Here we go again

A lot of people think that it is an enormous exaggeration to call US president-elect Donald Trump a neofascist, or even to interpret his election as a huge “contribution” to the second coming of world fascism. They much prefer to describe DT as just another, almost comical, champion of right-wing populism, along the lines of the zonked-out former mayor of Toronto (Canada), Rob Ford, who became the butt of all the late-night US jokesters during his four years in office (2010-2014).

But to understand what is happening here, it is not a good idea to focus exclusively on the differences between the suburban populism of “ordinary Joes” like Ford and billionaire attempts at reviving classical fascism on a much larger scale, like Trump appears to be doing. It is probably more useful to focus instead on what all the very numerous kinds of neoconservative populism all over the world, and not just in North America, have in common. In fact, they all seem to be more similar than they are different, each one acting as part of an ongoing continuum, or linear spectrum, a bit like the concept of the autism spectrum currently being used in psychiatry.

In other words, the less virulent forms of conservative populism and the much more dangerous, contemporary revivals of classical fascism aimed at making some particular imperial nation great again, should be seen as part of a world-wide, neofascist sphere of influence. The lesser forms of suburban populism can therefore be interpreted as milder, more localized, versions of much larger varieties of extreme political alienation, affecting millions more people. More or less the same way that mainstream political analysts in the West used to describe meeker, left-liberal individuals and groups belonging to the Soviet-led peace movement during the Cold War, as “fellow travellers”, accusing them of being more or less willing dupes of totalitarian, international communism.

The concept of a neofascist sphere of influence could then be applied to any sort of right-wing or ultra-right wing political movement, anywhere in the contemporary world, whose ideology is based mainly on nostalgic references to an invented “golden age” that supposedly used to exist in days gone by. Which is to say, from their point of view, before the “corrupting influence” of rival ideologies made it impossible for such reactionary “true believers” to continue to “live well and prosper” like they imagined that they were doing, before losing their own particular version of “paradise”. Like the original fascists of the first half of the twentieth century, nostalgic for a pre-industrial, peasant/artisan, Tolkien village that never really existed, today’s false-memory images of theoretical golden ages have once again become the common theme uniting superficially dissimilar movements, also once again disseminated all over the world.

Contemporary golden-age projections certainly include the Trump supporters constant reference to the post-war era not so long ago when “America” was supposed to have dominated the entire world. Which was also when the “American dream” of rags to riches for everyone was still ideologically intact, before it became obvious that it was not working out as originally prophesied. But they also include such other golden-age projections as how wonderful it was supposed to have been back when “Mother Russia” was still under the control of the “Old believers”, or when China was once presumed to have been a harmonious “Middle Kingdom” surrounded by underdeveloped, barbarian satrapies. Or, in the most extreme of all the current phantasmagoric projections, the jihadist fantasy about what a great world it was, at least for them, when the original Islamic caliphate began conquering its way towards setting up what was supposed to have become a universal, exclusively Muslim umma, or world community.

Such profoundly erroneous, but nevertheless seriously maintained, visions are again being projected all over the world the way that they used to be during the classical period of fascism. The last time around, it was mostly because of the consequences of the First World War, followed a few years later by the Great Depression. This time around it is happening again because various different peoples have reacted in astonishingly similar ways to such contemporary anxiety-forming crises as world-wide financial instability and equally demoralizing climate change. Reactionary movements in each region, during classical fascism as well as nowadays, also share a common religious element, based on widespread adhesion to fundamentalist forms of most of the world’s extant religions, including not only Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but also Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, shamanism and totemism. Orthodox, literal interpretations of the most important beliefs in each one of those religions keep being revived, as a necessary element in every kind of classic fascist or contemporary neofascist fantasy.

This is because the world’s religions are so often based on ultra-idealist, magical, paranormal, other-worldly fantasies that seem to be specifically designed to get as far away from material reality as possible. An excellent example of this sort of thing is the Christian Apostles Creed, which secular scholars interpret as being a compendium of a large number of visionary concepts, such as virgin birth, originally invented by several different pagan religions from earlier, pre-Christian, civilizations scattered all over the Middle East. In the modern world at least, anyone attempting to truly believe in such a pastiche, in the obsessively literal fashion favoured by religious fundamentalists all over the world, makes such a person extremely susceptible to constantly suspending judgement and believing in just about anything.

The original, twentieth-century fascists, not only in the West but also in many other parts of the world, developed their own peculiar visions of what they disliked so intensely about the increasingly secularized, modern world by referring back to religious mythology such as in the half-Christian, half-pagan, gobbledegook invented in Nazi Germany. In today’s world, climate skepticism, or deliberate denial of the scientifically accepted Anthropocene hypothesis, is a good example of the kind of other-worldly psychological traps into which true believers are falling once again. Which also helps to explain why the Bible Belt areas of the USA voted for Donald Trump much more than did the large urban centres.

