How to be a good masochist

It never ceases to amaze me how so many people do things so often that seem to be totally contrary to their own best interests. These days, the world’s most amazing example of that kind of social masochism was the all-out support given by tens of millions of poor white, all-American machos for Donald Trump, a person who seems to me totally unsuited for those supporters chosen role. How can a billionaire possibly serve as a champion for ordinary, working-class people, who have been betrayed for the past 35 years by overclass monsters and traitors just like him, sending all the formerly best-paid American jobs to poverty-stricken paradises like China and Mexico? How can they think that a guy who makes obscene gobs of money in ultra-low wage, illegal-immigrant hotels and mafia-friendly casinos could possibly restore the USA’s world-class industrial economy from half a century ago? What do they think is going to happen to the social and economic fabric of their country if he ever really tries to deport eleven million illegal immigrants out of the USA, in some kind of crazy-nazi cattle drive? Why do they believe this jackass when he claims to be able to permanently solve every last domestic and foreign affairs crisis in only a few weeks time? How can anyone be so mind-bogglingly stupid as to say such things, or to support someone making such ridiculous claims?

Why do those millions of average Joes, and millions of average Janes as well, hate themselves so much? Why did most of them refuse to support someone with a much more appropriate plan to restore the USA to its former social and economic glory, by adopting instead a twenty-first century version of FDR’s “New Deal”? Someone like Bernie Sanders, for example, before he caved in to Hillary Clinton, in a vain attempt to keep Donald Trump out of the White House? If the majority of the US working-class had been standing up to Wall Street over the past three and a half decades, massively increasing both the size and the militancy of its trade unions, and supporting democratic socialists like Sanders the whole time, maybe they would not be in such a desperate situation nowadays. In fact, they ended up doing exactly what the ultra-conservative PAC financiers paid for them to do, by voting for a billionaire, neofascist rabble-rouser from Manhattan.

The only industry that could have benefited from all the promises DT made during the election was the fossil-fuels industry, which is probably the source of much of his unknown campaign financing. Just the sort of people one would expect to be upset with the Obama administration’s lukewarm support for the ecology movement. Unless one decides to count high finance as an “industry”, with Trump promising to lower taxes on big business even more than they have already been lowered, including a near-amnesty for all the multinational American corporations who have been keeping all their profits overseas instead of repatriating them back to the USA.

After all, the only thing that those poor wage-earning Trump supporters have in common with a monster like him is their visceral hatred of political correctness, which to them only means acting politely all the time, like sissies. They actually thought that Trump was one of their own when he imitated a handicapped, female journalist on national television, when he denounced everyone who would not let him get away with treating women like sexual garbage, when he accused Mexican immigrants of being rapists and thieves, and when he supported the white policemen emptying their weapons into the backs of black people trying to run away from them.

Those poor saps enjoyed Trump’s barbarian behaviour because they like to identify with the big, tough character in the “Sixteen Tons” country and western song, constantly threatening lesser men on the street with his enormous fists if they do not scurry out of his way like mice. In their eyes, Trump is so normal and so genuine because he refuses to behave in a civilized manner. For them, acting politely is an establishment way of doing things, conveniently forgetting that the ultra-right-wing billionaires who secretly bankrolled the ultra-right-wing Trump campaign are just as disgusting in private life as they are in their business dealings.

How can anyone truly believe the trump-ster (rhymes with “dumpster”) when he makes as if he wants to do away with the branch-plant state, ruled by an international financial overclass, by tearing up all the not-so-free trade agreements that the USA has signed and/or negotiated over the past several decades? Does he not himself belong to that same world-wide fraternity of multinational bankers and corporate chieftains who benefit from those same agreements every time that they sue every government that dares adopt any social or environmental legislation that threatens to lower their profit margins, anywhere in the world? As for the poor, dumb, white voters who hate “the system” so much, did they not themselves vote for Ronald Reagan, the guy they still think was “the best president ever in US history”, who convinced Americans to return to free trade and to economic liberalism after several decades of economic nationalism and a minimum program of social welfare? The same policies that have been upheld by all the US presidents, republicans and democrats alike, since 1981. How can those same voters nowadays honestly accuse the establishment of imposing the same system that they themselves have supported for the past 35 years?

