to be with that person every day, maybe for years, and why subject yourself to someone you have no respect for or outright don’t like?”

When the abhorrent forced its way into his stories, he tended to rationalize it. His formulation that Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, was a lesser evil necessary to prevent a greater evil (heavy American troop losses) may have got it exactly backward.

His paeans to American greatness even wore on American audiences in his later years. Reviews of The Pioneers, his 2019 account of the Euro-American settlement of the Ohio River valley, accused him of “romanticizing white settlement and downplaying the pain inflicted on Native Americans.”

I raise these issues not to speak ill of the dead but to say that McCullough is worth reading, and reading again, even if, like me, you’re part of the minority who can find him hard to take at times. (The majority love him: I’m not sure any historian has sold more books.)

I had the pleasure of meeting David McCullough in Toronto at an intimate lunch arranged by his publisher, Simon & Schuster. I interviewed him later for Macleans. He was a complete gentleman and an enjoyable companion, notwithstanding his many twice- and thrice-told stories (an occupational hazard for touring writers).

I was able to draw him out on various aspects of non-fiction craft, which he spoke well on. What follows are some of my favorite quotes from the interview along with several other things McCullough said about writing and one comment by another author, the great Candace Millard, about his work.

History Summarized: The Acropolis

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, Greece, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 29 Apr 2022

They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is …
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August 20, 2022

How Turkey Fought a WW1 Peace Treaty – The Greek-Turkish War 1919-1923

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Greece, History, Italy, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 19 Aug 2022

The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 meant that it got its own peace treaty like the other three Central Powers. But the emerging Turkish National Movement under Mustafa Kemal resisted the Treaty of Sevres and occupation by various Entente Powers. Their successful resistance led to the creation of modern Turkey and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
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The historical tourist attractions of Pisa

Filed under: History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes talks about a recent trip to Italy, specifically the historically interesting places in Pisa and Lucca:

Galileo Galilei circa 1640.
Detail of an oil portrait by Justus Sustermans (1597-1681) from the National Maritime Museum via Wikimedia Commons.

Some are famous. Galileo Galilei, for example, is said to have used the leaning tower of Pisa to drop two spheres of different masses, to show that they would fall at the same speed — at least, that’s what his disciple Vincenzo Viviani claimed, ten years after Galileo’s death, and many decades after the alleged demonstration. Even if Viviani was being accurate, however, Galileo certainly wasn’t the first to demonstrate the concept. And Viviani mistakenly claimed priority for all sort of other scientific breakthroughs for his master, so like most other historians I’m inclined to doubt the story.

Nonetheless, Pisa was certainly Galileo’s birthplace — though it turns out that there are three different locations in the city to have claimed the honour over the years.

Galileo was initially thought to have been born in or near the fortress (its walls are impressive to look at and contain a pleasant garden). But this location was then refuted on the basis that for Galileo’s father Vincenzo Galilei to have lived in the fortress he would have had to have been a master at arms, which he was not. He was in fact a merchant and lute-maker. So in the nineteenth century a new location emerged: the casa Bocca, on the Stretto Borgo, which Vincenzo rented a few months before Galileo’s birth, and where the Galilei family lived for the next decade. It seemed a secure candidate for a while, except for a weird discrepancy: Galileo’s baptismal certificate assigned his birth to the wrong parish.

It then emerged that Galileo’s mother’s family — the Ammannati — lived in the correct parish, and that the custom of the time was for women to return to their parents’ home for the birth of their first child. Thus, the evidence points to Galileo having been born at the Casa Ammanati on the via Giusti. It’s a neat story of how a tourist destination can jump around based on new research, though there’s unfortunately not much to visit there other than a plaque.

In terms of things to actually see, one of the most impressive things in Pisa is the Museo delle Navi Antiche (Museum of Ancient Ships), which we found to be undeservedly deserted. Housed in the old stables for the city’s cavalry, and once the site of the Medici-era naval arsenal, the museum gives a fantastically thorough overview of the city from its Etruscan beginnings through to Roman subjugation, Ostrogothic invasion, Byzantine reconquest, and Longbeard settlement in the sixth century (although they’re usually called the Lombards, this comes from langobardi — literally, longbeards — so I think calling them that is both more accurate and more fun).

