Is everyone equally guilty?

Brian Mulroney, the former Conservative prime minister of Canada (1984-1993),  gave a speech recently in Montreal condemning anti-Semitism, that was reprinted in one of the local newspapers. In that speech, Mulroney denounced in no uncertain terms the recent revival in vociferous anti-Semitic declarations and activities in many different parts of the world, including Canada. Unfortunately, Mulroney also managed to considerably reduce the positive impact of his speech by attacking both anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the same breath, as if those two forms of opinion were somehow identical. Which is not to deny that anti-Semitism quite often hides behind anti-Zionism, particularly in the propaganda emanating from such supremely racist, terrorist and neofascist organizations as the Islamic State movement. Anti-Semitic anti-Zionism is also one of the main ideological characteristics of ultra-right-wing governments like the ones in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, which often (not so secretly) sponsor such terrorist movements.

It is, however, completely ridiculous to make as if all possible criticism of Israeli policies, such as its own, frequent, state-terrorist attacks against ordinary Palestinian civilians, should necessarily be considered anti-Semitic as well. It seems to me that people who are careful about what they say, or what they write, should not go around deliberately muddying the waters about such extremely deplorable situations. The government of Israel, its current government even more than any of its previous governments, is by no means blameless when it comes to attacking innocent civilians. Which also applies to attacks on innocent Israeli citizens emanating from the other side of the fence, since more than a few anti-Israeli forces have not often been any more discriminating in their own assaults. Not to forget, however, that Israel has succeeded quite well over the years in maintaining a long-term kill ratio very much in its favour, encompassing civilian deaths as well as military ones. Which keeps the Israeli side quite a bit further “ahead” of the anti-Israeli side when it comes to counting the overall number of innocent victims in that never-ending conflict.

For me, this particular controversy is a really good example of the fact that trying to find exactly the right way to express one’s opinions, without going too far in any particular direction (for ideological reasons), is a genuinely difficult task. Politicians all over the world, from practically every political tendency, often “mis-speak”, frequently revealing a particular prejudice that they would have often preferred to have kept under wraps for at least a little while longer. Others, of which Donald Trump is one of the “best” examples, come right out and repeat the most incredibly disgusting opinions, over and over again, constantly brushing aside any attempts on the part of their friends or allies to claim that they must have been mis-quoted the first time around. Egomaniacs like him rely instead on their infinitely unflappable, political bases to gobble up any swill that they may choose to offer, regardless of how unappetizing it might turn out to be.

Several years ago, when I was teaching courses in a dozen different colleges and universities,  about the history of Western civilization or the history of the Third World, I found it easy to avoid presenting any out-and-out, Trump-like, neofascist interpretations of events. Like some of those that I read in other people’s history books when I was preparing my own material. But I also tried very hard to make sure that I was not giving my students false information, by inadvertently coming down too hard on any particular side of any issue. While simultaneously trying just as hard to also avoid wishy-washy interpretations of events as much as possible, like those thoroughly inadequate teachers who always do their very best to avoid saying anything controversial. Trying to do both of those things at the same time was quite difficult, and I have to admit that I did not always succeed as well as I had originally intended.

Trying to do that anyway, in spite of everything, meant that I first had to steer clear of the official, reactionary, elitist point of view adopted by the Western empires (Europe and the USA), that had been dominating dozens of formal colonies and economic satrapies (informal colonies), for quite a long time, but nevertheless felt that their overall impact on those colonies was “mostly positive”. Which was still an official point of view recommended for history classes taught in France, for example, as recently as just a few years ago. However, trying to be as honest as possible also meant that I had to steer clear of taking a totally unrealistic, falsely “post-colonialist” approach, according to which all the problems of all the countries that were dominated by the Western empires during the official colonial period (between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries) should be exclusively blamed on the deleterious effects of Western colonialism.

In reality, imperialism, colonialism, racism, military invasion, long-term subjugation of “inferior” peoples, frequently “successful” genocide, slavery, class-based exploitation and most of the other negative characteristics attributed by some post-colonial scholars exclusively to Western domination, were also practised throughout the entire world long before the modern Western empires were set up. The forms of imperialism, colonialism, slavery and so on already established in many parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas long before European expansion began, as well as during that same expansion, varied a great deal from place to place, but so did many of the diverging forms of Western imperialism.