Another equally important element uniting twentieth-century fascist movements with twenty-first century neofascist movements is their common origin in a preceding liberal, or neoliberal, “gilded age”. For original fascism, the 1885-1914 period (as well as the 1920s in some countries) served as the corrupting liberal influence, and the neoliberal period since 1979 for today’s neofascist reaction. In each of those cases, unprecedented world-wide “prosperity” (at least for rich people) was based on an enormous expansion in international free trade and relatively free movements of capital across most parts of the globe. But also by an equally enormous increase in the income gap between a very small number of ultra-rich people and an increasingly large number of poor people. (An observation that is in no way invalidated by UN claims about a recent decline in the overall numbers of the ultra-poor, since their definition of what constitutes extreme poverty only applies to people making less than the ridiculously low rate of two dollars a day.) Oddly enough, it was the “golden”, or “gilded”, ages of liberal-minded international capitalism that paved the way toward the subsequent adoption (in each case) of both the fascist and the neofascist visions of a lost paradise presumably affecting their own false-memory golden eras.

At the more serious end of the neoconservative/neofascist spectrum, more interesting comparisons than the one involving Rob Ford and Donald Trump have therefore been made between Trump and the former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who dominated politics in that country from 1994 to 2011. Both of those two bullies catapulted themselves into successful political careers as ultra-conservative strongmen, capable of taking on “the liberal establishment” because of their status as extremely well-known, billionaire tycoons. Berlusconi as a former real-estate mogul who became the owner of the most important media empire in Italy and Trump as not only a leading New York real-estate mogul, but also as a popular American media performer. The main difference between them being that Berlusconi’s recent convictions and numerous other legal troubles means that he seems to be currently barred from taking political office again, at least not right away, while Trump is just getting started. Not to mention the fact that being a reactionary president of the still extremely powerful USA means that Trump can do a lot more damage to the whole world than Berlusconi has so far been capable of doing.

Make no mistake about it, however, neither of those two billionaire politicians is, or was, just a buffoon, constantly carrying on and on about each one’s numerous dalliances with airhead women, rather than sniffing too much cocaine like poor old Rob Ford. In spite of Berlusconi’s current status as an ex-con, his political influence is far from over. Nor has Italy genuinely recovered from its recent bout of attempted neofascism and could easily have a relapse sometime soon, perhaps under some Berlusconi clone hailing from the Northern League, long before “the Knight” himself becomes eligible again for getting re-elected. More importantly, Berlusconi’s status as a genuine, if inefficient, neofascist is not just related to his ultra-reactionary stance in Italian domestic and foreign policy, unaccompanied by any significant achievements, but also to his Forza Italia party’s absorption of the former Italian Social Movement. That particular organization, the direct descendant of Benito Mussolini’s original fascist dictatorship, was run for a time by Il Duce’s grand-daughter Alessandra Mussolini, now a senator in Berlusconi’s party.

Similarly, Donald Trump is not just another unstable, foul-mouthed circus clown, using pornographic misogyny, white supremacy, anti-Muslim military rhetoric and a generalized law and order agenda in order to get elected. Even though, during the transition period between his election and his accession to office, he seems to have toned down some of his electoral promises, there is nothing in his current attitude that would disqualify him as the most important elected neofascist in US history since Louisiana governor Huey Long. To be sure, currently threatening to deport only those two or three million illegal immigrants who have also been convicted of other crimes, rather than the entire eleven million illegals he previously threatened, looks like a significant political downgrade, as does his apparent decision not to have Hillary Clinton tried for treason, or even his very short-lived feint about waffling on climate change.

So how should everyone react to DT’s transition strategy of sometimes trying to look like an ordinary neoconservative politician, reneging on some of his more extreme electoral promises, but still choosing cabinet ministers and political appointees associated with every one of his ultra-right-wing political ideas? First of all, it should not be forgotten that DT could very easily reinstate his signature, full-fledged neofascist approach, once Barack Obama finally hands over the box containing the nuclear codes. Some of the extremely reactionary ideas that Trump put onto the mainstream political agenda during the campaign might also continue to be underplayed during DT’s first few months as commander in chief, only to be redeployed very rapidly during a future crisis of international proportions. For example, anyone who keeps up to date with the financial media these days knows that an even bigger catastrophe than the one that took place back in 2008 is still very much on everyone’s minds. It is universally seen as a rather likely event in the near future rather than as just a possible one.

