Survival of the biggest faker

All the world’s leading institutions currently seem to be practising the noble art of negative projection, imitating the ex-commander-in-chief of the USA (recently voted out of office), by accusing everyone else of propagating fake news. As a result, every manager is getting into the act of refusing to act, at every level of every government and of every business. Every kind of official bureaucrat in every country is spending a fortune on public relations and carefully-worded communications, explaining to all the ordinary peons that every time something goes wrong anywhere at all, in a hospital, in a school, in a care home, in a supply chain, or even in the recent construction of an enormous private villa located right next to the Black Sea, everyone in the world has to understand that the people in charge were not guilty of doing anything wrong, ever, and were in fact (at least, according to them) doing everything perfectly well at all times.

Ergo, the reason why so many less-important people (neither rich nor powerful) have suffered in some way, and seem to be considerably less well-treated than the VIPs are, must be their own fault, or perhaps some other unknown person’s fault. With the ironic result that everyone in charge of anything at all seems to be in competition with every possible rival in a concerted effort to root out the (fictitious) “non-performing element” in every institution who “should never have been hired in the first place”. Every time any journalist manages to ask any official why this or that unfortunate incident came to be, it was always an isolated, once-in-a-lifetime event, never to be repeated, occurring for some unexplained reason, in an otherwise very well-oiled machine. None of the people in charge will ever accept any responsibility for anything, unless whatever we are talking about turns out to have been something extremely rare, a good thing that benefited everyone (through no fault of their own).

None of the major problems at the world level, such as the current pandemic, or ever-worsening environmental degradation, or the ever-expanding nuclear arms race, or constantly multiplying gaps in income distribution, or the worldwide persistence of racist and misogynous violence, are ever given anything approaching adequate treatment by any of the people who are presumably supposed to deal with such things. Which means that the ever-increasing number of people (not belonging to any management circles), who fall by the wayside and feel completely left out of any significant decision-making, are becoming increasingly skeptical about the validity of their own future. Particularly because they have to put up with everyone in charge reacting to everything that happens, concerning the pandemic or any other equivalent problem, in the same, totally abysmal, eternally non-committal fashion. Always trying to be on both sides of every question, every single time, without ever doing anything about whatever it is they are supposed to be combatting.

Those few individuals possessing a great deal of wealth and power, who run every country in the world, do not seem the least bit interested in providing for the needs of those very numerous, “other people” who no longer function well in the formal, largely automated and virtualized economy, based as it is these days on joint, short-term, neoliberal-neofascist, profit maximization. This accelerating alienation of the vast majority of the world’s population applies just as much to countries pretending to be run as formal democracies, as in honestly authoritarian countries pretending to “consult all their citizens indirectly”, by banging them over the head whenever they protest against rotten living conditions.

Put in another way, this situation also applies just as much to the private-capitalist form of power and wealth accumulation as to the state-capitalist form of power and wealth accumulation, both of which are always present in every single country. The corporate people specializing in private capitalism know that the government officials specializing in state capitalism are just as corrupt as they are, because the private ones have been out there, trying very hard on every occasion, and succeeding so very often, in corrupting those very same officials. So that both groups can work together even more closely than before, to do an even better job at fleecing, and otherwise mistreating, the aforementioned ordinary people.

Although all the big-shots are participating in this universal evasion of responsibility, not every important person is as guilty as every other important person. In the USA, for example, Donald Trump cannot open his mouth for two seconds without lying, and still prides himself on being much more dishonest than any other rival for leadership of that not-so-great nation. His recently elected successor, Joe Biden, tells not tell nearly as many lies as Trump did, and still does. It is completely unrealistic, however, to declare that Biden never tells any lies at all, as so many fawning liberal journalists are currently pretending. Biden, after all, has been an active, high-level politician for the past fifty years or so, which means that his level of dishonesty has always been considerably higher than that of the average citizen. When he says, for example, that he fully intends to solve every one of the “important problems” of the “great democracy” that he currently leads, he has already told two or three lies, at the very beginning of his term.

Even though Biden and his collaborators will never be able to catch up with Donald Trump and his followers, in the lucrative business of telling particularly outrageous fibs to ordinary citizens, as a leading politician the new president of the USA, and the people around him, will undoubtedly continue telling more of their own, somewhat milder brand of deliberate misinformation, with every passing day. Even “Honest Abe” Lincoln was constantly lying about what he was doing, in contradiction with his totally undeserved reputation, although he too never lied as gloriously often as did his Confederate opponents. The Trump supporter carrying the Confederate flag in the Capitol building last month was also carrying on the white-supremacist tradition of southern slavery by joining the fight for “freedom” from being responsible to the whole population, and not just to a predetermined part of it.

To help explain why the world we live in these days seems to be working in such strange ways, many of us still manage to find some of the answers from the regular media. For example, on January 10 last, there was a program that aired on Québec television (“Découverte”), which attempted to explain from a neurological point of view, where false conspiracy theories come from. According to Marc Boucher, the author of a letter to the editor published in the Montréal newspaper, “Le Devoir”, on January 21, the producers of that program reminded everyone that the “primitive” part of the brain known as the amygdale, is in fact coming up with fake explanations of reality all the time, as part of the same neurological process that also engenders every kind of religious belief. Which certainly seems to be the scientific consensus on that subject.

Boucher completed his letter by explaining, also quite rightly, that in order to fight against such false ideas, we need to rely on the more profound sections of the brain, then use those parts of each normal brain to get a decent education. The kind of education that will enable us to acquire the all-important capacity for critical thinking, in order to overcome much more primitive ways of reacting to events, as those that lie behind religious belief and false conspiracy theories. This approach corresponds quite well with my own point of view, that I have also expressed several times in my blog, notably in my November 22, 2019, post, “Sapiens: cortex versus striatum”. The striatum being what some might call the worst part of the amygdale and the better part of the brain being the cortex.

Connecting the way in which all the people in charge are denying responsibility, in varying degrees, for any of the world’s major problems, with the way in which the primitive part of the human brain is contradicting its more intelligent part, is not as hard as it may seem at first glance. What is required here is to adopt exclusively rational, scientifically grounded, universal, all-inclusive approaches to world problems, leaving nothing pertinent out of the equation, and including nothing that is not pertinent. As opposed to irrational, irresponsible, religious, identity-projecting, ultra-individualist approaches that so often prevent millions of people, at all levels of society, from coming up with intelligent solutions to the way in which those world problems apply to every particular situation that arises in every particular country.

An excellent example of the completely irrational approach is what happened last month In the USA. The pro-fascist Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol were definitely domestic terrorists, intent on killing as many of their saviour’s opponents as possible, not only such obvious adversaries as Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but also “insufficiently dedicated traitors” like Mike Pence. Following that obviously neofascist event, the culmination of everything that Donald Trump has stood for from the very beginning, everyone involved in that deliberately anti-democratic conspiracy should be charged, tried and, if found guilty, convicted of participating in domestic terrorism. The guilty ones, beginning at the top of the pyramid, should then be sentenced to very long prison terms, the kind that are reserved for that sort of particularly heinous crime. Trump himself should be jailed for life, rather than any of his designated adversaries, such as Hillary Clinton (“lock her up”), that he has been so eagerly trying to put into prison for the past six years.

The neofascist people being dealt with in this fashion should include not only those who actually entered the Capitol with murderous intent, but also the thousands of other misguided insurrectionists providing back-up, just outside the building. Not to mention the leaders of that very real conspiracy, those who invented the false conspiracy about election fraud, and then used that hoax to plan and to carry out their very real rebellion against a “Satanic” entity that never really existed. The real Satan (according to the rules of negative projection) having been Donald J. Trump himself, and all the lesser devils running the Republican Party, without whose active leadership none of those anti-democratic events would ever have taken place. The Capitol event, after all, was only the most outrageous of the anti-democratic activities of the ex-president, who should have been impeached long ago. He would never have been elected in the first place if the leaders of the Republican Party, with the help of the Supreme Court, had not already gone down the rabbit-hole of supporting authoritarian deviants like him.

None of those conspiratorial leaders, and none of the active participants in that conspiracy, should be allowed to get away with using Joe Biden’s desire for national unity, or the return to business as usual, as if the things that they did never really happened. Most certainly not ultra-idiotic, Q-Anon nut-cases like Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (recently stripped of her House committee memberships), nor any of the armed, street-gang Nazis belonging to Donald Trump’s private military machine.

Nothing should be done nowadays either to placate any of the ultra-conservative Republican politicians, who still prefer, even now, giving billions of dollars in public funds to their billionaire friends, rather than to the masses of ordinary people who have suffered the most from the pandemic. In spite of the fact that it was the neoliberal stinginess of those same Republicans, as well as that of the more mainstream politicians still running the Democratic Party, that put an end to the “American dream” of social ascension once and for all, which in turn provided most of the fuel for the rise of the Trump version of neofascism.

Another excellent example of political negative projection is the worldwide conspiracy of Islamic fascism, directed as it is not only against the “crusader states” associated with rival religions, but also against the “insufficiently dedicated traitors” to Islam who do not practice the Muslim religion in the same fake, “ultra-rigorous”, way that they do. Not to mention the “apostates” from Muslim-origin communities who do not practice it any more at all. These ultra-right-wing Muslim terrorists, like the ones who attacked well-selected targets in the USA back in “9-11” (2001), are using falsely “literal” interpretations of the Koran in order to “justify” (in their eyes) thousands of murderous assaults on their own designated enemies. Most of their now-dead victims having once lived in Muslim-majority countries. A smaller, but constantly increasing number of their victims also used to live in European countries before they died, such as those who were murdered in France in 2015, including the “Charlie Hebdo” cartoonists. The Muslim terrorists use their own, ultra-reactionary misinterpretations of false-Muslim, tribal doctrine in the same way that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators used the false “election-fraud” gambit, in order to provide ideological cover for murdering all their designated victims.

