In fact Mackenzie King consulted his dead mother as to whether and when to declare war on Germany in 1939. She said yes and gave him the exact timeline. So he declared war in Parliament at exactly 10 minutes to 2:00pm b/c the hands of the clock represented the crucified Christ 3 days after Great Britain to commemorate His rising from the dead!😳 He headed Canada and the Liberal Party from roughly 1922 to 1949 with one break during the worst years of the Great Depression. He was batshit crazy! -a student of Canadian History who read through and survived all his diaries. The longest entry in the diaries describes the death of his dog, Pat, and was written as Canadians were slaughtered At Dieppe in 1942. There was little reference to that debacle.
It’s a story that was repeated by Stacey. I was quoting the diaries per se which I researched for a Master thesis on John Grierson and the use of propaganda during WW2 at Queen’s University, Kingston. The misogyny was rife during my time there (1975-1978) and I fought it tooth and nail! Female Scholars of my age (73) have this miserable history in common. We are still challenged as if we are idiots or liars today regardless of our academic pedigrees and publication history. It’s only gotten worse soince 2015.
My focus was not on King but on the emergence of the National Film Board but I do remember the oddities in the diaries and I do remember Stacey and other scholars repeating this one. I was particularly incensed with his focus on Pat b/c my father’s generation and a friend of his was captured by the Germans at Dieppe and remained in a POW camp until VE in May 1945. I used the story of King’s preoccupation with Bomber Command in my thesis as an example of how King played politics by trying to keep Canadian casualties down b/c the memory of losing a third of its male population as cannon fodder in WW1 was still fresh, hence a propaganda tool.
Since being a Canadian Historian was a dead end for women in my formative years, I went on to become a certified medical librarian and spent my career supporting medical research in Canada until Mulroney killed the Canada Council Grant program and put all of us out of work.
I emigrated to the US and spent the rest of my career supporting NIH research and then Duke U research until my retirement.
I offered my opinion in light of my background and as entertainment more than scholarship.
I don't think this is quite fair. According to CP Stacey, who went though King's diaries very thoroughly, there is no indication that his occult interests ever had any direct influence on his policy decisions. Stacey was very far from a King apologist, so I think he was lightly disappointed to conclude this.
My own perusals of King's diary have been far less comprehensive than Stacey's, but I've never found anything to suggest he was wrong. The (admittedly very long) account of his dog Pat's death and 'funeral' are from July of 1941, just over a year before Dieppe.
I read them all, spent 6 months in the bowels of the National Archives spooling through badly-reproduced microfilm whilst writing about wartime war propaganda and John Grierson. I am many- generation Ottawan with many family members who worked for King in the Gatineau at Moorside. And for succeeding PMs at Meech Lake. There are stories I could tell that I will not b/c my sources were poor grounds keepers. He was still talking about Pat a year later around the Dieppe Raid in his journals. I’m a dog lover and have mourned the passing of my pets so I don’t fault him for that. But to make decisions on when to declare war based on dead mother’s advice … and when the hands of a clock are just right… I do not doubt his political brilliance. He managed the number of 🇨🇦ian casualties by supporting RCAF Bomber Command big time. His rationale was when a bomber went down, you only lost 7 men. When you faced the enemy on the battlefield, you lost a lot more! And he held off conscription until the end of the war. He managed to separate 🇨🇦from Britain through the Halibut Treaty and overrode Governor General Byng in 1926 in a dispute on who should form the government. Notwithstanding (sorry!) he was batshit crazy!
C P Stacey, IMO, was a Liberal apologist.
While I am impressed with Carney and hope the Liberals win, this time, I am no fan. Having worked for years in the Fed Govt. and been at the wet end of some of the rank criminals they have spawned I expect they will be challenged to keep the usual pigs out of the trough.
It sounds like you've spent a lot more time than I have with the diaries, although evidently much less recently. If you can cite and quote the diary entry in which he reveals that he declared war based on the advice of his mother, I'll happily stand corrected.
