Tuesday, May 6, 2025

 The final solution


Back in the 1930s and 1940s, “the final solution” to fascist dictator Adolf Hitler’s totally invented “Jewish problem” was the Holocaust, the murder of over six million European Jews.  Nowadays, “the final solution” accurately describes Donald Trump’s “fashionable fascism”. Similar kinds of ultra-right-wing populism have become popular again in many other countries, like they did back in the days of classical fascism. Trump has become the most powerful “supreme leader” of national-socialism, trying to force every country in the world to unite “voluntarily” under his chaotic leadership. He has gone way beyond the methods used by the US empire in the past to oblige dozens of countries, particularly in the “third world” of Asia, Africa and Latin America, to do its bidding.


His brand of totalitarianism goes not only farther than “ordinary” imperialism, but also farther than Hitler’s deranged Aryan fantasy. Trump wants to impose nothing less than the nineteenth-century American dream of manifest destiny onto the entire world. His intention is to manoeuvre one nation after another into joining his country as a member-state, not just as a formal or informal colony situated outside the official borders of the USA.


His total disdain for any form of “un-American” sovereignty is extremely egotistical, because he wants to accomplish this colossal feat during his own life-time, ignoring the Constitution by adding a third or fourth term. If that strategy does not work, however, he may have no choice but to pass his legacy onto one of his younger mafia collaborators, JD Vance, Elon Musk, or some other flunkey. His chosen successor has to be an obedient collaborator, someone he can trust to do exactly what he would have done had he lived a little bit longer.


Trump is currently prevailing upon his North American neighbours, Greenland, Canada and Mexico, to join his nation right away, dropping hint-bombs like “freeing” Greenland from Danish control, referring to Canada as the “51st state” and substituting “Gulf of America” for Gulf of Mexico. Not to mention launching economic warfare on Canada, Mexico and Denmark, as well as on several other European nations. He intends to enormously expand US domination of international commerce, take back total control of the Panama Canal, impose US control on all traffic in the Suez Canal, ensure that the Arctic route north of Alaska and Canada is dominated by the USA, get rare minerals from Canada and Ukraine, petroleum and natural gas from  Canada and Russia.


He wants to pay for all this not just by by imposing huge tariffs on dozens of countries, but also  by eliminating USAID to dozens of other countries, originally set up to compensate in a small way for the extremely poor treatment imposed in the past by Western empires. He enormously reduced spending on atmospheric, environmental and space research, replacing the modicum of progressive internationalism that the USA used to support in favour of self-centred, ultra- reactionary nationalism aimed at glorifying his own person over everyone else on the planet.


He has already turned his guns on the countries south of Mexico, all the way down to Chile and Argentina. He exported his dictatorial crusade across the ponds (the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans), extending his empire worldwide, targeting all the European countries still untouched, and adding to his worldwide list of victims every country in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Pacific islands. His equivalent to Hitler’s “Jewish problem” has become an even more outlandish “American problem”, that he concocted out of thin air in order to flatter his enormous ego. “Captain America” wants to become “Captain Earth” and he will not tolerate any opposition whatsoever.


Trump’s number one rival for world hegemony is the “People’s” Republic of China, that he has singled out for much more severe punishment than that directed at any of his less menacing  adversaries. This is the same China that a previous Republican president, Richard Nixon, convinced fifty years ago to flood the US market with cheap manufactured goods. Nixon’s audacious strategy, dreamed up by Henry Kissinger, was to get China to abandon the USSR and return to the total submission practised before 1949 by the Kuomintang government.


They wanted China to replace Japan as the main Asian supplier of cheap goods to the USA. Nixon and Kissinger were certain that Chairman Mao could be convinced to become a “capitalist roader” himself. He, or one of his henchmen like Deng tsiao-ping, needed to realize that this generous offer would free China from Russian domination, under which it had been suffering for decades. China’s acquiescence to that proposition would then inevitably lead to the decline and fall of the entire Soviet empire.


Nixon’s breathtaking strategy succeeded so well that it created a new leading adversary for the US empire, one that has a much better chance of doing away with American hegemony in the future than the Soviet Union ever did. Which is why Trump, or his successor, has to smash China before it becomes stronger than the USA in every field of endeavour, as the Rand Corporation predicted it would by 2040. So Trump’s strategy, even more audacious than Nixon’s, is to overcome the Chinese threat at the same time that he takes over the entire world. This has to be the most exaggerated example of “killing two birds with one stone” that any human being has ever conceived.


Adding insult to injury, Trump convinced himself that his “American problem” can only be resolved by turning his nation into the “United States of the World”, while still calling it the United States of America. He wants his supporters to believe that this will bring an end to globalization once and for all. But forcing every country in the world to become a state in the USA would only result in incorporating dozens of new states into that country, making a total of 51 states if Canada is forced to join, then a potential total of 251 states once the rest of the world is folded in. But if a much-expanded “USA” ends up including all of North, Central and South America, as well as all of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Pacific islands, only about 20% of the total could be genuinely called “American”. Which is still considerably more legitimate than calling that country the USA right now, when it only controls a small portion of the three American regions, let alone every other part of the world.


Trump is currently attempting to make short-term deals with well-defended countries like Russia and China, trying to get them to hate each other as much as they did before Nixon,  then picking them off once he succeeds in “absorbing” the less powerful countries. So far, however, all this is only taking place within his own minuscule skull. In his ballooning delirium, he may eventually convince himself that “His Royal Highness” has become the first dictator in history capable of winning a war based on getting every nuclear power to wipe out every human being on the planet, by rapidly launching their entire supply of “weapons of mass destruction”. In deranged conversation with his own alter ego, the world’s most “infallible” egomaniac is convincing himself that now is the time to act. “When you’re hot, you’re hot”. 


Recent sabre-rattling between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region underlines the fact that a nuclear war could begin between two smaller powers, quickly turning into a total conflagration, Trump’s USA supporting India, China and Russia supporting Pakistan. The “MAD” doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction cannot deter any nuclear power from launching its weapons if the world is dominated by heads of state who abandon restraint by falling under the total control of their own mental delusions.    


In Trump’s he-man version of double-speak, “building a better world” means destroying it altogether. He is determined to spread his absurd theories over every continent, thereby sealing the fate of the entire human race. Those who do not enjoy lapping up his excrement are slated to die first. No thinking person can follow his discourse, in which every new promise contradicts one previously announced. We are left wondering how such an inveterate liar and  horribly corrupt, multi-sinning, criminal monster could get away with imposing such an unnatural, gargantuan disaster on everyone else in the world.


Is there anyone in the USA, or in any other country, capable of standing up to this “MAGA”-bully from Hell? Obeying his own Satanic prophecy, he has also devoted the rest of his life to serving his fanatical Christian base by giving them exactly what they asked for, becoming the “angel of death and destruction” announced in the Book of Revelations, paving the way for the Apocalypse.


Fellow conspirators like Vance, Musk and the other denizens of Trump’s inner circle suck up to his ultra-conservative, ultra-elitist projections, weakly disguised as an attack on the “liberal-democratic” section of the same elite. Millions of ordinary Trump supporters, however, belong to the under-class of ultra-poor, downtrodden “inferiors” who focus their resentment at their plight on the more prosperous members of the working class, rather than on the much more powerful ruling class, reduced to a single deranged mind-set.


Many of the workers who did better than the under-class on the job market, however, also support Trump’s totally insincere promises, none of which could ever succeed in the real world, to repatriate all the manufacturing jobs shipped off to other countries by Nixon and his successors. An identical scenario was resurrected during the recent Canadian election campaign, when a large percentage of manufacturing workers, suburban residents and rural people voted for the Conservative Party run by Pierre Poilievre. This “pit-bull politician” is a Trump imitator in every respect, who pretended to be opposed to the US president’s tariff assault in an unsuccessful attempt to get himself elected as prime minister of Canada.


Instead, the newly-elected prime minister is Mark Carney of the Liberal Party, an accomplished  technocrat, international investor (who started out working for Goldman Sachs), and renowned champion of corporate tax-evasion, who also served as governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013, then governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. However, Carney could very well fail to win much of anything for Canada in his inevitable showdown with Trump.


Poilievre could then return as Carney’s replacement. After a short period of transition, the Conservative leader could merge his country with his powerful neighbour to the south, turning Canada into a resurrected “Dixie-land”, calling it “Trumpskie-land“ instead. He could become the first governor of the 51st state in a much larger USA, stretching all the way from the Florida Keys to the North Pole. Trump and his completely subservient governor could then celebrate the victory of a resurrected and much-expanded Confederate States of America, as a prelude to taking over the rest of the world.


