The Meeting of Extremes

I saw in the newspapers that Ken Stone, described as a longtime peace activist in Hamilton, Ontario, became very upset about having been recently visited by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Apparently, he had written a public letter roundly criticizing the Harper government for describing Iran as the world’s most serious threat to international peace and security. According to the newspaper reports, Stone felt that the Canadian government’s description of Iran contributed to a fear of Muslims among Canadians, since for him Iran is a country that lives in peace with its neighbors. Apparently, he made this observation when he was visiting that country a couple of years ago to attend an international conference supporting the Palestinian cause.

Later, he was also reported to have complained to the independent Security Intelligence Review Committee about the CSIS visit, saying that the interview was an obvious attempt to intimidate him and to keep people like him from exercising their freedom of speech. It seems that CSIS also refused to release their records of their visit to him on the grounds that his opinion constituted a threat to national security.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing has been going on since this country was founded. Canada belongs to a large group of nations proclaiming their formal adhesion to the principles of democracy and human rights, while simultaneously reneging on those principles whenever they feel the need to do so. Whenever they want to get around the freedom of speech barrier, they invoke the national security excuse instead. Then they feel that they can do whatever they want with anyone who criticizes some aspect of their official foreign policy.

Unless Stone did something else that was not mentioned in the newspaper reports I read, just the fact of disagreeing with the government’s attitude toward Iran or Palestine is not nearly enough to justify the allegation of a threat to Canada’s national security. If the Canadian government really adhered to the principle of freedom of speech, CSIS would not be bothering critics of its foreign policy any more than it is supposed to be bothering Canadians who disagree with the government’s domestic policies. Personally, I find the Iranian government’s attitude toward its own citizens to be considerably more totalitarian than the Canadian government’s own attempts at intimidation. But the difference between these two governments seems to be one of degree rather than one of principle.

For me, those newspaper reports were also a blast from the past since Stone used to belong to the same radical socialist organization, known as the Canadian Party of Labor, that I was in more than forty years ago. The only thing that I can remember now about him, however, is being impressed by a small booklet that he wrote on the history of the Hamilton steel strike of 1946. As I pointed out in the autobiographical part of my blog, the CPL was one of several  tiny outfits back then that thought that private capitalism was the source of all evil, including class oppression, racism, sexism, war, famine and frequent economic depressions. In those days, we were convinced that supporting the Maoist version of the Marxist-Leninist alternative was the only way to get rid of all those horrible things once and for all. How wrong we were! It turns out that Chairman Mao was not at all the progressive leader that we thought he was, but in fact one of the worst people who ever lived, not only in his public policies but also in his private life.

All we ended up supporting was an extreme version of state capitalism that was just as evil, sometimes even more so, than the disgusting private system. To make things even worse, many of those little groups of extreme leftists also adopted Mao’s slogan according to which “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. As a result, in 1979, many of them supported the Islamic revolution in Iran, apparently believing that any radical opponent of both the USA and the USSR must be doing something good. Doing that, however, only meant replacing one horrible, totalitarian dictatorship with another one, the Islamic theocracy turning out to be somewhat better than the CIA-imposed Shah’s regime in some respects, and a whole lot worse in many other respects.

In my case, I left the CPL quite a few years before the Iranian counter-revolution and ended up briefly joining what I thought then was a much more intelligent socialist organization, then called the International Caucus of Labor Committees. Unfortunately for me, that outfit promptly got involved in an ongoing war of fisticuffs with all the rival leftist groups, becoming more and more paranoid as time went on. I quit that group two years after I entered it, along with a large number of other supporters. Their leader, Lyndon Larouche, then followed in the footsteps of Benito Mussolini by gradually turning his ultra-leftist organization into an ultra-rightist formation. By the early 1980s, he had adopted a form of ultra-patriotic Americanism and styled himself as a conservative Democrat, favoring extreme forms of economic nationalism rather than free-enterprise libertarianism.

What those two separate political developments, Iran and Larouche, have in common is a meeting of extremes. Whenever extreme leftists support extreme rightists, or themselves decide to become extreme rightists, they are not contributing anything at all toward what were supposed to have been their original goals. No one can in fact get rid of class oppression, racism, sexism, war and depression by supporting state capitalism. Neither can anyone get rid of any of those evils by supporting Islamic extremism, or patriotic extremism or any other “true-believer” philosophy.

When radical socialism does not work, it is not a credible alternative to substitute the extreme right for the extreme left. Nor is it a credible alternative to become a sycophant instead, and lapse back into saying that private capitalism is not that bad after all. This was proved once again back in 2008, when truly enormous dollops of private greed led to a world financial crisis that is still very much with us five years later. If it were not for major government intervention, such as the so-called quantitative easing (in the USA alone to the tune of 85 billion dollars a month), the entire private capitalist system would have fallen apart completely, taking the rest of the world economy with it.

So there does not seem to be any way that any of the evils identified by the leftist radicals during the 1960s and 1970s can be eliminated, or even lessened, by supporting private capitalism, or state capitalism, or religious extremism, or extreme patriotism or ultra-individualism. These days, neither the moderate left nor the extreme left, neither the moderate right nor the extreme right, and most certainly not the God-forsaken political center, seem able to deal adequately with any of humanity’s major evils. Most of today’s political parties and movements, all over the world, are either supporting the kind of wrong-headed policies already identified, or are much too weak or compromised to solve any of those horrific problems.

So far as I can tell, the only thing that can be done nowadays by people who still believe in some kind of progress is to keep on supporting whatever democratic freedoms that still exist, keep on denouncing the ever-increasing gap between the social classes, denouncing racism, sexism, religion and belief in magic, keep on supporting secular skepticism and critical thinking. And hoping that the next financial crisis will not become the kind of uncontrollable disaster that will convince all the world’s governments to do away with freedom of speech altogether.