Fake facts forever

Trump adviser Kelly-Anne Conway’s recent “invention” of alternative facts is not much of a discovery, since fake facts have been around just about forever. For at least the past 6000 years, since the first urban-based civilizations started setting up shop all over the world, ideological controversies have broken out between the aristocratic rulers of succeeding dynasties and rival empires. As well as between those same secular rulers and the equally aristocratic power bases constructed by the priestly elites controlling each succeeding religion, embedded within each one of those empires.

Over the centuries, those rivalries have generated millions of conflicting messages constantly being sent out, in every form of iconographic communication known to exist during each succeeding period of history, to firmly impress on every subject population just how much more glorious each ruler “obviously” was when compared with each real or potential challenger. In every part of the world, history has been invented, and re-invented, over and over again, the wealth and the power of each succeeding empire and religion always depending on its capacity to convince millions of ordinary people that the universe itself was created precisely so that each competing group of rulers could always demonstrate, beyond the shadow of any popular doubt, just how incredibly appropriate its control of everything important in their lives really was. As Percy Shelley pointed out so succinctly in his poem, “Ozymandias”, each succeeding message from each ruler was nothing but an enormous ego-projection, always based on constructed “facts” that did not really prove what they were intended to prove.

As far back as ancient Greece, more than 2500 years ago, the founders of rationalist philosophy first began attacking the foundations of all this official narcissism by emphasizing the colossal differences between natural, material explanations of reality and the faith-based anthropomorphism of traditional Greek mythology. This led directly to the well-known ideological showdown between Socrates and the Athenian rulers, who forced that early philosopher to drink poison as punishment for his alleged “moral corruption” of Athenian youth. A similar confrontation also took place many centuries later between the Italian Renaissance scientist, Galileo Galilei, and the equally powerful inquisitors of the Catholic Church. Not to mention the “monkey-trial” condemnation of American schoolteacher, John Scopes, for having illegally taught Darwin’s theory of evolution to high-school students in Tennessee back in 1925.

Science and religion have therefore been presenting alternative sets of facts for thousands of years, with more and more civilizations gradually joining in to add their own contributions to that ongoing war between competing visions of reality. Starting out in the physical sciences, this same conflict also eventually spread to most of the social sciences, non-scientific secular ideologies soon receiving the same skeptical treatment from the scientific community that all the world’s religious mythologies had previously received. In the scientific presentation of reality, no particular facts are accepted as such unless initial hypotheses, based on William of Ockham’s practice of presenting the simplest possible hypotheses first, are tested over and over again by independent researchers all over the world. All of them, or almost all of them, as a family of researchers, have to reach similar conclusions after confronting each successive hypothesis with multiple interrogations grounded in the observation of nature and the duplication of extremely well-prepared experiments. Only then do some of those proposed facts become real facts, at least until the next scientific revolution, instead of fake ones.

On the other hand, in religious discourse, or in any other unfounded ideological interpretations of presumed reality, true believers are expected to accept such outlandish concepts as, for example, the virgin birth of the son of God (Christianity), or as a second example, the “sui generis” formation of public virtue arising spontaneously out of private vice, “as if by an invisible hand” (Adam Smith). In all such cases, unnatural concepts like those ones are always given or revealed by some “higher power”, without any of those lazy people having to use the much more laborious scientific method. For its part, religious belief is based entirely on faith, which means, as Martin Luther explained it, the voluntary renunciation of human reason common to all truly religious communities. It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone that political concepts such as Conway’s “alternative facts” have a tendency to crop up nowadays especially in regions of the world most afflicted by the presence of large concentrations of religious fundamentalists, offering literal interpretations of sacred writings, such as the Bible Belt in the USA and similar areas of “rural idiocy” inside dozens of other countries.

Faith is also the main ingredient involved in the ideological concoctions of such secular religions as Adam Smith’s economic liberalism (founded back in the eighteenth century) and its current offspring, known as neoliberalism. In spite of its universal pretensions, most of today’s economic “science”, like “Christian science” or “Islamic science”, is still almost exclusively based on attempting to “prove” an assumption that is scientifically impossible to prove, like economic liberalism’s contention that the world’s largest accumulations of capital were gathered together in a humanitarian attempt to provide jobs for the unemployed! Rather than to admit that profit maximization and capital accumulation in reality have a lot more to do with the cynical erection of Ozymandian phallic symbols of egotistical, brand-name power, such as Donald Trump’s ubiquitous towers.