This is an entirely plausible scenario, given Trump and Poilievre’s fixation on privatizing everything that exists, as if the private bureaucracies running the world’s largest corporations were not as self-centred as the world’s oligarchic state bureaucracies. Ultra-conservative people would have us believe that every individual, no matter how poor or downtrodden, has to accept full responsibility for his or her place in life. They deliberately ignore the fact that the vast majority of human beings suffer from poverty through no fault of their pwn. In preparation for his future role, Poilievre is following in the footsteps of Trump, getting closer and closer to the evangelical branches of Christianity.


By far the largest bloc of Trump supporters are ultra-right-wing Christian extremists, “true believers” belonging to a cross-section of every social class in the USA. Many of them belong to the under-class, others hail from the more prosperous section of the working class, others from the middle class, but their leaders all belong to the ruling class. This should come as no surprise given the fact that the bosses of the extremist factions of every religion—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism and Shintoism—control every ultra-right-wing religious movement in the world. Worldwide, religious extremists support any private or state bureaucracy capable of getting them closer to the “Promised Land”, that they define as whatever each brand wants it to be.


Individualist monsters like Trump run their countries like fiefdoms belonging to hereditary aristocrats, relying on obedience to power, to money and to charisma rather than on religion. However, this does not prevent every autocrat and dictator in the world from supporting any religion popular enough in his nation or region to make him look like a hero. As submissive partners, the heads of fanatical religions always accept fake support from powerful toxic individualists, explaining to their obedient followers that God, Allah, or some other mythical entity, “anointed” a well-known sinner to do His work, for His own “unfathomable” reasons. In reality, however, this imagined “exchange of services” amounts to getting one brand of fake news to prop up another brand of fake news.


Ultra-right-wing chieftains enjoy singing along with their true-believer clients, so long as the songs being sung are as violently patriotic and libertarian as they are. A not at all metaphorical example would be: “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the Cross of Jesus going on before, from victory unto victory, His army he shall lead, ’til every foe is vanquished, and Christ is Lord indeed”. The fundamental difference between the evangelical-Christian version of this deeply reactionary song, and Trump’s version, is that he would like his followers to recognize him as the new Messiah. From his hubristic point of view, in this day and age, Jesus of Nazareth is woefully outdated and inadequate. The “Son of God” needs to be replaced by a more devious guy like him, one who can do a much better job at begetting Armageddon. Trump imitators in other parts of the world are just as deluded as he is.


I came up with the idea of comparing “Onward Christian soldiers” with Trump’s way of thinking when I was watching a documentary called “Churchill at war”. Part of that program was narrated by George W. Bush, who, along with Britain’s Tony Blair, invaded Iraq to get rid of  Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Bush was an appropriate narrator for that program because his grandfather, Preston Bush, alongside Henry Ford, led the  ultra-rich, ultra-conservative, pro-fascist, fifth column of phoney isolationists. They totally opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to bring the USA into the Second World War on the Russian-British side, rather than on the German-Italian side.


Conveniently ignored in that documentary was the fact that Churchill supported Mussolini for at least 15 years, before the founder of fascism fell under Adolf Hitler’s total control. Hitler then forced Churchill’s hand by threatening to invade Britain if Winston refused to hand over half the British Empire to him. Another event, this time acknowledged in the program, was Churchill’s decision to starve to death between three and five million people in the Bengal region of India during the Second World War. The official reason he gave for committing this particular war-crime was that a wayward leader of the Congress Party, Chandra Bose, had joined forces with the Japanese army against the British Empire. In reality, however, Churchill used that rebellion as a god-send, to justify his long-standing refusal to share his empire with any rival power, be it Germany, Japan, Russia or the USA.


These historical facts demonstrate that Trump’s ultra-right-wing imperialism was preceded by a large number of historical antecedents, such as the fake-isolationist movement in the US and Churchill running his empire in the same way as most of his predecessors had done. Many leading figures throughout US history have been equally reactionary, oscillating between Churchill’s way of doing things and Hitler’s way, rather than adopting more flexible approaches like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt did. Those two ran the US empire in less belligerent ways than Churchill ran the British empire, while Churchill ran his empire in a less belligerent way than Hitler ran the Third Reich.


Trump chose the same manifest destiny that presidents Polk (“54-40 or fight”) and McKinley had also championed decades before he was born. Polk’s geographic slogan eventually became part of the border between Alaska and the Canadian province of British Columbia. It was McKinley’s extension of Polk’s idea that led to the establishment, in 1903, of the current borders between the US colony of Alaska (that became a territory in 1912 and a state in 1959), the province of British Columbia and the Yukon territory of Canada, over strenuous British and Canadian objections.


Those events were precipitated by the discovery of gold in the region, echoing the influence that a previous gold rush had already had in the founding of California. Unfortunately for McKinley, he was voted out of office two years before that, so the credit for getting the new border went to his replacement, Theodore Roosevelt. Not to forget that the British Empire referred to Canada as “British North America” from 1867 to 1931, before granting it a limited form of sovereignty.


From the beginning of its existence, however, the USA has also followed British example much more often than it has opposed that example. The USA only succeeded in breaking away from the British Empire in 1783, in a war that started out in 1776 as a civil war within the British Empire. But the US colonists may never have won if they had not been helped out by French and Spanish military interventions, as well as by receiving financial aid from the Netherlands. In other words, US independence depended to a large extent on international politics.


After 1783, the USA’s formerly British colonists continued the British Empire’s initial war against the indigenous peoples in North America, just like the French, Spanish and Dutch empires had also done. All those powers simultaneously participated in the worldwide slave trade, that moved on from its Slavic origins (hence the word “slave”) to be based on getting African chieftains to sell people coming from “inferior” (conquered) tribes to Western empires. North America was just another part of the undeclared world war between the European empires, that also took place throughout Africa, leading to the establishment of apartheid-supporting entities like the Dutch-speaking “Boer” colony in South Africa.


All the European powers, imitated by the USA, then moved on to colonize parts of Asia, Australia and the Pacific islands. Back in North America, the USA completed the work that the  British had begun by continuing to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific during the same period that the British Empire up in Canada also expanded. The British Empire also reached the Arctic Ocean along the way, largely because of the efforts of the first limited-liability corporation in the world, the Hudson’s Bay Company, currently in danger of disappearing altogether.


Carrying on the British tradition of colonization even further, the USA then began a prolonged assault on the countries in “Latin” America, beginning with Mexico, using both military and financial force. It followed that up later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, grabbing many more colonies and satrapies in Africa, Asia and the Pacific region, such as taking the Philippines away from Spain. At the same time, its imperialist rivals were also hard at work taking over as many colonies and dependencies as they possible could. Russia, for example, extended its Asian empire into North America, crossing over into Alaska in 1784, before being bought out by the USA in 1867.


After that, the scramble for world hegemony among the leading empires became what the “great powers” decided to call the First World War. This resulted in the slaughter of about twenty million people, some of them military “cannon fodder”, the others innocent civilians. The inconclusive results of that enormous conflict then led to the Second World War, leaving behind sixty million more victims, military and civilian, half of whom died within the official borders of the USSR. The imperialist “winners” ended up with the lion’s share of the spoils, but even some of the “losers” in that horrendous conflict profited to a more limited extent from both of those confrontations.


The US military base in Greenland was established just in time for the “Cold War” between the USA and the USSR, both seeking worldwide hegemony in a period when many of the other empires were obliged to begin “decolonization”, replacing many of their formal colonies with informal ones. The USA won the Cold War round of conflict between those competing empires hands down. In today’s world, however, taking over Canada and Greenland would give Trump much better access to the Arctic Ocean than the USA had previously held. This could help out a lot if today’s Russia, under the violently autocratic grip of Vladimir Putin, turns out to be the last holdout before Trump incorporates the entire world into a much-expanded “USA”.


Getting back to Trump’s alliance with Christian fanatics, we have to realize that “radicalized” Christians adopt reactionary interpretations of their number-one text, in the same way as do similar extremists from rival religions. Reading the Bible over and over again did not prevent them from rejecting such sentimental concepts as “love thy neighbour as thyself”, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God”, and “suffer the little children to come unto Me”. Nor do they set out to comfort women like Mary Magdalene, feed beggars, succour lepers, or help any other downtrodden people, if those unfortunates happen to belong to the “wrong” religion, or to “mistaken” interpretations of Christianity. All the ultra-right-wing sections of the world’s other religions behave in a similar fashion.


It seems to me that if true-believers in Christianity, or in any other religion or ideology  pretending to be universal, were honest and progressive rather than dishonest and reactionary, they would be true to their faith in a more convincing fashion. Instead, religious fanatics support the most extreme and violent forms of domination of men over women, billionaires over poor people, powerful people over powerless ones, intolerance over tolerance, white skins  over other colours, and arrogant narcissists over modest people. If they really practised what they preached, they would be doing the world an immense favour. The least that can be said, however, is that in a world dominated by extremist religions and ideologies, honest and progressive people are few and far between, like they were during several previous periods of history.