You know I can’t do that b/c my research was done 45 years ago. It’s a cheap trick. Get the “little lady” to bust her ass to prove herself to big man. It’s been pulled many times on me. I don’t need to prove myself to you or anyone for that matter. In fact, CP Stacey also references this in his work. Which one, I don’t remember and I am not going to waste my time doing your work. It is a well known and repeated story among Canadian historians. Find it yourself. 🤬 Why is it that men can’t accept the scholarship of women w/o being intimidated by it? I used to spend a lot of time justifying my existence to people who took the words of men at face value but not a woman’s. No more, I know who I am. Do you?
I'm sorry, I've clearly caused offence, and I honestly didn't mean to. I wasn't denigrating you. It's just that there's only one authoritative source for this story - it isn't you, and it isn't me, it's King's diary. Claiming that he declared war on the advice of his mother's ghost is pretty damning, and I don't think such claims should be made casually. I think it's important to verify such claims before making them, and to challenge them if they're made without evidence, no matter who makes them.
I did mean to challenge, but not to offend. Please accept my apologies.
Cathy and Peter, as a reader of this thread, may I ask you to both have no hard feelings? I absolutely love seeing good discussion between informed people. Thank you both for contributing. Dan
I don't know how I can persuade you that I'm being sincere, but yes, of course I'd have challenged you if you'd been male. Because I'm not actually challenging the person, or the woman. I'm challenging the facts as presented, which I believed, and still believe, to be incorrect.
No one has produced any evidence that King based public policy on advice received from the dead. The person who has looked hardest, by far, for such evidence is CP Stacey. And here's what he concludes, on page 198 of A Very Double Life:
"At the end of this account of Mackenzie King's involvement with the spirit world, one faces the question, so often asked, Did he conduct the affairs of Canada in accordance with what he believed to be advice from Beyond? And the answer is quite clearly No."
If evidence that disproves that conclusion surfaces, I'll gladly change my view.
None of this in any way questions or invalidates your experience of gender bias in academia, which I'm sure was exactly as you say. There's still lots wrong in academia, but in this at least, we have made a lot of progress. Here's hoping we don't backslide on that due to political pressure (much less of a concern in Canada, for the time being, than in the USA).
Not to mention that one of the hallmarks of sociopaths is that they can be extremely charming, and use that charm facade to get whatever it is they want.
This is brilliant. I have the WSJ headline from the day after he became chancellor: "BERLIN VIEWS HITLER CALMLY. Rise in Stocks Reflects Confidence He Will Not Disrupt Nation's Affairs."
Mackenzie King, and his government, and probably most of Canada, were antisemitic. F.C. Blair, who was in charge of immigration policies in Canada during World War II, when asked how many Jews Canada should take in, said, "None is too many."
Excellent Twilight Zone episode from the last season, "He's Alive" explains the methodology behind the madness. Written by Rod Serling and sterring Dennis Hopper. Not many laffs though. If I'd known we going for laffs I'd have recommended "The Death of Stalin."
It just shows how no one takes these guys seriously until they invade a neighbouring country, or two. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Greenland…,
In M-K’s defence he did not repeat Robert Borden’s economic missteps from the end of World War One. When the Second World War ended the Canadian government kept the economic wheels greased with spending on infrastructure building home, hospitals, post secondary and public education and providing programming to ensure employment in well-paying jobs (many unionized.) The result was a level of prosperity unprecedented in Canada’s history.
So, he was the opposite of Hitler in some ways, perhaps personally inept, but a good leader for a democracy. 🤷🏽♂️
It seems to me that the NYTimes IS exhibiting a bit of playful spirit by using irony coupled with satire to either equate Trump with Hitler or build a semantic legal defense for defamation.
With King succumbing to Hitler's alleged charm, I think there are lessons here for our own election.
Trump played Maher like a fiddle. I've enjoyed Maher for years and watched his Trumpian Dinner soliloquy in "Real Time" with surprise, waiting for the punch line. But it never came . And Bill is in good company - just look at the last US election results. And I seem to recall a very similar response to the first State of the Union during his first reign.
As a Canadian I remember back then thinking the Trump Reality Show was now replacing the Ringling Bros Circus as "The Greatest Show on Earth" . Great TV and grist for the comedy mills.
But now David's satire and Trumps declaration of global economic war have reminded me of what happens when powerful nations go rogue. My wife was born in a converted Army barracks in Germany after her parents were dispossessed and thrown out of their native Hungary after WW2 because of their German heritage. My 2 US uncles were in the US Army during that war - one was killed in France and the other was institutionalized for life thanks to his trauma in the Pacific.
