La religion tue la liberté

Je viens de lire le récit, “Une minute quarante-neuf secondes”, publié en août dernier chez Actes Sud par Riss, le dessinateur du journal satirique “Charlie Hebdo” qui a survécu, blessé, à l’attaque meurtrière du 7 janvier 2015 à Paris. Pendant laquelle douze de ses compagnons furent massacrés par deux terroristes musulmans, armés jusqu’aux dents, ostensiblement pour avoir osé republier des caricatures danoises du prophète Mohamed, en 2006, ainsi que d’avoir aussi publié leurs propres caricatures similaires par la suite. Cinq autres victimes furent aussi tuées par d’autres terroristes musulmans, le 8 et le 9 janvier de cette même année, dans la même série d’attentats en France, notamment contre un marché juif.

C’est un livre très bien écrit, même si d’une intensité presque intolérable par moments, non seulement sur l’attentat anti-Charlie et ses séquelles en tant que tel, mais aussi sur les efforts colossales de Riss, ainsi que de ceux de ses collaborateurs qui étaient vraiment dédiés aux principes du journalisme, de remettre sur les rails cette revue satirique après l’élimination épouvantable de la plupart de ses dessinateurs. Une bonne partie du livre est aussi consacrée à une dénonciation très méritée des interventions délibérément démoralisantes de certains politiciens et intellectuels français, qui n’ont pas vraiment souhaité la réussite du nouveau “Charlie Hebdo”. Dont quelques-uns qui frôlaient la collaboration avec les tueurs islamistes eux-mêmes. Toute la France a été divisée en 2015 entre les “Je suis Charlie” et les “Je ne suis pas Charlie”, les sous-groupes de chaque liste se trouvant dans le premier ensemble, ou le deuxième, souvent pour des raisons très contradictoires.

Dans son livre (pages 181-190), Riss a divisé les “Je suis Charlie” en cinq sous-groupes, soit les libertaires favorisant les points de vue les plus divers possibles, les voltairiens philosophiquement favorables à la liberté d’expression en tant que telle, les laÏcs pour qui aucune religion ne devrait échapper à la critique, les racistes de l’extrême-droite française détestant tous les musulmans en tant que musulmans, et les penseurs “jésuites” distinguant entre l’islam, en tant que religion, et l’islamisme, en tant qu’idéologie politique. Ensuite, il a aussi divisé les “Je ne suis pas Charlie” en cinq autres sous-groupes, soit les imams confondant n’importe quelle religion avec une “race”, les musulmans réactionnaires mettant le droit de religion au-dessus de tous les autres droits, les “trotsko-staliniens” de l’extrême-gauche opposés à n’importe quelle critique d’une religion jugée très populaire auprès de la masse musulmane, les haineux détestant le style d’humour de la revue (avec ou sans Mohamed), et les partisans de la “laïcité apaisée” dirigeant leur hargne contre la prétendue ”islamophobie” de tous les non-musulmans. (Voir aussi la recension du livre de Riss publié par Julien Beauregard, “Nous étions Charlie”, dans “L’Aut’journal”, le 29 novembre 2019.)

Personnellement, je m’identifie davantage avec les laïcs de la première liste, puisque je trouve complètement ridicule la prétention selon laquelle une croyance religieuse aurait beaucoup plus de valeur que n’importe quelle autre croyance idéologique. Tout comme Riss (pages 100-101), je ne croit pas du tout à la vie après la mort, ni à aucune autre forme de métaphysique religieuse. Surtout pas à l’arrogance absurde des religions faussement “universelles”, pour qui les femmes n’existent que pour combler les besoins sexuels (au ciel) de martyres exclusivement masculins, ou pour qui les femmes, à cause de leur sexe, n’ont pas le droit à la réincarnation, et ainsi de suite. La misogynie éhontée de l’ensemble de toutes les religions les placent définitivement parmi toutes les autres idéologies politiques, le plus souvent du côté de l’extrême-droite populiste. Les fondamentalistes, ou vrai-croyants, de toutes ces religions sont en fait la source principale de l’appui à tous les mouvements néo-fascistes actuels (qu’ils soient au pouvoir ou non), provenant de plusieurs variétés différentes de chrétiens, de musulmans, de juifs, de bouddhistes, de hindoues, de sikhs, de confucéens, de shintoïstes, et même d’animistes, dans tous les pays et dans toutes les régions du monde entier.

Je dois ajouter, toutefois, que je trouve très étonnant le fait que des “trotsko-staliniens” en France pourraient avoir adopté un point de vue si réactionnaire par rapport à la religion que celui mentionné par Riss. Il me semble que tous les partis ou les mouvements communistes du vingtième siècle, que j’ai moi-même côtoyé brièvement il y a cinquante ans, détestaient toutes les religions mythologiques de façon égale, en tant que “opium du peuple”, utilisé par le capitalisme pour éloigner “les masses populaires” du mouvement communiste. À l’époque de la guerre froide (1945-1991), il me semble qu’aucune des diverses tendances marxistes-léninistes, provenant de l’influence de Trotsky ou de l’influence de Staline, n’aurait abandonné si cavalièrement un individu ou un peuple au contrôle néfaste d’une quelconque religion métaphysique. Depuis plusieurs décennies maintenant, je me suis libéré quand même de l’influence marxiste-léniniste d’autrefois, ayant découvert sur le tard que l’ensemble des pays se réclamant du communisme ne cachait en fait que des régimes totalitaires du capitalisme d’état, en concurrence avec le capitalisme privé du libéralisme faussement démocratique. En réalité, toutes les idéologies politiques du monde agissent comme des religions, et toutes les religions métaphysiques agissent comme des idéologies politiques. On n’est pas plus avancé avec l’un ou l’autre de ces deux sous-ensembles.

Malheureusement, même le socialisme démocratique, théoriquement opposé au communisme totalitaire, doit aussi être rejeté de nos jours, tous les partis socialistes ou sociaux-démocrates du monde entier ayant accepté depuis plusieurs décennies de jouer complètement le jeu de la démocratie libérale et d’avoir par le fait même totalement abandonné le socialisme. En France, par exemple, le gouvernement socialiste de François Mitterrand, après avoir subi un assaut brutal pendant deux ans (1981-1983) contre son programme économique, de la part du capitalisme international ainsi que du patronat français, a laissé tomber le socialisme de façon définitive, adoptant, en reddition totale, le capitalisme néolibéral de l’empire anglo-américain, devenu dès cette époque l’idéologie de choix un peu partout au monde “libre”.

Ainsi, à part les religions meurtrières, alliées à l’extrême-droite populiste, l’autre idéologie dominante du temps présent se trouve être ce néolibéralisme, très similaire au laissez-faire du dix-neuvième siècle, associé comme son prédécesseur, davantage au capitalisme privé qu’à l’état. Et liberticide aussi, en dépit de son nom, parce que ne prônant la liberté que pour des gens riches et puissants. De nos jours, on perçoit que la quasi totalité des pays du monde sont gouvernés par des régimes sous l’influence conjointe du néo-fascisme et du néolibéralisme, des pays encore totalitaires comme la République populaire de Chine étant davantage du côté du capitalisme d’état, tout en adoptant une bonne dose du néolibéralisme aussi, et des pays pas vraiment libres du tout, comme les États-Unis d’Amérique, se penchant davantage du côté du capitalisme privé, tout en adoptant une bonne dose de populisme d’extrême-droite (néo-fasciste) aussi.

