There are no lesser evils

The greatest mistake that progressive-minded people all over the world make when they are casting around for a political party or tendency that champions their goals, is to betray their intended message by pandering to the theory of the lesser evil. By progressive-minded people, I mean those who support social progress in all its forms. The best way to do this would be by greatly reducing the ever-increasing income gap between the social classes, by completing and reinforcing the modern welfare state, rather than eliminating it bit by bit. This obviously puts social progressives, in the trade unions as well in nominally socialist parties, on a collision course with the twenty-first century’s three dominant but also curiously complementary ideologies, neoliberalism, neofascism and religious atavism, that are getting perilously close to achieving their common goal of doing away with social development altogether.

Progressive people are also those who support feminism and complete equality between men and women, since nothing real can ever be done to reduce the yawning chasm between the social classes without simultaneously championing sexual liberation. The austerity programs of the neoliberal/neofascist/atavist coalition always hurt women more than men, making it impossible to approach social equality without also promoting sexual equality, and vice versa. By the same token, neither social nor sexual equality can ever be approximated without simultaneously defeating racism and cultural exclusivism. This is because real fraternity among all the peoples and cultures composing the world’s increasingly globalized population is a necessary prerequisite for social and sexual progress. If all the rival cultures in the world are constantly warring with each other over artificially induced identity crises, none of the solidarity required to effect real social change (permanent, world-wide) will ever be possible.

Unfortunately, most of the left-wing political parties, trade unions and socialist movements that have so far existed, which are theoretically supposed to be championing such progressive ideas, are run by people whose personal fears and ambitions induce them to seek a quick fix. They hate the feeling of relative political impotence that so often comes with running organizations frozen out of power for long periods of time, and are regularly tempted to join forces with falsely designated “lesser evils” that seem to be opposing some of the same people that they are opposing. That age-old geopolitical slogan, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, like a mind-altering drug, leads them right into the swamp of political opportunism, the inevitable prelude to ideological compromise, and the eventual abandonment of their socially progressive ideas altogether.

An article published last month in a Montreal newspaper (“Le Devoir”), by two normally progressive-minded intellectuals, philosopher Michel Seymour and historian Samir Saul, is an excellent example of the dangers involved in appearing to choose sides in any given crisis, geopolitical or otherwise. The article refers to the conflict that erupted a few months ago between Russia and Turkey, about how to participate in the ongoing Syrian civil war, which also implicates all the other world powers, and regional powers, involved in the Middle East. The main thrust of the Seymour-Saul article was to virulently denounce Turkish duplicity in that war, as a country that pretends to be fighting against the Islamic State movement while simultaneously providing IS with a kind of base camp inside its own territory.

Fair enough. Seymour and Saul’s description of all the different ways in which Turkey is carrying out its two-faced strategy appears to be entirely factual, if incomplete. In their article, they clearly indicate their opposition not only to Turkey’s curious role in that war, but also to that of its NATO allies, such as the USA and France, as well as such other indirect participants as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. So far, so good: from a socially progressive point of view, supporting the Western allies own duplicitous role in this conflict is no more useful than supporting the Turkish variety of deception, nor the even more obvious duplicity of the ultra-conservative Gulf states.

Instead, the problem with the Seymour-Saul article comes from their attitude toward Russia. For some strange reason, they seem to think that Russia’s role is somehow preferable to that of every other power involved. But why would the Russian dictatorship’s attempt to have a real influence again in the eastern Mediterranean, by shoring up the Assad dictatorship in Syria, deserve any more support from social progressives than the liberal-imperialist USA’s attempt to oust both Assad and the Islamic State, without endangering its perilous “partnership” with Turkey and Saudi Arabia? Seymour and Saul seem to have chosen Russia as their champion for the rather simplistic reason that it is successfully defying US “leadership” in that region, at least for the moment.

