Pandemics are not parochial

I began to write this blogpost a little over a week ago, on March 11, 2020, the day that the World Health Organization finally got around to admitting that the coronavirus outbreak had indeed become a global pandemic. This is one of those worldwide epidemics that many observers like myself have been predicting over the past few years, that would break out over and over again as a result of most top-level big-shots refusal to prepare for any type of crisis that did not initially seem to threaten their own domineering control over every possible form of human activity. The kind of pandemics, like the coronavirus, that would inevitably intersect with every other known variety of international crisis, such as the enormous recent expansion in the emission of greenhouse gases, or the increasingly dangerous escalation in the number of countries possessing ever greater quantities of nuclear weapons. To provoke a perfect storm of mutually reinforcing threats to the quality, and even to the duration, of human life on this planet.

This is the kind of world we are entering right now, when it is becoming increasingly difficult to figure out how we can get any kind of hold on what is happening to all of us these days. Six years ago, when Canadian social activist Naomi Klein published her book about how “This changes everything”, she assumed that people’s worldwide reaction to the reality of climate change would be more than enough incentive to, in fact, change everything drastically. To finally realize that we had to dump our much too long-lasting, eternally hegemonic system of capital accumulation into the garbage. And to come up instead with an entirely different approach to running a modern, “cooperative commonwealth” of almost eight billion highly interdependent human beings.

In place of that , what we got in the real world was even more regression than we had already accumulated since the late 1970s, when the coordinated juggernaut of neoliberalism (deregulation of everything) and neofascism (ultra-religious, ultra-ethnic communitarianism) was unleashed on the world by the central banks monetarist “war on inflation”. The worldwide recession that they deliberately created in the early 1980s inaugurated a period of forty years during which private and state forms of capitalist empire-building combined together to make sure that no one anywhere would be able to escape their total control over world politics, the world economy and subordinated social conditions.

The proof of which being the fact that most of the new wealth created in the world over the past forty years has gone to an extremely small group of people, centred on the 2000-plus billionaires to be found spread out all over today’s world. Resulting in an ever-increasing gap between a handful of extremely rich people (some of them “earning” up to 100 million US dollars per day) and hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people (still barely surviving on only one or two dollars per day). An income gap that is dozens of times greater than it used to be, as recently as fifty years ago.

Now, however, it looks very much like their coordinated control of everything has broken down completely, not just because of the pandemic itself but also because of their hyper-ridiculous reaction to this latest crisis. Especially in the USA, still the world’s largest economy, where their “striatum president” deliberately dragged his feet for several weeks, obstinately refusing to do anything at all capable of containing the spread of the virus. Even after that, his idea of an appropriate response was to declare a “national emergency” that focused on merely blocking individual travel for 30 days between the USA and the European Union. Initially leaving out the UK and Ireland, even though their exposure to the coronavirus was as dangerous as that of the designated 26 EU countries overall average. Which idiotic reaction set off an unprecedented meltdown in the world’s stock markets, that all began falling apart faster than they ever have before, weak little rallies never coming close to catching up with much greater losses. Not just 1987 but even 1929 do not seem to have been this bad, if not for any other reason than that of the much more inter-dependent nature of recent economic globalization.

This is where we find ourselves nowadays, in a hyper-individualist period of history during which the most egotistical members of the ruling elites, against all odds, are still deliberately trying to ignore not only the laws of physics (notwithstanding Greta Thunberg’s reminder that “You cannot make deals with physics”), but also to ignore the laws of biology as well. Not to mention specifically ignoring what is euphemistically known as “the rule of law”, a series of agreed-upon rules among elitist rulers that underly any possible attempts at international coordination against exactly this kind of threat. Even though a few eternal optimists are still trying to argue that “everyone seems to be pulling together” against the coronavirus, it ought to be obvious to everyone now that completely disconnected, hyper-narcissistic maniacs like  Donald Trump, and all the other ultra right-wing populists currently in power in dozens of other unfortunate countries, are again doing their best to use the fight against the virus as just another way of preserving their own personal hold on power. Creating even more chaos by constantly trying to convince their extremely foolish supporters that they are in fact god-kings, always automatically doing the right thing from the outset, without even breaking a sweat.

Even in the UK, prime minister Boris Johnson, who seemed to be intelligent enough to have finally set aside the extreme neoliberalism left over from Margaret Thatcher’s antediluvian approach, has nevertheless decided to constantly downplay the coronavirus threat, at first openly refusing to do anything at all about the spread of that disease into his unfortunate country. Then trying to play catch-up with the French quarantine a few days later by talking about (!) taking much more drastic action. More or less in the same way that the Canadian government caved into Québec’s criticism about not doing anything about controlling foreign visitors, by shutting out most countries, while still exempting the USA for a few days, as if it were not also a foreign country. Now that the border with the USA has finally been closed, by mutual agreement, Canada still seems to be sharing with its huge neighbour, and with Germany, the absurd notion that most people do not have to be tested for the virus, not even those arriving at airports from abroad. How long is that ridiculous idea going to last?

For their part, the rest of the world’s only slightly less self-centred chieftains, those who still claim like France’s Emmanuel Macron to be “doing something real” about the crisis, making a big show about “getting tough”, are nevertheless coming up with the same kind of “one quarter, or maybe half of the way” solutions. Just like they have always been doing in every other crisis situation that has arisen over the past several decades, since at least as far back as when everyone started hearing about the concept of “climate change” for the first time.

However, none of the official reactions to the current crisis, be they totally or partially inadequate, in no way justified the completely opposite kind of hyper-individualist reactions to the pandemic, committed by millions of panic-stricken ordinary shoppers. Who demonstrated their total indifference to the needs of everyone else in their respective neighbourhoods by at least temporarily cleaning out local stores completely. Stocking up with such weird choices as an entire year’s supply of toilet paper!

All of which has brought at least one major change throughout the world, namely a whole lot of speculation (in those places where it has not already gone way beyond that stage) about hospital triage setting in. In other words, public and private health systems becoming so overwhelmed by treating victims of the coronavirus that they deliberately decide not to treat selected groups of “ordinary patients”, such as everyone over 80 years old and/or anyone at all suffering from life-threatening problems not related to the virus itself!

In fact, governments all over the world have also been proclaiming in the last few days a similar kind of political triage, namely their intention to “put off” doing anything at all about such “unrelated” problems as climate change, until the coronavirus itself has been defeated once and for all. Which, given the way that such governments have functioned over the past few decades, could mean doing nothing about anything else for a very long time. Long enough for any one of those “other” problems, or all of them ganging up together, to turn our eventual triumph over the virus (if ever that happens) into a pyrrhic victory, the effect of those other crises making it totally impossible for anyone to celebrate the projected end of this particular epidemic.

The recent geopolitical spat between the USA and China over the origins of the virus has underlined just how easy it is for diplomatic quarrels between rival nuclear powers to affect their judgement about other things. The USA chose to emphasize over and over again the Chinese origins of the virus by reminding everyone how dozens of other major epidemics in the past have begun in those parts of central China where the poorest peasants have always been in close proximity with wild animals as a source of food. And China chose to reply to those endlessly repeated taunts by claiming that it was in fact the US Army that initially planted the virus in that particular region!

But the problems being constantly magnified by the world’s most important propagators of deliberate ignorance are not just the ones already mentioned: the pandemic itself, unprecedented levels of environmental degradation, equally unprecedented levels of nuclear proliferation, record-level income differentiation and the stock-market pandemonium, all of them resulting in the extremely negative effect of all of those things together on the fragile world economy. Recent reports attempting to estimate just how disastrous the economic effects of the COVID-19 crisis have been, in every one of the affected countries as well as throughout the globe, have emphasized the fact that both local and international recovery efforts will be  blocked for quite some time by the intersecting effects of the pandemic.

