New horizons

My career teaching history at the college where I had earned my permanence was not going very well. Although we had all resolved to change the human science program substantially since completing the evaluation process that I mentioned earlier, none of the changes that were implemented had managed to stop a precipitous decline in enrollment. It did not help at all that many of our other proposals had been deliberately ignored, but the decline also seemed to depend a lot on the kind of image competition with other colleges that the government had been encouraging all along. The limited kind of tenure we had did not prevent that college from putting me and several other teachers on a list of people whose jobs were not guaranteed any more. So I ended up getting transferred to yet another new college instead, which turned out to be a good career move because I finally found genuinely long term employment for quite a few more years.

While I was still in the process of changing colleges, however, the southwestern part of Quebec, and other nearby regions in neighboring states and provinces, were hit by a giant ice storm that cut out electricity for several weeks. That ice storm was even more frightening than the Saguenay flooding that we had already lived through, as well as being another good example of disaster capitalism. While everyone was suffering together and reading stories about all the abandoned homes being robbed and vandalized, I remembered what had happened several years before that. Back then, one of the PQ ministers, François Gendron, had informed me and a small group of other PQ members that Hydro-Québec’s distribution system was extremely fragile and that something had to be done about it very soon.

As usual in such cases, nothing was ever done, not at all before the ice storm and nothing much since then, the authorities always deciding in such cases not to spend any real money on preparation for any extreme events, whether natural or manmade. However, millions more people all over the world have been suffering just like we did then, as extreme circumstances tend to become more and more commonplace. Several years after the ice storm, for example, the same combination of natural and manmade disasters resulted in more unprecedented floods, this time in the Richelieu region, north of Lake Champlain, after having also devastated large parts of the eastern USA. In that situation, nothing had been done beforehand to prepare for that kind of disaster either, even though thousands of people were knowingly living on a flood plain, and nothing much has been done once again, since then.

My new junior college turned out to be my last place of work and the one that I taught in the longest. In addition to a regular teaching load and normal participation in department and program committee meetings, I also contributed several short articles to the little bulletin that the department put out during several consecutive semesters for our students. Most of those contributions were centered on controversies in history, such as the ongoing battle between the science of history and the heritage industry that so often warps historical knowledge for some current political purpose, all over the world. I also wrote about many other topics, like the political philosophy of the ultra conservative Quebec historian, Lionel Groulx, the disgusting opinion of an ultra orthodox Israeli rabbi concerning God’s alleged use of the Holocaust to punish the Jews for their sins, and the American controversy over the 9000 year old Kennewick skeleton.

Several years later, I read a very carefully written book by Ronald Fritze, called Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions, that did an excellent job debunking several different historical fabrications. A fascinating chapter in that book contained quite a bit more information about the American controversy that I wrote about earlier, concerning the skeleton found recently near the city of Kennewick, in the state of Washington. Fritze made a convincing, well documented case that the skeleton was indeed not from any of the Amerindian first nations, of Siberian origin, but probably from a person of Ainu origin (northern Japan), possessing “Caucasian” features. According to him, several other skeletons found later on in different parts of the Americas tended to confirm the hypothesis about the multiple origins of the pre Viking peoples in the New World. Fritze also took extreme care in the same chapter not to give credence to any of the ridiculous racial myths about ancient or medieval European arrivals in the Americas that were not supported by any archeological or anthropological evidence.

It seems that the American Indians who went to court back in the 1990s to prevent scientists from doing confirmation testing on the Kennewick skeleton were indeed not so much interested in preserving their ancient religious practices. What they especially wanted was to make sure that no one could question their status as first nations, and the expenditure of the several billion dollars in federal subsidies that went with that claim. Apparently, they were afraid that if anyone proved once and for all that their ancestors were not the only people who lived in the Americas 9000 years ago, they could lose a large part of that money. The worst aspect of that story is that they may very well have been right. Native peoples all over the world should be able to be compensated for much more recent examples of racism and abuse, without having to falsify historical reality.

During that same period, I also embarked on a long term project aimed at writing several books on skepticism and secularism. After many years of research, I prepared three small works of about 150-180 pages each, that all came out during the first several years of the new century: Taking the Lying out of Living, Universal Skepticism and Billions of Big Babies. Each book was an attempt at applying the principles of model dependent realism to the human condition, by pointing out that physical or biological nature, and human nature, are part of the same process and not independent entities. I have to admit, however, that my own understanding of the human perception of reality has matured over the years, since each book was rather more optimistic than the succeeding one. The twin prejudices of optimism and pessimism cannot be allowed to get in the way of any genuine attempt to perceive the world as it is rather than as we want it to be. Today, unfortunately, it is not at all obvious that humanity as a whole is really progressing toward any kind of secular skepticism.

