Holistic remedies for narrow-minded communitarianism

I just finished reading a book by Lynda Gray, First Nations 101: Tons of stuff you need to know about First Nations people (2011), that seems to be quite popular in Canada (sixth printing in  2016). Gray is the executive director of the Urban Native Youth Association in Vancouver, British Columbia, and is also a member of the Tsimshian Nation (and the Orca clan), originally from the northwest coast of BC. For non-Canadian readers of my blog, I should point out that “First Nations” (or FN) is a term that refers to the indigenous peoples living in what is now called Canada. Which according to Gray includes not only all the “status Indians” living on officially recognized reserves, but also the more numerous, urban-based, native “Indians”, as well as the Inuit originally from the Canadian North, and the “mixed-blood” Métis.

A large part of the focus of this book is on the often horrible ways in which many non-First Nations people in Canada, particularly those of European origin who have dominated the ranks of the Canadian government, have treated indigenous people over the past several centuries. Although Gray in her book does not dwell that much on the specific dates of “first contact” (between indigenous peoples and Europeans), it took place a lot further back in history in the eastern part of Canada (and Quebec) than it did in many parts of the West, where some native peoples did not run into any Europeans until the nineteenth century. Ignoring the unsuccessful Viking incursion that occurred way back in the eleventh century, the first, permanent, European arrivals took place in 1497 (Newfoundland), almost 400 years before the most recent contact dates in the West. The examples that Gray uses to illustrate her points in the book are also heavily weighted on the western part of Canada, particularly BC, which has a significantly higher percentage of indigenous people living in it than do any of the other provinces. Nevertheless, only about four percent of the overall Canadian population seems to be of mostly indigenous origin (not counting people like myself with only one or two FN ancestors).

As for the horrible ways in which the indigenous peoples have most often been treated, this emphatically includes not only full-fledged genocide (as in the case of the former Beothuk population of Newfoundland), but also the frequent use of the food weapon to starve reluctant tribes into submission. Since Gray’s book was first published, James Daschuk’s book has come out (2013), on the genocidal treatment meted out to the Plains Indians by the government of Canada’s first prime minister, John A. MacDonald (in power from 1867 to 1873, and from 1878 to 1891). Which definitively proves, among other things, that about 30 000 Prairie “Indians” were effectively starved to death as part of their “pacification” by the Canadian government during that period. A significant “crime against humanity”, no doubt about that, but one that also belongs to the same colonial period during which, to give another example, the same British Empire in the real India also used the food weapon to a much more considerable extent, managing to eliminate (according to such scholars as Mike Davis) about fifteen million people overall. To which can be added several million other victims of the same food weapon elsewhere around the colonial world, during the same period.

Gray also focuses much of her book on the kind of social and cultural genocide that mainly took place in more recent times, from the MacDonald regime right up to the Harper decade of 2006-2015. Particularly on the century-old “residential schools” that separated “Indian” youth from their families and subjected them to several different kinds of horrific abuse, as well as on the “Indian” day schools and many other, similar programs. On almost every page of her 275-page book, she denounces the various colonial and neocolonial policies that devastated FN communities over the years. Resulting in a situation whereby even though Canada as a whole is considered to be quite a decent country by the United Nations, often scoring somewhere in the “top ten best” nations world-wide, the FN communities inside Canada end up being placed somewhere in the statistical equivalent of seventieth or eightieth place (out of about 190 countries).

My main criticism of her work does not come from any major disagreement about any of that abuse, but about the curious “golden age” of indigenous history, before the Europeans came, that she has naively conjured up. According to Gray, none of the FN peoples living inside the boundaries of today’s Canada way back then, ever did anything wrong. They all got along quite well, treated women, children, elders and “two-spirit” people (of uncertain gender) almost perfectly, lived off the land so successfully that they always had lots to eat, settled disputes through discussion, compromise and “mutual evolution”, always lived in the same places (“since time immemorial”) that they are now claiming as their original lands, held warm-hearted spiritual beliefs in natural, animal-based origins (as depicted on the BC totem poles), and all shared the same “Creator” concept that completely satisfied any curiosity that they may have had about their collective place in the universe.

