Skulking through the underbrush by night, hiding his radio under the floorboards, derailing ammunition trains, and furtively stringing tripwires to kill federalist motorcycle messengers, Gilles Duceppe works tirelessly for the liberation of Quebec from the ruthless invader who cruelly grinds the faces of the people beneath his alien and authoritarian bootheel. Or not.
Duceppe's comparison of the Bloc Québécois to the Resistance in France during the Second World War can be seen only as a fatuous absurdity that should rank right up there with the day he wore the cheese hat as one of the most ludicrous landmarks of his career.
The comparison Duceppe made last weekend insults both the federal government from which he has drawn a salary for 20 years and the real French Resistance, whose members had to endure the risks, and often the reality, of injury, torture, and death. Duceppe will have to endure nothing worse than a gold-plated MP's pension.
We note, too, that many of the Resistance leaders who survived the war were in government within a few years. Duceppe, conversely, is coming up on 20 years in Parliament - the anniversary will be in August - with no more hope than ever of taking office.
The Bloc, he claimed, is making possible the glorious day when Quebec becomes sovereign, just as the Resistance kept the flame of France burning during the Occupation.
Oh yes? A better military icon to represent the Bloc today, we believe, would be those poor Japanese soldiers who kept emerging from caves on Pacific Islands, 20 years after the Second World War ended, hopelessly out of touch and utterly clueless about how much the world had changed.