Published in the Western Standard, October 31, 2005, p. 56. (Also available in a pdf scan.)

The Man Behind the Mask
by
Pierre Lemieux

George Jonas and I are very different in many regards. He is an uprooted, non-religious, Hungarian Jew, a famous writer living in Toronto, a Canadian patriot, and he comes out as a staunch pro- American. I am a descendant of Normandie craftsmen and French- Canadian coureurs des bois, a redneck of the North who is not very popular in today’s statist Quebec, and I am appalled by the police state that is growing in America. On the other hand, George and I are brothers in many ways (and I am honoured to be among his friends). We both love life, words and women. He is more into flying, I am more into guns and computers, but ours are all freemen’s pursuits. We share the same deep individualism, and are both suspicious of the state and its social engineering. And, to my delight, in his just released memoirs, Beethoven’s Mask: Notes on my Life and Times (Key Porter Books, 2005), he describes himself as a Martian, just as I have often done myself with people who wonder where I come from and where I got my ideas. George Jonas is one of the most irreverent and iconoclastic writers in Canada. There are things that only he can say and get away with. “To this day,” he notes in this new book, “Communist holocausts may be respectably denied in countries whose laws treat the denial of the Nazi Holocaust as a crime.” Beethoven’s Mask shows scenes of Jonas’s life, from his birth in Hungary in 1935, to his escape from the communist tyranny in 1956 and his new life in Canada, through his family using false ID papers to escape the local Jew hunters under the Nazi occupation. A large part of the book is about the author’s interpretation of political events during his life and times. Defining himself as a classical liberal, Jonas quotes Friedrich Hayek approvingly. He is a strong anti-communist (who would blame him?) who says that, had he immigrated to the U.S. instead of Canada, he would have volunteered for the Vietnam War, even if he believed that this war was “nonsensical.” He interprets 9/11 partly as the continuation of the fight between eastern tyranny and western liberty. Perhaps a libertarian could blame him for sometimes underplaying, in the wake of 9/11, the threat to our liberties that the state—our state—represents. But his National Post and CanWest columns correct this impression: what Jonas wants is to minimize evil, and he always remains highly suspicious of state power. On most issues, he comes out as more libertarian than conservative or even classical liberal. Perhaps he would agree that the main consequence of the “war on terror” has been that our already monstrous western states have grabbed more power to undermine our traditional liberties; at any rate, I think I could persuade him. The author of Beethoven’s Mask explains how the interventionist state is compatible with democracy. But, he continues, “[w]hat the interventionist state is not compatible with is liberty.” His targets include multiculturalism: “Harmony is expected to flow from scientific liberalism placing the country under the watchful eye of its love police.” Contrary to many non-economist students of history and politics, Jonas understands that institutions have their own logic, which they follow irrespective of the intentions of their builders. This is why tyranny, of the Nazi or any other form, is a permanent danger. Jonas also understands how individuals always act out of self-interest—even those who sometimes enjoy being altruistic. Beethoven’s Mask is not only interesting from a political and historical viewpoint, it is also beautifully written, humorous and full of fabulous stories. The author’s sentences contain whole worlds, as when describing the disquieting encounter and lunch with aging Hungarian novelist Lajos Zilahy: “We sat on plastic chairs and drank water.” And listen when he explains how, in the 1970s, he interviewed Canadian nationalist and socialist Dave Godfrey on CBC radio. Godfrey flatly argued that Communist China was the country where power and privilege were shared most equally among the people. “Okay,” said Jonas, “maybe we should change the subject. How do you feel about goldfish?”