The museum’s highlight, however, is the ancient ships for which it is named, and which are incredibly well-preserved. I was stunned to see a massive actual wooden anchor, not just a reconstruction, of a cargo ship from the second century BC. It’s so well-preserved that you can even make out a decoration, carved into the wood, of a ray fish. The same goes for the rest of the various ships’ timbers. You can see almost all of their original hulls and planking, as well as finer details like rudder-oars, benches for the rowers, and in one case even the ship’s name carved into the wood — the Alkedo, which appears to have been a pleasure boat from the first century. Apparently, during excavation, the archaeologists could even make out the Alkedo‘s original red and white paint, as well as the impression left by an iron sheet that had covered its prow. The ships’ contents are often just as astonishing, with well-preserved baskets, fragments of clothing, and even bits of the rigging like its wooden pulleys and ropes. Well worth a visit.

Czech M14: The ZK-420S Battle Rifle

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Apr 2017

The ZK-420S is an experimental Czech rifle that is virtually unknown today, but which was remarkably influential, bearing significant elements of the Garand and several other Czech designs, and influencing the M14 and Kalashnikov rifles. Originally designed by Josef Koucky in 1942, the plans were hurriedly dusted off and improved at the end of World War 2. With many nations looking at the possibility of adopted self-loading military rifles, Brno hoped to make export sales of the design.

The ZK420S uses the trigger mechanism of the M1 Garand and a gas-operated rotating bolt action very similar to the Garand and AK rifles. It has a simple adjustable 3-position gas system, and a quick and simple disassembly procedure. It uses detachable box magazines (10 round, and not copied from an existing design) and was made in a variety of calibers for testing — including 8×57, 7×57, 7.5 Swiss, 6.5 Swedish, and .30-06. Examples were trialed or examined in the United States, Argentina, Israel, Ethiopia, England, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and elsewhere — this particular rifle is from the Norwegian trials.

In my opinion, it is an excellent rifle, and its failure to sell was probably due to price and the combination of tight budgets and cheap surplus war material in the late 1940s. It is handy, well balanced, and has a good magazine design and good sights. Recoil is comparable to the Garand. Ultimately the development program in Czechoslovakia would lead to the ZK-472 in 7.5x49mm, which would proceed to the 7.62x45mm in the vz.52 rifle.
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QotD: The improbable survival of the Byzantine empire

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The [Eastern Roman] Empire was faced by a triple threat to its existence. There were the northern barbarians. There was militant Islam in the south. There was an internal collapse of population. Each of these had been brought on by changes in the climate that no one at the time could have understood had they been noticed. It would not be until after 800 that the climate would turn benign again. In the meantime, any state to which even a shadow of Lecky’s dismissal applied would have crumpled in six months. Only the most courageous and determined action, only the most radical changes of its structure, could save the Empire. And saved the Empire most definitely was.

The reason for this is that the Mediaeval Roman State was directed by creative pragmatists. Look for one moment beneath its glittering surface, and the Ancient Roman Empire was a ghastly place for most of the people who lived in it. The Emperors at the top were often vicious incompetents. They ruled through an immense and parasitic bureaucracy. They were supreme governors of an army too large to be controlled. They protected a landed aristocracy that was a repository of culture, but that was ruthless in its exaction of rent. Most ordinary people were disarmed tax-slaves, where not chattel slaves or serfs.

The contemporary historians themselves are disappointingly vague about the seventh and eighth centuries. Our only evidence for what happened comes from the description of established facts in the tenth century. As early as the seventh century, though, the Mediaeval Roman State pulled off the miracle of reforming itself internally while fighting a war of survival on every frontier. Much of the bureaucracy was shut down. Taxes were cut. The silver coinage was stabilised. Above all, the senatorial estates were broken up and given to those who worked on them, in return for service in local militias. Though never abolished, chattel slavery became far less pervasive. The civil law was simplified, and the criminal law humanised – after the seventh century, as said, the death penalty was rarely used.