But in what way does supporting Russia, and/or Assad, against the hastily-cobbled “American-led” coalition, help the cause of progressive social change? And why underline many of the horrible things that Turkey is doing to help the Islamic State without any mention anywhere in the article about Iran’s similarly duplicitous role, albeit in a somewhat different direction, through its influence on the Syrian government, and the Iraqi one? Why target the obvious hypocrisy of the Western role in that conflict, or the even more disgusting Saudi role, or Israeli influence for that matter, any more than the Russian or the Iranian “contributions” to that disastrous conflict? What is to be gained by supporting, or at least appearing to support, any one of the dubious interventions of any of the rival imperialist powers?

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with socially-progressive people writing analytical articles about Middle Eastern geopolitics, and trying to figure out how that disgusting mess might be negatively influencing any attempts at ridding the world of the hegemonic ideological alliance between neoliberalism, neofascism and religious atavism. However, a more useful approach to the subject than the one suggested in the Seymour-Saul article would have been to adopt a much more honest “pox on all your houses” posture, showing that none of the world powers, or regional powers, involved in the Syrian civil war, directly or indirectly, are doing anything at all to help us get out of that murderous situation. Why not instead borrow the title of the 1948 Quebec artists manifesto, “le refus global”, which in this case could be transmogrified into meaning “total rejection” of every empire’s attempt to win the Syrian “civil” war against the interests of every other empire? Why not admit that none of the powers involved in that war are acting in any kind of responsible or fraternal way, that would help Syria recover from that horrible war rather than continuing to fight it down to the last living Syrian?

In its adherence to the lesser-evil dichotomy, the Seymour-Saul article on Turkey’s role in Syria also reminds me a lot of Michel Seymour’s role in the Quebec debate over the wearing of coverup religious garments in the public service, that became a decisive issue in Canada’s recent federal election campaign. He was one of the people who argued that there was nothing wrong with letting people like Zunera Ishaq, an Islamist sympathizer from Pakistan, wear her face-covering niqab at her swearing-in ceremony when she became a Canadian citizen. Since she showed her face privately to the court clerk, she could hide it during the public ceremony, since according to Seymour there was no longer any security problem. For people like Seymour, who identifies with the Québec solidaire party, anyone at all who supports any kind of restraint on anti-feminist scabs wanting to use their personal definitions of religion to make a political point in favor of voluntary female slavery, is necessarily suffering from what they choose to call “Islamophobia”.

Seymour and his friends like to promote the ideological multiculturalist amalgam of confounding the very real, ultra-right-wing prejudice against everything Muslim (à la Donald Trump), with the much more restrained, democratic and secular goal of establishing, or maintaining, a real division between religion and the state. For Seymour and company, everyone who thinks that individually-defined freedom of religion (rather than freedom from religion) is not considerably more important than women’s liberation, is necessarily a racist.

In his 2013 brief to the Quebec National Assembly’s parliamentary commission on the wearing of “ostentatious” religious symbols, Seymour tried to distinguish between what he called “individualist” religious belief and “communitarian” religious belief. According to him, governments that try to legislate on such matters can legitimately do so if they are dealing with people whose religious belief is individualist (such as today’s Christians, influenced by the Enlightenment), but not if they are dealing with people whose religious belief is still essentially communitarian (such as Muslims, Sikhs and Jews).

He seems to be very much under the influence of what French author Sophie Bessis called essentialism, in her 2014 book on the twin problems caused by both religious and commercial fundamentalism. In her use of the concept, religious essentialism is the idea according to which every group of people in the former Third World, who were colonized for several centuries by European empires (such as the Muslim community), have to get back to their precolonial roots (in this case, primitive Islam). Essentialists believe that all the former colonies, including economic satrapies like China used to be (1842-1943), are obliged to reconnect with precolonial ways of thinking in order to avoid “neocolonial contamination” from such “exclusively Western”, “falsely universal” concepts as liberty, equality, fraternity and laicity.