Even so-called pre-historic (palaeolithic, mesolithic and neolithic) societies of indigenous peoples, in regions that had not yet developed urban-based civilizations prior to the arrival of Western imperialism, practised their own forms of government and social organization that would not be considered the least bit “politically correct” nowadays. One example of that sort of thing was cannibalism, which was not at all confined to any one particular region of the world. Meaning that more than a few of the very real problems currently facing previously-dominated countries on every continent cannot be blamed exclusively on Western domination itself.

However, even though every one of the different societies and civilizations set up all over the world, was far from perfect, this does not mean that every one of those same societies and civilizations are, or were, equally to blame for any of the negative situations currently affecting today’s world. Different countries and different cultures are not “just as guilty” as any other ones. In the same way that individuals in all those countries and cultures are not at all equally responsible for every kind of behaviour considered by careful observers to be reactionary or despicable nowadays. As a general rule of thumb, it is most often the largest geopolitical entities that have the most negative effects on the world’s different peoples (including their own), just like it is the biggest VIPs (“very important psychopaths”) who cause the most harm inside every community.

The world’s, very few, super-rich and ultra-powerful people are much more responsible for the sorry state of human affairs on any level, during any particular period of history, than are the much more numerous poor and powerless people. Even though millions of the latter, like Trump’s coprophagic base, certainly contribute to that unfortunate situation. Anyone currently supporting any of the very numerous neoliberal and neofascist power nodes (like Trump’s base), in every part of the world, are doing whatever they can to prevent humanity from solving any of the very serious ecological and geopolitical crises that beset us nowadays.  Compounded as they are by ever-expanding fissures in economic stability and social cohesion. It looks more and more these days like Barry McGuire’s 1960s vision of the “eve of destruction” was only a little bit premature, and not at all inappropriate.

To give another example, the liberal media nowadays are also certainly justified in their constant denunciations of white supremacy, as well as their condemnation of those same ultra-right-wing populists for accusing all Muslims of supporting terrorism (islamophobia), rather than just the extremist ones. However, attributing the blame correctly and not at all lopsidedly, also means that the liberal media should also be denouncing Islamic terrorism and fundamentalist religious propaganda at the same time. The fact that ultra-right-wing populism is on the rise in Western society does not cancel out, but rather feeds, the simultaneous rise of ultra-right-wing populism in Muslim society, as well as in Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucian, Shintoist and even indigenous (animist) forms of “religious nationalism”.

The world’s numerous religious strains of neofascism also include the Christian variety of evangelical populism, emanating from any of the different, historical, forms of Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant), as well as any of the competing forms of any of the other religions (like the Sunnite and Shiite divisions within Islam). All these ultra-right-wing movements, all over the world, are just so many Eastern and Western varieties of the same worldwide neofascist trend, each variety of extremely reactionary political ideology reinforcing all the other varieties. Each one of these competing strains of religious neofascism wants to conquer the world as soon as possible, making all the other strains disappear forever. But paradoxically their combined efforts end up reinforcing each other instead, thereby making an eventual fight to the finish between warring visions of populist “perfection” increasingly inevitable in the near future. Which is why they all have to be denounced simultaneously, without leaving any of them out of the picture.

People should also not shrink from calling various everyday symptoms of these neofascist movements by their real names. Muslim women, for example, wearing head scarves and various other kinds of cover-up clothing, are not just innocent practitioners of their chosen religion. For the obvious reason that more than a few Muslim regimes, in the past as well as nowadays, practise (or practised) something akin to Mutazilism (rationalist forms of Islam), rather than extremist fundamentalism. Which means, among other things, that millions of Muslim women do not feel the slightest need to hide behind cover-up clothing.

Nor should those who do choose to cover up (in a kind of reverse exhibitionism of their extreme religiosity) be considered “good feminists”, in spite of everything, because they have jobs to go to every day of the week, instead of staying at home with the children. Like their barbarian brethren oblige them to do whenever they manage to seize power over any previously civilized region. The false-feminist true-believers who choose to cover up have to be called out for who they really are, namely proselytizers for fundamentalism, propagating after all an atavistic version of human society, in which women are considered fundamentally inferior to men, whether or not they work at home all day, or work outside the home instead.