As previously referenced, this kind of world-wide financial instability is the main reason why 62 million “deplorable” US citizens ended up voting for a monster like Trump in the first place. His poor-white, working-class, rust-belt electoral base was, after all, created by 35 years of applying Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s brand of “voodoo economics” to the USA. During that entire period, no matter which major party dominated the Congress and/or the presidency, the neoliberal program had almost exclusive control over government policy, combining free trade in every direction, tax cuts for the rich, budget cuts for the poor, deregulation of the financial “industry” and widespread encouragement for distinctly unpatriotic US companies to ship most manufacturing jobs to the low-wage “Third World” (Asia, Africa and Latin America). As in every other country where neofascism has raised its ugly head recently, neoliberalism in the USA not only preceded neofascism but also continues to accompany it.

Which is why there is no way that the Trump juggernaut could possibly “drain the swamp” in Washington, or anywhere else, for the obvious reason that his ultra-conservative minions are swamp people themselves. Half of the neoliberal (laissez-faire, libertarian) swamp that has dominated the USA since Reagan was elected are from the Republican side, after all, as well as from the Democratic side. Most of the politicians on both sides are owned outright anyway by investment bankers from firms like Goldman Sachs, as Trump himself demonstrated in his choice for Treasury secretary. Having the neofascist swamp people from the ultra-conservative movement try to drain the only slightly more liberal Democratic half of the same swamp will only result in the entire USA taking on an even browner colour than before. Nativist, know-nothing populists like Trump, are in fact quite similar to those who existed back in the nineteenth century, as depicted with relatively reasonable levels of inaccuracy in such films as “The Gangs of New York”. Trump’s art of the deal, also depicted in the same film, is the very definition of swamp politics.

While DT makes a big show of wanting to tear up all the treaties favouring free trade, and prevent even more complete deindustrialization by reintroducing the protective tariff in certain specified industries, he still steadfastly remains loyal to cutting taxes even more drastically than before, especially for rich bankers and multinational corporations. At the same time, he also wants to completely do away with the very mild controls that the Democrats introduced to protect what is left of the environment, and their equally minimalist national health program, now known as Obamacare. In other words, he does not want to eliminate economic liberalism (aka neoliberalism), but only to “improve” on it, so that it will create even greater numbers of “deplorable” poor people in the future. Not only many more people joining Trump’s army of “poor white trash”, but also even greater poverty than before for all those “unAmerican” Blacks, Latinos and other assorted non-white populations.

In any case, it is highly doubtful that DT would ever be able to rid the USA of free trade altogether, even if he really wanted to do more than just pay lip-service to yet another one of his hopelessly unrealistic electoral promises. Most of the other American billionaires are totally committed to low wages in foreign countries and would only consent to bring back the millions of industrial jobs lost since Reagan took office if the “poor white trash” consented to work for several times less than the wages currently being paid to the remnant of industrial workers still employed nowadays in the USA. Of course, if those Trump supporters decided to make such an exceedingly unlikely offer, that might also help “solve” the problem of all those illegal immigrants currently working for considerably less than the legal minimum wage, for Trump as well as for all the other billionaires who were “forced” to entice them to enter the USA in the first place.

Most American employers, especially the larger ones, are still as fully committed to low-cost foreign labour as are similar employers in Canada who also still uphold the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that the USA signed with Canada in 1989 and with Mexico in 1993. Employer pundits in Canada and the USA still support NAFTA because of all the new-found wealth they pocketed from the tremendous increase in trade between their countries, as well as with low-wage Mexico, not to mention benefiting from similar agreements with dozens of other low-wage countries.

Most multinational corporations and employer associations in the USA and Canada still do not give a fig nowadays about the enormous loss of good-paying jobs and industrial strength in both countries brought on by those agreements, preferring to rely instead on exploiting mostly foreign labour, combined with an increased reliance on natural resource extraction and the service economy. The current, neoliberal and capital-l Liberal government of Justin Trudeau in Canada may be significantly less obscurantist than the former, semi-populist, neoliberal Conservative government of Stephen Harper, but it has exactly the same approach to international trade. Both recent Canadian governments also share shabby treatment of ethnic minorities with recent governments in the USA, particularly when it comes to indigenous populations.

In the USA, the Donald’s unique governing blend of in-your-face racism, sexism, militarism, environmental atavism and neofascist xenophobia has now become a potent political weapon to help all the radicalized extra-conservatives in the Republican cluster achieve final victory over their liberal enemies, in their antediluvian assault on everything considered even remotely progressive. If DT himself ends up disappointing his millions of jaundiced followers by truly becoming just another unreliable, wishy-washy, professional politician, watering down his intoxicating election rhetoric so much that it no longer smells like really good moonshine, there are thousands of other, even more demented uber-patriots out there, ready to take his place.