The Mediaeval Roman Empire survived because of a revolutionary transformation in which ordinary people became armed stakeholders. The inhabitants of Roman Gaul and Italy and Spain barely looked up from their ploughs as the Barbarians swirled round them. The citizens of Mediaeval Rome fought like tigers in defence of their country and their Orthodox faith. Time and again, the armies of the Caliph smashed against a wall of armed freeholders. This was a transformation pushed through in a century and a half of recurrent crises during which Constantinople itself was repeatedly under siege. Alone among the ancient empires in its path, Mediaeval Rome faced down the Arabs, and kept Islam at bay for nearly five centuries. Would it be superfluous to say that no one does this by accident?

Sean Gabb, “The Mediaeval Roman Empire: An Unlikely Emergence and Survival”, SeanGabb.co.uk, 2018-09-14.

August 19, 2022

Why Quebec rejected the American Revolution

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Conrad Black outlines the journey of the French colony of New France through the British conquest to the (amazing to the Americans) decision to stay under British control rather than join the breakaway American colonies in 1776:

Civil rights were not a burning issue when Canada was primarily the French colony of New France. The purpose of New France was entirely commercial and essentially based upon the fur trade until Jean Talon created industries that made New France self-sufficient. And to raise the population he imported 1,000 nubile young French women, and today approximately seven million French Canadians and Franco-Americans are descended from them. Only at this point, about 75 years after it was founded, did New France develop a rudimentary legal and judicial framework.

Eighty years later, when the British captured Québec City and Montréal in the Seven Years’ War, a gentle form of British military rule ensued. A small English-speaking population arose, chiefly composed of commercial sharpers from the American colonies claiming to be performing a useful service but, in fact, exploiting the French Canadians. Colonel James Murray became the first English civil governor of Québec in 1764. A Royal proclamation had foreseen an assembly to govern Québec, but this was complicated by the fact that at the time British law excluded any Roman Catholic from voting for or being a member of any such assembly, and accordingly the approximately 500 English-speaking merchants in Québec demanded an assembly since they would be the sole members of it. Murray liked the French Canadians and despised the American interlopers as scoundrels. He wrote: “In general they are the most immoral collection of men I ever knew.” He described the French of Québec as: “a frugal, industrious, moral race of men who (greatly appreciate) the mild treatment they have received from the King’s officers”. Instead of facilitating creation of an assembly that would just be a group of émigré New England hustlers and plunderers, Murray created a governor’s council which functioned as a sort of legislature and packed it with his supporters, and sympathizers of the French Canadians.

The greedy American merchants of Montréal and Québec had enough influence with the board of trade in London, a cabinet office, to have Murray recalled in 1766 for his pro-French attitudes. He was a victim of his support for the civil rights of his subjects, but was replaced by a like-minded governor, the very talented Sir Guy Carleton, [later he became] Lord Dorchester. Murray and Carleton had both been close comrades of General Wolfe. […]

The British had doubled their national debt in the Seven Years’ War and the largest expenses were incurred in expelling the French from Canada at the urgent request of the principal American agent in London, Benjamin Franklin. As the Americans were the most prosperous of all British citizens, the British naturally thought it appropriate that the Americans should pay the Stamp Tax that their British cousins were already paying. The French Canadians had no objection to the Stamp Tax, even though it paid for the expulsion of France from Canada.

As Murray and Carleton foresaw, the British were not able to collect that tax from the Americans; British soldiers would be little motivated to fight their American kinfolk, and now that the Americans didn’t have a neighboring French presence to worry them, they could certainly be tempted to revolt and would be very hard to suppress. As Murray and Carleton also foresaw, the only chance the British would have of retaining Canada and preventing the French Canadians from rallying to the Americans would be if the British crown became symbolic in the mind of French Canada with the survival of the French language and culture and religion. Carleton concluded that to retain Québec’s loyalty, Britain would have to make itself the protector of the culture, the religion, and also the civil law of the French Canadians. From what little they had seen of it, the French Canadians much preferred the British to the French criminal law. In pre-revolutionary France there was no doctrine of habeas corpus and the authorities routinely tortured suspects.

In a historically very significant act, Carleton effectively wrote up the assurances that he thought would be necessary to retain the loyalty of the colony. He wanted to recruit French-speaking officials from among the colonists to give them as much self-government as possible while judiciously feeding the population a worrisome specter of assimilation at the hands of a tidal wave of American officials and commercial hustlers in the event of an American takeover of Canada.