Liberal-minded attempts at defending such people under the aegis of “human rights” are simply turning truth on its head, deliberately misinterpreting a misogynist attack on human rights by calling it instead an illusory “defence” of the right to practise one’s religion. But the right to pray in a mosque, rather than in a church or a temple, is not the same as publicly, and ostentatiously, attacking women’s liberation from the kinds of male domination that always accompany every fundamentalist form of religion. Freedom from religion, especially atavistic religion, is also a basic human right, even though very few countries have ever included it in their charters. Granted, cover-up clothing is obviously not as dangerous to human survival (via “herd immunity”) as the often religiously-motivated refusal to vaccinate one’s children against frequently debilitating infectious diseases. On the other hand, it certainly does not contribute to any kind of social progress.

Nor are officially liberal-democratic countries as free as they claim to be from religious influence on their policies, when they tolerate largely publicly-funded religious schools that do not in fact teach the official curriculum, or when they exempt religious buildings from paying taxes on private property. Requiring fundamentalist women to remove cover-up clothing in certain, well-defined circumstances, on the grounds of state neutrality toward religion (laicity), is not any more intrusive than requiring visitors to mosques to remove their shoes before entering the building. In the final analysis, misguided liberal-individualist efforts to turn voluntary slavery (cover-up clothing, for women only) into a fight for freedom simply demonstrate once again the veracity of the proverb according to which “there are none so blind as those who will not see.” This is ideological obfuscation at its self-evident worst. Requiring the same degree of Pollyanna naïveté that is also demonstrated by those other unfortunate people who really believe that inveterate liars like Donald Trump are serious in wanting to clean up the same swamp on which they themselves depend for all their food.

Yet another good example of deliberate obfuscation is the refusal often encountered when some people avoid using the word “terrorism” to describe events that really are terrorist. The most obvious example being those who deny that official, state terrorism (such as bombing civilian populations from the air) is every bit as terrorist as that committed by “private” terrorists like those from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Another such example is the event in Montreal back in 2012, when Richard Henry Bain tried to prevent the newly-elected, Parti Québécois premier of Québec, Pauline Marois, from giving her victory speech. Just because Bain’s gun jammed right after he started firing and he only ended up killing one person, does not mean that he should not be called a terrorist. One of the Sikh organizations in Canada has also gone so far as to call on the federal government to stop using the expression “Sikh terrorism” in its official communications because there have been no “recent” incidents of Sikh terrorism in Canada. Not, that is, since the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight out of Montreal (with mostly Canadian citizens of the Hindu faith on board), that killed a total of 329 people!

Many of the people supporting the Québec independence movement are also very reluctant to use the word “terrorist” in connection with the FLQ (“Front de libération du Québec”) revolutionaries who killed several, mostly innocent, people back in the 1963-1970 period. I can remember being one of only a very few people who remained seated during a Parti Québécois convention back in the early 1980s when almost everyone else gave a standing ovation to an ex-FLQ member when he walked into the room. Many people nowadays, representing several political tendencies in Québec, are also reluctant to call Alexandre Bissonnette a terrorist, even though he gunned down a half a dozen Muslim men praying in a mosque in Quebec City back in 2017. All these different examples demonstrate quite well how opportunistic a lot of people are when it comes to correctly identifying the different forms of terrorism, for all sorts of hypocritical reasons.

Still another good example of people refusing to maintain a proper balance in their political judgements these days are those numerous Conservative pundits writing articles in the media about the current Canadian controversy over the Trudeau government’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin affair. This particular Québec-based engineering and construction company got into a lot of hot water several years ago when it succeeded in securing several lucrative contracts in Mouammar Gaddafi’s Libya by bribing one of his sons. Illegal activities of that nature, even though they are common to every large corporation in the world (in private capitalist countries as well as in state capitalist countries), are nevertheless punished whenever they become too obvious. In this case, Trudeau and his Liberal friends are being lambasted in the Conservative media for having tried to prevent one of their own ministers from refusing to grant that corporation a convenient way (“deferred prosecution agreement”) of avoiding genuine criminal prosecution. That is also currently being used extensively in the USA and dozens of other countries, in similar cases of Big Business running amok.