Not only that, but any of the more recent, negative, characteristics that some FN people have adopted nowadays, such as using a lot of violence, male domination of society, and mistreatment of children, all came about as a result of the rotten, corrupting influence of the “outsiders” and the “foreigners”, mostly from Europe, who stole all their lands and betrayed all the terms of the treaties signed with the “Indians” over the years. From her point of view, FN people in those parts of North America that later became Canada and the USA, never went to war with each other before “first contact”, and only learned how to fight wars at all when  resisting the European invaders, sometimes taking opposite sides (for the first time) when temporarily allied with one European empire against another one. Their ultimate defeat in resisting Western imperialism then brought about the disgusting, racially inferior conditions in which most of the FN people are forced to be living nowadays.

In other words, as in many other parts of the world, what she has done is simply to have taken the worst possible kinds of “anti-native”, European racism, according to which only “Western civilization” (the European countries and their various North American and Australasian “extensions”) has ever done anything great or noble, throughout all of human history—and then turned this completely ridiculous idea on its head. In her, “reverse racist” version of human history, the Western world of European origin is not great and noble at all, in any of its nefarious manifestations, but is instead entirely reactionary and despicable.

While according to her upside-down interpretation of Western racism, it is the “First Nations” peoples of what is now called Canada and the USA, that used to be exclusively progressive and noble, before they were partly corrupted by the evil empires from Europe. From her point of view, all that is required to turn the situation around once again, and get back to the original, FN “golden age”, is to re-adopt all the (largely imagined) characteristics of traditional FN societies, and to “re-connect” with all the wonderful, pluperfect, features of that pre-European, indigenous culture, supposedly common to all the different FN peoples in North America.

Her vision of such a pre-contact golden age, which seems to be shared by at least some of the other authors whose written contributions are identified within the pages of her book, is in reality just a FN fantasy, similar to the “Garden of Eden” myth from the other side of the world,  or to the “virgin birth” scenario adopted by true believers in Christianity. Surpassing even the “noble savage” projection invented by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, back in the eighteenth century. It also resembles, in its pristine pureness, many of the other fables also concocted in dozens of other parts of the world throughout history, such as the concept of Allah’s will resulting in the original formation of the perfectly marvellous Islamic caliphate, its subsequent demise as a result of the European “crusader” invasions, as well as its supposedly “imminent” return in our own time.

Muslim fundamentalists nowadays seem to forget, just like today’s Christian fundamentalists and every other kind of religious (Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, etc.) true-believers seem to forget, that alongside the incredibly sophisticated achievements of every single “great” civilization in history, like the glorious Muslim empires of the past, are despicable examples of barbarism, obscurantism, repression and murderous mayhem. Just like the enduring achievements of the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods in Western history (among others) have also always been accompanied by equally disgusting barbarism, obscurantism, repression and murderous mayhem.

Numerous other golden-age projections, all of them partly mythical and partly historical, have also been conjured up over the years, and used to “justify” other imperialist pretensions from the “Old World”, such as the “for their own good” colonization of hundreds of indigenous peoples shanghaied into the Russian Federation, or into the People’s Republic of China, or into dozens of other Asian “works in progress”, such as India, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Equivalent examples coming from every other region in the world, such as “Latin” America and Africa, as well as Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands. Including all the countries in Europe, that were also constructed as “imperial nations” within Europe, even before they began conquering most of the rest of the world, forcibly incorporating many different European populations into their compressed framework, some of those peoples having almost disappeared over time.

Each imperial nation of Western European origin (Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Denmark) has also invented dozens of different kinds of historical “justifications” for its own colonization adventures all over the world, along the same lines as the Russian (Eastern European) pretension of dominating various other peoples “for their own good”. To which ought to be added as well, the imperialist pretensions of the USA, which have usually been hidden behind some kind of absurd mumbo-jumbo of “freeing” such nations as Cuba from “undemocratic empires” like Spain. Right up to the most recent addition to such phantasmagoric interpretations of current events like Donald Trump’s “highly successful” (3000 dead people) efforts at “saving” Puerto Rico from destruction by a hurricane. 