Liberal-minded people in many of the Western countries have tried over the years to make excuses for the Islamic form of neofascism by blaming Western colonialism for having caused all this mayhem, such as by violently establishing all the more recent Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine, and the even more murderous, US-led invasions of Iraq in 1991 and in 2003, as well as by the still more deadly economic boycott of that same country in between those two invasions. To be sure, aggressions of that sort have most certainly constituted a kind of antechamber for Islamic terrorism, more or less in the same way that the past forty years of neoliberal austerity, particularly virulent in the USA, have become the antechamber of the Trump movement’s own variety of neofascism.

Many people in Québec recently recalled with horror what happened at the Grande Mosquée in Sainte-Foy, on January 29, 2017, when the anti-Muslim, white supremacist Alexandre Bissonnette murdered six Muslim worshippers and attempted to murder several others. During the commemoration of that horrible event, a Canadian politician, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, was quoted in the media as saying that the federal government should censor Internet messages coming from the extreme right. Whether or not that would be a good idea, however, is not at all obvious, given the unforeseen consequences that a too zealous interpretation of such government censorship might entail for freedom of expression.

More importantly, however, what people who make such comments seem to forget is that the ultra-radicalized, Islamic extremists also belong to the political category of “the extreme right”, every bit as much as do Bissonnette and all the other ultra-radicalized, white supremacists in this world, including those who attacked the Capitol building in the USA. The expression “extreme right” ought also to include Republican Party big-wigs like Donald Trump who launched that assault, as well as the leaders of several other varieties of neofascism, all around the world. Such as those promoting other religious forms of extremism (including “Hindu nationalism”, “Buddhist nationalism” and primitive forms of Christianity), not to mention those imbedded within the ruling classes of such authoritarian, post-communist countries as China and Russia.

Bissonnette, of course, was also accused from the outset as being motivated by Islamophobia, as well as by white supremacy. The use of that word, however, has also become an issue in Québec, with the government refusing to use the word “Islamophobia” very much, while also refusing to admit that systemic racism also exists here. Presumably because both “Islamophobia” and “systemic racism” have become political footballs, the federalist movement in Québec using those terms for its own political purposes, and not at all to really defend minority victims of discrimination, such as Muslims living in Québec, as well as Black people (whether francophone or anglophone) and indigenous people.

These terms are being used to help the federalists establish the idea that the Québec independence movement, as well as the currently “autonomist” government of Québec, should be opposed by everyone else, not just because complete independence, or too much autonomy, would break up Canada (which is, according to them, “the greatest country in the world”), or at least weaken it. But also because, in their opinion, the “separatists” and the autonomists are all a gang of racists and white supremacists, anyway. Some of the people in the independence movement, opposed to the “merely autonomous” provincial government, have also fallen into that trap by claiming that indigenous people are the only ones in the long list of Québec minorities who have really been treated over the years in a racist fashion. Rather than admitting that systemic racism, as well as systemic sexism, both exist after all in every country in the world, whether or not it has attained the status of an independent nation. And also admitting that like British colonialism, French colonialism in North America also supported the slave system in a major way, and not just peripherally.

From their side of the fence, the federalists, as well as some of the people in those minority groups, regularly “forget” to include the francophone Québécois as a whole (most of whom, but not all of whom, are white people) as themselves constituting an important minority group within Canada, as well as within all of North America. That has often been discriminated against in the past, and is still being discriminated against at the present. The Québécois, and all the other “French Canadians” who have not yet disappeared into the anglophone magma, having the dubious distinction, that they share with the Irish, of having often been treated as poorly as many other colonial minorities all over the world, in spite of the predominantly white colour of their skins.

As for Islamophobia, it ought to be obvious to everyone that it is an appropriate expression to use, if one is referring to people who are afraid of all Muslims, the more moderate, non-violent ones as well as the ultra-fundamentalist, violent ones. Being afraid of Muslim terrorists, however, does not qualify as a phobia, since the word phobia means an irrational fear, whereas being afraid of extremely violent people is a rational response. Which means that the federalists in Québec, as well as many of the pro-independence and the pro-autonomy people, are all misusing the word Islamophobia, in opposing ways and for opposite reasons.

When using words and expressions, especially emotionally-charged ones like “Islamophobia” and “systemic racism”, everyone involved in political debate should stop taking short-cuts and decide to use such terms wherever they are appropriate, while refusing to use them when they are not appropriate. In other words, responsible people should indeed behave in a responsible fashion at all times, and avoid modulating their discourse to suit dishonest political objectives. Ultra-right-wing Islamic terrorists did not mainly get that way because they were pushed into it by Western imperialism, they got that way mainly for their own ideological reasons, using fundamentalism and tribalism as methods of controlling the entire Muslim community.

Once they attain that necessary control, their constantly repeated intention is to proclaim holy war on the rest of the world, forcing everyone to convert to Islam by the sword, just like they imagine that the founders of their religion did many centuries ago. Convincing “their women”, by hook or by crook, to wear sexist, cover-up clothing like the hijab, has also become a necessary, symbolic gesture designed to help advance the cause. It is similar to the way in which the Maoists in China, and in dozens of other countries, wore Mao buttons on their clothing during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (1966-1976). Islamic neofascism also resembles the Trump movement’s neofascism in the sense that violent Trump supporters did not just get that way because of the enormous job losses caused by neoliberalism, they also became violent to get their champion ensconced, by hook or by crook, as the permanent president of the world’s most powerful country (“MAGA”). With the ultimate goal of making the world safe for ultra-conservative, white, Christian-fundamentalist supremacists forever, who in their view deserve to lord it over the rest of the world.

Another fascinating way in which some of the people in power in this world misuse their positions has to do with the state of Israel’s relatively recent, official definition of anti-Semitism. Which is quite important all over the world, and not just in Israel, because the anti-Semitic form of racism has been exceptionally virulent in many different countries, and has existed for thousands of years. Among other places, it has become part and parcel of ultra-reactionary forms of Christianity, and of Islam, in every part of the world that has been influenced by those two major religions, both of which affect many more people than those directly influenced by Judaism as such. On the other hand, there are also millions of Christians, called “Christian Zionists” in the USA, who are quite happy with their country’s support for Israel, because of Biblical predictions about how the re-establishment of Israel is a necessary pre-condition for the (supposedly imminent) second coming of Jesus Christ (“Christ” being derived from the Greek word for “Messiah”).

The main problem with the Israeli definition is the part of it having to do, some might say inevitably, with the state of Israel itself. Which is usually interpreted as claiming that it is inevitably anti-Semitic even to question the establishment of modern Israel on the same territory in which ancient Israel was established, by coming up with the false idea that doing so would be “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” (see the Montréal weekly, “The Suburban”, February 3, 2021). The first group of people having a problem with this part of the definition being religious Jews who believe that Israel could only be re-established after the coming of the Messiah. There having been no such Messiah, from their point of view, not Jesus of Nazareth nor anyone else, the establishment of modern Israel is therefore entirely illegitimate.

To be sure, the Palestinian, Arab-speaking people living in the modern territory taken over by the state of Israel in 1948 also objected to that state of affairs, and received the military backing of many other Arab states during several, unsuccessful, wars against Israel. As a result of having lost each one of those wars, over the years, several Arab states let fall their opposition to modern Israel’s existence, a trend that has accelerated quite recently, having been helped along by some ultra-imperialist people serving in the recent Trump administration in the USA.

In the meantime, however, an Israeli historian, Shlomo Sand, came up with the fascinating theory (the English version of his book, “The invention of the Jewish people”, having been published in 2009) that today’s Palestinians constitute in fact a majority of the descendants of the original Jewish population of Israel, who were later converted, first into Christianity and later into Islam. A quite disturbing point of view, to say the least, so far as the state of Israel is concerned. Which was also accompanied by another historical idea, which became popular among some well-known Jewish people, such as the Badinter couple in France (quite influential during the Mitterrand administration), that many of the world’s modern Jews are descended from the nomadic Khazar people (mostly from southeastern Europe), converted en masse to Judaism during the ninth century. Other people have also pointed to many other, non-Semitic groups of converts to Judaism, such as people of Chinese and Black African origins, as well. All of those ideas certainly seem to be undermining most of the historical, and ideological, foundations upon which is built modern Israel’s territorial claim.

As I pointed out earlier, however, this particular controversy over the official Israeli definition of Israel, is by no means confined to the groups of people so far mentioned. Only last week, the Côte-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough inside the city of Montréal, decided to adopt the Israeli definition of anti-Semitism as well, ostensibly because that borough, like several other boroughs nearby, has one of the largest Jewish-minority populations in Québec. It may very well be true that most of the Jewish people in and around Montréal support the Israeli definition of anti-Semitism, although it is also true that quite a few of those communities seem to be very religious indeed.

However, it is also true that the same borough, as well as many other parts of the greater Montréal region, are also home to various other groups of non-Christian-origin people, some of whom are of Muslim origin, most likely including among them many people who may have quite negative reactions to the CDN/NDG borough’s decision. Some of those people may very well be among those Muslim “apostates” mentioned earlier, who came to this country in order to get away from religious fundamentalism altogether, but who would most probably not want to support Israeli imperialism in the Middle East, either. Others, of course, could also be practising Muslims, some of whom could certainly be died-in-the-wool anti-Semites themselves, who could not care less about where any of the world’s Jews come from, because they hate them all anyway, for their own totally irrational, ultra-Islamic reasons.