As a human science teacher, I had by that time abandoned the ideologies that I had been supporting earlier in my life, and adopted the fight against belief itself as my main intellectual stance. To teach history as a science rather than as a vehicle for religious or ideological propaganda therefore became a major theme in my own books. Ever since I had read Chinese leader Liu Zhao chi’s text, How to be a good communist, back in the 1960s, I had been wondering why people always seem to have huge problems trying to remain true to their chosen beliefs. What I found out over the years was that all belief systems are necessarily based on false premises.

Over the centuries, idealistic people have come to believe in all sorts of strange things, such as magic, or God, or the workers state, that do not exist in the real world. Those naive people are a lot like the children targeted by the treatment of fairies in several popular animated cartoons. Extreme gullibility makes them feel that their chosen ideal will continue to exist and grow stronger if only they believe in it hard enough. Once they allow themselves to mature, however, confrontation with reality constantly leads many of those same people to betray their ideological masters.

This observation applies to every kind of belief system, all the religions as well as all the modern ideologies. Spiritual belief systems include not only tribal religions of “prehistoric” origin, but also all the different kinds of elitist religions, whether they be polytheist, monotheist, or religious philosophies. Throughout world history, missionaries from all those elitist religions, of aristocratic origin, converted most of the world’s peoples from the various forms of tribal animism they were supporting before to the different kinds of newly established, state supported, belief. One of the reasons those missionaries did that was because whatever the differences between them, all the official religions always emphasized the divine or heavenly origins of the various regional aristocracies.

Rebellion against ruling class domination could therefore be denounced as sacrilege, or war against the celestial order of things. In other words, official religions have always been used to support political and social domination. In more recent times, the false premises of organized religion were also replicated as incomplete or parochial versions of reality in all the modern political ideologies, such as conservatism, liberalism, nationalism, socialism, anarchism, fascism and communism. During my research I discovered that every one of those unscientific beliefs, whether religious or political in origin, conflicts with reality all the time. This statement applies equally to all the various factions and schisms within those same belief systems.

Reality’s conflict with faith, and the inevitable competition between all the different belief systems that have sprung up over the centuries, have led many people into adopting hybrids. In other words, millions of people end up trying to follow more than one kind of belief at the same time. To start with, all the official religions failed in their initial attempts to completely eradicate the influence of tribal religions among the different peoples that their missionaries were supposed to have converted over the centuries. As a result, hundreds of millions of believers officially counted nowadays as belonging to some major religion or another have instead adopted syncretic beliefs, becoming partly disciples of the officially imposed religion, but also partly retaining significant credence in antediluvian forms of superstition and sorcery.

They did this in spite of the fact that none of those hybrids were in any way logical or consistent, since each kind of shared belief inevitably betrays the fundamental premises of the other kind. For example, how is someone in his or her right mind supposed to simultaneously believe in the jealous hegemony of one universal God, and in the real efficacy of an amulet to ward off evil spirits? Why does it not occur to people of faith that those two kinds of belief are mutually exclusive? In spite of those rather obvious contradictions, many of the newer fundamentalist sects have deliberately added beliefs of tribal origin to their own official religious liturgy even in more recent times.

Most religious believers also combine their faith with simultaneous adhesion to one or several secular beliefs. They somehow manage to reconcile their spiritual attachment with some form of patriotism (imperialist or anti imperialist nationalism), as well as with some other political ideology such as conservatism, liberalism or socialism. As a result, most believers end up adhering to many different and conflicting kinds of belief at the same time. Moderate as well as fundamentalist believers do this in spite of the fact that, again theoretically, no universal, spiritual, ontology is at all compatible with any one of the lesser, more parochial beliefs. One major example of this is the tendency among millions of monotheists to spend most of their time worshipping Mammon rather than God, even more nowadays than they did in centuries past.

Some of them, including many fundamentalists, have gone so far as to adore wealth as a sign of divine pleasure, thereby splitting their religious devotion into simultaneous worship of good and evil (Manichaeism). Whenever such competing belief packages enter into conflict with each other, as they so often do, what initially seems to outside observers like a simple dispute between competing confessions ends up becoming quite a bit more complicated. In case after case, the causes of sometimes violent battles between competing groups of believers become hard to pin down when different communities fight with each other partly for religious reasons, partly for patriotic reasons and partly for social or economic reasons expressed in the form of opposing ideologies.

