And we are back. (PEI -- you should go.)
On the weekend, the Toronto Star published an excerpt from Shadows of Tyranny. It focusses on Prime Minister William Mackenzie King and his fawning upon German dictator Adolf Hitler, even as late as when they met in 1937, when the nature of the Nazi regime should have been abundantly clear to him.
McGoogan assigns King's blindness to his spiritualism -- essentially to his being a nut: his "intense belief in spiritualism, rooted in his veneration for his mother, probably made him less discerning than he might have been."
He's right about the bizarreness of King's spiritualism for sure (and the fawning!), but I'm less sure about the lack of "discernment." King was always good at having his crystal ball and his mother's spirit tell him exactly what he had already calculated.
In the 1930s King was intensely committed to extricating Canada from the remaining bonds of the British Empire. He understood that a new European war would not only be a long, grim disaster but would renew the old pressure for Canada to march to the aid of old England. And it would once more fire up the profound divisions between English Canada and French Canada that the First World War had produced. King could not prevent a new war, and he did not really need a crystal ball to know its outbreak could destroy most of what his political career had been aimed at.
I suspect King's desperate hope that somehow Hitler would decide not to provoke a new world war was underpinned by his desperate passion to avoid war, or at least to enable Canada to stay out of it. And so his crystal ball told him Hitler could be a great man and a man of peace, not a war-obsessed tyrant.
Hitler was not, of course, the man he hoped for. King got the war he did not want. He spent the early part of it trying to minimize Canadian participation, delaying the Canadian declaration of war and declining any instant dispatch of troops to Britain. Even as Canada gradually became fully committed, King remained alert to any threat to Canadian independence -- and to anything that would encourage French- and English-Canadian factionalism.
Ken McGoogan's condemnation of King's moral and political blindness -- matched by that of British appeasers and American isolationists -- is entirely justified. But King was never simply a naive, goofy crystal-ball gazer somehow catapulted into high office. In 1937, I'd say, he was desperately trying to convince himself that looming circumstances he saw as being disastrous to Canada might yet not come to pass.
Book looks interesting. Note whose silhouette adorns the cover. Ken thinks Kamala Harris may be the Churchill for our time.
Update, September 3: On Twittex, Ken good-naturedly suggests we hold a public debate. Not sure I really disagree with him on much in this book, but we would have fun.
