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.

Being politically correct is becoming more and more difficult

Hundreds of millions of people all over the world now know about Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish environmental activist, who recently addressed the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York and also participated in a huge protest march just a few days ago, right here in Montréal. To get to New York, she refused to take a plane and decided to cross the ocean on a racing yacht instead, in order to reduce her own personal contribution to atmospheric pollution. Her message, that the world’s most important decision-makers nowadays are much more interested in making huge piles of money than in doing anything real about climate change, ought to be supported by anyone still capable of differentiating between individual wish-fulfillment and objective reality.

Here in the Kingdom of Canada (section Québec), we are in currently in the middle of a federal election campaign, in which the only two political parties that have ever governed the Canadian Confederation, since it was originally set up back in 1867, are both severely lacking in ecological conviction. The currently ruling Liberal Party talks a lot about reducing Canada’s role as one of the largest per capita contributors to pollution, increasingly exacerbated by oil-sands production in the province of Alberta, and has attempted to introduce a small carbon tax. But it nevertheless supports oil pipeline construction in a major way, having bought one recently for several billion dollars, in order to complete its construction. After the private American corporation that started building it decided that there was too much popular opposition to the project for them to make any real money off of it. (Except from the Canadian government.)

While the Conservative Party, much more popular in Alberta than in any of the other provinces, is even more obsessed with increasing fossil-fuel production, rather than reducing it, and is running on a political platform that does not include any significant climate protection promises at all. If returned to power, that they already enjoyed as recently as 2006-2015, they have also promised to do away with the carbon tax altogether. In other words, the Conservatives have taken a much more atavistic outlook than the Liberals have, toward what certainly seems to have become the world’s most important political objective. Although one could argue that  their very limited promises are much closer to their real, business-as-usual point of view than the Liberal promises really are.

People all over the world who enthusiastically support the movement against all the different kinds of pollution currently threatening our collective future are much less reactionary and antediluvian than are the climate skeptics and the laissez-faire politicians. At least the anti-pollution people are trying their best to move the world in the right direction, advocating severe cuts in the use of fossil fuels, as well as in the use of many other kinds of harmful products (such as micro-plastics) constantly being added to the toxic soup by short-sighted neoliberal fixation on quarter-year profit maximization. Nevertheless, political correctness, which in this case means moving away from neoliberalism and doing the right thing about climate change instead, is not an easily-achieved objective.

Even when someone like Thunberg attempts to reduce her own personal contribution to pollution, the results are not terribly convincing. A private yacht crossing the Atlantic Ocean, for example, even when it is extremely well-equipped with the latest energy-saving equipment, is not at all carbon neutral. It is in fact impossible for anyone to possess any large modern piece of machinery like an ocean-going yacht, or even a private automobile, without almost every individual component involved having emerged from some kind of massive, pollution-producing, industrial process.

Which unfortunately includes all the fuel sources available these days, not only fossil fuels (by far the most important producer of greenhouse gasses), but also wind and solar power, as well as hydrogen and hydroelectricity. The same thing goes for any piece of modern communications equipment, like a computer or a smartphone, and almost everything else in regular use on this planet nowadays. Rebooting every part of the modern, globally-integrated, economy, in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, and in every country, during the same extremely limited period of time (ten years to turn everything around!), is not going to be an easy thing to do. Not by a very long shot.

Still, getting several million people all over the world, especially young people, to demonstrate against massive pollution of our air, our water and our soil, is a laudable objective in and of itself. The goal being to convince every one of the world’s governments (international, national, regional and local governments), as well as every one of the world’s private corporations and investment funds (which are often much more powerful than most governments), to fully participate in bringing an end to life-threatening pollution. Especially the most dangerous kinds of pollution but also all the other kinds as well. Everyone participating in this objective, however, has to realize at the outset that pulling this off, before it is too late, constitutes the most difficult objective ever undertaken by human beings, particularly since it has to succeed in such a short time period.