Idealists who believe in some sort of universal good, of whatever origin, are also in deep trouble whenever they try to blindly adhere to any particular ideological vehicle, or institution. In reality, the larger, the more important and the longer lasting that institution is, the more it should be avoided, for the simple reason that it has had more opportunity to do evil. Everyone’s theoretical ideals go out the window when those institutions fall under the influence, as they always do, of either economic gain or geopolitical considerations, or both at the same time.

A good example of one such long lasting ideological institution is the Catholic church, many of whose representatives have committed all sorts of heinous crimes throughout the past fifteen centuries or so. Other such vehicles or institutions include the governments of extremely powerful empires built up in modern times by all sorts of dominant countries, from every region of the world. The list of such morally corrupt human institutions is endless, since no religion, ideology or ethnic identity has ever been able to avoid any of the different kinds of immoral behavior for very long.

Consequently, no one who belongs to any of those institutions, large or small, has any right to be proud of his or her affiliation, as a whole. An individual believer may legitimately take pride in certain positive contributions of many of those institutions to overall human society, but the negative aspects of every one of them easily cancel out anything positive that they may have accomplished in the past.The end result of all this is that no one can become a good communist, or a good patriot, or a good Christian, or a good Muslim, or a good anything else. Nor can anyone outside those belief systems be legitimately accused of blasphemy, since it is the believers themselves who are always blaspheming their own devotion by mixing it up with something else.

It turns out that every single one of those ideal beliefs is too demanding by itself for real human beings to successfully follow. Every single believer ends up betraying the cause, sinning all the time, becoming as unfaithful to his or her chosen ideology as a serial adulterer. All believers end up becoming liars, not because they want to be but because they are after all just human beings who are forced to live in the real, natural world, rather than in an imagined world of their own choosing.

That is why, in the second book of my skeptical trilogy, I was able to criticize the point of view developed by three American historians (Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob) in a work that they called Telling the Truth about History. Although those three authors did quite a good job in defending historical science from relativism and deconstructionism, they nevertheless erred in assuming that science can always be used to promote a more intellectually alive and democratic society. Unfortunately, democracy is just another imperfect ideology, like monotheism or patriotism. To be truly scientific about it would mean to acknowledge that with a little effort any more or less democratic country can be manipulated into supporting all sorts of unscientific abominations, although not quite as easily as in more authoritarian countries.

Aside from the millionaire funded Tea Party movement in the USA, one of the more interesting recent examples has been the democratic rebellions against long established dictators in the Arab world. Some of the elected regimes in the countries with an Arab language majority have turned out to be more reactionary, in some ways, than their more authoritarian predecessors, especially insofar as women’s rights are concerned. The same kind of misogyny also became obvious in Iran after the Islamic counter revolution of 1979, and more recently even in officially democratic Israel, not to mention the ultra conservative points of view adopted by most of the Christian evangelists in the USA.

In a dictatorship, ordinary people have no rights whatsoever whereas in a democracy, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, rights are guaranteed only until people really need them. In any kind of crisis, such as world wars or great depressions, human rights are always set aside by all the elected authorities. Even in relatively minor crises, such as large scale strikes, democracies end up becoming almost as authoritarian as totalitarian countries. It turns out that democracy is no guarantee at all against restrictions on supposedly fundamental rights.

Supporting science as opposed to magic, religion or ideology also means avoiding turning it into just another belief system, as is the case with positivism or scientism, not to mention government or private enterprise skewing of scientific work for propaganda purposes. Whenever that is done, the result is not genuinely scientific, since secular skepticism is the only scientific attitude possible. Even long established scientific facts, supported by multiple observation, experiment and peer review, are always only temporary, waiting for the next scientific revolution to overturn them. In science, there can be no eternal fixation on established facts.

The one book that impressed me the most when I was reflecting on all those different things in my own writings was David Lowenthal’s contribution, Possessed by the Past: the Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. In that book, Lowenthal showed how the myth makers from every single religion, ideology, national or ethnic identity in the world have managed to rewrite history in order to promote any number of erroneous accounts about their origins. All those stories were specifically invented to help rulers control millions of intellectually dependent people, regardless of what kind of spiritual or political regime was doing the controlling. Even more importantly, the myth makers have always managed to impose their false versions of history even decades after serious historians succeeded in theoretically demolishing all those historical inventions.

Successful deceptions include not only such rather obvious attempts as the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, from czarist Russia, as well as dozens of other more recent scribblings of the same ilk. They also include the somewhat more sophisticated arguments of the promoters of Zionism concerning the historical origins of Israel and Palestine. I was therefore additionally impressed with the contributions of Norman Finkelstein (The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering) and Marc Ferro (Historical Taboos), both of which included material about the manipulation of history to support erroneous claims to Greater Israel.

