Nationalist oligarchies

The recent coming-out of Pierre-Karl Péladeau as a Parti Québécois candidate in the current election campaign has made a lot of people in Quebec very happy, and a lot more people very upset. Péladeau is a media mogul based in Quebec, but with significant holdings in English Canada as well, who has become the only near billionaire to have so far declared his undying support for Quebec independence. As a result, the election campaign has focused on the constitutional issue once again, meaning that the current PQ attempt to form a majority government may have been sabotaged by the notoriously weak support for sovereignty even among the francophone Québécois.

In fact, people have known that Péladeau and his deceased father, the founder of the Québecor media dynasty, were Quebec separatists for quite a long time. But this is the first time that any ultra-rich oligarch has ever come out openly for sovereignty, which raises a lot of questions about the limitations that could be put upon such a person if ever he became a minister in the Quebec government or even, one day, the provincial premier. Those same questions may also become a lot more important even later on if Péladeau’s option ever wins a future referendum and he becomes a minister, or even the president, of an independent republic.

All the turmoil caused by Péladeau’s recent announcement, however, should be tempered by the fact that the Quebec independence movement has never really been about complete separation from Canada. Because of the large anglophone minority in Quebec, and the now equally large allophone community, it would take about 65% support for Quebec sovereignty among the francophone population just to achieve 50% plus one vote in a general referendum. Since that type of support has never been achieved, the PQ has always had to scale back its objective to sovereignty-association, or hyphenated sovereignty, meaning that an economic association with English Canada has always been part of their message. No one really knows if English Canadians would ever envisage a merely economic association with Quebec, however, since the PQ did not win the two referendum campaigns already held, even though it came a lot closer in 1995 than it did in 1980.

Nationalist movements all over the world have always been based on the premise of national liberation from foreign control. By removing politically or economically oppressive foreign control over the nation’s vital forces, the argument is that independence will lead to a much better life for the majority of the population. All the social components of the nation are supposed to put aside their differences and pull together toward a common goal of national development, that becoming possible for the first time because the people are no longer oppressed or exploited by a foreign empire.  

Back in the 1960s and the 1970s, English Canada also went through a national liberation phase of sorts, many people feeling that Canada as a whole had become nothing but a US satellite country, both politically and economically. Paradoxically, the Liberal governments back then that tried so hard to silence the Quebec separatists, were also the same governments that adopted economic nationalism to free the Canadian economy from US control, as well as taking decidedly anti-American stances in foreign policy. National liberation for Canada was supposed to have been focused in particular on ending the old reliance on exporting natural resources, in order to develop a more industrialized and therefore more independent nation.

On a world scale, however, the national liberation promise has been vehemently criticized over the last several decades because of the obvious failure of many liberated countries to achieve most of their goals. As a result, the majority of the people in most of those countries do not seem to be much better off now than they were before independence. National pride may have grown tremendously, but economic or social development has often lagged far behind. The national liberation of places like India, Algeria, or South Africa, for example, only seems to have replaced one group of foreign oppressors with a new group of national oppressors, the national bourgeoisie taking the place of the imperial bourgeoisie but refusing to pass on any of the liberating effects of independence to any of the socially inferior classes.

In many cases, colonialism has been replaced by neocolonialism, with the former empires abandoning outright political control but substituting arms-length economic control instead. The same multinational corporations from the same countries as before simply operate through the compradore bourgeoisie, which is to say local politicians and investors who take a small cut of the profits for themselves before transferring most of the loot to the real bosses in the former “mother country”, or some other foreign empire that has taken its place.

Putting those two situations together means that ordinary people all over the world are now being exploited by a combination of local and foreign big shots, the percentage of national or imperial control varying greatly from one place to another. The only element of the equation that has not changed at all is the way that the majority of the people are being treated. No national liberation at all for most of them, including in Canada, where a recent succession of mostly Conservative prime ministers have brought the country back into its old pattern of resource extraction for the benefit of foreign empires.

