“Lest we forget” what?

In this particular blogpost, I want to write an “autopsy” of the recent 75th anniversary commemorations of the 1944, “D-day” invasion of the Normandy region in German-occupied France. In order to emphasize, in several different ways, how much of a gap there was between the official interpretation of what happened back then, and a much more realistic approach toward the part played by that invasion in the Second World War. As well as trying to underline some of the more important effects of that incredibly destructive war on the world that we are still living in nowadays. “We” who are being asked not to forget that particular invasion, and the rest of the war as well, for a number of very specific, but not often very good, reasons.

The best way to start is by pointing out the extremely obvious, but nevertheless curiously forgotten, fact that in order for anyone to actually remember anything significant about what happened back then, one would have to be at least 80 years old right now. Which means that most of the people nowadays being asked not to forget are, by definition, much too young to remember anything at all about that period of history. Just like absolutely everyone being asked every year, on Remembrance Day, to “remember” the November 11, 1918 armistice ending the First World War, is definitely going to have to rely on someone else’s history lesson in order to remember whatever that person is not supposed to be “forgetting”.

Like any other historical event, the best way to find out what happened during World War II is not to believe any of the official propaganda, from any particular country, about what took place back then, at least not at first glance. In order to get a better idea about the entire context of that war, one has to read at least several hundred pages of professional historical accounts of that period, like I did many years ago when I was preparing to give a 45-hour college course on the subject, during several consecutive semesters. Not just about the most relevant military events, but also about all the other political, economic, social and cultural aspects as well. Including historical information coming not only from researchers trying to justify their own country’s particular role in the war, but also from many other researchers who were highly critical of all those politically biased evaluations.

Which means that people nowadays trying to find out what really happened during any historical event of this magnitude have to be very careful. What we are faced with here, as in so many other cases, is a blatant attempt on the part of today’s authorities to get millions of people all over the world to celebrate their official interpretation of what the D-day landing, and the war as a whole, was all about. Not so much because it is important to recognize the “supreme sacrifice” that millions of soldiers, and millions more civilians, all over the world, made back then, some of them for a relatively good cause, others for a much more evil cause. 

It is at least as important not to forget that almost all the civilian victims in that war were not intentionally “sacrificing” themselves in any real sense because they died during such involuntary events as aerial bombings, or incarceration in death camps (not all of which were run by German, or Japanese, officials). Even most of the soldiers involved were either conscripted, or answering “the call of duty” because they could not find jobs during the Great Depression, and foolishly believed that the war would be all over anyway within a few months.

As so often happens, it turns out that the main reason why we are all supposed to be “remembering” D-day is because the politicians representing the victorious powers on the Western front, in charge of this year’s 75th anniversary commemorations, wanted to make a point about how much more liberal-democratic our world currently is than it would have been had the Axis powers won the war. While it ought to be obvious to everyone that things would have been a lot worse than they really were if the other side had won the war, it is not at all obvious that the post-war world can genuinely be characterized as “liberal-democratic”.

In the first place, this is because during the longer, and more murderous, second phase of the war (1941-1945), the Western powers were, after all, allied with the USSR, which was almost as totalitarian as the Axis powers. This was not yet the case during the first phase of the war, which started in 1937 in Asia and in 1939 in Europe, when the Soviet Union reacted to the Western powers’ initial Munich (1938-1939) capitulation to fascist imperialism (Italy and Germany), in Ethiopia as well as in Europe, by signing its own “non-aggression” pact (1939-1941) with Adolph Hitler. Which meant that the USSR was not involved all that much in the war during that first phase, except for having fought off an attempted Japanese invasion of Siberia a short time before the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed.

The only other Soviet “participation” in that earlier part of the war was by physically occupying the parts of Eastern Europe assigned to the Soviet empire by the terms of its temporary alliance with the German empire, and putting down any national rebellions against its rule, like the one in Finland. Several large Communist Parties in the West, such as the one in France, also sat out that part of the war by refusing to mobilize against the fascist invasions of their home countries.

However, when the same Adolph Hitler abruptly repudiated the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1941, and instead launched an all-out Axis assault on the Soviet Union, Stalin was obliged to join the war against the European fascists, while simultaneously adopting a neutral attitude toward Japan (except during the last few months of the war). Even while trying to survive that onslaught, the Soviet regime was still, however, a falsely-communist version of the previously-established Russian empire. Which meant that it treated the people under its rule, especially non-Russian people, very poorly indeed, almost as poorly as the fascist imperialists treated their own subject populations.

After the Second World War, and mostly because of what happened during the second phase, the state-capitalist hierarchy running the Soviet Union grew into a large Soviet bloc of countries, eventually ruling almost one-third of the entire world, including most of Eastern Europe, several east Asian countries (most of China, half of Korea, all of Laos, and, by 1975, all of Vietnam, not to mention the short-lived Maoist regime in Cambodia), as well as Cuba (1960). Besides building on its long-standing alliance with dozens of anti-Western national liberation movements, many of which had come to power in the post-war, post-colonial period of history. The Soviet bloc, however, was not exactly what most people have in mind when they use the expression “liberal democracy”.

Nevertheless, it was what the USSR and the millions of Communist Party members in other countries did to destroy the Axis powers during the second phase of the war that left them with an enormous amount of prestige after 1945. One of the main problems with most of the official Western accounts of the events of the war is that they somehow manage to avoid making very many references to the Eastern front, in which the Soviet Union fought almost by itself against the 1941-1944 onslaught of Nazi Germany and its Eastern European allies, being helped out only by several thousand pro-communist partisans, particularly those in Yugoslavia.

During those extremely bleak years, precious little aid came from the West, which only managed to send about four percent of the military supplies used by the USSR in its fight for survival. With the result that the Soviet Union lost about 27 million people killed during the war, a “killing field” that was made even worse by the “scorched-earth” policy of the initial Soviet retreat. Those 27 million dead people nevertheless amounted to a very significant portion of the total world-wide loss of about 65 million human beings.