Among others, those two historians put forward the alternative hypothesis that some of today’s Jews could be the descendants of the Khazar tribes from Eastern Europe who converted to Judaism during the ninth century, rather than forcibly dispersed people whose ancestors originally came from the Semitic areas of the Middle East. At the same time, they also mentioned the possibility that many of the descendants of the Semitic Jews from the Bible later converted to Islam and eventually became part of today’s Palestinian population. It turns out that the entire Israeli-Palestinian situation is just a special example of the same kind of historically absurd territorial conflict that takes place just about everywhere else in the world, as with the ethnic and religious divisions in the British-Irish archipelago.

Almost every piece of territory on this planet has been occupied and fought over by various competing groups of people since the beginning of human existence. At the same time, membership in any one of the competing ethnicities, religious or political affiliations, has never been biologically exclusive. Ergo, from the point of view of historical science, no self proclaimed ideological entity nowadays, Zionism included, has the right to legitimately claim exclusive control over any particular geographical territory.

Erna Paris (Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History) has also denounced more or less similar fabrications concerning the history of several other countries, such as South Africa, many of which were used to justify pardons given to the ruling elite by the extremely dubious truth and reconciliation commission. Recent events in that unfortunate country have certainly borne out her critique, today’s rulers behaving almost as badly as those of the apartheid period. Her book also covered competing official lies that various different countries have concocted about World War Two, including the Holocaust, not to mention erroneous attitudes toward slavery in the USA and toward the more recent wars of disintegration in the former Yugoslavia.

The reading of all those works has convinced me that historical lying is one of the most important growth industries that currently exists. Recent debates between professional historians and theologians over what really happened during the actual lives of religious icons like Moses, Confucius, Gautama, Jesus, Mohamed, and a host of others, are also excellent examples of the incredible gap that always exists between history and heritage. Even much more recent icons, such as George Washington and Mahatma Gandhi, are most often treated in the same hagiographic manner. This is why true believers always hate the discipline of history so much, because it is forever proving that all the world’s systems of belief are merely contingent parochialisms, with no divine or scientific origins after all. In other words, history is to heritage as astronomy is to astrology, or as evolution is to creationism.

Later on, I was able to make similar observations when I found out about all the recent historical controversies in France. These started up only a few years ago, when that country passed a law similar to the one previously adopted in Germany, prohibiting people from denying the Holocaust. Unfortunately, that law was misinterpreted by some people to include rendering illegal the publishing of any historical material about the suffering that non Jewish people, such as the Rom people, the Slavs or even the Germans themselves, had to put up with during the Second World War, lest that result in reducing the relative importance of the Holocaust. Other recent extensions of similar laws also included taking historians to court if they wrote about African slaves being traded among other Africans, or by Islamic empires, lest that reduce the importance of the Atlantic slave trade by comparison. Another legislative attempt, since abandoned, was to silence any historian, or history teacher, who did not emphasize the positive results of French colonialism, as opposed to underlining anything negative about it.

Some of those controversies also had quite an influence on some of the material that I was publishing back then. In my contributions, I often made reference to those controversies and several other ones that came into the public domain during that same period. In Quebec, for example, a historian had started writing a biography of PH Desrosiers, the founder of a chain of retail stores during the 1950s, based on archives that were then owned by a more recent company. The head of the new company refused to let that historian complete his work because he felt that said historian was becoming much too critical of the cozy relationship that the founder had developed with Maurice Duplessis, the ultra conservative provincial premier back then. In other words, the heritage industry for rewriting history was not just confined to protecting belief systems and ethnic identities from any possible criticism, but also included protecting business groups from charges of corruption as well, not only recently but also a long time ago.

At one point, that kind of observation led me to put up a sign on my office door that I borrowed from a slogan adopted by skeptical historians during the final years of the Soviet Union: “Who knows what the past will look like tomorrow?” This is because all the world’s religions, ideologies and political parties are constantly trying to change history to suit their respective prejudices just as much as they are always deliberately misinterpreting current realities to further their own partisan objectives.

Another major theme in my books was my denunciation of the egotistical monsters who end up running most of the major institutions in the world, such as governments, private enterprises, universities, hospitals, and so on. On several occasions, I incorporated concepts borrowed from such experts as Marie-France Hirigoyen on toxic personalities to better explain some of my own conclusions. Her book on Stalking the Soul: Emotional Abuse and the Erosion of Identity, focused on helping psychiatric patients overcome rotten treatment at the hands of dominating individuals in their own lives.

