Narcissism forever

I read a newspaper story last week about how a financial action group of investigators set up back in 1989 by the economically powerful G20 countries, has been complaining recently that the world’s 194 governments have largely failed to use any of the legal instruments that most of them possess to crack down not only on tax evasion but also on the financing of terrorism. Only a handful of governments have ever condemned any financiers caught in the act of raising money for terrorist groups, and the few cases acted upon only involved relatively small amounts of money. Apparently in the wake of the recent Paris massacres, the French finance minister, Michel Sapin, thinks that it is high time that every country made a real effort to prevent the world’s leading financial criminals from supporting their prodigies billion-dollar terror operations.

As most people realize, since 9-11(2001) in the USA, by far the most important sources of non-governmental terrorism in the world have been the ultra-conservative Islamic organizations, Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and their various subsidiaries. In theory, a large coalition of armed forces are supposed to be trying to eliminate those terrorist entities, a coalition that currently includes not only the USA and France, but also Russia, Britain, Germany, most of the Arab countries and many other places. That coalition’s attempts to eliminate the terrorists have so far been mainly military, focusing on poorly targeted bombing and drone strikes from afar (state terrorism), as well as arming and training various, presumably anti-terrorist, local militias. None of those efforts have succeeded in curtailing private Islamic terrorism (quite the contrary), not only in Muslim-majority countries but also in the so-called “crusader” (Christian-majority) countries.

So why have the coalition states not tried to attack terrorist financing as well? The answer to that question does not seem to have anything to do with the usual official bleating about how difficult it is to track terrorist communications. A much more likely reply is to point to the evident lack of resolve on the part of the coalition governments themselves. Many of the Muslim-majority nations, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, have regularly been condemned in the world media for their two-faced attitudes toward Islamic terrorism. The guilty countries officially fight against the terrorist groups but secretly support them, either directly by investing millions of dollars of seed money, or indirectly by refusing to crack down on the trafficking of fighters, slaves, weapons, illegal drugs, illicit petroleum, looted antiquities and the various other international sources of terrorist income.

But the Muslim-majority members of the coalition are not the only ones lacking resolve in the anti-terrorism campaign. Major partners in the coalition whose populations are not mostly Muslim (such as the USA, Britain, France and Russia) also seem terribly reluctant to go all out in fighting terrorism. They are not only refusing to commit large numbers of their own soldiers outside their own borders, but also refusing to openly condemn their two-faced allies, and refusing to make a serious commitment to eliminating international terrorist financing.

By itself, this kind of behavior is hardly surprising, given the fact that for the past hundred years or so, the Western empires have, at various different times and in various different countries in the Middle East, allied themselves temporarily with nationalist organizations like the Baath movement in Syria and in Iraq against the communists, or allied themselves with the Islamist movements, also temporarily, to defeat the nationalists and the communists. Up until 1956, they even played Zionist nationalism off against Arab nationalism. Being two-faced, or even three or four-faced in not anything really new for the Western countries, any more than it has been for the USSR and Russia.

As has been pointed out by dozens of political commentators all over the world, the post-1979 radicalization of modern capitalism, aka the return of laissez-faire, aka neoliberalism, has also helped pave the way for the formation, or the return of, such other forms of extreme radicalization as Islamic terrorism. Starting in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher was first elected to power in Great Britain, most capitalist countries began severely reducing state intervention in economic or social development, outsourcing national industrial strength and substituting globalized, speculative “investment” in its place. Leading politicians in the West made a big show of denouncing the rise of Eastern forms of fascism and imperialism, while simultaneously increasing the dependence of their own imperial economies on the very countries they were so strenuously denouncing! Some of those Western countries, including Canada, even decided to cut way back on military expenditures, hypocritically without cutting back at all on belligerent rhetoric.

The most intriguing case of such two-faced behavior was the USA’s constant refusal to do anything at all about “allies” like Saudi Arabia, with its trillion-dollar expenditures (especially since the Yom Kippur War of 1973) on promoting ultra-Islamic Wahhabism all over the world. The USA also chose to ignore the involvement of hundreds of Saudi citizens, and citizens of many other two-faced countries, in some of the most important terrorist attacks, starting with 9-11. Even nowadays, with the USA and Saudi Arabia actively engaged in an economic world war over the control of petroleum supplies, no changes to their official relationship are currently being planned by any of the declared candidates in the current presidential election race.

