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.