So now, with that declaration of economic war, it's getting too close to home. One of my wife's recent novels was set during WW2 and one of the themes was that it's not the people who are evil, it's the ideology and leaders that ensnare them.
I hope my fellow Canadians will be able to pick a leader in the upcoming election who is a strategic, skilled economic warrior but who can still relate to the people if not the leaders of the opposition, both at home and abroad. And who can unite us all in yet another "new normal".
And that we can avoid being played by rhetoric & empty slogans and instead support a platform that recognizes the economic & identity emergency confronting us and will start to lay the foundation for a New Canada that extends far beyond a 5-year term in office.
I watched Bill Mahar's monologue. Mahar comes across as sincere and heartfelt. One of the key takeaways was Mahar's take on Trumps's sense of humour when he stated words to the effect "As a life long professional comedian, I can tell when someone is faking it, and when someone is real"
So what? Could it be that pathological liars believe everything they say in the moment is true?
"They're eating the Geese" and "Zelensky started it"
As a longtime aficionado of Real Time, Mahar has shown his lack of knowledge of subjects that many would never pick up on. His defence of Rob Ford (former mayor of Toronto - for those who might not know that name) for smoking crack cocaine, made no mention of all the other surrounding criminal issues that Ford was embroiled in. All Mahar saw was a Politician hounded for drug abuse.
Similarly, Mahar saw Trump in a very comfortable environment, surrounded by those deeply devoted to him such as Kid Rock. It was easy for Trump to be humourful and welcoming. Trump like Mahar, has been in show business for many years. Where facts don't matter but personal impressions do.
Or does Mahar believe like Trump, he has to generate controversy to keep his viewers tuned in? After all Bill Mahar is a long time Showman, and it's an increasing fragmented media landscape.
Always a challenge to decide if there is a real or authentic person between the private and the public persona. This piece and the David satire are useful lessons in remembering that there is greater complexity to individuals than may seem at first glance. And, as noted that someone who seems beyond the pale in public might not be so in private. It should not come as that much of a surprise though since we are often faced with the opposite - someone who has a wonderful or just normal public persona but who does unspeakable things in private.
I think the challenge for MacKenzie King (and all politicians and diplomats) is that one often feels a need to maintain a positive relationship of some kind. You display your own public persona to your interlocutor, all the while accepting that that person is doing the same. Writing the person off because your assessment is that the person is a sociopath, sadist or narcissist is not possible because there will likely continue to be a need to engage with that person. And you hope that the type of private assessment contained in King’s diary does not get coloured by your need to keep paths open - or your wish for the person to be better so that you can avoid confrontation or ultimately war.
I wonder if in part King saw the Hitler he desperately needed to see. He badly wanted to avoid war, not least because he wanted to avoid another Conscription Crisis. He needed Hitler to be rational and reasonable; Hitler threw him a few straws, and he clung to them.
I believe Dan has written before about confirmation bias....
Actually, I like David's piece. It's tight and consistent and well, funny. Oh, I disagree with him heartily about Trump. I like Trump! But instead of the tired, old, profane invective from most of the unhinged Left, this is quite good. Swig heil, baby!
I remember hearing one Richard Langworth speak in New Jersey at a Yom Ha Shoah event. he recounted an account from one of Churchhill's private secretaries. Apparently, Churchill, his son and some others were in a bar in Munich at the same time that Hitler and a crowd of his friends, who were drinking at another table. Hitler was a well known politician but was not in power. According to Langworth, Hitler sent someone over to Churchill's table inviting Churchill to join him for a drink. Churchill declined saying that he was there for a family celebration with his son. The private secretary asked Churchill why he didn't accept the offer since Hitler seemed like an amiable man who was an up and coming German politician. Churchill said that he didn't want to meet Hitler because he might like him and he was sure that one day they would be enemies. It was something about how the devil hides behind pleasant faces.