But the influence of laissez-faire neoliberalism has recently become much more extensive than it was initially. Ever since the 2007-2009 world financial crisis, the world’s leading financiers, and their political backers, seem increasingly reluctant to do anything at all about world-wide flows of capital, legal or illegal, lest anything they do touch off a new round of financial collapse. They do not want to do anything real or serious about international terrorist financing for the same reason that they do not want to do anything real or serious about international tax evasion, shadow banking or totally unproductive financial speculation. They fear that any attempt whatsoever at getting serious about any large flows of capital anywhere, for whatever reason, would touch off an international panic among the world’s increasingly skittish, big-time investors.

Unfortunately, the world’s most important capitalists seem to be suffering from an extreme form of individualist narcissism that makes each one of them deathly afraid of what each other one might do to his (or her) power-base, or accumulated fortune. In other words, they have lost any trust, or confidence, whatsoever in their fellow conspirators, each individual trader thinking that each other trader has become capable of even more large-scale cheating and backstabbing than they already practiced in the past. It is like imagining the projection into the present of the ultra Machiavellian attitudes already described by James Clavell, in his novel “Noble House”, about the 1960s machinations of the directors of fictitious firms, based on the operations of real trading companies like Jardine Matheson and the Hong Kong-Shanghai Banking Corporation.

Now more than ever, the whole world seems to be divided up into competing gangs like those ones, half big business, half big politics, their simultaneously public and private empires in perpetual Hobbesian warfare of each against all, for maximum power and profit, completely ignoring nominal differences of nation, religion or ideology among all the leading players. All the “democratic” capitalists, the “proletarian” communists, the “independent” terrorists, the Islamists and the crusaders, are ideologically joined together hand in hand, ignoring the real needs of ordinary peons (clay pigeons) everywhere.

Instead, they are substituting ultra cynical manipulation of masses of people into Us and Them categories that are systematically ignored by all the real players, who continue trying to outmaneuver each other in pop-cult games that are not limited by any reference to any real countries, religions, ideologies or cultures. Each gang of players simply uses its own particular religious, cultural, and/or patriotic slogans to keep the ignorant masses in line, without actually believing in any of its own ridiculous propaganda.

This, however, has not prevented a few multicultural sycophants in the West from continuing to flog a dead horse, to the effect that ancient Islam not only inspires the terrorists but also the anti-imperialists in the Arab spring movement. In an article updated and republished recently in a Montreal newspaper (“Le Devoir”), a prolific author and editor from a Jesuit periodical (“Relations”), while pretending to attack the racist prophecy of Samuel Huntingdon (1993) about the supposedly ongoing clash between Christian and Islamic civilizations, managed to do exactly the opposite!

Emiliano Arpin-Simonetti’s way of “fighting against” cultural shock was to deny Muslims any access to “Western-imposed” universalism (either liberal or socialist), and to insist that they had to go through Islam to find the mystical resources necessary to solve their culturally exclusive problems. This seems to be an application of Catholic liberation theology (with situationist and/or gnostic tendencies thrown in) to “help” progressive-minded people from formerly colonized cultures, every one of them being induced to go way back to the primeval sources of their local religions, before being allowed to move on to more modern ways of thinking. Or is this just a back-handed way of getting people in the West to go back to their mystical Christian origins as well, and to convince everybody in the world to leave aside such modern secular slogans as liberty, equality and fraternity, in favor of a massive return to belief in magic?

The same ultra-cynical attitudes also seem to apply to the political and economic refugee crisis, which has seen millions of people simultaneously trying to get out of several failed states in western Asia and northern Africa, and dozens of other countries (in the Middle East as well as in the West) either refusing to take any of them in, or trying to take in as few of them as possible. The worst case of all seems to be in the Republican half of the USA, with leading politicians from that party not only wanting to keep any more Old World refugees out, but also wanting to simultaneously deport millions of illegal citizens of Latin American origin. In Canada, the new Liberal government seems open to receiving a few thousand more Old World immigrants, but only if they can be shown not to have any terrorist tendencies. No one in Canada has so far bothered to point out to the government what everyone in Europe already knows, that it only takes a few months of radicalization to transform a mentally unstable person into a suicide bomber, no matter in which country that person starts out.