It does not seem possible to overcome the effects of the coronavirus merely by government intervention, nor indeed by central-bank intervention, as several previous financial crises and economic recessions were overcome. For the simple reason that most world governments have lost much of the power, and most of the financial clout that they used to possess. Having gradually abandoned anywhere between one-half and three-quarters of their former strength, even in countries like China, after forty years of neoliberal deregulation of practically everything. All the world’s public authorities seem nowadays to be acting a lot like older, already-sick people succumbing to the virus more than anyone else, because those public authorities have also been greatly weakened before the coronavirus itself came into being.

In any case, even government largesse in dire circumstances always goes mainly to relatively well-off people in every affected region, in spite of official fake-news messages claiming that the most underprivileged people among us are being helped the most. Just like some wit pointed out a few years back about foreign aid, which in spite of government propaganda to the contrary, usually ends up with “poor people in rich countries helping rich people in poor countries”. Commentators like Craig Kielburger, the WE-Movement co-founder who writes a column published by a Canadian newspaper chain, has tried to argue that the pandemic could have been avoided if all the world’s richest governments and richest individuals had combined together over the past few decades, to spend the 5 trillion dollars necessary in order to attain the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Thereby eliminating poverty in the poorest parts of the world and avoiding the pandemic altogether; see his article, “Complicit in COVID-19”, “The Montreal Gazette”, March 17, 2020. What Kielburger left out of the equation, however, is the fact that even the world’s richest countries are not at all well prepared to face up to the virus, since even they cannot control poverty in their own countries, let alone in the rest of the world.

Not to mention the fact that a whole series of other major crises, that particularly insensitive people consider “less important” or “totally unrelated” to the ones already mentioned, are also taking place right now, and also depend for their own propagation on the same completely narcissistic, irrational and irresponsible attitudes. Another example of which being the recent, atavistic revival of male chauvinism, all over the world, resulting in a whole new wave of targeted attacks on most of the world’s female population, including a recrudescence of “feminicide”, wife battering, gang rape, excision, forced marriage imposed on really young girls, trafficking of millions of sex slaves, and ever more degrading forms of domination pornography than those that already existed in all the earlier periods of history.

Even though, paradoxically enough in the USA, Harvey Weinstein, the extremely powerful film producer, serial rapist and Trump clone, was finally brought down, in France the equally well-known film director Roman Polanski got rewarded instead. In spite of having accumulated an almost equivalent pedigree of sexual violence over the past several decades. He won a “César” award for best film, an event that set off a fire-storm of denunciation of sexual predators in that country. Including the publication in the “Libération” newspaper of an extremely hard-hitting article by novelist Virginie Despentes, accusing the “clan of powerful people” using their “financial fire-power” to glorify one of their own. Thereby spitting in the faces of millions of innocent victims, in France even more than in any of the other Western countries. Her analysis of that excessively painful event was particularly insightful, when she accused her country of proudly exhibiting its true nature as a class-based society, bent on deliberately mistreating everyone not belonging to the ruling circles of power, either because they belong to “inferior” social classes, or to the “weaker” sex, or to the wrong political orientation.

What made the whole thing so incredibly poignant was the fact that the Polanski film that won the national award, “J’accuse” (“An officer and a spy” in English), was in fact a reasonably accurate depiction of the Dreyfus affair in France, during the years leading up to the First World War. When Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army, was falsely accused of spying for the Germans and sent off to a prison camp in French Guyana, before being eventually reinstated after an immensely important national debate over that very anti-Semitic affair. In other words, today’s ruling elite in France is quite content to pretend to repudiate one small part of their predecessors racist attitudes, just so long as they are allowed to continue to crush, dominate and exploit most of the rest of the population. Exactly the same kind of flamboyant hypocrisy that people like Donald Trump (and Harvey Weinstein before his fall from grace) exhibit whenever they also laughingly pretend to support social equality (“equal opportunity”), gender equality and/or “racial” equality.

Yet another excellent example of the convergence of these seemingly independent crises, all of them stemming from the same sources of hyper-individualism, is the eternally head-in-the-sand attitude of many otherwise intelligent observers, especially in Western countries, to the ongoing threat of religious fundamentalism, particularly virulent these days in the Muslim world. And not at all unrelated to the revival of those extreme forms of male-chauvinism in the preceding example. In Canada, Don Macpherson, a columnist for the Montreal Gazette, followed up recently (March 7, 2020) on his 50-year career of Quebec-bashing by again attacking Québec’s “Bill 21”, an  attempt to shore up provincial laicity, ever so slightly, by making it illegal for civil servants “in positions of authority” to wear proselytizing religious garments and symbols while at work.

His column was published just after it was revealed in the news that two fundamentalist Muslim daycare workers in Montréal were observed trying to convince Muslim-origin girls in a daycare facility attached to a public school to be “good Muslims” by wearing the hijab, praising Allah at every available opportunity and getting their parents to complain about the absence of halal food in the school cafeteria. The parents of the children affected, however, were Tunisian immigrants who came to Canada specifically to get away from just that kind of religious propaganda. Instead of complaining about no halal, they complained to the authorities about how their children were being brainwashed, and threatened to go to court if need be to put an end to such practices. In his column, Macpherson, like many other such commentators from English Canada, downplayed the significance of this latest development by claiming that it failed to “make the case for Bill 21”, since Islamic fundamentalism in Québec only represents a minority opinion, even inside the relatively small Muslim minority currently living in Québec.

What Macpherson and all the other commentators like him refuse to recognize, however, is that even though the Muslim minority in Québec is still quite small by comparison with the Muslim minority living in such countries as France, increasingly fundamentalist control over the entire Muslim world is quite capable of doing a considerable amount of damage to human rights wherever it shows its ugly head. Macpherson and his crowd like to think that they live in some kind of near-perfect Canadian society, completely isolated from the horrible things going on in all the Muslim-majority countries spread out from northwestern Africa all the way over to southeast Asia, not to mention Muslim-minority countries like France.

In fact, many of the things that people like Macpherson fear so much are also taking place right now in France, whose Muslim minority of almost six million people, constituting slightly less than nine percent of the total population, is hugely affected by the current wave of fundamentalist sentiment, and by its terrorist offshoot, to the same proportional extent as in every other part of the Muslim world. France’s well-known and long-lasting laicity laws, much more extensive than any such legislation in Québec, have not succeeded all that much in blunting many of the negative effects of Muslim fundamentalism. Which, after all, is merely the hyper-violent Muslim equivalent of the kind of ultra-right-wing populism, and white supremacy, that has affected all the European, and European-origin, Christian populations spread out over many other parts of the  world.

As president Emmanuel Macron put it in a recent speech denouncing “political Islam”, also known as “Islamic separatism”, the French republic finds it inacceptable whenever someone refuses to shake hands with a woman simply because she is a woman, or refuses to be cared for or educated by a woman, or refuses to be educated at all for the same reason, or imposes virginity certificates on women before they are allowed to marry, or considers the laws of religion to be superior to those of the republic. (See “Macron s’engage contre l’islam politique” in “Le Devoir”, February 19, 2020.) In hundreds of different neighbourhoods in France, particularly in those suburban regions in which the majority of the local population is Muslim, the apolitical, “moderate” Muslims of days gone by have been largely replaced by militant Muslim fundamentalists, who insist on making life very difficult indeed not only for every Muslim, or person of Muslim origin, who does not want to kowtow to their deliberately backward way of doing things. But also for every other French citizen living in the same area, regardless of his or her ethnic background, religious affiliation, or lack of a religious affiliation.