True-believers in the USA, like the ultra-right-wing partisans of self-appointed, fascist prophets in other countries, always turn reality on its head. They substitute reactionary concepts for anything the least bit progressive, whether or not those sentiments show up in the Bible, the Koran, or any other sacred text. All religious fanatics continue to behave in this way, while  pretending to be doing exactly the opposite. Their religious and quasi-religious strategies resemble the political strategies of the worldwide collection of autocrats and dictators, who behave just as badly.


As “Boer” Musk put it recently, the “new Jerusalem” means ridding the world of “sissy” notions like empathy and “do-gooder” mentality. Taking Herbert Spencer’s social-Darwinism to a new extreme, Musk believes that everyone ought to accept as fact, once and for all, that in order to survive, “civilization” has to be run by excessively rich, powerful, egotistical, misogynous, racist, toxic-alpha males. According to this bizarre theory, “superior beings” become ultra-rich and ultra-powerful because their wealth and power “prove” that they are the “worthiest individuals”, chosen by God or some other deity to run the world.


People like Musk think that everyone ought to accept their domination, precisely because they are the right kind of elitists, which is to say ultra-right-wing ones. They ought therefore to be allowed to rule over the ignorant masses of ordinary schmucks specifically for that reason. Anyone not conforming to their vision of what constitutes “civilization” has to to be brainwashed, or re-brainwashed, right away. Otherwise, their extremely limited definition of what “civilization” is all about cannot survive.


Which is why they turn every facet of reality completely upside-down. Like Adolf Hitler did in days gone by, they have figured everything out, discovered what is “really going on”, and concocted an accurately-measured, 100%-reversed, trans-humanist transmutation of accumulated knowledge in every field. They falsely assert that their version of the truth is “scientific” because they eliminated any possible uncertainties from it. They reject and denounce the standard definition according to which science must include an element of uncertainty in every one of its theories. But for ultra-right-wingers, any degree of uncertainty is much too frightening to  contemplate. It makes them so incredibly anxious that they cannot think straight.


Trump makes every effort these days to remind people that he likes Hitler, because he had total control over his military commanders. Trump also opened up concentration camps in Guantanamo, Salvador and Alcatraz, as well as offering cash and performance medals to mostly-white women bearing six children or more. His administration has also interfered in election campaigns in Germany, the UK and Romania, like Hitler used to do outside his own country. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are also hard at work intervening in as many other countries as they can. In spite of Trump’s efforts, however, a lot of people still get upset whenever he is compared to his pal Adolf, as well as to Adolf’s other contemporary imitators. As the saying goes, “there are none so blind as they who will not see.”


Shortly after it was published in the spring of 2024, I read the “Nexus” book by the prolific historian Yuval Noah Harari. This was only a few months before Trump was elected, just in time as it turned out, to save Harari’s most important hypothesis from disaster. The book started out as a comparative history of information systems, culminating in the recent introduction of artificial intelligence. He went on to speculate about how AI systems, reflecting the intellectual prejudices of the young Western men who developed most of them, could self-replicate into machines capable of enslaving millions of people, or even replacing humans altogether.


He explained, however, that he did not just want to focus on information systems as such, but also to support the “middle way” strategy of liberal democracy, that he thought capable of preventing such an abominable future for artificial intelligence. He developed this idea in chapters 5 (“Decisions: A Brief History of Democracy and Totalitarianism”), 9 (“Democracy: Can We Still Hold a Conversation?”) and 10 (“Totalitarianism: All Power to the Algorithms”). 


According to him, society can reconcile the need for order, and the need for truth, through “self-correcting mechanisms”, like the “checks and balances” in the US Constitution, also imbedded in the Western versions of artificial intelligence. He also claimed that nuclear war could be avoided by the use of “feasible safeguards” (page 300). It seems to me, however, that now that Trump has been in power for several months, imposing his brand of fashionable fascism on the world, the publication of Harari’s book just prior to Trump’s return to power seems to have been planned in advance.


I think that it is a huge mistake to rely on liberal democracy to save our bacon. Neither liberal democracy nor social-democracy is truly capable of protecting society from totalitarianism, although social-democracy goes a lot farther than the liberal kind. Both make an attempt at alleviating the devastating degrees of popular misery associated with capitalism, but neither are capable of preventing a return to capitalist totalitarianism.


Harari is unable to recognize this because he limits his definition of totalitarianism to either the fascist or the “communist” models. He refuses to consider the proposition that fascism is just an extreme form of capitalist exploitation which, in periods of accelerated political, economic,  social and cultural decline, becomes totalitarian, abandoning any democratic pretensions that it held previously. Harari also came up with an “intermediate”, or “inter-subjective” form of analysis, that he situated between objective reality, that he confined to the non-human part of the material world, and subjective reality, that he confined to the human part. He refused to accept the standard definition, according to which most analysts realize that social categories can be every bit as objective as can material ones.


In my view, liberal and social democracy fail to stand up to fascism because they cling to the reformist, parliamentary theme of “His Majesty’s loyal opposition”, not only in the UK but everywhere else as well. As for “communist” totalitarianism, it was originally founded as an attempt to go beyond democratic socialism by adopting revolutionary socialism. Immediately after the First World War, German socialist revolutionaries like Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were assassinated by “frei-korp” war veterans. Most revolutionary socialists then adopted the Leninist model of total obedience to whoever was designated as the “supreme leader” of the communist movement in every country. But the Leninist strategy quickly degenerated into what Trotsky, after having been ousted from power by Stalin, called a “degenerate workers’ state”. Trotsky was later assassinated in Mexico, on Stalin’s orders, during the Second World War.


All over the world, “communist” totalitarianism rapidly turned into a disguised form of degenerate capitalism, in which fake-communists like Stalin, Mao and the Kim family in North Korea, substituted individual dictatorship for the proletarian kind. Lenin himself, as well as Mao, apparently recognized this possibility, arguing that maintaining “proletarian dictatorship” after giving up on communism, would inevitably lead to fascism. In any case, “socialism in a single country” never existed as a working model. Since Trotsky’s death, political leaders following his path avoid running countries most of the time, instead promoting wayward political strategies, like Lyndon Larouche used to do in the USA and in several other countries.


One of the leaders of the Trotskyist movement in the UK, Chris Harman, suggested a few  years ago to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the left-wing leader of “La France insoumise”, that he could promote socialism in his country by entering into an electoral alliance with ultra-right-wing Islamists. This may have seemed like a good idea at the time because none of the ultra-right-wing Christian fanatics in France, such as Marine Le Pen or Éric Zemmour, could be caught dead having anything to do with Islam. For different kinds of opportunist reasons, this seemed just as acceptable to the French Islamists as it did to Mélenchon’s formation.


Trump also avoids Islam like the plague, for opportunist reasons of his own. This, however, does not prevent ultra-right-wing partisans of Islam in the USA from supporting him anyway. Not to forget in this context that capitalism itself has always been based on opportunities exploited by investors, who dominated everyone else in society once their system became worldwide. Since that time, the richest investors lord it over the medium-rich, as well as millions of people who never seized any of those opportunities. Most of the world’s “ordinary” people do not even realize that such possibilities exist. Others do not want to treat their neighbours as poorly as some of their neighbours treat them, a difference in attitude that started out long before the rise of capitalism, and continues to this day. Rotten ways of behaving toward others have always existed for individualist reasons, that are not always entirely dependent on the prevailing social system.


Harman’s opportunism is another example of the way in which Trotskyists do not often stand up to fascism in a real way, any more than do supporters of liberal democracy, social-democracy and Stalinism, each one for reasons particular to each ideology. The world is a complicated place, in which people often start out with totally different ideas, before behaving in a similar fashion anyway, for the most dissimilar reasons imaginable.


Although Harari got his definition of totalitarianism wrong, in another section of his book he made a real contribution to our understanding of how ultra-right-wing religious movements work. His analysis of the Jesus story was that this Jewish rabbi, preaching in ancient Israel about 2000 years ago, had a significant influence on only about 10,000 real people. Two thousand years later, the tiny band of followers emerging from that relatively small group of people was transformed into billions of Christians, most of them becoming “true believers”. One of Harari’s fellow professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Schlomo Sand, also pointed out recently that many of today’s Jews are not always of Semitic origin. According to him, most of the Jews of the Bible converted first to Christianity, then to Islam. We now call those people Palestinians.


Since Harari avoids “Marxist lingo” like the plague, he does not want to recognize that such an incredible increase in the number of Christians benefitted enormously from the colonial expansion of imperialist nations harbouring evangelical churches, from both the Eastern and the Western rites, that sent their missionaries into every corner of the world. In more recent times, fake-Christian true believers began massively supporting “illiberal democracy”, not only in the USA but also in Russia and dozens of other countries.