My main argument here, however, is to point out how completely inappropriate it is for any Montréal borough, or any other group of politicians anywhere else, to adopt a 100% pro-imperialist point of view on this subject, without worrying at all about any of the possible implications of so doing. It seems to me that everyone should be telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, about situations of this sort. No one should be allowed to get away with adopting the official Israeli definition of anti-Semitism without pointing out all the consequences of so doing that I have listed above. Just like in the debates about the right ways to deal with the pandemic, or with environmental degradation, or with the January 6 invasion of the US Capitol, or with the rise of Islamic terrorism, everyone should be “following the science” (Greta Thunberg’s expression) and not trying to use misinformation in order to achieve these various kinds of dishonest, opportunistic political goals.

In my opinion, following the science is most definitely the thing to do in every situation, not just in the worldwide fight against pollution, nor only when it comes to dealing with the coronavirus pandemic (one of many competing pandemics, like cancer), but all the time. To be sure, as we have all experienced during the SARS-2 pandemic, governments, corporations and all sorts of other official institutions, often get all mixed up trying to follow medical science which, like every other kind of science, is not nearly so easy to follow as it is sometimes assumed to be. Uncertainty is a necessary ingredient in every scientific inquiry, so it is not always possible to know exactly what to do in every given circumstance.

Which means that it is extremely important, as many different people have already pointed out, for every decision-making organization to be as transparent as possible, to make sure that  ideologically handicapped people, like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, do not go off half-cocked all the time, and come up with the world’s most bizarre and thoroughly nonsensical “explanations” for everything that moves. As many such people already did at various times in the past, such as with the crazy series of “UFO” sightings during the extremely dangerous Cold War.

People all over the world should also stop putting the emphasis on one cause over another cause, for example by saying that we should all concentrate on defeating the viral pandemic right how, and deal with all the other problems later. The problem with that approach being that all these extremely disturbing crises (the pandemic, the environment, the next economic depression, the nuclear arms race, etc.) are all linked to each other all the time, each one of them (most certainly the pandemic) making each other one much worse than it otherwise would be, all by itself. We all have to be rational and progressive, trying to get rid of every one of the world’s most reactionary ideologies in one fell swoop: neoliberalism, neofascism, extractivism, imperialism, militarism, racism, sexism, social-class elitism (sometimes called “class-ism”), religious fundamentalism and ethnic exclusivism. A program that is obviously extremely difficult to accomplish, as well as being absolutely necessary, since all these problems are, constantly and increasingly, inter-connected. They are all merely different kinds of irrational behaviour, all of them proceeding, unfortunately, from the same, primitive parts of every human brain.

 Free to flout the rules

Originally, this blogpost was supposed to have been focused on the coronavirus pandemic and the way in which people’s non-compliance with all the anti-virus rules, not only ordinary, individualist rebels but also the much more well-connected, reactionary folks egging them on, has led to a truly disastrous situation worldwide. But that was before Donald Trump told his closest, neofascist supporters to go to the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and to make sure that the Democrats would not get away with “stealing” his re-election away from him. Everyone in the world who follows the news knows what happened next, their murderous, para-military storming of the US Congress being almost totally unprecedented in that country’s history. The only possible exception being the successful, British military invasion of the same Congress two centuries ago (1812).

The way in which I had planned my original article, I was going to start by explaining some of the many different ways that the people deliberately flouting all the rules were helping the virus kill off a much larger number of victims than it originally would have, if everyone had decided to support the worldwide fight for public health instead. Then I was going to follow that up by pointing out how similar the pandemic situation is to the way in which many of the same kind of people have also been flouting all the rules in several other, equally important fights, such as stopping the ever-increasing pollution of the natural environment, or reversing the ultra-elitist trend toward ever-greater social divisions between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor.

But as soon as I started focusing on the huge escalation of the US empire’s current political crisis, represented by the barbarian militia attack on the Capitol building, it became obvious to me that in spite of how extremely dangerous US politics has become, it is nevertheless yet another example of the same overall phenomenon: ultra-right-wing populists deliberately flouting all the rules in that situation as well. To be sure, not everyone who voted for Trump in November was an ultra-right-wing populist, nor do all the people who refuse to obey the anti-virus rules necessarily belong to that extreme political category. In both cases, however, millions of ordinary people (neither rich nor powerful) are being led to support different kinds of anti-social violence, blindly following the deliberately misleading guidance of people who are extremely rich and powerful, and who use that power to exert an ultra-conservative influence on everyone else.

What is so special about the most recent military invasion of the Congress is that the USA seems to be going through a period of history that is strangely similar to that which Germany went through during the late 1920s and the early 1930s. It is just so incredibly false-ingenue the way in which veteran political analysts in the USA, such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper, pretend to be so entirely surprised by the never-ending list of evil machinations that Donald Trump and his minions have been getting away with so very easily, ever since he first started his presidential campaign six years ago.

It seems to me that everyone in the establishment media should have admitted by now that the support that so many of the USA’s most important patricians (such as the ultra-rich, ultra-conservative, Koch brothers), have given over the years to enable Trump’s rise to power, and his attempts to “make America great again”, bear an uncanny ressemblance to the way in which just as many German patricians, such as Hindenburg and Von Papen, tried to manoeuvre a street-fighting leader of the Nazi Party, into helping them get rid of the German communist and social-democratic movements, almost a century ago.

People as well-informed and as well-connected as Cooper, belonging to the extremely rich Vanderbilt family, ought to have recalled finding out just how many US patricians during that same period, such as George W Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, were so very inclined to support the same kind of pro-fascist attempt to preserve the worst kind of unbridled, private capitalism. In the same, almost delirious, way that the German patricians also tried to do back then. Even Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, another well-known patrician, seemed to be supporting an ultra-conservative point of view during the first version of his “New Deal” (1933-1935), that only became a pro-labour second version (1935-1939), after the successful uprisings of pro-communist movements in San Francisco, Milwaukee and Toledo (Ohio) in 1934.

History never repeats itself, at least not in any of the particular details, but that does not mean that we cannot learn from the mistakes of the past. This is not the first time in history that fascist movements have started popping up all over the world, which happened back then not only in Italy and in Germany, but also in dozens of other places, including several other Western countries (Portugal, Spain, etc.), as well as several countries in East Asia (including militarist Japan and the “Blue-shirt” youth section of the Nationalist regime in China), many of the Muslim majority countries, and several Latin American countries (Brazil, Argentina, etc.). In fact, there were important fascist and pro-fascist movements in almost every country in the world back then, even if some of them never became strong enough to take power locally. Religious fundamentalism was also an important component of every popular fascist movement that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century.

Nowadays, neofascist governments have also taken power in many different places, including a few still officially communist countries, following Chairman Mao’s own prediction that any “revolutionary communist” leadership that stops supporting communism as a goal, but still remains in power, inevitably becomes a fascist dictatorship instead. Fascism has also become quite popular, once again, in dozens of countries currently controlled by governments relying for their popularity on ultra-right-wing movements promoting religious fundamentalism, coming from several competing religions. The parallels between what is happening in those countries and the Trump movement in the USA ought to be obvious, even though each country involved is obviously quite different, in many other ways, from all the others.

The focus on religious fundamentalism, for example, does not just apply to Trump’s evangelical Christian supporters, but also to the Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist varieties of religious fanaticism currently dominating dozens of other countries. Not to mention ultra-orthodox Judaism in Israel, as well as the Chinese “communist” revival of feudal Confucianism. An eerie  parallel can also be made between the evangelical Christianity of the Trump movement, providing the necessary ideological grounding for the 2021 domestic terrorist assault on the Capitol, and the Muslim fanaticism that provided the ideological underpinnings for Al-Qaeda’s foreign terrorist attack on American targets back in September 2001.

People in the Trump movement may imagine that they are all a bunch of freedom fighters trying to save their country from the onset of bureaucratic socialism, or in the more extreme delirium of the Q-Anon faction within the Trump nation, from the ridiculous liberal-pedophile conspiracy that they themselves invented. But in fact all the pro-Trump fanatics are not that different from the Muslim extremists who also imagine that they are somehow trying to free their own “true” religion from the Western imperialism of the “crusader states”, and their local lackeys in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Competing varieties of neofascist ideology all over the world are constantly coming up with clever slogans about how they are sincerely trying to free their people from some kind of powerful opposing force, while simultaneously imposing their own ultra-right-wing dictatorship on everyone around them instead.

Somewhere around 50 million US citizens constitute Trump’s base-support group, people who have been thoroughly radicalized by that totally barbarian Svengali. Just like the even larger number of ultra-right-wing extremists, all over the Muslim world, radicalized by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic state, the Trump nation will go on trying to take power by any means available, even when their original champion suffers a few temporary setbacks. The USA under Biden and Harris will not just be able to erase the past four years of history and go back to the way it was when Obama was still in power. Trump’s ultra-reactionary, neofascist bulldozing enormously intensified, to an unprecedented degree, the neoliberal (anti-social) laissez-faire of the preceding thirty-six years, for a total of forty years of constantly accelerating reaction, during which most of the new wealth created in that country was gobbled up by a very small number of ultra-rich people.

During that entire period, establishment Democrats like the Clintons, Obama, Biden and Harris, participated in reinforcing the total abandonment of the US industrial working-class, not to the same extent as the Republican patricians did, but almost as much. To be sure, if they had refused to help rich companies from avoiding government regulation, they would have been cut off from the millions of donation dollars that they (and the Republicans) rely upon to finance their elitist “political action committees”. During that time, most of the well-paying industrial jobs in the USA were shipped off to low-wage havens like the “People’s Republic” of China, and many other such places, especially during the Reagan years of the 1980s. An atavistic move that greatly contributed to the enormous, subsequent increase in the gap between the social classes in the USA, and many other Western countries, which have long pretended to represent beacons of democracy for social climbers relying on such mythical paths to paradise as “the American dream”.