Aux États-Unis aussi bien qu’en Grande-Bretagne, ainsi que dans plusieurs autres pays, des dizaines de millions d’ouvriers ont perdu la plupart de leurs emplois industriels dans la désindustrialisation délibérée des années 1980, orchestrée par des champions du néolibéralisme tels que Ronald Reagan et Margaret Thatcher. Plus récemment, une bonne partie de ces mêmes ouvriers, malheureusement aliénés et manipulés par le capitalisme à la fois libéral et conservateur, ont contribué réellement à la montée constante du populisme d’extrême-droite (le néo-fascisme), en votant souvent, encore tout dernièrement, en faveur des mêmes partis politiques (tels que les Républicains aux États-Unis et les Conservateurs au Royaume-Uni) qui les avaient abandonnés, de façon si atroce, il y a 30-40 ans. Bien sûr, la France a aussi été très affectée par cette même désindustrialisation, mais la classe ouvrière française ne donne pas l’impression de collaborer autant avec le néolibéralisme qu’ailleurs en Occident. Le populisme d’extrême-droite, à la fois néo-fasciste et néolibérale, ne semble pas attirer un si grand nombre d’ouvriers français, même parmi les gilets jaunes.

Dans son livre, je ne pense pas que Riss utilise le mot “néolibéralisme” en tant que tel, mais il me semble qu’il parle quand même de l’influence néfaste de cette idéologie-là quand il dénonce, par exemple, “l’égocentrisme infantile érigé en valeur moderne d’épanouissement” (p. 11). Une idéologie hyper-individualiste, le néolibéralisme est aussi très souvent complété par la “pleine conscience” de la psychologie populaire, mettant l’accent exclusif sur l’environnement immédiat, presque corporel, de chaque individu. La maximisation du profit à court terme, de l’économisme libéral, fait fi de toutes les “externalités” non strictement économiques, telles que l’égalité sociale et l’environnement naturel de toute la planète. Tout comme la pleine conscience essaie de couper chaque individu isolé de toutes les “externalités” de la vie moderne, y compris du devoir de tout bon citoyen de se soucier quand même un peu de la santé collective de la grande société environnante (le “bien commun”).

Riss revient aussi à ce thème de dévouement social dans sa dénonciation de certains faux collaborateurs de “Charlie Hebdo”, plus intéressés par les millions de dollars en dons reçus du grand public après l’attentat que par la remise sur pied du journal satirique, voulant continuer à dénoncer publiquement et férocement l’attitude criminelle des grandes corporations néolibérales et de leurs alliés politiques dirigeant des gouvernements corrompus, envers la société humaine qui les entoure. Il parle ainsi de l’appât du gain parmi certains autres journalistes crapuleux (et leurs avocats) ailleurs dans son texte; “Et moi, je n’ai droit à rien?” (page 151). Pour ma part, je trouve très intéressant le fait de souligner la similarité structurelle entre, d’une part, le fondamentalisme religieux, qui n’accepte pas la séparation entre la religion et la politique (Riss), et d’autre part, le néolibéralisme, qui n’accepte pas la séparation entre les affaires et la politique. (Voir l’article de Pierre-Luc Desjardins, “Contestation sociale: De la France au Québec”, dans “Le Devoir” du 5 décembre 2019.)

En ce qui concerne l’islamophobie en tant qu’idéologie, je pense quand même (en bon “jésuite” que je suis) qu’on doit distinguer entre l’islam “modéré” des croyants musulmans qui acceptent, tout comme certains croyants similaires de toutes les autres religions, de garder leur foi pour eux-mêmes, et les musulmans “radicaux”, fondamentalistes et proselytes, qui essaient, souvent avec énormément de violence, de dominer le monde autour d’eux de manière impérialiste. Bien sûr, on peut argumenter que ces “militants militaristes” se trouvent en “guerre mondiale” contre tous les autres empires rivaux (les États-Unis, l’Union européenne, Israël, la Russie, la Chine, etc.). Il reste que ces mêmes fous furieux, poussés dans le dos par des empires régionaux comme l’Arabie saoudite, la Turquie et l’Iran, ont souvent été très facilement manipulés par plusieurs grandes puissances occidentales (et par Israël), utilisant leur militantisme meurtrier “à bon escient” pour débarrasser le monde musulman (y compris dans le diaspora) de certains autres courants de pensée, plutôt nationalistes et communistes. Même les pays dit communistes ont manipulé ces mêmes terroristes contre des nationaux-communistes qui ne voulaient pas être contrôlés par ces empires qu’on persiste encore de nos jours d’appeler “communistes”.

Même si tous les fondamentalistes musulmans, comme les fondamentalistes de toutes les autres religions, n’appuient pas toujours (ou n’appuient pas ouvertement) les éléments les plus meurtriers de leur religion, il reste que ces mêmes éléments terroristes ne pourraient jamais fonctionner autant qu’ils le font à l’heure actuelle, sans la montée du fondamentalisme religieux, source principale de l’appui populaire pour tous les mouvements d’extrême-droite populiste. L’islam est aussi la religion dans laquelle le fondamentalisme musulman, basé comme tous les autres fondamentalismes sur une interprétation littérale des textes sacrés, est devenu le plus militarisé de nos jours. Plusieurs pays importants du monde musulman, pas seulement au Moyen-Orient, ayant été bouleversés encore récemment par des conflits militaires très meurtriers, deviennent par le fait même uns sorte d’aimant pour ces terroristes. Le terrorisme islamiste fait la plupart de ses victimes parmi les musulmans “modérés”, mais tue aussi très régulièrement beaucoup de gens non-musulmans (des “mécréants”) un peu partout en Afrique et en Asie, mais aussi en Europe et en Amérique du Nord.

Vers la fin de son livre, Riss parle aussi un peu de ses voyages après l’attentat, dans plusieurs pays de l’Europe, pour mettre l’accent sur le fait que chacun de ces pays est devenu, pas seulement autrefois mais aussi récemment, une sorte de fosse commune et l’Europe toute entière “un cimetière de l’Atlantique à l’Oural” (page 289). Pas uniquement, bien sûr, grâce au terrorisme religieux mais aussi de toutes sortes de guerres, civiques autant qu’internationales, liées aux chocs extrêmes entre toutes sortes d’idéologies opposées. Je pense qu’on peut facilement appliquer cette même observation à l’ensemble des autres continents de ce monde. Dans son livre, Riss a aussi parlé de sa rencontre pendant un reportage au Vietnam avec le colonel Bang, du Viêt-minh (pages 295-298), dans un pays asiatique aussi affecté, sinon plus, par la guerre idéologique que la plupart des pays européens.

De ce côté-ci de l’Atlantique, le gouvernement actuel du Québec, essayant en dépit de son statut provincial d’imiter un peu le républicanisme de plusieurs pays européens (dont la France), a adopté la loi 21, sur la laïcité de l’État, qui interdit aux fonctionnaires “en position d’autorité” de porter des signes religieux pendant leur heures de travail. Une loi qui a été dénoncée par tous les fédéralistes canadiens comme si c’était en train d’éliminer complètement l’influence de la religion sur l’état du Québec. En réalité, la séparation entre la religion et l’état n’existe pas ici, ou très peu, toutes les organisations religieuses, et leurs édifices, étant toujours exemptés de l’impôt (fédéral et provincial), l’état provincial subventionnant encore la quasi totalité des écoles confessionnelles, et ainsi de suite. Les fédéralistes canadiens, toutefois, fidèles à la constitution canadienne de 1982 et à la charte des droits adossée à cette constitution, appuient une forme extrême de multiculturalisme censée protéger intégralement tous les courants religieux, même les plus fondamentalistes. Ils voient la loi 21 comme étant issu directement du mouvement indépendantiste du Québec, même si ce mouvement est sérieusement affaibli à l’heure actuelle, et par conséquence ces mêmes fédéralistes veulent éliminer cette loi québécoise, laïque, en tant que symbole futur de la reddition totale et complète du “séparatisme” québécois à l’empire canadien.