In fact Mackenzie King consulted his dead mother as to whether and when to declare war on Germany in 1939. She said yes and gave him the exact timeline. So he declared war in Parliament at exactly 10 minutes to 2:00pm b/c the hands of the clock represented the crucified Christ 3 days after Great Britain to commemorate His rising from the dead!😳 He headed Canada and the Liberal Party from roughly 1922 to 1949 with one break during the worst years of the Great Depression. He was batshit crazy! -a student of Canadian History who read through and survived all his diaries. The longest entry in the diaries describes the death of his dog, Pat, and was written as Canadians were slaughtered At Dieppe in 1942. There was little reference to that debacle.
It’s a story that was repeated by Stacey. I was quoting the diaries per se which I researched for a Master thesis on John Grierson and the use of propaganda during WW2 at Queen’s University, Kingston. The misogyny was rife during my time there (1975-1978) and I fought it tooth and nail! Female Scholars of my age (73) have this miserable history in common. We are still challenged as if we are idiots or liars today regardless of our academic pedigrees and publication history. It’s only gotten worse soince 2015.
My focus was not on King but on the emergence of the National Film Board but I do remember the oddities in the diaries and I do remember Stacey and other scholars repeating this one. I was particularly incensed with his focus on Pat b/c my father’s generation and a friend of his was captured by the Germans at Dieppe and remained in a POW camp until VE in May 1945. I used the story of King’s preoccupation with Bomber Command in my thesis as an example of how King played politics by trying to keep Canadian casualties down b/c the memory of losing a third of its male population as cannon fodder in WW1 was still fresh, hence a propaganda tool.
Since being a Canadian Historian was a dead end for women in my formative years, I went on to become a certified medical librarian and spent my career supporting medical research in Canada until Mulroney killed the Canada Council Grant program and put all of us out of work.
I emigrated to the US and spent the rest of my career supporting NIH research and then Duke U research until my retirement.
I offered my opinion in light of my background and as entertainment more than scholarship.
I don't think this is quite fair. According to CP Stacey, who went though King's diaries very thoroughly, there is no indication that his occult interests ever had any direct influence on his policy decisions. Stacey was very far from a King apologist, so I think he was lightly disappointed to conclude this.
My own perusals of King's diary have been far less comprehensive than Stacey's, but I've never found anything to suggest he was wrong. The (admittedly very long) account of his dog Pat's death and 'funeral' are from July of 1941, just over a year before Dieppe.
I read them all, spent 6 months in the bowels of the National Archives spooling through badly-reproduced microfilm whilst writing about wartime war propaganda and John Grierson. I am many- generation Ottawan with many family members who worked for King in the Gatineau at Moorside. And for succeeding PMs at Meech Lake. There are stories I could tell that I will not b/c my sources were poor grounds keepers. He was still talking about Pat a year later around the Dieppe Raid in his journals. I’m a dog lover and have mourned the passing of my pets so I don’t fault him for that. But to make decisions on when to declare war based on dead mother’s advice … and when the hands of a clock are just right… I do not doubt his political brilliance. He managed the number of 🇨🇦ian casualties by supporting RCAF Bomber Command big time. His rationale was when a bomber went down, you only lost 7 men. When you faced the enemy on the battlefield, you lost a lot more! And he held off conscription until the end of the war. He managed to separate 🇨🇦from Britain through the Halibut Treaty and overrode Governor General Byng in 1926 in a dispute on who should form the government. Notwithstanding (sorry!) he was batshit crazy!
C P Stacey, IMO, was a Liberal apologist.
While I am impressed with Carney and hope the Liberals win, this time, I am no fan. Having worked for years in the Fed Govt. and been at the wet end of some of the rank criminals they have spawned I expect they will be challenged to keep the usual pigs out of the trough.
It sounds like you've spent a lot more time than I have with the diaries, although evidently much less recently. If you can cite and quote the diary entry in which he reveals that he declared war based on the advice of his mother, I'll happily stand corrected.
You know I can’t do that b/c my research was done 45 years ago. It’s a cheap trick. Get the “little lady” to bust her ass to prove herself to big man. It’s been pulled many times on me. I don’t need to prove myself to you or anyone for that matter. In fact, CP Stacey also references this in his work. Which one, I don’t remember and I am not going to waste my time doing your work. It is a well known and repeated story among Canadian historians. Find it yourself. 🤬 Why is it that men can’t accept the scholarship of women w/o being intimidated by it? I used to spend a lot of time justifying my existence to people who took the words of men at face value but not a woman’s. No more, I know who I am. Do you?