The Conservative pundits are accusing Justin Trudeau of being just another ordinary (corrupt) politician rather than the much more honest, “new type” of prime minister that he promised to be after taking office in 2015. As happens so often in such cases, however, those pundits conveniently “forget” that the former Conservative prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, who ran the country from 2006 to 2015, was also involved in the same controversy, since it was mostly under his watch that SNC-Lavalin paid all that money to the young Gaddafi. Not to mention the fact that the same government was also, even more directly, involved in several other, even more disgusting events, such as the Mégantic scandal of 2013. Which took place when a very poorly managed, kilometre-long oil train got away from its owners and blew up 47 people in the village of Lac-Mégantic, Québec.

It turns out that the Harper government, in 2008, completely abandoned all oversight of safety features on such trains to the tender mercies of the railway and petroleum corporations that run them, such as the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the Irving Oil company, both of them implicated in the Mégantic disaster. Curiously enough, no one has ever been punished in that particular case, even though most people would argue that it was a good deal more tragic than the SNC-Gaddafi affair. New federal elections, coming up later on in 2019, could very well result in the Conservative Party being returned to power, and the SNC-Lavalin scandal could also become one of the most important factors pushing many naïve Canadian voters back toward the Tories. In other words, those hypocritical Conservative pundits could, for at least once in their lives, have a direct effect on real events, but for all the wrong reasons.

Another debate currently dividing public opinion in Canada, as in dozens of other countries, is the one about energy policy. In this case, pitting those who claim that this country cannot afford to do anything much about industrial pollution and climate change (because it has to become more competitive vis-à-vis other countries in getting its petroleum to market), versus those who still want to reduce pollution anyway and prevent climate change from becoming completely catastrophic. People from central Canada, for example, are being accused by people from western Canada (the Prairie provinces) for trying too hard to meet Canada’s official targets in reducing toxic emissions into the air and the water, because their attitude results in not enough pipelines being built to get bitumen (schist oil) to extremely lucrative markets in eastern Canada, the USA, Europe and Asia.

No other country in the world, they say, lets several hundred billion dollars worth of product sit in the ground, doing nothing profitable, just to meet theoretical anti-pollution targets that will (according to them) not have a dangerously negative effect for decades to come. These absurdly unrealistic people pretend not to have heard that global warming is proceeding twice as quickly in this country as it is in the rest of the world. A lot of otherwise very intelligent people in Canada seem to have a great deal of difficulty accepting the fact that they belong to the same human race whose future existence is being compromised all the time by their own deliberate obtusity, as well as that of like-minded people in other countries.

People all over the world are also being bought off, at least indirectly, by those who say that we should be very grateful for everything that the world’s leading philanthropists do for all sorts of worthy causes, giving away billions of dollars to help handicapped people, or underprivileged children in poor countries, or hospitals, universities, art galleries and so on. Those who want us all to be genuinely grateful, however, do not often go into very great detail about how some of those billionaire philanthropists accumulated all their capital. Nor are they terribly eloquent about all the tax breaks that most of those philanthropists receive from pro-business governments and their senior civil servants, who are constantly trading places, back and forth, with senior executives from the same corporations that the philanthropists own. Nor about the hundreds of billions of tax dollars that the same governments could have been spending themselves on their less wealthy citizens, like some of them used to do before neoliberalism and neofascism got in the way.

Speaking of taxes, why is nothing being done (for real, I mean) to stop the current epidemic of tax evasion, all over the world, years after the publication of all sorts of documents, such as the Panama Papers, revealing the names of hundreds of thousands of practitioners of that extremely costly art (for everyone else, not for the perpetrators)? Or about the billions of dollars not being paid in taxes by major, new-technology firms like Netflix, which do not have to abide by the same rules being used by those cumbersome investors still plodding along with old-fashioned methods of disseminating entertainment?

Yet another curious example of misguided reactions to current events are the much too rapid conclusions of some political pundits in the USA, when they claim that it was great after all that Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Russian government and the Trump machine “proved” that the alleged collusion never happened. Just because Mueller blinked, as they say, and refused to accuse Trump of collusion is no reason to conclude that there was not any collusion, before, during and after the 2016 election campaign. Like millions of other prosecutors all over the world, Mueller may have decided not to proceed out of simple, abject fear of his increasingly dangerous adversary. The evidence already collected being deemed insufficient in stand up in courts in which the judges are by no means always as untouchable as they are theoretically supposed to be. Or, perhaps, because the events described in the evidence did not constitute “collusion”, as defined by legal beagles, in the same way that Bill Clinton “did not have sex with that woman” because their “marriage” was never consummated according to Clinton’s ridiculous definition of what “having sex” really constitutes.