But Trump may also be in fact and not just in rhetoric, clinically unstable, a borderline personality constantly switching back and forth from ordinary, right-wing populism to raving, lunatic fascism, agreeing with whichever one of his “advisors” (controllers?) that he was talking to most recently. One day in the near future, he could be chewing the fat with Vladimir Putin about some geopolitical situation or another, and the next day he could become convinced by some advisor that Putin had put one over on him the day before, and threaten Russia with nuclear armageddon instead. The disturbed individual who flummoxed everyone watching the election campaign does not seem to be able to distinguish between his own personality and his country’s best interests. It’s all the same to him. Which makes every one of the nightmare scenarios that much closer to being realized now than they were during the campaign itself.

American citizens, along with everyone else, should also not forget that many leading Americans were quite tempted as well by the same kind of fascist agenda during the interwar years, although the country as a whole never succumbed to it the way that Italy did under Mussolini. Aside from Governor Long, who was conveniently assassinated several months before his campaign for the US presidency in the 1936 elections really took off, the USA sported quite a few influential fascist supporters back then, including Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest hosting an extremely popular pro-Mussolini radio show, often sounding a whole lot like today’s gaggle of ultra-right-wing radio commentators. The chairman of Texaco, Torkild Rieber, also supported European fascism during the 1930s, commercially and ideologically, before moving on to help the US government strike an oil deal with the Shah of Iran, after the 1953 overthrow of that country’s nationalist prime minister.

Not to mention such well-known figures as Henry Ford, who apparently preferred the Nazi variety of fascism to the Italian one because of Hitler’s virulent anti-semitism. A point of view that contrasted greatly with Mussolini’s initially excellent relationship with many important Italian Jewish fascists, who were with Il Duce from the very beginning and never stopped supporting him until they were assassinated as Jews during the German occupation of northern Italy. Some US historians even argue that the first version (1933-1935) of FDR’s “New Deal” closely resembled the 1932 electoral program of the German NSDAP, in stark contrast with the second version (1935-1939), which was much more pro-labour.

Recent controversies in the USA and Great Britain are also still swirling over the role of George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, a leading banker and former senator, in representing certain well-known pro-Nazi German interests (such as Thyssen) in the USA for several years. As well as supposedly being involved with dozens of other upper-crust American families in an alleged plot to overthrow the by-then pro-labour FDR and replace his government with a pro-fascist regime. Those stories were all revived during George W. Bush’s period in office, leading some people to allege that W’s extremely expensive (in lives and dollars), totally useless and completely illegal overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003 was consistent with his grandfather’s alleged behaviour.

Even though the Bush family does not like DT very much, the Bushes in power (1989-1993, 2001-2009) certainly seem to have had more than a few things in common with Donald Trump’s current program. But then, so did Dwight Eisenhower and his world-controlling Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, during the 1950s, and the evil tandem of Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, during the 1970s. Not to mention the last great American cold warrior, Ronald Reagan, and his defence secretary, Caspar Weinberger, forced to resign during the Iran-Contras scandal, but later pardoned by none other than GHW Bush. Weinberger also had a lot in common with W’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, and his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. All those Republican politicians, including some who never made it all the way to the top, like Barry Goldwater, certainly seem to have helped push the USA further and further to the right over the years, eventually helping to make their country ripe for a more straightforward, less hypocritical, version of neofascism nowadays.

But then, so did quite a few leading politicians in the Democratic Party, such as Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, as well as JFK and LBJ, both benefiting from the escalating advice of “Doctor Strangelove” himself, Robert McNamara. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama also made their own, somewhat more subdued, “contributions” to the long-term right-ward trend, such as Bill Clinton’s role in the United Nations 1991-2003 economic embargo of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that killed a far greater number of Iraqis than did W’s 2003 invasion. Not to mention Clinton’s participation in the Republican assault on both the American welfare system and Depression-era controls on investment banking.

However, the most important thing about the influence of fascism in the USA during the 1930s was not about how far it went, but more as another fascinating proof that twentieth-century fascism was not just about Italy and Germany. Many commentators nowadays have a hard time accepting that people like DT do in fact belong to the current, world-wide, neofascist sphere of influence because they equate the word “fascism” with only its most extreme manifestations, such as stormtroopers and concentration camps. There were all sorts of fascist and pro-fascist movements, political parties and established authoritarian or ideological allies all over the world back then, in Canada, Latin America, every country in Europe, several places in Africa, western Asia (the Middle East), India, China, Japan obviously, and so on, just about everywhere.