Not to mention dozens of less destructive, but nevertheless largely invented stories, such as the ultra-conservative Quebec historian Lionel Groulx’s concoction, back in the early twentieth century, about the “great French-Canadian hero”, Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, in reality a drunken racist from the seventeenth century who lost his life fighting against the Iroquois. Not that the Iroquois were blameless “babes in the woods” themselves, as anyone can attest who has had the courage to read such works as historian Roland Viau’s 1997 book about their methods of making war, and eating certain selected prisoners of those selfsame wars.

Aside from such diverse imperialist constructions throughout history, many different peoples from all over the world claiming to be indigenous, not just in North America, have also adopted their own mythological versions of history. According to these, only slightly less self-centred interpretations of history, all those supposedly indigenous peoples, having been mistreated for centuries not only by the world-wide Western empires of the colonial period, but also by the previously established, regional empires that were set up on every continent over the past 6000 years, adopted their own post-colonial liberation myths, each people postulating its own original innocence (or lack of original sin).

This list includes the ideological constructions of many different, falsely “indigenous” movements in “Latin” America, some of them based on the “glorious” histories of such empires as the Aztec, Inca and Mayan peoples, as well as many different empires (such as the old Kongo empire) established in various parts of Africa, long before the Europeans showed up. In other words, many of the world’s so-called “indigenous” peoples, suffering in recent centuries from Western colonialism and neocolonialism, were themselves imperialist peoples, at one time or another, long before, or in some cases just before, the most recent (European-origin) colonial period began.

Which means that if we go back far enough in history, practically every separate ethnocultural people in world history has suffered under some kind of foreign imperialism at some point, as well as themselves dominating many other peoples during other parts of their extremely long history. Gray refers in her book to the arrival of the Inuit in northern Canada several hundred years ago, but says nothing about the presence of the Dorset people in the same regions, whose lands were gradually taken over by the Inuit. Did the Dorset people just die out by themselves before the Inuit showed up, or were they pushed out? In today’s Africa, the Khoi-San and the Pygmy peoples lost most of their original lands when the dominant Bantu peoples began their own expansion from their origins in northwestern Africa towards the southern and eastern parts of that continent, in some cases long before the Europeans arrived, and in other cases just prior to the formation of the “Western world”. Much of North Africa, as well as many countries in western Asia, were also colonized during the Muslim Arab imperial expansion, beginning in the seventh century, the Arabs being indigenous only to the area covered by the Arabian peninsula.

Almost all of Asia was also colonized by dozens of different, Asian-origin empires when Europe was still in its ultra-weak, medieval period, the British in India for example only gradually taking over the Indian sub-continent from the previously established Mughal empire, of Turco-Mongol origin. Back in North America, the Iroquois, originally from the southeastern part of today’s USA, migrated towards the north long before any European colonization. Which put their “neolithic” culture, living off of extensive agriculture as well as wild game, into conflict with the “palaeolithic” (non-agricultural) Algonquian peoples originally living in what is now called Canada. Not all the FN peoples back then were as fortunate as the “riparian” cultures in the northwestern part of North America, living next to millions of annually spawning salmon.

I should also point out that the term “First Nations” is itself ambiguous. The nations that were originally set up in some parts of Europe during the early-modern period were not just confined to one specific tribe, such as the Tsimshian people in BC to which Gray belongs. Instead, they were gradually stitched together by the absolute monarchies from one small region, successively conquering surrounding peoples and officially incorporating them into one, more or less culturally unified, linguistic community. Western empires then “exported” that idea to their far-away Asian, African, American, Austro-asian and Pacific colonies, most of which adopted the nationalist form of government during the post-colonial period, also incorporating various “inferior” peoples dominated by politically “superior” ethnocultural populations.