It is incredibly difficult not only for technical reasons, but also because for the past forty years at least, almost all decision-making, all over the world, has been totally dominated by a completely contradictory, ideological agenda, based on purely short-term profit-making, designed exclusively to satisfy “shareholder rights”. Ever since all the socialist and communist movements fell apart completely, in the 1970s and the 1980s, economic “externalities”, such as climate change, enormous social inequality, unprecedented economic instability and extremely dangerous geopolitical confrontations, have all been deliberately ignored, almost everywhere, by every major public or private investor. Even nationalized public utilities, like Hydro-Québec, have been forced to operate as if their only goal were to make a profit for their owners.

Montréal is also quite an unlikely city, after all, to have hosted what seems to have been the largest anti-climate-change protest march in the entire world. In spite of the huge numbers of people who participated in that demonstration, it is nevertheless also true that most of the people living in the greater Montréal area are quite conservative, even more so than in some other large cities. At the present time, most of them would certainly not support any radical changes in our ecosystem that involved a massive reduction in their own capacity (for example) to move around freely. Such freedom of movement, given the state of our seriously underdeveloped public transportation system, still necessarily means doing so most of the time, as now, in cars with only one or two people in them at any given time. Walking and cycling are not often terribly viable alternatives.

Developers in Montréal are also just as reactionary as developers in any other large city, as are our very own slum landlords. I verified this for myself the other day when I decided to re-visit Île Sainte-Hélène, part of a public park in the middle of the Saint Lawrence River, near downtown Montréal. For the first time since the previous municipal administration authorized the construction of a huge, fake-Chinese village next to the subway station over there. Which is billed by its promoters, owned by the Montréal Canadians hockey team, as a giant sound-and-light show for pop music to be performed at night. One thousand trees were cut down to allow this project to go ahead, over the objections of hundreds of homeowners on the nearby South Shore, who are regularly forced to give up their sleep time to help entertain the fans. Curiously enough, most of the musicians involved probably support the objectives of the anti-climate-change demonstrators, but not to the extent of refusing to condone backward development.

The area I visited is also right across the other side of the river from Griffintown, a sort of southwestern extension of the extremely built-up downtown area, that used to be full of working-class houses. All that housing has now been replaced with dozens of newer buildings, some of which are just as tall as the ones in the downtown core. True to their nature, the developers of that area concentrated on building mostly luxury condos, often purchased by absentee landowners for speculative purposes, as well as a few more office towers, deliberately deciding not to include any much less profitable infrastructure, such as schools, public parks and social housing. The same attitude was also taken by all the other developers in the greater Montréal region, none of whom have given any indication of wanting to change their approach even on the current projects on which they are now working. None of those people seem the least bit interested in going along with any of the proposals supported by the marchers in the climate-change demonstration, even after the recently-elected, relatively progressive city administration, decided to support those proposals as much as they possibly can, given the much-reduced role assigned to governments these days.

We also have to avoid going overboard on this issue, to guard against over-subscribing to the delirious misinterpretations of reality coming from the dark side of the ecology movement. Some of the more extreme partisans in that movement seem to have given up on human beings altogether, not so secretly hoping that climate change will eventually eliminate people altogether (including themselves). Which they seem to think is the only sure-fire way of preserving what is left of the natural environment on this planet, for the benefit of all the innocent plant and animal species that are currently being wiped out by massive human over-consumption. Eco-fascism is most definitely a “thing” and has been around in fact for quite a long time. So as more and more people become convinced, like the ones in Montréal, about the imminence of the climate change threat, we have to guard against an additional mental-health problem centring on ecological delirium. Keeping it all rational and scientific is the only way that we can attempt to deal with this enormous problem without going down the toilet with it.