During that second phase of the war, the USSR ended up fighting against twice as many Axis troops as did their new-found Western allies, who chose to fight only in places like North Africa, Italy, and the Atlantic Ocean (including naval battles off the coasts of North and South America). The Normandy invasion of German-occupied Western Europe (1944-1945), even though very difficult, would therefore have been a great deal more deadly than it already was had the main part of the German army not been fighting against the USSR at the same time.

Up until D-day, the Western powers were quite content to let the Germans and the Russians kill each other off in very large numbers, their own “contribution” to all that bloodletting being the massive and deliberate bombardment of civilian targets in German-occupied territories, as well as in Germany itself (a scenario also repeated in Japanese-occupied territories and in Japan). Which meant putting off D-day until the USSR’s anti-Axis counter-attack threatened to leave all of continental Europe in Soviet hands by the end of the war.

This downplaying of the importance of the Eastern front in Europe also carried over into an accompanying under-emphasis on all the other fronts in the war, the self-centred Western powers, like all the other powers in the world, always believing that everything that they did was necessarily way more important than whatever any rival power ever did. But the Second World War turned out to be much more of a world-wide conflict than the First World War, not so much because of all the fighting in various different parts of Africa and western Asia (both wars having included those two regions), but especially because of the much more extensive fighting having also taken place in the eastern part of Asia, centring on China but also including major battles as far west as India, and as far south-east as Indonesia. Not to forget the enormous Pacific Ocean region, from Hawaii to New Guinea. A popular, military chronicle of all that world-wide fighting (complete with lots of maps and photos) can be found In Yann Magdelaine’s book, Atlas de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Éditions Ouest-France, 2014.

The Second World War was also a larger war than the first one because a lot more countries were officially involved, even in regions in which there was not a lot of direct military activity. Even theoretically “neutral” countries, like Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden, as well as Thailand (at least at the beginning of the war), actually helped the Axis powers in several different ways much more than they helped the Allies. Millions more colonial soldiers either volunteered, or were conscripted, into the armies of the Second World War than in the First World War, especially in places like India (mostly on the British side but also including several thousand soldiers on the Japanese side). The Russian-dominated Soviet Union also had to fight, at least towards the beginning of the war, with nationalist armies in countries like the Ukraine, which were often pro-fascist as well. Some of the Western countries conquered by the Germans, such as Vichy France, also collaborated with their former enemies for similar reasons.

Another very significant aspect of World War II has to do with women’s role in the war, which in most cases did not contribute all that much either to the progress of liberal democracy. There were very few female combat soldiers back then (quite rare in those days, even in the USSR), but millions more women than in the First World War participated as nurses, secretaries and support staff. Many more millions of them also trooped back into the factories than had already worked there during the previous war, as industrial workers replacing men sent into combat. All of which certainly had a long-term, positive effect on the partial emancipation of women, especially in the Western countries.

Nevertheless, the most important effect of that horrible war on women, all over the world, was as victims. As usually happens in such cases, whenever enormous civilian casualties are racked up in a war situation, such as during bombing campaigns aimed at punishing the overall enemy population, millions more women (and children) die than do men. Partly because, after all, most of the men were off getting themselves killed somewhere else.

Millions of other women also “participated” in the war as victims of rape, and all the horrible consequences of rape, each one of the world’s overwhelmingly-male armies having engaged in unofficial warfare against the female population wherever they went. The official ideologies being practised by each major power (liberalism, fascism, communism, etc.) having little or no influence on the sexual appetites of most of their soldiers. Nor on the sexual appetites of most of their officers.

Nor, for that matter, whenever there were insufficient numbers of women (or little girls) to go around, did those ideologies have much of an influence on homosexual rape, the number of mostly forced sexual encounters between men in every war situation being several times greater than the more normal, consensual, homosexual activity of peacetime. Which effectively puts the lie to popular propaganda, as in the facetious 1950s US military musical, “South Pacific”, about how there was never anything wrong with any man in the US army during the war that could not be solved by putting him near a “female, feminine, girlish, womanly dame”.

In fact, the Second World War was probably the most concentrated period of world-wide atrocities in human history. The Axis powers, particularly the German Nazis and the Japanese militarists, were definitely the main sources of many of those atrocities, not only in the concentration camps that soon became physical-elimination camps for millions of people, but also in hundreds of other, “lesser” evils. But the Allies, not just the Soviet ones but all the other allies as well, committed their own “fair share” of atrocities, such as the aerial bombing campaigns against civilian populations, culminating in the USA’s use of the atomic bomb against two Japanese cities in 1945.

Not so much to end the war quickly and therefore to reduce the potential increase in the overall number of dead American soldiers (the official reason), but mostly to make sure that the American empire did not have to share occupied Japan with the Soviet empire, like it had to do with occupied Germany. As is always the case in such horrendous events, millions of “ordinary people” also profited from “the war effort” to commit crimes and to settle old scores with their neighbours. Every kind of inhuman, human activity became much more popular during the war than it was in peacetime.

In addition to all those very significant differences between the kind of (“fake-news”) war officially being commemorated during the D-day ceremonies, and a more realistic interpretation of what took place back then, it is just as important to emphasize that the liberal form of capitalism, based largely on private investment (as opposed to the various different kinds of state-capitalism), has not very often been terribly democratic. Liberal capitalism was first conceptualized back in the eighteenth century, towards the end of the period of classical mercantilism (commercial capitalism and colonial expansion, initiated by the absolute monarchy), which corresponds to the same centuries also known as the “early-modern” period (1453-1789).

Since its inception back then, liberal capitalism has gone through several succeeding stages of development, adjusting itself in different ways to the overall political-economic conjuncture of each succeeding period of history. In the nineteenth century, it was focused on promoting an ultra-individualist, largely inhuman, socio-economic kind of liberalism, also known as laissez-faire, which meant all-out profit maximization and mistreating the ever-increasing working-class, at home and in the colonies, in every possible way. All of which set the stage for the inter-imperialist rivalry culminating in the First World War.

During the 1880s, and continuing for almost a century afterward, working-class resistance to laissez-faire and the simultaneous expansion of modern imperialism all over the world, led to the development of neo-mercantilism. Which is to say a general and gradual tendency to return to a more interventionist form of liberal capitalism, in order to deal with such enormous crises as the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the cold war, while still avoiding the dirigiste extremes of the fascist or communist varieties of state-capitalism. 