Presumably, if the FN peoples in North America had been able to adopt the nationalist method of governance themselves before the European invasions, it could have resulted in the establishment, for example, of an even more unified Iroquois Confederacy than the one that briefly existed during the modern colonial period, before being forcibly dissolved. In other words, all the peoples in the Iroquoian linguistic community under the control of one large nation, ruling a contiguous territory covering parts of what is now southern Ontario, southern Quebec and several neighbouring states of the northeastern USA, between the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River region.

If the Europeans had not conquered North America when they did, similar indigenous nations could eventually have been set up in various other parts of the continent, uniting many other related tribes into considerably larger entities. Each nation is supposed to include several smaller ethnic groupings, or “tribes”, more or less in the same way that the tribe is supposed to include several different clans, and the clan is supposed to include several extended families. At least theoretically, the reality of the situation in every area often differing from the overall historical concept.

This is not to exclude the possibility that one or another of the very numerous identity movements, from today’s world, could ever intersect with progressive political viewpoints, promoting advanced forms of political, economic, social and cultural democracy. Thereby becoming firmly opposed to the kind of upper-class domination that characterizes both private and state capitalism all over the world, and, simultaneously, just as firmly opposed to gender domination (sexism) and to ethnocultural domination (racism). The trend today is, however, decidedly in the opposite direction, with the world’s two most powerful current ideologies, neoliberalism and neofascism, moving hand-in-hand toward ever greater divisions between the social classes (extreme income and control-of-power cleavages), between the sexes (particularly focused on the rotten treatment of women), and between the world’s currently dominant, and currently dominated, ethnicities and cultures.

Getting back to our analysis of the Lynda Gray book on Canada’s FN peoples, another important weakness in her work is the fact that she does not make any specific reference to the cultural division between English Canada and French Canada, nor to the recent political dispute between Canadian federalism and Quebec “separatism” (independent nationalism). She even managed to introduce her readers to the brief, nineteenth-century existence of the Métis rebellions, allied at one point with “Indian” military resistance to colonialism, in the territories that later became the “Prairie provinces” of Canada, fighting against both the British Empire and the Dominion of Canada. But without mentioning either Métis leader Louis Riel’s intimate connections with Quebec, nor the existence of any Métis people in eastern Canada, nor even of any French-speaking FN people in Quebec.

She did, however, make a brief reference to the armed Mohawk conflict with the Quebec provincial police in 1990 (the Oka crisis), that resulted in the intervention of the Canadian army, but once again without specifically relating any of that to the constitutional dispute between Canada and Quebec. It is as if she believes that the political conflict between English Canada and French Quebec, in the nineteenth century as well as more recently, does not intersect in any way with the political conflict between all the Canadian governments (federal and provincial) taken together, on the one hand, and all the FN peoples on the other.

To be fair, it is true that Gray occasionally tries to argue, here and there in her book, for some kind of reconciliation with non-FN people who, if they are kind enough and smart enough to adopt her point of view about everything, could be brought around to some sort of “consensus”. She posits re-educating the non-FN population into accepting the kind of “holistic” interpretations of reality that “have always prevailed” in traditional FN societies, and to dump their anti-FN racism into the garbage. Proving their new-found honesty by signing treaties with all the First Nations not yet covered by such treaties, and applying (for the first time) all the provisions of the treaties already signed by fully funding all the programs originally promised to each treaty nation (in exchange for land already stolen). Also by overcoming the ridiculous situation in which Canadian governments have consistently ignored the demands of the urban-based majority of the FN population, often with the collusion of corrupt chiefs and band councils from the (mostly rural) official reserves.

In a few places in her book, she has even gone one step further, and talked a little bit about uniting with progressive-minded people from the non-FN population to help all the “disenfranchised” people in Canada, from both FN and non-FN origins. At one point, she even considered the possibility of helping develop a world-wide movement of progressive-minded people, before abandoning that idea and falling back into her much more frequent denunciations of deliberately degrading, settler colonization. An approach that was probably exacerbated by the fact that her book was mostly written, and published, during the especially reactionary, anti-FN, Harper Conservative period of Canadian government. Not that the Trudeau Liberals of today, who spend a lot of time talking about abandoning the old, regressive attitudes toward FN people, really seem to be acting all that differently.