Although she only hinted at any social generalization of her theory in her book, I was able to include her contribution to help me develop my theory about kakistocracy, the idea that all human societies always tend to be dominated by the world’s worst people. Or as baseball coach Leo Durocher put it, “Nice guys finish last.” This has led me to the conclusion that all human history can be summed up as a battle between sadistic and masochistic elements within society, which explains struggle between the competing social classes as well as all the other varieties of exploitation and suffering. False reconciliation between the victims and their oppressors often leads to such further abominations as the so called Stockholm syndrome, as with the Jewish capos in the Nazi concentration camps.

Reflections such as these also led me to change my mind about some of the other ideas I had supported in the past. One example of that was public automobile insurance in Quebec, introduced by the PQ government back in 1979. Unfortunately, that legislation included a no fault clause, meaning that everyone involved in most accidents is compensated equally by the public purse, even when it is proven that the reprehensible behavior of one person in particular caused the very dubious accident. To his credit, Marc Bellemare, a former justice minister, made this issue his special concern several decades after that law was passed. What is wrong here is that with this law evil behavior is rewarded rather than being sanctioned. Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens quite often all over the world, in the private sector at least as often as in the public sector, whenever responsible people are made to pay for irresponsible people’s actions.

Another major theme in my books was about the criminal justice system in general. In most cases, that system still errs on the side of repression, convicting innocent people regularly as well as condemning many ordinary criminals to lifelong incarceration for relatively minor crimes. At the same time, millions of other people having committed the very same crimes as those that were committed by the people currently in prison are never punished at all. To make matters still worse, some of the more liberal jurists in this world go to the opposite extreme, by trying to do everything that they can to help those criminals who have been convicted avoid the kind of punishment that society has deemed appropriate. As a result, they end up punishing the victims instead, a second time, by exonerating the criminals altogether or handing out ultralight sentences, then getting extremely upset at victims or their relatives when they refuse to pardon their tormentors. It seems to be much more important for those falsely magnanimous jurists to control popular reactions against their system than it is to control the criminals themselves.

Not long after I published those books, I got involved in another major Quebec controversy. That was right after the provincial government had set up another commission, led by a well known philosopher, Charles Taylor, and an equally well known historian, Gérard Bouchard, to make recommendations about what to do about so called reasonable accommodations. This had to do with all the attempts that ultra orthodox religious groups were making at the time to get Quebec society to allow them to do whatever they wanted, regardless of the deleterious effects that many of those concessions were having on the rest of the population. The very real and lingering racism of many thousands of unnamed ordinary people was trotted out as an official justification for over compensation.

At one point, I wrote an article that was published in a Montreal daily, La Presse, about how many of those demands were coming not only from some of the recent immigrants arriving in the west from the third world, but were also shared by some of the religious fanatics of purely western origin. Both groups demands were quite similar, involving such things as requiring semipublic institutions to put screens inside windows lest anyone passing on the street see women exercising in skintight suits. Other examples included requiring public institutions to make rooms available for private daily prayers, or letting students carry hidden knives, as religious symbols, with them while at school, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

My contribution was to point out that the moderate majority was under attack from all over, some of the world’s one billion fundamentalists coming from inside western traditions themselves, and not just from the more extreme factions within the immigrant populations that had recently moved to the west. Nowadays, countries in every region of the world have to defend themselves from the repeated onslaughts of ultra conservative religious groups, as in the recent assault of the ultra orthodox Jews against the secular majority inside Israel. In every case, accommodating extremist demands too much only means being excessively tolerant with the most intolerant people in society, a masochistic strategy that inevitably leads to strengthening intolerance in the long run, rather than weakening it. Recent declarations by the conservative Canadian government, to the effect that religious freedom should be considered more important than equality between men and women, make it obvious which side of the debate those people are on.

I also wrote another article that I intended to have published in the bulletin of the Quebec Association of college history teachers, about how reverse racism is often just as bad as the original variety. This is the term sometimes used to describe what happens whenever politically correct people try to kowtow to any group of extremists within an immigrant community who are committing crimes against their own populations. Honor killings of young women, for example, are tolerated much more by the politically correct when carried out by someone within an immigrant community, than if the same crime had been committed by someone within the host community. The same consideration also applies to crimes committed against women inside a native community.