During the “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975), especially in the Western countries, this led to what German social-economist Wolfgang Streeck has called “democratic capitalism”, in which liberalism tolerated the rise of a strong labour movement as well as the so-called welfare state, particularly in countries that had developed powerful social-democratic parties. CIA attempts at using allies coming from organized crime, and from the right-wing sections of those same social-democratic parties, in order to weaken the popularity of the Communist Parties in the West, did not always succeed very well.

Even in its mildly interventionist period, however, to remain true to itself liberal capitalism still had to focus on the maximization of private profit, without extracting quite as large a percentage as before of its privately-accumulated wealth, directly from the Western working-class. To pull that off, while still allowing its overseas colonies (mostly in Africa and in Asia) to gain political independence at the same time, liberalism turned to a much more virulent form of economic neocolonialism, than the kind that had already been tried out in a more limited way in precociously post-colonial Latin America, back in the nineteenth century.

The idea being to continue exploiting all the former colonies, even more than before, by greatly expanding the previously-founded compradore relationship between extremely rich private investors in the neo-imperialist countries, and their not-nearly-so-rich but still dominant elites in the neocolonial countries. While also, simultaneously, increasingly developing ever more technologically advanced forms of exploitation of the natural world, the result of which eventually caused the world’s current ecological crisis, through totally irrational and deliberately unregulated profit maximization, at the expense of every possible “externality”.

All of which means that during the “thirty glorious years” at least, liberal capitalism did in fact give the impression that it had become significantly more democratic than it had been before that time. Particularly for people whose judgement was being influenced by the facile comparison between liberal capitalism on the one hand, and the fascist and fake-communist forms of state capitalism, on the other hand. But the whole thing came crashing down during the 1970s, when liberal capitalism profited from the structural weaknesses and geopolitical divisions of the Soviet bloc, and the ongoing, “jurisdictional” battles between rival political and trade-union bureaucracies in the developed world, to promote neoliberalism instead, over the past forty years or so.

Although a lot of people nowadays do not seem to know where neoliberalism came from, as the word suggests it was simply a return to the original economic and social liberalism, or laissez-faire, that had already been adopted during the nineteenth century. Therefore, summing up the entire history of capitalism, all this meant that private capitalism was originally called into being by the empire-building absolute monarchies in Europe during the mercantilist period, then it took over most of the Western imperialist countries during the period from 1789 to about 1885 (classical liberalism, under various constitutional disguises). After which it then transferred back to a milder form of mercantilism (neomercantilism) from 1885 to 1973, the year in which military dictator Augusto Pinochet inaugurated a new period of history by inviting the “Chicago boys” to run the Chilean economy. Which initiated the recent return to a much more nineteenth-century, laissez-faire approach, currently known as neoliberalism, but which has also engendered an increasingly anti-liberal, anti-globalization, right-wing populist (neofascist) reaction as well.

Getting back to the significance of the 75th anniversary commemorations of the D-day invasion, it is this victory of both neoliberalism and neofascism together, from the 1970s to the present, that ultimately puts the final nail in the coffin of the official Western interpretation of the Second World War, according to which D-day brought about a post-war transformation of world politics toward liberal democracy. What is particularly interesting in this most recent period is the fact that neoliberalism is not genuinely democratic at all, but instead concentrates on reconstructing and reinforcing the ultra-elitist focus of classical economic liberalism, thereby repudiating “democratic capitalism” altogether.

As such, it functions as a disguised (“fake-news”) version of right-wing populism, officially opposed to the more straightforward racism and sexism of authoritarian neofascism, but still mistreating most women and minority peoples anyway, since those groups of people always tend to be over-represented among the poorer sections of each national population. It turns out that neoliberalism and neofascism are just two discreet points on the same spectrum of reactionary political stances adopted nowadays by most private-capitalist and state-capitalist investors, all over the world. An observation that is confirmed by the fact that every right-wing populist, authoritarian, neofascist regime in today’s world always adopts neoliberalism as the dominant ideology governing its economic and social policies.

The closely-aligned nature of neoliberalism and neofascism in the current period of history was certainly foreshadowed during the  neomercantilist period, when the theoretically liberal countries profited from both the First and the Second World Wars to impose “temporary totalitarianism” during wartime, which gave them the militarily useless opportunity (among other things) to incarcerate large numbers of recent immigrants, as “enemy nationals”, because they had previously emigrated from regions governed by the “aggressor nations”.

During the Great Depression (1929-1939), the same temporary totalitarianism was also used quite often in theoretically liberal countries, such as in the USA’s extremely reactionary treatment of World War I veterans protesting against the lack of jobs. Even during the more liberal “thirty glorious years” after World War II, whenever the people in power found it necessary they also “temporarily” rescinded all the usual human rights, such as during the anti-Vietnam war protests (as became evident during incidents like the Kent State shootings in 1970). As Bertrand Russell famously pointed out several decades ago, “in a democracy, you have your rights until you need them”.

Over the past forty years of neoliberalism, temporary liberal tolerance of strong labour movements and welfare-state policies were abandoned, quickly in some cases and more gradually in others, in favour of an internationally coordinated assault on anything that smacked of “communism”. Communism being defined, in this case, as any situation whatsoever that interfered with short-term (quarter-year) profit maximization. This began in a huge way with the decade (1979-1989) of the “war on inflation”, the very rapid quadrupling of interest rates imposed on the “liberal-democratic” part of the world, that successfully eliminated the 1970s inflation crisis (caused, among other things, by an OPEC-initiated quadrupling of world petroleum prices). In its place, the neoliberal central banks imposed a world recession instead, that became particularly virulent between 1979 and 1981.