Very few Canadian governments, federal, provincial or municipal, have ever acted in genuinely progressive ways, toward FN people or toward any other disenfranchised population. With the possible exception of the Quebec government in 1975, when it signed the first autonomy agreement with the Cree population living in the James Bay area of that province (as well as with the Naskapi and the Inuit, in neighbouring regions), or the 1999 British Columbia treaty with the Nisga’a people in one part of that province. Neither of those agreements, however, were designed to prevent the dominant FN community in each region from mistreating even smaller minorities within its boundaries, be they other FN, or non-FN, “minorities within a minority”.

In order to be described as being truly “holistic”, however, the approach Gray adopts would have to move beyond the strictly “us versus them”, ethnic dichotomy of indigenous peoples versus more recent settlers (since 1497), to take a much broader interpretation of events. In the first place, she would have to drop her often repeated opposition to any kind of historical research being conducted concerning the pre-contact period. While it is true that professional historians and anthropologists should include oral memories of FN people among their useful sources, such oral memories have to be professionally treated (such as being compared with other sources of information), just like any other source (archeological digs, etc.). No professional historian could ever accept such orally transmitted, traditional knowledge (limited even by Gray as going back a mere seven generations), at face value, in her view constituting the only politically-correct source of information possible.

The often contradictory oral histories coming from hundreds of FN peoples spread out all over North America, would first have to be professionally compared and contrasted. Even then, accepting all those (often largely imagined) oral histories at face value, as the be-all and end-all of politically-correct interpretations of pre-contact reality, is just as absurd and ridiculous as accepting some ultra-conservative British historian’s claim that the British Empire, all over the world, just happened to fall together completely by accident, without any genuinely imperialist design ever having been adopted.

Gray seems to be totally opposed to any “foreign” (non-FN) scientists using FN ancient artefacts and human remains in order to discover what really happened anywhere north of Mexico in the pre-Colombian period (before 1492). From her point of view, those people are just treating FN people like “any other object” of scientific study, as if that was somehow objectionable. According to her, all the artefacts ever discovered should be turned over to the FN from which they came, to be disposed of as they see fit, and all such human remains should be returned to the ground forthwith, since they were after all discovered by someone “desecrating” a “sacred burial ground”.

She seems to be deathly afraid, like the US “Indians” who got upset after preliminary tests were done on a 9000-year old skeleton found (in 1996) near Kennewick, in the state of Washington, that some “outsider” might indeed discover something about people living in North America back then, that could possibly upset her own preconceived theories about the past. As for the artefacts, she asserts that even totem poles from long ago should not be preserved for a long time, since FN people used to just make new ones whenever the old ones gave out. The artistic value of any existing objects having no importance whatsoever, since the authenticity of the new ones being made would presumably be guaranteed by the orally transmitted memories of the FN people carving them.

Given the fact that our species has been around for at least 200 000 years, and started spreading out from its apparently African origins a very long time ago, it is highly doubtful, if not impossible, that every single FN tribe, or indigenous linguistic grouping, in North America, or anywhere else in the world, was occupying exactly the same territory now being claimed as “eternally theirs” from the very beginning. Even if we exclude any territorial changes imposed by “outsiders” since 1497. Unfortunately, if the whole world continues on its current downward trajectory toward ever more reactionary, ultra-right-wing, ultra-racist points of view, the entire profession of history as we know it, may not exist any more, anyway, after a couple more decades of this kind of cultural devolution.

Any genuinely holistic approach to reality, however, would also have to include a number of other, equally important, considerations. “Disenfranchised” populations did not just come into being because of the division of human beings over time into thousands of competing, ethnocultural communities, they also arose (as Gray herself sometimes seems to recognize) because of huge gender differences, as well as enormous differences of income and standing between the various social classes. It is unconscionable to blame every non-indigenous person in the world with having contributed to imposing ethnocultural discrimination on every indigenous person in the world equally, without any reference whatsoever to gender differences and/or class differences. This is particularly obvious from the point of view of social classes, the poor and the powerless people in the world, from whatever cultural origin, not ever possessing the influence and the clout necessary to impose world-wide ethnocultural domination on any other cultural community whatsoever.