According to Bessis, even several extreme left-wing (Maoist and Trotskyist) organizations also decided during the 1960s and 1970s to adopt extreme right-wing definitions of “Eastern” religions like Islam, as part of their anti-Western bias. This was prompted by their grossly exaggerated belief that Western colonialism and neocolonialism were the exclusive source of evil in every non-Western country. They foolishly refused to admit that such social ills as extreme class divisions, slavery, genocide and misogyny, existed more or less equally inside every Eastern and Western culture, at least until recently. They mistakenly thought that all those social evils only became really important in “the East” (a concept extended to include all non-Western peoples, even native minorities within European settler colonies), only after the various Western empires began their global expansion back in the fifteenth century AD.

In a similar way, Michel Seymour, and other left-liberals like him, seem to be using “communitarian religion” as a convenient method of denying access to modern secular concepts to anyone from any of the “Eastern” religions. He appears to think that people coming from countries or religions that have not yet adopted the anticlerical ideas of the eighteenth-century Western Enlightenment, must be allowed to get away with doing at least some of the things that can no longer be tolerated from “individualist” Christians.

But, in his 2013 brief, he refused to acknowledge the continued existence of millions of Christian communitarians, such the “old” fundamentalists (the Amish and the Mennonites), the “new” fundamentalists (such as the much more numerous Pentecostals), and partly-Christian hybrids like the Mormons. Not to mention several hundred million Eastern Christians, coming mainly from the various Orthodox churches. Nor did he try to explain why he included all Jews as communitarians, rather than admitting that some of them may also have become “individualists” influenced by the Enlightenment. And what are we to do with all the believers in the other Eastern religions not mentioned in his list, such as Hindus, Buddhists, Confucianists and Shintoists? What about believers in any of the animist religions (totemism, shamanism, etc.), that are still important among many of the world’s native peoples, including the ones in Quebec? Are all those different kinds of believers supposed to be communitarians as well?

But aside from the obvious errors involved in his description of all Western Christians as being rank individualists, his “reverse racist” attitude toward many non-Christian religions would appear to mean that, according to him, all modern governments must refrain from criticizing any of the symbols that communitarian believers regularly use to proclaim their public identification with their own totalitarian religious sect. In the case of Islam, he also “forgot” that fundamentalism was relatively weak until quite recently, when it started started receiving a lot more money from the ultra-conservative Gulf states after the Yom Kippur War. Not to mention a lot more help from Western governments trying for several decades to rid the Middle East of communism and nationalism by promoting jihadism instead.

Strangely enough, however, Seymour also believes that modern societies should not tolerate such psychologically harmful religious practices as virginity testing, nor allowing a religious communitarian man to require that his wife be examined by a female doctor rather than a male one. He made no mention, however, in his 2013 brief, of even more harmful tribal practices such as excision, wife-beating, honor killings and forced marriages of under-age spouses. Moreover, his grounds for allowing state intervention against such psychologically harmful practices as virginity testing, without allowing it to also be used against the wearing of fundamentalist symbols in the public service, are extremely weak. They appear to be based exclusively on finding an appropriate balance between, on the one hand, social constraints legitimately applied to all citizens, and, on the other hand, the individual freedom of each and every religious communitarian to advertise his or her lack of respect for civic neutrality. Just one of the rather obvious sophisms to be found in his brief.

So it appears that Seymour’s essentialist attitude in the religious symbols debate has something in common with his geopolitical preferences in the article he co-authored with Samir Saul denouncing Turkey’s role in the Syrian civil war. In each case, he adopted a point of view that is not at all consistent with the usual ideological profile of his chosen political party, Québec solidaire, as a presumed defender of progressive social change. It turns out that the enemy of my enemy is not in fact my friend.