Following that enormous shock, it was relatively easy to impose a restrictive fiscal policy on all incomes except those of extremely rich people, who were treated to a much more liberal policy than ever before. Resulting, inevitably, in today’s unprecedentedly enormous income gap between the world’s social classes. During recent decades, world-wide globalization and (initially) relatively high levels of unemployment, coupled with the total capitulation of all the social-democratic parties, and the almost complete elimination of most of the world’s communist parties, led to the imposition of neoliberal austerity programs almost everywhere. Thereby rolling back most of the “welfare-state” provisions of the previous period of history.

Those countries still ruled by an official “communist” party abandoned any genuinely communist content that they may have possessed at one time, running those state-capitalist countries (such as the People’s Republic of China), as if those entire nations were just so many giant private corporations. Even government-owned corporations in the still officially democratic countries, such as Hydro-Québec, increasingly run their own “sovereign” empires using a similar kind of short-term profit-maximization. Governments all over the world have become increasingly incapable of providing any of the public services previously furnished to ordinary people, their own tax bases being severely undermined by the enormously expanded use of legal and illegal tax evasion, as well as the relatively tax-free super-profits granted to the newer technological giants, such as Facebook and Netflix.

All of which immediately led to an almost world-wide, ultra-right-wing populist (neofascist) reaction, hundreds of millions of people in dozens of different countries lashing out against their enormous loss of purchasing power, and their previously established conviction, now lost forever, that their children would henceforth be living even better than they were. Populist demagogues like Donald Trump and Marine LePen succeeded in convincing millions of new followers, who used to support the Democratic Party in the USA, or the Socialist and Communist Parties in France, that they were going to make their respective countries great again, by cleaning up the “liberal swamp” of free-trade globalization.

Instead of doing that, however, all those neofascist movements and governments, not only in various other parts of the Western world (Hungary, Poland, Austria, Italy, etc.), as well as in countries as diverse as China, Russia, India, Myanmar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Brazil, Honduras, the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, and so on and so forth, simply adopted a totally “fake-news” stance. In which the enormous difference between what they pretend to be doing, and what they actually succeed in doing, is in reality even more considerably pronounced than the similar gap between liberal-democratic pretensions and their own limited realizations. So far as I can tell, there is no country in the world today, nor any religion, nor any political ideology, that operates on anywhere near an honest projection of its own capabilities. All the important political stances currently dominating the entire world are completely bankrupt. Which, to say the least, does not bode all that well for the future of humanity.

Vladimir Putin’s recent declaration about the final demise of liberalism, and its replacement all over the world with various different kinds of authoritarianism, should not, therefore, be seen as a step forward. If all the countries in the world that are still officially liberal-minded, such as Germany, France and Canada, abandoned liberalism forever and become just as authoritarian as most of the other countries have become, there would not be any reason for any non-elitist commoner to celebrate. The total disappearance of free speech and free assembly would simply turn the entire world into a disgusting disaster of dystopia, in which all dissidents would either be jailed for a long time, or killed outright.

Unfortunately for all of us, neoliberalism and neofascism are plunging the world into crisis after crisis, characterized by severe economic instability, extreme social divisions, increasingly dangerous geopolitical confrontations, increasingly irrational attitudes toward vaccination against highly infectious diseases and constantly accelerating environmental degradation. Most frustrating of all, whenever childish people hear any rational argument about anything at all, they have a psychopathic tendency to become even more irrational than they were before.

When the natural world becomes so incredibly polluted by all this pretension and deliberate distortion, that it is no longer capable of putting up with human beings any more, it will no longer be possible for us to breath, or to drink, or to eat, or to defend ourselves against pathogens, in the horribly hot swamp that our illustrious leaders will have succeeded in creating. Rendering all the enormous sacrifices that our predecessors made back in the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the cold war, totally useless after all. Which is not exactly what the official organizers of the D-day commemorations had in mind when they talked about the legacy of the 1945 victories over fascism.

The futility of it all

It is getting increasingly difficult these days for independent-minded people like myself, who reject all the world’s competing varieties of neoliberalism and neofascism alike, to continue to feel the least bit optimistic about the future. Especially after reading recent media articles, like those of Montreal columnist Lise Ravary (The Gazette, April 23 and May 28, 2019), to the effect that trying to protect the natural environment by bringing to an end our continued reliance on fossil fuels, would change our way of life so completely that any such attempt has to be totally rejected. According to people like her, our only hope is that someone, somewhere, will somehow come up with some kind of scientific discovery, and spend enough money on developing it, in order to solve the problem for us. Thereby saving everyone from embarking on any “idiotic ‘degrowth’ schemes” that would make recent, neoliberal-government austerity programs look like a vacation in the South Pacific, by comparison.

While I certainly agree with Ravary that most of the negative growth schemes currently being promoted are indeed idiotic, I have long given up hoping that somebody will miraculously find something, such as fusion power, that will solve all our ecological difficulties. That is, without moving away very drastically from our common reliance on largely fictitious economic growth, generated by the eternal maximization of quarterly profit margins by every last one of the world’s public and private investment firms. As if the titles of every firm involved in every capitalist investment market, in every country, must always get more and more valuable forever, and can never be allowed to decline, at least not for more than two consecutive quarters.

Unending profit maximization seems especially important to those most involved in all the newer varieties of parasitic (speculative) investment, that have been taking over almost total control of the world economy for the past several decades. More specifically, since the joint introduction of neoliberalism and neofascism back in 1973, when CIA-backed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet invited the “Chicago Boys” into his country to help him run the national economy. A move that was rapidly supported (or rather programmed in advance) by such VIPs (“very important psychopaths”) as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and rapidly adopted all over the world, particularly after the 1989 collapse of the totalitarian “communist” bloc of countries. And is still being promoted nowadays by a new crop of anti-social leaders, such as Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Recep Erdogan, Jair Bolsonaro, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Viktor Orban, Benjamin Netanyahu and dozens of other authoritarian chieftains, all over the world.

What we really need instead is to adopt the kind of world-wide cooperation between currently competing economic “stakeholders”, from all the social classes and all the world’s countries, that would make it possible to agree upon acceptable forms of economic development for the less fortunate, allowing the world to keep pace with voluntarily curtailed population growth in every region, while drastically reducing speculative investments. Forms that would therefore negatively impact the very small number of billionaire incomes in the world much more than they would affect the much more important number of modest incomes.