I'm sorry, I've clearly caused offence, and I honestly didn't mean to. I wasn't denigrating you. It's just that there's only one authoritative source for this story - it isn't you, and it isn't me, it's King's diary. Claiming that he declared war on the advice of his mother's ghost is pretty damning, and I don't think such claims should be made casually. I think it's important to verify such claims before making them, and to challenge them if they're made without evidence, no matter who makes them.
I did mean to challenge, but not to offend. Please accept my apologies.
Cathy and Peter, as a reader of this thread, may I ask you to both have no hard feelings? I absolutely love seeing good discussion between informed people. Thank you both for contributing. Dan
Question: if my tagline was male, would you have “challenged me?” Of course you will say yes. 😔
I don't know how I can persuade you that I'm being sincere, but yes, of course I'd have challenged you if you'd been male. Because I'm not actually challenging the person, or the woman. I'm challenging the facts as presented, which I believed, and still believe, to be incorrect.
No one has produced any evidence that King based public policy on advice received from the dead. The person who has looked hardest, by far, for such evidence is CP Stacey. And here's what he concludes, on page 198 of A Very Double Life:
"At the end of this account of Mackenzie King's involvement with the spirit world, one faces the question, so often asked, Did he conduct the affairs of Canada in accordance with what he believed to be advice from Beyond? And the answer is quite clearly No."
If evidence that disproves that conclusion surfaces, I'll gladly change my view.
None of this in any way questions or invalidates your experience of gender bias in academia, which I'm sure was exactly as you say. There's still lots wrong in academia, but in this at least, we have made a lot of progress. Here's hoping we don't backslide on that due to political pressure (much less of a concern in Canada, for the time being, than in the USA).
Not to mention that one of the hallmarks of sociopaths is that they can be extremely charming, and use that charm facade to get whatever it is they want.
Correct. The irony is that they must appear charming to a very large swath of their country’s people or they could never rise to power.
This is brilliant. I have the WSJ headline from the day after he became chancellor: "BERLIN VIEWS HITLER CALMLY. Rise in Stocks Reflects Confidence He Will Not Disrupt Nation's Affairs."
Mackenzie King, and his government, and probably most of Canada, were antisemitic. F.C. Blair, who was in charge of immigration policies in Canada during World War II, when asked how many Jews Canada should take in, said, "None is too many."
Hitler had a lot of fans.
Excellent Twilight Zone episode from the last season, "He's Alive" explains the methodology behind the madness. Written by Rod Serling and sterring Dennis Hopper. Not many laffs though. If I'd known we going for laffs I'd have recommended "The Death of Stalin."
Congratulations on a really clever piece, a rare blend of insight and fun at a time when we need some relief!
It just shows how no one takes these guys seriously until they invade a neighbouring country, or two. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Greenland…,
In M-K’s defence he did not repeat Robert Borden’s economic missteps from the end of World War One. When the Second World War ended the Canadian government kept the economic wheels greased with spending on infrastructure building home, hospitals, post secondary and public education and providing programming to ensure employment in well-paying jobs (many unionized.) The result was a level of prosperity unprecedented in Canada’s history.
So, he was the opposite of Hitler in some ways, perhaps personally inept, but a good leader for a democracy. 🤷🏽♂️
It seems to me that the NYTimes IS exhibiting a bit of playful spirit by using irony coupled with satire to either equate Trump with Hitler or build a semantic legal defense for defamation.
With King succumbing to Hitler's alleged charm, I think there are lessons here for our own election.
Trump played Maher like a fiddle. I've enjoyed Maher for years and watched his Trumpian Dinner soliloquy in "Real Time" with surprise, waiting for the punch line. But it never came . And Bill is in good company - just look at the last US election results. And I seem to recall a very similar response to the first State of the Union during his first reign.
As a Canadian I remember back then thinking the Trump Reality Show was now replacing the Ringling Bros Circus as "The Greatest Show on Earth" . Great TV and grist for the comedy mills.
But now David's satire and Trumps declaration of global economic war have reminded me of what happens when powerful nations go rogue. My wife was born in a converted Army barracks in Germany after her parents were dispossessed and thrown out of their native Hungary after WW2 because of their German heritage. My 2 US uncles were in the US Army during that war - one was killed in France and the other was institutionalized for life thanks to his trauma in the Pacific.