All the different kinds of political, economic, social and cultural domination in this world are always imposed by a tiny minority of rich and powerful people, in every country and in every region. The “poor white trash” in the southern USA, for example, may indeed have adopted racist attitudes toward the various ethnocultural minorities in the USA (Afro-Americans, indigenous people, people of Asian origin, etc.), in an opportunistic (and unsuccessful) attempt to curry favour from Big Business and Big Government (which are almost always united against the interests of “lesser” beings). That has never prevented poor whites, however, from quite often suffering degrees of poverty and helplessness reasonably close to what many of the people in the above mentioned minorities have also suffered. Helping out culturally or sexually disadvantaged people, without also helping out the socially disadvantaged, is a lot like a domestic version of foreign aid, described by one humorous wag as “poor people in rich countries helping rich people in poor countries”.

This kind of thinking on Gray’s part also brings to mind the recent controversies in Quebec, when playwright Robert Lepage and his collaborators attempted to present a play (or musical) called “Slav” about the slavery issue in the USA, and another one called “Kanata” about the historical relationship between the European-origin majority and the indigenous minority in Canada. Although both of those plays apparently condemned European-origin racism in no uncertain terms, the fact that they were presented using mostly white actors and singers was thoroughly denounced by several people from both the Black and the FN communities in Quebec. This may indicate that the crimes committed in the past, as well as ongoing discrimination in the present, toward both of those communities, by people of mostly European origin everywhere in the Western world, may have eliminated forever any possible attempts at reconciliation nowadays.

This in spite of the fact that nowhere in the world do poor and powerless people, nor even the much-maligned “middle” classes, have the “capability” (following the approach toward power developed in India by Amartya Sen) to impose racial discrimination, or any other form of domination, on any group of people larger than a nuclear family. Only the world’s richest and most powerful people have the capability, or clout, to impose any kind of systematic discrimination on anyone at all. Opportunism and complicity are not the same as power and control on a large scale. It is also particularly disgusting to include progressive-minded people belonging to any ethnically dominant population as belonging to “the enemy”, for the same reason that the major decisions being made every day by a very small number of immensely rich and powerful people in the world do indeed justify their being categorized as such by everyone else.

Which does not mean, however, that anyone actively engaged in sexist or racist activities, or even in propagating such opinions via the social media should not be properly denounced for engaging in such disgusting activity. Millions of “deplorable people”, as Hillary Clinton likes to call them, do indeed exist outside the ranks of the ruling classes, all over the world. But the private and state capitalist systems that dominate every country nowadays were not set up, nor are they being maintained, primarily by the “poor white trash” and similar groups of socially, but not ethnically, disenfranchised people all over the world.

It is also quite wrong to let some people in some racially discriminated community get off the hook when they commit various different crimes, completely or partly, simply because of their membership in that group. Men from racially-discriminated populations, for example, who murder their cousins, or beat their wives, or rape their daughters, or whatever other deplorable acts they commit, should not be systematically getting off with much lighter sentences for those acts than do men from racially dominant populations. (The concept of “race”, of course, being a totally unscientific concept that is nevertheless being used in everyday society over and over again, by “polymorphous perverts” who do not give a fig about science, or anything else outside their extremely narrow way of looking at things.)

Not to forget that women, too, are quite capable of adopting extremely poor behaviour toward people they consider to be weaker than themselves, such as other women, as in the case of millions of mothers in many different countries forcing their daughters to endure sexual excision. Women are also quite capable of “scabbing” on each other, as in the example of those Muslim women who choose to wear cover-up clothing in public, symbolizing their own voluntary inferiority, just like those working-class people who engage in strikebreaking (also known as “scabbing”) against other working-class people. Gray herself also states in her book that modern feminism is not compatible with traditional FN culture, which seems to indicate that she wants to have her cake and eat it too, since she simultaneously condemns male domination of women as a “foreign import” into FN culture.