After all, if Trump really intended to enable the US government to regain its lost sovereignty, he would have promised instead to completely eliminate tax evasion by billionaire bullies like himself, not promise to increase it drastically. Why do those dumb white mostly-males refuse to recognize that he is in fact lying on an even more colossal scale than Hillary Clinton ever has? In fact, no ultra-rich investor would ever want to bring back the kind of 92% maximum taxes on large fortunes that used to prevail in the USA before the onset of neoliberalism. Just like all the other, fake anti-capitalist leaders of the past, the fascist dictators, the military dictators and the phoney communist (state-capitalist) dictators, his opposition to the dictatorship of private (laissez-faire) capitalism is as unreal as his completely bogus official opposition (!) to racism and to sexism.

It seems obvious that the millions of “poor white trash” in the USA who support populist gangsters like DT do so because of their masochism, and not because of their fake machismo. These are the same kind of people all over the world, who vote for government austerity measures because they have been convinced by the professional lobbyists that the only way to fight for jobs these days is to further increase the already historically-large income gap between the social classes. The truth is that the world’s largest investors are playing all the world’s governments off one against the other. Sometimes they decide to move to wherever they are being offered the lowest possible taxes on enormous fortunes, other times they simply pocket the investment incentives being offered to them by almost every government in the world, foolishly competing against every other government for those same non-existent, well-paying, industrial jobs.

Some of those lying lobbyists occasionally claim to be against the widening of the horrendous, world-wide income gap, while at the same time arguing that every single method ever advanced for reducing that gap can never work for some particular reason. They claim that protectionism is not the way to go because free trade has made every country much richer than before, conveniently forgetting once again that most of the new-found wealth of the past 35 years has gone to the top one percent of one percent (one ten-thousandth) of the world’s population. The same extremely well-paid experts also claim that a 15$ per hour minimum wage is not the way to go because it would reduce the overall number of jobs available, and therefore hurt the very people it was supposed to help. And so on and so forth: every time someone comes up with some method or another to reduce the income gap between the social classes, the experts always agree that it is not the way to go. No method of reducing inequality ever works for them, for the simple reason that they do not really want to help the poor and the powerless at all, but only to make sure that their billionaire idols go on dominating the whole world forever.

The US presidential election results also put the lie to all the big talk about “American values”, or “Western values” in general, things like belief in democracy, equality between men and women, racial equality, minority rights, and all the other righteous pretensions. What is so democratic about choosing between a tax-avoiding billionaire and a friend of Goldman-Sachs? If the losing half of the voting population supports feminism and the winning half opposes it, what does that say about overall support for sexual equality? What about the 50-50 popular-vote split between racism and anti-racism, or between xenophobia and tolerance? If the American people hate each other so much, is that not a reflection of their own self-hatred as a disunited people? If the USA is not any more in favour of Western values than the German people were during the dying days of the Weimar Republic, or the Italian people voting for DT’s buffoon-like, fascism-founding predecessor, what does that say about “Western values” as a political slogan?

To be sure, this does not at all mean that the political correctness that Trump supporters hate so much is really a good thing, just that their definition of it is so completely out of whack. Political correctness is indeed at work in another well-known example of collective masochism, namely whenever liberal-minded people in the West argue that we cannot let ourselves get too upset about the world’s most disgusting Islamic terrorists lest demagogues like Trump turn that “negative emotion” into Islamophobia. They claim quite reasonably that not all Muslims are terrorists, but then they transform that simple fact into its opposite by laying all the blame for the rise of Islamic fascism on the rotten treatment of Muslims by Western armies in dozens of Muslim-majority countries, as well as in Muslim immigrant ghettos inside North America and Western Europe.