But it is not just in the fight against climate change that political correctness has become an increasingly difficult stance to maintain. Dozens of other major political objectives in this world are every bit as controversial as climate change, at least from the point of view of political rectitude, which theoretically seeks to eliminate every form of disgusting behaviour (both neoliberal and neofascist) that currently exists. Nuclear war is also just as much a “clear and present danger” as is climate change, given the ever-increasing number of unstable political regimes currently in power. Not only in Donald Trump’s USA (notice that the initials DT also refer to “delirium tremens”), but also in places like Pakistan. The prime minister of that much beleaguered country, Imran Khan, warned just a few days ago about the imminent danger of nuclear war with India, over the Kashmiri situation. It is also just as possible to get delirious about nuclear annihilation as it is to go insane over climate change, but simply ignoring the possibility of a nuclear exchange altogether is certainly not a more viable option. Not only for human beings but also for all the plants and animals that we were talking about earlier.

Another example of political correctness gone delirious, that is very much in the news right now, also has to do with the increasingly mentally-unstable president of the USA. To wit, Donald Trump’s sickening attempt to blackmail the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, into launching an inquiry into Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s alleged links to corruption in that country. Through his son Hunter’s involvement with a Ukrainian company whose activities were denounced as part of a local corruption scandal. The quid pro quo for Trump being the temporary suspension of several hundred million dollars worth of promised US military aid, designed to help Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression in the southern and eastern parts of its territory. (Why does Vladimir Putin seem to be, once again, the only foreign leader supporting DT on this issue as well?)

Which of course led to the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives decision to launch an inquiry with the intent of impeaching the USA’s extremely unconstitutional president. This kind of political correctness looks perfectly legitimate at first glance, because every one of Trump’s actions since he became a presidential candidate himself three years ago point in exactly the same direction, namely that he has always tried to bully every one of his opponents into complete submission, all over the world, as if he were some kind of mafia chieftain. In the process, he has also deliberately ignored just about every moral principle (separation of powers, involving foreign countries in US elections, accepting emoluments, etc.) enunciated in the entire US constitution, on dozens of different occasions.

Nevertheless, where the political correctness of the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry threatens to break down ideologically lies in the fact that ever since its founding back in 1840, the more “moderate” or “mainstream” elements in the Democratic Party have always been associated with corruption themselves, in hundreds of different scandals that have broken out over the years. In fact, the Democratic Party has long had much the same negative track record on corruption as have most of the leading stalwarts of the Republican Party, ever since its own founding back in 1856.

In recent times, however, following the 1980 presidential campaign that elected Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has pulled significantly ahead of its Democratic counterpart in the championing of corruption. Through its eager endorsement of neoliberalism, deliberately downgrading government’s overall role in the economy and society in general (specifically including the fight against pollution), to the enormously profitable benefit of the billionaire class. Resulting several decades later in the ultra-corrupt government of Donald Trump, a real-estate, casino and “reality” show billionaire, essentially cutting out the political middleman in the USA by dominating the entire country directly as president, rather than (as well as) dominating just a part of it as a major, tax-evading tycoon.

In spite of all that, the 63 million ultra-foolish US citizens who voted for Trump because he demagogically promised to “drain the swamp” of federal politics, still have a point when it comes to Democratic adversaries like Joe Biden. It is not a very big stretch of the popular imagination to suppose that old-fashioned VIPs like Biden might indeed be personally profiting from such events as the young Biden’s business ventures in the Ukraine, as well as from the older Biden’s position as a leading federal politician. Especially given his stint as vice-president from 2009 to 2017, in Democratic administrations that often supported neoliberal legislation as well, although not quite as often as the Republican big-shots did back then.

I have not yet read anything to indicate that either the older or the younger Biden broke any US laws in this particular instance, nor do I expect to read about something like that in the future, because it sounds very much like Trump made the whole thing up. Nevertheless, everything in Joe Biden’s political career points to a person who is as close to ultra-elitist Big Business as any Democratic politician can be. Without crossing the line, however, to the extent that Donald Trump has done from the very beginning, his own business investments profiting very directly every day from the commanding heights of his position as “POTUS”. No one in the USA could possibly be more corrupt than this particular jackass. A fact that does not, however, absolve Joe Biden, or any other mainstream Democrat, from legitimate suspicion in his (or her) own right. People who realize just how laughably corrupt the Trump Republicans have all become are still entirely justified in refusing to accept the Democrats’ attempt to portray themselves as paragons of virtue, when it comes to protecting lower and middle-income citizens from the forty-year-old, libertarian, “open conspiracy” designed to turn the entire country, and the entire world if possible, over to the ultra-rich.