But refusing to fight terrorism or racism for real, or refusing to fight tax evasion for real, and imposing austerity on all the little people instead, are not the only manifestations of the extreme narcissism that seems to have infected so many people, whether VIPs or their intellectual sycophants. All over the world, pollution and climate change are also being treated in the same two-faced manner as terrorism and the refugee crisis, with all the major players (examples like Volkswagen and India come to mind) blaming every ecological crime on someone else, or claiming to be doing something constructive while actually doing nothing of the sort.

Trying to defend democracy, such as it is, by fighting against corruption, is another case in point, in which ultra-radical and ultra-cynical attitudes are again preventing people from moving forward. In Quebec for example, the Charbonneau commission on corruption in the construction industry finally handed down its report, making all kinds of neat suggestions while simultaneously refusing to attribute any blame to the real ringleaders, such as former premier Jean Charest. Every country, region and city in the entire world seems to be going through very similar corruption crises at the present time, with very similar results. In every case, commentaries in the media about what is going on serve to reinforce the same observation made earlier, that none of the real players genuinely want to doing anything real about this problem either. Especially since in this case, as in so many other cases, they created the problem in the first place, and really do identify strongly with their own corrupt selves.

Neoliberal thinking on this subject exhibits the same libertarian or nihilist attitude as with every other major crisis, by downplaying what happened and emphasizing how disruptive it would be to society if anyone ever decided to actually do anything about any of these situations. Another sycophantic commentator in another Montreal newspaper went so far as to create an artificial boundary between corruption and cronyism, pretending that Quebec has suffered from very little real corruption, which could be easily rectified, and a great deal of cronyism, which is okay because according to him it has never been a real problem after all.

Other commentators followed this up by saying that the construction scandal showed that Quebec suffers from too much democracy, rather than not enough, because the commission recommended that elected politicians be separated from public construction projects as much as possible, since they are so easily corrupted, and that provincial and municipal construction projects be handled exclusively by much less corruptible, “independent” experts. The incredible idiocy of that observation did not seem to have occurred to any of the people who brought it forward, since none of them seems to have realized that all the so-called independent experts were actually hired by the private contractors who participated in the entire sting operation from the beginning.

The same method of defending democracy from corruption also occurred recently to defenders of Donald Trump in the USA, who said that their man avoided corruption altogether by using his own millions to pay for his presidential campaign! But the USA is certainly not the only country in the world where this kind of beleaguered logic is being tried out these days. For example, the good people in Quebec’s main opposition party, the Parti Québécois, also recently voted to take out the middleman between politics and business in their organization by electing their own neoliberal millionaire, Pierre Karl Péladeau, as their current chief. Péladeau, however, has been trying to transform himself into a social democrat, at least in public, ever since his internal election, which is certainly not true of Donald Trump. Nevertheless, the Quebec population in the next provincial election will still have to choose between premier Philippe Couillard’s 100% austerity-minded Liberal Party and the PQ’s lesser brand of libertarianism, since none of the smaller opposition parties seems capable of getting elected. Every other country in the world seems stuck in the same kind of political vise.

Other major problems being treated with the same nonchalant attitude include the enormous recent increase in the income gap between the social classes, all over the world, accompanied by a ridiculous claim that the social classes themselves have all disappeared. Not to mention the rip tide against women’s liberation, stemming from the largely anti-female effects of both austerity and religious atavism. To sum it all up, most of the world’s countries, in every major civilization, seem to be getting less and less democratic, more and more socially divided, and more and more corrupt, as time goes on. Unfortunately, our world is combining massive declines in real democracy, and in real ecology, with massive increases in real terrorism, real tax evasion, real austerity and real corruption. None of these manifestations of VIP narcissism, on every continent, seem to augur well for humanity’s immediate future, not to mention its long-term survival.