bar·bar·ic

Justin Trudeau gets stuck in what could be Canada's first etymologically based scandal.

Chatter continues in the op-ed pages over Justin Trudeau’s ill-advised decision to take issue with Canada’s new citizenship guide’s use of the word “barbaric” to describe practices like honour killings and female circumcision.

“Justin was hurling this politically correct vomit all over Twitter,” writes Sun Media’s Charles Adler. “We think it’s barbaric to remove your little girl’s clitoris and labia so as to keep her ‘pure.’ It is pure barbarism. And we Canadians aren’t interested in pretending that your choice to mutilate, assault and murder are as benign as our choosing to participate in hockey, football and curling.”

Trudeau’s remarks “revealed a great deal about the sorry mess that is modern liberalism,” writes the Ottawa Citizen’s John Robson. “The problem is that [liberals are] committed to a mentally and politically paralyzing cultural relativism, driven more by sentiment and snobbery than serious thought.”

But as far as The Mark Newsroom can see, cultural relativism has nothing to do with it. Trudeau did not at any time suggest he found crimes like honour killings benign or somehow equivalent to our own accepted cultural practices. Indeed, it doesn’t look like he made any value judgment whatsoever, but quibbled with the word “barbaric,” which as we wrote earlier this week, has specific implications that “deplorable” or “unacceptable” does not.

The dictionary definition of the word is “without civilizing influences; uncivilized; primitive,” or “befitting barbarians.” It doesn’t take a brain-dead slave to “political correctness” to know that when governments label foreign people as barbarians and societies as primitive, it can lead to bad things. Now, if this was what Trudeau was actually thinking, or what he felt he was going to accomplish when he picked a fight over the word, is unclear. If he wants to have academic debates about etymology, he’s in the wrong profession.

In Maclean’s today, Paul Wells says that Trudeau is looking a lot like the future of his party. But if this “barbaric” flap shows us anything, it could be that Trudeau looks a lot like his party’s present. He’s an articulate, intelligent academic type with questionable political instincts. Sound familiar?