Highly influential people like Edward VIII, the briefly reigning King of England (1936), supported Adolf Hitler completely, before and after his abdication, while the longest-lasting Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, merely praised Hitler’s futuristic “industrial relations” during an official visit in 1938, and enthusiastically agreed with his anti-semitic views. The president of the Congress Party in India, Chandra Bose, took Hitler’s personal advice and supported Japanese expansionism in Asia, the wife of Chinese dictator Chiang Kai-shek, Soong Mei-ling, led the so-called “Blue Shirts” youth movement, each of them, along with thousands of other such personalities all over the world, belonging for a time to the world-wide, pro-fascist sphere of influence. Many other nationalist revolutionaries in Africa (Tunisia, Egypt), Asia (Thailand, Burma, Indonesia) and Europe (Ireland, Croatia, Ukraine) supported the fascist Axis, either briefly or for quite a long time, because they initially thought the Axis countries could become useful allies in the fight against colonialism and neocolonialism, whether imposed on them by the Western empires, or by the Soviet empire. Several authoritarian, military dictators in equally neocolonial Latin America (Brazil, Argentina) also supported fascism, both before and after the Second World War.

Not to be outdone, most of the ultra-conservative intellectuals in the Western countries also eagerly supported the original, Western varieties of fascism not only because of its virulent anti-communism and anti-liberalism, but also because it seemed to cherish traditional Western philosophy, art and music, from the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, as well as from the Renaissance and the Romantic period. More or less along the lines of Maggie Smith’s ultra-egotistical, Scottish schoolteacher character in the film, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, who like thousands of other real intellectuals, foolishly encouraged her young prodigies to support the Franco-fascist invaders against the popular-front republic during the Spanish civil war.

Nowadays, too, the appeal of neofascism has not just been burgeoning again in the USA and Italy, it has become just as much a world-wide phenomenon as was the original fascist movement during the interwar years. Other Italian politicians not previously mentioned, such as the Christian Democratic Party’s Giulio Andreotti and the Socialist Party’s Bettino Craxi, certainly contributed as much to the rise of Berlusconi’s version of neofascism as the American politicians  who helped pave the way for Donald Trump. Similarly, after 1945, politicians in dozens of other countries also helped gradually push their countries step by step backwards, trying very hard over the years to make ultra-right-wing points of view appear legitimate once again.

In today’s Europe, both Hungary and Poland have recently returned to governments whose policies closely resemble those of Berlusconi and Trump. Hungary, already part of the Axis coalition for awhile during the Second World War, has reinstated a national-conservative government under Viktor Orban (prime minister in 1998-2002 and again since 2010), whose “illiberal democracy” seems to have definitely replaced not only the former communist regime, but also the highly unstable coalitions of liberal and socialist parties opposed to Orban’s rule since the collapse of communism. In Poland, the so-called Law and Justice party, dominated by party leader Jaroslav Kaczynski, an active supporter of national-social conservatism since the fall of communism, also recently recaptured control of the government, and promptly launched a Trump-like frontal assault on the liberal media, bringing it under full governmental control like it used to be during the communist period.

The British population’s recent decision to leave the European Union (“Brexit”) is probably the European event most often compared with Trump’s rise to power in the USA. It was obvious during the referendum campaign that the neofascist UK Independence Party had a great deal more influence inside the ruling Conservative Party than anyone except them had previously imagined. Waxing nostalgic about the dearly-departed empire on which the sun never sets became the preferred British choice for an atavistic “golden age” that never really existed, except as a favourite theme for Rudyard Kipling’s poetry and more recent television dramas like “Upstairs/Downstairs” and “Downton Abbey”. Britain’s declining military power was originally supposed to have been offset by its very patriotic membership in the nuclear club. But Margaret Thatcher’s unique combination of militant neoliberalism and the Falklands military adventure against Argentina did a lot more to pave the way for the UKIP, as did the Labour Party’s pro-European stance and its own abandonment of the working-class to neoliberalism (Tony Blair’s “New Labour”). Not to mention Blair’s all-out support for W’s 2003 adventure in Iraq.

France may very well be European neofascism’s next victim. It is currently under the control of a very unpopular president, François Hollande, a nominal socialist leader running an increasingly neoliberal government, who was forced to renounce his pursuit of a second term by the other Socialist Party leaders because he had no chance whatsoever at winning the 2017 presidential elections. However, no matter which other more or less left-wing politician replaces him, things do not look good for the French Left as a whole.

At the moment, the former conservative prime minister (2007-2012), François Fillon, from the recently retooled Republican party, is running ahead of the neofascist, National Front, candidate, Marine LePen, at least in the polls. Although previously identified as coming from the economic-nationalist Gaullist tradition, Fillon recently won his party’s national primary on what he described as a “100% Margaret Thatcher” program aimed at eliminating the jobs of half a million civil servants, while simultaneously upholding Catholic social conservatism and attempting to impose total government control over Islamic fascism in suburban France. In other words, he thinks that he can combine both neoliberalism and right-wing Christian populism, in order to defeat the traditional French anti-immigrant, neofascist party. French visions of its former imperial grandeur still also dominate its racist, neocolonial policy in Africa, recently identified with Fillon’s former boss, Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as its increasingly expensive “force de frappe” (nuclear weaponry) that has become steadily less useful as a propaganda weapon with the recent entry of so many other nations into that same club.