Whenever people of western, or Judaeo Christian, origin behave in that way, they are denounced, quite rightly, by the politically correct as behaving like Nazis or other fascists. However, if someone from a non western, or non Christian, community behaves in the same way, cultural relativists refuse to denounce Nazi or fascist tendencies within any of those groups. In these cases, reverse racism means refusing to condemn atrocities as much if they are coming from within any oppressed group, or any group that is seen as being oppressed. Particularly disgusting religious or cultural practices are therefore tolerated more easily if they are committed in the third world, which is seen by most cultural relativists as still being largely oppressed by western countries. Executing people for apostasy, ablation of the clitoris, forcing raped girls to marry their rapists, female infanticide, the list is endless of the number of Nazi like horrors that politically correct people want us to play down, or even to ignore, when they are found outside western or Judaeo Christian parameters.

Most of those cultural abominations involve deliberate oppression of women in particular and it makes no moral difference why those atrocities exist. The victims do not really care if the presumed justification for their suffering can be found inside sacred works from some established religion, or is just the result of tribal influences that were never adequately eradicated. Unfortunately, my article on that subject was refused for publication in that bulletin, meaning that that organization had joined the growing list of associations imposing self censorship. I tried to protest against that decision with the editorial board, but none of my efforts ever led to anything. So I had to stop getting my contributions published in yet another periodical.

On summer trips during that same period, I got to travel to Europe a lot more often than I had done in the past, visiting quite a few of the major monuments and cultural sites in several European countries, from every period of history. While visiting such places, I could not help reflecting on the fact that each hugely expensive construction of all those large monuments was inevitably incurred for the increased glory of some immensely egotistical rulers who always managed to physically eliminate hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens in the process. Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias”, is an excellent source of inspiration about this kind of thing.

That is what I was thinking, for example, when I visited the enormous undertaking that Louis XIV had begun at Versailles, the incredible beauty of the site contrasting with the millions of peasants who died during the great French famines that took place during his reign. The Sun King’s even more incredible military expenditures may have had a lot more to do with worsening the effects of those famines than did his massive expenses on monuments, but his constant wars also added several hundred thousand more dead people to his total contribution to European history. Unfortunately, every single one of those buildings that I visited, not to mention thousands of others that I have only seen in museum exhibitions or picture books, is not only incredibly beautiful. Each one has also been quite literally built on the backs of millions of badly mistreated ordinary people (non VIPs), from every single country, since the beginning of recorded history.

Unfortunately, I also had very similar experiences during vacations in several parts of North America as well. One of those sites was the very strange “Diefenbunker” near Ottawa, an enormous, underground bomb shelter that was built during the cold war, when John Diefenbaker was the prime minister, to save Canadian dignitaries (not everyone else) from the much anticipated Third World War. Another example was the weird way in which the Mississippi River seems to have been raised up by army engineers so that it looks down on New Orleans. Going to Katrina modified New Orleans in particular made me reflect once again on how often non VIPs are mistreated by the ruling elites who had all those things built.

Back in my working life, those were also the same years during which the public sector unions in Quebec put together another one of their common fronts between the normally competing labor organizations. In the past, particularly back in the 1970s, those same federations had been able to unite sufficiently to make significant gains in wages and working conditions. Sometimes, they even managed to profit from the divisions between the federalist and the separatist governments. By the early part of the new century, however, all the Quebec governments had been gradually following the neoliberal lead of Thatcher and Reagan for quite some time, and were not at all interested in letting the union movement get the jump on them this time around.

For a couple of years, I got involved in many of the large demonstrations that those unions organized to get more money and more recognition for our work from the provincial government. We were in fact trying to catch up to the salaries and working conditions of other unionized employees in equivalent professions, in both the private sector and the rest of the public sector (federal and municipal employees). To be sure, we were like all the other middle class people in North America, in that our living and working conditions had stagnated, or even deteriorated, over the previous decades. From 1979 to the present, in almost every country, most of the benefit from any economic growth that took place has gone almost entirely to rich people.

To make things worse, in Quebec the provincial government has always paid everyone in the public sector, including doctors and teachers, much less than such people normally receive in many other parts of North America. In recent years, that gap has widened even more in most cases. As a result, I often found myself demonstrating at exactly the same geographical sites where I had already been protesting, often for quite different reasons, several decades before that.

At one point during those union pressure tactics, I was sufficiently involved in the movement to induce a couple of other activists to ask me if I would be interested in becoming a member of the local executive. My refusal then was based on the same argument that I had already used in another college several years before that. My problem with becoming a union official has always been that they are expected to support all their members in disputes with the administration. This even includes supporting members who are known to have committed crimes, sometimes heinous crimes, against other people while at work, something that I have always refused to condone, even toward colleagues that I knew personally.