Harari also described how Judaism made its own contribution to this ideological subterfuge by creating false memories among its true believers. They were taught to believe that God arranged to have them physically participate in the Exodus, even if they had not yet been born at the time. Although Harari avoids using provocative terms of any kind, the transformation he describes of the Passover text (the “Haggada”) into the “Halakka” law code, ought therefore to be seen as an early version of “fake news”.


Harari also avoided any reference in his book to the third telling of that same story. The prophet Mohamed’s interpretation of those events was initially laid out in the Koran, which, like the Talmud and the Bible, treats that narrative in a significantly different way. Over the centuries Islam divided up into several competing sections, each claiming to be the only “true” interpretation, just like Judaism, Christianity and all the other religions did. Harari misses the point completely by claiming that “when the human imagination summoned a belligerent and hate-filled god, we retained the power to rid ourselves of it and imagine a more tolerant deity” (page 297). Tolerant deities, however, have never been particularly popular in history, nor in most parts of the world. These days, it is hard to find any of them anywhere. They seem to have disappeared from sight altogether, along with such other historical oddities as roller derbies and green stamps.


It is also fascinating to observe how contemporary Jewish and Christian fanatics refuse to recognize that their partisans commit terrorist acts just as often as Islamic fanatics do. The difference between militant terrorism and state terrorism is usually measured in the number of innocent civilians each brand is capable of killing. Kill ratios have always been considerably higher whenever those doing the killing were better equipped militarily. Which is why governing states always succeed in killing many more innocent people, through “collateral damage”, than they kill actual enemies. None of the world’s militant groups ever succeed in killing anywhere near that many, even when they try as hard as they can, like the Hamas movement did recently in Gaza. However, just like in every other extremely devastated territory in the world, most of the civilian victims in Gaza were killed by government forces, Israeli in this case, rather than by militant forces like Hamas.


The civilians who die from both causes suffer what is for them a similar fate. This remains true even though it does not seem that way to victims of Islamic terrorism in Israel and in the Western nations, victims of Israeli terrorism in the Middle East, victims of Russian terrorism in Ukraine (among other places), victims of Taliban terrorism in Afghanistan, and victims of US terrorism, also in Afghanistan as well as in dozens of other countries.


This same kind of cause-and-effect differentiation applies equally well to all the other religions. It also applies to political ideologies whenever they are treated as if they were religions, as has happened over and over again to ideologies as diverse as conservatism, liberalism, socialism, nationalism, anarchism, fascism and communism. This observation applies just as well to the world’s competing states and empires, every one of which has always been infected by the same religions and ideologies. The worst states are those that go the farthest in the direction of ignominy, such as the Nazi regime in Germany, or Trump’s current, “fashionable fascist” attempt to take over the entire world.


In his book, Harari also made frequent references to the theories of Benedict Anderson, the prolific author of a series of books outlining his definition of nations as “imagined communities”. As the jacket of the updated 2006 edition of Anderson’s book put it: he “explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of secular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time and space. He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was adopted by popular movements in Europe, by imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa.” I read this edition shortly after it came out and was quite impressed by it, as were thousands of other people.


It seems to me that Anderson’s work lends a great deal of credibility to many of the things that I have been trying to put forward in this text. He was one of my favourite sources back then, though he would probably not agree with many of my interpretations. Unfortunately, there are not very many references in his book to parts of the world that did not make it into the official list of 193 (at last count) nations officially recognized as such. Mere “regions” like Tibet, Sin-kiang, Siberia, Québec, Scotland, Catalonia, Amazonia, Patagonia and thousands of other unrecognized indigenous nations, are always left out, even when they are larger, more populated, more developed, or more important than some of the countries accepted in the “official” category.


Most of today’s sovereign nations have gobbled up many “mere regions”, in spite of the fact that most of them were violently incorporated inside the official borders of the successful “candidates” for sovereignty. To get recognized as such, it looks very much like geopolitical “winners” have to triumph over geopolitical “losers”. To be sure, some of those winning nations proceeded in much more violent ways than did some of the others. Only a few of them were as violent as Nazi Germany was, while the most violent of all may turn out to be the Nazi imitator currently presiding over the USA. This is because Trump is going all out to silence anyone, in the USA or in any other country, who disagrees with him on any subject whatsoever. “Might makes right” has never been a more popular slogan than it has become these days, not only in the USA but everywhere else as well.


Another fascinating part of Harari’s book are his numerous references to homosexuality as another kind of community, referred to by the LGBT series of letters and symbols, constantly being “updated” with recent additions. But the community of sexual minorities turns out to be not really all that different from the majority, heterosexual community. People often make the same kind of mistake, interpreting the word “community” to mean that everyone within it treats each other more kindly than they are treated in rival groups. Many “queer” people, for example, have convinced themselves that they belong to one of those “nicer” communities.


However, I have not seen any real evidence to prove that lesbians, gays, binary and trans people treat each other significantly better from the way that people are treated in the heterosexual community. Some well-known gay people, such as J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, were either openly gay or “closet” gay, but they were most definitely not known for their kindness. How does one go about proving that people like those two no longer exist, not only among gays but also among lesbians, binary and trans people? Why would people in the LGBT community not behave in the same way as people do in the heterosexual community, which is quite often dominated by alpha males?


It seems to me much more probable that human beings never cease to act like human beings, no matter which political, economic, social and cultural domains influence them the most. Individuals and groups in every community sometimes treat each other well and just as often treat each other poorly, in every period of history and in every part of the world. I see no reason to believe that decent behaviour always prevails over deplorable behaviour, certainly not nowadays. Wishing something was true does automatically not make it true. One should never underestimate the power of denial. Real scientists need proof.


In his book, Harari also made reference to another popular book, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”, by David Graeber and David Wengrow”, published in 2021. I also found this book to be a lot of fun to read, particularly because those authors came up with the concept of “schismogenesis”. They defined this as the tendency among rival groups of people to magnify the differences between them. Even if they live in parts of the world in which each group would benefit from the useful inventions and discoveries made by another group, they refuse to do so, admiring their own contributions, while downplaying or completely ignoring the usefulness of a rival group’s discoveries and inventions. Harari should have realized that this concept does not just apply to rivals like the Inuit and the Cree in northern Canada, that Graeber and Wengrow provided as an example in their book. It seems to me that “schismogenesis” also applies quite well to the contemporary world.


Extremely reactionary people find it imperative to constantly increase the number of wars going on, the number of weapons of mass destruction being produced, the number of horrendous consequences being caused by global warming and climate change, as well as the number of women being mistreated through unrestricted misogyny (Margaret Thatcher and a few others like her notwithstanding). The number of people being exploited these days by extreme social divisions and exacerbated thought control, increases at a tremendous rate, much faster than the total number of human beings alive today. If we let these idiotic antediluvians reverse every kind of reality that exists, we do not stand a chance of surviving as a species. A world made up almost entirely of monsters bent on eliminating their “inferior” neighbours is completely unsustainable. This is particularly true when such dominating monsters falsely claim to “know what they are doing”, like Trump does.


Governments and corporations styling themselves as either liberal-democratic or social-democratic at least acknowledge the existence of the impending catastrophes threatening our  existence, without doing much about them. But the world’s “fashionable fascists” have become considerably more powerful than any of those “middle-of-the-road” leaders, who believe in offering “all-things-to-all people”. The egotistical maniacs promoting fascism are totally focused on silencing everyone who does not agree with them, leaving them free to run the world by themselves. Which fascist dictator ends up on top will be the last thing they will try to figure out, before everything explodes in their faces, taking the rest of us with them.


Led by chieftains like Trump, millions of true-believers in hundreds of ultra-right movements, at war with each other as well as with everyone else, project their fake-news onto their enemies through gas-lighting. They blame their ideological adversaries for doing everything that they are  themselves doing. In their diseased minds, every person who does not support their project of worldwide domination is an “enemy of the people”. Their total obsession with money and power has no limits to its growth. In their fantastic, totally irrational way of interpreting the world, they must prevail over every adversary, including material reality itself. No physical, chemical or biological obstacles can ever be allowed to get in their way, any more than can any one of their human opponents, regardless of the dire consequences of adopting such an apocalyptic outlook.


Whenever the world’s ultra-reactionary fanatics increase the number of wars going on and the number of weapons being produced, they pretend to be doing exactly the opposite. They start wars not only between rival states and peoples, but also civil wars, even when they take place within their own borders, targeting “the enemy within”. They pretend to support world peace, while accusing anyone who disagrees with them of “flagrant disregard for the truth”, an expression that characterizes their strategy, not that of their opponents. In their deranged opinion, truth belongs exclusively to “winners” (“Truth Social”), not to “losers” (animate or inanimate entities refusing to obey orders).