La plupart des fédéralistes appuient aussi les quelques dizaines de femmes musulmanes portant le hijab fondamentaliste, qui veulent trouver un emploi dans le secteur public au Québec, sans être obligées d’enlever leur foulard au travail. Les nationalistes canadiens de l’anti-laïcité fédérale ont même poussé l’audace jusqu’à traiter ces femmes intégristes, pratiquant la servitude volontaire, en  “féministes” luttant contre un état “colonialiste”! Selon leur idéologie d’individualisme ultra-libéral, tout le monde doit soutenir ces pauvres “victimes” non seulement en fonction de l’article 27 de la charte canadienne des droits, favorisant le multiculturalisme, mais aussi en fonction de l’article 28, sur l’égalité entre les hommes et les femmes. En d’autres mots, ils accusent le gouvernement du Québec d’être colonialiste et anti-féministe, tandis qu’en réalité c’est l’article 27 de la charte canadienne qui est en contraction flagrante avec l’article 28 de la même charte! Ce sont en fait les fédéralistes canadiens qui sont les véritables misogynes dans cette histoire, tout en étant les véritables colonialistes.

Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed, une chroniqueuse musulmane portant le hijab, a publié un article (“A time to reflect on all violence against women”) dans le quotidien anglophone de Montréal, “The Gazette”, le 6 décembre dernier, commémorant le trentième anniversaire du massacre anti-féministe de quatorze étudiantes, commis à l’École polytechnique de Montréal par un tueur du nom de Marc Lépine. Elle a oublié, toutefois, de mentionner dans son article que ce même Lépine (qui a pris le nom de famille de sa mère) est aussi le fils d’un homme d’affaires, Rachid Gharbi, un musulman algérien dénoncé par Madame Lépine pour sa violence misogyne. Même si Gharbi semble avoir été un musulman non-pratiquant, on peut quand même avoir le droit de critiquer la misogynie inhérente à toute idéologie métaphysique sans être faussement accusé d'"amalgame islamophobe" uniquement parce qu'on dénonce l'idéologie religieuse en tant que telle et pas uniquement son aile fondamentaliste (Riss, page 189). En tant que bon "jésuite", j'aimerais même poser la question si Naqvi-Mohamed n’est pas en train de se mettre dans une contradiction idéologique structurellement similaire à celle du premier ministre du Canada, Justin Trudeau. Qui, pendant la campagne électorale récente, a promis de se battre aussi fortement pour aider l’industrie pétrochimique du Canada que pour lutter contre le changement climatique dans le monde entier. En d’autres mots, n’est-il pas difficile, quand même, pour des gens comme Trudeau et Naqvi-Mohamed, de soutenir deux idées si totalement contradictoires en même temps?

Il me semble aussi qu’en dépit de sa prétendue liberté d’expression individualiste, Naqvi-Mohamed souffre, comme toutes les autres musulmanes portant le hijab, de la servitude volontaire. D’une manière très similaire aux soeurs voilées de l’Église catholique d’autrefois au Québec, comme celles dans le film récent (2019) du cinéaste Léa Pool, concernant une congrégation québécoise qui laissaient tomber leurs voiles pendant la Révolution tranquille, laïque, des années 1960, se libérant enfin d’au moins une première partie de leurs chaînes catholiques. Dans le cas des femmes “ordinaires”, mariées et mères de famille, je dirais comme Riss (page 260), que la famille agit aussi à la manière d’une communauté religieuse, même de nos jours, c’est-à-dire comme une cellule de prison pour la femme musulmane pratiquante, et pour les femmes catholiques pratiquantes aussi. Ainsi que pour toutes les autres femmes pratiquantes au sein de toutes les autres religions métaphysiques. À mon avis, c’est complètement absurde de comparer les porteuses de hijab, anti-laïques, aux victimes de la tuerie anti-féministe de l’École polytechnique, comme l’essaient de faire Mélissa Blais et Diane Lamoureux dans leur article, publié dans le quotidien “Le Devoir” du 6 décembre 2019, “Un devoir de mémoire, mais aussi d’actions”.

En réalité, le désir de liberté est toujours présent dans les esprits des êtres humains vivants, mais il est souvent occulté par le blasphème, soit le mot choisi par les pratiquants de religion pour nier l’existence même de la liberté d’expression. C’est la servitude volontaire des individus manipulés et aliénés par les religions métaphysiques, et par les autres idéologies liberticides, qui est à l’origine de cette “superstition honteuse” (le blasphème), en tant que tueur de liberté bien implantée malheureusement dans beaucoup d’esprits (Riss, pages 215-216). Quand les gens tombent sous le contrôle du totalitarisme dans leurs têtes, c’est en ce moment-là que les religions, et les autres idéologies meurtrières, gagnent le pari. Que ce soit le totalitarisme faussement communiste, le totalitarisme faussement démocratique (le laissez-faire et le néolibéralisme) ou le totalitarisme ultra-religieux et ultra-ethnique de l’extrême-droite.

Ainsi, la perversion polymorphe de toutes les religions métaphysiques, aussi bien que de toutes les autres idéologies antédiluviennes (du sous-ensemble séculier), tuent la liberté constamment, surtout la plus précieuse des formes différentes de la liberté, soit la liberté d’expression. En ce faisant, elles font partie d’une grande “conspiration ouverte” (“open conspiracy”) sur la scène mondiale, un système sadomasochiste de communication perverse entre les agresseurs sadiques de toutes les variétés existantes de totalitarisme, et les esclaves volontaires, masochistes. Ceux qui continuent de lutter quand même pour la liberté véritable, sans concession, sont souvent dénoncés par les réactionnaires de tout acabit comme étant “l’ennemi du peuple”, tandis que ce sont ces réactionnaires aux-mêmes qui sont en réalité l’ennemi de tous les peuples du monde entier.

Sapiens: cortex versus striatum?

Even though I first heard about the extremely popular book by Yuval Noah Harari, “Sapiens: A brief history of humankind” several months ago, I did not get around to actually reading it until now. First published in Hebrew back in 2011, Harari’s highly entertaining history of the world was “updated with new material” in 2014 for the English edition, which judging by unusually frequent references to the USA, seems to have been aimed mainly at an American readership. Since that time, however, having been translated into dozens of other languages, it has now become the first of a set of three block busting bestsellers, that have collectively turned their author into a world-wide celebrity, far beyond his home base in the World History Programme of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Sapiens book is not at all the ordinary kind of dry collection of historical facts, arranged in chronological and geographical order, as well as in conceptual order (political, economic, social and cultural history), that I was expecting to read. That said, however, Harari’s decision to deliberately avoid thoroughness in his one-volume history, of everything important that human beings were supposed to have done since our species first appeared on this planet, certainly leaves out a great deal of highly pertinent information. The errors of omission in such a work being every bit as important as any errors of commission.

Especially since those same errors of omission seem to have led to what initially seemed to me to be Harari’s much too optimistic interpretation of today’s world, such as severely underplaying the importance of the current ecological crisis (well-publicized since the 1970s). An unfounded “optimism” that upon further reading turned into Harari’s overly-positive approach not toward the future of human beings, but instead toward what he projects as humankind’s ultimate replacement by a race of super-robots! Harari seems to be caught, therefore, in an even more extreme variety of the kind of “yellow-brick-road” illusions that led to the similarly overwrought views of the US State Department bureaucrat, Francis Fukuyama, back in 1989, when he wrote about the end of history because of what he thought was the total victory of liberal capitalism, all over the world.

A very good example of what is wrong with Harari’s approach has to do, paradoxically, with his initially quite well thought out analysis of the shortcomings of a significant part of the arguments provided by what he calls “the prophets of doom” from the ecological movement. One of the major misinterpretations of the “Limits to Growth” philosophy is that resources are scarce and that we are running out of everything that we need in order to keep the modern economy functioning properly; so we have to scale back on everything drastically, right now, or we are all going to die. Harari’s response to that ideological discourse is quite similar to the one concocted back in the 1980s by another “yellow-brick-road” illusionist, Lyndon Larouche.