In the end, however, the provincial government was able to convince most Quebeckers not to support us much, by pointing out that the majority of unorganized, private sector, workers had suffered a lot more from the recent economic recessions than we had. The fact that those international recessions were not at all caused by anything that we had done was simply ignored by everyone else but the unions. Also ignored by the government and most of our potential supporters was the fact that a large part of the accumulated provincial debt could be traced back to the monetarist strategy of fighting inflation back in the 1980s. Much of the federal government’s debt caused by that strategy had been transferred to the provinces during the 1990s, resulting in huge, annual, provincial deficits in many parts of Canada. Since then, of course, the federal debt has skyrocketed once again, because of all the more recent financial boondoggles in the private sector.

Conveniently forgetting all that several years later, the Quebec government stopped negotiating altogether and adopted a five-year (2005-2010) decree, or government fiat, by which provincial managers essentially wrote the new collective agreement all by themselves. Even today, many years after the designated period, most of the clauses of that decree are still on the books. Like the PQ administration of the early1980s, the Liberal government of the first decade of the new century also added insult to injury by banning any public criticism of its own decree.

Both of those governments were condemned several years after the fact by the International Labor Organization and the law courts for having negotiated in bad faith, but as usual those belated condemnations did not change the overall situation very much. In other words, more than two decades after Reagan and Thatcher had succeeded in crushing union militancy in the USA and Great Britain, the government of Quebec finally caught up. Since that time, the union movement in Quebec has had a lot less influence than it used to have. Construction union collaboration with crooked politicians and organized crime has also contributed greatly to that decline.

Not long after that, I became just as incensed as millions of other people when the 2007-2009 world financial crisis broke out, much bigger than any of the previous panics since the Second World War. This horrible event took place because of an enormous increase in the importance of purely speculative financial transactions, egged on by the incredibly stupid decisions of several leading politicians to completely eliminate all the financial safeguards that had been adopted during the great depression of the 1930s. One of those politicians was Bill Clinton, the most republican Democrat in the USA since Thomas Jefferson, who specifically promised everyone that his 1999 repudiation of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act would not lead to any kind of crisis whatsoever.

The world economy received an enormous jolt then from which it has not yet recovered, permanently undermining most of the world’s pension plans, including my own. Governments that were already hugely indebted to large private investors because of monetarism, and other more recent financial panics, all over the world, had to pay out tens of trillions of dollars of extra funds to those same financiers in order to save the world economy from another debilitating depression.

In fact, in recent years the speculative financiers have gone one step further on the road to iniquity than the ones that the radical socialists used to denounce back in the 1970s. Financiers nowadays not only do not care about less fortunate people in society, as they always refused to do in the past, now they do not even care what happens to the very investment firms that employ them. They have no loyalty to anyone except to themselves as individuals, thereby realizing the Hobbesian “war of each against all” quite a bit more than most of their predecessors ever did. By manipulating world markets, those egotistical maniacs got away with breaking the most fundamental rules of private capitalism, among other things by lending massive sums of money to people who had no capacity whatsoever to make good on their loans. Other toxic personalities disguised as CEOs and CFOs, using similar methods, also ruined several hundred huge corporations in dozens of different countries, from the 1980s right up to the present day.

As a result, even the great bugbear of the past, extreme greed, has now become only an instrument for the new financiers ultimate goal, which is to show everyone else in the world that they are indeed the meanest human beings who have ever existed. Like full patch biker hoodlums but on a much larger scale, each trader and money manager competes with each other one in order to be recognized by his peers as being the world’s leading psychopath. Financial sycophants who bleat every day about how corrupt and inefficient the public sector is, always conveniently avoid talking about the private sources of all that public corruption in their blurbs. No one should forget, however, that government debt all over the world is at astronomical levels mostly because of those extremely dishonest financiers. Some of the banks have paid back some of the money loaned to them by government during the great debacle, but they were only able to do that by considerably undermining normal economic growth.

The amount of capital that the international economy has lost to the world’s leading money managers since the Savings and Loan collapse of the 1980s in the USA, is therefore much higher than the sum of all the welfare cheating, misplaced foreign aid, union featherbedding and every other kind of popular corruption in every country put together. Ultra conservative commentators talk all the time about corrupt poor or middle income people in the hope that everyone will forget the much more important sources of corruption that come from their own friends in high finance. But the problems caused by those super big time crooks are in fact much more important to society than the problems caused by all the small time ones.

One rogue trader can do more damage to the world economy in one day than can a million homeless people in a year, even when they are rioting. In a similar way, Tea Party politicians and other friends of big business always denounce governments that are supposedly undermining incentives for private investment in the real economy whenever they raise taxes on rich investors, or increase the minimum wage for the working poor. But the apologists for high finance refuse to recognize that since the laissez faire counter revolution started in the 1980s, by far the world’s largest disincentive to productive investment has been the enormous, exponential increase in non productive investment. Managers and their professional apologists are always trying to convince or to coerce every less important person in the world to buckle down, to work hard, to increase productivity, and thereby to produce enormous quantities of profit for big time investors.

