Puritanism and Perversion

Many of my more recent observations have focused on the theme of puritanism versus perversion. In dozens of different examples from all over the world, I have noticed that human beings and their institutions very often combine numerous instances of puritanical interpretations of reality with equally numerous instances of different kinds of perversion. Even though those two ways of looking at things seem to be totally contradictory, at least on the surface of things, people are constantly combining them together anyway.

One of the more obvious examples of the emergence of this theme was when I was trying to figure out how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s mind works. Netanyahu has gone on record several times over the past few weeks, denouncing the Polish government’s recently adopted legislation making it illegal for anyone in that country to refer to the concentration camps established by Nazi Germany in Poland during the Second World War as being “Polish” camps. Even though the Poles claim that their new law merely recognizes historical reality, the very idea that the extremely conservative Polish government felt the need to translate that fact into such a peculiar kind of legal existence raises legitimate concerns. The Israeli government, among many others, is worried that the Poles are simply trying to ignore the very real collaboration with murderous German antisemitism that affected a very large number of Polish people at the time, including many prominent members of the Polish establishment. The law looks like it was drafted for contemporary political reasons, in an attempt to somehow cover up for the increasingly ultra-right-wing policies currently being adopted by the Polish government.

Netanyahu, however, has gone overboard on this issue (as on so many other issues) by accusing Poland of trying to re-write history. While there is no doubt that that is indeed what the people in the Polish government are doing, it is really incredible that a guy like Netanyahu could make such a claim against anyone else, given the number of times that he himself has engaged in this kind of behaviour. The deliberately organized Israeli ignorance of Palestinian reality, for example, has become much more elaborate under Netanyahu’s rule than it ever was before, making his criticism of Poland seem exceptionally hypocritical.

The very idea of referring to the occupied West Bank using the Biblically inspired fiction of “Judea and Samaria” is just one example among dozens of others of how today’s Israel attempts to re-write history as much as it possibly can. Netanyahu wants everyone in the world, not just the Christian Zionists in the USA, to exclusively accept his own stultified version of history. And to accuse everyone who does not kowtow to that one-sided interpretation of events as being antisemitic, just like those horrible Poles. Israel has also taken on an increasingly right-wing populist profile over the past few years, not only in relation to its neighbours, but also in domestic policy, treating its own (Jewish-majority) population a lot worse than it did in the past.

Like many of the leading people in the Polish government, several leaders of the Israeli government, of which Netanyahu is the most important example, are in fact combining puritanism and perversion in several disgusting ways. Their puritanism is exemplified in the mental rigidity of re-defining both history and current events in ways that are consistent with the extremely orthodox vision both governments have of the official Polish and Israeli projections of reality. No one else is to be allowed to adopt any other version of each country’s imagined history, which according to them must always parrot each official, falsely perfect, interpretation of each nation’s “internal essence”. At the same time, however, most of the leading lights in both countries are also extremely corrupt individuals in their own personal and political lives, Netanyahu himself currently being denounced inside Israel for many different instances of corruption, particularly (but not exclusively) the financial kind.

Shortly after I made this initial observation, it occurred to me that Poland and Israel are far from being the only places in which today’s leading figures are committing both puritanism and perversion together. The USA’s Donald Trump also can always be counted upon to rise to the occasion whenever it comes to any possible kind of wrongdoing. The fact that he apparently paid 130 000 dollars to a porn starlet named Stormy Daniels to (unsuccessfully) keep her quiet about a dalliance he had with her several years ago is just one of the more recent examples on the corruption side of the equation in his case. The puritanism in the equation being provided by his totally ridiculous projection of the US empire’s recent political, economic, social and cultural decline as having been caused by a swampy liberal establishment’s politically correct flirtations with affirmative action, women’s liberation and uninhibited, illegal immigration.