In the Quebec case, the sovereignty movement used to characterize the Canadian federation as nothing more than a political extension of the former British empire. One of the more radical members of that movement, Pierre Vallières, accused the Canadian sub-empire of treating the francophone Québécois like “white niggers of America”, exploiting them in the same way as the Black minority in the USA were being exploited by the White majority. Former Quebec premier René Lévesque also referred to rich English Canadian minority leaders within Quebec as “white Rhodesians”, who treated the French-speaking population in Quebec the same way that Ian Smith’s government (1965-1980) treated the Black majority in Zimbabwe.

All of this was initially based on the fact that Quebec used to be what Chicago sociologist Everett Hughes called a folk society, in which most of the employers were anglophones, while most of the industrial workers were francophones. That meant that for quite a long time the Québécois were indeed both politically and economically subordinate to the English-Canadian majority in the rest of Canada.

This neocolonial situation began to change, however, during the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, when the provincial government began actively subsidizing the development of a much larger Québécois bourgeoisie than the one that used to exist for a century and a half before that. Francophone investors like Pierre Péladeau and his son, Pierre-Karl, started becoming a lot richer and a lot more powerful than their predecessors ever were in days gone by. Although anglophone investment in Quebec (from the USA, the UK, English Canada and the anglophone minority within Quebec) undoubtedly remained dominant, for the first time francophone Québécois investors became a significant minority in the overall community of big-time capitalists operating within that province. The folk society was kaput.

Back in 1987, I remember talking briefly to Pierre-Karl Péladeau when I was attending a conference on nationalism organized by a conservative magazine called L’Analyste. Much of the debate going on during that meeting concerned the influence of neoliberalism, that had just recently become a popular ideology after the election and re-election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I had published an article in that magazine claiming that the debate between which institution should control economic development, the state or private enterprise, was a false debate since no large modern economy seemed able to function properly without involving both of them. Right after that, I also published a two-part series in the same magazine about the history of economic nationalism in Quebec.

The Québecor empire went on to become a perfect example of a private enterprise profiting from state intervention, especially in 2000 when the Quebec government prevailed upon the Caisse de dépôt pension fund, to join with Péladeau to keep the Vidéotron cable network from falling into the hands of a rival, English-Canadian, media empire. More recently, Québecor has also profited from the Conservative federal government’s desire to help it become a major player on the much larger pan-Canadian media scene, in order to break up the current price-fixing oligopoly of three English-Canadian conglomerates.

Unfortunately, on a number of other fronts, Pierre-Karl Péladeau has adopted a much more neoliberal style than his father had developed initially. For one thing, Péladeau fils  became a case study in bad industrial relations, using lock-outs on 14 different occasions, not in order to reach any kind of compromise with the rambunctious unions within his sprawling empire, but to eliminate them altogether. He also managed to circumvent the Parti Québécois government’s anti-scab law during those conflicts and, more recently, seems to have prevailed upon the party to cancel a resolution that was to have become part of its electoral program, aimed at updating that law so as to include electronic media. The journalists association in Quebec is also upset at what they call Péladeau’s micro-management of his newspapers, according to them constantly intervening in editorial decisions in spite of the fact that he has always claimed to be against that sort of thing.

This has led a large number of critics to fear that if Péladeau gets elected, and becomes an important minister in the PQ government, he will use the same style of neoliberal management in whatever presumably economic portfolio he inherits. Critics are concerned that recruiting him right now fits in very well with the PQ’s drift to the right over the past few years. Instead of sticking with the interventionist, social-democratic, pro-union profile that used to characterize that party, the PQ seems intent nowadays on cozying up to the business class instead. Their drift to the right has notably included much lower taxes on mining companies than they used to advocate, as well as ignoring any environmental disasters that those companies leave behind. The PQ has also decided to play along with the federal government’s endorsement of importing petroleum into Quebec from the Alberta tar sands, another policy area in which they are now advocating what they used to oppose.

Those fears about Péladeau may turn out to be entirely justified. Someone who made a lot of money with the help of the government may one day turn against using state intervention for social programs. Most people with a neoliberal frame of mind think that Quebec spends far too much money on such things as health care, education, welfare and daycare, especially given the fact that the Quebec debt is already quite a bit higher than that of any of the other Canadian provinces. What happens when the provincial government, or  a future sovereign state, has to choose between helping Quebec businesses succeed against ferocious competition from outside Quebec, or continue developing social democracy for the rest of the population?