Hundreds of millions of people all over the world have recently fallen even more under the control of ultra-right-wing populist ideas than they were in the past. In the USA and various other countries, extremely popular “reality shows” are not about political, economic, social and cultural realities at all, but are only about people in public acting as vulgarly and as loathsomely as possible, displaying the kinds of disgusting behaviour that official censorship used to keep off the air in the old days. The popularization of such behaviour on the social media, including television, has helped spawn tremendously powerful political movements, such as the one that has coalesced around billionaire showman Donald Trump, all over the world. The movement behind Victor Orban, the current prime minister of Hungary, being another prime example. People in those movements believe that “democracy” means bringing all of society down to the “lowest common denominator” of behaviour, which is extremely low-down indeed.

Promoting pristine origin myths, such as the one that Gray has developed in her book, unfortunately fits in quite well with this world-wide race to the bottom. Although Gray in her everyday work seems to be opposed to this kind of bottoming out, her propagation of “culture as therapy” for FN people, using a reverse racist, “virgin birth” definition of that culture, cannot possibly lead to anything good. Her flat-out opposition to any kind of professional, historical research concerning the true nature of the pre-European period of FN history, follows the same kind of “fake-news” logic as the Trump movement or the Orban movement. In other words, making as if reality outside of one’s own head has to be exclusively defined by the self-righteous projection of one individual’s inner feelings onto the outside universe.

Populist definitions of “honesty”, like populist definitions of “reality”, are therefore mere projections of one or several individual persons’ inner mental turmoil onto the outside world, resulting in the invention of all kinds of unscientific “fake news”. The perpetrator always disseminates such fake news at an astonishing rate of delivery, all the while pretending that it is the “traditional media” who are the “real” liars. Education, science and fact-checking are thereby transformed from honest inquiry about the real world, into deliberate dissemination of false information, turning reality upside-down. Just like Lynda Gray turned white racism upside-down in order to develop her own “reverse-racist” theories. Innocence, just like guilt, has to be proven after all, and cannot just be automatically assumed for strictly personal, psychological or ideological reasons.

Denouncing information about reality as being exclusively “upper-class” and “anti-democratic” turns out to be the most powerful weapon ever invented by Svengali-like magicians practising elitist versions of “artificial intelligence”, in order to preclude any attempt at doing away with elitism itself. Dividing the working-class all over the world into ethnically dominant and ethnically dominated groups, or mutual enemies, the “whites”, along with the Chinese and the Japanese, on the one side, versus every other ethnocultural group on the other side, is the most diabolical method ever devised for ensuring that those who are rich and powerful nowadays will remain so forever.

At least until the enormous pollution and climate change caused by today’s rulers’ short-term pursuits of power and wealth (state capitalism and private capitalism), combine to do away with the human race once and for all, by thoroughly poisoning the air, the water and the soil under everyone’s feet. Not so much if, but rather when, the next major financial crisis brings about a total collapse in everyone’s best efforts to finally do something real about environmental issues, as well as about all the geopolitical, social and cultural divisions that separate human beings into opposing groups, we will in fact have run out of time to save everyone’s bacon.

The people devising all these pristine origin myths, of whatever variety, seem to prefer seeing human beings perish altogether rather than admit that their particular constituencies, “Western civilization”, the “Chinese path toward socialism”, or the indigenous peoples of the world, are not after all the world’s “chosen people”. Following the teachings of scholars like Shlomo Sand, it appears that even the original chosen people, the Jews from the ancient world, or at least many of them, may have abandoned Yahveh over the past few centuries and massively converted, first to belief in a Christian God, and then to belief in Allah instead. Thereby becoming the majority constituency inside the current “Palestinian Arab” population, itself under the military control of an Israeli “second coming”, some of today’s Israeli Jews lacking any biological connection with the Jews of the ancient world. One never knows what might happen whenever people are allowed to carry out original scholarship, independent of any narrow-minded communitarian fantasies about what really happened way back when.