Eliminating “artificial” distinctions between the objective and the subjective worlds allows them to define reality as whatever they want it to be. They go even farther along this path than did Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Stalin, Mao or the first two Kims. The worst of the lot are obsessed with dystopian daydreams that suggest that they should go much farther than even the fictitious characters who were supposed to “boldly go where no man has ever gone before”.


Ultra-right-wing leaders produce more fossil fuels and plastic products than prior perpetrators did, because for them the devastating effects of climate change, global warming, meteorological disasters and the enormous decline in biodiversity do not exist, any more than do anything else that their rivals call reality. They impose totalitarian versions of capitalism on every part of the globe, increase the already considerable gaps between the sexes, the social classes, the “superior” and the “inferior races”, with the same devotion that they attach to widening existing divisions between “great” nations and slave ones, dominant countries and “shit-hole countries”. They set out to turn the world’s “providential” social-media corporations into instruments of ideological torture.


The “final solution” of today’s fascist international has become a globally-coordinated campaign designed to eliminate the entire human race forever, along with any “material enemies” that also “conspire” to prevent them from travelling to far-away places like Mars whenever they feel like it. They impose their ultra-conservative “Project 25” clones onto everyone, without acknowledging that they really exist, while projecting their evil intentions onto everyone and everything else. Anyone believing in any other reality is denounced as anathema, the “anti-Christ”, unworthy of whatever political or religious dogma that they decide to support.


They abandon every attempt at alleviating the misery of the world’s increasingly numerous, poor and powerless “sub-humans”. They sleep-walk their way into including their own downtrodden recruits as additional victims of their criminal strategy. All over the world, they “drill, baby, drill”, “kill, baby, kill” and “burn, baby. burn”, pretending to be saving their victims rather than wiping them off the face of the earth. Every ultra-right-wing big-wig in every country is having the time of his life, focusing exclusively on his own importance, augmenting his political power and his commercial fortune, ruining ordinary citizens and future customers alike, doubling down on his ultra-short-term bottom-line. They are all drunk on cash, addicted to power, obsessed with delusion, refusing to let anyone or anything stop them from doing whatever they set out to do.


Each one of these monsters wants to make the USA great again, make Europe great again, make Israel great again, make Russia great again, make China great again, make India great again, make Korea great agains, make Brazil great again, make Argentina great again, make Turkey great again, and so on. Ultra-right-wing conspirators pop up even in countries as distant from world power as Canada, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Panama, Paraguay, Uganda, Mali, Iran and Palestine. They all want to get into the act, to strut and fret their own hours on the stage, before it is too late.


This worldwide, ultra-religious crusade completely transcends the phoney division between capitalism and communism. None of the world’s self-proclaimed “socialist states” ever came close to anything remotely resembling communism, that never exists in a single state. They have always been run by dictators substituting their own erratic personalities for the downtrodden classes that they claim to represent.


At the same time, none of the countries acknowledging their “preference for capitalism” have ever become genuinely democratic, nor are they run by anything resembling the “rule of law”. Believing in such fairy tales is something that vaguely resembles the naive way in which hundreds of millions of ordinary people support socialism or communism. Not to forget that democracy, socialism and communism were originally supposed to be based on allowing ordinary people to come to power, “by, of and for” the people, as Abraham Lincoln put it. In the real world, however, those who seize power often reserve ever kind of hegemony for themselves, almost entirely under less repressive regimes, completely under totalitarian ones.


If things keep moving toward this kind of ultra-right-wing self-destruction, none of us are going to survive. As the anti-fascist economist John Maynard Keynes put it back in the 1930s, albeit in a radically different context, “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.”


Thursday, October 24, 2024

 A truly progressive, international, anti-imperialist world-view


The total absence of any truly progressive, international, anti-imperialist world-view makes the world’s most important threats much more difficult to overcome. The all-too-frequent recourse to war, the never-ending proliferation of nuclear weapons, the constant acceleration of global warming, the total domination of predatory capitalism, the ever-increasing income gap inside each country, artificial intelligence as an elitist instrument of thought control—none of those threats can be adequately addressed one nation at a time.


People all over the world are denouncing each other inappropriately, in the shrillest of voices, focusing their hatred not only on those who disagree with them inside their own countries. They are also denouncing everyone trying to flee from the most devastated parts of the world, to find refuge in the richer countries. Paradoxically, however, the richer countries are themselves responsible for most of that same devastation. This is yet another fact deliberately ignored by irrational denouncers, who refuse to admit that most of those refugees are genuine victims. Only a tiny percentage of them are faking it.


If we could develop a genuinely international approach to our major problems, along the lines that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has been suggesting, we could do away with the current Hobbesian “war of each against all”. We could then get on with the task of solving the world’s most important threats, each one of which is worldwide in its very nature. We desperately need to adopt much more international empathy, even between the 56 countries and movements currently at war, a list drawn up by former UK prime minister Gordon Brown. Each side in each conflict is supported by dozens of “rogue allies”, theoretically collaborating  with the world’s dominant empires. This means that every conflict really becomes a local version of a global war for worldwide hegemony, that the belligerents themselves refuse to officially recognize as such.


The “Very Important People” (VIPs) in every country, the powerful politicians and the dominant investors, whether openly autocratic or fake-democratic, run the world. This is true not only in the officially capitalist countries but also in the countries still pretending to be socialist. The elitists residing in the richest nations deliberately mistreat the majority of the world’s people, who are excluded from the inner circles of power and privilege. Each competing empire is also backed up by complicit compradores in the poorest countries, helping to ensure that no one succeeds in fomenting a successful rebellion against foreign control. Even in the richest countries, subordinated regions are treated like “internal colonies”, and suffer similar fates.


Ongoing confrontations not considered to be active wars, such as the decades-old stand-off between the USA and Cuba, or between China and Taiwan, add even more tension to the overall picture. Each leading empire, those possessing nuclear weapons and those actively seeking them, the USA, Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Turkey and Iran, are fighting each other for hegemony, either on a worldwide scale or on a more limited one. No matter which conflict captures our attention, none of the participants involved seem the least bit interested in standing down. Every month of every year that goes by, our world keeps on getting more and more dangerous.


To provide more insight into each of these themes, I read two books of recent history, both of which provided fascinating “previews” about of what is currently going on in today’s world. The first book was written by British author Tariq Ali, about Winston Churchill’s imperialist career, while the second one was written by Québec sociologist Jean-Philippe Pleau, about his transition from a childhood dominated by his illiterate, working-class father, into becoming an upper-middle-class Québec intellectual. At first glance, those two books do not seem to have anything in common, the authors having taken quite different approaches, and the subject matter appearing to be even more distant. Nor does it seem obvious what either of them have to do with the major themes that I mentioned above. It turns out, however, that they share more than a few similarities, relating to several of those themes.


Tariq Ali’s work was entitled, “Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes” (2022), the French translation of which I happened to come across in a local bookstore. His book was a well written account, focusing on Churchill’s very numerous contributions to both the expansion and the preservation of the British Empire, between the Boer War (1899-1902) and the first half of the Cold War (1945-1965). Ali confirmed everything that I had already found out about several decades before his book came out, when I was preparing my college and university courses on the history of Western civilization, as well as on the history of the third world.


I was particularly impressed by his excellent treatment of Churchill’s imposition of a major famine (1943-1945) on the Bengal region of India, designed to punish a radical Indian renegade, Chandra Bose. This patriotic leader had dared to attack British forces in that region, in open support of the Japanese attempt to take over that part of India. Somewhere between three and five million people died during Churchill’s induced famine, an event that Ali compared to Hitler’s massacre of six million Jews during the Second World War. The Bengali famine did not succeed in killing as many people as did Hitler’s assault on the European Jews, but Ali concluded quite rightly that it should nevertheless be seen as one of the most important war crimes in recent history.


This comparison was foremost in my mind when I read an article published on August 12, 2024, in the Montréal daily, “Le Devoir”: “Ce qui Gaza nous dit sur l’état du droit international humanitaire: Jamais autant de civils ont été délibérément affamés sous les yeux de l’humanité,” (“What Gaza tells us about the state of international humanitarian law: Never have so many civilians been deliberately starved to death while the rest of the world looks silently on.”) In that article, François Audet, the director of the Institute of International Studies as well as “l’Observatoire canadien sur les crises de l’action humanitaire”, stated that the current Israeli invasion of Gaza is killing off the largest number of civilians ever deliberately starved to death.