Even more importantly, what happens to the whole national liberation movement within Quebec if its leaders adopt exactly the same pro-business, libertarian stance that every other government in the world has already endorsed? If the only people who get liberated are the billionaires, why should the rest of the population go along with the gag? If the Quebec population cannot afford social democracy any more, how can they afford to help their oligarchs compete against much richer countries, or against poorer countries using low production costs as a bargaining chip? The same question also applies to the Canadian government as well.

In today’s world, the various national governments have to compete not so much with each other, but more importantly with the world’s most powerful banking corporations. Those people now spend most of the world’s available capital on several different kinds of speculation, but particularly on monetary speculation, which has increased 500 times over since 1970. Most of the government debt in today’s world comes from speculation rather than from social programs, as we all found out following the 2008 debacle. What kind of sovereignty, or independence, can countries have from each other, if all of them are totally dependent on geographically disembodied pools of capital for their survival? Even the USA is totally dependent on foreign bondholders who control most of its increasingly colossal debt. What does national liberation mean in a world like this?

Religious conspiracy theories

Those who follow any of the world’s media regularly are constantly being bombarded these days with dozens of comments about how stupid it is that so many people continue to believe in conspiracy theories. Without a doubt, most of those theories, like the one about how the Americans never really landed on the Moon after all, are completely bogus and were indeed invented by weak minded people to help them deal with the unbearable anxiety caused by not always having all the answers to every question. Other conspiracy theories, however, like the one about how President Aristide of Haiti was overthrown back in 2004 by a military conspiracy involving the USA, France and Canada, are most likely true, even if they have not so far been proved.

As I pointed out several years ago in one of my published books, real conspiracies have been happening throughout recorded history, not only in the political sphere of human discourse, but also in the economic, social and cultural spheres as well. Since the rise of capitalism, the most frequent conspiracies are the ones constantly being concocted by the world’s most important companies of investors, who are always trying to make more money than everyone else by keeping their various investment strategies a secret until it is too late for the competition to do anything to thwart them. Modern political ideologies like liberalism, nationalism and socialism have also created hundreds of their own conspiracy theories over the years, the libertarian conspiracies for running the world by doing away with the state altogether becoming a mirror image of totalitarian conspiracies aimed at abolishing the private sector instead.

But the conspiracy theory that I like the best is a lot older than those ones. This was the “Donation of Constantine”, a document written by the first Christian emperor of Rome that granted hegemony over all Christianity to the bishop of Rome, presumably starting with Saint Peter as the first pope and continuing right up until the Apocalypse. It was not until John Paul II’s reign that the Church officially admitted that the whole thing was based on a fake document written by Catholic monks during the Middle Ages, several centuries after Constantine’s death. It turns out that the first time that anyone really believed that the bishop of Rome was the acknowledged head of the universal (catholic) church was when Gregory the First became pope towards the end of the sixth century, AD. In reality, the Christian emperors, from Theodosius I to the fall of Rome, adopted a form of imperial control over the Church (Caesaropapism), a practice continued later both within the Orthodox churches of the Byzantine and Russian empires, as well as the Anglican church of the British empire, but not at all by the theocratically inclined popes of the Catholic Church.

But anyone who thinks about such things from a social science point of view soon realizes that all religions are, in and of themselves, conspiracy theories on a gigantic scale. Fearful and anxious people have always tried to reassure themselves about the world that they live in by inventing all sorts of metaphysical or supernatural myths about creation, procreation, death and the end of the universe. This has been going on since our first Paleolithic ancestors tried to control their fear of the dark by creating belief in magic and the spirit world, as exemplified in the various kinds of prehistoric animism, shamanism and totemism. The somewhat newer, state-sponsored, official religions created since the rise of urban civilization 6000 years ago are simply more recent variations on a long-standing theme.

In all the official religions, the aristocratic founders of the state invented either polytheist pantheons of divinities, or a monotheist God with a human face, whose one common characteristic was to recognize the ruling aristocrats as the sons and daughters of the creator(s) of the universe. That way, any social upheaval among the inferior classes could be condemned as sacrilegious. Anthropomorphic surrogate parents dwelling in the sky (heavens) also helped reassure their earthly children that all was well and that the menacing manifestations of the natural world were nothing more than divine toys being manipulated in mysterious ways by their benevolent, immortal ancestors.