Trump also referred to the MS-13 street gang, most of whose members come from El Salvador, in his State of the Union address, alleging that their frequent killings and other violent criminal acts committed in the USA supposedly make the very existence of that gang a good reason for Americans to support his immigration policy, aimed at keeping such people out of his country in the future. Trump’s attack on MS-13, however, is just further evidence of his curious double commitment to both puritanism and perversion, since the Salvadorian civil war of 1980-1992, between the triumphant, US-backed military and the severely outgunned, Cuban-backed guerrilla army, was the main vehicle by which that Central American country became so extremely violent in the first place. Like many other such countries, the Salvadorian banana republic, dominated for many decades by US corporations, has never fully recovered from that horrendous event, political, economic and social conditions there ensuring a constant flow of legal and illegal immigration to the USA (and Canada).

US foreign policy, from both sections of the joint Democratic-Republican swamp in Washington, has adversely affected dozens of third world countries over the past few decades, from all over Asia, Africa and Latin America. Both sides in the Salvadorian civil war tried to maintain totally fictitious, puritanical stances, “democratic anti-communism” on the pro-US side and “popular anti-imperialism” on the pro-Cuban side, as well as committing very real atrocities (perversion) on a large scale. As in many other Cold-War conflicts, however, the overall contrast between the puritanical nature of each propaganda message, and the horrific nature of the violence each side committed in the real world, was much more pronounced on the pro-US side. Making Donald Trump’s current bleating on that subject particularly inappropriate.

In fact, the real cause for the very real decline of the American empire becomes abundantly clear as soon as its recent history is compared to that of the up-and-coming Chinese empire. What is making China great again, at least compared to much more intensely neoliberal countries like the USA and the European Union, is the fact that the Chinese government still has a great deal of control over the development of its national economy. To be sure, China is most definitely not a People’s Republic, since the “red-diaper billionaires” who run the place nowadays are not any more interested in the ordinary people’s welfare than their parents were  when Chairman Mao was using large-scale famine to force all the peasants into abandoning the small family land ownership that they had initially acquired right after the 1949 revolution.

The “capitalist-roaders” in power in China since 1979, however, have not yet permitted their billionaires to sell their country down the river to the same extent that the USA, the EU and many other such countries have done, letting their own billionaires pursue extremely unpatriotic, short-term profit margins, in the process freely trading off most of their companies industrial output to former third-world countries like China. Cheap labour has allowed China, much more than India, Mexico or any other such nation, to kick-start a post-1979 “Long March” toward world domination. Which includes attempting to impose its own puritanical, and highly inaccurate, interpretation of China’s history, that is officially based on the “restoration” of China’s “age-old domination” of the world economy, that suddenly (and inexplicably) disappeared during the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution.

As a result, the formerly dominant USA has been left in the lurch, still spending enormous quantities of money on its fantastically expensive military operations, but increasingly hamstrung by successive waves of tax reductions on rich peoples fortunes, recently intensified once again by the excessively backward, “soak-the-poor” policies of the highly corrupt Trump administration. China’s puritanical interpretation of Chinese history also includes its oh-so-natural domination of all the non-Han minority regions within its current, official borders. Not to mention its own expansionist military strategy. But so far the well-entrenched financial corruption and like-minded perversions of China’s own billionaire class have not yet been allowed to seriously undermine Chinese patriotism, at least not to the same incredible extent as in its more thoroughly neoliberal rivals, not only the USA and the EU, but also Britain, Russia, India and Japan. In other words, China’s ongoing march toward total domination of the world economy and, eventually, geopolitics, has not been the least bit accidental.

To be sure, all the different varieties of neoliberalism, and neofascism, that have dominated politics in almost every country in the world over the past forty years, also display equal doses of puritanism and perversion, just like in the above-mentioned examples. For its part, wherever it occurs, neoliberalism is based on a completely unrealistic interpretation of world economic history over the past several centuries, during which the supposedly pristine spirit of “free enterprise” has been gradually emerging into the open air, liberating itself in the process from the stultifying stranglehold of its own alter ego. Which is the diametrically opposed ideal-type known to theoreticians of laissez-faire (economic liberalism) as government “intervention” into economic affairs (economic nationalism).