So now, with that declaration of economic war, it's getting too close to home. One of my wife's recent novels was set during WW2 and one of the themes was that it's not the people who are evil, it's the ideology and leaders that ensnare them.
I hope my fellow Canadians will be able to pick a leader in the upcoming election who is a strategic, skilled economic warrior but who can still relate to the people if not the leaders of the opposition, both at home and abroad. And who can unite us all in yet another "new normal".
And that we can avoid being played by rhetoric & empty slogans and instead support a platform that recognizes the economic & identity emergency confronting us and will start to lay the foundation for a New Canada that extends far beyond a 5-year term in office.
I’ve read that Hitler loved his dog. Trump incapable of even that.
I don't know about that. Maybe if there was a licensing deal involved he could fake it.
Brilliant and essential comment! Thank you so much. But that was then and this is now. And were still sleepwalking.
Fascinating piece, I’d like to see this one go viral.
No reference to Trump. No need.
I watched Bill Mahar's monologue. Mahar comes across as sincere and heartfelt. One of the key takeaways was Mahar's take on Trumps's sense of humour when he stated words to the effect "As a life long professional comedian, I can tell when someone is faking it, and when someone is real"
So what? Could it be that pathological liars believe everything they say in the moment is true?
"They're eating the Geese" and "Zelensky started it"
As a longtime aficionado of Real Time, Mahar has shown his lack of knowledge of subjects that many would never pick up on. His defence of Rob Ford (former mayor of Toronto - for those who might not know that name) for smoking crack cocaine, made no mention of all the other surrounding criminal issues that Ford was embroiled in. All Mahar saw was a Politician hounded for drug abuse.
Similarly, Mahar saw Trump in a very comfortable environment, surrounded by those deeply devoted to him such as Kid Rock. It was easy for Trump to be humourful and welcoming. Trump like Mahar, has been in show business for many years. Where facts don't matter but personal impressions do.
Or does Mahar believe like Trump, he has to generate controversy to keep his viewers tuned in? After all Bill Mahar is a long time Showman, and it's an increasing fragmented media landscape.
Always a challenge to decide if there is a real or authentic person between the private and the public persona. This piece and the David satire are useful lessons in remembering that there is greater complexity to individuals than may seem at first glance. And, as noted that someone who seems beyond the pale in public might not be so in private. It should not come as that much of a surprise though since we are often faced with the opposite - someone who has a wonderful or just normal public persona but who does unspeakable things in private.
I think the challenge for MacKenzie King (and all politicians and diplomats) is that one often feels a need to maintain a positive relationship of some kind. You display your own public persona to your interlocutor, all the while accepting that that person is doing the same. Writing the person off because your assessment is that the person is a sociopath, sadist or narcissist is not possible because there will likely continue to be a need to engage with that person. And you hope that the type of private assessment contained in King’s diary does not get coloured by your need to keep paths open - or your wish for the person to be better so that you can avoid confrontation or ultimately war.
I wonder if in part King saw the Hitler he desperately needed to see. He badly wanted to avoid war, not least because he wanted to avoid another Conscription Crisis. He needed Hitler to be rational and reasonable; Hitler threw him a few straws, and he clung to them.
I believe Dan has written before about confirmation bias....
Actually, I like David's piece. It's tight and consistent and well, funny. Oh, I disagree with him heartily about Trump. I like Trump! But instead of the tired, old, profane invective from most of the unhinged Left, this is quite good. Swig heil, baby!
I remember hearing one Richard Langworth speak in New Jersey at a Yom Ha Shoah event. he recounted an account from one of Churchhill's private secretaries. Apparently, Churchill, his son and some others were in a bar in Munich at the same time that Hitler and a crowd of his friends, who were drinking at another table. Hitler was a well known politician but was not in power. According to Langworth, Hitler sent someone over to Churchill's table inviting Churchill to join him for a drink. Churchill declined saying that he was there for a family celebration with his son. The private secretary asked Churchill why he didn't accept the offer since Hitler seemed like an amiable man who was an up and coming German politician. Churchill said that he didn't want to meet Hitler because he might like him and he was sure that one day they would be enemies. It was something about how the devil hides behind pleasant faces.