In itself, Harari’s answer to the limits theory is completely valid, the entire history of the industrial revolution providing abundant evidence of the fact that whenever some source of raw materials was drying up, scientists and engineers soon managed to find a completely new source, dependent on a totally different technology. For example, burning scarce supplies of wood for heating houses, and for operating blacksmith furnaces, was replaced with coal, which was itself largely replaced by more efficient petroleum, long before the world’s coal supplies ran out. Hydraulic power was eventually replaced with hydroelectricity, to which were added nuclear fission, wind and solar power. For his part, Lyndon Larouche’s favourite source was fusion energy, the peaceful harnessing of the power behind the hydrogen bomb, to produce electricity from naturally occurring, extremely abundant isotopes of hydrogen (such as deuterium and tritium).

Harari should have known, however, that opposition to change from huge, already established, firms (like those in the fossil-fuel industry) and also from recently established ideologies, like the neoliberalism that took over the entire world during the 1980s (Thatcher, Reagan, etc.), are often quite capable of blocking major development projects that they do not support. Harari devotes several pages in his text to “the marriage of science and empire”, and fully realizes that in order to develop new things, scientists and engineers require enormous amounts of money that can only come from either very rich private capitalists, or from very rich state capitalists. For example, since the US Army launched the Internet back in the early 1980s, trillions of dollars have been invested since then to develop extremely profitable social media all over the world. But the secret of harnessing fusion energy has not yet been found, either because of severely underfunded research, or because some scientific secrets are a lot more difficult to uncover than others. We have developed a much more modest form of hydrogen power nowadays, but it is a much less significant contribution to humanity than fusion power would have been.

Twenty-five years after Fukuyama, Harari did not even seem to notice the rise of ultra-conservative atavism, also known as ultra-right-wing populism, or more simply as neofascism, not only in the Western countries but also in several different parts of the former “Third World” (fundamentalist Islamic terrorism being an excellent example). Harari has a lot to say about Nazism (more on that later), but nothing whatever to say about classical, Italian fascism, nor about the other forms of fascism (including Catholic and Jewish varieties) developed in several dozen other countries, all over the world, from the 1920s to the 1960s.

In my opinion, much of today’s neofascist atavism ought to be seen as a consequence of the post 1979, world-wide, neoliberal fixation on exclusively private capitalism as a capital-accumulating antidote to the kind of profit-limiting government “intervention” into economic and social policy, that characterized the entire 1914-1979, “neomercantilist” period of history. More or less in the same way that the laissez-faire of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century engendered (among other things) the rise of classical fascism during the 1920s. I was already writing about the recent, neofascist trend around the same time that Harari’s English-language version was being published. For example, in my blogpost from July 5, 2104, called “Regression trumps progress”.

Which explains the second part of my title for this blogpost, “cortex versus striatum”, based on the curious contributions of scientific journalist Sébastien Bohler, from his recent book (2019), “Le bug humain”, about how the human brain really works. That I found out about by reading a review (“Le cerveau, notre meilleur ennemi”) (“Our best enemy, the brain”), written by Fouad Laroui and published in the September-October 2019 edition of the French newsmagazine, “La Revue”. Bohler’s thesis, according to which the domination of the relatively primitive striatum in the brain, over the much more recent and much less primitive cortex, could presumably be interpreted as helping to explain why, in spite of all its cortex-driven advances, humanity never seems to be able to go beyond recurring episodes of an atavistic frame of mind, as in the current return of ultra-right-wing populism, all over the world.

The striatum is a small part of the brain that seems to communicate with the body through such hormones and neurotransmitters as dopamine, seeking to satisfy (at least according to Bohler) five (and only five) basic needs: eating, reproducing, laying the foundations of power and seeking useful information, while still expending the least amount of effort possible. (I always think of Donald Trump whenever I read that list of primitive desires.) All of which seems to fit in quite well with Harari’s contention (page 432) that recent discoveries in biology confirm that happiness is not so much related to “external parameters” like social relations and political rights as it is to the influence of “biochemical substances such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin”.

According to him, those substances tend to maintain the body at a steady state of emotional influences, making it impossible to remain happy, or sad, or angry, or whatever, without a constantly renewing stream of those same biochemical substances. Which he then interprets as meaning that instead of trying to improve the world through seeking world peace and/or ecological balance, we should instead be devoting our future efforts to controlling our biochemical happiness. As in Aldous Huxley’s science-fiction novel, “Brave New World”, that Harari considers to be a much more prescient work than George Orwell’s “1984”. But Harari never really explains in his book why happiness in and of itself ought to be the number one goal of human beings, which seems to contradict his own attempts as a good Buddhist to avoid craving altogether. Did he get the happiness idea from Thomas Jefferson?

If Harari is right about biochemical substances, and if Bohler’s book backs him up on this, then we inadequate humans are in for a very difficult time indeed in the immediate future. Certainly nothing like the rather smooth sailing projected by Harari’s artificial-intelligence-assisted transition into a robotic super-race. However, instead of accepting at face value what seems to be a biologically-grounded explanation of the past, and of the future, of homo sapiens as a species, what would happen if we quite simply decided to turn this hypothesis on its head, into something radically different?

It may very well turn out that Harari (and perhaps Bohler as well) made the same misinterpretation of biological science as Herbert Spencer made back in the nineteenth century, turning Darwin’s theory of evolution through “natural selection” into a “survival of the fittest” dictum applying to human society as well. Resulting in the foundation of “social Darwinism”, that underlay much of Western imperialism’s disdain for the various non-Western societies that they were turning into colonies and/or neo-colonial satrapies back then, as well as of Nazism’s own 1933-1945 version of racist imperialism. Not to mention the American empire joining forces with dozens of allied military dictatorships, during the Cold War, in the physical elimination of several million communist peasants, throughout the “Third World”  (another historical “detail” that escaped Harari’s attention).

Turning the whole Harari hypothesis upside down would mean that it was the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism and neofascism back in the 1970s, and the domination of those two reactionary ideologies since then, that caused such complete misreadings of recent biological science, rather than the other way around. Which could mean that instead of trying to find a biological underpinning for pessimistic interpretations of human history, and the projected need for an artificial replacement for our atavistic species, we should be positing instead an ideological underpinning for why some of today’s biologically-based theories seem to be leading us to “the eve of destruction”. Rather than accepting neoliberalism and neofascism as the only credible ideologies in today’s world, we should maybe be getting back to the reasons why we gave up so easily on much less reactionary modes of thought like democratic socialism back in the 1970s and 1980s.

The very numerous errors of omission contained in Harari’s book, therefore, cannot just be explained by the fact that no one could possibly include everything important that there is to say about humanity in only a little less than 500 pages of text. His chapters on “the scent of money” and “the capitalist creed”, for example, are considerably more developed than his treatment of any of the competing, anti-capitalist creeds, as well as being downright naive, even adolescent, at times. He starts out by providing only the official liberal view on those two related subjects, without delving into any of the very numerous criticisms, and denunciations, of the enormous conceptual weaknesses inherent in that highly biased, pro-capitalist, point of view.

In spite of loving capitalism so much, at least theoretically, Harari is still quite capable of making a causal connection between private investment and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as well as of several other major historical abominations, such as capitalism’s horrible treatment of the European working-class. (Without explaining why he thinks that only the European part of that social class was exploited so drastically, and why the same kind of treatment is not just as obvious nowadays as it was back in the nineteenth century). His naive emphasis on productive, economic growth as the very essence of capitalism fails to account for such recurring fetiches as its periodic fixation on speculative investment instead, leading to a long series of financial crises and economic depressions. Which, by the way, are lurking again, right around the corner, and do not just belong to the not-so-distant past (2008).

