The truth cannot be told

This blogpost was inspired by the recent story about how a human sexuality teacher in a California community college was forced out of her job, at least temporarily, and went into hiding out of that state, because of the enormous negative reaction to her in-class rant against Donald Trump. Apparently, she said that DT’s election last November was an “act of terrorism”, and that it meant that the USA was “really back to being (in) a civil war”. According to newspaper articles on the subject, many Trump supporters sent her death threats for being “a commie”, and her union president reported that one such supporter claimed that if she wanted communism, she should go to Cuba, and that if she tried to bring communism to “America” (aka the USA), “we’ll put a (expletive) bullet in your face”.

What I found most interesting about that story is that it was reported in the news during the same week that Trump himself confirmed that Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, was his choice for secretary of state. All the electronic and print media, all over the world, then filled up with stories about Tillerson’s very close business ties with Russian oil and gas companies, their common investments in Siberia (Russia) and in Alberta (Canada), and the very prestigious 2013 “Order of Friendship” award bestowed on him by Vladimir Putin. Not to mention the fact that ExxonMobil lost a billion dollars on its Russia investments because of Obama’s economic sanctions imposed on that country after its recent military seizure of the Crimean peninsula, that had been granted by the USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev to the Ukraine back in 1954. All of which came out at the same time as Barack Obama’s renewed warnings about Russian electronic manipulation of the recent election campaign, in favour of Donald Trump. Who also talked a lot during the campaign about how much he liked Vladimir Putin, and how Russia and the USA ought to be cooperating together against their common enemies, rather than fighting with each other, as in Syria.

All those recent events backed up the comments that I made in my previous blogpost about how Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and several dozen other ultra-conservative populists in many other countries, seem to be trying to reimpose an updated version of the fascist axis that made a concerted attempt to take over the world during the Great Depression and the Second World War. In that text, I also referred to the role being played back then by American business tycoons like Texaco chieftain Torkild Rieber, in promoting Italian fascism and German Nazism, both commercially and ideologically. Although today’s neofascist leaders are not yet operating quite as openly as they did eighty years ago, there does seem to be a certain resemblance between Rieber’s role back then and Tillerson’s role nowadays.

To be sure, history never repeats itself, at least not completely, but sometimes it comes a bit too close for comfort. In my previous post, I also made the point about how the business group in the USA that seemed most favourable to DT during the election campaign was the fossil-fuel industry, which was furious at Obama for having imposed environmental controls on that particular industry. Controls that outside the USA look very puny, but that inside the USA seem to have both the petroleum companies and the right-wing populists upset about foreign ecological influence on the Obama administration, and his apparent lack of interest in “making America great again”. Now that energy independence for “America” finally seems realizable in the very near future.

All of this was also coming out at the same time as reports about the recent victory of Syrian shiite dictator Bashar al-Assad against the rebel coalition in Aleppo, described in the media as a bloody massacre. Assad’s forces were, as everyone knows, backed up by the Russian air force, as well as by ground forces from Iran and the Hezbollah militia, based in nearby Lebanon. For its part, the anti-Assad coalition of sunni Muslims in the ongoing civil war include not only US-backed military forces theoretically favouring some kind of “democracy”, but also ultra-reactionary Islamist forces, including the Islamic State movement. Not to mention the often conflicting roles being played by Syrian Kurdish forces (mostly Sunni) and forces backed up the Turkish army (also Sunni). Similar forces also seem to be at work, often with just as devastating results, in many other recently failed states, such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, the South Sudan, the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo, Haiti and so on.

So what does all this appear to indicate for Trump’s upcoming presidency, and for the immediate future of the human race? It looks uncomfortably like a contemporary repetition of Aimé Césaire’s definition of twentieth-century fascism as an extension to the Western world of the same kind of inhumane treatment that had previously been meted out to all the colonial peoples, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Nowadays, extremely alienated white supremacists in the Western world, which includes North America, Europe, the Russian federation, Israel and Australasia, are on the warpath again. Most of the ordinary people in all those countries, of whatever racial origin, have not benefited in the slightest from the massive increases in wealth accumulation that accompanied economic globalization over the past four decades. 