From 1981 to 2021, the joint Republican/Democratic establishment put into place the initial, semi-barbarian onslaught on US society, that wiped out all the limited gains of the working-class during the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975 (a period known as democratic capitalism in West Germany), and led to the completely barbarian machinations of Trump’s (Proud Boy/QAnon/Boogaloo/Oath-keepers) neofascist hooligans. In other words, neoliberalism was the necessary antechamber of neofascism, not only in the USA but also in most of the other countries (such as China) belonging to our excessively elitist world.

Neoliberalism and neofascism together are still being promoted all over the world even now, Including in Québec where the provincial government is still furiously mistreating most of those who work on the frontline in its health system, still imposing compulsory overtime, still refusing to allow them to go on vacation from time to time, and still moving them around (against the rules) from one viral hot-spot to another. At the same time also, the enormous gap between the social classes is constantly being further enlarged by the fact that most scientific research is still being conducted by private corporations, who are only interested in the kinds of applied-science, industrial innovation that lead to more automation, and even fewer, well-paying industrial jobs. All of which has prompted some observers to fear that the whole world may soon be engulfed, once again, in a planetary economic depression.

Nevertheless, there could be something unexpectedly positive about the microscopic monster that causes the pandemic, an idea that I will introduce shortly. But certainly, on the face of it, it is extremely upsetting the way in which a very large number of people, in every country, have consciously decided to exercise their “basic freedoms” by flouting all the rules. Which is really a very stupid thing to do, since by acting in this way, they are helping the coronavirus get around all the obstacles that much more responsible people are using to fight against the pandemic, such as by putting into place confinement strategies and vaccines to contain its spread. The “freedom to flout” has therefore become the main ally that the virus possesses in its ultra-primitive desire to eventually infect every human being on this planet, without any regard for “race”, religion, sex or social status, until everyone has finally succumbed.

True, the world’s poorest people have suffered much more from the virus than have the world’s richest people, just like they suffer much more from every other kind of major social problem that exists. But that is because the people who flout the rules the most egregiously, not just the public-health, anti-virus rules but also all the rules concerning the environmental and social aspects of “good governance”, are precisely the world’s richest and most powerful people. It is not the virus that makes such obvious class distinctions, but human societies that set up those  disgusting divisions, that do more to help spread the virus, and every other kind of misfortune, than any other source. At the same time, while always pretending to do exactly the opposite, most of the rich and the powerful people in this world could not really care less about adopting any truly effective defence of the general population against any of those ills, since most of those being helped are obviously much less fortunate than rich people are, and are therefore considered to be totally undeserving of that help, from an ultra-elitist point of view. The virus itself, however, has a truly “socialist” attitude toward human diseases, targeting everyone on this planet who has not yet caught the disease. Not just once but many times over.

So the only thing paradoxically positive about this extremely dangerous form of human irresponsibility is the way in which it definitively underlines for all of us, the current victims as well as the potential victims, just what is wrong with adopting a devil-may-care attitude toward most of those suffering from every important social crisis. Ironically, inside the country with the largest number of pandemic cases, and of deaths, in the world, the Trump movement has graciously provided all of us, not just the citizens of the USA, with the greatest learning opportunity ever offered. Which is, to prove to everyone in the world, once and for all, that attacking the reality of collective human existence, the “horrible beast” that Trump supporters call socialism, is the best way to ruin everything, for everyone, by promoting ultra-individualist egoism, instead. A fact that ultra-right-wing populists in Canada seem to have realized by engaging in their current Internet chatter, focused on attacking all the anti-virus vaccine distribution centres that are being set up, in a potentially upcoming attempt to prevent everyone from getting protected against the virus.

In this context, it is quite fascinating to realize how many different countries, theoretically sporting “entirely different” and opposing ideologies, have nevertheless come up with the same strange combination of neoliberalism and neofascism, all at the same time. The most important examples of which are precisely the world’s two most powerful countries, the USA and China. Which is why I have to so strongly disagree with Postmedia columnist Tasha Kheiriddin, who wrote an article, “American conservatives must disavow Trumpism”, that was published in the Montréal Gazette one week after the horrendous invasion of the Capitol in Washington, DC. She started her article by quoting Ronald Reagan’s speech that was delivered on the eve of the 1980 presidential campaign, about how “America” was supposed to have represented an exceptional “ideal of freedom and equality”, run from “the city on the Potomac”, known the world over as a “shining city on a hill.”

According to her, that wonderful “tradition of American conservatism”, an idea that Reagan borrowed from Puritan settler John Winthrop, was reinforced by the anti-racist legacy of the Civil War, that “still remains” alive in the USA today. A tradition that became particularly glorious, in her view, during the Cold War (1945-1991), when America “stood for freedom against its greatest threat, the communist regime of the USSR”. However, claiming to base her account on historian Isabel Wilkerson’s “brilliant work, ‘Caste: the origins of our discontents’”, Kheiriddin claims that all of this American goodness came apart recently because “racist sentiments that were never extinguished” have flared up in the USA, mostly because “manufacturing jobs have disappeared”. Leading to the triumph of Trumpism and the siege of the Capitol. She concludes her column by asserting that, as a result, American conservatives have to redeem themselves from their recent fall from grace, “rediscover their roots and rebuild in the image of the shining city”, not only for their own benefit, but for the benefit of “conservatives the world over.”

There are so many things wrong with her analysis of those events that it is hard to know where to begin. Suffice it to say that I completely disagree with her contention that the USA ever constituted any kind of shining beacon for freedom. Certainly not during the Cold War, when that country allied itself with over a hundred ultra-right-wing dictatorships, all over the world, in order to physically eliminate tens of millions of ordinary people, for having supported pro-communist or anti-imperialist regimes. It seems to me that the whole point of the historical reference to the USA being based on a racist caste system, from the very beginning, is to thoroughly discredit the kind of American exceptionalism embodied in the entirely mythical idea of a “shining city on a hill.” Just like the USSR and the “People’s Republic” of China, which also eliminated tens of millions of ordinary opponents of their own misbegotten system, the USA and its allies never came within a billion light-years of realizing any of their radically overblown historical pretensions.

More to the point, after having denounced “Red” China for several decades, the USA turned right around and handed most of its manufacturing jobs over to China’s tender mercies, as well as to a dozen other low-wage countries, especially during the years when Ronald Reagan was in power (1981-1989). Reagan became the USA’s number-one champion of neoliberalism, helping already super-rich American industrialists, and similar patricians running the Federal Reserve’s “war on inflation”, become much richer than they ever were before. Thereby inaugurating the forty years of ultra-conservative, anti-labour reaction that culminated in the constantly accelerating neofascism of the entire Trump presidency. Which means that everything that Kheiriddin wrote about all those things is completely off-base.

That said, however, I also disagree with an entirely different columnist, Robin Philpot, who wrote an article, “Relations avec la Chine: le Québec n’est pas le Canada”, published on December 18 (2020), in a left-wing Montréal newspaper, “L’Aut’journal”, that also favours Québec independence. In that text, Philpot started out by saying that the federal government of Canada has abandoned its own sovereignty in its relations with China, ever since the 2018 arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, accused by the USA of fraud because of that company’s allegedly friendly relations with Iran. He then points out that recent opinion polls have determined that the Québec population is significantly less inclined to adopt anti-China points of view than is the population of English Canada, in spite of all the recent anti-China rhetoric coming from the Canadian government. In his opinion, therefore, it would be wrong for the Québécois to support the participation of Taiwan in the trans-Pacific free-trade deal in which Canada is involved, since that would be seen by China, quite rightly according to Philpot, as a violation of its own national sovereignty.

I think that Philpot’s analysis of recent Canada-China relations, while not nearly as far off-base as Kheiriddin’s point of view, is much too complacent toward China. Philpot, like many other leftists, seems to be treating Chinese imperialism in a more indulgent manner than he treats US imperialism, presumably because the US empire still dominates a lot more countries than the Chinese empire does. Nevertheless, it seems to me that people supporting Québec independence from Canada put themselves in a strange position when they refuse to support Taiwan’s independence from China. In spite of all the obvious differences between Taiwan’s historical status and Québec’s historical status, I get the impression that Philpot does not like Taiwan all that much because of its close ties to the US empire, and not because it used to be a Chinese province during a significant portion of its history.

The same kind of complacency toward China was also expressed in another recent article, “À propos de l’espionnage chinois”, also published in “L’Aut’journal” (January 15, 2021), downplaying the importance of Chinese spying on Western companies (such as Canada’s own Northern Telecom). According to its author, Paul Lavoie, China’s recent technological advances have much more to do with the superiority of its own educational system than with any unusual Chinese emphasis on spying. Even if that is true, however, I do not see why anyone in Québec would want to defend China’s imperial ambitions any more than anyone in Québec would want to defend the USA’s imperial ambitions.

A related controversy going on in Canada these days, as well as in many other countries, concerns China’s domination of its Sinkiang province, the historical homeland of the Uyghur national minority. China has been accused, mostly by the Western countries, of committing cultural genocide on the Uyghur population, notably by forcing millions of them to work in slave-labour camps, producing a large proportion of the world’s cotton products. China’s official reply to those accusations focuses on how those labour camps have nothing to do with slavery, and are merely Chinese attempts to fight against the popularity of Islamic extremism within that minority group. The Uyghur are also a Turkish-speaking people, currently being courted by the leaders of the Turkish empire, promoting an alliance of all the Turkish-speaking peoples in Asia, under its own “benign” leadership. In my opinion, however, China’s role in Sinkiang, as well as in Tibet, not to mention its attitude toward Taiwan, are much more imperial than they are benign. There is also nothing benign about Turkish imperialism either, nor about US imperialism, any more than there is anything benign about the rising influence of Islamic extremism inside any of the Muslim-majority countries in this world.