True believers in religious fiction, and other non-scientific alternative facts, are constantly being trotted out to provide enormous doses of competing varieties of ideological opium, in order to help unscrupulous political rulers control hundreds of millions of ordinary people, and keep them “in their place” socially speaking. Nowadays, all the world’s most important concentrations of wealth and power are always run by extremely “radicalized”, professional propagandists whose single-minded dedication to profit maximization and state power help “maintain order”, and ensure that democracy in any real sense is never allowed to take power and privilege away from those who are convinced that only they truly deserve to dominate others. Alternative facts are absolutely necessary, therefore, if one’s goal is to present authoritarian and/or totalitarian regimes as being somehow synonymous with freedom from social constraint and the tranquil practice of individual human rights uncorrupted by collectivist chimeras. Even in theoretically socialist and communist countries, such chimeras are only supposed to be gobbled up by ordinary working people, not by their “more intelligent”, elitist rulers.

A good example of “alternative facts” being used nowadays, “even” by anti-Trump forces in the USA, was the recent attempt by liberal scribes in that country to provide a diplomatic justification, to explain why American leaders over the past forty years avoided accusing the People’s Republic of China of committing highly successful currency manipulation. According to the liberal media, the USA’s laissez-faire attitude toward Chinese economic policy in the past was only adopted in order to help that country enter peacefully into the “international community”, led by the USA, and therefore to contribute greatly to world economic and political progress. The real reason for that deliberate policy vacuum, however, had nothing to do with promoting democracy or development. It was done simply to encourage the use of cheap foreign labour, making thousands of billions of dollars more money for unpatriotic American investors, by reversing the tendency that US workers had developed before the Chinese onslaught, towards improving their overall wages and working conditions. As Calvin Coolidge pointed out back in the 1920s, “the business of America is business”, it has nothing to do with making the world a better place in which to live for “inferior” people. In the real world, neither the liberal-Democratic nor the conservative-Republican tendencies within American politics are genuinely concerned with democracy as such, but only with its usefulness as a manipulative slogan to help out their respective friends in the business community.

I got my own introduction to the use of alternative facts 50 years ago, in April of 1967, when I was arrested along with several other people, for trying to burn a US flag during an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in Toronto. When my arrest came to trial, the police attempted to present the burning of that flag as a crime, not because there was any law in Canada about committing such a symbolic deed. Instead, their take was that burning that foreign flag could have become a public danger, setting fire to the flowers growing in the concrete bins the city had planted in the median separating the four lanes of traffic on University Avenue, next to the US consulate! Which only goes to show, just like in the previous example, that the reasons why people in power claim to be doing whatever they are doing are not always terribly convincing, in spite of their self-proclaimed tendency to describe themselves as generally more intelligent than everyone else. Nowadays, Donald Trump has been coming up with dozens of similar explanations for his own erratic behaviour, that are not any closer to reality than the arguments invented by the Toronto police force during the incredibly violent Vietnam War, most of whose millions of victims were killed from the air by US forces.

Which does not necessarily mean that people opposed to the current domination of most of the world by private capitalism are always less inclined to use alternative facts in their own propaganda. I just finished reading a recently-published book by Gilles Morand, L’époque était rouge: Militer au Québec pour un avenir radieux dans un parti marxiste-léniniste, about the five years he spent as a young man in Quebec during the late 1970s and early 1980s trying to help build the Workers’ Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), before it fell apart shortly thereafter. He was one of several hundred young people lured into one of the tiny ultra-communist groups in Quebec during that period, some of whom sincerely thought that they could actually bring about a radiant new future for the Canadian working-class. Most of them ended up following the teachings of such people as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, while others accepted the first three guys, but substituted Trotsky for both Stalin and Mao. None of those groups ever got anywhere near their intended goals, their main effect on the history of Quebec probably being to slightly diminish the nationalist influence of the Parti Québécois prior to and during the 1980 referendum on Quebec sovereignty.