But even if we agree, as seems to be the case, that the 2.3 million citizens of Gaza are currently being wiped out by the Israeli army, the total number of deaths would not surpass the most important war crime of Churchill’s illustrious career. In order to get into Churchill’s league, Israel would also have to kill off just as many other civilians, in several other countries, such as it has already started to do in Lebanon and Syria, even in Iran. As it stands right now, Audet’s assertion could only make sense if we focus on the fact that Churchill’s most important war crime was not very well-known at the time, and is still not being officially recognized as such nowadays. This seems quite similar to the way in which Israel’s state-terrorist war crimes, much more murderous than anything that its militant-terrorist enemies have carried out, are also not being officially recognized by the so-called “international community”, which is to say the US empire and its allies.


To be sure, war crimes have been committed over and over again since the beginning of human history, even before the coming into being of the world’s first regional empires. Even indigenous peoples often participated in extremely violent confrontations, such as the Iroquois Confederacy’s assault on the rival Iroquoian (Huron) Confederacy, that wiped out most of them. If we want to be cynical about it, we could say that the number of victims of war crimes has been keeping pace quite well with the enormous increases in the world’s population, especially during recent decades.


The sycophants who describe Churchill as a “democratic” leader, because of his war-time opposition to Nazi Germany, deliberately ignore the fact that Hitler wanted Britain to hand over half its empire, in order to avoid an imminent invasion. Unfortunately for Germany, preserving the British Empire, not giving it away as some other British leaders were quite willing to do, was what Churchill was all about.


After the Second World War, Churchill was subjected to the supreme humiliation of watching the US empire, that had already replaced British domination in the Americas, replace Britain as the world’s largest empire. His only consolation may have been that even though American imperialism dominated the world after 1945, taken separately none of the war crimes committed by the USA, such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the atrocities committed in Korea, in Vietnam, or in dozens of other countries, exceeded the number of victims that his famine produced in Bengal.


A similar comparison can also be made between Churchill’s induced famine in India and  Stalin’s induced famine in Ukraine and south Russia during the 1930s. Churchill’s starvation policy in Bengal, however, killed more people than Stalin succeeded in eliminating. So far as I can tell, the only induced famine that topped Churchill’s number of victims was Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” of 1958-1961. Stalin’s and Mao’s induced famines, however, do not qualify as war crimes, since both of them took place within the official boundaries of a single empire, not in an officially recognized war.


However, their induced famines could honestly be compared to Churchill’s internal war on the British working-class. Stalin and Mao both targeted peasants who were refusing to cooperate with forced collectivization and forced industrialization. In so doing, those two dictators were motivated by an attempt to catch up with what Britain had already achieved during the first industrial revolution (1760-1830), when it abandoned aristocratic feudalism in favour of industrial capitalism. The USA and Germany had also caught up with Britain (the UK), decades before Russia (the USSR) and China (the PRC) did.


An even more fascinating comparison could be undertaken between induced famines having taken place in the recent past, and the current controversy surrounding the definition of genocide. South Africa succeeded in convincing the International Criminal Court that Israel’s  assault on Gaza, that killed many more innocent people than did the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, could “plausibly” be seen as a form of genocide.


I read an article in “Le Devoir”, published on October 4, 2024, re-visiting this controversy after a similar article had been published six months prior to that. In both cases, journalists from that newspaper cited several sources who agreed with the contention that Israel’s recent assault on Gaza could be seen as a form of genocide. One of those sources was William Schabas, a professor of international law at the University of Middlesex in London, who concluded that  Israel will most likely be condemned by that court once they finish their deliberations. I remember talking quite extensively with Schabas about international affairs over fifty years ago, when we both belonged to a short-lasting, left-wing organization in Toronto. There really are quite a few similarities between Churchill’s period of history and our own times.


Ali also referred to Churchill’s imperialist disdain for Ireland, that he described as the only group of white people mistreated by Churchill in the same way that he mistreated the black and brown-skinned people living within his empire. It seems to me, however, that Ali left out another group of predominantly white people, those belonging to the francophone majority in Québec, whose current population is larger than that of today’s Ireland. The Québécois, however, should not be confounded with the French-Canadians living in English Canada, most of whom have lost their ability to speak their language of origin because of Canada’s assimilationist strategy.


British and English-Canadian imperialist attempts to include the francophone Québécois, particularly those supporting independence, as part of the French-Canadian phenomenon, break down as soon as we realize that most of those people, like my (now deceased) biological father in British Columbia, communicate exclusively in English. Not to forget that millions of US citizens, also of French-Canadian origin, lost their capacity to speak French generations ago. The total number of former French-Canadians living in the USA is even larger than the number of francophone Québecois, and the throughly assimilated French-Canadians living in English Canada, put together.


Getting back to my main theme, as a British imperialist, Churchill was also very much opposed to any attempts on the part of the League of Nations, or the United Nations, to replace constantly-recurring warfare between empires with any kind of international strategy aimed at achieving long-lasting peace. Ali also demonstrated quite well in his book that Churchill was firmly opposed to ending the war between the social classes, not only inside his country, and  his empire, but also everywhere else. Aside from preserving the empire at all costs, he devoted his life to making sure that the world’s “inferior classes” would always remain in their place. To be sure, he was only one of thousands of other empire-builders all over the world who have long sought to preserve the domination of the world’s elitist minorities, whether of aristocratic or of bourgeois origin.


The other book that I read recently, Pleau’s “Rue Duplessis, ma petite noirceur”, published in 2024, does not seem to resemble Ali’s book on Churchill at all. Pleau’s work is largely a chronicle of his rejection of his parents’ lack of formal education, in particular his father’s lack of literary skills. His title refers to his attempt to compare his childhood while living with his parents on Duplessis Street in Drummondville, Québec, with the “grande noirceur” of Québec premier Maurice Duplessis’s periods in office (1936-1939 and 1944-1960). Duplessis kept his province in relative poverty during his time in power, focusing on less advanced, labour-intensive industries like textile production (as in Drummondville) rather than more prosperous industries like automobile production, then being developed in Ontario and the USA.


His book was denounced by many reviewers as the complaint of a spoiled social climber. Nevertheless, he did briefly describe how his father, in spite of his literary handicap, was able to plan how to go about doing his work. Like millions of other such people, without ever writing a word, he could still imagine what his final product ought to look like, and bring that plan to fruition using only artisan’s tools. Pleau was born in 1977 and his father was still alive ten years later, so everything that he had to say about the illiterate origins of a large section of the working-class in Québec, as well as about the long-lasting, ultra-conservative prejudices of those who thought like his father did, were not just confined to the Duplessis era.


On a world scale, not just in Québec, but also in the other Canadian provinces, throughout the USA, Europe, European Russia, Russia’s Asian colonies, Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, all the other countries in Asia (not just the big ones like China and India), all the countries in Africa, as well as all the Latin American countries south of the USA—the worldwide, non-feudal working-class encompasses billions of people. Millions of them, mostly in the richer countries, are better educated and more prosperous nowadays than they were before, but most of them, especially in the poorer countries, are not nearly as well-educated nor as well-off. Millions of them also belong to movements trying to do away with class discrimination altogether, but millions more share the same kind of ultra-conservative beliefs that Pleau’s father did.


If we look at the overall situation realistically, however, today’s workers are not being better treated than they were back in the nineteenth century, when observers like Karl Marx were alive. Not at least in proportion to the corresponding levels of prosperity and deprivation that existed back then. We can certainly be impressed with the huge changes that have taken place recently in our world, but we also must not lose sight of the fact that many things have not changed all that much. When comparing Ali’s book on Churchill with Pleau’s book on his life, in spite of all their differences, they do nevertheless have several things in common.


Québec essayist Pierre Milot was inspired to write an article (“Trump a l’oreille d’un essayiste ‘littéraire’ comme colistier”) published in “Le Devoir” on July 20, 2024, comparing some of Pleau’s arguments with those of Donald Trump’s candidate for vice-president, J. D. Vance. According to Milot, Vance’s popular book, “Hillbilly Elegy”, that also inspired a Ron Howard film, took a totally different attitude toward social climbing than Pleau did. Vance decided that an ultra-reactionary attitude should be adopted instead, denouncing social climbing in favour of “protecting” the hillbillies from the so-called “liberal elite”.


Milot criticized Pleau’s attempts to justify his own social ascension by turning to his personal advantage the theories of the well-known French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu (“Science de la science et réflexiivité”). According to Milot, a more recent French philosopher, Chantal Jaquet, author of “Les transclasses ou la non-reproduction”, argued against Bourdieu’s reflexivity approach, but her opposing point of view about people all over the world who change social class in the course of their lives, did not prevent Pleau from making his own attempt at using Bourdieu’s reflexivity theories anyway.