Other parties and movements in the neofascist sphere of influence are also becoming increasingly popular in several other European countries, such as the Freedom Party in the Netherlands and the so far even more successful Freedom Party in Austria, apparently founded in the 1950s by former Nazi supporters. The Flemish portion of Belgium is also gradually moving even further to the right than it used to be. In Germany, Angela Merkel of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, still in an uneasy alliance with the even more conservative Christian Social Union based in Bavaria, is easily holding her own against the steadily declining and increasingly neoliberal Social Democratic Party. But the recent entry of a million more immigrants fleeing various failed states in western Asia and northern Africa has put a relatively new, ultra-right-wing Alternative for Germany party in her path, which came out of nowhere to claim considerably more support than similar neofascist movements in that country used to possess.

The Russian Federation, which is still a huge imperial country dominating eastern Europe and northern Asia, is also most definitely within the neofascist sphere of influence. The nominal democracy that is supposed to be running that country is becoming harder and harder to detect, with all the decisions always being made by strongman Vladimir Putin, firmly ensconced in power since the 2000 collapse of Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic, ultraliberal, post-communist regime. Putin is still battling it out with NATO and the European Union for full control of all the formerly communist Eastern European countries, especially those that used to be part of the USSR. And with China over control of the central Asian section of the former Soviet Union. Putin’s recent neocolonial adventures in the Syrian civil war and the increasingly complicated US-led war on the Islamic State in that same region show that he also considers the USSR, not just Imperial Russia, as a former “paradise”, at least in so far as foreign policy is concerned.

As mentioned earlier, the Islamic jihad movement, still based in slowly-diminishing parts of Syria and Iraq, now operates throughout northern Africa, as well as all over western Asia. It is also quite active inside most of the other Muslim-majority countries in southern Asia and in Southeast Asia, the remnant Al Qaeda part of the movement very much overshadowed nowadays by the fake-caliphate of the Islamic State organization. Those people are currently running the most obviously ultra-violent, raving lunatic fascist movement in the entire world. Even though ultra-reactionary political Islam was initially financed by the Western empires in their attempts to defeat both nationalism and communism in all the Muslim-majority countries, Sunni jihadism is currently receiving most of its funds from a group of very rich people in Saudi Arabia and several other Salafi billionaires all over the Muslim world. A militant minority of jihadist fighters have also accompanied millions of Muslim immigrants into many of the Western countries.

Some of those ultra-conservative Islamic militants do not just belong to the majority Sunni section of Islam but also to the minority Shiite section. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution against the US-supported Shah, Shiite Iran has lived under an ultra-conservative, theocratic regime, desperately trying to carve out a space for its own version of jihad in its own Middle Eastern (and central Asian) sphere of influence. Its sworn enemies include most of the Sunni-majority countries in the same region, particularly such other ultra-conservative, theocratic states as Saudi Arabia. Iran’s role in the Syrian civil war, as an ally of the minority shiite regime in power there, as well as with Russia, makes it increasingly difficult to figure out how the USA’s Donald Trump will be able to maneuver in that extremely volatile regime any better than his predecessor did.

The entire Muslim world is also once again under the influence of an ultra-reactionary social atavism trend, resulting in a recent revival of many of the “barbarian cultural practices” such as “honour” killings, that most Western countries have always railed against. Even theoretically multi-confessional Lebanon’s recent decision to re-apply a 1940s law requiring rapists to marry their victims has become an extremely disgusting case in point. While it is possible that that particular step backwards may not survive for very long in Lebanon, most other countries with a more firmly entrenched Muslim majority, in many different parts of Africa and Asia, have been steadily backtracking in all sorts of ways recently, particularly when it comes to denying equal rights to women. Recip Erdogan’s ultra-conservative government in Turkey, for example, has become increasingly reactionary, in every possible way, ever since he first came to power in 2003. But most especially since, after surviving a recent coup attempt, he launched an all-assault on everyone in the country who disagrees with him about absolutely anything. He is also an excellent example of a politician combining both neoliberal and neofascist tendencies.

Israel, the only truly pro-Western country in the Middle East, supported by billions of dollars mostly coming from the USA, was originally established as a sort of enclave for Jewish people who felt that they could not survive anywhere else because of well-entrenched antisemitism, both in Europe and in northern Africa. Unfortunately, for Biblical reasons they chose to set themselves up in Palestine, which was already settled for centuries by an Arab-speaking population that could very well include the remnants of both ancient Israeli and Philistine peoples that converted to Islam.