Unfortunately, it seems that a large and growing proportion of the white people, or at least of those who consider themselves to be white people, in all those increasingly multiracial Western countries, seem to be falling once again for the populist chimera of blaming all their troubles on people considered to be non-white, both those living in the West and those living abroad. Like the “poor white trash” of the antebellum period in the USA, many of the ordinary whites who voted for “Big Daddy” strongmen like Trump and Putin are turning to nativist “solutions”, “preserving their dignity” by considering themselves to be “at least” superior to all the world’s non-white populations. If not to the rich and powerful minorities from their “own race”, who are exploiting their labour so completely, as well as that of a large part of the “non-white” labour in the world.

At the same time, as I also reported in my previous post, dozens of ultra-authoritarian post-colonial governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America, are simultaneously justifying their own similar treatment of their own populations by blaming all their nation’s troubles on the legacy of Western colonialism. Or on the ongoing neocolonialism still being practised not only by the Western powers, but also by the Russian Federation, not to mention all the other emerging, or re-emerging, neocolonial empires. Even such previously left-wing populist governments as the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe and the Maduro regime in Venezuela, are also using similar rhetoric these days. Meanwhile, the most important of those recently reconstituted empires, the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of China, finds itself in the peculiar situation of not only blaming the same white-skinned empires for many of its current problems, but also being blamed by less powerful countries for having copied those same powers, as well as imperial Japan, by setting up its own, very similar, political and economic empire.

In other words, all the ultra-conservative governments and populist movements all over the world are blaming each other for the presumed fact that every country’s, or every religious community’s, current situation constantly appears to be getting worse and worse. Every extreme right-wing, fundamentalist religion or populist ideological tendency in the world has also invented its own version of a mythical empire from the past that can be used as a rallying cry to make that particular country or religion “great again”, by decisively defeating every foreign, impious enemy in its path. At the same time, each currently established government and movement is constantly being pushed further and further to the right by rival movements and potentates claiming that it has not yet gone nearly far enough in its campaign against its own, “particularly disgusting” enemies.

So far as I can tell, whenever large numbers of ordinary people end up supporting the reactionary political views of very rich and very powerful people from their own country or religion, alienation or false consciousness is to blame. This alienation sets in after those target populations have suffered through decades or even centuries of mind-altering propaganda, aka “brainwashing”, designed to deliberately induce cognitive distortions on a massive scale, about their social status. Eventually succumbing to that official propaganda, large percentages of less wealthy and less powerful people, from various under-privileged social classes, end up adopting erroneous conceptions of what their lives are all about.

In a recent work, Canadian author Ronald Wright described what happened to poor people in the USA, for example, with the following quote (apparently often wrongly attributed to John Steinbeck): “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Wright’s idea about poor Americans brainwashed into believing in their nation’s totally unreal dream of rags to riches, certainly seems to apply to most of the slightly over one quarter of the potential US electorate who actually voted for Trump. They do indeed seem significantly more alienated than the somewhat larger group of American citizens who voted for Hillary Clinton, or the even larger group (more than two fifths of the potential electorate), who did not vote at all.

In the USA, the majority of the current population are no longer small farmers, like they used to be during the nineteenth century, nor industrial workers, like they became during the greater part of the twentieth century. With the the rise of neoliberalism, following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the industrial workers lost their majority position and have now been replaced by service workers. Only extremely dishonest people, professional con men like Donald Trump, can get away with claiming that most of the decisions taken by the business leaders and the leading politicians of the USA (“the business of America is business”), have actually ever been, or ever will be, taken in the best interests of service workers (or their industrial and agricultural predecessors).

As in every other modern “democracy”, the USA has in fact always been run in the best interests of a small minority of the population, those who own and operate the most important businesses in the land, in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy. Individually and collectively, none of the less wealthy and the less powerful citizens, whatever their social class, have ever actually run the country, as one would normally expect if one’s only source of information about the subject was reading a dictionary definition of the word “democracy”. Which makes false consciousness a very important concept indeed for understanding anything important about the real world, i. e., the one in which we are all forced to live, by virtue of having been born on this particular planet.