Later on, more enlightened human beings in various cultures began developing the rational view of the universe instead, attributing natural phenomena to natural causes and doing away with metaphysical explanations of reality altogether. Rational explanations, however, always seemed too cold and insufficiently nurturing to the fearful among us, who much preferred more comforting explanations of events. In recent times, even the compromises between science and religion adopted by more moderate believers were judged woefully inadequate by literal believers, who desperately needed a more fundamentalist version of the written word to deal with the nightmares caused by modern, urban living.

In today’s world, the rise of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish ultra orthodoxies, combined with a syncretic rise in belief in magic, threaten to forever eliminate science, the Enlightenment, critical thinking and, ultimately, technology itself. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world are finding it exceedingly difficult to come to grips with all of their problems, because they are still reading (if at all) at a grade-school level in a world run by post-doctoral computer geeks and their high-financial employers. The fundamentalists absolute faith in heavenly intervention helps them deal with the fact that they do not stand a chance in today’s world, and leads them directly to their only alternative, which is to destroy today’s world completely and replace it with a return to antediluvian, old-time religion. Even if it means wiping out most of the world’s current population, which has become so pitifully dependent on more modern ways of thinking.

All the Muslim countries, as well as Muslim minorities in other parts of the world, have been particularly stricken by the fundamentalist disease, resulting in atavistic attacks on secular constitutions established during the twentieth century. As a result, the status of Muslim women is under worldwide attack, tribal customs and Islamic theology being combined to maintain or to reintroduce such abominations as excision, unpunished rape, forced marriages, cloister clothing and denial of access to basic education. But the fundamentalist epidemic has also broken out in Christian countries as well, exemplified by similar attacks on secular constitutions, women, gays and other minorities, not only in Africa and Latin America, but also in the USA and Europe. Hindu fundamentalists in India are set to take power again in that country, attacking women and gays as much as, or more than, any other fundamentalists, while pursuing their ongoing vendettas against any authors or publishers (such as Penguin India) who dare diffuse works that describe the mythological origins of Hindu divinities. Buddhist authorities in Burma (Myanmar) are also putting the lie once again to the myth of Buddhist pacifism in their ongoing treatment of Muslim minorities within that country. Israel is also under constant attack by its own ultra-Orthodox true-believers, even expelling one particular sect for its  outrageous treatment of women and children, the same sect going on to commit the same crimes in Quebec before doing it all over again in Ontario, and now moving on to Guatemala.

All over the world, fundamentalist organizations have succeeded in imbedding themselves within modern politics, taking power through theocratic revolution or through democratic election, whichever method works best in their own particular neighborhoods. In North America, they have taken over almost complete control of the Republican Party in the USA as well as the Conservative Party in Canada, but they also have strong constituencies within the other major parties. Their influence can be felt not only in domestic policy but also in foreign policy.

Israel, for example, practically owes its very existence not only to its own patriots but also to the ever-increasing numbers of Christian Zionists who back everything that the Israeli government does for their own peculiar reasons. They say that they like Israel because it is much more democratic than any of the other countries in the Middle East, forgetting what many Israeli scholars have already pointed out, that it is impossible for any state with an established religion to be genuinely democratic in any meaningful way. Israel’s ongoing successes in industry and its very large percentage of scientists within the overall population are also not the real reasons for their support of that country.

In reality, they like Israel because for literal interpreters of the Bible, the second coming of Jesus Christ cannot take place until Greater Israel has been firmly re-established within its entire Biblical territory. Nor does this mean that they particularly like the Jews themselves, since the Book of Revelations predicts that the Jews at Armageddon will be given one last chance to redeem themselves by converting to militant Christianity. Those who refuse to do so are slated to suffer torture for several hundred years during the Apocalypse, and eventually perish forever, along with every other kind of unbeliever in the world.

This may have been what was going on in the minds of Conservative true-believers in Canada recently, when leading ministers of their government compared Putin’s recent seizure of the Crimean peninsula with Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland in 1939. On the face of it, that comparison was not too outlandish since both the Germans and the Russians successfully conspired to occupy territory ostensibly to protect national minorities living inside Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine. Political opportunists in the USA may also have repeated the same comparison in order to help people there to forget recent American territorial conspiracies in places like Iraq or Afghanistan.