As Morand himself points out in his book, Marxism-Leninism was only a pipe-dream in North America, even during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the subsequent liberal-communist alliance during the latter phase (1941-1945) of the Second World War. Nevertheless, militants like him did manage in a few cases to get themselves elected, sometimes openly, into positions of trade-union leadership among select groups of real workers, even during his period of militancy. In his case, it seems that he actually managed to contribute to a successful union campaign for job-site safety in a munitions plant in the city of Valleyfield, well-known at the time for frequent explosions that killed several workers. For awhile, according to his account, the workers managed to force the company to drastically change its extremely unsafe practices that had caused those explosions. Later on, however, the collapse in union militancy throughout North America during the rise of neoliberalism (starting in 1979 and continuing to this day), that also contributed to a decline in the already-weak popular support for socialism and communism, resulted in the subsequent return of traditionally lax company attitudes toward on-the-job safety.

I remember reading several newspaper reports back then about how industrial safety was strengthened in Quebec throughout the 1980s, but I strongly suspect that any decline in industrial accidents and deaths during recent decades, in any of those industries, was caused instead by the closing down of most of the important factories in Quebec, and in the rest of the Western world, because of delocalization and de-industrialization. Nowadays, after several decades of neoliberalism, on-the-job deaths are definitely on the rise again in Quebec and in most other places. Many new deaths are also being caused by increasingly unsafe conditions in the transportation of dangerous chemicals, as in the 2013 deaths of 47 citizens in the village of Lac-Mégantic, when a petroleum train left unattended wiped out most of the downtown core. As was the case in Valleyfield almost forty years ago, most company officials and their government allies are blaming that “accident” on negligent workers, rather than on their own corporate negligence.

Government and company promises to re-route the train tracks around the village, rather than right through it, have been totally ignored since that horrendous event and it certainly does not look at this point in time that anything will ever be done, anywhere, to prevent any future “incidents” of this kind. Union militancy in Quebec may still be slightly greater than elsewhere in North America, but it remains a shadow of its former self. Part of the problem, as in most of the other continents, is in the much greater efficiency of today’s “alternative facts” in inducing everyone to accept their fate, most of the time, without getting terribly upset about supposedly “inevitable” accidents, or any other negative events. The problem with that attitude is, as it always has been, that most of the world’s “accidents”, including “ordinary” car accidents, happen for a reason. Quite often, they are nothing but “accidents waiting to happen”, caused by “collective” (i. e., official) negligence much more often than by individual negligence.

To be sure, a large part of the forty-year decline in on-the-job militancy, in most parts of the world, was also caused by the tremendous hypocrisy of totalitarian communism. The Leninist “dictatorship of the proletariat” has always been just another slogan invented by professional liars every bit as cynical as Donald Trump, long before he or his favourite groupie, Kelly-Ann Conway, were ever born. None of the Leninist governments in the world have ever been anything but State-capitalist caricatures of private capitalism, government bureaucrats simply replacing the private bureaucrats of “regular” capitalism, and behaving just as badly toward the 99.99% of the population who do not belong to the privileged minority.

I visited the incredibly beautiful city of Prague recently as a tourist and went to their “Museum of Communism”, set up not so long ago by an ultra-right-wing American political science professor whose ludicrous display of primitive anti-communism was just as insanely one-sided as the equally dumb-ass, pro-Soviet propaganda that the Czech communist regime was displaying during its period of totalitarian power. Neither the official communist point of view presented in the displays, nor the official anti-communist point of view written on the side panels in that museum, would help any intelligent person figure out why anyone in his or her right mind could ever be so asinine as to support either one of those two completely unrealistic systems of belief.

How are we supposed to choose between the Bhopal “accident” of 1984, in an American chemical factory situated in India, and the Chernobyl “accident” of 1986, in a nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine? In what way has the world improved since the fall of totalitarian communism, if similar “accidents” are still killing thousands of people in countries like Bangladesh, which specializes in making textile products for Western companies? As if this was not already a big enough problem, in tragically real terms even more than in the illicit use of propaganda, it has also been complicated a bit further recently by Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, getting into the act. Her own line of clothing, produced in the same incredibly hypocritical, Third World sweatshop conditions as the clothing lines of all the other foreign producers, turns out to be in total contrast with her own stated goal of trying to help salaried women “liberate” themselves from their own self-imposed wardrobe limitations. She does not seem to be terribly worried about the rather more serious “shopping issues” of the severely underpaid women she exploits every day.