As a result, most of the Arabs living either in or near Israel have about the same relationship with their Israeli neighbours as Donald Trump’s recently deprived working-class voters have with the liberal establishment in Washington. A reality that is compounded by the fact that Israel, originally modelled after the socialist kibbutz, under constant attack by its militarily inferior Arab neighbours (including the Palestinians), has recently adopted a decidedly neoliberal attitude toward its own Jewish population, as well as an increasingly neofascist attitude toward the Arab populations, without any concern whatsoever for the official “two-state solution”. The increasing popularity of ultra-conservative, political Islam in the larger Middle Eastern area feeds off the Israeli occupation of Palestine, while simultaneously rendering it increasingly difficult for Israel to return to the much less reactionary attitude that resulted in the 1993 peace deal between the two sides. Making the whole situation an “ideal” example of the rise of ultra-right-wing sentiment everywhere in the world.

Unfortunately, many other countries in Africa and Asia, besides those already mentioned, are not at all immune to the current world-wide, right-wing and ultra-right-wing political trend. Ivory Coast, for example, run for a long time by pro-French neocolonial governments, in 2000-2011 fell under the control of an evangelical-Christian government run by Laurent Gbagbo. His attempt at totalitarian control over practically every aspect of society led to his regime finally being replaced, after two civil wars, by a so far more moderate regime currently run by a  Muslim president, Alassame Outtara. Evangelical Christians and ultra-conservative Muslims have, however, clashed even more dramatically in many other African countries, while enormously-violent ethnic divisions have also led to dozens of other civil wars. All over Africa, the “barbarian cultural practices” mentioned earlier, such as female excision, stoning of witches and total rejection of homosexuality, are common among not only Muslim, but also among Christian and animist populations.

Such practices are also quite common in such Asian countries as India, within its Hindu-majority regions every bit as much as in its Muslim and Sikh-minority regions. India’s current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist in power since 2014, is another excellent example of a politician combining both an ultra-conservative social program, widespread repression of religious and ethnic minorities, and a neoliberal economic program. Other Asian countries have also recently participated more than usual in repression of both ethnic and religious minorities, including Buddhist-majority countries like Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), as well as Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia.

Meanwhile, in South Korea, another partly neoliberal, partly neofascist politician, elected president Park Guen-hye, the daughter of dictator Park Chung-hee (1961-1979), has recently been impeached for corruption, apparently because she let a close friend, the unelected daughter of the founder of a religious sect (or church), share power with her. Moreover, the current president of the Philippines, a largely Catholic country long dominated by the USA, has also been frequently been compared with Donald Trump these days, because of his own fondness for swearing and his adoption of a neofascist attitude inciting vigilantes to kill thousands of suspected drug dealers in that country.

The nominally communist government of China has also moved increasingly toward the right in recent years, also combining large dollops of neoliberalism with a renewed emphasis on the repression of minorities and a revival of the Confucianist tradition. Japan is also moving in the same direction by combining continuing support for neoliberalism with a renewed interest in militarism and officially-sponsored Shintoism. Both of those major Asian countries are also fixating on glorious periods of imperial expansion in days gone by, a long time ago in China but very recently in Japan, in order to motivate desires for the rekindling of regional empires nowadays.

Many countries in Latin America are also very much influenced by similar ideological tendencies, such as neoliberalism, Christian fundamentalism and neocolonial treatment of ethnic minorities, especially indigenous ones. In Colombia, the decades-long civil war between the Conservative government and its number one Marxist adversary (FARC) is officially over. But the first negotiated deal between the two sides was nevertheless rejected in a national referendum, which was lost by the current government leader, apparently because an ultra-Catholic majority decided that one of the clauses in the deal was too liberal toward sexual minorities. Even previously pro-Marxist politicians in Latin America, such as president Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, has also recently fallen under the influence of conservative Catholicism, as witness his recent rejection of legal abortions in his country. Most of the population in Latin America is still Catholic, but the rise of fundamentalist churches financed largely by similar organizations in the USA, has been pushing many Catholic leaders to the right for several decades now, in spite of what Pope Francis, of Argentinian origin, might think.

In Peru, the 2016 presidential election was barely won by a neoliberal, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, over neofascist Keiko Fujimori, daughter of Alberto Fujimori, a highly corrupt quasi-dictator in power from 1990 to 2000. At the same time, Brazil is currently being run by Michel Temer, also a highly corrupt, neoconservative politician, who used to be the vice-president in Dilma Rousseff’s regime, before ousting her in a corruption scandal. She was a leftist leader from the Workers Party, like her illustrious predecessor, Lula da Silva, president of Brazil from 2001-2011, but both of them now seem to be caught up in the same scandal involving that country’s nationalized petroleum company, Petrobras, as have dozens of other leading politicians.