Ruling extremely large numbers of people against their own best interests means finding some kind of effective “opium of the people” capable of keeping all those people in their place, which has most often been accomplished by using any one of the world’s most reliable myth-making machines, known as religions and/or political ideologies. Belief in a heavenly father-figure such as God, for example, helps pave the way toward getting people to trust strongman dictators, whether or not they are elected to power. Belief in a fake democracy, as in modern liberalism, is another tried and true method that has often been used with a great deal of success. So has belief in the restoration, or the “moral rearmament”, of some previously existing empire, such as in the slogan “making America great again” or, alternatively, “restoring the Islamic caliphate”.

Neoliberalism and neofascism are the two most important non-religious ideologies in the world today. Both of them, however, are almost always used in conjunction with some religious concept, as when fundamentalist Christians use the slogan, “God helps those who help themselves”, in order to justify spending most of their time making money rather than praying, or converting all the God-forsaking non-believers to the “one true religion”. All over the world, all currently existing political regimes and systems use such slogans to stay in power, not just the ones pretending to be much more democratic than all the others.

Similar slogans have always been used throughout history to justify the power of every other dominant regime that ever existed. Every now and then, well-known authors like Ronald Wright come up with extremely useful quotes like the one cited above, about the USA’s proletarian millionaires. But even such relatively perspicacious analysts of present reality often also make truly outlandish claims about more ancient civilizations, as in Wright’s 1992 work, Stolen Continents: The New World through Indian Eyes, since 1492. In that book, his completely justified indignation against the way that European empires treated the American “Indians” during the 500-year-long colonial period led him into making extraordinary, and completely unrealistic, claims about how well the native empires (Incas, Aztecs, etc.) were doing before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

In fact, as I discovered over and over again when doing extensive research in preparation for my numerous courses on the history of the “Third World”, none of the pre-Colombian civilizations anywhere in the world were any further advanced, or less advanced, than the European colonizers were from an overall moral standpoint. It is just as important to rid ourselves of “reverse racism” (pro-native prejudices) as it is to rid ourselves of “Western” racism (anti-native prejudices). Unfortunately, no truly universal point of view, based on the genuine absence of privileged treatment toward any exploited sex, class or minority grouping whatsoever, has ever existed in any established government, regime or social-political system known to mankind. Every group of people in power, in whatever part of the world or in whatever period of history, has always been obliged to use some form or another of false consciousness to stay in power. There are no exceptions, and no justified claims for any kind of exceptionalism, American or otherwise.

False consciousness about one religious or political ideology is almost always complicated, as well, by the fact that almost everyone, not only from the ranks of the poor and the powerless, but also among many rich and powerful people, suffer from belief in more than one such bogus ideology at the same time. People’s inherent tendency to impose a non-scientific, ideological, origin on practically everything that happens, leads almost all of them to simultaneously adhere to several conflicting “explanations of reality”, without realizing that each one of those false prophecies effectively nullifies the other preferred interpretations of events. Over the past several years, the US Republican Party has become a “classical” example of such a thoroughly confusing amalgam of criss-cross belief systems.

Today’s Republican Party contains what commentators refer to as conflicting “wings” of the same organization. First of all, there is the Christian fundamentalist wing, focusing on social-conservative issues such as abortion, homosexuality and related “abominations”, which often spawns the kind of politicians who state that they are “Christian first”, and something else, such as “American”, second. Then there is the “America First” contingent, who, without openly disavowing Christianity, nevertheless put the emphasis on “making America great again”, notably by repudiating, or rather by saying that they intend to repudiate, all the free-trade agreements entered into by previous governments. Lastly, there is the libertarian wing, theoretically favouring the total elimination of all government “intervention” into anything at all, thereby going even further toward “rule by market forces” than the original laissez-faire tradition (economic liberalism) in US politics. Which began even before Adam Smith himself pointed out, in 1776 (!) how beneficial it would be for the British Empire if ever its American colonies succeeded in becoming an independent state.