In the geopolitical article, the Seymour-Saul analysis was considerably weakened by their attempt to portray one side of the war (Assad, Russia, Iran, and other shiite forces, both “moderate” and fundamentalist) as being distinctly preferable to the other side (the curious situation in which the Western empires and the sunni Gulf states also find themselves strategically united with both “moderate” and fundamentalist forces). Similarly, in Seymour’s contributions to the religious symbols debate, he appears to be agreeing with the fundamentalists that only “communitarian” believers can properly represent Muslims, Sikhs and Jews, an opinion almost identical to the one being projected by many right-wing Western thinkers. They agree with him that the Enlightenment was an exclusively Western phenomenon, influencing (Western) Christians and non-believers only. (Although many of them also include Westernized Jews, of the Ashkenazy tradition, among the enlightened ones.)

But in what way do either of these opportunist stances help to further the cause of progressive social change? They seem in fact to be concessions to political strategy, in the first case by deciding which imperialist forces are preferable to opposing imperialist forces, making “our side” look a bit stronger than it really is. And, in the second case, using essentialist (communitarian) definitions of religion to help his chosen political party  carve out a position designed to be radically different from that of its main rivals. His convoluted theorizing on religious fundamentalism seems to have been crafted mainly to give Québec solidaire the opportunity to distinguish itself radically not only from the totally accommodating Liberal Party of Quebec, but also from the much less accommodating Parti Québécois.

Unfortunately, appeasement of neofascism does not weaken the ultra-conservative forces in this world, but instead strengthens them. Seymour’s left-liberal concessions to right-wing points of view are strangely similar, in fact, to those of such mainstream liberal organizations as the Democratic Party in the USA, which has often been the preferred target of self-proclaimed, left-wing intellectuals like himself. People like Seymour have been denouncing the Democrats since at least the Franklin Roosevelt presidency, for often combining relatively progressive social policies, such as Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” back in the 1960s, with reactionary attitudes on foreign policy, such as the same president’s radical escalation of the Vietnam War.

Since Bill Clinton’s period in office, they have also condemned the Democrats for cozying up to the country’s leading financial speculators, rather than trying to control them a little bit like FDR tried to do a long time ago. Seymour finds himself in the absurd position of copying the hypocrisy of mainstream liberals like Johnson, Clinton and Obama, rather than differentiating himself from them, at least in the realms of geopolitical and religious policy.

But above and beyond Michel Seymour’s convoluted sophisms, any political concessions by left-wing (socially progressive), left-liberal, or even mainstream liberal forces, to what they call lesser evils, are always incredibly dangerous. That is because none of those evil forces are ever significantly less evil than any of the other ones. Let us take a closer look at the triumvirate of ultra-reactionary ideologies that we identified earlier as currently dominating world politics: neoliberalism, neofascism and religious atavism.

Since its introduction in 1979, during the inflationary crisis, neoliberalism has been an attempt to turn back the clock so as to eliminate all the economic and social progress accomplished, especially in the Western world, since the Great Depression. This reactionary movement has been quite successful in curtailing the efforts of economic nationalism and social democracy, that started to combine forces between 1935 and 1979, and were then threatening to go world-wide with their joint alternative to laissez-faire.

Since 1979, neoliberalism’s goal has been to do away with all that “socialist nonsense” and to gradually reinstate the kind of extreme class divisions that used to exist during the “Gilded Age” of private capitalism (1885-1914). In other words, the original kind of “classical” economic liberalism, or laissez-faire, that has been depicted recently in such edulcorated television programs as “Upstairs/Downstairs” and “Downton Abbey”. Identified with such right-wing populist organizations as the Republican Party in the USA and the “reformed” Conservative Party of Canada, neoliberalism wants to reserve the use of state power exclusively for the benefit of large banks and large corporations, bailing out only those who are “too big to fail”, and paying for that enormous expense by doing away with every social program in the world except “self-help” and charity. They have taken collusion and corruption, between big business and big government, to a whole new level.