Thereby reversing the extremely reactionary “decision” made during the 1970s, through the joint influence of neoliberalism and neofascism, to abandon all attempts at sharing at least some of the world’s wealth. That had previously characterized all the genuinely social-democratic movements, and national-liberation movements, that used to exist in days gone by. Accomplishing such an enormous change, however, could never be envisioned by any of the totally individualistic people wielding political, economic, social and/or cultural forms of power nowadays, who believe that they have a much better chance at “getting ahead” in their own lives by pursuing their personal wars with everyone else rather than by cooperating with any potential rival.

In the meantime, forty-six years into this half neoliberal, half neofascist, counter-revolution, today’s world-wide social divisions have ended up looking a lot like the very elongated pyramid that I saw depicted in an ad about (very rare) quality wines versus (very common) ordinary wines in the Bordeaux region of France. That turned out to be an heuristic device much longer and thinner than the shorter, “fatter-looking” pictures of the ancient Egyptian pyramids that everyone is used to seeing. If such a device were applied to the enormous gap between the world’s social classes nowadays, as opposed to the significantly smaller gap depicted on such charts fifty years ago, it would show an extremely tiny group of ultra-rich people at the very top of the pyramid, followed by dozens of progressively more numerous, and progressively poorer, classes of people, before finally arriving at the most numerous, and poorest, group of people at the very bottom. Which is constantly being even further elongated by the unfortunate fact that the world’s poorest regions have a much higher rate of population growth than do the world’s richest regions.

The two ends of the pyramid have therefore become much further apart than they used to be back in the 1970s. Today’s world, after all, is one in which a few thousand individuals officially earn tens of millions of dollars per day, while hundreds of millions of ultra-poor people are still making less than two dollars a day. In other words, an ultra small group of people are considerably richer than they were before, a slightly larger group are only somewhat better off than they used to be, a still larger group of people have not budged at all in either direction, while the vast majority of the world’s people are still as poor, or even poorer, than they were before. The world’s population is much greater than it used to be, but we all still live in the same, extremely unfair societies in which most of us have been living for thousands of years. The main difference being that nowadays, things have never been (at least relatively) worse for most people than they are now, since world-wide class divisions as a whole have never been more pronounced.

I have to admit, however, that trying to turn around this half-century-old tendency towards ever-greater social divisions, looks almost as difficult as trying to rely on miraculous scientific discoveries, in order to solve the ecology crisis. Any attempt at saving the environment that does not involve reducing the enormous gap between the social classes, seems to me just as futile as trying to eliminate poverty, even extreme poverty, without solving our equally enormous environmental problems.

Succeeding in both of those two extremely difficult projects together, however, and thereby preserving human life on this planet for awhile longer, means that we definitely have to abandon our current, fanatical reliance on undifferentiated profit maximization. Unfortunately, given the kind of highly concentrated brainwashing that both the neoliberal and the neofascist movements have succeeded in imposing on almost everyone in the world over the past several decades, largely through the power of the newer forms of social media, truly progressive ideologies such as democratic socialism and anti-imperialism have been almost universally abandoned instead. They are currently being ridiculed as insignificant, outdated utopias.

Hundreds of millions of alienated people all over the world, paradoxically including even quite poor people, have switched over instead to supporting completely counter-productive, pro-dystopia ideologies, such as ultra-right-wing populism, recycled imperialism (Trump, Xi, Putin, etc.), religious fundamentalism, terrorism (including state-terrorism) and the kind of ethnic nationalism according to which every one of the world’s cultures is deemed to be “inherently superior” to every other culture! Not to mention vulgar forms of fake leftism (such as the Black Block movement), which is supposed to be anti-fascist, but has the opposite effect instead. All those neofascist ideologies are harmful to everyone, including most of the people who support them, and have become the main obstacle toward achieving any genuine progress toward either environmental protection, or saner levels of income distribution, or both.

Not to mention simultaneously solving all the other major problems that beset us nowadays, such as the imminent threat of a much greater financial crash than the one that took place in 2008, which would certainly exacerbate already quite dangerous geopolitical tensions between extremely well-armed adversaries, all over the world. To which we can now add the threat of massive epidemics, caused mainly by millions of religious fanatics refusing to vaccinate their children against any of the common diseases that we all assumed to be under complete control before the current wave of organized ignorance broke out.

All these atavistic tendencies put together have enormously reinforced already reactionary attitudes toward the natural environment, as well as fostering antediluvian methods of dealing with every other important political, economic, social and cultural issue. Instead of trying to clean up their act, millions of people all over the world are throwing their trash away even more than they did before, into the air, onto the ground or into the water, wherever they happen to be at the time, deliberately ignoring any attempts at recycling. Not only in poverty-stricken, failed states run by deranged dictators, that have never managed to set up any kind of organized trash disposal, but also involving a large percentage of people living in countries that have developed modern recycling programs. Which are considerably undermined whenever neoliberal governments encourage some local mafia or another to take over those increasingly inefficient trash programs.

Ultra-right-wing populists on every continent are constantly repeating their lumpen mantra, according to which only “liberal sissies” observe any of the modern rules of behaviour, while “regular folks” are encouraged to enjoy uninhibited individual “freedoms”, such as the freedom to discriminate with impunity, the freedom to bear as many arms as any human being can possibly carry, and the freedom to pollute in any way anyone damn well pleases. Per capita rates of pollution, especially the kind emanating from the ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels, nevertheless remain much higher in most of the richer countries than they do in most of the poorer ones.

Observing all these recent trends, many current commentators (who just happen to favour the status quo), caution against interpreting the various kinds of ultra-right-wing populism in today’s world, as being forms of neofascism. On the grounds that the original kinds of fascism, as they used to exist in Italy and in Germany, between the 1920s and the 1940s, were considerably more extreme, and militaristic, than today’s varieties of reactionary populism.