In all the different areas of the world, numerous left-wing parties and politicians have also contributed in their own way to the current fixation on both neoliberalism and neofascism. The Marxist-Leninist communists, whether of the “revisionist”, Maoist, Trotskyist or Che Guevara varieties, made their own unique “contribution” by replacing the original communist vision with the imposition of a totalitarian party dictatorship in each one of the countries that they dominated. By replacing private capitalism with bureaucratic state capitalism, they made it exceedingly difficult for anyone advocating any form of socialism to avoid being tarred by the totalitarian brush. At the same time, the democratic socialist parties and politicians also succeeded in turning socialism into a dirty word in many other countries by constantly giving up on socialism altogether, mostly for ostensibly electoral purposes, replacing it first with “liberalism in a hurry” and more recently with neoliberalism. All in all, none of the left-wing parties, whether formally communist or socialist, ever came close to overcoming each one’s internal demons.

I was reminded of those realities when I finally got around to reading Benjamin Isitt’s fascinating book, Militant Minority: British Columbia workers and the rise of a new left, 1948-1972, published back in 2011. He told the story of how several thousand industrial workers in the Canadian province of British Columbia consistently supported either the social-democratic “Cooperative Commonwealth Federation” that eventually became today’s New Democratic Party, or the Communist Party (sometimes called the Labor-Progressive Party), for a long period following the Second World War. They continued to support those two rival formations, through thick and thin, sometimes switching back and forth between the two like one of my own relatives did, in spite of the fact that the majority of their fellow workers voted instead for the more traditional Liberal and Conservative Parties, or for the ultra-conservative Social Credit Party.

In other words, even in parts of Canada, ordinary industrial workers, and not just left-wing students and intellectuals, used to support socialist and/or communist organizations at least to a certain extent, just like they did in much greater numbers in Europe, and many other parts of the world, before seeming to disappear from the face of the Earth altogether. Massive deindustrialization in the Western countries dispersed those industrial jobs all over the world, to various countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where large portions of the population still live in extreme poverty, as well as in pre-industrial conditions. In today’s world, industrial workers have become much more numerous than they ever were before, but most of them are also much poorer, and much less well-organized, than the much smaller number of them that used to dominate the workforce in the West and Japan, in days gone by.

Nowadays, the gap between the rich and the poor is considerably larger than it used to be. On the one hand, we have billionaires like Warren Buffet making 30 million dollars a day, or thereabouts, while on the other hand we have hundreds of millions of people still making only about one dollar a day. A truly astronomical income gap! So while, in Marxist-Leninist lingo, the “objective conditions” (the increasingly rotten treatment of increasingly numerous ordinary people by a tiny coterie of the rich and the powerful) for some kind of anti-capitalist revolution have never been greater, the “subjective conditions” (the organized, political independence of ordinary people from ruling parties) have never been weaker. These days, all around the world, most people are completely alienated from political activity of any kind, while those who do participate in such things are forced to choose between neoliberalism and neofascism, if they do not end up voting for both of them at the same time!

In almost every region in the world, most of the slightly left-wing parties and politicians still active nowadays have also been inadvertently helping right-wing, and/or extreme right-wing politicians and parties, get into power by choosing to spend most of their time supporting ethnic, religious and sexual minority groups instead of trying to win over any potential majorities. In countries like France and Great Britain, for example, they relied on the ideology of fossilized multiculturalism in order to let ultra-right-wing organizations and movements among recent, “Third World” immigrant populations take over entire neighbourhoods. They also allowed those same organizations free rein by accommodating every last possible demand for showing off their peculiar religious idiosyncrasies, especially whenever those ultra-right-wing movements wanted to deny equal rights to women. The British have even gone so far as to deny rights to all Muslim women in their country, at least in family matters, preferring to let the imams apply sharia law instead of applying the “Western” principle of equal rights for women in that particular community.

In Quebec, human rights lawyer Julius Grey has become the most well-known ultra-individualist “freedom fighter” who, in spite of public declarations to the contrary, nevertheless seems to specialize in helping ultra-right-wing religious sects and anti-union scabs win their court cases against the rest of the population. He is constantly giving the impression that for him, the human rights of the ultra-conservative, minority populations are way more important than are the human rights of any less-radical, majority populations. For some reason, the entire human rights “industry” in the West also seems to prefer freedom of religion over women’s liberation, or freedom from religion. Most of them do not seem to believe that freedom from religion ought to exist, for anyone at all.

In other words, most of today’s remaining leftists have totally abandoned the “huddled masses” of ordinary wage-workers and farmers that they used to champion, like the ones in post-war British Columbia, in favour of concentrating on helping “anti-establishment” minorities, but only those of a right-wing nature. Which is also one of the reasons why neofascism has once again become an “acceptable” point of view, gaining momentum all over the world. Here we go again.