For him, the eighteenth-century Mississippi Bubble, for example, was an example of anti-capitalism, and not of capitalism itself at work, presumably because that “joint venture” of private capital and the French state turned out so very badly, causing an enormously destructive panic among investors, as well as as a major setback for the French economy. Resulting in the fact that France totally lost its battle with Great Britain for the control of the entire region that became the USA later on. (Harari did not mention the British retention of the northern part of that region, Canada and Québec, after the American Revolution, in his highly oversimplified analysis.) He also seems to truly believe in such incredible pronouncements as writing (page 356) that dictatorial states are opposed to defending private property (not even in today’s China?) and that “an oil-rich country cursed with a despotic government, endemic warfare and a corrupt judicial system will usually receive a low credit rating” (page 366). Which, to say the least, does not seem to describe very well the current situation in the Middle East.

Harari often denounces private capitalism quite severely, in dozens of different circumstances, such as the 10 million peasants killed off by the British East India company in the Bengal famine of 1769-1773, or the King of Belgium’s elimination of ten million colonial, Congolese subjects in his late nineteenth century rubber plantations. (Many more recent unnatural disasters, such as the 1943 Bengal famine, are completely ignored.) In spite of all that, he nevertheless totally supports Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” dictum in his book, of private vice somehow transmogrifying itself into public good (“egoism equals altruism”). He manages to convince himself through several succeeding chapters that, in spite of everything, capitalism has remained basically a good thing over the past few centuries, even though it has so often been associated with so very many, major, unnatural disasters. In his view, private capitalism, working alongside the “imagined communities” of the modern nation-state, has nevertheless managed to eventually produce good news, at least in recent times, since (according to him) recent statistics prove that humanity nowadays is not nearly as poor as it was in centuries gone by. So far as I can tell, the recent, unprecedented rise in social inequality, on every continent, somehow managed to escape his notice.

Since the only other alternative system he can think of, totalitarian communism, turned out to be a total disaster, resulting in such extremely murderous abominations as China’s “Great Leap Forward” (1959-62), capitalism must therefore be the only real alternative we have left, which means that we have to make do with it, after all. Even consumerism, convincing millions of people to consume goods and services that they do not need in any way whatsoever, and are often quite harmful to them (such as opioids, pornography, prostitution, gambling, video games and all the other contemporary obsessions), is also okay as a system. For no other reason than that at least it proves that people are doing exactly what the capitalist/consumerist system wants them to do, a claim that no other system can apparently make. In other words, successful manipulation of psychologically damaged people is a true sign of success!

Harari can also be quite insensitive toward poor people in many of his different comparisons, as when he ironizes about such middle-class habits as taking a shower every day for reasons of hygiene, that he considers to be a mere fad, a social habit not at all necessary. He seems completely impervious to the fact that upper middle-class people in Israel using a lot of water every day may be contributing to the much reduced consumption of poorer populations, not only within Israel but also in neighbouring countries, that constantly suffer from having his country completely dominate the vast majority of water use in that region.

His treatment of communism is extremely short and dismissive, concentrating exclusively on the totalitarian nature and social engineering experiments of the communist regimes that, in fact, though Harari never mentions it, abandoned the ideal of a classless society completely. Nor does Harari have anything whatever to say about the other, non-communist forms of economic nationalism that have been put into practice over the past few centuries, such as the governments that used the “infant industry” argument to protect their economies from neocolonialism (centred in Britain during the nineteenth century and in the USA in the twentieth century) while they were industrializing their own economies. His treatment of democratic socialism is also practically non-existent, no mean feat for a historian based in a country theoretically founded on democratic-socialist principles, which led even the USSR to support Israel in the beginning. At least before it joined Britain and France in attacking economic-nationalist Egypt, during the Suez canal crisis.

Harari’s congratulatory attitude toward liberal capitalism is particularly upsetting, so far as I am concerned, given the fact that in the rest of his book, he usually avoids the rather pedestrian error of maneuvering around historical controversies, without coming down on any one side, as do most of the other world histories that I have read over the past several decades. Instead, he plunges right into controversy from the very beginning, postulating the existence of a “cognitive revolution” about 70 000 years ago, that seems to have turned our previously uninspiring species of animal into a global killing machine, wiping out all the extremely large mammals that it encountered on its destructive path, over several dozen millennia, out of East Africa into all the other regions of our planet. A point of view that, to say the least, does not jibe very well with the more romantic description provided by many traditional historians, according to which all the world’s “prehistoric” peoples lived in perfect harmony with “Mother Nature” when they were still nomadic, or at least semi-nomadic, hunters and gatherers.

Harari’s coverage of the agricultural revolution (starting about 12000 years ago), as “history’s biggest fraud” since it presumably forced peasants into working much harder than hunters and gatherers had to do, is every bit as controversial as his treatment of “the first cognitive revolution”. As are his interpretations of the scientific revolution (500 years ago), which he thinks was based on the “discovery of ignorance” (that according to him had never before even been considered as a concept), and of the industrial revolution (200 years ago), even more enslaving for workers than the agricultural one was for peasants. So far as Harari is concerned, it was those economic systems that ruined millions of people’s lives, as systems, and not just the landowning aristocrats and the industrial capitalists, as slave-driving individuals exploiting the downtrodden masses. He finishes up his book by postulating the existence of an upcoming “second cognitive revolution”, based largely on the development of artificial intelligence, as part of what he sees as a “permanent revolution”, an idea that he seems to have further developed in his more recent works.

Apparently, Harari has gone on to write extensively about a “useless class” of future unemployables, an expression that recalls the Nazi reference to “useless eaters”, although his solution to that problem, the guaranteed annual income, seems a lot more palatable than anything the Nazis ever did. It will probably, however, be exceedingly difficult to convince the billionaire class to part with even a penny of their eternally-increasing wealth since they, like all the other psychologically dependent seekers of dopamine, will never want to stop pounding over and over again on the pleasure button, for all eternity.

Having myself published several books and articles supporting “universal skepticism” over the past twenty years, I find that by far the most entertaining aspect of Harari’s book is his entirely irreverent, even downright cynical, attitude toward most of the different forms of religion and ideology that have been invented over the past several thousand years. Which is to say, the kind of “imagined communities”, or “imagined orders”, that have been used by the world’s most successful ruling classes, throughout the sedentary part of history (since the agricultural revolution), to keep millions of ordinary peasants and workers under the control of the various different empires that sprang up over the centuries, from the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia (2250 BC) to the American Empire nowadays. (There is, however, no mention in his book of the quite popular contention that Israel also constitutes an empire, currently competing with Iran and Saudi Arabia for control of the entire Middle Eastern region.)

In spite of their entirely non-material nature, the world’s very numerous ideologies, for which Harari means not only spiritual religions like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, but also “secular religions” like liberalism, nationalism, humanism (including human rights), communism and Nazism, have all been more than useful in preventing both individuals and masses of people from creating any true forms of intellectual liberty. Not even during any of the world’s various political revolutions, such as the ones that began in the USA in 1775, in France in 1789, in Russia in 1917, or in China in 1949.

His treatment of Nazism is particularly odd, however, since he classifies it as a kind of illiberal humanism, whose extremely inhumane treatment of its victims was based on its contention that human beings have always been engaged in a biological “battle for existence” (social Darwinism), that favoured the “more advanced” peoples, such as Aryans like themselves. According to Harari (page 263), contemporary biology has also proven that they may have been right after all, not so far as genocide is concerned, but at least in the sense of anticipating the current revival in the quest for superhuman powers. A quest in which he himself indulges toward the end of his book, with all his talk about cyborgs and such. I find it strange, however, that in the twenty-first century we no longer seem to be able to rely on history professors, even those hailing from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to defend us all against Nazi ideology in any coherent way.