But for Christian Zionists that same comparison could be inspired by a subconscious desire on their part that the Russian occupation of the Crimea be soon followed by the outbreak of World War Three, just like the Sudetenland occupation was soon followed by the outbreak of the Second World War. That would certainly go a long way toward fulfilling one of the most important conspiracy theories originally written down in the Bible. If God and the Son of God do indeed exist, as good Christians so ardently believe, how could they ignore such a magnificent opportunity to establish the long awaited Kingdom of Heaven?

It would be nice to believe that even Christian fundamentalists could not possibly be thinking nowadays in such old-fashioned, apocalyptic terms, nor that they too could some day pull off such diabolical schemes as the one that their Islamic cousins committed in the USA back in 2001. But as long as conspiratorial religions keep on getting stronger and stronger, and rational methods of thinking keep on getting weaker and weaker, even crazier things than 9/11 may become increasingly possible. Those who still feel like reasonably accommodating the more exotic antics of the different kinds of true-believers these days would probably do well to re-read some of the most hair-raising sections of the world’s most sacred religious literature. There may very well be a few passages in those works that could lead to attempted wish fulfillment on the part of some of the more deranged conspiratorial minds among us.

I plead not guilty

It never ceases to amaze me how often I come across people who assume that because someone like me belongs to a designated group, that means that I and others like me must necessarily benefit from belonging to that group, or are necessarily guilty of all the alleged crimes committed by the selfsame group. These very peculiar people automatically assume that everyone in the reference group always participated fully in whatever collective activity that they wish to praise, or to denounce. Personally, however, I plead not guilty to dozens of presumably good or evil undertakings in which I did not participate at all.

The most obvious case has to do with my nationality. For as far back as I can remember, the fact that I was born in Canada, more specifically in English Canada, and spent almost my entire life here, in anglophone provinces or the anglophone part of Montreal, is somehow interpreted as proof that I did something, or refrained from doing something else, because of that. Patriotic English-Canadians, for example, often refer to how “we” beat the French-Canadians at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and therefore separatists nowadays should watch out lest “we” do the same thing all over again. Canadian nationalists also like to reminisce about how “we” won the War of 1812 against the USA, or the fact that “we” were on the winning side in the First and the Second World Wars, not to mention the cold war, and that therefore “we” are somehow better than the inferior people who were born in countries that were on the other side of the aforementioned conflicts.

The accident of birth in any country, however, has nothing whatever to do with personal participation, or even symbolic participation, in any historical event. In the first example, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham was mostly fought by British and French regular troops rather than by any of the local Canadian militias, just like the War of 1812 was fought mostly by British and American regular troops, even if most of the action took place in Canada. The Seven Years War (1756-1763), fought simultaneously in Europe and in several colonies all over the world, included the 1759 British-French skirmish on the Plains of Abraham, just as the Napoleonic Wars of 1799-1815 included the War of 1812-1814 as a North American sideshow. The outcomes of both of those wars did not depend in any significant way on what the very few people who thought of themselves as Canadians did or did not do back then. Neither did Canadian participation in the major conflicts of the twentieth century change much so far as the overall results of those wars are concerned.

None of those confrontations were anything like the kinds of conflicts that most patriotic Canadians assume that they were. Just to give one example among dozens of others, during most of the Second World War, the liberal-democratic group of nations that presumably included Canada, was allied with one major totalitarian dictatorship (the USSR) against the Axis coalition of other totalitarian dictatorships. Moreover, the liberal-democratic nations participating in that war did not often act in what are assumed to be liberal-democratic ways nowadays. In Canada, the War Measures Act of 1914, re-adopted in 1939, turned this country into just another totalitarian state, democratic rights being explicitly suspended once again for the duration of the war.

An even more important realization, however, is the fact that every country in the world has changed enormously over the past centuries and even more rapidly in recent decades. The kind of people who lived in English Canada, or in francophone Quebec, or in the USA, or any other place, two hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, are not generally the kind of people who live here today. At the same time, significant minorities within those populations, long ago, more recently or nowadays, did not and do not think in the same ways that the majority of those same populations did then, or do now. People who assume that “we” won any battle or any war in the past, or participated in the same way in any other event over succeeding periods of time, are just creating fantasy worlds inside their own heads. In all those cases, the designated group known as “we” never really existed and does not exist right now either.