I would also like to take issue with another, more mainstream, supporter of Québec independence, former Parti Québécois finance minister Nicolas Marceau, who published another recent article, this one entitled “Le surplace canadien”, in the Montréal newspaper, “Le Devoir”, on January 9, 2021. In that article, Marceau began by supporting globalization, which according to him has provided many Québec companies with the foreign markets on which they depend for their survival. But then he went on to denounce a whole series of thoroughly negative consequences of that same globalization, such as rising social inequality, increasing cultural uniformity, insufficient taxation of capital inputs, fiscal evasion, inadequate environmental protection, loss of state sovereignty, insufficient government regulation of the huge tech corporations and the related crisis in the print media. He concluded his article by asserting that Québec independence is every bit as necessary as it ever was in the past, because the Canadian federal government seems to be incapable of doing anything about all those unfortunate consequences of globalization.

It seems to me that Marceau was describing neoliberalism in his article, particularly its very important free-trade component, rather than globalization as such, which does not necessarily, or even exclusively, have to depend on laissez-faire capitalism for its very existence. In theory at least, the world could set up an alternative form of globalization to the currently existing kind, which would still be based on large-scale trade and cooperation between competing countries, without having to put up with the predatory excesses of the current system, in which “shareholders’ rights” constantly take precedence over every other consideration. Instead, independent, anti-imperialist countries the world over (a larger number of them than those that currently exist) could compete among themselves at providing more services for their ordinary citizens than the other nations provide, rather than compete among themselves, as they do now, in order to provide fewer such services than their neighbours do.

Personally, I do not see how an independent Québec, run by people doing all the things that Marceau wants them to do, could possibly succeed if all the other countries in the world continue to operate under the prevailing system, based as it is on the philosophy of “the devil take the hindmost”. Marceau seems to belong to the wing of the Québec independence movement that supported former PQ premier Bernard Landry’s wholehearted enthusiasm for the 1988-1989 Canada/US free trade deal, as a way of weakening the Canadian empire by deliberately boosting the American empire instead. In that sense, Marceau’s article reads a bit like a more conservative version of Philpot’s article, both of which seem to favour one kind of foreign imperialism over another kind. It seems to me much more appropriate for anyone supporting Québec independence to avoid taking sides between rival imperial strategies.

We are all living nowadays in an increasingly complicated world, in which it is extremely difficult for anyone trying to do the right thing, or even advocating the right thing, when there are so many “right things” competing with each other for our attention. For example, many well-meaning people, such as Daniel R. Rousse of the Québec-based group of experts known as “Des Universitaires”, are currently advocating negative economic growth as a method of protecting what is left of the natural environment, by reducing commercial, industrial and agricultural pollution at the source (“Les changements climatiques: bénédiction ou malédiction?”, in “L’Aut’journal”, 11 décembre 2020).

Unfortunately, in today’s world, the people suffering the most from pollution, and from climate change, tend to be the world’s poorest, most downtrodden people, who as I pointed out earlier, are the same people also suffering the most from every other kind of crisis situation that currently afflicts our world. Although I have nothing against advocating negative economic growth, as such, I think that anyone supporting that goal, as a method of dealing with ever-expanding pollution at the source, ought to make sure, in every such article, to include at least a few paragraphs about how the goal here is not to make life a lot worse for the enormous numbers of people suffering from extreme poverty, but to channel negative growth toward eliminating all the ugly excesses of extremely rich people instead. Nothing creates support for ultra-right-wing populism, neofascism, and widespread rule-flouting as well, more quickly than refusing to provide downtrodden people with any way of escaping from the rotten conditions forced upon them by the over-fortunate.

Lastly, I would also like to take this opportunity to lambast one other miscellaneous group of rule-flouters, namely those who try to have their cake and eat it too, by constantly coming up with “fake news” versions of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, “the emperor’s new clothes”. One of the examples of which has to do with the pretensions of those people in Québec who try to condemn the provincial government for attacking human rights, because of its secularist law prohibiting wearers of religious garb, such as the hijab, the cross or the skull-cap, from becoming government employees “in positions of authority”. Those who insist on wearing those things anyway seem to feel that anyone who wants to do that should be allowed to do so entirely on individualist grounds, thereby promoting freedom for anti-social behaviour. In the case of the hijab, the women wearing it act as if it did not in fact represent an attack on women’s liberation, nor constitute a symbol of Islamic extremism. All the ostentatious wearers of such garb seem to be much more interested in using those tribal symbols as a form of in-your-face, “wearing of the colours” propaganda, aimed at deliberately provoking negative reactions from unbelievers. In other words constituting an admittedly much milder version of the Trump supporters’ tribal-symbolic attack on the US Capitol.

What the religious-symbol wearers are really doing, however, is trying to force non-believers into refusing to see what they do in fact see, just like in the Andersen tale. In other words, everyone in society is supposed to adopt their point of view about what they are doing, and, like them, refuse to admit that what is happening is really happening, after all. A situation that, curiously enough, does not arise whenever some ultra-right-wing fanatic paints a swastika on a synagogue. In the case of the swastika symbol, everyone seems to be quite rightly denouncing that kind of neofascist activity honestly, and no one is ever called upon to deny the evidence coming before everyone’s eyes.

Another example of a fake-news attitude, similar to that often exhibited by the wearers of religious garb, comes from some of the non-binary people, who have made up their minds to eschew any of the biological differences between men and women. A few such people, born with male bodies in this case, have come to the conclusion that they are in fact women, at least from their own personal points of view. So they dress up as women, grow long hair and, in some cases, take hormones in order to grow female breasts. Most of the time, this kind of behaviour is tolerated by others, except in a tiny number of exceptional cases. In one such situation, certain, non-binary individuals insist on getting their genital regions shaved by women who normally practice on other women (born biologically female). In those cases, the non-binary person gets extremely upset if that individual is not being treated just like any other female in the room.

Or, in other similar cases, an individual athlete, born male, will insist on keeping prizes won in competition with other athletes, born female, even if that individual’s born-male muscles may have had something to do with that person’s superior performance. In both these kinds of cases, genital shaving and sports competitions, the born-male person once again insists, just like the religious-symbol person above, that every other person alive must see the world in exactly the same way that that individual sees the world. Everyone is supposed to copy each one of those excessively individualistic kinds of people, by refusing to admit that biology is any way part of universal reality.

In all these cases of extreme rule-flouting, hyper individualists try to oblige people who do not share their particular fantasy about the world, to share it anyway, in spite of what they themselves actually experience. Just like in the case of Trump supporters, these hyper individuals denounce as “fake news” everything that every non-believer in their cause will do, whereas in the real world it is the Trump supporter, or the hyper individualist, who is in fact the real bearer of fake news, using a kind of “negative projection” of that person’s psychological characteristics. In other words, all these different kinds of rule-flouters, the Trump supporters inside the Capitol, people all over the world who insist on spreading around the coronavirus as much as they want, the different kinds of people imposing neoliberal and neofascist “solutions” to the world’s most important problems, those who prefer one rotten empire over another one, and the hyper individuals within the religious-symbol and the non-binary movements, all have at least one thing in common. They all want to make sure that everyone in this world be obliged to deform reality, or to deny it altogether, in exactly the same way as they do.

 Complacency is a form of denial

Far too many naive, liberal-minded people these days are reacting to what seems to them to be very good news, such as the fact that Joe Biden has become the president-elect of the USA rather than Donald Trump, or the fact that a couple of huge pharmaceutical corporations have apparently discovered vaccines that could, in the event that everything works out exactly as announced by those companies, help save at least some people from the current pandemic. Starting, of course, with the world’s richest countries, and continuing much later (if at all) with a few of the world’s poorer countries. As a result, these easily satisfied optimists have decided to stop feeling morose and to start feeling good again, as if a few tidbits of what may or may not be good news (depending on where one lives), somehow prove that everything is okay again in (their part of) the world.

According to them, we are all on our way now toward a wonderful recovery not only from self-centred, isolationist politics and exponential increases in dishonesty, but also from high mortality rates (depending on social class) and an unfortunate economic depression caused by horrendous public health confinement strategies. So now they feel that “we” can all get back to what they consider to be “normal” democracy, “always beneficial” international cooperation, increasing longevity “for everyone”, and uninterrupted economic growth, just like “we” used to enjoy before those unfortunate, but temporary, setbacks got in the way of “our” (their) long-term happiness.

It ought to be obvious, however, that a return to liberal normalcy in the US presidential elections, albeit by a very slender margin, is nothing to get excited about all by itself. In the first place, the USA no longer possesses nearly the kind of influence it used to enjoy in this world, which means that the weakening of only one of the world’s leading autocrats, even one as disgusting as Trump (or his ultra-ambitious deputy, Mike Pompeo), is not going to have a major impact on all the other authoritarian regimes in this world.

It is also absurd for liberal-minded people outside the US to claim that very few countries are in as rotten a situation as the USA is in today, given the fact that most of the countries in this world are run by long-established dictators, who do not give a fig about most of the people living under their control. A few of those dictators run rival empires, very poorly most of the time. But most of the world’s weaker countries, exploited by foreign firms coming from industrialized countries hunting for raw materials, are governed by even more miserable, tin-pot dictators who are only capable of thoroughly mistreating their own long-suffering populations to death, with no influence at all beyond their own borders.

In the current circumstances, however, even if Biden (and the rest of his country) manages to survive the scorched-earth policy of the Republican reactionaries (and its ultra-right-wing friends in countries like Israel) until the January inauguration, none of the president-elect’s recent declarations, about abandoning his “former” neoliberal elitism in favour of a more inclusive attitude toward the majority of the US population, are very convincing. The Democratic Party chose Joe Biden as their candidate, not Bernie Sanders nor any of the other,  left-liberal personalities in that organization, in order to make it possible for the establishment majority in that party to win the election over an extremely popular, ultra-right-wing opponent. 

