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.”