Those observers forget, however, that fascism was a world-wide tendency back then as well, not at all confined to only two countries, nor even merely to Europe. If we look at the different manifestations of twentieth-century fascism as a political spectrum, more or less in the same way that psychiatrists see autism and the Asperger syndrome as parts of the same spectrum of mental disorder, then it becomes obvious that fascism after the First World War spread out gradually not only from Italy into Germany (the Nazi form), but also into slightly less virulent forms in Portugal (Salazar), Spain (Franco) and France (Pétain), not to mention in dozens of other European countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, as well as in North America (Louisiana), Latin America (Argentina), Asia, Africa (Egypt) and Australia.

Classical fascism also had a major influence on countries in which no formal fascist movement officially took power, pushing traditional, authoritarian regimes even further to the right, in countries like Japan (General Tojo), China (the “Blue Shirt” youth wing of the Nationalist Party) and India (the Chandra Bose wing of the Congress Party). There were literally dozens of countries that were more or less influenced by classical fascism, just like there are literally dozens of countries nowadays that are currently influenced by neofascism, not only white-supremacist, imperialist and religious-fundamentalist revivals in the Western world, but also quite similar movements all over Asia, Africa and Latin America (the former “third world”).

Religious fundamentalism in the Islamic world is certainly very much on the rise nowadays, especially in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran, its more extreme manifestations morphing into such well-known entities as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State movement. Very similar developments are also taking place among Hindu nationalists and Sikh nationalists in India, Buddhist nationalists in countries like Burma (Myanmar) and Sri Lanka, Confucian nationalists in China and Shintoist nationalists in Japan. Not to mention similar religious revivals (animism, totemism, shamanism) also taking place among the world’s 370 million indigenous people (divided up into hundreds of different peoples, spread out all over the world).

Countries trying to control the spread of religious extremism with laicity-promoting legislation, as in Quebec nowadays, are being depicted as enemies of democracy and human rights, rather than as champions of the separation of Church and State, and the equality of men and women. Seeing laicity as an attack on democracy and human rights, however, is a lot like depicting employee submission to neoliberal corporations as a form of “personal development”, rather than as a form of class domination. Those who argue that promoting laicity in Quebec is a useless intervention because there is no religious extremism here, like there is in Saudi Arabia, are similar to those other misguided people who also argue that extreme pollution and climate change do not exist here either. In addition, some of the same kind of people like to pretend that nothing has to be done in Quebec, nor in the rest of Canada, to reduce enormous income gaps between the rich and the poor, because the gaps here are not as extreme as the ones that exist in places like the USA, Brazil, South Africa and China.

Misguided people like to promote fear of laicity, and secularism in general, by pointing out that ultra-right-wing politicians in the West, like Marine LePen in France, are supporting laicity programs as part of their “racialized”cultural war against the entire Muslim system of belief. Which only means that those supporting laicity as democratic separation between religion and government should double-down on their opposition to all religious symbols being worn by theoretically-neutral government bureaucrats, from all the different religions, as well as those worn by male and female bureaucrats alike. All the countries promoting legislation in favour of state neutrality toward religion (in fiscal policy as well) should make sure that they are not leaving any opportunities for neofascist organizations of any kind to exploit any existing weaknesses in their programs. Rather than cozying up to those neofascist tendencies, instead.

Another extremely useful weapon in the war against all the competing forms of neoliberalism and neofascism, is the current attempt that at least a few people are making, to try to figure out why so many millions of human beings succumb so easily to programmed propaganda, like the current revival in extremely reactionary ways of thinking. One such attempt has recently been made by British psychologist Nick Chater, who published a book in 2018 called The Mind is Flat: The illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind. I found out about his ideas for the first time when I read a short description of his work (by Marc Olano) in the French magazine, Sciences humaines (February 2019), referencing a French version of Chater’s book, Et si le cerveau était bête? Les nouvelles découvertes sur l’intelligence humaine.

According to Chater, the human mind is in fact quite superficial. Rather than reasoning according to our values and convictions, people simply make up reasonable sounding justifications for their acts, after the fact. Apparently, experimental psychologists have recently shown just how biased our perception of the world really is, as well as arriving at the conclusion that our emotions arise out of mental misinterpretations of merely physiological conditions caused by mere circumstance. Although I think that this kind of radical reinterpretation of human thought processes seems more than a little overwrought, it does nevertheless help to understand why millions of poor and powerless people could possibly support ultra-elitist, neofascist movements run by professional manipulators like Steve Bannon, who are not the least bit interested in helping them out in any real way.

In the same issue of Sciences humaines, I also found out a little more about the recent origins of “fake news” in the USA, based on the more orthodox contributions of several American contributors to this inquiry about why so many people have decided to support ideologies that do not seem to be in their best interests whatsoever. Contributors like Steve Tesich and Ralph Keyes, for example, believe that after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, many Americans came to associate reality (truth) with “bad news” and therefore decided, in their flight from national demoralization, to create their own alternative versions of “reality”. Which, according to other contributors, like French philosopher Myriam Revault d’Allonnes and psychologist Sébastien Dieguez, means that many American people (and people in many other countries) invented their own “democratic” versions of reality, based on “cognitive comfort”, that allowed them to believe whatever they wanted to believe, regardless of the facts.

All of which seems to me to indicate that journalists like CNN’s Anderson Cooper can never succeed in their attempts at keeping politicians honest (in the USA or anywhere else), for the simple reason that ultra-right-wing demagogues like Donald Trump have managed to create a completely dishonest, “alternative reality”, that will enable them to keep their political bases on their side forever. Which also seems to be just an updated version of the way in which all the world’s leading religious gurus, and political ideologues, have always enthralled their poor, unfortunate victims ever since human beings started living on this God-forsaken planet.

Childish people on every continent seem to have less and less control these days over their own personal cravings, which is where popular support for both neoliberalism and neofascism probably come from. Uncontrolled consumption of dangerous drugs and putrefying pornography, addictions to trendy foods and dangerous diets, all the different varieties of religious fundamentalism (crusaders and jihadists), particularly the monotheist kind (always depicting God as a kind of “male chauvinist pig”), anti-feminist fanaticism (down with abortion, long live head-scarves), elitist ravings about the innovative and creative destruction of other people’s livelihoods, media frenzy (addiction to one’s smart-phone), the list goes on and on.