Wherever ultra-right-wing populists congregate, in whatever part of the world, they always produce local situations just like the ones that Macron was denouncing in the fundamentalist regions of France. It makes no difference whatsoever if the neofascist movement inside any particular country or region is of imperial-Western/evangelical-Christian/white-supremacist origins, or if it originates among colonial-Eastern/Muslim-fundamentalist/non-white-supremacist origins, or for that matter in any other combination of world regions, religions and forms of racism anywhere else in the world (including Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucian, Shintoist and animist communities) . Intolerance toward ethnic and religious majorities or minorities, intolerance toward women or other “inferior” genders, intolerance toward “inferior” social classes: all the different kinds of intolerance are equally spread out all over the world, and are not just reserved, or even particularly concentrated, as some ultra-alienated, Western “anti-colonialists” imagine, uniquely or exclusively in the Western world.

So, as I have been pointing out over and over again in my blog, human beings have to drastically repudiate, very quickly indeed, this jointly neoliberal and neofascist trajectory that we have all been on for the past forty years. Otherwise, we are going to self-destruct, not because of any particular kind of epidemic, economic crisis, environmental degradation, geopolitical confrontation, or social atavism, but because of what happens when all of those crises come at us all at once. It is highly unlikely that we are all going to be saved in the nick of time, by some unforeseen miracle, without changing our own attitudes in a major way. As Johnny Cash put it, during his Folsom Prison concert more than 50 years ago, in his song about a jailed murderer waiting for a pardon: “But this ain’t the movies, so forget about me.” We all have to become much better people than we were before, right away quick, but that certainly does not seem to be happening nearly often enough at the moment.

It is not just the hyenas like Warren Buffett who have been profiting from every “lesser” person’s problems, even mistreating other tycoons possessing somewhat less money than he does, over the past few decades. It is also the fact that the example provided by such billionaires has been replicated at all levels of society, even among middle-class and lower-class people, sadistic copycats in even “ordinary” circles constantly mistreating their more masochistic neighbours and family members, keeping everything for themselves (goods and services) that were supposed to have been shared with everyone else in their particular social group. Even people in the union movement, at least those practising what is called “business unionism”, try to keep for themselves all the crumbs that regularly fall off the big investors tables, rather than sharing whatever is left over of the world’s wealth with unorganized labour, weaker unions or retirees.

Liberation from all of these multiple crises coming together at the same time has to be coordinated world-wide and become universal, rather than parochial, if any of us can hope to survive this particularly disappointing period of history.

A tidal wave of misinformation

I just finished reading Daniel J. Levitin’s book, “A field guide to lies: Critical thinking in the information age”, published in 2016. It fitted in quite nicely with my own research on the same general subject, that began with the writing of three related books, “Taking the lying out of living”, “Universal skepticism” and “Billions of big babies”, published in 2001, 2003 and 2006. To which I have since added a slew of related articles, in various magazines and newspapers, as well as my current blog, with monthly postings since 2013. A good twenty years of research and commentary on what is probably the world’s most important topic, indispensable for explaining what has gone wrong with our collective mishandling of every single major issue currently afflicting human society. Or all of them together, at the same time.

More than anything else, it is the misinformation constantly being created by millions of ultra-right-wing trolls all over the world, that explains more than any other common cause why we have not been able to deal even minimally with any of the recent, escalating, ecological, financial and geopolitical crises. Nor with the highly related, extremely serious, partly neoliberal and partly neofascist wave of barbarian atavism, taking over every part of the world as well as threatening our collective future as a species. The trolls are not only the anonymous jackasses polluting social media but also the very well-known, and very prolific, creators of fake news currently running most of our governments, political organizations and multinational corporations, as well as most of our religious and cultural institutions. Relatively rational explanations of reality have been almost completely submerged by thousands of irrational fabrications, many of them based on the re-emergence of long discredited, replacement myths dredged up from the distant past. The entire homo sapiens part of the biosphere has been inundated over the past few decades with a gigantic tidal wave of misinformation that threatens to put us all out of commission permanently.

Levitin’s book, as the title suggests, mostly deals with the technical aspects of misinformation, about all the different ways in which human beings manage to misinterpret all kinds of data, such as quantitative (statistical) data, accidentally or deliberately misunderstanding plausibility, averages, graphic representations, reporting biases, sampling biases and probabilities. As well as qualitative misevaluations involving such things as expertise, alternative explanations, counter-factual “knowledge”, and several of the most common logical fallacies. My favourite fallacy in his list has always been “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (“after this, therefore because of this”), that crops up all the time in historical discourse. Which does not mean that succeeding events never have a cause and effect relationship, but rather that they are not necessarily related in that way.

Levitin does not focus very much, however, on what I consider to be the most psychologically damaging kind of mangling of the facts, namely deliberate, official attempts to fool ordinary people into going along with whatever their leaders have previously decided to do (before consulting them), no matter how dangerous the consequences could turn out to be. For example, his reference (page 129) to the U. S. government’s claim about the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq prior to the 2003 American invasion of that unfortunate country. Which he refers to as a “mistake”, even though it has since been admitted that it was a deliberate fabrication to get the U. S. population onside, in a predetermined effort to remove a rival dictator in that region. Somewhat similar to the 1964 “Gulf of Tonkin incident”, involving a supposedly “completely unprovoked” North Vietnamese attack on an American warship, that the U.S. government now admits to have been a deliberate misinterpretation of events, intended to justify major escalation in that earlier war.

Just as I was finishing the Levitin book, I also stumbled upon an earlier work, “The influencing machine” (published in 2011) by U. S. public radio personality Brooke Gladstone, a kind of adult comic book (graphic non-fiction), abundantly illustrated by Josh Neufeld. This book is a very impressionistic, liberal-minded history of the media, almost exclusively focused on “the American exception” (the title of chapter 2), the idea according to which the U. S. constitution guarantees freedom of speech like no other country does, even if the U. S. media and “the American people” in general are constantly forgetting what freedom of expression genuinely entails. Her general proposition is that the media interprets the news the way that “people” (big shots as well as ordinary people) want it to do, so that “we get the media that we deserve”. Which means that according to her, there is nothing particular going on these days that has not been going on before, at least not since the coming into being of the modern media (during the nineteenth century). Except perhaps for her own projection of a future tainted with artificial intelligence (see chapter 15, “I, robot”).

Gladstone, however, is not nearly as naive as Levitin about U. S. government attempts to control the media, readily admitting all sorts of official misinformation, such as the observation (page 72) that U. S. involvement in the Spanish-American war, the First World War, the Vietnam war and the invasions of Iraq (1991 as well as 2003), were all prepared in advance by total media fabrications to make sure that “the American people” would want to go to war as much as its government did. Gladstone, however, very carefully avoids providing any information that could have gotten her into trouble with her publisher, or with her radio audience, about fundamental problems that go far beyond her discussion of the different kinds of media bias on which she focuses her attention (commercial bias, status quo bias, access bias, visual bias and fairness bias).