Neoliberal puritans firmly believe that nothing good can ever happen in this world until everything that moves is completely “free” from any collectivist impulse whatsoever. For them, the only barrier holding back unbridled economic development has always been the “red tape” of public bureaucracy. From the ultra-idealistic point of view of extreme individualism, “red tape” has always been defined as anything whatever that prevents the world’s leading private investors from making a lot more money than they ever did before and dominating all ordinary, proletarian non-VIPs much more than what they have previously been allowed to get away with doing.

This kind of extreme individualism, open to only a relatively small handful of the world’s leading manipulators of capital, also has the added advantage of dovetailing quite nicely with unmitigated perversion, in which dominant alpha males like Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein (along with a small coterie of female imitators) simultaneously free themselves from the sexual limitations of ordinary social intercourse. The result being a veritable orgy combining entirely “free” enterprise, totally uninhibited exploitation of labour, as well as free “love” between dominant philanderers and their unfortunately more introverted victims. Whose theoretical “consent” to whatever they are being forced to do is always guaranteed, not by them, but by an ever-accommodating, old-boy legal system constantly intervening on the side of elitist tradition.

Superficial appearances to the contrary, the other leading ideology these days, neofascism, does not have any problem whatever with world-wide neoliberalism, just as long as each participating, elitist, racist and sexist empire, religion and competing cultural tradition is allowed to introduce its own peculiar sort of falsely puritanical perversion into the overall swamp. Another example of this kind of puritanical history lesson being the recent scandal in Thailand, where the ruling elite has been trying to jail for life an old professor who had the temerity to claim that the king of Thailand might not in fact have won a battle with the Burmese empire that took place over 500 years ago! Presumably, this tyrannical attempt to constantly support everything that any Thai king is doing nowadays, or that any other Thai king has ever done in the past, is part of that country’s long-standing tradition of artificially preserving the monarchy (at least) from any of the incredibly ingrained kinds of financial corruption and polymorphous perversion, that has characterized most of Thailand’s recent governments.

Still another recent example of this sort of thing comes from the Hindu-nationalist, but also neoliberal, government of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, whose tourist department has taken the country’s most well-known architectural symbol, the Taj Mahal, out of all official tourist brochures because that enormous mausoleum was built by a Muslim ruler, and therefore cannot really be Indian after all. Needless to say, the same government is also enmeshed in a long series of financial scandals, making it another perfect example of the current world tendency toward combining puritanism and perversion.

In other words, as long as the international, neoliberal elite allows each long-established tradition to get away with imposing its own (fake) puritanical version of history on its own people and to include its own vision of the supposedly eternal domination of each distinct society by traditional elites (political elites from dominant ethnic groups, and allied elites from the business world, established religions, established genders and so on), the two dominant ideologies in today’s world can get along famously.

The international liberal elites, who are in theory ideologically opposed to the kinds of ethnic, religious and gender-based traditions that favour neofascist behaviour, can go on bleating as loudly as they want about how wrong all of those traditions really are, so long as they refrain from imposing any real changes. Lip-service is perfectly acceptable, as long as every wealthy and powerful person in the world, neoliberal and/or neofascist, agrees not to rock the boat too violently about all those (evanescent) non-traditional approaches to society.

Leaders like Canada’s Justin Trudeau can therefore propose including labour rights, gender rights and minority rights into international trade deals as often as they want, so long as they recognize that those demands are only being introduced as bargaining chips for domestic political consumption, to be thrown away as soon as something really important comes up. “Something really important” being any concessions from the other side that could potentially help Canadian corporations improve their bottom lines, which is what trade deals are really supposed to be all about.

But it also occurred to me recently that this kind of combined puritanism and perversion on the part of most of the world’s very important people is not just a fascinating characteristic of today’s society, but has in fact existed for a very long time. Not so long ago, I went to an official reception in a nearby Montreal suburb, set up to honour a number of distinguished personalities from that suburb’s recent past. One of the speakers at that event, the current scion of a very well-known, and very rich, commercial family from that community talked for several hours about the history of the founders of the family, as well as about many more recent leading lights in the family firm. He started off by referring to the Viking origins of his family, and how they participated in all the raiding, pillaging and raping that their ancestors had carried out hundreds of years ago in the British Isles. Before they intermarried with their former victims and became good British citizens themselves.

