Liberal and neoliberal extremism

In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France, the pages of most of the world’s media are once again full of denunciations of religious extremism. The assassinations of 17 people, 12 of them in the headquarters of France’s leading satirical magazine, certainly seem to be part of Islamic fascism’s world-wide attempt to forever silence any non-Muslim critics of that religion. Radical Islamists are trying to prevent anyone at all from depicting the prophet Mohamed in any way, or for whatever reason, as part of their desire to impose their beliefs on everyone else and ultimately take over the world.

As followers of one of the world’s most extreme right-wing ideologies, the Islamists are continuing their murderous campaign to force everyone into adopting some form of behavior that will further their cause. Their goal is to terrorize millions of people into slavish acceptance of every one of their dictates, in this case by removing their prophet from any form of visual corruption by dirty infidels. Hypocritically, they are also continuing to encourage as many Muslim women as possible to to wear cover-up clothing in public, such as the hijab, as a kind of advertising symbol for their religion. Anyone who objects to either of those propaganda stunts is denounced as a racist, even though Islam, as a theoretically universal religion, is hardly confined to any one “race”.

The murders themselves were also deliberately committed to provoke even more extreme right-wing reactions by rival forms of fascism, explicitly to encourage the rise of anti-Muslim ultra-conservative movements among non-Muslim populations. Anyone kowtowing to their incessant demands, or responding to their provocations in a reactionary way, will only help them achieve their goal of world domination, either by turning millions of their opponents into sniveling cowards, or by driving the moderate Muslim majority into their arms for protection against the other kinds of extremists.

Unfortunately, current denunciations of the Islamic ideology by most of the world’s leading politicians and professional publicists are often insincere and hypocritical, coming from people with radical agendas of their own. The easiest reactions to unmask are those coming from fundamentalist factions based in every one of Islam’s rival religions--Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, etc., etc. Those people’s criticisms of Islamic terrorism are highly suspect, coming as they do from ultra-orthodox movements sharing multiple characteristics with ultra-conservative Muslims, such as literal interpretations of religious texts, long-standing accommodations with “prehistoric” tribal customs, and often successful attempts at forcing millions of non-believers to accept their own religious dictates.

Other ideological reactions to the Islamist onslaught are somewhat more subtle. A few surviving, left-wing ideologues, for example, still cling to the hoary Third World apology for extremism, according to which it is perfectly acceptable to denounce Western imperialism’s Judaeo-Christian prejudices, but not the religious pretensions of oppressed peoples originally based in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Back in 1979, this curious idea helped convince dozens of left-wing organizations, and countries, to support the Islamic counter-revolution in Iran against the American-financed Shah. Today, those same self-deprecating ideologues still think that sectarian and/or communitarian customs coming from “Oriental” systems of belief, even when imposed by violent methods, even by people living for several generations in the West, are much more acceptable than anything coming from strictly Western traditions.

This kind of thinking could have had some kind of sympathetic origin in the past, when the liberal empires from the West completely dominated most of the other regions in the world.  Even today, most of the Third World countries are still a lot poorer and relatively under-developed when compared with most of the countries in the West. But the right-wing, theocratic totalitarianism and obscurantism that still afflicts many non-Western countries is not fundamentally of Western origin, even though many Western empires have allied themselves with those same reactionaries in the past. It is hopelessly naive to pretend that the disgustingly rich, ultra-conservative billionaires, in power nowadays all over Asia, Africa and Latin America, are somehow better than the Western elites, no matter what their own official ideological projections may turn out to be. Even the former statistical concentration of excessively wealthy individuals in the Western countries is not at all obvious nowadays.

A more important form of anti-Islamist hypocrisy, however, is coming directly from the liberal empires themselves, France, Great Britain and the USA. During the entire twentieth century, those empires regularly used the promotion of different varieties of Islamic ultra-orthodoxy, such as Wahhabism or the Muslim Brotherhood, to help them defeat nationalist and communist movements throughout the Muslim world. During the Cold War, the USA was particularly active, as recently as during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-1989), in promoting the careers of many of the future soldiers and leaders of Al-Qaeda and other extremist Islamic organizations. As presidential candidate Barry Goldwater put it back in 1964, in the not entirely unrelated circumstances of the Vietnam War, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”. For those liberal empires to now denounce Islamic State or the terrorist assassins at Charlie Hebdo is a bigger joke than anything that the cartoonists themselves ever dreamed up. It is even funnier than the Islamic fascists themselves recently claiming to be the Western empires greatest enemy.

Liberal politicians and propagandists, allied with various Christian churches, have also carried out extensive campaigns in many parts of the Western world, such as Canada and Quebec, to accommodate the extremist pretensions of several different “Oriental” religions. Their main argument in so doing has been their conceit that bending over backwards in favor of religious extremism is required by their belief in fundamental human rights, such as freedom of religion. They have tried to use their upholding the excessive demands made by non-Christian sects as a wedge to help undermine secular  separation of church and state, thereby making it easier for those religious liberals to reimpose a Christian agenda on Western governments as well. Freedom of religion, yes sir, but freedom from religion, no way. This is probably the main reason why their media allies still refuse to publish any drawings of Mohamed, even after the Islamist massacre.