But it does no good whatsoever for billions of people all over the world to do that if a few thousand traders, bankers and managers, going rogue, are allowed to destroy all that wealth in a few weeks during their recurring orgies of speculation. They periodically dump most of the world’s available capital into a giant black hole, where it disappears forever, and then wonder why everyone else gets upset at them. With speculation controlling most investment since the late 1970s, a lot more than it did before then, we are not only losing out because some corporations are too big to fail. We are also losing the benefits of over thirty years of recent productive investment, that would have taken place a lot more if speculation had been kept in check, at least a little bit, like it was during the previous thirty years.

As if this was not bad enough by itself, the entire neoliberal movement that led up to the 2008 crisis was also accompanied by a massive expansion in organized crime. As French historian Jacques de Saint Victor has pointed out, every time that some government gets into the austerity business, cutting back on economic controls, or the welfare state, organized crime steps in to take up the slack. As he put it, “the Mafia surfs on the idea of ultra individualism”, as happened in Montreal, where various regional and municipal services were completely taken over by criminal groups. In other words, the same downsizing, deregulation and outsourcing that led to the 2008 debacle has also brought about an enormous increase in government corruption at all levels, in every country, making it that much more difficult to put an end to the whole mess.

I wrote an article back in 2008 denouncing that artificial crisis as the biggest sting operation in world history, but I never managed to get it published anywhere. Thousands of other people have succeeded in getting a similar message across, but nothing substantial has changed since then. The vast majority of the perpetrators, the deregulating politicians as well as the speculators themselves, have not been punished for any of their crimes. In theory, for this crime as well as for many other such crimes in days gone by, every single banker, trader and politician involved should have been sent to jail for life. Unfortunately, even if ordinary people had enough power to do that, which is impossible, sending them all to jail would still be unrealistic for the simple reason that their probable successors would inevitably act the same way all over again.

Upbraiding one or two of these international criminals from time to time, in particular scandals relating to particular firms, does nothing to change overall reality. Most of them are still out there doing everything wrong all over again, on an even larger scale, actively preparing the next major debacle. When the next major crisis hits, overextended governments will be incapable of doing anything at all to counteract its effects, thereby plunging the entire world into an unprecedented economic and social catastrophe.

Another much smaller event that has nevertheless had a huge effect on my own little life recently has been Quebec’s postsecondary student strike aimed at eliminating sudden massive provincial government increases in university tuition fees. For several months, my college was among those closed down while thousands of students and their more active supporters fought police and security guards in almost daily demonstrations, some of them quite violent. The tuition protest rapidly became part of a general polarization of Quebec society, a lot like the one that took place in Greece, with much of the population reluctantly supporting government austerity and another large portion refusing it outright. Several attempts were made to negotiate an end to the strike, but each attempt was repeatedly scuttled by ideological intransigence.

Unfortunately, the whole thing soon turned into just another example of sadomasochistic social relations. This started out with particularly violent police use of billy clubs, pepper spray and mass arrests, which were even used against passersby not involved in the protest in any way. Things worsened again when some of the protestors, or their often dubious allies (who may turn out to belong to officially controlled counter gangs), started targeting the general population, by attacking major bridges and the Montreal subway system, rather than focusing on the Liberal government. That government then reacted with a special law to end the strike, going a lot further than previous governments by reducing civil liberties much more drastically. Several clauses in that law were aimed at turning the student associations and the teachers unions into organs of the state, by requiring them to guarantee that none of their members would ever do anything judged illegal by the government.

That set off even larger protests, many ordinary people taking to the streets still more than before in support of the students. The special law also forced a months long postponement of the remainder of the semester, at many different colleges and universities, as well as a severely truncated overall teaching period. Later on, the Liberal government was replaced again by a PQ government, the PQ having supported some of the more moderate student demands during the strike. The new government then came out with a proposal for much smaller tuition increases than the ones advocated by their predecessors, while at the same time drastically cutting back provincial subsidies to post-secondary education.

For the long term future, my main worry is that if I ever get too old or too sick to take care of my own bodily functions, I may end up dying in some horribly under staffed and under equipped hospital that has been turned into a giant killing field for decrepit baby boomers. However, in the unlikely event that the human race manages to avoid any of the possible catastrophes that would make that sort of thing inevitable, such as another great depression, the rest of my personal existence on this planet may not turn out too badly. Otherwise, all bets are off.