Then he went on to describe in grandiloquent detail about how his family later switched to commercial activity, trafficking many of the same products that they had originally stolen, selling those goods over the centuries to millions of more recent customers, through what he himself described as “legalized pillage”. He also joked about how the men in the family simultaneously replaced rape with somewhat more civilized methods of sexual conquest. Then he went on to describe how some of the more recent heads of the family had done their utmost  to help ensure the victory of the British Empire in many of its nineteenth and twentieth century wars, as well as contributing greatly to the development of such exemplary religious and charitable institutions as the YMCA, that also made an important civilian contribution to the empire during many of those same wars.

The whole speech reminded me very much of Quebec “separatist” leader René Lévesque’s denunciation of the “white Rhodesians” in Quebec society who had dominated commercial affairs in that province up until the 1960s. According to him, they were also the most fanatical supporters of Canadian federalism, that Lévesque once described as being a recent extension of the British imperial tradition. Lévesque, of course, has been denounced hundreds of times over the years for that kind of nationalist rhetoric. Too bad he did not live long enough to have listened to the same speech as I listened to several decades after his death.

I found yet another example of this kind of combination of puritanism and perversion when I was reading the doctoral thesis of Christopher William Powell, “‘Vietnam: It’s Our War Too’: The Antiwar Movement in Canada, 1963-1975” (University of New Brunswick, 2010), which is available online. Powell’s goal was to basically describe the Canadian participation in the anti-Vietnam war movement, including the demonstrations and public meetings all over Canada, the political organizations that ran the movement at the time, their close ties to similar groups in the USA and the role of specific groups within that movement, such as the US draft dodgers in Canada, the pacifist Voice of Women, and the ongoing involvement of various rival Canadian communist parties, affiliated to either the USSR, to China or to the Trotskyist “Fourth International”. For me, it was a real “blast from the past”, since the antiwar movement was also a big part of my life during those years. Powell also refers in his 500-page text to many of the people I met myself back then.

Unfortunately, there are several interesting gaps in Powell’s presentation. For example, he refers only briefly and indirectly (pages 193-194) to a “flag-burning incident” at the US Consulate in Toronto during the International Day of Protest in April, 1967, which was falsely attributed to the Trotskyist movement, who vehemently denied having participated in that event. If he had done any checking, he would have found out that the US flag was effectively burned during a protest organized by the Toronto branch of the Maoist “Progressive Workers Movement”, based in Vancouver, that he mentioned on several other occasions in his thesis. His thesis director, Gregory Kealey, who was interviewed by Powell as one of his original sources, was apparently quite active in the antiwar movement, and also a well-known Trotskyist at the time, and presumably could have filled him in about this.

I was one of the people arrested at the April, 1967 demonstration in Toronto, and the only Canadian (to my knowledge) later sentenced to three months in jail (as well as a substantial fine) for antiwar activity during those years (of which I only served three weeks, the prosecutor having changed his mind along the way about the unusual severity of the initial sentence). Powell could have found out about all this quite easily, which could have become an interesting footnote in his thesis, as well as contributing to the thoroughness of his coverage. Not least by reading the account of that event (accompanied by a front-page picture of me being arrested) in the Toronto Star in August of 1968, when my trial took place. Including this material, as well as several other details related to the Toronto PWM (that later became the nucleus of the “Canadian Party of Labour”, also mentioned by Powell a few times later on in his text), could have helped avoid the rather severe bias in his thesis toward the organizational prowess of the Trotskyist movement.

As for the role of both puritanism and perversion in the history of the anti-Vietnam war movement at the time, and in the Vietnam War itself, they were all over the place. So far as the USA and its allies are concerned, their puritanism was obvious in their vainglorious effort to pass off their own overwhelming participation in the Vietnamese civil war as part of their goal of freeing the “democratic” world, including the dominoes in Southeast Asia, from the totalitarian communist attempt at world domination. In reality, the USA and its allies were much more interested, as in the more recent Salvadorian example cited above, in keeping all the world’s regions open for economic exploitation by neocolonial investors, the US leaders of that movement merely fulfilling former president Calvin Coolidge’s old American “mission statement” according to which “the business of America (sic) is business”.