Even more hypocritical is the fact that the publicists of classical liberalism have always felt that the kind of individual human rights they supported were much more important than collective rights favoring economic and social development for everyone in society. Nineteenth-century liberal ideology, now revived under the title of neoliberalism, upheld the social-Darwinist pretension according to which individual investors who have become ultra-rich deserve to keep all their wealth, and do not have to share any of it with the millions of other individuals who, according to them, failed to invest their own rather limited funds as successfully as they did.

This may seem at the outset to be an entirely different subject of debate than religious fanaticism, having nothing at all to do with the Charlie Hebdo murders. However, it is just another example of ideological blindness leading to massive shortcomings in human society, that in fact helps to provide large-scale spawning grounds, all over the world, for violent attacks on the establishment. Massive rejection of the anal retention of wealth on the part of the world’s most powerful elites is coming not only from Third World countries, where the majority of the population remain ultra-poor, but also from groups of disenchanted immigrants now living in the West. Not to mention the similarly radical rejection of those same ultra-rich elites coming from millions of recently impoverished, working-class populations in the previously industrialized countries, who have never recovered from deindustrialization and the ensuing financial crisis of 2008. Encouraging right-wing anti-immigrant groups to blame right-wing immigrant groups for their problems, and vice versa, is a good way of getting the rich social-Darwinists off the hook for their own ideological arrogance.

It is true that for a few decades following the Great Depression, many of the more liberal parties in the Western countries parted company with their more conservative brethren, at least to a limited extent, in order to head off the threat posed by the rise of the labor movement and international communism. During the “thirty glorious years” of 1945-1975, that decision contributed to a gradual decrease, in many parts of the world, in the overall income gap between the rich and the poor. But by 1979-1980, with the advent of anti-inflationary monetarism and the neoliberal, electoral victories of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the anti-social prejudices of classical liberalism came back into vogue. Since then, most liberal and conservative political parties in the West, including most of the former communist and social-democratic parties, have joined forces to support neoliberalism and thus to re-introduce, and to continually reinforce, an enormous, ever-growing, income gap between the social classes.

Nowadays, almost all the mainstream parties in the world, East and West, North and South, have given up on the war on poverty as well as on protecting the middle class from the economic disasters introduced by neoliberalism. One by one, they have all become well-paid instruments of the world’s leading financial investors, in the rich people’s concerted drive to reinstall the kind of million-to-one income division that already existed back in the Gilded Age, during the thirty years leading up to the First World War. Unfortunately, that was the very same extreme class division that also led to the rise of the anarchist, communist (State-capitalist) and fascist movements that dominated world politics for most of the twentieth century. Throughout the Third World, as well as inside urban ghettos in major Western cities, the debilitating social conditions now being resuscitated from the Gilded Age are recreating the depressed environment necessary to encourage extremism once again, both from immigrant and from “native” European populations. Not to mention the extreme poverty of most of the genuinely native peoples in North America and Australasia.

The austerity programs currently in vogue in most parts of the Western world are a concerted attempt on the part of the laissez-faire movement to make sure that all the tremendous wealth accumulated since the advent of neoliberalism in 1979 will remain exclusively in the hands of the rich and the ultra-rich. Political and media apologists for cut-backs in government spending argue that austerity is not really the issue, since the overall budgets of most governments, not just in the West, are still expanding. Most of that new spending, however, is not going to the poor, nor to the middle class, but to people in the upper classes. Millions of new millionaires are being created all the time, through massive financial speculation, enormous managerial bonuses, and huge profits for such worthy groups as military-hardware companies and drug dealers. Political corruption and tax evasion, both legal and illegal, are also at an all-time high. Austerity is being applied almost exclusively to the lower classes, notwithstanding a few window-dressing programs aimed at cutting industrial subsidies, or fining fraudulent investment bankers sums of money that seem huge to middle-class people but not at all to the ultra-rich.

Nevertheless, none of this financial violence against social and economic rights exonerates, or justifies, the murderous physical violence of the terrorists. It is true that the reintroduction of social Darwinism creates the ideal conditions, all over the world, for extreme right-wing assassins and extreme right-wing xenophobes to become more and more popular, by feeding off of each other. But in reality the main way in which both religious liberalism and neoliberalism are similar to both the terrorists and the xenophobes is in their extreme ideological arrogance.

The truly fundamental origin of all these seemingly opposite ideological stances is the tendency that they all share to try and dominate the world. Each one of those theoretically contradictory platforms is a sadistic attempt at convincing the world’s different groups of ordinary masochists to follow them down the primrose path of ideological collaboration. Every one of those conflicting ideologies wants to win, by eliminating all their enemies and taking over the whole world. Ordinary people, who are neither rich nor extremist, are just supposed to sit back and watch the theoretically competing groups of sadists fight it out among each other for world domination. Or for the domination of whatever is left of the world after they are all finished.