These are the same people who drive too fast, ride their bicycles too fast or jog too fast, regardless of the consequences to any slower people, who always end up getting pushed down and out of the way. The world’s obsessed (trans-humanist, artificial intelligence) people are constantly in a hurry to get somewhere besides the place where they happen to be at the moment, as well as being driven to perform at work ten times better than everyone else, and make a lot of money in order to afford numerous vacations in trendy places swarming with tourists just like them. Where they are often joined by millions of other fun-seekers who, while they take a much more hands-off approach to working hard, nevertheless go on vacation all the time anyway, by regularly maxing out their numerous credit cards.

Which also helps to explain why American super-hero movies have become so popular all over the world, both children and their parents being led to act like spoiled brats by totally unrealistic propaganda about everyone always being able to accomplish absolutely everything. As repeated ad nauseam in millions of school valedictorian speeches as well as in the revival of the “power of positive thinking” mantra by professional politicians like Barak Obama (“Yes we can!”). The same ultra-narcissistic tendency also seems to explain why, all over the world, “Kindness seems to be suffering a slow death”, which is the title of an article by communication strategist Martine St-Victor, that I read recently in The Montreal Gazette (June 4, 2019).

I also get the impression, from many of my recent readings, that the philosophical error known as essentialism has undergone a massive, simultaneous, revival as part and parcel of this overall neoliberal/neofascist ideological onslaught. The same issue of Sciences humaines that I was referencing earlier, also included a review about several recent books on the French Revolution. One 2018 book, by Marcel Gauchet (Robespierre: l’homme qui nous divise le plus), spoke about how the fundamental error of those in power during the most violent, Jacobin, phase of the revolution, was to have “essentialized” the common people, making it seem as if the entire nation spoke in one voice. Those misguided revolutionary leaders then identified themselves with that mythical voice, as if the leaders and the people were all part of one organic reality. An error that, according to many other observers, had simply been carried over from the considerably more violent “ancien régime”, in which successive French monarchs, no matter how disgusting, were supposed to personify the essential characteristics of the entire nation. An idea that was also replicated in such more recent aberrations as the USSR’s extreme, fictitious identification between the “inherent characteristics” of the Soviet people and “Jacobin” leaders like Joseph Stalin.

Many other academic sources that I have been consulting over the past couple of years, about even more recent events, have described the same kind of misplaced essentialism in the thinking of such gurus of ultra-right-wing populism (neofascism) as Steve Bannon, Marine LePen, Viktor Orban and Abu Bakr Al-Baghadi. These ideologues have apparently “essentialized” all the world’s existing civilizations, such as Western civilization, Islamic civilization, Chinese civilization and Indian civilization (à la Samuel Huntington), by turning each of them into separate organic myths. In which each of those huge communities is supposed to contain only a limited number of “essential characteristics”, and each one of those characteristics is supposed to be organically fused with the persona of each idealized (idolized), populist leader. A better scenario for bringing on a multilateral World War Three, as soon as possible, could hardly be imagined.

This is also the common thread uniting such apparently contradictory ideas as “Islamophobia” and “Islamophilia”. The first misinterpretation essentializes Islam as being nothing but terrorism ever since the prophet Mohamed first brought it into being, while the other, theoretically opposing point of view, essentializes the same religion from a fundamentalist (Wahhabite) perspective, as an eternal jihad (in the inspirational sense as well as in the military sense). Both of those supposedly opposite, essentialist interpretations of Islam have therefore come to practically the same conclusion! In the real world, however, just like any other ideology, Islam is instead divided up into dozens of conflicting interpretations, none of which can genuinely claim to be essential. The real Islam is not an identity marker that never changes, but a dynamic ideology, constantly changing under the influence of dozens of competing ideologies, whether religious or secular. Non-Muslims who essentialize Islam end up attempting to fight one variety of neofascism by favouring another kind of neofascism instead, just like those who positively or negatively essentialize any other contemporary ideological construction.

Populists all over the world nowadays, afflicted with the same essentialist disease no matter what their chosen ideology, seem to be completely unprepared to accommodate any kind of evolutionary cultural change whatsoever, and want to rescind all the accumulated changes that they have already “suffered from” since the contemporary world began. They are all victims of philosophical essentialism, equating everything modern with evil, satanic influences on their own, previously perfect, fetishized-past mindset. Causing every last one of them to want to make their particular “chosen people” great again, whether that be evangelical “America” or Confucian China, Orthodox-Christian Russia, Sunni caliphates or their Shiite equivalent, evangelical Brazil, Hindu India, Sikh “Khalistan”, Ottoman Turkey, Magyar Hungary, Catholic Poland, Eretz Israel, or whatever other God-forsaken ideological construction that such neofascist essentialists may have hit upon, in every part of today’s world.

Another book that I read while preparing this particular blogpost, also seems to corroborate some of the points that I have been making here. This is Richard Swift’s 2014 book (apparently only slightly amended in a second edition published in 2016), S.O.S.: Alternatives to Capitalism (published by The New Internationalists). In that book, Swift attempted to investigate all the different anti-capitalist strategies that have been adopted over the years, so as to weed out all those that did not pan out very well, leaving in place the one strategy that he thinks is currently succeeding. As such, it is probably the most disappointing book that I have ever read, since Swift dismisses most of those strategies, such as totalitarian communism and social-democracy (especially the latter) too rapidly, while promoting another one that does not seem to me to be anywhere near as strong and as promising as he claims it to be.

Swift does everything he can to avoid being identified with the revolutionary socialist concept, according to which the day after a violent (essentialist) revolution, everything is supposed to be completely different from what it was the day before. With the result that he tends instead to interpret a number of rather ordinary campaigns involving localized, communitarian resistance to capitalism in parts of Latin America and southern Europe as being “the answer” to Lenin’s question of “What is to be done?” (in order to eliminate capitalism). It seems to me that he is going over to the other extreme instead, by presuming that all that the world’s anti-capitalists have to do is to generalize, or globalize, whatever happens to be going on already in those two particular regions. (Or at least which seemed to be going on in those regions back in 2014, or even as recently as 2016.) So far as I can tell, however, none of the anti-capitalist movements in either of those regions seem to be the least bit strong enough, or well-organized enough, even if similar strategies were adopted in many other regions, to succeed in doing away with extremely resilient, neoliberal and neofascist, contemporary capitalism.