After four years of lobbying non-stop in London, Carleton gained adoption of the Québec Act, which contained the guaranties he thought necessary to satisfy French Canada. He returned to a grateful Québec in 1774. The knotty issue of an assembly, which Québec had never had and was not clamoring for, was ducked, and authority was vested in a governor with an executive and legislative Council of 17 to 23 members chosen by the governor.

Conveniently, the liberality accorded the Roman Catholic Church was furiously attacked by the Americans who in their revolutionary Continental Congress reviled it as “a bloodthirsty, idolatrous, and hypocritical creed … a religion which flooded England with blood, and spread hypocrisy, murder, persecution, and revolt into all parts of the world”. The American revolutionaries produced a bombastic summary of what the French-Canadians ought to do and told them that Americans were grievously moved by their degradation, but warned them that if they did not rally to the American colours they would be henceforth regarded as “inveterate enemies”. This incendiary polemic was translated, printed, and posted throughout the former New France, by the Catholic Church and the British government, acting together. The clergy of the province almost unanimously condemned the American agitation as xenophobic and sectarian incitements to hate and needless bloodshed.

Carleton astounded the French-Canadians, who were accustomed to the graft and embezzlement of French governors, by not taking any payment for his service as governor. It was entirely because of the enlightened policy of Murray and Carleton and Carleton’s skill and persistence as a lobbyist in the corridors of Westminster, that the civil and cultural rights of the great majority of Canadians 250 years ago were conserved. The Americans when they did proclaim the revolution in 1775 and officially in the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, made the British position in Canada somewhat easier by their virulent hostility to Catholicism, and to the French generally.

How Accurate is Saving Private Ryan? – WW2 D-Day Special

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Media, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 16 Aug 2022

How accurate is that famous beach scene in Saving Private Ryan? Is it true to the history or just another Hollywood story? Seeing as we’re about to start the filming for our massive D-Day project, we figured we’d break it down, shot by shot.
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The DeLorean Story

Filed under: Britain, Business, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Big Car
Published 5 Jan 2020

There’s much more to the DeLorean Motor Company than Doc’s 88mph time machine in Back to the Future. It’s a story of a playboy founder with a meteoric rise, a story of hope and regeneration in an area torn apart after a decade of fighting, and of a cocaine smuggling fall from grace. Yes, this story has it all!
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QotD: How pre-modern polytheistic religions originated

Filed under: Greece, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… normally when you ask what the ancients knew of the gods and how they knew it, the immediate thought – quite intuitively – is to go read Greek and Roman philosophers discussing on the nature of man, the gods, the soul and so on. This is a mistake. Many of our religions work that way: they begin with a doctrine, a theory of how the divine works, and then construct ritual and practice with that doctrine as a foundation.

This is exactly backwards for how the ancients, practicing their practical knowledge, learn about the gods. The myths, philosophical discussions and well-written treatises are not the foundation of the religion’s understanding of the gods, but rather the foaming crest at the top of the wave. In practice, the ruminations of those philosophers often had little to do the religion of the populace at large; famously Socrates’ own philosophical take on the gods rather upset quite a lot of Athenians.

Instead of beginning with a theory of the divine and working forwards from that, the ancients begin with proven methods and work backwards from that. For most people, there’s no need to know why things work, only that they work. Essentially, this knowledge is generated by trial and error.

Let’s give an example of how that kind of knowledge forms. Let’s say we are a farming community. It is very important that our crops grow, but the methods and variations in how well they grow are deep and mysterious and we do not fully understand them; clearly that growth is governed by some unseen forces we might seek the aid of. So we put together a ritual – perhaps an offering of a bit of last year’s harvest – to try to get that favor. And then the harvest is great – excellent, we have found a formula that works. So we do it next year, and the year after that.

Sometimes the harvest is good (well performed ritual there) and sometimes it is bad (someone must have made an error), but our community survives. And that very survival becomes the proof of the effectiveness of our ritual. We know it works because we are still here. And I mean survival over generations; our great-great-grandchildren, for whom we are nameless ancestors and to whom our ritual has always been practiced in our village can take solace in the fact that so long as this ritual was performed, the community has never perished. They know it works because they themselves can see the evidence.