In her treatment of objectivity, for example, she agrees that “the Communist menace is real” (page 104) before going on to denounce those Americans who dropped all pretence at objectivity in their treatment of the U. S. role in the Vietnam war. Even though she details dozens of horrible examples of all sorts of people being constantly mistreated by those who care only about profits, she never specifically denounces private capitalism as such. She has nothing to say about why so many people all over the world became communists in the first place. Nor does she explicitly state anywhere in her text that private capitalism has in fact been much more menacing to the extremely inadequate kind of democracy that still exists in this world, than the kind of fake communism practised by the geographically-limited Soviet bloc (really only a variety of state capitalism), lasting for a relatively short period of time.

She also readily admits that things happening to people in every country in the world have an enormous impact on people’s lives in every other country, but she nevertheless has nothing whatever to say about how the media works in such places as Russia, China, India, Nigeria,  Brazil, or any other non-Western country. As if the relationship between the media and the people in those “faraway” places has no effect whatsoever on what is going on with the media inside Western nations like the USA. In most of her text, she treats the USA as if it was some kind of microcosm of the whole world. Imagine how much more controversial, and difficult to publish, her book would have been if she had included several chapters about the even more incredible media distortions going on in regions like the Middle East. Or if she had included in her text several chapters about the enormous damage being done to democracy in every major region by what is currently happening to the world’s most important religions. More specifically  by the current wave of ultra-right-wing fundamentalism that has so dramatically contributed to the political and social atavism, all over the world, that I was mentioning earlier.

Every government on this planet, past and present, misuses information on purpose, pretty much all the time, to serve whatever political purpose it may have, on any particular occasion. As do all the world’s major banks and corporations, private capitalism since its inception always having been (congenitally) focused on using hidden or prefabricated information in order to keep ahead of competitors, legislators, customers, employees and pretty much everyone else. It is also true that conspiracy theories as such first came into being long before the capitalist system was invented, like the Catholic Church’s fabrication of a document supposedly dictated by fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine, giving the Catholic version of the Christian message precedence over the Orthodox version. It was not until very recently that Pope John Paul II finally admitted (a thousand years after the fact) that it was in reality a medieval forgery. Nevertheless, it is completely ridiculous to conclude, as Gladstone has done, that misinformation nowadays is just “business as usual”, thereby refusing to admit that it has become a genuine, worldwide tidal wave and not just the normal ebb and flow of ordinary seawater.

The ease with which gullible people all over the world are so easily fooled nowadays was emphasized in Daniel Levitin’s section on expertise, when he referred to numerous individuals who took their medical advice from someone who plays a doctor on television (page 135). Which eerily predates the subsequent election of “presidential” actor Volodymyr Zelensky as the current (real-world) president of the Ukraine. The same Zelensky for whom fake-news U. S. president Donald Trump threatened to cut off military aid if he refused to investigate rival Joe Biden’s possible involvement with political corruption in one of the Ukraine’s most important corporations. Also the same, Russian-supported, “DJ” Trump who recently survived an attempted impeachment over the Zelensky affair by bullying his party’s senators into refusing (for the first time in U. S. history) to call any witnesses or to table any documents during his trial. Also the same neoliberal-neofascist numbskull who was photographed making the raised-fist salute, of the world communist movement, to celebrate his victory over everyone else. As they so crassly say in the USA, “you can’t make up this kind of s—t”!

Thousands of commentators all over the world wonder why the millions of evangelical Christians who support Trump do so in spite of the fact that he seems to stand for absolutely everything that they are supposed to abhor the most. Such as encouraging as many men as possible to mistreat as many women as possible, by promoting promiscuity, prostitution and pornography (“grab them by the pussy!”). Or by encouraging as many white people as possible to mistreat as many “coloured” people as possible by refusing to distinguish between supporters and opponents of white supremacy, during a recent confrontation between rival groups of demonstrators. Not to mention every other ultra-stupid, ultra-reactionary comment that he has made even more recently, on every possible subject, or his unforgivable pardons of a dozen of his favourite underworld collaborators. With the result that he is currently being denounced by the anti-Trump media as himself personifying the same behaviour displayed by the thoroughly corrupt leaders of all the nations that he calls “sh—hole countries”, most of them to be found in the poorer regions of the world.

Could it be that those evangelicals are in fact trying to hasten the onset of Armageddon, provoking their God’s supreme displeasure by deliberately contributing to the rapidly accelerating moral degeneracy of human society? More or less in the same way that such people also support “Christian Zionism” because the Book of Revelations apparently says that at the end of time, the Jews have to first take over the Middle East completely, in order to finally prompt “the Lord” into forcibly converting them at last into good, evangelical Christians? In other words, as Trump himself was reported to have said about recent Muslim radicalism, don’t we want to really “find out what the hell is going on” with all of these antediluvian, fundamentalist movements?

It is very odd, to say the least, that all the ultra-right-wing populist leaders in every region seem to think that the best way to fight corruption at the highest levels (“the deep state”) is by encouraging even greater corruption, at still higher levels than before. Which may help to explain why the Gates foundation recently honoured the increasingly autocratic prime minister of India (Norendra Modi) for building millions of toilets, thereby ignoring one of the most important goals in the United Nations list of requirements for sustainable development, i. e., the need “to promote peace, human rights and the rule of law”. It might also help to explain why the people who run the Nobel Prize for economics recently honoured several neoliberal economists, like climate-change skeptic William Nordhaus, thereby betraying the overall Nobel mantra of only recognizing those giving the greatest possible benefit to all humankind, and not just to a very small section of it.

We currently live in the kind of world in which after every well-publicized incident involving charges of corruption and incompetence, the public relations department of every large corporation or government service always issues a press release about how their particular institution is “committed to the highest possible standards” in doing whatever it is they were supposed to be doing. No matter how many such “incidents” have been recently reported. Deliberate misinformation has therefore become institutionalized at the very highest levels of every sector of every society and of every culture. Typically, very few of the people responsible for any of those incidents ever gets blamed, or punished, for any fault whatsoever.

This same, thoroughly dishonest, denial mentality permeates every kind of discussion concerning every one of the world’s most important problems. This upside-down attitude is particularly obvious whenever the conversation happens to touch on the ever-worsening degradation of the natural environment, not only regarding such imminently dangerous realities as climate change, or the accumulation of toxic waste products in the world’s oceans, but also the increasingly deadly pollution of the air, the water and the soil conveniently situated, most of the time, right next to most of the world’s highly populated neighbourhoods. Far away from where most of the rich people live. Which is happening more and more often, not less and less often, not only in countries like Paraguay and Bangladesh, but also in places like Canada and Japan. Mountains of abandoned mine tailings, forgotten oil wells and decaying industrial sites proliferate all over the world, as the world’s most impervious investors move on from one region to another, leaving death and destruction in their wake, in millions of different localities.

Not that phoney, post-modern, left-wing discourse is necessarily coming up with any more accurate depictions of reality. In an article published in the Montreal newspaper “Le Devoir” (February 1, 2020), about the debate over dogmatism in Western universities, author Stéphane Baillargeon quoted Concordia University sociology professor Jean-Philippe Warren commenting on left-wing dogmatism in the social sciences. To the effect that in order to fight against the hierarchization of knowledge in today’s society, the post-modern leftist interpretation of reality has been to claim, for example, that science and shamanism are equivalent forms of discourse. Imagine that: scientists claiming that the scientific method does not get us anywhere closer to the truth than shamanism, which is based on somehow communicating with “the spirit world” in order to be able to import those spirits’ (non-existent) “transcendental energy” into our own world.