Moreover, significant minorities in every country in the world, including Canada and the USA, did not then and do not agree now with at least some of the decisions taken by their “leaders” over the years, not only on issues of war and peace but also concerning  every other sort of public policy. For example, during the world wars of the twentieth century, when the Canadian government insisted on conscription in order to provide sufficient cannon fodder for its army, this policy was opposed not only by the majority of the French-speaking population, but also by significant numbers of political radicals in English Canada, most of them from the left wing of the political spectrum. No country on Earth has ever presented a totally united front on any major issue.

Governments and political pundits, however, still insist all the time on including everyone in any given country whenever they talk about how “our nation did this” and “our nation decided that”. In fact, all that these sycophants are referring to in every case is some decision or another made exclusively by a very small number of people in power. Sometimes, those decisions did indeed reflect the general sentiment of a majority of the adult population, in most dictatorships as well as in most democracies, but quite often the leaders point of view was in at least partial contradiction with the majority sentiment, not to mention the fact that there always existed a significant minority opinion on every major issue.

This kind of thing is particularly evident when it comes to refuting assumptions about Western nations made by a lot of people from the Third World. Critics from Asia, Africa and Latin America often assume that everyone in the West always agrees with, and still profits from, every rotten action or policy carried out in the Third World during the colonial period of history, not to mention the neocolonialism that still exists nowadays. Activists in, or from, those places are constantly denouncing “the Western imperialists” or “the crusader states” for mistreating their peoples over the past few centuries, without taking the time to reflect on whether or not all the people of Western origins really supported, or profited from, any of the aforementioned policies.

In those cases when the majority of the people disagree with government policy, they are sometimes more conservative than the people in power, and sometimes more progressive. At all times, however, some of the people are always opposed to every policy, often for quite different reasons. It is therefore extremely disgusting, particularly for people like myself who have practically never agreed with any official decision on anything, that the pundits, the ideologues and the publicists always refer to the whole country when announcing any decision, rather than admitting that the number of people within the country who made that particular decision is always a very small minority. I get particularly incensed every time someone associates me with any particularly stupid decision taken by any Liberal or Conservative government of Canada, since I have never voted for, nor otherwise supported, either of those parties.

Another major objection to the all-inclusive way of thinking is the fact that hundreds of millions of people all over the world do not in fact have an accurate vision or knowledge of their own origins. In my case, I found out rather late in life that my family origins were not the ones that I thought I had during the first several decades of my existence. Not only were my ancestors not from the same families, in some cases they were not even from the same ethnic or linguistic groups, an observation that applies not only to my European ancestors but also to my Amerindian ancestors.

There were thousands of different reasons why people’s biological origins often differed greatly from what they were led to believe initially. Racism often had a lot to do with that. Over the centuries, people’s true origins were often hidden by their families in order to avoid the stigma attached to “inferior races” or to minority religions. Millions of individual family names were changed in the process, either partly or completely. Anyone with a good general understanding of world history soon realizes as well that the “races” considered “inferior”, or the religions considered anathema, were not always the same ones, from one part of the world to another, or from one period of history to another. Every identifiable group in history has suffered from some kind of exclusion or mistreatment at some point or another, even if certain groups ended up suffering a lot more than others.

As a result, practically every ethnic or religious origin in the human universe has in one place or another, at one time or another, been subjected to some kind of voluntary ignorance of its existence. Even in “pre-historic” tribal societies, millions of people have been inducted over the years into every tribal group who did not biologically belong to it at first. It is therefore impossible for anyone living nowadays to know for sure that he or she is really and truly of some “racially pure” ethnic origin, or some “completely pious” religious or ideological origin, for the simple reason that no such purity exists now, nor has it ever existed in the past. In today’s world, people who build their entire lives and identities around some particular kind of ethnic or spiritual origin, are just being ridiculous. No one alive today really knows for sure where and from what all his (or her) ancestors really came.