History has also been repeating itself these days, at least a little bit, with the rise of right-wing populist, neofascist movements all over the world, similar to the rise of the original kind of fascism in the period following the First World War. “Classical” fascism was also founded during the 1920s to help classical liberalism (laissez-faire) fight back against trade unionism, socialism, communism and the temptation among many liberal politicians to “save capitalism” by agreeing to a number of economic and social reforms such as those introduced by FDR in the USA between 1933 and 1945. The pre-World War Two kind of fascism was popular not only in those countries where it took state power (Italy and Germany), but also in dozens of other countries in the world, in the West as well as in many different parts of the colonial world. For example, pro-Mussolini Louisiana governor Huey Long probably had a good shot at winning the 1936 elections in the USA, if he had not been conveniently assassinated instead in 1935.

Since that time, the kind of State capitalism that people still call communism discredited itself completely by taking power not only in the USSR, but also in China and many other countries, only to engender totalitarian dictatorships without any significant working-class participation. In the end, those regimes were all considerably less socially-progressive than either the democratic socialism of the Scandinavian countries, or even the distinctly less interventionist social programs set up in such places as Britain and the USA. In the period from 1945 to 1979, many of the Western countries passed on some of their post-war riches to their own people, a little bit more than they had ever been tempted to do before. Unfortunately, none of their wealth ever made it as far as the pocketbooks of the ordinary people in the Third World, because of neocolonialism and the Western alliance with dozens of thoroughly corrupt, anti-communist political and military dictatorships.

As in the period between the first and the second world wars, today’s neoliberalism also finds itself working along quite well with a large number of more or less populist, authoritarian, and/or neofascist regimes spread out all over the world (such as in Turkey). As well as with similar authoritarian-populist movements that have yet to completely triumph over much-weakened forms of liberal democracy (such as in the USA). All of those neofascist regimes and/or movements also rely heavily on atavistic, fundamentalist religious movements (established within the different branches of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc.), which are as important to the “neofascist” definition of those various regimes and movements as are their populist and authoritarian characteristics.

Each one of the world’s most reactionary regimes and movements is not just motivated by its own internal development. Each of them is also trying to compete for commercial and geopolitical domination, of the whole world and/or of its own particular region. Each one also competes with each of its designated adversaries on the religious, cultural-identity level, periodically rewriting its own history or “brand” in order to help it project its own “bat signal”. First inwards, to rally its own skeptical population, then outwards against “inferior” rival brands, much in the same way as rival banks or large corporations do with their commercial logos.

In the Middle East, for example, the Islamic State movement decided to set itself up as a “caliphate”, ostensibly to restore the “golden-age purity” of the early Muslim empires, but conveniently forgot in the process that most of the cultural achievements of those empires (just like in the early Christian empires) were made in spite of their religion, rather than because of it. Similarly, in the same region, the government of Israel has also decided to refer to the occupied West Bank as “Judea and Samaria”, as if nothing else important had happened in that area of the world over the past 2000 years.

The “tribal geocentrism” (Shlomo Sand) of the reinvented Jewish people has been thrust onto the world stage in the same pre-fabricated manner as the tribal-based caliphate’s reconstructed version of primitive Islam. Today’s Israeli government represents the descendants of different peoples converted to Judaism over the last several centuries, and hates the Palestinian people not only because of everyday terrorism but also because today’s Palestinians are considered to be apostates, the descendants of the Biblical Jewish population who converted to Islam rather than remain faithful to their original religious heritage.

But, as Bessis emphasized in her 2014 book, today’s radical Muslims also fully participate in the “us” versus “them” dichotomy, notably through virulent antisemitism magnified by the partly successful Nazi attempt to cultivate an ideological bond with anti-Western Muslims during the Second World War. With the result that Hitler’s 1924 book, “Mein Kampf”, is apparently more popular reading in the Middle East than in any other region. In many different ways, all over the world, countries, cultures and religions that were originally founded on the reinvention of history and the reification of tribal systems of belief, have also recently intensified their efforts to develop even stronger brands in order to compete even more actively than before in the constantly recycled identity business known as “heritage”.