Harari himself seems to have succumbed at least in part to this kind of “progressive” thought control, not only through his tendency to support economic liberalism (otherwise known as laissez-faire, or neoliberal capitalism), through the exclusion of all the other possible points of view concerning economic development. But also through his adhesion to a form of “special-seeing” Buddhism. It seems to me that Buddhists fail in becoming successful followers of Siddhartha Gautama not merely by continuing to simultaneously believe in pagan gods, as Harari contends, but also by continuing to believe that they too are capable of attaining nirvana (an end to craving). The “enlightened one” (Buddha) himself only having done so according to Gautama’s own account, that no one else has ever succeeded in verifying, or replicating.

I do however very much agree with yet another aspect of Harari’s thinking, namely his contention that it is almost impossible to expect individual ideas, or ideas belonging only to an intellectual minority, no matter how well thought out they may be, to prevail over culturally implanted ideas. The division of all the world’s people into social classes, for example, at least since the beginning of the agricultural revolution, seems to be an unimpeachable constant in human societies throughout the ages. Even, or perhaps especially, when the very existence of social classes is called into question for purely ideological reasons, such as in today’s prevailing neoliberal order (particularly well-ensconced in the Western group of countries). Curiously enough, Harari seems to be able to support such very particular points of view, while still simultaneously pretending that he is being entirely neutral toward all points of view. Quite a mean feat, when you really think about it.

Once again, I do not agree at all with his overly optimistic attitude toward the very numerous problems affecting today’s world. In my view, most people living nowadays seem to be almost entirely controlled by two prevailing ideologies, neoliberalism and neofascism, which in many (if not most) countries seem to operate in tandem. So far as I am concerned, this observation applies to Islamic fundamentalist nations (Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.) as well as to sub-national movements like Hamas, Hezbollah and the so-called Islamic State. But it also applies to a wide variety of other governments and movements, also heavily influenced by other kinds of religious fundamentalism and ethnic isolationism, such as the Trump regime in the USA, Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Orban’s Hungary, Netanyahu’s Israel, and dozens of other such regimes, all over the world. The first example of this kind of joint neoliberalism and neofascism having been the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973-1990), which was after all founded over forty years before the English version of Harari’s book came out, and still has an extremely powerful influence on that unfortunate country even nowadays.

The world that we are living in right now desperately needs a much more advanced system of international cooperation than anything that has so far existed, to deal not only with the horrendous ecological crisis, but also with the ever-widening proliferation of nuclear weapons all over the world. Not to mention the ever-growing rate of resistance to antibiotics among the world’s very numerous “superbugs” (see the article written by Canadian scientists Steven Hoffman and Charu Kauschic, that was published in “The Montreal Gazette” on November 20, 2019.) The nerve-wracking problem of superbugs, largely caused by the unnecessary overuse of antibiotics, is also being compounded in today’s world by the increased proliferation of religious fundamentalism, one of the major contributors to an enormous recent decline in “herd immunity”. These problems, along with unprecedented inequality between the social classes, and increasing intolerance of women’s liberation as well as of hundreds of ethnic minorities all over the world, cannot possibly be addressed in any real way without the development of some kind of world-wide cooperative organization of truly sovereign states that would not just be run by the same imperial powers that currently dominate the United Nations.

The communist international no longer exists, nor does the socialist international in any real sense. Everyone nowadays therefore acquaints internationalism with domination by enormous, neoliberal, multinational corporations, operating out of those same imperial nations, combining private capitalism with state capitalism. Harari’s book, theoretically focused on describing the past in a completely scientific (non-ideological) way, instead plays up exactly the kind of ideological blinders that prevent humanity from surviving much longer. Thereby paving the way, so far as he is concerned, for its replacement by a trans-human transition to a new race of super-intelligent robots. Harari’s history of “Sapiens”, therefore, reads more like a funeral oration than as a panegyric. It also seems to give credence to Bohler’s equally depressing theory about the striatum managing to win out over the cortex in the long run.

How to be a good progressive

The Canadian election campaign ended a short time ago with the return to power of the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau, but only with a significantly reduced, minority government. Which will most likely depend on the parliamentary support of the considerably less successful New Democratic Party (NDP), which bills itself as being a lot more progressive than the Liberals, in order to survive for very long. During that campaign, Trudeau repeated over and over again that people should vote for him, instead of the austerity-mongering Conservative Party, because he was the only “progressive” candidate for the Prime Minister’s office who had any chance of winning that election against the Conservatives. Which, after all, is the only other party in Canadian history that has ever had a chance of forming a national government, the NDP and all the other “third” parties never having succeeded in overthrowing Canada’s binary habit, at least not at the federal level.

In Québec, one of those other “third parties”, that won even more seats than the NDP but still a lot fewer than either the Conservatives or the Liberals, was the Bloc Québécois. Under new leadership, the Bloc sprang back from near elimination the last time around (2015) to a position of once again (at least theoretically) holding the balance of power in the new federal Parliament. This time out, the Bloc has paradoxically become a much more successful electoral machine than the considerably weakened Parti Québécois, that functions only at the provincial level. The PQ was originally supposed to be controlling the Bloc, as its federal wing, back in the days when the PQ was the only (much more popular) party favouring independence. The Bloc leader, Yves-François Blanchet, used to be the environment minister in the most recent PQ government (2012-2014), and has also tried to fashion the recently reconstructed Bloc as a progressive political party.

Which makes it similar to the NDP in some ways, but with the enormous difference of also supporting Québec independence, although Blanchet has promised not to bring up the (currently less popular) sovereignty issue in the near future (at least not at the federal level). So far as progressive politics is concerned, supporting independence gives the Bloc an advantage over the NDP in one sense, since it means that the BQ can position itself as trying to free the people of Québec from Canadian imperial domination, in various different ways. Somewhat in the same fashion as Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, used Canadian nationalism, particularly economic nationalism, back in the 1970s in a half-hearted, and unsuccessful, attempt to free Canada as a whole from US imperial domination.

However, the Bloc’s position on the environment is not sufficiently free from populist influences, as in its support for the construction of a “third link” connecting vehicular traffic between Quebec City and the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. In order to qualify as a more genuinely progressive party, the BQ would have to resist the temptation to help build this kind of “pre-transition” infrastructure, which would only improve the traffic situation for a few short years, after which it would inevitably bung up again. The real solution being to spend a lot more money on vastly improving much more efficient public transit instead.

Apparently, Trudeau himself borrowed the title of “progressive”, that he had never used before the recent election campaign, from some of the people in the USA currently trying to become the Democratic Party’s candidate in next year’s presidential elections. Trudeau seems to see himself as the Canadian equivalent of the Democratic resistance to the violent, ultra-conservative, quasi-dictatorship of Donald Trump, represented in Canada by the only slightly less antediluvian Conservative Party. Which certainly begs the question of what exactly constitutes a “progressive” stance these days, since until very recently many people in Canada saw the Liberals (quite rightly) as being nothing more than “the other” Big Business party, whose ideological profile was not quite as atavistic as the Conservative one.

Trudeau’s self-imposed “progressive” monicker also seems to have become another example of continually expanding US influence on Canadian politics. Curiously enough, even though the Democrats are supposed to be engaged in an all-out battle against foreign (Russian) influence on American politics, that did not stop former Democratic president Barack Obama (not to mention Martin Luther King, Jr.) from sending out a message to Canadians, only a few days before the election, calling on them to re-elect Trudeau. Some of the people running the Democratic Party seem to think that Trudeau, like Emmanuel Macron in France and Germany’s “liberal-conservative” Angela Merkel, are all part of a world-wide, liberal-internationalist resistance movement. Pitted against the kind of ultra-right-wing, ethnic-isolationist and religious-fundamentalist populism typified not only by Donald Trump, but also by dozens of other autocratic politicians (in Russia, China, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria, India, Colombia, Chile, Haiti, etc.) who have taken over an ever-increasing number of countries, on every continent.