The problem, of course, is that there is no way for anyone to succeed in being a good Christian, a good patriot (American or otherwise), and a good libertarian, all at the same time. Each one of these three ideologies is universal in scope, and cannot possibly combine itself with any other ideological pretension without thoroughly repudiating its own internal essence. Christianity, for example, is most emphatically a universal religion, which cannot be fitted into either a small nationalist or a great nationalist (i.e., imperialist) mold, nor into a market-shaped “invisible hand”, without collapsing into total nonsense. God cannot be kind and gentle with only one people, or one sex, or one social class, without ceasing to be God. Look at it whichever way anyone has ever tried to look at it, the job cannot be done without repudiating the Supreme Being forever. Not even if we change his name from “God” to “Allah”, or to “Jahveh”, the original version, each theocratic ideology of abrahamic origin being in total agreement on this point. “I am what I am”, which means not to be shared with any lesser idols.

In the same way, patriotism cannot combine with libertarianism, in any possible way whatsoever, without both of them turning themselves into thoroughly extraterrestrial abominations. “America” (or any other nation) cannot become great again (on the unlikely assumption that it was indeed great at some point in the past), if its imperial designs are thwarted at every turn in the road by the need for its government to kowtow completely to every US-born billionaire’s absolutely un-negotiable desire to make the greatest possible profit imaginable at everyone else’s expense. Running the entire world entirely without any government at all, no “interventions” into anything that might curtail some megalomaniac’s individual desire to be “free” of all bureaucratic restraints, is not only impossible, but also incompatible with any kind of patriotism whatsoever.

Which means that the real question that people should be asking about this particular ideology is, what are any true libertarians doing in the Republican Party in the first place? Why are other libertarians trying to get themselves elected on their own ticket, not only to become part of the US government, but of any other government? By its very essence, libertarianism is totally opposed to the very idea of government, and the pragmatic compromises that any government operating in the real world always entails. Or have we already gone so far down the yellow-brick road, of refusing to make any distinctions at all between real news and fake news, that no logical objections to anyone’s ideal belief systems make any difference any more?

To be sure, the US Republican Party’s internal ideological contradictions are not any more obvious than any of the other internal contradictions also being adopted by any one of the dozens of other weird political amalgams also being practised anywhere else in the world. Such as Vladimir Putin’s unnatural combination of Russian patriotism, Orthodox Christianity and toleration of the economic corruption of certain selected Russian billionaires. Or Xi Jinping’s harmonious, heavenly mandate bringing together Chinese patriotism, Confucian social policy and respect for the individual rights of his own red-diaper billionaires. Or an even more extreme amalgam, uniting a strictly Sunni form of jihadi salafism with enormously generous subsidies from a relatively small number of Muslim billionaires, buying their way into paradise without having to repudiate their own intimate contact with impious usury.

In today’s world, beset by such huge problems as massive environmental degradation, unprecedentedly large divisions between the social classes, dangerously stagnant economic conditions and increasingly threatening cultural conflicts, the last thing that people ought to be doing is falling ever more completely under the control of such unnatural ideological combinations. What the world needs now is intelligent cooperation to help solve all those problems, not even more vigorous competition between rival forces. We need more political, economic, social and cultural democracy, not more kowtowing to billionaire-financed religious movements disguised as multiculturalism. We need toleration of prosperous minorities in every country as well as, rather than in place of, prosperity for majority populations. We need scientific scepticism rather than bought and paid-for “house scientists”. And so on, and so forth. Instead, what we are really getting is every possible combination of deadly obsessions with completely contradictory systems of absolute belief.

People everywhere need to get over the ridiculous idea that “social harmony” between conflicting ideas can be imposed on the world through the kind of pre-packaged amalgams described above. Governments all over the world should no longer be allowed to get away with adopting falsely harmonious ideological structures like the Quebec government’s “Ethics and religious culture” (ERC) program of courses imposed on both primary and secondary students in that province. It should not be possible for politicians to continue getting away with presenting all the world’s religions as being socially and ethically neutral, ignoring the fact that they are instead deliberately discriminatory in every way, particularly on gender issues. It is simply not possible to “pursue the common good”, as the ERC propagandists proclaim, by substituting false harmony for ideological reality.

Unfortunately, instead of doing what they should be doing, that is becoming more and more progressive all the time, almost every political and religious force in the world is doing just the opposite. Instead of going forward, they are all backing up as fast as possible. Which gives the impression that the truth cannot ever be told, because the rich and the powerful still feel that they must deploy every one of those eternally conflicting forms of popular belief in order to rule the rest of us, for at least as long as those internal contradictions do not succeed in blowing up in all of our faces.