The truth is that the Western empires and their ultra-conservative Muslim allies, like the Wahhabi government of Saudi Arabia, did indeed contribute to the coming into being of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, using islamism as a weapon in order to fight against the influence of both nationalism and communism inside most of the Muslim-majority countries. Muslim immigrant populations in the West have also been ghettoized just as much as have any of the other minority populations. But these contributing factors to the rise of Islamic terrorism do not by themselves explain the enormous recent increase in terrorist activity of Muslim origin. It is also true that every religion in the world also possesses its own ultra-reactionary, fundamentalist factions, like the Salafi movement within Islam, but the fact remains that only the Muslim religion is currently being afflicted by such a huge tendency to impose jihad terrorism on so many different countries. Why do the liberal-minded masochists try to prevent targeted populations from getting as upset as they have every right to be at jihadist violence?

The victims of that terrorism, who are mostly less-conservative Muslims anyway, should be able to denounce jihadism virulently without being accused of promoting racism. Just because Western fascists like Donald Trump want to kick all the Muslims out of their own countries does not mean that “Eastern” fascists like the Islamic State cannot be denounced in no uncertain terms by any of its victims. Nor is it “illegal” to point out that the Koran itself also makes its own contribution to the jihadi movement by containing a much higher number of disturbingly violent denunciations of non-Muslims than it contains verses preaching tolerance instead.

Which means that criticizing islamism is not the same as condoning Islamophobia, no more than criticizing Israel is the same as being anti-Semitic. Nor is it racist to point out that the true believers in all the world’s most conservative religious movements are themselves suffering from masochism, just like those poor-white Trump supporters in the USA. The Salafi and Wahhabi Muslims, at least those whose suffering is not forced on them against their will, voluntarily suffer tremendously from their own ultra-rigid, self-imposed ideology.

As in many other such extremist sects, like the Amish, the Mennonites and many of the other fundamentalist movements inside Christianity, or the Hassidim and Lev Tahor within Judaism, the women inside these Muslim movements suffer a great deal more than the men, being confined to exclusively “feminine” roles inside the home, forbidden to communicate with “outsiders”, as well as being obliged to wear extremely uncomfortable, cover-up clothing wherever they go out. Some extremist sects also suffer from ridiculous rules dangerous to their members health, such as refusing vaccination, or blood transfusions, or being treated by a doctor from (heaven forbid) the opposite sex. Or from refusing to educate their children about the modern world, rather than just having them memorize ancient religious texts. Not to mention observing completely outdated, ancient rituals concerning food consumption, and sometimes succeeding in imposing those rituals on non-believers in ultra-tolerant states, using such subterfuges as universal kosher labelling. Many states also subsidize religious education, even for “mainstream” religions, to the detriment of the non-religious population, which also suffers from universal tax exemptions granted to private religious buildings only.

Yet another variety of social masochism is the overwhelming tolerance currently being observed all over the world for increasingly dangerous acts of political, economic and social corruption. No matter how many such disgusting acts are carried out by the world’s leading elites in every country, none of the big shots involved ever seem to get anywhere near adequate punishment for the horrible things that they are constantly doing. All the media commentators treat all of this increasingly damaging and expensive corruption as if it was normal and inevitable, apparently believing that every time some well-placed individual has the opportunity to do something illegal, with a reasonable hope of getting away with it, it is unreasonable for ordinary people to expect that individual not to go ahead and do it. Nor is it useful to send the perpetrators to jail, whenever they are caught, nor to at least oblige them to resign and replace them with anyone else, because corruption is considered to be inevitable among such people.

High-placed leaders like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, for example, have never been punished in any way for invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, knowing full well that the reasons stated for justifying that invasion were complete fabrications from the beginning. The realization that the overthrow of Hussein led directly to the rise of the horrendous Islamic State movement does not seem to have had the slightest effect on either of their illustrious careers. Nor have the considerably less implicating, but nevertheless disturbingly similar, roles of such Western leaders as Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton and Alain Juppé in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, had any great effect on their careers, in spite of providing the Islamic State with yet another major region in which to expand its ultra-reactionary, imperialist influence.