This seems to me to be the worst possible way of fighting against elitism and the enormous, ever-accelerating gap between the social classes, all over the world. Which was created by the alliance of private (neoliberal) capitalism and state (neofascist) capitalism, not by science as such. To be sure, all the world’s ultra-rich and ultra-powerful elitists have been using the discoveries of modern science, including social-science research into the different methods of ideological manipulation, in order to reinforce their control over “the lower classes”. But cutting all the world’s poorer and less powerful people off from those scientific discoveries, by equating the scientific method with the methods being used by shamans, and all the other religious fundamentalists, is not going to get us anywhere at all in the fight against elitism. Just like in the case of the ultra-right-wing populists mentioned earlier, it is only going to make things a lot worse: replacing existing ideological corruption with even more ideological corruption, on a whole new level.

Another case in point being well described in an article published recently in “The Montreal Gazette” (February 13, 2020) by social entrepreneur (and former prostitute) Valérie Pelletier, “Sex work isn’t work, it’s sexual exploitation”. In that article, Pelletier lambasted all the recent, post-modern attempts at treating prostitutes as “sex workers”, who supposedly have the right to ply their trade in a “free” society just like everyone else. She pointed out that in the real world there are very few happy ‘sex workers’, because sexual exploitation of overwhelmingly poverty-stricken women is not at all joyful, but “bleak and identity stealing”.

To which I might add that interpreting prostitution as sex work is just another kind of deliberately fake-feminist misinformation, a lot like the equally false feminism of people who claim that the Muslim-fundamentalist hijab is “not really” a symbol of male domination over women. Or those who believe that the Super Bowl half-time show in the USA, featuring Latino performers Jennifer Lopez and Shakira dressed in ultra-revealing costumes, was not a good example of hyper-sexualization because they were just celebrating Latin culture (and Middle Eastern culture as well in Shakira’s case). As if sexism only applies to Western culture, and everything emanating from “oppressed” cultures has to be supported, no matter how debilitating its content.

Which is also quite similar to the so-called “intersectional” argument according to which feminists should be concentrating on helping the world’s most oppressed women (poor, non-white, etc.) rather than fighting against sexism directed at all women in general. With the result that the intersectional crowd end up having no idea what to do whenever they are faced with a conflict between two opposing groups of oppressed women. As in the case of transgender activist Jessica Yaniv’s denunciation of South Asian (Sikh) women in a British Columbia beauty salon, who refused to shave (his/her) decidedly male genitalia. To what extent are people supposed to believe that a person self-identifying as a woman really is a woman, in the original sense of the word, if that person is unable to become pregnant, or to bear children? In other words, how is the real world supposed to interact with the imagined world these days?

Yet another fascinating example of how weird ideological misinterpretation can become these days is how some of Canada’s Jewish leaders, who should know better, have gotten extremely upset about Montréal mayor Valérie Plante’s refusal to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-semitism. It seems that a small minority of revisionist Jews had a certain influence on the mayor’s decision, since they believe that the proposed definition could include banning any discussion of Israel’s origins. Which is certainly plausible given the enormous controversy that erupted inside Israel when historian Shlomo Sand published a book (“The invention of the Jewish people”, 2008) according to which today’s Palestinian population are largely the descendants of the Jewish population of ancient Israel, most of whom converted to Islam later on.

He also argued that most of today’s Jews, the majority of whom currently support Zionism, are in fact descendants of various different peoples who converted en masse to Judaism at various different times, and that the forced dispersion (diaspora) of the Jews in the ancient world never happened. In addition, he has accused Israel of having adopted an increasingly ethnocentric attitude over the past few years, “doubling down” (like Donald Trump likes to do) on its colonialist attitude towards the Palestinians. A fact that prompted emeritus history professor Yakov Rabkin, of the University of Montréal, to describe today’s Israel as having become an inspiration for all the white supremacists in the world, from Poland to Bolivia.

Needless to say, Sand’s version of Jewish history has been completely rejected and denounced by dozens of other mainstream historians who support the official point of view, and therefore consider Sand to be a traitor to the Jewish cause, that they equate with the Zionist cause. The Jewish leaders in Montréal who denounced mayor Plante undoubtedly know all about that controversy, but they curiously do not refer to it at all (the sin of omission) in any of the newspaper references to that controversy that I have read, preferring instead to make it appear as if the city administration is merely being anti-semitic. This is a truly excellent example of how even such a serious charge as anti-semitism can be turned on its head by thoroughly dishonest people who have no interest in partaking in any kind of civilized debate about anything whatsoever.

To be sure, identity myths like the Israeli one are currently being revived and refashioned all over the world nowadays. Canada, for example, was originally founded in 1867 by the imperial parliament’s “British North America Act”, accompanied by a historical myth about how the new nation was based on the “peaceful coming together” of two founding “races”, the “English” and the “French”, later replaced by “the anglophone and the francophone communities”. When Prime Minister Pierre-Elliott Trudeau got the Queen of England to sign an ideological reconstruction of Confederation in 1982, he reworked the original Canadian myth, replacing the “two founding races” with a “multicultural Canada”, theoretically combining all the indigenous peoples living north of the U. S. border, all the descendants of the English and French “races” that settled in the same region before 1867, and all the (immigrant) “cultural communities” that have set up shop in this country since that time.

The only people consulted directly by P.-E. Trudeau (the father of Canada’s current P. M.) for his 1982 Canadian constitution being the premiers of the nine (mostly) anglophone provinces, the one (mostly) francophone province (Québec) never having signed on. But then, neither did any of the indigenous peoples of Canada, since they were not invited to the reconstruction conference in the first place. Nor, for that matter, were any of the immigrant (cultural) communities specifically invited. Such are the workings of modern, representative “democracy”, a situation that has only gotten even worse since that time, not only in Canada but also in every other country that likes to brag about being so very democratic.

Canada’s treatment of its indigenous peoples has generally been a lot worse than its treatment of any of its other minority populations, such as the Québécois, the francophone minorities living outside of Québec, or any of the immigrant groups. Most of the indigenous communities spread out all over Canada are still living in very backward conditions, like the ones that still prevail in most “Third World” countries, lacking such basic necessities of modern life as drinking water, readily available health care and high-school graduation. Not to mention such abominations as the residential schools, designed to “take the Indian out of the Indians”, or the deliberately botched inquiry into what happened to thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women. It is not much of a consolation to any of those communities that indigenous peoples in other countries, such as the USA, Australia, the Russian Federation, China, India, and practically every other country in the world, are not treated any better.

This world-wide mistreatment of indigenous populations is also another good example of misinformation as well, since very few of all the countries harbouring these peoples have ever honestly acknowledged their own colonial responsibility for this extremely unequal treatment. The misinformation aspect is particularly galling in Canada, whose current government seems to be the world’s most glaring example of an enormous contrast between what the government says that it is doing to rectify this situation (a lot), and what it is really doing instead (not much). As can be readily observed during the current crisis over the very serious indigenous blockades of Canadian railroads, to protest against pipeline construction in the province of British Columbia (B. C.), primarily to move natural gas to Asian markets.

Nevertheless, it must not be thought that indigenous peoples are not also themselves participating in this global tidal-wave of misinformation. About a year and a half ago (September 17, 2018), I published a blogpost called “Holistic remedies for narrow-minded communitarianism”, in which I presented the main ideas contained in a book, “First Nations 101: Tons of stuff you need to know about First Nations people” written by Lynda Gray, an indigenous author from B. C. In my blogpost, I was quite sympathetic to most of what Gray had to say about Canadian ethnic and cultural genocide aimed at the indigenous peoples in this country.