To be sure, the mainstream Democrats in the USA, and their mainstream Canadian imitators, do not seem to be very progressive at all, at least for those of us who have lived on this planet for more than a couple of decades. But it is the excessive backwardness of all those relatively new, ultra-conservative regimes, like the one Trump is running, that makes every political party in the world, considered to be even slightly to the left of them, look much more acceptable than any one of them used to be. The entire Trump machine comes off as some kind of dystopian nightmare dreamed up by someone like Hieronymus Bosch, and does indeed qualify as the most outstanding example in today’s world of an extremely dangerous political phenomenon. Namely, the capacity that that regime, and all the other ones like it, seem to possess of being able to turn the most antediluvian elements inside each popular culture into a barbarian cudgel. A cudgel that is capable of convincing millions of poor and middle-class citizens, all over the world, that their future depends on supporting openly criminal, right-wing populist strongmen rather than the more discreet leftovers from previously-dominant neoliberal internationalism, like the USA’s Democratic Party and the Liberal Party of Canada.

Aside from inspiration for a Bosch painting, Donald Trump himself also looks and acts like a kind of sick parody of the imaginary characters in “Gitarzan”, American country singer Ray Stevens’ hit from way back in 1969. In which a guitar-strumming Tarzan impersonator tries to set up a mock-rock band, featuring himself belting out a “tune” based on Johnny Weissmuller’s war cry, that was originally designed to imitate the attack scream of the great apes. The Tarzan character being backed up by “plain Jane, with no last name”, warbling “bay-bay” over and over again, and their pet chimp (“let’s hear it for the monkey”) creating its own guttural noises. In Trump’s version, of course, he gets to play the role of Tarzan, with Kelly-Anne Conway doing Jane and Rudy Giuliani filling in for the chimp. The rest of Trump’s comic-relief entourage doing their best to make sure that everyone else stops noticing that the whole gang of them are only in it for themselves, and could not care less about the USA, nor about its so-easily-conned population. Nor, for that matter, for any other country or people on this increasingly degenerate planet.

In order to legitimately call someone, or some political tendency, progressive, however, requires a lot more than not being quite as prehistoric as Donald Trump, nor of any of the other ultra-right-wing barbarians currently running an increasingly large number of the world’s political organizations. Some of the people projecting a progressive image, like the leader of Canada’s left-liberal NDP, Jagmeet Singh, at least at first glance do indeed seem to be significantly more progressive than mainstream politicians like Justin Trudeau. Singh’s ecological qualifications, for example, are significantly more real than those of Trudeau, whose government recently paid several billion dollars to buy a “white elephant” tar-sands pipeline with the intention of completing it, and presumably running it, some day. Nevertheless, even Singh does not oppose the occasionally job-creating fossil-fuel industry as much as he could, or should, a point that was made over and over again during the recent election campaign by Canada’s considerably less popular Green Party.

More significantly, however, is the fact that Singh is also a practising believer in the Sikh religion, which in his case means that he chooses to wear in public the various outward signs of official Sikh-ness, such as the turban, the dagger, the long beard and all the rest of it. Which is in itself a much more conservative, traditional and fundamentalist way of practising a religion than that of the more liberal, ecumenically-minded Sikhs, who realize that their religion does not require such ostentatious proof of religious orthodoxy when they are out and about among the non-Sikh people with whom they share this planet.

Singh’s approach, in an increasingly globalized and multicultural world, does not help at all to free humanity from religious fundamentalism, one of the more important characteristics of every ultra-right-wing populist movement in the world. Whether it be Christian fundamentalism (evangelical Protestantism in the USA, Orthodox Christianity in Russia or ultra-conservative Catholicism in Poland), Islamic fundamentalism (Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, its terrorist offshoot in the Islamic State movement, or Iranian Shiite orthodoxy and its own offshoots), Hindu fundamentalism in India’s ruling BJP party, Buddhist fundamentalism in ethnic-cleansing countries like Myanmar, Confucian fundamentalism in China, Shinto fundamentalism in Japan, ultra-Jewish orthodoxy in imperial Israel, or even totemist and shamanist traditionalism still dominating the thought processes of some of the world’s indigenous peoples. Not to mention the ultra-conservative wing of the “Khalistan” movement in the Punjab (Sikh-majority) region of India.

During the recent Canadian election campaign, however, Jagmeet Singh did not threaten, if elected, to possibly disallow Québec’s laicity law (“Bill 21”), like Justin Trudeau did. That law, preventing government employees in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols on the job, such as the Christian cross, the Jewish skull-cap and the Muslim hijab, should be seen as a legitimate contribution to progressive politics. In spite of a well-financed campaign in English Canada trying to depict laicity in Québec as just another example of ethnic isolationism. To be sure, Bill 21 is more of a symbol of laicity than it is a significant move against religious fundamentalism, since the Québec government still allows the Christian crucifix to be displayed in most provincial buildings, and also continues to exempt religious property from provincial taxes, as well as subsidizing religious private schools almost as much as it supports religiously-neutral public schools.

During the campaign, Singh’s way of dealing with “the Québec problem” was simply to show off his own religious garb as a kind of personal statement of counter-symbolism. However, now that Justin Trudeau has been re-elected, and apparently needs the NDP’s help to remain in power for very long, it remains to be seen what Jagmeet Singh will decide to do if ever Trudeau makes good on his threat to use the Canadian constitution against Québec’s limited-laicity law. Unfortunately, most of English Canada seems to be living in some kind of fairy-tale “Western civilization” cocoon, refusing to realize that, even though some people in the Western world support religiously-neutral laicity for reactionary, anti-Muslim reasons, the fight against religious fundamentalism is still an integral part of planetary progressivism.

Not only because religious orthodoxy always accompanies every form of right-wing populism, and ethnic isolationism, all over the world, but also because it directly threatens women’s liberation as well. Not just symbolically (as with the hijab) but also because of the hundreds of different kinds of more severely misogynist “barbarian religious practices” (such as forced marriages for under-age girls), still being supported by fundamentalists belonging to every one of the world’s religions. Which also gives the Bloc Québécois another advantage over the NDP, at least from the point of view of progressive politics.

Another major fault in most English-Canadian political opinion, at least so far as progressivism is concerned, is its eternal refusal to permit Québec’s overwhelmingly francophone majority to enjoy self-determination without outside interference. Not to the incredibly extreme extent, thank goodness, as Spain’s “anti-separatist” government, that threw some of the leaders of the Catalonian independence movement into jail for a very long time, just for daring to organize a referendum on the subject. Still, if the English-Canadian establishment really wanted to adopt the progressive mantle of “all-inclusive” politics, that they so erroneously claim to have done in the Bill 21 controversy, it would seem rather obvious that they would want to support genuine self-determination for the people of Québec. Rather than throw obstacles in their path all the time, like the sponsorship-scandal diversion that they created during the 1995 referendum campaign. Why is the possibility of Québec becoming independent some day always considered to be even more damaging to fake-progressive politics in English-speaking Canada, than does the granting of self-determination to any of Canada’s indigenous peoples? And why does the Canadian government also refuse to condemn the new Spanish Inquisition’s current attack on Catalonian self-determination?

All-out opposition to imperialism, after all, has always been considered part and parcel of progressive politics everywhere in the world. How can people outside China legitimately get upset about Chinese imperialism directed against political democracy in Hong Kong, or Chinese denial of self-determination for the Tibetan, the Uighur and the Taiwanese peoples, while simultaneously denying such rights to Québec, or to Catalonia, or to Scotland? Why not also support the reunification of the Irish people, at the expense of the imperial UK and its Northern Irish satrapy? For that matter, why get upset about Russian imperialism in the Ukraine, or in any other part of the former Soviet Union? Or even in occasionally “separatist” sections of the Russian Federation itself, such as the Chechen Republic? If would-be progressives in the Western world want to go around promoting democracy all the time, why don’t they support it all the time for real, rather than just whenever it suits them?

