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.