But the juvenile delinquents in the Trump camp still retain the capacity to block every move that a mainstream politician like Biden could possibly make, toward using the US government to get the pandemic under control before it kills everyone off, or to re-boot the national economy in a slightly more egalitarian way. In spite of Trump’s ridiculous claims about  the Democratic Party being dominated by non-existent “ultra-leftists”, none of the mildly socialist minority faction inside that party will ever do anything to jeopardize Biden’s extremely centrist mandate.

The ultra-right-wing, laissez-faire numbskulls in the Republican Party, in their ideological ignorance, will still continue to deliberately reject any government action on behalf of ordinary (non-rich) people as a form of (heaven forbid) socialism. This goes not only for the half neoliberal, half neofascist, Republican side of the Senate and the House of Representatives, but also for the very similar, ultra-conservative majority in the Supreme Court, which quite recently ruled in favour of ultra-orthodox religious fanatics opposed to the anti-pandemic interventions of the state of New York.

For its part, the US constitution has once again been interpreted in a very political way, just like all the other constitutions in all the other countries in the world, which are constantly being rebooted according to the political considerations of every succeeding period of history. In the USA, the emoluments section of the very same constitution, condemning foreign gifts for acting presidents, has been ignored ever since that illustrious document was originally ratified, with the current president recently becoming the worst offender ever since he took office (with foreign help). People all over the world, ordinary politicians as well as eminent jurists, only worry about what is written down in constitutions when they feel like it.

As a former Québec finance minister, Nicolas Marceau, pointed out recently in a Montréal newspaper, the social mobility of “the American dream” is much more evident in countries that more often use government action in a positive way, as in Québec for example (“La mobilité sociale, un rève américain ou québécois?”, “Social mobility, an American dream or a Québécois one?”, in “Le Devoir”, November 14, 2020). The particularly enormous income gap in the USA, caused by forty years of exceptionally intense neoliberalism, resulted in making a very large portion of the US population feel completely left out of society.

Biden himself participated in this kind of anti-democratic ultra-capitalism by defending the super-huge US credit-card companies against government attempts at controlling their excesses, while his running mate Kamala Harris also protected many of the major banks from popular reaction while acting as attorney general in California during the 2008 subprime crisis. Liberal-minded people outside the USA, who identify with mainstream Democrats like the Clintons and Obama, consider Biden and Harris to be “leftists”, which is not true at all. In the real world, they are merely traditional right-wing politicians, who only seem to be leftists, or centrists, in comparison with all those extremely backward neo-nazis in the Trump camp.

The enormous excesses of the entire neoliberal movement, controlling the US government since Ronald Reagan took power forty years ago, provoked an ultra-right-wing populist reaction among the totally neglected, industrial working-class, similar to the one that also took place in dozens of other countries, such as Russia. In the USA, this took the form of ultra-individualist hero-worshiping of anti-social billionaire Donald Trump, whose total rejection of government action to help ordinary people in distress simply made the plight of those left behind by private-sector deindustrialization even worse than it already was in the beginning.

Trump supporters’ neofascist, self-centred reaction against the “deep state”, however, only benefited the big-business executives who caused the problem in the first place, when they started back in the 1980s shipping millions of industrial jobs overseas, especially to equally neoliberal/neofascist China. Donald Trump, supported by a huge religious lobby promoting the idiotic, nineteenth-century, Pentecostal slogan of “God helps those who help themselves”, succeeded in turning a large section of recently impoverished workers, from a potential threat to the future of capitalist society, into a political weapon to be used against the rest of the USA’s population.

This huge portion of the mostly white working-class gobbled up Trump’s ultra-conservative attack on all the minority “races”, as well as denigrating such century-old, economically and socially positive practises as letting women leave “their traditional place” in the home and continue to enter the workforce alongside the men, even more than before. All of which is just an updated version of John Steinbeck’s observation back in the 1930s, about the majority of US workers seeing themselves not as exploited proletarians, like in all the other countries in the world, but as really just (racist and sexist) fake “millionaires” suffering from a “temporary cash-flow problem”.

A thoroughly reactionary attitude that was made even worse in the USA (as in many other  Western countries) by the presence of millions of immigrants fleeing from totalitarian, falsely “communist” countries, starting with the “White Russians” after the 1917 Soviet revolution, continuing on with the East Europeans of the 1950s, all the way down to the anti-Castro Cubans and the anti-Chavez Venezuelans of more recent decades. Quite a few of those immigrants having been directly involved in neo-nazi movements in their home countries, before going on to massively support successive, ultra-conservative, Republican politicians in the USA, culminating in the worst of them all, Donald Trump and his gang of ultra-right-wing sycophants.

French economist Thomas Picketty, the author of two important books on the extremely egotistical functioning of the world’s most important financiers during the entire history of capitalism, has also been highly critical of the way that neoliberal governments and central banks have continued to deliberately increase the already enormous income gap between the social classes, rather than taking positive action to reduce that gap instead. They have not only continued to promote artificial inflation through so-called “quantitative easing” (buying up hundreds of billions of dollars worth of private financial debt), but also by offering the lowest possible interest rates so as to “incentivize” the world’s richest owners of wealth into investing huge amounts of capital in order to restore economic growth after the pandemic. The only result of which is to transfer all that debt onto the backs of those ordinary (i.e., not rich) people, who do not have the same capacity as the millionaire/billionaire owners and managers of the huge banks and corporations possess, to move their assets into one, or several, of the world’s most important fiscal paradises.

Picketty thinks that those forms of “hyper-capitalism” should be replaced by what he calls “participatory socialism”, a genuinely inclusive strategy that he believes would be completely different from the state capitalism of the totalitarian “communist” regimes that used to exist during the Cold War. According to him, the horrible results of the 2008 financial crisis and the current pandemic crisis should have pushed the world’s governments into adopting policies that would be good for everyone, not just for the tiny elite of ultra-rich people. He predicts that an ongoing succession of crises over the next several decades (more major recessions, new pandemics and a constantly intensified ecological crisis) will eventually result in such a welcome change of attitude. Nothing currently happening, however, seems to me to justify even that kind of extremely limited optimism. The zero-sum attitudes of the private and the state capitalists alike ensure that, from their mountaintop point of view, none of the “inferior” social classes should be allowed to possess much of anything, lest that take away from the “superior” social classes necessary possession of almost everything.

The prolific Québec non-fiction author, Alain Deneault, is also convinced that nothing good seems to be coming out of humanity’s reaction to the coronavirus tragedy. In a recent article (“Retour à l’anormal”) (“The return to abnormal behaviour”, “Le Devoir”, November 17, 2020), Deneault was quite adamant in insisting on the fact that the pandemic has not changed anything for the better. Everything that was being done wrongly over the past several decades, such as neoliberal concentration on exclusively short-term profit, the ongoing destruction of the natural environment in a thousand different ways, the popular gobbling up of hyper-transformed, obesity-producing, fast foods, and all the other aberrations, has not been repudiated in any way since the pandemic began. Quite the contrary.

Deneault got a taste of what it means to criticize totalitarian capitalism when, along with co-authors Delphine Abadie and William Sacher, he was successfully condemned in court by a Canadian mining company (Barrick Gold) back in 2008, and forced to destroy all the copies of his first book, as well as not being allowed to print any more of them, forever. Simply because that book, “Noir Canada: pillage, criminalité et corruption en Afrique”, denounced Canadian mining practises in Africa, in no uncertain terms, accompanied by all the documentation necessary to prove their case. According to Deneault’s most recent article, the world as it really is, with all its underlying ugliness, does not change nearly as quickly as do the false pretensions of many of the world’s leading liberal politicians. Who, I might add, claim to be quite progressive, while continuing to support environment-destroying, raw-material extractivism, which is particularly concentrated in all the world’s poorest countries.

He includes in his list of neoliberal aberrations the rise of the worldwide tourism industry, whose growth has been at least temporarily halted by the pandemic. According to him, middle-class tourism, just like all the other mass-based aberrations, should be allowed to disappear forever, even if that means that, once again, only rich people will be able to regularly visit foreign countries in the future, as was already the case prior to the 1980s. He hates the fact that all those manifestations of ultra-capitalism are in fact slated to re-appear, because the mass media are concentrating all their attention these days on how absolutely everything is supposed to be getting better soon, once the pandemic disappears (even in poor countries!), and the world situation gets back to what they call “normal”.

In my opinion, another major observation we should also be making in this context is the fact that this incredibly destructive pandemic started out in China, after all, and nowhere else. Even though it would be a mistake to believe in any of the fake news coming out of the ultra-right-wing rumour mills about the coronavirus being concocted in an official Chinese laboratory, the pandemic began, nevertheless, in one of that country’s quite numerous, open-air “labs”, namely the wild-animal meat markets. While it is true that many other East Asian countries also possess such markets, it is also true that China all by itself accounts for something like 80% of the entire East Asian population, as well as a similar proportion of those ultra-polluted markets. Which seem to have existed for centuries, and may very well have contributed to dozens of other Chinese-origin epidemics in the past, such as the Eurasian “Black Death” of the fourteenth century.

It was also the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government that decided that the pandemic officially began in December of 2019 (hence the acronym, COVID-19), rather than several months earlier as reported not only in China but also in Italy, to cover for the fact that it was the same PRC government that stalled around for several weeks before letting the rest of the world in on its big secret. Which gave Chinese travellers all the time they needed to spread the disease all over the world, most of them without even realizing what they were doing. According to all the most important liberal media, the Xi Jinping faction inside what those people still choose to call the Chinese Communist Party could have eliminated all the wild-animal meat-markets, like some of the leaders of the opposing factions wanted to do, but decided instead to keep them operating for national-populist reasons.