The total contrast between ideology and reality not only applies to all the propaganda debates between private capitalism and state capitalism, it also applies just as much to the current propaganda exchanges between “Eastern” and Western varieties of neofascism. The National Front party, for example, is once again threatening to take over the French Republic with its incredibly unrealistic claims to help reverse the neoliberal, globalization trend in the European Union by re-imposing an old-fashioned, “united Gaullist” vision of an exclusively Western-Christian France. Apparently, they intend to achieve that goal by simply expelling all the corrupting immigrants from the Muslim countries and Eastern Europe (especially the Roms). Neofascism is indeed a lot worse than neoliberalism, but neoliberalism is definitely part of the problem, because it has succeeded quite admirably in making neofascism popular again.

Which plays quite nicely into the hands of the radical Islamic denunciation of Western ethnocentrism, promoted by such movements as “Les indigènes de la République” in France, who do not think that “racialized minorities” such as Muslims or Black people living in the West should have to live up to the same standards as their White, European-origin, counterparts. They think that Black women, for example, should be “allowed” by White feminists to spend a lot more money on beauty products because White racists have always thought that Blacks could never be beautiful. They also claim that Muslim women in the West should not be criticized for wearing symbols of female oppression, such as the hijab, because they are only wearing such garments to push back against White-racist rejection of their Islamic culture. The same organization also believes that it is quite all right to accuse the cartoonist victims of Islamic terrorism at Charlie Hebdo as “Zionists”, to condemn all forms of “deviant” sexuality, and to oppose inter-racial marriages for reasons of cultural preservation.

In reality, those reactionary people are simply using “reverse racism” to slightly disguise their own “Eastern” forms of neofascism. Even White judges in Western countries, for example in the Canadian province of Ontario, are also (astonishingly) guilty of the selfsame “reverse racism”. Especially when they deliberately give lighter sentences to wife-beaters and to spouse murderers of Black or of indigenous origins, than to Whites convicted of similar crimes, in order to “compensate” for the negative effects of White racism on minority males.

In the final analysis, all the competing ideologies mentioned in this text, such as religion, neoliberalism, State capitalism and neofascism, are merely non-scientific manifestations of competing varieties of philosophical idealism. Each “ideal” world-view tries to substitute invented (manufactured) facts for natural (material) facts, always trying to impose its projected will or wish fulfilment not only on reality, but also on all the other, competing visions. Ideological history then becomes nothing else than a kind of vector analysis of the relative strengths of all those competing forces, at any particular place or time. According to each one of those ideologies, the best possible situation that professional ideologues can provoke is when the perceived contrast is greatest between material reality and idealistic projection, provided that the latter wins the day in spite of everything.

An example of such a “perfect” confrontation would be showing of a group of jihadists preparing to cut off an innocent “unbeliever’s” head, while forcing their victim to recite the verses in the Koran that proclaim that Islam is one hundred percent opposed to the massacre of innocent people. The violent contrast between what is really happening, Islamists deliberately killing an innocent person, and their religious projection of its idealistic opposite, “this is for Allah and not just to make us feel like dominant males”, then becomes the highest possible realization of “alternative facts”, for that particular ideology. Much in the same way as what happens when a rapist’s lawyer succeeds in getting him off by arguing that the victim “provoked” the rape by wearing a short skirt, or something to that effect.

What is important to the fabricator of fake facts is total success in imposing his or her will on reality. Not only must the victim be successfully victimized, but he or she must be seen to be “enjoying” or “agreeing with” his or her own victimization. This is what the psychopathic behaviour of every successful ideologue depends on, getting each individual and society as a whole to accept the turning of reality on its head as being “normal”, and to condemn material reality itself as being the pathological interpretation of events, instead. Total victory for passionate untruth.

People should therefore be proud of such abominations as ethnic imperialism, religious fundamentalism, capitalist exploitation, tax evasion, elitist “communism”, neoliberalism, neofascism, "reverse" racism, sexist “equality”, and all the other different kinds of alternative facts, rather than being proud of their undying opposition to any of those things. All the theoretically opposite varieties of reactionary behaviour have precisely the same roots, which is to say doing the most violence possible to the largest possible number of innocent people, with the added pleasure of getting them to admit that their suffering is, after all, only for their own good. Which is why apologists for evil always run around proclaiming that everyone is equally guilty of every sin, and not just the obvious perpetrators.