(These sorts of justifications are offered in ancient works all the time. Cicero is, in several places, explicit that Roman success must, at the first instance, be attributed to Roman religio – religious scruples. The empire itself serves as the proof of the successful, effective nature of the religion it practices!)

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part I: Knowledge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-25.

August 18, 2022

The Communist Spies in America’s Atomic Program – WW2 – Spies & Ties 22

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 15 Aug 2022

The NKVD have wormed their way into British society. Across the pond, America is also teeming with communist spies. They’re in the government, military, even OSS, and the FBI. Now they’re going for the biggest secret of all – the atomic bomb.
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The bridge design that helped win World War II

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Vox
Published 12 Mar 2021

It’s a simple innovation that helped win a war.

The Bailey bridge was Donald Bailey’s innovative solution to a number of wartime obstacles. The allies needed a way to cross bodies of water quickly, but bombed-out bridges — or an absence of crossings entirely — made that incredibly difficult. That was only compounded by new, heavy tanks that needed incredibly strong support.

Bailey’s innovation — a modular, moveable panel bridge — solved those problems and gave the allies a huge advantage. The 570-pound steel panel could be lifted by just six men, and the supplies could fit inside small service trucks. Using those manageable materials, soldiers could build crossings sufficient for heavy tanks and other vehicles.

As impressive, the Bailey bridge could be rolled across a gap from one side to the other, making it possible to build covertly or with little access to the other side. Together, all the Bailey bridge’s advantages changed bridge construction and may have helped win the war.
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QotD: Nostalgie de la boue

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

TWS suggests we take a hard look at the concept of nostalgie de la boue:

    Nostalgie de la boue (French: “nostalgia for mud”) is the attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation, found at times both in individuals and in cultural movements … Tom Wolfe described a party in New York in 1970: “It was at this party that a Black Panther field marshal rose up beside the north piano — there was also a south piano — in Leonard Bernstein’s living room and outlined the Panthers’ ten-point program to a roomful of socialites and celebrities, who, giddy with nostalgie de la boue, entertained a vision of the future in which, after the revolution, there would no longer be any such thing as a two-story, thirteen-room apartment on Park Avenue, with twin grand pianos in the living room, for one family.”

I think TWS is right:

    It explains everything from those parties where they pretend to eat people and the Podesta brothers love of pedo-murder art to the Jersey Shore and all rap music. People of Wal-Mart and people who enjoy mocking them. The idea covers everything happening.

Back in the days, they called all that “authenticity”. The Working Man ™ was supposed to have an “authenticity”, a raw experience of life, that the Intelligentsia did not, so the Intelligentsia made it their mission to ape “authentic” proletarian manners and mores. That’s why every self-styled “Intellectual” since Marx has carried on like an unbathed schizophrenic hobo — they think they’re being “authentic”.

It never occurs to them that this is grossly insulting to The Workers they’re supposedly helping, because of course they never ever meet any Workers — they imagine how they think a longshoreman would act, and then go do that.

I have far more respect for “the People of Walmart” than I do for those who make fun of them, because “the People of Walmart” have been beaten down and brutalized by the dominant culture. They’ve had all their self-respect kicked out of them by little college snots with Gender Studies degrees. It’s like the peasantry in pre-Revolution Russia: Everything the intellectuals said about the nobility was true … but everything the nobility said about the serfs was also true. It was a chicken-and-egg problem with no solution save one.

I also have some respect for Walmart as an institution. Yeah, I know, it’s cheap Chinese shit, but trust me: Though I didn’t grow up poor, you could see “poor” from my house for a lot of my childhood. I don’t recall having Walmart back then, but K-Mart’s Blue Light Specials improved our day to day quality of life enormously. And when I first got out on my own, I decorated my entire first apartment in Walmart — it wasn’t fancy, but it worked, and I had a hell of a lot more stuff that I could actually use than I ever could’ve afforded any other way.

You want to make fun of Walmart, and the people who shop there? Ok, fine, motherfucker, but first try living in a trailer where your couch is patched up with duct tape, and go to school wearing your California cousins’ hand me down clothes, so that you’re dressed like a surfer when you’re 500 miles from the nearest ocean.

I will never, ever understand this. You can choose to be ugly, and to surround yourself with ugliness. Or you can choose NOT to do that. Why would anyone pick the former?