Milot’s opinion about what Pleau was up to is quite interesting, but I would have to read Bourdieu’s works on that subject, and Jaquet’s contribution, before making up my own mind. What I would like to comment on here is Vance’s attempt to turn reality upside-down, typical of ultra-right-wing populists’ false identification with downtrodden people, such as the “hillbilly” section of the US population. For decades now, fascist politicians all over the world have pretended to “protect” the lowest of the low from their elitist enemies, but in an extremely false and destructive way.


Industrial workers living in the “Rust Belt”, who lost their jobs to countries like China and Mexico, not only in the USA but also in several other Western countries, have been targeted by political movements like Trump’s for similar reasons. Trump and Vance conveniently “forget” that it was the Republican Party, under Richard Nixon, that initiated the transfer of industrial jobs to poorer countries like China. In the real world, however, “Tricky Dick” did not belong to the “liberal swamp”, any more than did his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan. As an even more recent successor, Donald Trump is keeping alive the ultra-conservative tradition of blaming the rest of the world for everything that goes wrong in one’s own country.


I have been arguing since 2015 that Trump, his US allies, and ultra-right-wing populists in every other country in the world, are in fact coming from the same elitist swamp that they are pretending to replace. Decades ago, as well as nowadays, people like Trump do not try to help downtrodden people fight against the “liberal” swamp. In reality, from the 1920s to the present day, ultra-right-wing populists represent the reactionary wing of the very same swamp.


Today’s ultra-right-wing populists are simply re-enacting the classical-fascist version of that same strategy. Some people may argue that politicians like Trump are not as evil or as murderous as were Hitler and his allies back then. In reality, however, Trump’s repeated attempts to abolish future elections, after winning a plurality vote, closely resemble what Hitler did in Germany several decades ago. In other words, it is not just Churchill’s induced famine in Bengal that closely resembles Adolf Hitler’s massacre of the European Jews. Trump is also imitating Hitler, as he recently admitted.


Not to forget that Churchill also supported Mussolini’s fascism for years, abandoning that stance only when Mussolini fell completely under Hitler’s domination. As I pointed out earlier, Churchill had his own reasons for disliking Nazi Germany, because it threatened his empire. As it turned out, the British big-wig best known for supporting Hitler’s brand of fascism was former king Edward VIII, seconded by his wife, Wallis Simpson, the rich, American, Nazi-loving, divorcée blamed for his abdication, who played that role for several decades afterwards.


Getting back to the Trump campaign, they also claim that they want to “protect” American women from their own reproductive rights. This ridiculous proposition is quite similar, not only to Hitler’s contemptuous attitude toward women in general, but also to Trump’s neofascist attempts to “protect” the hillbillies and the industrial workers from the “liberal elite”. In reality, Trump and his followers want to “protect” all those people in the same way that they want to “protect” fellow autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un, by making deals that allow those dictators to do whatever they want, so long as those autocrats grant Trump the same favour. This is yet another situation that recalls the similarities between Churchill and Hitler.


Trump is opposed to women’s reproductive rights, including abortion, because he supports

the ultra-right-wing populist narrative according to which women ought to stop taking jobs away from men, stay at home and give birth to as many babies as possible. He currently supports this reactionary point of view, that he did not support before he decided to get into politics, because he knows that most of his base holds that same view for ultra-Christian reasons. It seems to me, however, as it does to millions of others, that women ought to be able to enjoy the same well-rounded lives as do many of the world’s men, getting access to decent homes, decent jobs, decent vacations and all the other good things in life.


Ultra-right-wing fanatics from every other religion, including Orthodox Christians (as in Russia, Serbia and Ukraine), but also Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Confucianist, Shintoist and indigenous fanatics, support the same anti-feminist fantasies. The only folks in today’s world who disagree with this from a non-religious point of view are the small number of trans-gender fanatics, of male origin, who do not seem to realize that pretending to be a woman is not the same as being one. The only people capable of giving birth to children are women, since it is physically impossible to fully change male-origin bodies into women’s bodies.


However, this does not mean that women should therefore be forced to get pregnant and to give birth all the time, against their will. Instead, all women the world over should be allowed to do whatever they want with their bodies. None of the women in the world’s poorest countries (such as Mali), and none of the women in the world’s richest countries (such as the USA), should be forced into accepting “traditional” (reactionary) ways of life. As for the total population in the world, it definitely does not have to increase all the time, putting enormous pressure on currently available resources, in order to accommodate such totally irrational fantasies.


Curiously enough, Trump’s “protection” of women from reproductive rights is also a lot like his  support for Israel, claiming that if the US electorate, particularly the Jewish section, votes for Kamala Harris instead of for him, Israel is finished. Once again, he is only saying that because he knows that his fanatic Christian base supports Israel because the Bible says that Jesus can never “come again” if Israel does not control the entire Middle East before that ancient day-dream can be fulfilled. Those same Christian nationalists refuse to realize that the Israelis of biblical times have become Palestinian Muslims over the years. Nor do they accept the fact that many of the people running Israel nowadays are not of Semitic descent. According to their thoroughly deranged point of view, accepting the world as it really is, rather than the way that they want it to be, is a form of sacrilege.


This is just one more reason that countries like Canada should change any laws that exempt religious organizations from those intending to guarantee human rights on a universal basis. In Canada’s criminal code, religious fanatics are allowed to hate other people as much as they want, and to discriminate against them, if their religious group requires it. Bloc Québécois politicians, elected to Canada’s House of Commons, have been urging the federal government to get rid of that exemption for quite some time, but to no effect. In the real world, exempting religious hatred from human rights legislation means that human rights anywhere cannot ever become genuinely universal.


The current US election campaign is also a good example of what not to do about climate change. Every country in the world, including the USA, has recently had to face up to tremendous damage being brought on by severe weather events (droughts, forest fires, flooding, a rise in sea levels threatening coastal communities, and so on) brought on by global warming. The main source of which being totally un-natural pollution caused by the constantly accelerating production and consumption of fossil fuels over the past 200 years.


Donald Trump and his ultra-religious friends have been pretending for years that these weather events have nothing to do with burning fossil fuels, and cannot be significantly reduced by limiting that consumption. They argue, as Vance did during the vice-presidential candidates’ debate, that the only acceptable way to improve the situation is to stop importing such products from outside the US. They want us to believe that all the other producers in the world pollute a lot more than they do. However, such a picayune measure would not change much in the overall world situation. This is just another example of something that cannot be controlled on a nation-by-nation, or an empire-by-empire basis. It can only be tackled by adopting a truly progressive, international, anti-imperialist point of view.


This situation is also compounded by the fact that Kamala Harris could not solve that problem either. This is because her approach is to promise everything to everybody living in her country, simultaneously. She wants to bring about some kind of future “transition” to deal with climate change, while continuing to support Biden’s own version (the Inflation Reduction Act) of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” slogan. It ought to be obvious to everyone that building up the US economy, or any other national economy, by burning a lot more fossil fuels, while still claiming to deal adequately with climate change, is impossible. It is so incredibly unrealistic that it amounts to a new form of insanity.


Fossil fuels have been a very large part of the world economy, and world prosperity (no matter how unevenly distributed), for quite a long time. This is just another excellent example of how nothing whatever can be done to solve this conundrum on a national or an imperial basis. In Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand, in the UK, in Western and Eastern Europe, in China, in India and in every other Asian, African and Latin-American country, people are faced with exactly the same impasse as they are in the USA. Some kind of genuine (not fake) international cooperation has to be put into place, very quickly, if we are ever to get out of this enormous quagmire.


Another one of the huge crises that I mentioned earlier is the use of artificial intelligence to enormously expand thought control. While it is true that AI is being used to good purpose in some areas, the fact remains that predatory capitalism is also using it for nefarious purposes. The “Guardian Weekly” recently printed an excerpt from historian Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, entitled “Never summon a power you can’t control” (August 30, 2024). Although I did not like some of the interpretations of events that Harari offered in one of his earlier history books, I must admit that the Guardian excerpt from his history of information gathering impressed me quite a bit.


His basic idea is that most of our large networks of international cooperation “have been built and maintained by spreading fictions, fantasies and mass delusions—from enchanted broomsticks to financial systems.” He goes on to say that “information is the glue that holds networks together, and when people are fed bad information they are likely to make bad decisions”. His conclusion is that because of the recent acceleration in the production of information, “circulating at breathtaking speeds, humanity is closer than ever to annihilating itself.” Like other well-informed commentators, he zeroes in on how all of this is jeopardizing “the ecological foundations of our own species” and “producing ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction.”


He claims that artificial intelligence is turning into a form of alien intelligence. From his perspective, this newest form of alienation is a completely unacceptable extension of the kind of ultra-egotistical attitudes that have long been adopted by many extremely rich and powerful people in the past. They belong to the dominant minority, deliberately mistreating millions of ordinary people, that they consider to be “inferior” to themselves, in order to fulfill their own hubristic fantasies of superiority.