Although it is obvious to me that such “state-socialist” regimes as the USSR and the People’s Republic of China (even before Deng Xiao-ping got hold of it), were in fact state-capitalist regimes instead, the treatment meted out in Swift’s book to those horribly misgoverned experiments does not do justice to any of the admittedly rather limited social innovations that those regimes managed to implement, if only for a short time. Only Cuba gets any kudos at all from Swift, mostly for its educational and medical services inside the country, some of which  were also “exported” to neighbouring countries like Venezuela. Cuba is also the only one of those totalitarian “communist” countries for which Swift acknowledges at all the tremendous pressure that they were all subjected to for several decades by the often devious machinations of international (liberal) capitalism.

He also briefly describes how all the democratic socialist parties in the world abandoned their own anti-capitalist principles to adopt neoliberalism (and “neo-free-trade”) instead. Mostly by focusing in on the 1983 decision of the French Socialist government under François Mitterrand to privatize many of the huge firms that it had initially nationalized after it was elected to power (with the help of the French Communist Party) in 1981. That 1983 turnaround only took place, however, after an enormous attack on the brief attempt to genuinely institute some kind of democratic socialism, in which international capitalism and France’s richest private capitalists together launched on all-out assault on the French economy. An assault that miraculously disappeared right after the Mitterrand government caved in.

In other words, “state socialism”, in both its communist and social-democratic forms, did not just disappear for opportunistic reasons, they were also very much pushed toward capitulation by their ideological enemies. Which, in the case of the USSR, also involved such outside interventions as a massive invasion by fascist-capitalist forces starting in 1941, that was not followed by the liberal-capitalist (Normandy) counter-invasion of previously German-occupied Western Europe, until the Soviet counter-invasion of Eastern Europe made it look as if all of continental Europe might end up being controlled by the Soviet empire.

The result of all this capitulation, no matter how it came about, being that in today’s world, most of the important political parties, governments and sate-run enterprises run their operations in the same way that multinational corporations run theirs, following the same short-term dynamic of maximizing profit. Which means that in most cases no one can rely any more on any institutions that avoid money and power as the only currently acceptable principles of management. Which means that the “rule of law” does not so much uphold democracy as it does “might makes right”. The only human freedom therefore left over for most people is to “rage against the machine” on the social media, to no effect at all. Unless such messages turn out to have any kind of mobilizing effect on large numbers of people, in which case even that freedom will be rescinded, as has happened recently in places like China (not only in 1989).

I also get the impression that Swift simply replaced his observation about the convergence of both centre-left and centre-right parties (toward supporting rather limited reforms of neoliberal capitalism), by substituting a similar convergence between the extreme-left and extreme-right strategies of replacing neoliberal globalization with strictly localized communitarianism instead. In other words, he seems to be engaging in a form of “newspeak”, by describing the ignominious defeat of every one of the anti-capitalist strategies known to mankind (“state socialism”, anarchism, the cooperative movement, etc.) as an uplifting victory for what he saw as a newer kind of localized resistance to capitalism instead.

Given his generally realistic (and therefore paradoxical) appraisals of each one of those failed strategies, one would have expected him to have come to a very pessimistic conclusion indeed, rather than trying to end his entire discourse on a relatively optimistic note. I just do not see how localized opposition to capitalism in certain areas could possibly achieve the kind of “critical mass” that Swift was talking about, in order to firmly install some kind of long-lasting alternative to profit-maximizing capitalism, all over the world.

It seems to me, therefore, that the current ideological stranglehold over the entire planet, by today’s well-coordinated forms of neoliberal and neofascist capitalism, cannot be done away with nearly as easily as Richard Swift seems to imagine. Towards the beginning of this blogpost, I said that the only way to deal with such huge problems as global environmental degradation and unprecedented social inequality would be to somehow get all the social classes, in every region, to agree on an even more unprecedented program of global cooperation aimed at dealing efficiently with such enormous problems.

But it would be entirely unrealistic to assume that such a fantastic change in the way human beings usually operate, even recently, could in fact take place without the arrival of an equally fantastic shock, much bigger than any of the relatively tiny anti-capitalist movements that Swift was talking about could possibly bring about. Unfortunately, I think that at this point such an unprecedented level of global cooperation could only come about after humanity somehow managed to survive a gigantic (megadeath) loss of millions of people, sometime in the near future, brought on by the coming-together of all the ecological, social-economic and geopolitical crises mentioned earlier in this text. After which the survivors could presumably be convinced that it was capitalism (private capitalism and state capitalism imitating private capitalism) that caused such an enormous loss of human life.

More or less in the same way, but on a much larger scale, that millions of people agreed back in 1945 that capitalism had been the cause not only of the First World War and the Great Depression, but also of the Second World War, all three of which, combined together, probably killed at least 100 million people, between 1914 and 1945. Which then led, paradoxically, in the immediate post-war period to what is known as “the thirty glorious years” (1945-1975), characterized by the many concessions that several different working-class organizations and anti-imperialist movements, all over the world, managed to wring out of international (liberal) capitalism, during the decades that German economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has called “the era of democratic capitalism”. That was, rather promptly and very unfortunately, then overthrown by the joint neoliberal-neofascist counter-revolution that is still in power nowadays.

Needless to say, such a fantastically positive outcome to such a gigantic loss of life, does not seem to be a very likely dénouement. It is rather more probable that what will happen instead is something akin to what Nikita Khrushchev was talking about when he said, away back in 1956, “We will bury you.” Only instead of the state-capitalist system burying the liberal-capitalist system, that outcome will probably be about the two (falsely opposed) kinds of contemporary capitalism (neoliberalism and neofascism) burying the human race forever, along with millions of other multicellular species. People all over the world, therefore, would be well-advised to choose some other kind of outcome before it is too late.