Unfortunately, liberal or nominally-socialist tolerance of all the different kinds of parochial neofascism, for commercial, geopolitical and ideological reasons, is having a devastating effect on what is left of social progress, not only in the West but also in all the other regions of the world. In Europe for example, the huge recent influx of refugees, mostly from Muslim countries, is provoking a crisis of epic proportions, mostly because of misguided reactions to neofascist behavior. On the one hand, restricting individual liberties for everyone, as the nominally-socialist president of France decided to do recently, may not turn out to be the best way of winning the war on terrorism. Especially since the proclaimed goal of the terrorists is precisely to do away with individual liberty altogether for their own “communitarian” reasons.

On the other hand, the same Socialist Party in France that got François Hollande elected as president has also been one of the main political forces in recent years to have accommodated every single attempt that the Islamists have made in many French suburbs to ensure that local Muslims, and everyone else, kowtow to their particular, ultra-conservative version of Islam. According to Nadia Remadna, an anti-Islamist Muslim from Algeria living in one of those suburbs, and founder of the local “Mothers Brigade”, left-wing mayors (mostly from the Socialist Party) in those same suburbs have been so afraid of being accused of racism and “Islamophobia” that they have allowed the Islamists to eliminate laicity and feminism completely, in total contradiction with what used to be called “French national values”.

Oddly enough, in the same copy of the Montreal newspaper (“Le Devoir”) in which I first read an article a couple of weeks ago about Remadna’s denunciation of that peculiar situation, there was a column by a well-known Quebec feminist, Francine Pelletier, reacting to the newest kind of Islamic terrorism in Europe. Namely the rape-and-groping attacks on hundreds of women that took place first in Sweden, then in a coordinated fashion on New Year’s Eve in many German cities by gangs of young Muslim immigrants, mostly officially rejected refugees not yet physically expelled from that country. Pelletier reacted to those disgusting attacks in a rather strange manner, that echoed Michel Seymour’s, and the French Socialist Party’s, morbid fear of Islamophobia.

She started out honestly enough by denouncing the cultural aspect of those attacks, comparing the sexist actions of those violent young Islamists in Germany with similar misogynous behavior in Egypt during the “Arab spring” uprising of 2011. But then she devoted the last part of her column to putting the emphasis on a demographic cause, the fact that according to her most of the refugee claimants in Europe these days are young males. She also hinted that such attacks would not have taken place if the European countries had deliberately tried to admit as many women as men, like Canada apparently did.

And she concluded her column by accusing “Everyman” (“monsieur Tout-le-monde”) of being sexually aggressive, not just young Islamic refugees in Europe, completely ignoring the fact that the “communitarian” varieties of Islam have yet to adopt modern attitudes toward women in the same proportion as the “individualist” Christians. Of course there are millions of misogynists all over the world, even in Canada where our egotistical prime minister recently sent out millions of copies of a photo of him fondling his wife in public.

Nevertheless, Pelletier’s approach is a blatant example of the method of argument that French-speaking people call “noyer le poisson” (literally, “drown the fish”). In other words making the Islamist rape attacks look less disgusting than they really were by accusing every single man on this planet as being as misogynist as any of the New Year’s Eve sexual assaulters in Germany. Asserting that every male human being is inherently a violent sexist, at least in the last part of her text, seems to have been her way of avoiding being accused of harboring a “racist” attitude toward all Muslims.