This ties in quite well with my own observations about how countries pretending to be democratic do not in fact succeed any more than do countries pretending to be socialist. Fake democracy has come up with slogans like “the rule of law” to make it seem as if those countries are truly democratic, just like “revolutionary socialism” pretends to treat everyone equally in a communist fashion, while “democratic socialism” pretends to treat everyone equally in a democratic fashion. The “rule of law”, however, never seems to be put into practise for real, a lot like the way in which social equality is never really observed under either “revolutionary” or “democratic” socialism.


Predatory capitalism, founded during the first industrial revolution in Britain (1760-1830), the the era of classical liberalism, gradually fell out of favour in many countries during the twentieth century, but was restored during the neoliberal counter-revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. It is still very much the dominant economic system today, having spread from the West into every other part of the world. Harari’s description of “alien intelligence” is based on the same general idea, the new systems making things even better for a very small number of people, while making them even worse for the vast majority of people. A few million people seem to have benefited from yet another rise in their standard of living, while hundreds of millions of others have lost out once again. Worldwide, it seems that the number of poor people, defined by one international agency as those living on less than 6 or 7 dollars a day, has increased in recent years, returning to the situation that already existed in 1990, when predatory capitalism (aka neoliberalism) took over the world.


In the Guardian excerpt, although Harrari never explicitly says anything like that, his description of alien intelligence, as an extension of already-established ways of mismanaging the entire world, looks to me like a recent revival of Lenin’s theory about imperialism as the most advanced stage of capitalism. Nowadays, the human race is destroying its capacity to survive by letting the world’s most powerful investors control everything that we do, even more drastically than they were already doing a hundred years ago. A recent illustration of this sort of thing took place when Elon Musk jumped for joy behind Donald Trump, after receiving praise from his political champion. Nowadays, ultra-right-wing billionaires like Musk are not only funding ultra-right-wing populists like Trump in every corner of today’s world. They are also using fascist politicians to guarantee the ever-expanding domination of predatory capitalism. This degree of thought control was only a distant dream for the “robber barons” of the early twentieth century.


Trump’s pedigree as the world’s leading fascist and isolationist politician has been particularly well-established, as film-maker Ali Abbasi reminded us recently in his documentary “The Apprentice”, about Trump’s entry into popular prominence. Trump’s and Musk’s patrician predecessors, people like Prescott Bush (George W Bush’s illustrious grandfather), were already on this path 90 years ago. They wanted to save capitalism from destruction during the Great Depression of the 1930s by supporting the US version of fascism and isolationism, aka ultra-right-wing capitalism. They disagreed completely with Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to save capitalism by accepting a modicum of social democracy, a move that helped bring about the “Keynesian compromise” between capital and labour, then going to war against fascism in alliance with the USSR.


After the war, anti-Roosevelt patricians supported extreme forms of anti-communism, typified by the rise of what came to be known as McCarthyism, after senator Eugene McCarthy, a thoroughly corrupt individual who went much further in this direction than did FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, in repudiating Roosevelt’s ideas. McCarthy succeeded in enthralling a large part of the US public with his ultra-reactionary denunciation of the “communist plot to take over the world”. As pointed out in the film, McCarthy’s number-one henchman was Roy Cohn, a hyper-sleazy, hyper-reactionary, closet-homosexual who stopped at nothing to get what he wanted.


This was the same Roy Cohn who later in life convinced his apprentice, Donald Trump, to become “The Apprentice”, using Trump’s reality television series (2004-2017) to turn him into an American celebrity, capable of getting himself elected as president. The re-election of this disgusting individual on November 5, 2024, would mean that he would be free to repeat Adolph Hitler’s exploit of the 1930s, abolishing any further elections in the USA, as he already tried to do the first time he was president, and running the USA as a fascist empire. This is the role that Trump has been preparing for in recent years, becoming an up-to-date champion of the fascist isolationism of his American predecessors. Given the concomitant rise of ultra-right-wing populism in every other country in today’s world, this is likely to become the worldwide victory that fascism did not succeed in pulling off during the Second World War.


It looks very much like totalitarian capitalism has come to control the entire world nowadays, propelled forward by the unprecedented success of reactionary movements all over the world. Ultra-right-wing capitalist investors and politicians are also being helped along to a certain extent by people pretending to be doing just the opposite. Opportunist leftists like Jean-Luc Melenchon in France promote social-democratic policies while simultaneously relying on electoral support from ultra-right-wing Islamist immigrants. This is happening not only in traditionally Catholic-Christian countries like France but also in traditionally Orthodox-Christian countries like Russia, where the Putin regime thinks nothing of allying itself with Islamist movements and countries like Iran, as long as they are anti-Western.


An even more insidious way of supporting totalitarian capitalism, without saying so, is to adopt fake communism instead. In the past, highly eccentric individuals like Stalin and Mao used the slogan “socialism in a single country” to promote something that was not really socialist or communist at all. The same strategy has been revived by more up-to-date practitioners like Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. I read an article by psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, “The Age of Rage”, published in the “Guardian Weekly” (September 20, 2024), about the “public mood” created by  “social media warriors”, currently being “harnessed by populist agitators”. Although most of this rage has been channelled into ultra-right-wing populism (fascism), it is true that some of it is being used by oppressive regimes pretending to be communist.


Those regimes manipulate mass anger, expressed by “victims of injustice and oppression”, into a kind of “rage bank”. That “bank” is then used to manipulate millions of people into supporting fake-communist regimes, that turn out to be just as oppressive as those that support capitalism openly. Cohen borrowed part of his analysis from German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, the author of a book published in 2006, “Rage and Time”, that I would definitely want to get my hands on soon.


For the past several years, I have also been arguing that such regimes imitate totalitarian capitalism in a very peculiar way. They make it seem to their own people that they are opposing class discrimination, while in fact turning most of them into mass worshippers of individual domination. Those dictators incorporate the actions of the oppressors running openly capitalist countries, fashioning their own personal forms of exploitation. They treat their millions of eager devotees as if they were standing in, individually, for the thousands of powerful investors and politicians running ordinary capitalist regimes.


Whether referring to people like Churchill, or to the working-class in Duplessis’s Québec, or to Trump’s American subterfuge, or to any other portion of reality, it is just as important nowadays as it was in the past to find out what is or was really going on. We cannot passively accept the lies being told by whoever happens to be in power, or aspiring to power, anywhere in the world, at any particular time. We need to do away with reactionary, capitalist, imperialist, fascist and fake-socialist attitudes, toward every major theme, no matter from which direction they come: North, South, East and West. We also need to dump illusions about fake “progress” into the garbage can. In every case, this is not just about powerful people, nor just about downtrodden people, it is true about how all people relate to one another worldwide.


Given the increasingly dangerous nature of these converging crises—frequent wars, nuclear proliferation, global warming, totalitarian capitalism, abysmal social divisions and the triumph of thought control—we no longer have a choice. If we are serious about preserving human life during the next several decades, we are going to have to adopt a truly progressive, anti-imperialist, anti-reactionary world-view.


Unfortunately, the least that can be said right now is that the leaders of empires, their capitalist collaborators and their allies in the downtrodden nations, will never support anything like that. The small number of perpetrators of all those huge crises are backed up by hundreds of millions of political and religious fanatics practising ultra-right-wing populism, in every corner of the world. The enormous weight of all those political forces put together is also being strengthened by the fake opposition of centrist politicians and corrupted left-wing organizations.


To fight against all the reactionary tendencies currently dominating Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and evangelical fanatics), of Islam (Sunni and Shiite fanatics), of Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Confucianist, Shintoist and indigenous fanatics, we need to go beyond medieval obscurantism. We should be following the lead of people like Fatima Aboubakr, an immigrant from Morocco now running a day-care centre in Québec, who is thoroughly opposed to religious fanaticism, not only in her country of origin but also in her adopted country. I was very impressed by an article she wrote in “Le Devoir” (October 22, 2024), “Ne plus tolérer l’intolérance: Il ne suffit pas d’avoir des lois pour affirmer la laicité de l’État, encore faut-il les faire respecter” (“No tolerance for intolerance: It is not enough to proclaim official laicity, we must also enforce it”). She probably never heard of me before, so she may not agree with everything that I have written in this blogpost, but I believe that we need more people like her in this world.


Unfortunately, the millions of ordinary people who support genuinely progressive movements and causes are few and far between. There are not nearly enough brave souls out there, ready to adopt a truly progressive world-view, in order to overcome the domination of the degenerate VIPs who run the world. This is particularly true when we realize that the VIPs and their hundreds of millions of fanatic allies, are in fact competing violently with each other for world domination. The human race as a whole cannot survive this kind of constant geopolitical and ideological warfare much longer. We have to support a truly progressive, international, anti-imperialist world-view if we want our species to survive.