Come to think of it, why not get just as upset about the total lack of Canadian support for the Kurds, who may very well be the largest ethnic minority, to have always been denied statehood by almost all the world’s major empires? After having been the main force involved in putting down the ultra-barbarian Islamic State caliphate (sponsored by “Western ally” Saudi Arabia), the Kurds in Syria were abandoned, once again, by the USA and the other Western empires, to the tender mercies of the Turkish empire, the Russian empire and its own Middle Eastern satrapy, the Assad regime in Damascus.

Why has Donald Trump’s ditching of the Kurds not got very many of the world’s only theoretically “progressive” governments and political parties as furious as they ought to be? Is it because, like Trump, they cannot get themselves to support the PKK section of the Kurdish nation’s attempt to fight against both neoliberalism and neofascism by supporting US theoretician Murray Bookchin’s “communitarian socialism”? Unfortunately, Canadian politicians (and those of most other Western nations) do not seem to be all that interested in “external affairs”, at least during popular election campaigns, but that never seems to prevent them from making real foreign policy decisions all the time (sins of commission as well as sins of omission), “on behalf of the Canadian people”.

Which brings us to the other major reason why so many politicians claiming the title of “progressive” do not really deserve that title at all, namely the very strong, mutually supportive, relationship between neoliberalism and neofascism. Neoliberalism being the revival of nineteenth-century economic and social liberalism, then called laissez-faire, and neofascism being a synonym for the kind of ultra-right-wing populist authoritarianism mentioned above. Both those ideologies, originally expounded by aristocratic theoreticians like Friedrich von Hayek during the 1950s, got their first support in the real world in 1973, when the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile called on “the Chicago Boys” to concoct a socio-economic policy for them, based exclusively on the promotion of multinational “private enterprise”. Starting in 1979, Pinochet’s best friend, Margaret Thatcher of the UK, and her American sidekick, Ronald Reagan, then turned that initial partnership into a world-wide onslaught of Big Business control over everything, that even managed to include the former Soviet Union, as well as Deng Xiao-ping’s China, coming together in an orgy of gargantuan social and economic inequality, on a scale never seen before.

It was in fact the neoliberal juggernaut that created the social and economic conditions, in country after country, continent after continent, necessary to create a world-wide base for ultra-right-wing populist, neofascist, regimes like the one brought into being in the USA by Donald Trump. Which is why mainstream Democratic politicians in the USA, such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and also Liberal politicians in Canada like Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Justin Trudeau, are not being at all honest when they claim to be “progressive” alternatives to barbarian monsters like Donald Trump. If the neoliberalism of almost every Western government, and dozens of neocolonial “Eastern” governments as well, had not created the conditions for the still-rising popularity of neofascist regimes all over the world, humanity would not be in the disastrous situation in which we find ourselves nowadays.

Today’s world is one in which all the major issues in international politics so far mentioned are in a state of crisis, each one of those issues negatively impacting on each of the other ones. Such as the horrendously important environmental crisis, control over which is not only being impeded by neoliberal business-as-usual, but also by extremely dangerous geopolitical confrontations between rival forms of imperialism, many of which possess nuclear weapons. As well as by world-wide imperialism’s decidedly negative effect on national self-determination, not only of minority peoples trying to become nation-states for the first time, but also on existing nation-states trying to prevent imperial neocolonialism from controlling their own destinies. Ongoing neoliberalism is also preventing any of the world’s governments from spending a much larger amount of money on social development (health, education, welfare, social housing, public transit, women’s liberation, etc.). For the simple reason that the tax base of every government, at every level, has been enormously curtailed by the world’s most important tax evaders, which is to say, the world’s most important corporate investors, not only the private ones but also the state-owned corporations copy-catting on the world’s largest individual fortunes.

In order to have the slightest chance of solving any of these horrific problems, or rather all of them coming at us all at once, we have to step back a ways and more deeply consider what is really happening here. When discussing the environmental crisis, for example, many people seem to think that “nature” is composed exclusively of all kinds of plants and animals, which are completely different from human beings. Such, however, is not the case. Most of what is natural in this universe is really an enormous amount of “empty” space, that seems to go on forever, “interrupted” from time to time by such things as energy, dark matter and a much smaller amount of visible matter (such as stars and planets), very little of which seems to be alive in any way. While it is entirely possible, given the immensity of the known universe, that there are billions of other life-forms out there somewhere, the only ones we know of at the moment are right here on Earth. At the same time, the only semi-intelligent life-forms we know of, capable of bringing into being such things as fossil fuels and nuclear weapons, without, unfortunately, being able to control them all that much, are human beings. (A category of nature which, unfortunately, includes such evolutionary throw-backs as Donald Trump.)

As for plants and animals, the way that some of those creatures treat each other much of the time really does resemble human behaviour, at least in the sense of often being unbelievably stupid and aggressive. On the one hand, it is quite “natural” for some human beings to adopt progressive ways of doing things, to a greater or a lesser extent, whenever they succeed in putting the emphasis on positive ideas, like cooperation, the common good, social development and the emergence of a much kinder, more understanding, attitude toward the other life-forms that surround us (at least for the moment) in that extremely tiny part of the universe we call the biosphere. On the other hand, however, it is also quite natural for many other human beings to have become so incredibly stupid and aggressive as to have invented the kind of reactionary behaviour underlying such concepts as neoliberalism and neofascism. So our main problem is not so much how to go about solving all the ecological, geopolitical, cultural and socio-economic problems listed above, as to how to go about controlling the antediluvian ogres among us so that they do not succeed in turning our still-lovely little planet into a lifeless landscape like the one to be found on our planet’s nearby satellite, that we have chosen to call the Moon.

The only way, therefore, to prevent William Shakespeare’s rather pessimistic description of human life on this planet as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, with Donald Trump filing in this time for Macbeth, is to enormously strengthen our common, shared progressive message against world-wide reaction. And the best way to do that is to weed out all the fake ideas creeping into that message from time to time, like the ridiculous pretension that the Muslim hijab is somehow an expression of women’s liberation, rather than in fact being quite the opposite. Or the equally ridiculous conception according to which international neoliberalism is somehow a bulwark against national-isolationist neofascism, rather than being its ideological parent instead. Bringing all the world’s progressive causes together also means doing away with merely regional ways of interpreting world politics, such as seeing everything through the kinds of deforming prisms known as Western civilization, or “making China great again”, or reviving the Islamic caliphate, or whatever other equivalent shibboleth.

Lack of unity among progressives helps ensure that reactionary forces will also remain much more powerful than progressive forces into the future. Which also means that nothing really good may emerge in this world during the next several decades because we let completely irresponsible, atavistic ways of interpreting the world dominate international politics. As I have tried to show in this blogpost, even if the conversation starts out with something as seemingly banal as the most recent Canadian election campaign, a proper understanding of what is going on requires relating all the “strictly Canadian” issues to what are really local versions of international problems. How to be a good progressive, therefore, means bringing together all the intermediate strands of the overall, world-wide message into one common discourse.

It is completely impossible to do anything real toward defeating such nauseating symptoms of political degeneracy as Donald Trump without taking on the entire antediluvian counter-revolution as a whole. We are not just up against the refusal to recognize the very existence of climate change, or nuclear war, or government austerity, or constitutional imperialism, or economic instability, or skyrocketing social inequality, or toxic masculinity, or whatever other recent manifestation of cultural entropy was recently eructed into our tiny, little section of the universe by the extremely violent forces of international reaction. But by all of them together, all the time. Doing away with one of them is also doing away with all the other ones, at the same time.