However, I also included extensive criticism of what I considered to be her naive presentation of pre-contact indigenous culture as being totally devoid of war, sexism, the killing-off of large mammals, or anything else that most people nowadays might define as objectionable behaviour. Useful Information that historians of all the other cultures and civilizations in the world normally include in their works. It seemed to me to be practically impossible that none of the indigenous groups living in what is now called Canada, before the modern European invasions, ever did anything at all that anyone living nowadays might not like very much.

The use of the term “First Nations” itself could also be easily misconstrued, if it is used to suggest that each one of the indigenous peoples currently living in some particular region have always been living in that very same region since time began. The history of so-called “prehistorical societies”, prior to the invention of writing or some other arbitrary criterion, is changing all the time, with each additional discovery about what was really going on during the first 200 000 years of human existence on this planet. But one of the characteristics of that history that seems certain, alongside the intermingling of our species with various other kinds of (now extinct) human beings, is that every last one of the world’s identifiable cultures all belong to that same (homo sapiens) species, the various cultural groups of which have been moving back and forth across the planet for thousands of years.

Making it extremely unlikely that more than a few currently existing cultures live in exactly the same region nowadays as they did when our species first arrived in any given area. Which means that even the expression “indigenous peoples” should not be used to imply permanent occupation of any predetermined geographical setting. History is one thing and mythology is another, in spite of what any particular identity quest for complete and total ethnic purity might come up with, as an “alternate reality”.

There are, obviously, hundreds of thousands of other examples of deliberate misinformation being foisted on everyone these days, by all kinds of ideological manipulators pretty much evenly spread out all over the world. They are all contributing to the current tidal wave of alternative realities now being proposed by everyone out there with an axe to grind. Deliberate denial of the existence of an identifiable real world is just the most convenient way that all those axe-grinders have of refusing to come to terms with any of humanity’s most pressing problems. If someone judges some particular reality as being too much for that someone to handle, that person just has to pretend not to see it, nor to hear, smell, touch or feel it. Which, unfortunately, will not be enough to make it disappear for real.

Mainstream extremism: the origins of denial

Helena Norberg-Hodge, an author and documentary film producer who advocates for a local solution to world economic problems, wrote a fascinating summary of her views in a short article, “Globalization and extremism—join the dots”, that was published in the November-December 2019 edition of the British newsmagazine, “The New Internationalist”. In that article, she started off in the same way that I also began many of my own blogposts, by trying to find out why, in today’s world, there are so many “rightwing authoritarian leaders and extremist political parties gaining strength” in so many different countries, such as Donald Trump’s USA, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

Her answer to that question is that worldwide economic globalization has not only caused an enormous social problem, “expanding the obscene gap between rich and poor”, but has also caused the majority of the world’s population to feel politically and psychologically, as well as economically, insecure. In her view, these related varieties of globalized insecurity have made millions of people “highly susceptible to false narratives purporting to explain their precarious situation”. As she describes it, people’s economic insecurity is especially based on job insecurity, caused by “footloose corporations” eliminating even long-held jobs, through “downsizing and offshoring, mergers and takeovers, artificial intelligence and automation”. To explain where this job insecurity comes from, pro-capitalist, rightwing, authoritarian politicians refuse to blame giant global corporations for ruining so many working-class lives, and choose instead to manipulate millions of susceptible people into blaming big government, immigrants and minorities for their problems. In spite of the fact (I might add) that most of the immigrants and the members of minority groups also belong to the same working-class as the majority populations, a class that has become much bigger and more worldwide than it ever used to be.

Norberg-Hodge also emphasized in her article just how ironic it is to blame big government for any of those policies by pointing out that the political insecurity that millions of people are also feeling, comes from the fact that most governments are being impoverished by the huge subsidies and tax breaks that they have been foolishly handing out “to attract big business” in the first place. Leaving those governments unable “to cover the heavy social and environmental costs of global growth”, and causing ordinary people to “see their government leaders as inept at running the nation’s affairs”, as well as getting them to support imitating the success of big business by running “the country (even) more like a business”. She also points out how psychological insecurity resulting from the “social fragmentation and isolation” caused by “the undermining of local and national economies”, coupled with the enormous consumerist propaganda of global advertising, has succeeded in getting millions of people to replace what she considers to be relatively healthy, local identities with extremely unhealthy, ultra rightwing, extremist and fundamentalist, identities instead.

Curiously enough, I happened to come across Norberg-Hodge’s article when I was also in the process of reading British socialist leader Chris Harman’s monumental book (728 pages), “A people’s history of the world: From the stone age to the new millenium”, first published back in 2008. I was particularly fascinated by Norberg-Hodge’s description of the “economic transformation driven by the deregulation of global banks and corporations, largely through free-trade treaties”, while “businesses and individuals at the national and local level are burdened with ever heavier regulations and squeezed for taxes to subsidize transnationals that pay almost no tax.” That seemed to me to be almost a kind of logical extension of Harman’s description of how social-class oppression itself came into being, when the first regional empires were originally set up over 5000 years ago by ruling-class merchants and aristocrats. Those newly-dominant folks were intent on persuading much more numerous, ordinary peasants and artisans that they (the rulers) were the only ones capable of representing everyone in civilized society. They began to see “their control over resources as being in the interests of society as a whole”, “themselves remaining fit, well and protected from the famines and impoverishment that periodically afflicted the population as a whole” (page 25). In other words, neoliberalism could very well be just the latest, most up-to-date version of what has been unfortunately going on in most human societies for the past several thousand years!

I certainly agree with many of Norberg-Hodge’s contributions to the ongoing debate over the causes of mainstream global extremism. My take on those same authoritarian radicals that she was talking about is that they are all a bunch of neofascist politicians, whose intense hatred of all forms of socialism, and of any emphasis whatever on anything that all the people in the world have in common (the original definition of communism), forces them to focus on racial segregation and misogyny as two very useful ways of avoiding any talk about the even more intense division of today’s world into competing social classes. A division that has become even more obvious nowadays than it was back in the era of “classical” fascism during the first half of the twentieth century.

However, I cannot agree at all with Norberg-Hodge’s equation of “worldwide economic integration, or globalization”, since the Second World War, with what used to be called “development” in “the Global South” or “progress” in “the Global North”. It seems to me that we have to distinguish between what was going on in the world during the so-called “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975) and what has been emerging internationally since the joint, neoliberal and ultraconservative “counter-revolution” started up right afterwards. Following the 1945 victory of the liberal-communist coalition against classical fascism, there had ensued a short period of what German social-economist Wolfgang Streeck calls “democratic capitalism”. 

A very peculiar period of world history during which international capitalism had to contend with a competing “Eastern” bloc of nations theoretically focusing on promoting worldwide communism, and thereby forcing world capitalism to tone down its previously radical emphasis on laissez-faire. Which did not, however, prevent the military wing of capitalism from killing off several million pro-communist workers and peasants anyway, in order to “contain” the spread of the rival ideology. During which time, nevertheless, a certain amount of real economic development and real social progress was allowed to briefly co-exist, here and there, alongside ordinary capitalist and imperialist exploitation, inside both the Global North and the Global South.

That strange little period did not last very long, however, for two very important reasons. One was that the world’s most important private-capitalist investors, dominating most of the only slightly democratic governments of the Global North, had no intention of “sharing the wealth” (even a little bit), for any longer than absolutely necessary, with any of the “inferior” social classes of the North, or the equally “inferior” colonies (or semi-colonies) of the Global South. The other was that the leaders of the only-theoretically communist dictatorships of the “Eastern bloc” of nations betrayed the communist ideal almost from the outset and ran their governments with an iron fist, creating a “new class” (Milovan Djilas) of government bureaucrats to replace the bourgeois/aristocratic rulers of the past.