It would be relatively easy to compile a list of several thousand other such examples of excessively misguided political hubris, in hundreds of different countries, that have taken place over the past few decades. What they all have in common is an extremely disappointing tendency not only among the perpetrators, but also among all the other leading authorities in the world, not to want to do anything about any of this kind of megalomaniac behaviour and exaggerated self-justification. Nor does there seem to exist any kind of credible, independent and/or popular tribunal to which cases like these could presumably be referred.

But geopolitics is hardly the only domain in society in which corruption has become endemic. None of the people involved in causing the extremely destructive 2007-2009 world-wide recession have ever been punished to anything near the extent that they ought to have been punished, given the enormity of their crimes. At the same time, none of the measures put in place ostensibly to make it more difficult for this kind of thing to happen all over again, have anywhere near the kind of severity that would make them really useful in any future disaster caused by financial corruption. Everywhere in the world, the people in power act as if whatever the world’s most corrupt investment bankers do is out of bounds to anyone wanting to impose any kind of genuine control on them. Ordinary people accepting this situation continue to vote for the same politicians who advocate letting all the bankers get away with all the damage to the world economy that they have so illustriously accomplished, so why would anyone still want to go after those monsters for real?

The tens of thousands of particular scandals concerning most of the world’s leading multinational corporations are also handled in the same mollycoddling ways. None of the executives of any those firms, whether they be huge automobile companies (Volkswagen), or pharmaceutical companies (Valeant), or pipeline companies involved in oil spills (Enbridge), or railway firms involved in oil-transportation disasters (CPR), or engineering and construction firms that did illegal work for Middle Eastern dictators (SNC-Lavalin), or mining companies ruining different ecosystems all over the world (Barrick Gold), have ever been punished either anywhere near to the extent that they have also damaged the real world economy.

None of the leading politicians involved in helping them cheat and steal and pollute on a massive scale, and worm their way out of every legal situation they find themselves in, not to mention subsidizing their “recovery” programs with public money, have ever ended up with long prison terms either. The former mayor of Montréal, Gérald Tremblay, the former premier of Québec, Jean Charest, the former prime minister of Canada, Jean Chrétien, are not in jail several years after having committed their crimes, and not about to be sent there either. Nor are the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, nor the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, nor the president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, nor the interim leader of Brazil, Michel Temer, who seems to be a lot guiltier of corruption than that country’s disgraced president, Dilma Rousseff, who he has recently replaced. Nor any of the other ultra-corrupt politicians in practically every other city, province and country in the world. Somebody ought to try making a list of all of these people, all over the place, just to show how incredibly long it would turn out to be.

Still another long list could also be drawn up, of all the different ways that journalists are being mistreated all over the world, all the way from the assassination of journalists being carried out in many different countries (Russia), to the large-scale jailing of journalists in many other countries (Turkey), and finally to the numerous cases of judges granting police warrants to spy on journalists all the time (Quebec). Judges in Quebec, and dozens of other places, also regularly go on temper-tantrum power-trips, and throw out criminal cases, even murder cases involving the Hell’s Angels, because the police or the prosecutors make dozens of mistakes, or take too long to bring people to trial, or whatever. The different kinds of corruption going on simultaneously in today’s world are probably more numerous nowadays than they were before, if only because the world’s population has expanded enormously in recent decades, therefore providing that many more opportunities for important people to do evil, in so many creative ways.

What the otherwise unrelated Trump fiasco in the USA, the false amalgam between criticizing islamism and contributing to Islamophobia, and the various different kinds of high-level corruption all over the world, have in common is popular masochism. Ordinary people everywhere are tolerating all of this disgusting overclass behaviour either because they have no choice in the matter, or because they let their own faults and foibles blind them to the fact that their “betters” are much worse people than they are themselves, and not at all deserving of their support.