So what do the Seymour-Saul article on the Syrian civil war, Seymour’s analysis of the religious symbols debate in Quebec, the French Socialist Party’s attitude toward Islamism, or Pelletier’s analysis of the sex-terrorism attacks in Western Europe, all have in common? The answer is capitulation and appeasement, inventing excuses for the crimes and the disgusting beliefs of the group considered to be the lesser evil, while refusing to invent similar excuses for the group considered to be the greater evil. While misogyny is to be found in every culture, as is glorification of violence in general (as in the USA’s obsessive gun culture), large numbers of people who act in a more civilized manner than others (fewer guns per capita, or a less tolerant attitude toward rape and groping) ought to be considered as relatively good people, not just as greater or lesser perpetrators of evil. People who support social progress, in any one of its forms, should not, individually or collectively, be lumped in together with genuine reactionaries.

It is the world’s most important reactionary ideologies, neoliberalism, neofascism and religious atavism, that are indeed equivalent and complementary evils, none of which is lesser than any of the others. From the point of view of social progress, Russia is not a lesser evil than France, nor is Islamism a lesser evil than Islamophobia. The crimes that the Islamic terrorists have committed over the past several years, killing mostly Muslim victims, cannot possibly be excused by accusing Westerners, or anyone else, of fearing all Muslims rather than just the guilty ones.

Sure, different groups of Christians (Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox), as well as different groups of Hindus and Buddhists, are attacking and killing thousands of Muslims (and vice versa), particularly through majority-Christian countries bombing raids in places like Syria and Iraq. But none of that justifies any of the Islamic terrorist attacks, nor the total indoctrination of Muslim youth to get them to hate everyone else in the world. Most of the Christian bombs are being dropped in the name of God, while most of the Islamist victims are being killed in the name of Allah, but wiser people realize that God and Allah are just pseudonyms to cover the tracks of individual morons (be they soldiers or military commanders).

The goal of socially-progressive people in all of this should be to condemn all equivalent crimes equally, no matter who commits them, and not to invent excuses for some of the criminals, and not for the others. What neoliberalism, neofascism and religious atavism have in common is that they all seem to be engendered by a kind of a world-wide epidemic of extreme egoism, which produces different kinds of diseases among different kinds of sick people. But which is always based on hatred and aggression toward the lower classes, as well as toward rival corporations, geopolitical rivals and rival ego-projections that people call religions and/or ideologies. In other words, the competing manifestations of evil, self-centered, satanic behavior, present in all countries and in all cultures but taking specific forms among specific groups of people, is currently drowning out the unifying power of godly (God=good), or cooperative, behavior, based on universal values such as liberty, equality, fraternity and laicity.

In an increasingly globalized world like this one, encouraging all the cultures and religions to indulge in total war against each other, is a recipe for disaster. People whose proclaimed goal is social progress should not be caving in to reactionary forces every time that they are confronted with some form or another of monstrous behavior. If the bad people keep on getting worse, and the good people keep on hiding behind euphemisms, the future of the human race is really bleak.

Potentially catastrophic events such as a repeat of the Great Recession of 2008 are entirely plausible in the near future, given the fact that no one controls the egotistical monsters of speculative capitalism nowadays, any more than they did eight years ago. Given the current incapacity of the world’s much weakened (and much poorer) governments nowadays to contain such a chaotic event, the next great recession could easily become the next great depression. If that happens, and there is no reason to presume that it never will, then the neofascist and atavistic tendencies of so many opposing powers could easily take us all down the road to Armageddon. Which would make all the world’s crazy religious fanatics deliriously happy, since they all look forward to such an event as the only possible port of entry into what they call heaven.

Not to mention the fact that those who fear most of all that if nothing is done now to protect the natural environment, humanity could be facing a series of catastrophic events touched off by a four-degree increase in global warming by 2100, should reflect on how far off 2100 really is from 2016. Global warming could certainly kill off a good proportion of the human race because the evil (egotistical) people mentioned earlier, particularly concentrated among the richest and the most powerful individuals, managed to prevent anyone from stopping it. But if nuclear winter comes first, there will not be any catastrophic global warming after that. In short, nothing good is going to happen on this planet, certainly not for the vast majority of the population, if we keep on letting ourselves be dominated by speculators, tax evaders, right-wing populists and religious troglodytes.