During the 1970s, the internal corruption inside each “communist” country, the division of the Eastern bloc into two warring factions (pro-Soviet “revisionists” versus pro-Chinese “maoists”), the emerging geopolitical alliance between the USA and China against the remaining members of the Soviet bloc, as well as the neocolonial corruption of the former “liberation movements” in the Global South and the largely-provoked decline in popularity of the communist and social-democratic parties in the “Western” part of the Global North, finally made it possible for the private capitalists in the Global North to abandon their temporary concessions and return to the vigorous pursuit of a revived form of laissez-faire known since the 1970s as neoliberalism.

It is in fact this “new” form of economic and social liberalism, putting an end not only to the “thirty glorious years”, but also to a long (85-year) period of succeeding crises of capitalism (the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War), that had fostered a kind of economic-nationalist (“neomercantilist”), or at least Keynesian, drift away from classical liberalism. When Helena Norberg-Hodge referred to those “footloose corporations” and their worldwide globalization causing political, economic, social and psychological insecurity, she was in fact describing the joint, post-1975 rise of both neoliberalism and neofascism, leading to an accompanying rise in the number of ultra-rightwing governments and movements. In other words, a phenomenon that I like to call “mainstream extremism”, that got its first experience with power when the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990) handed that country’s economy over to the neoliberal economists from the USA known as “the Chicago boys”.

That South American extremist, and dozens of other military dictators just like him, were paradoxically but also very firmly and very directly, supported by the popularly-elected and re-elected regimes of Margaret Thatcher in the UK (1979-1990) and Ronald Reagan in the USA (1981-1989). Both of them becoming champions of worldwide neoliberalism, anti-communism and anti-social-democracy, imitated by dozens of other rightwing clones since that time. The reactionary character of their regimes not being surpassed until the more recent rise of such even more antediluvian politicians as Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Donald Trump in the USA, Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and all the other half-neoliberal, half-neofascist atavists currently in power.

Not to forget that the neoliberal movement also got an enormous boost from the simultaneous “war on inflation” of the world’s most important central banks, led by US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. By simultaneously raising interest rates all over the world from about 5% to about 20% (!), between 1979 and 1981, those “monetarist” banks effectively wiped out inflation by deliberately causing the biggest recession that had afflicted the world since the Great Depression. An economic assault that not coincidentally also made it a great deal more difficult for increasingly indebted governments to maintain any kind of active role in managing the world economy.

To be sure, during the 1945-1975 period of (slightly more) democratic capitalism, as well as during the post-1975 period of mainstream extremism, the big-business private investors were most definitely extending their exploitation and control of both the “inferior” classes of the Global North and the “inferior” nations of the Global South. But during the “thirty glorious years”, they were not doing so with quite as much assurance, nor with quite as much intensity, as they have been since 1975. As for the former “Eastern” bloc of nations, all of them have now reintegrated the “brave new world” of neoliberalism and neofascism that has taken over the entire planet, even if some of them (such as the “People’s” Republic of China) are still run by almost completely totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism, however, currently exists not only in several formerly communist countries, but also in several other, very backward theocracies like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Both kinds of totalitarianism are even more radical forms of “mainstream extremism” than that currently running dozens of other countries, all over the world, including such “outstanding” examples as the USA, Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, Italy, India, Israel, Austria, Colombia, Zimbabwe and tutti quanti. Not to forget, in this ever-increasing list of rogue regimes, that the USA is still the most powerful country in the world (not only militarily, but also in many other ways), and therefore has the capacity to do more harm to the entire world population (as it already has in the recent past) than any other country in that list, including China (at least so far).

In today’s world, there are two main subjects about which most of the world’s neoliberal/neofascist leaders, and also most of their very numerous followers, engage in increasingly obvious denial of current reality. The first of these is the constant deterioration of the natural environment, caused by unprecedentedly high levels of pollution: agricultural waste, industrial waste and ordinary biological waste from almost eight billion people, none of which is being properly treated before being thrown into the air that we are forced to breathe, the water that we are forced to drink and the soil upon which we depend for most of our food.

Resulting, among many other extremely negative effects, in the kind of worldwide climate change that has already greatly expanded both the wildfire and extreme flooding seasons in dozens of different regions. Thereby also adding Donald-Trump clones like Australian prime minister Scott Morrison to the worldwide rogues’ gallery of backward, mainstream extremists. Moreover, the Chinese claim to have done more to end climate change than any other nation is bogus, since as Ma Tianjie explains in her own article (“How green is China?”, published in the same issue of “The New Internationalist” as the Norberg-Hodge article), for every Chinese coal mine recently closed by the regime, that country has financed the opening up of new coal mines, most of them in various Third World countries.

The second subject eliciting mainstream-extremist denial these days is an equally toxic confluence of all the different ways by which human beings are constantly mistreating each other, now more than ever before, especially through the unprecedentedly enormous income gap between the rich and the poor that Norberg-Hodge was mentioning. But also by the neofascist intensification of all the different kinds of exploitation and oppression (including the sexual kind) constantly being directed against the world’s poorest and least powerful categories of people, including most of the world’s women, many of the religious and ethnic minorities on every continent, and a very large percentage of the world’s children as well. The entire world-system, especially the legal branch of that system, seems intent on forever ensuring that none of the most oppressed and exploited people on the planet will ever come anywhere close to freedom.

It is as if all the world’s most reactionary antediluvians, running all the ultra-rightwing movements and governments in every country, were collectively screaming at the top of their lungs, “f—- the environment” and “f—-the common people”! To which they seem to be adding several more comments like these ones: “All the so-called ‘stakeholders’ in the world economy who are not good, upstanding shareholders like ourselves can just go to hell forever! We don’t want to have anything to do with the plight of the ignorant masses, nor with the God-forsaken natural environment! All we want is short-term profit maximization for all eternity, no matter what the cost! And to make sure that we have the power necessary to make ever more obscene gobs of money, we are going to lie and cheat and manipulate ordinary people even more than before, into enthusiastically supporting every last one of our fake ‘anti-establishment’, ultra-narcissist authoritarians, in every single country! We superior beings do not just want to lord it over the undeserving commoners like we have already been doing for thousands of years, we want them to truly enjoy being good, loyal slaves for us forever!”

After forty years of conjointly installing neoliberal and neofascist regimes all over the world, these incredibly disgusting individuals seem to be indulging in some kind of primitive childishness, or infantile egocentrism, blowing their stacks every time someone decides to stand up to them. They are constantly getting violently ticked off whenever some person, or some group, that they associate with “weakness”, does something unexpected, like a former victim accusing them of rape in public, or a previously battered spouse running off to a women’s shelter (thereby leaving them in the lurch), or a young, media-friendly person intensely worried about climate change, or a group of lower-class people banding together for the first time against economic and social domination, or a previously quiescent, “inferior” nation that suddenly gets indignant about foreign imperialism, or any other formerly servile, social entity that no longer tolerates some form or another of sadistic torture.

This is the sort of thing that Montreal newspaper columnist Pierre Trudel (“Le consentement”,  “Le Devoir”, January 7, 2020) was referring to when he wrote about victim Vanessa Springora’s so-called “consent” when she was sexually assaulted several decades ago, as a 14-year-old girl, by the well-known French author, Gabriel Matzneff, who has become very successful openly describing, in excruciating detail, his own sex crimes in his novels. Trudel’s conclusion about such cases, or any similar use of legal consent to “justify” the heinous acts of any other perpetrator of any other form of social violence, is completely illegitimate, since there is no such thing as “free consent” in any situation involving social inequality. To which I would add that given the prevalence of social inequality in practically every human situation, there really is not very much “free consent” going on in any top-down relationship whatsoever.