The same general kind of observations can be made about dozens of other presumed collectivities and not just about ethnicity or religion, nations or empires. I remember when I was going to high school during the 1960s and being encouraged to show a little “team spirit” toward  “our” local sporting associations. People from whatever local area were expected to support “their” teams, as they are still now, whether or not they particularly liked some of the jocks who dominated those teams, or some of the adults who ran them, or even some of the local mayors, who were not always the marvelous leaders that everyone was expected to pretend that they were.

Team spirit in sporting activities often also overlaps with ethnic chauvinism, such as during the Olympic Games, when “we” are supposed to support “our” athletes, whether they won or lost, not to mention whether they behaved well or poorly towards the host country. This problem is particularly evident in bicultural or multicultural places like Canada, because some people do not like identifying with certain athletes, if they are too “French” or too “English”, or too whatever. But racism or religious bias means that politically incorrect reactions to athletes or other heroes takes place all the time, and in every country.

Like everyone else, I also ran up against the same “team spirit” ideology many times during the 49 years I spent working for a living. Most private companies and public institutions adopt what are called loyalty pledges or mission statements that make it clear that everyone who works there has no choice but to support whatever its leaders support and to denounce whatever its leaders denounce. Nations, cities, towns, counties, corporations, schools, hospitals--all those institutions require every private or public employee to go along with the gag and to necessarily accept whatever the people in power want them to accept at any given time.

If they disagree in public with official institutional policy, they can lose their jobs, or their freedom, or even in extreme cases their lives. Personally, I can remember being made aware of dozens of different situations, in many of the places in which I worked, that I would like to have denounced directly to the media, but was prevented from so doing by forced loyalty. Many of the decisions taken by “our” leaders were completely bogus to me, particularly the many times when those leaders refused to do anything at all about poor working conditions, even though problems were frequently brought to their attention by the employees whenever they put everyone’s health and security in real danger.

Since I have lived all my life in a relatively democratic country, it is obvious because of everything that I have been pointing out, that the “democracy” everyone is supposed to enjoy so much, is not all that convincing. People who live in dictatorships have no freedom of speech whatever, but people who live in what we choose to call democracies do not have that many more real opportunities to convince “our” leaders that they should be working for all of us rather than just for some of them.

I have similar objections to comments I heard recently about how the baby-boomers ruined the natural environment when they were running the world, leaving more recent generations with a whole host of ecological problems. Once again, leave me out of the equation. In the first place, people alive now, of whatever generation, are still being influenced in all kinds of different ways by decisions taken by leaders who have been dead for decades, or even for centuries. As a group, today’s baby-boomers were not any more collectively responsible for the current ecological crisis than the soldiers in the trenches were responsible for the First World War.

As I pointed out earlier, the main reason why that is true is because the world’s major decisions are always taken by a very small proportion of the world’s population. Very few of the hundreds of millions of baby-boomers had the opportunity to participate in any of the important decisions leading toward today’s massive environmental degradation. As in similar social situations, such as the 2008 financial crisis, millions of people cannot realistically be expected to lay down their lives on the barricades every five or ten years, in the hope of creating some kind of successful revolution, whenever the big shots make some particularly odious decision. This is especially true because in the past the new gang of leaders who took over after most of the world’s successful revolutions always found a way to betray their disciples and to follow in the footsteps of the old gang of leaders, instead.

Nevertheless, it is true that millions of ordinary people do not go out of their way very often to oppose whatever rotten decisions their leaders are making. Large-scale complicity is a very real problem, even if most public opinion is being manipulated every day on an even more massive scale than it was in the past. In Canada, for example, the Harper government has been systematically doing whatever it could for the past several years to help the country’s major polluters greatly enhance their already enormous carbon footprints, without suffering any discernible loss of support from ordinary voters. People from the baby-boom generation certainly do have a tendency to drive their cars to and from work every day even when public transportation is readily available. But those of us older people who have been taking the subway to work, nine times out of ten, for the past several decades, are still tarred with the same brush as the owners of the tar sands.

Unfortunately, none of the problems enumerated above are ever likely to go away any time soon. Most people seem to truly enjoy doing the same thing over and over again, no matter what the consequences. The world’s conformist majority also loves to blame “everyone” for every problem, the better to deny any possibility that some people might in fact be a whole lot more guilty than others.