In my less obfuscated opinion, just the evidence that has so far been presented in the media, about meetings between various Trump people and various Russian officials, on many different occasions, combining business and politics, should be enough for a condemnation, if the courts in the USA were genuinely irreproachable in any real way. Very important psychopaths like Donald Trump are getting away with that sort of thing all the time, all over the world. Thereby upholding Trump’s own point of view, according to which people like him can get away with things like pussy grabbing in public, and shooting guns down major streets with impunity, because everyone thinks that they are too important to be charged for anything. It is in fact American exceptionalism which is completely absurd, there being nothing at all exceptional about the Trump regime, at least not in today’s world. Practically every country on this planet is currently being run by the Siamese twins of private capitalism and state capitalism, jointly professing both the neoliberal and the neofascist ideologies, simultaneously.  

Other kinds of crimes are also being committed every day, in every country, right in front of numerous eyewitnesses, again without anyone ever being charged. A fascinating example of that sort of thing, that has always intrigued me over the years, is fist-fighting between professional athletes, right out in the open, that is never treated the same way that it would be treated if the same thing were taking place in the street. In Canada and the USA, for example, all the television stations have accumulated millions of hours over the years, showing professional hockey players duking it out in front of everybody. Quite often causing genuine physical damage to many of the participants, without anyone ever being arrested. Millions of professional athletes also suffer debilitating concussions in hundreds of other such sports (Mohamed Ali, for example) without anyone ever being charged for what ought to be designated criminal activity. For the obvious reason that sports crimes, that “liven up” the game (!) for bloodthirsty spectators, are collectively considered to be “less serious” than other crimes that do often lead to prosecution.

Trying to attribute the right amount of blame to everyone who deserves it, in all the different ways that I have so far described, is most definitely a never-ending assignment. In addition to mentioning all the various cases in point so far described, I could have also have concentrated on dozens of other examples instead. Such as the obvious hypocrisy of forcing millions of people all over the world, such as nurses in most Québec hospitals, to work compulsory overtime in a massive way, even though people in that province, and in dozens of other such places, are supposed to be living (once again) in a liberal-democratic society. Or the equally obvious hypocrisy of letting millions of pedestrians and cyclists get killed off by drivers of cars and trucks, regularly committing traffic crimes that are treated like “accidents”, for which very few people (in comparison with the number of “incidents” involved) ever get prosecuted.

Or the odd spectacle of governments consistently refusing to ban assault weapons designed to kill large numbers of people (i. e., useless for hunting wild animals), even after the recent epidemic of mass shootings all over the world. Or the refusal of officials in many different jurisdictions to put down vicious dogs who have killed, or severely wounded, several people, as well as their refusal to prosecute any of those dogs’ equally vicious owners. Or the apparent inability of both governments and private corporations in the communications business, to do anything real and efficient about the enormous flood of disgusting pornography on the Internet.

The world-wide combination of neoliberalism and neofascism, supported in one way or another by most of the people possessing the capacity to do anything about any of the situations mentioned in this blogpost, seems to be keeping absolutely everyone from doing anything serious about any of the situations so far mentioned. And hundreds of other, similar situations. Which means that even though all these deplorable things are going on nowadays, all over the world, and even though it seems obvious that not everyone is equally guilty of refusing to solve any of those enormous problems, there does not seem to be much of a chance that any of these situations will ever be adequately addressed. We all seem to be collectively running over a cliff, or rather (if that were possible) running over many equally dangerous cliffs at the same time.

If people refuse to smarten up soon, and start fighting back against neoliberalism and neofascism, like they used to do against the original forms of economic liberalism and national-socialism, we are all going to end up piled high on top of one another, like lemmings at the bottom of those same metaphorical cliffs, in a relatively short period of time. By then, the only thing left for any of us to do will be to just listen to Barry McGuire’s most popular song one more time, before it is all over.