This is also the same PRC government that, once it finally decided to strongly react against the extremely dangerous nature of the disease in that imperial nation, pulled out all the stops and succeeded in imposing the kind of multi-million-people, total confinement strategy, the like of which most countries can only dream about. With the result that, at least according to the official government statistics, the pandemic killed only a very small group of people in China, in comparison with the much, much higher numbers of people who have died in many other parts of the world. And who will go on dying, in even greater numbers, unless by some miracle, the entire world population ends up getting properly vaccinated.

Several other East Asian countries, somewhat more democratic than the PRC, managed to avoid total disaster, at least in the beginning of the pandemic, because the people there cooperated fully with emergency government strategies set up to contain the disease. The most hard-hit countries in the world, however, were much more individualist countries like the USA, India, Brazil, the European nations, Canada/Québec, even (Eurasian) Russia, none of which, with the partial exception of Russia, are often seen as friends of China. The highest numbers officially recorded so far being posted in the USA, China’s main enemy. Even though the second SARS virus was created outdoors rather than in an official laboratory, how terribly convenient that the damn thing has nevertheless become for the ever-rising fortunes of the Chinese empire!

Still, none of this death and destruction seems to have been planned out in advance, at least not completely, in order to produce those spectacular results. There is, after all, plenty of evidence available in the real world that demonstrates that at least partial coincidences, even of that monstrous sort, do still take place quite often. Not everything that happens in this world comes about exclusively because of some official conspiracy, even though many of those conspiracies are quite real, and by no means all of them are fake.

The vast majority of the world’s natural scientists are convinced that the planet we all live in has entered into the Anthropocene era, in which the various different forms of pollution caused by human activity have come to have a major (almost entirely destructive) impact on the natural environment. Aside from all the other negative effects of this extraordinary phenomenon (such as climate change), ever-increasing, human-population expansion into areas once inhabited exclusively by wild animals has set off a series of recent pandemics, the long list of which includes the swine flu and two related, coronavirus pandemics. The first coronavirus pandemic apparently went away all by itself, back in 2004, while the second one has so far killed about two million people in 2020, according to the World Health Organization. The fact that the same WHO calculates that 12 million people are also slated to die in 2020 from environmental pollution, does not seem to have had much of an effect on the media. Nevertheless, it is true that ultra-individualist countries like the USA inevitably suffer a great deal more from the more persistent pandemics than do ultra-collectivist countries like China.

While it is true that the Trump movement is also a form of authoritarian neofascism, in its own way, it does not function in the same, much more collectivist fashion, as the authoritarian neofascism of the People’s Republic of China. The recently elected Georgia congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, from the ultra-idiotic Q-Anon faction inside the Trump organization, gave everyone a superb example of what Trump-ism is all about when she refused to wear an anti-virus mask in that august assembly.

Borrowing a slogan from the women’s liberation movement (that she nevertheless despises), she showed off her ultra-individualist attitude by exclaiming “my body, my choice”, by which she indicated that she did not want to participate, in any way whatsoever, in any of the USA’s traditional, constitutional rhetoric about upholding the “common good”, or, as they say in Massachusetts, the “Commonwealth”. From her point of view, the word “common” (as in the UK’s House of Commons) is merely the root idea inside the word “communism”. Even though she seems to belong to the social category known as “the common man” (or rather the common woman), since even though she is a business person, she does not seem to be excessively rich, she still refuses to admit that she could be just as common as anyone else. By rationally fearing death from the God-forsaken coronavirus, for example.

The “Trump nation’s” ultra-reactionary movement is similar in many ways to dozens of other countries under the joint influence of neoliberalism, neofascism and religious fundamentalism, on every continent, many of which, such as Hungary, Poland, Russia, Brazil, and so on, have also adopted local forms of atavistic Christianity. Which is in fact quite similar to the way that equally atavistic Hinduism in India has also been acting, as well as antediluvian Buddhism in countries like Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and ultra-right-wing Islam in an ever-increasing part of the Muslim world (Algeria, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia, and so on). Not to mention the neofascist role of ultra-orthodox Judaism in Israel (and several other countries).

Even the Chinese “communist” government has replaced its old-fashioned “Mao Zedong Thought” mantra with a revived adhesion to ancient, paternalist, religious feudalism, using its Confucius Institutes as the main thrust of its “united front” activities outside China. There is also another similar group in Japan trying to revive ultra-right-wing Shintoism as well. This is what “identity politics” in those countries is really all about. Even many of the extremely numerous indigenous peoples (“First Nations”), spread out all over the world, are also participating in this kind of thing, drawing on their own “animist” spirituality to make their own false claims. Such as for example, that each and every one of those peoples have always lived, since the dawn of creation, in exactly the same regions that they inhabit nowadays.

Getting back to the Muslim world, while it is true that fundamentalist Islam is only one of the world’s very numerous, very active, ultra-right-wing religious movements, it is also the one that is by far the most focused nowadays on killing off most of its enemies in the most spectacular, horrific ways possible. Organizations such as Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and Boko Haram routinely track down and behead as many “unbelievers” as possible, not only in every one of the Muslim-majority countries, or regions, but also in as many different “crusader states” as possible, succeeding in pulling off exceptionally spectacular attacks particularly in those European countries that possess a significant Muslim minority.

Whenever people in the Western world get more than a little upset by the disgusting activities of those Islamo-fascist organizations, however, professional liberal movements that concentrate their attention exclusively on individual rights and liberties, rather than on collective rights, accuse them of committing the sin of Islamophobia. From the liberal standpoint, collective rights, such as those of that official non-entity, the working-class, do not really exist except inside overheated, left-wing imaginations, because, as people sharing Margaret Thatcher’s interpretation of the world, they believe that there are no social classes, nor are there any other other sociological collectivities. Their world is made up entirely of individuals, and collections of individuals, such as those who choose to belong (one by one) to organized religions and political parties.

Ultra-individualist liberals, even if they belong to the national branches of worldwide organizations like Amnesty International, refuse to adopt a genuinely international approach to the world, and treat every event taking place in every country as if it happened in their own parochial backyards. Which means that they can be thrown off track very easily, as when some extreme-right-wing ideologues, such as Marine LePen in France’s National Rally political party, adroitly use laicity as a weapon against the influence of Islam in that country. The same thing also happens when similar reactionaries in Québec come out in support of the government’s “Bill 21”, which bans the wearing of religious insignia for civil servants in positions of authority. Individualist liberals use that tactical, temporary, ultra-right-wing support for (partial) laicity as an excuse for attacking any attempt at government neutrality toward religion, and accuse those governments of being just as ultra-conservative as the neofascist ideologues themselves.

In reality, the ultra-right-wing movements in the Western world are using the tactic of “identifying with laicity” for anti-Muslim propaganda purposes only, their long-term strategic goal being to do what such movements have always done, which is to support ultra-Christian forms of fundamentalism instead. Just like the Trump movement in the USA does, in a much more honest variety of pro-Christian neofascism. On the other hand, just about everyone in the USA knows that Trump supporters are in fact paternalist, white supremacists, even though they often pretend to be against racism and sexism in their official speeches. Supporting laicity would never occur to those antediluvians, such a stance being totally useless to their cause in a country like the USA.

It is only in places like France and Québec that any self-respecting neofascist would even think of pretending to support laicity, a point of view which tries to distance itself from all religious influence on the government by adopting a completely non-Christian, non-Muslim, non-any-other-religion approach. Only entirely dishonest, professional, liberal-individualist ideologues refuse to recognize that laicity as such has nothing whatever to do with ultra-conservative ideology. These liberal egoists nevertheless try to defend their erroneous point of view by accusing supporters of laicity as being in favour of systemic racism, since many of the people demonstrating against state-sponsored religious neutrality in Québec are Muslim women wearing the hijab, and various other kinds of cover-up clothing associated worldwide with Islamic fundamentalism.

Systemic racism, however, is a major problem all over the world, and not just in countries (France a lot more than Québec) that support official laicity. Countries adopting a “multicultural” promotion of religious plurality, such as the USA, Great Britain and English Canada, are every bit as much practitioners of systemic racism as are countries promoting laicity instead. Systemic racism is thoroughly entrenched in every society, on every continent, constituting a form of ultra-elitist class collaboration, just like systemic sexism also does, being constantly reinforced by not-so-invisible popular adhesion, by the ways in which constitutions are framed, by professional corporatism, by legal systems, by military systems enforcing imperialism, and by dozens of other, similar mechanisms. It cannot be erased merely by legislative tinkering, setting up liberal or social-democratic regulations that can easily be ignored by non-compliant bureaucracies, or by egotistical private citizens. Or rapidly overturned by more conservative governments, like the social-democratic nationalizations of major industries and services, in dozens of different countries, that have so often been overturned in the past.

Getting rid of systemic racism, and systemic sexism, both require much more profound social revolutions than anything that any of the world’s progressive political movements have so far been capable of effectuating. All the great political revolutions of the past, from the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, down through the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century, the Latin American revolutions of the nineteenth century, the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century, as well as all the similar revolutions that also took place back then in Vietnam, Algeria, Bolivia, Cuba and dozens of other places, only managed to change the composition of the political groups in power. None of them managed to make any fundamental, long-lasting changes so far as systemic racism, or systemic sexism, are concerned. Nor did they succeed in doing away with the related, equally systemic, elitist, social-class divisions that have dominated every human society established on this planet since the neolithic revolution.