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-13.

August 17, 2022

Amazing Money Heist by Polish Resistance – WAH 073 – August 14, 1943

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, India, Italy, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 14 Aug 2022

The reality of war finally seeps through to the majority of Germans, and it didn’t match up with the propaganda. Meanwhile resistance is increasing, and part of that is a classic money carriers when the Polish Home Army robs a money transport.
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To understand Justin Trudeau, you need to look at his relationship with his mother

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo on how a lot of Justin Trudeau’s personal quirks may be directly traced to his upbringing and particularly his relationship with Margaret Trudeau:

Malia and Sasha Obama talk with Prime Minister Trudeau and his mother Margaret Trudeau during a reception on the Truman Balcony, 10 March, 2016.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons.

Cue the popularity of Justin Trudeau, who at first seemed all sincerity, even to the point of public spectacles of tearfulness and child-like ebullience. He was the first Canadian leader to march in the Gay Pride Parade as if it were his natural milieu, not merely a vote-seeking opportunity. His enthusiasm for Bollywood-style gyving, Hindu fancy dress, and participation in Islamic prayer, though heavily criticized, seemed genuine, at least in a high-school drama teacher way.

When he refused to give a real answer to the question of why it was necessary to appoint a gender-equal cabinet as one of his first actions upon assuming office in 2015, his insouciant quip “Because it’s 2015” suggested an unstudied feminist commitment. His comments after the Boston bombings emphasized that empathy rather than harshness was the appropriate response to murderous acts of terror.

But there has always been a harsher side to Trudeau, a fondness for dictators, an attraction to brute power, and an inability (or unwillingness) to hide his contempt for political opponents. Perhaps his empathy for the Boston bombers was respect or even admiration for their willingness to use violence. Many were shocked by his open admission that one of the countries he most admired was the “basic dictatorship” of China. When churches burned across Canada in the summer of 2021 in response to the alleged discovery of “mass” graves at a residential school (a discovery that has not yet yielded a single body), Trudeau condemned the arson but hastened to say it was “understandable”. About Canadians who chose not to take the Covid-19 vaccines, he could not control his impatience, unleashing a volley of stigmatizing, scapegoating rhetoric. For the truckers who camped out in Ottawa amid a sea of Canadian flags and bouncy castles demanding vaccine mandates be revoked, he had a brutal contempt.

Which is he: the soft feminist with the fancy socks, joy in Gay Pride, and empathy for the marginalized? Or the hard, contemptuous leader who could oversee without flinching a violent RCMP crackdown on the Convoy protest that saw an Indigenous woman trampled under the hoofs of a police horse?

The answer is: both. A clue to his doubleness may be found in his relationship with his mother.

I recently watched an old interview with Margaret Trudeau that offers some illuminating glimpses into the character of the woman who mothered Justin. The interview took place in 1979, after Margaret had left Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father, who was Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 until 1982. Pierre had primary custody of their three young children.

The interview shows a very beautiful woman whose consciousness of her attractiveness is a paramount part of her identity. She is not, as has sometimes been claimed, stupid; many of her answers to the interviewer are clever in the manner of a wayward adolescent convinced she can get away with nearly anything so long as she charms. At times she flirts openly, smiling suggestively, tongue protruding through her lips, confident in her sexual power.

The overall impact of her answers is horrifying for a viewer who fails to be enchanted. This is a woman who takes herself seriously but evidently does not take seriously her position as a mother to three young sons (all of them under 10 years old at the time) — and certainly not her position as estranged wife to the leader of the country.

She boasts girlishly about smoking marijuana, listening to psychedelic music, and giving up guilt over failing to meet others’ expectations. Spouting feminist rhetoric about being true to herself, she makes clear that she is more interested in having lovers than in looking after her children. She dismisses her husband’s shock at her unfaithfulness as owing to “old-fashioned principles of fidelity”, and indicates that Canadian society would be better off if more people heeded their “feelings” rather than stodgy moral precepts.

I cringe to think of Justin Trudeau, even today, watching this interview. The woman who presented herself therein — self-preoccupied, proudly promiscuous — must also have been evident to the son who watched her flamboyantly “find herself”, feminist-style, as his parents’ marriage crumbled.

H/T to Brian Peckford for the URL.

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