Killing a couple of million anti-American Vietnamese, especially those dying in the massive carpet bombing of civilian targets, became an important addition to the several million other victims they also eliminated in dozens of other pro-communist targets all over Asia, Africa and Latin America. Not to mention several million additional victims, belonging to non-communist but still anti-imperialist adversaries, people opposed to the USA and its allies for reasons of national independence, those theoretically non-aligned countries who feared domination from both sides during the extremely violent “Cold” War (1945-1991).

Which is not to say that both the communist and the nationalist adversaries of private-capitalist imperialism were not also guilty of both puritanism and perversion, during the Vietnam War as well as in every other case. For their part, the Marxist-Leninists from the USSR and all the other pro-Moscow communist parties, but also the ones who supported the Maoists in China as well as the different factions inside the Trotskyist movement, were not really communists at all, but totalitarian state-capitalists. In fact, the communist (ultra-egalitarian) ideology as such was never really practised by any of those different kinds of Leninists, but only used as a rallying cry to trick people into supporting their policies, on behalf of a new oligarchy whose role was to replace a small number of private-capitalist investors and their government representatives with an equally small number of totalitarian, state bureaucrats running such countries for the exclusive benefit of an obedient coterie of party militants. (Including Leon Trotsky himself, before he was booted out of the USSR by Joseph Stalin.) Not to forget the millions of lives lost in such ultra-communist abominations as Stalin’s forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, as well as Maoist China’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”.

The same kind of analysis also applies to most of the nationalist adversaries of the imperial countries supporting private capitalism, such as the African National Congress in South Africa. In that country, the ANC’s (theoretically anti-imperialist) nationalist elite came to power in 1994 and promptly replaced the old, pro-apartheid elite (a product of Western imperialism) with its own militants, oppressing the majority of the population almost as much as they were oppressed by the previous regime. Needless to say, those nationalist elites also invented their own puritanical mythologies of “Black liberation” in Africa (also adopting similar slogans in Asia and Latin America) in an attempt to hide their real-world betrayal of their own, highly theoretical, principles.

Putting the Cold War examples of puritanism and perversion together with the more recent examples mentioned above, means that I am forced to come to a very disappointing conclusion. Since I first got involved in political activism, more than 50 years ago, not much progress seems to have been made in human behaviour. Revolutions are constantly being betrayed, progressive reforms are constantly being reversed, and the status quo nowadays stinks as much as it ever did. So I was initially tempted to conclude this blogpost by using the well-known Québécois expression, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”.

Unfortunately, the lack of progress does not mean that things cannot end up getting a whole lot worse. If some major new crisis, like some sort of repetition of the world-wide financial crisis of 2008, breaks out shortly, as seems more than likely, the world’s governments and central banks may no longer have the financial wherewithal to do anything about it. In which case, mildly reactionary leaders like French president Emmanuel Macron may want to imitate the Trump regime in the USA, doing whatever they want without worrying about the consequences. Leaders like Trump may want to go even further, and grind their opponents down the way a lot more than before, like Vladimir Putin does in Russia. Leaders like Putin may also want to go even farther than what they have already done, and adopt instead the almost total control over society enjoyed by leaders like China’s Xi Jinping. Or, even more completely totalitarian, like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. In other words, authoritarianism seems to be getting more and more popular with world leaders every day.

Since 2013, when I started writing this blog, I have often denounced the fact that even the world’s more democratic countries, like the one in which I have always lived, have not really always been as democratic as all that, even at the best of times. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, may have embedded fundamental human rights in his remake of the Canadian constitution (with mixed results), but he is also well-known for having successfully used the draconian “War Measures Act” against a tiny terrorist organization (the FLQ) that never had more than 30 members in it at any one time. Half of which may very well have been police agents of some kind.

Writing a blog like this one, even if it has never become terribly popular, may not be possible at some point in the future. At least half of the world’s current political regimes do not tolerate public criticism of any kind, no matter how few people in such countries even know that such criticism actually exists. The fact that there does not seem to have been much progress in the world over the past half-century makes reaction, the opposite of progress, that much more possible in the foreseeable future.