Of course, there are millions of people all over the world, just like Vanessa Springora, who are fighting back against all these ultra-reactionary individuals and their movements, including even a few people in high places who claim that they also support such progressive ideas as cleaning up the environment and putting an end to the more extreme varieties of exploitation and oppression. But none of that opposition to the joint domination of the world by people promoting different varieties of neoliberalism and neofascism seems to be having any real, long-lasting effect in human society, while the “open conspiracy” of ideological denial seems to be getting stronger and stronger with every passing day.

The mechanism by which all this denial of reality is taking place is exactly the same as the one already discovered by political sociologists in the USA, when they were trying to find out from whence the Trump phenomenon originated. Observers like Steve Tesich and Ralph Keyes posited that the whole idea of calling reality “fake news”, and simultaneously creating a “new reality” which would be more palatable to the points of view of ultra-reactionary people, came from the US defeat in the Vietnam War and the constitutional failures of the Watergate crisis (that also took place during that very decisive decade, the 1970s). Not being able to accept those two very negative realities, so completely unnerving to the ultra-proud American psyche, millions of ordinary people started believing in the almost “psychedelic” ideological inventions of that country’s ever-active populist opinion manipulators (such as Breitbart News Network and Fox News), who created a “better reality” for them than the one that existed in the much-too-negative, much too real, real world.

Fake, “reality-show” billionaire Donald Trump, with the help of Russian hackers further manipulating the already manipulative (and equally billionaire) social media, and the completely undemocratic Electoral College institution, then managed to turn that deliberately phoney worldview into an upset victory in the 2016 presidential election. Setting up a new regime combining most of the neoliberal policies of all the previous administrations (since 1981 in the USA) with a generous new layer of authoritarian neofascism. A process that also seems to apply quite well to all the other recent outbreaks of neofascism all over the world, not only in the countries mentioned by Norberg-Hodge, and all the other ones that I added to her list, but also in places like Russia, that have also experienced extremely debilitating recent events, tearing at the national and/or religious psyche.

Fake news, of course, has been around for a very long time, some of the earlier forms of which have been the equally strange systems of belief in supernatural phenomena known as religions. All the world’s known religions, as well as the somewhat newer kinds of reactionary beliefs (including Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century fantasy about “private vice creating public virtue”), seem to me to be have something in common with what some psychoanalysts refer to as reaction formations, by which aspects of reality deemed unacceptable give rise to imagined, ersatz inventions of the mind to make the world seem more psychologically palatable. Also more or less similar to what some of the psychotherapists studying borderline personality disorder refer to as pseudo-mentalization, describing how disturbed minds make up false representations of reality as a psychological coping mechanism for dealing with aspects of the real world that seem to them totally alien to their own well-established worldview.

The founders of ultra-right-wing (neofascist) populism, as well as most of its neoliberal fellow-travellers, also seem to be using “negative projection”, ascribing the term “fake news” to reality and accepting as reality the objects of their own feverish imaginations. Sometimes it seems that whenever someone, somewhere, gets upset about any kind of human travesty whatever, the ultra-reactionaries just retreat even more into their little fantasy worlds. A good example being any time that Greta Thunberg, or the scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, accuse climate skeptics of doing nothing on purpose, they often end up (paradoxically) creating even more Donald Trump clones than those previously existing, all of them “doubling down” on the use of fossil fuels more than ever before. In other words, even though science is still progressing somewhat, even today, ignorance is getting even stronger than science has ever been, with the overall result that regression is trumping progression.

Which brings me to the other, even more important, reason why I cannot accept Helena Norberg-Hodge’s proposed solution to everything that is going on nowadays. In her article, she also devoted several paragraphs to describing the Ladakh society, “an Indian-administered region on the Tibetan Plateau” where she has been working for the past four decades. According to her account, it was the economic development of that region since the 1970s that got the Buddhist majority and the Muslim minority into fighting with each other over scarce resources, rather than cooperating together as they had in the past, when everyone was equally poor. A situation that according to her was further corrupted by the introduction of Westernized education and dependence on political decision-making centred in the distant government at New Delhi. In concluding her article, she definitely gave the impression that the solution to enormous divisions like these, all over the world, is to get as far away as possible from development, progress and “global economic deregulation”, and to return to localized harmony instead.

But I really do not see how we can possibly get the genie back into the bottle. In my opinion, Norberg-Hodge has made the fundamental error of confounding the kind of deregulated, free-trade-oriented globalization introduced by the neoliberal juggernaut during the late 1970s with any alternative form of globalization. She did not even consider the possibility that real development and real progress could theoretically have put an end to widespread poverty and to the constant reinforcement of social inequality, if globalization had not been carried out almost exclusively under the control of the world’s most backward, big-time investors, economists and politicians. A good example of which is the European Union, which set up a smaller, regional version of deregulated globalization that was supposed to have also included a concerted, regional “war on poverty”, but somehow “never got around” to doing anything of the sort.

Back in the 1945-1975 period, many communist and social-democratic movements and governments, on every continent, were at least theoretically promoting a much more progressive form of globalization. If the neoliberal and neofascist movements had not joined together to take over the world as they did in the late 1970s, a completely different kind of globalization could have been put into place instead, focusing on worldwide cooperation and genuinely progressive development for poor and middle-class people, and not just for the ultra-rich ones. Who knows, it might even have adopted a much more ecologically friendly attitude back then towards the natural environment than the totally indifferent, or even downright hostile, attitude most world leaders have adopted nowadays.

Unfortunately, the kind of local traditions that are popular in every part of the world are exactly the kind of ultra-conservative traditions that classical fascists used to promote back in the twentieth century, and that today’s neofascist politicians are promoting all over again. Things like the caste system in India, still affecting not only the majority Hindu community in that country, but also copied by most of India’s important minorities, such as the largest sections of the Muslim community. Also things like excision, forced marriages of very young girls, priestly pedophilia in most of the world’s Catholic communities, polygamy, the death penalty for apostasy, the stoning of “witches”, “conversion therapy” for homosexuals, deference to feudal authority, and so on and so forth, the list is endless. Every major religion in the world today, and most of the minor ones as well, especially their ultra-conservative, fundamentalist (“evangelical”) offshoots, are all ancient depositories of reactionary behaviour, constantly being dusted off and revived by every single neofascist movement in the entire world.

Norberg-Hodge’s disparaging references to Western education, that replaced local cultural traditions among the Ladakh people, also sounds a bit too much like the Nigerian form of Islamic neofascism, “Boko Haram”, whose very name means “Western education is sinful”. I have nothing at all against incorporating traditional agricultural techniques into an overall program of genuine development of local economies, that bureaucratic governments very often tend to completely ignore. But that is not the same as rejecting Western education altogether, as if it did not include any positive elements whatsoever and was exclusively dedicated to maximizing short-term profit for multinational banks and global corporations. It seems to me that Norberg-Hodge, as well as the Indian bureaucrats to which she refers, are much too focused on extreme ideological division (“either/or” clivage) between 100% opposing ideas, rather than focusing on significantly reducing the more extreme kinds of exploitation and oppression, step by step, year after year, thereby reversing today’s extremely unacceptable trend of the constant worsening of the human condition.