After Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party defeated Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, a giddy New York Times assured Canadians, “Your long national nightmare is over.” The Times scribe felt “like a broken human after almost 10 years of Harper rule.” Oh, the suffering! Mr. Trudeau is different, she cheered herself up. “He is a better match [than Harper] for Canadians’ vision of themselves: peaceable, educated, emotionally stable, multicultural.”
For the North American political class, George W. Bush circa 2008 has become Harper in 2015. Indeed, Trudeau is being welcomed as fulsomely as Obama was. “Canadians simply ask that Mr. Trudeau… not be like his predecessor” said the New York Times writer. “Behold, we are already pleased!” One has to wonder: Is Trudeau’s Nobel Peace Prize being readied?
A “Trudeau era” will resume, say the Times and others nostalgic for Pierre Trudeau, father of Justin, in office as prime minister from 1968 virtually until 1984. The policies of the new prime minister do sound like-father like-son: “Reopen Canada’s doors” to immigrants. Make “taxes more fair.” End combat missions in Iraq. Revive Canada’s international peacekeeping. More gun control measures. You get the idea. Meanwhile, Mrs. Trudeau will focus on eating disorders, mental health, and women’s issues. Skeptics, not only in Canada, will await the results of these noble plans.
“We beat fear with hope,” Trudeau said after his victory. Americans heard the same from Obama in 2008, but fear has grown and hope has shriveled. Of course Trudeau is not bound to replicate Obama; he is only 43 and may be malleable. But his father’s record is a salutary warning. Trudeau was a charming leader with weird ideas.
The New Yorker last week recalled “the great Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.” Canadian writer David Frum sharply differs: “He nearly blew apart the country – and his own party.” At the beginning of the Trudeau years, separatism was a fringe movement in Quebec. A decade later, it was a major cloud. In 1968, Trudeau’s Liberals won 25 seats west of Ontario. In 1980, they won two.
The New Yorker omits much in calling Harper’s politics a tale
of division, nastiness, and fear. For much of its history, Canadian liberalism and its Liberals were instruments of a ceaseless search for intelligent accommodation, splitting differences instead of splitting heads. In the hands of Trudeau, Sr…. it still largely sought the bright side of the street, where people of different backgrounds and languages stroll along in reasonable harmony. It would be nice if we could walk that walk in the snows again.
Especially on the Cold War and China we should beware a resumption of the Trudeau era. “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China,” Justin Trudeau recently said. Firmly in the Thomas Friedman camp he declared: “Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.”
In Mao’s time there appeared a coterie of progressive Western politicians viewing China with wide-eyed wonder. One was Pierre Trudeau, who wrote (with a colleague) the aptly named Innocents in Red China.
Visiting China in 1961, Trudeau saw only language as a barrier to his knowledge of Beijing’s “experiment,” overlooking Leninist controls that hid much. Blaming missionaries for any negative views of China in the West, Trudeau saw the Cold War as a lazy transference by the West from “Yellow peril” to a peril flying “the Red Flag of Bolshevism.”
Utterly ignorant of Chinese history, Trudeau said Mao’s government was “leading its people out of several millennia of misery.” Unaware of the troubled story of African students in China in the 1950s, he said that in the People’s Republic “Africans were welcomed as brothers . . . What impresses Africans is the dazzling progress China has made . . . So you don’t have to have a white skin to build blast-furnaces?” This nonsense was written two years after the nightmare of the Great Leap Forward.
Pierre Trudeau was a decade later Canadian prime minister. Another famous “innocent in China” at this time was Francois Mitterrand, later president of France (1980-1995). Like Trudeau, Mitterrand wrote a book, La Chine au Defi (1961), after going to Beijing. Three traits marked the mindset of this Gallic pair: They were doves on the Cold War, ignorant of life within China, and seeking a fresh social engineering utopia to replace prior disappointments.
Trudeau the elder after a week in the PRC judged Mao superior to Chiang Kai-shek, since Mao’s regime was “founded on the people” and hence “bound to be as little alienated as possible from the Chinese masses.” Only on his return to Ottawa did Trudeau evidently learn about those things known as “elections.”
In La Chine au Defi Mitterrand likewise accepts hook, line, and sinker the “worthless Chiang Kai-shek” narrative, now discredited by historical research in the PRC. Chiang had been “abusive” of the heritage of Sun Yat-sen, Mitterrand said. He became “corrupted by the exercise of power.”
Nothing so unpleasant marked Mao, apparently. Being indefatigable in “inspecting the provinces” and “multiplying his contacts with locals,” Mao could inform Mitterrand face to face: “There is no famine in China.” At this time thousands of Chinese were dying each day of starvation. In all, tens of millions perished by the time Mitterrand returned to Paris.
To say there was a famine, Mao said to Mitterrand, “is a new form of imperialist aggression – we are used to it.” Mao suggested the imperialists “need to demonstrate that we have failed.” Mitterrand did not question, directly to Mao, or in La Chine au Defi, any of these assertions. Yet as he was in Beijing, Mao’s fearful colleagues were night by night trying to hint to him that the Great Leap Forward had bombed.
It was a tendency of the Trudeau-Mitterrand school to indulge the Soviet Union as a premise of giving socialist China the benefit of doubts. “Russian planes don’t crash,” wrote Pierre Trudeau in the face of much evidence to the contrary, multiplied in the years between pere and fils. “The accredited anti-Communists, of course,” the Canadian innocent in China said, “will go on believing for the next fifty years that the Chinese are on the verge of rising against their Communist government, just as some people have believed the same thing of the USSR for forty-four years.”
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Eventually these despised anti-Communists were correct about the Soviet Union. The PRC may avoid the fate of the Soviet Union. But Prime Minister Trudeau and President Mitterrand, both highly intelligent men, based their conclusions about China on a flawed mindset. As naive doves, they simply found in China what they set out to see. The novelist Saul Bellow once remarked, “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
Much has changed from Pierre to Justin, but if the young Trudeau shares even half the illusions of his father, the New York Times’ welcome to a joyful resumption of the “Trudeau era” is foggy. The Trudeau-Mitterrand mindset has not disappeared but re-geared for a go-soft-on-Islamism era. One hopes Justin, a former teacher, can learn from history. He’s shown curiosity about a wide range of issues, as did his father. But the left everywhere still inclines to heed good intentions, not facts.
The difference between the new Canadian prime minister’s remarks on China , and his father’s, is that China under Mao was given a pass by the West because of its exoticism, while today money does the job. It’s still in part a confidence trick. The Chinese flourished the pocket-book last week in London as David Cameron hosted Xi Jinping. Be alert, next, for Xi to visit Ottawa and cross with silver the palm of famously “inclusive” Justin Trudeau. “Walk that walk in the snows again,” if you will, this time Trudeau and Xi Jinping in step together.
Ross Terrill’s books on China include Mao, The New Chinese Empire, and Madame Mao. His next will be Crossing the Stones. He first visited China in 1964.