Which, among a thousand other consequences, also means that neither left-wing nor right-wing supporters of Québec independence, and of laicity, can legitimately claim that Québec’s “unique (historical) trajectory in the Americas” somehow proves that their country has never participated in systemic racism, not only towards Québec’s indigenous people, but also towards its own black population, or other such minorities. Not in the past, and not now. Just because Canadian federalism has been (ultra-hypocritically) denouncing systemic racism in Québec, as an ideological weapon in its imperialist assault on the Québec independence movement, does not exempt Québec from also having to embark on a much more serious assault on systemic racism, before and after having achieved its number one goal. The same thing also has to happen at some point in English Canada as well, whose phoney, fundamentalism-worshipping “multiculturalism” does not in any way exempt that country from also practising its own systemic racism in every part of its official territory.

Once again, systemic racism, and systemic sexism, are not the kinds of problems that can be solved by achieving national independence, nor by adopting laws aimed at reforming the way that police forces operate, nor by providing people looking for apartments to rent with anonymous résumés. The fight against systemic racism is a lot more difficult than that. As is the fight against systemic sexism, since half the people in both Canada, Québec and every other country in the world, are women (or girls), whether or not they belong to a dominant majority population or to a dominated minority population.

Nowadays, unfortunately, world politics as a whole is divided between the traditional, neoliberal, right-wing politicians, promoting private capitalism, and the upstart, neofascist, ultra-right-wing politicians, promoting state capitalism. In fact, it would be even more accurate to say that the vast majority of the world’s countries are run by pro-capitalist politicians using a combination of both neoliberalism and neofascism, promoting both private and state capitalism together. Ever since capitalism began, in the early-modern period of history (from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century), there never has been a country in the real world in which “private enterprise” managed to survive without some kind of government “intervention”. Nor has there ever been a country in the real world in which the government bureaucracy managed to run the economy without any kind of private sector contribution, not even in the USSR under Stalin, or the PRC under Mao. So the fact that some politicians favour private capitalism over state capitalism, and some prefer exactly the opposite, should not come as any sort of surprise.

The one thing that is truly new in world politics, since the 1970s, is the almost total disappearance of any large-scale left-wing movements. None of the huge communist parties that used to exist in days gone by have survived the complete extinction of the Soviet bloc, which disappeared partly from its own internal weaknesses, and partly from the USA’s highly successful flirtation with the so-called People’s Republic of China. A regime that has the audacity to pretend that its “red diaper baby” ruling class still really believes (super-long-term), in the communist cause. At the same time, all the world’s equally huge democratic-socialist parties from the same 1970s all caved in to neoliberalism during the 1980s, managing to remain pertinent by entering into formal, or tacit, coalitions with traditional conservative parties like the Christian Democratic Union in Germany. As a result, most of today’s “leftists” have all become fringe gad-flies, focused on cancel culture, toppling statues of official heroes from the past. Nothing terribly threatening to the people who are still very much in power.

Liberal-minded politicians opposed to the neofascist antics of enraged dough-heads like Donald Trump therefore find it quite easy to ignore the left most of the time, because there is nothing much left to ignore. Without, of course, acknowledging that all the neofascist autocrats in this world share with them their own deeply ingrained neoliberal tendencies. Neoliberalism therefore becoming the antechamber of neofascism, in spite of all the horrified disclaimers proclaimed by establishment liberals like the Clintons, Obama, Biden and Harris (in the USA), as well as quite similar politicians like Justin Trudeau in Canada, Dominique Anglade in Québec and Emmanuel Macron in France.

A reality that has prompted some really young political philosophers to go so far as to reject rationality and science as being inherently anti-humanist, because they have recently “discovered” that modern “economic science” is synonymous with neoliberalism, having  replaced exchange-value, focused on material considerations, for “spiritual” use-value. It is as if these people have convinced themselves to truly believe that no anti-capitalist economists (such as Karl Marx, for example) have ever existed. But why would any intelligent person, in his or her right mind, want to decide that the fact that liberal economists have unscientifically chosen to incorporate the capitalist (“free enterprise”) point of view into their ultra-reductionist frames of reference, should make spiritual philosophers reject everything scientific as being necessarily anti-human?

All the observations listed above, about the extraordinary weakness of the left-wing movements in the Western countries, and in the formerly totalitarian “communist” countries, also apply to most of the equally leftist, national liberation movements, of the former “third world” (Asia, Africa and Latin America). In South Africa, for example, the ANC government that overthrew the former apartheid regime during the early 1990s, merely replaced the Boer colonialists of European origin with a small group of black millionaires, leaving the vast majority of the population suffering from the same kind of extreme poverty that had already existed under the previous regime. African immigrants from neighbouring, even poorer countries, such as Mozambique, are also being treated in a racist manner by their “black brothers” in South Africa. Thereby totally ignoring the ridiculous claims of gad-fly leftists in the Western world that only white people can possibly be racist.

Left-liberal attacks on universalism as being inherently racist, because only Westerners promote universalism, are also way off-base, given the equally universal pretensions of Islamic fanaticism. It is also extremely important in this context to denounce the highly dangerous complacency of people like Chris Harman, the former leader (now deceased) of one of the UK’s Trotskyist parties, who thought that it was a good idea for leftists like himself to become occasional “fellow travellers” with ultra-right-wing, non-governmental, Islamic extremists, while always refusing to collaborate with anyone holding state power.

Harman somehow managed to convince himself that such totally dedicated reactionaries would eventually come round to identifying with the lower classes just by virtue of being opposed to Western imperialism. (See the article written by Jean Birnbaum, “La gauche et l’islamisme, retour sur un péché d’orgueil”, “The left and Islamism, return to a sin of pride”, published in “Le Monde”, November 26, 2020.) This is not quite as dumb an idea as pretending that the 1939-1941 Hitler-Stalin pact was really an anti-imperialist alliance, but it comes pretty close. It is hard to believe that this is the same Chris Harman who came out so strongly in favour of the European Enlightenment in his 1999 book, “The People’s History of the World”. 

In addition to all the different kinds of religious fundamentalism, extremely well-entrenched in dozens of third-world countries, many of those same places are also suffering from equally deep-rooted corruption affecting not only proudly right-wing regimes but also many officially left-wing organizations. (To be sure, that observation applies just as much to all the ruling elites in all the world’s richest countries as well.) In Colombia and Mexico, for example, the enormous cartels trafficking illegal drugs such as cocaine into North American markets have tremendous influence not only over traditional, right-wing governments but also over many of their theoretically left-wing opponents, such as the formerly popular FARC insurgency in Colombia or the current PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) in Mexico. The number of examples of this kind of corruption extends to practically every former national-liberation movement, all over the world, even in countries still fighting for their independence, such as the official, Fatah-led government of the Palestinian Authority, and the rival, Islamic-fundamentalist, Palestinian movement, known as Hamas.

In my opinion, nothing undermines support for left-wing organizations, movements and governments throughout the world as much as when they are, or at least appear to be, just as much involved in highly profitable, private-capitalist and state-capitalist, corruption as the more traditional, right-wing organizations, movements and governments. This same observation also applies to similar movements and organizations currently existing in many of the indigenous minorities in countries like Canada, Russia, Australia and Brazil. Whenever large-scale corruption and drug-trafficking also afflict those minority communities in a big way, it makes popular support for those movements, both from within their own communities and from the majority (non-indigenous) populations that surround them, much more difficult to develop.

In this context, it bears repeating that imperialism, colonialism and extractivism are not at all confined only to the Western varieties, such as US imperialism and European imperialism, or  junior-partner varieties like Canadian, Australian and Israeli imperialism. The same reactionary ideologies are also quite well-developed in countries like China and Russia, as well in less powerful forms of regional imperialism in Morocco, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Brazil and several other places. Racism is also equally well-developed in the above list of countries, as well as everywhere else in the world, as are militarism and ethnic exclusivism. It is genuinely racist to claim that all these reactionary ideologies are not in fact universal. Why would they not be? Human beings are the same the world over. Whenever a country gets strong enough to provide it with an opportunity to exploit other countries, that opportunity is  always taken.

At the present time, unfortunately, the pandemic is by no means going away, it is only just getting started. Failing to vaccinate the majority of the world’s population, either because the rich countries are using up all the available vaccines, or because millions of ultra-individualists are refusing to get vaccinated, only means that herd immunity may never be attained. Which also means that older strains, or newer ones, of the same disease may quite easily re-infect the world during multiple, future waves. At the same time, the enormous economic and social disruptions stemming from the pandemic have thoroughly worsened the already disastrous problems of extreme social divisions, environmental destruction and every other, potentially future-erasing, catastrophes that have been building up since the joint neoliberal/neofascist counter-revolution began back in the 1970s.

The return to work for at least several million of all the people who lost their jobs during the pandemic seems to have been compromised forever, as does the retirement pay of millions of other people as well. The pandemic has also become a complete and total setback for women’s rights all over the world, compromising the education of millions more young girls than before, as well as the removal of the partial protection from harm that school provided many of them in the past. Women’s job losses are also much higher than men’s job losses, their income reductions are much greater, domestic violence has increased everywhere even more than it was before, as have such anti-feminine, “barbarian cultural practises” as excision and “honour” killings, to say nothing of the much more difficult access to abortions.

Other groups of vulnerable people of both sexes, such as old people, “racialized” minorities and recent immigrants, are also suffering even more than before. There has also been an enormous setback for international aid programs, the possibility of wars breaking out all over the place has gone way up, as have the number of slaves enduring forced labour, infanticide has much increased (especially against baby girls), palliative care is also much more difficult to access. Progressive trends such as the increased use of mass transit in many countries have also nose-dived as a result of the pandemic.

As poet Edward Fitzgerald put it back in the nineteenth century, in his very British translation of the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”: “The Moving Finger writes; and having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit. Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” In other words, folks, it is going to be impossible to bring back “the good old days” from before the pandemic. Especially since those days were not nearly so good for the immense majority of the world’s people as they were for the tiny minority of people of privilege.