The financial pages in the media are also full these days with dire predictions concerning world economic instability caused by the same kind of absurd over-consumption, with no real money available to support such a thing, that led to the “Great Recession” of 2008. Back then, it was focused on selling millions of houses, all over the world, to millions of people much too poor to pay for their mortgages, whereas nowadays it seems to be concentrated on truly incredible levels of credit-card and student-loan debt, in many different countries once again. Not to mention the fantastically ridiculous, extremely volatile, bitcoin schemes, that also require massive over-consumption of electricity supplies to make them functional. Including Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s exceedingly dangerous proposal for a new kind of libra money, as well as his increasingly delusional attempts to ward off increasing regulatory pressure, from many different quarters, to break his enormous company up into several different pieces. Any criticism of  Zuckerberg over this kind of thing, however, also applies to all the other near-monopoly billionaires in this world, not only in the USA, but also in China (the Alibaba conglomerate, for example) and in many other countries.

All of which is now inciting many financial observers to wonder just how long this kind of thing can continue, before provoking a much more important crash than the 2008 debacle. Especially given the fact that the world’s most important central banks no longer seem to have any wriggle room left over to contain such an event a second time around. The overstated forms of political correctness in this particular case coming from all those pundits in the same financial media who are always pooh-poohing their colleagues’ dire warnings, on the delirious grounds that lightning, after all, does not strike twice in the same place. (Actually, it does, quite often.)

Yet another well-known example of political correctness gone awry, in many different parts of the world, is the attempt that millions of people seem to be making, especially in the Western countries, to accommodate some of the less obviously destructive characteristics of the Muslim fundamentalist movement, which often uses terrorist tactics to meet its goals. Like in Québec, where thousands of naive supporters of political correctness are still firmly opposed to the new provincial law banning the wearing of religious symbols by civil servants deemed to be in positions of authority. These appeasers have gone so far as to change their own definitions of what feminism is all about, in order to cave into the demands of the hijab-wearing anti-feminists belonging to the ultra-right-wing populist, Islamist movement. In reality, Islamic extremism is just another, oriental manifestation of pro-nazi ideology, that is every bit as reactionary and antediluvian as is white supremacy. The self-mortifying appeasers in Québec, and in many other Western countries, are simply supporting one kind of neofascism against another kind, adopting a completely head-in-the-sand attitude according to which only people of Western origin are capable of doing evil.

This kind of identification with the aggressor reminds me very much of a video that I watched recently, depicting the extreme left-wing ideology of political correctness gone utterly insane, in a school called Evergreen College in the state of Washington (USA). White people working for that college, as well as many of the students themselves, were forced to go through political indoctrination sessions worthy of the Maoist Red Guards during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China. In which all white people were deemed to be guilty at birth of supporting “white privilege” just because of the colour of their skin. And in which it was explicitly claimed, on dozens of occasions, that only white people can ever be racist. Professors opposed to this neofascist theory were surrounded by crowds of ultra-left students berating them over and over again, constantly chanting for them to resign.

In the real world, of course, racism is not at all confined to the white-supremacist variety. Nor are white people in the USA always rich and privileged, more than half of them being considered “poor white trash” instead. Anyone living in the state of Washington should also know that one hundred years ago, most of the almost entirely white population in that state back then were also exceptionally poor. Which is why Washington state was one of the main recruiting grounds for the ultra-socialist Industrial Workers of the World. Agreeing with the idea that all white people are privileged, and always have been privileged, seems to indicate that the “ultra-leftist” radicals at the Evergreen college are taking their cues from the German Nazi regime of days gone by, believing that white “Aryans” have always dominated the entire world. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. There are hundreds of millions of poor white people in this world, as there have been in the past, just as there are even more hundreds of millions of poor people possessing various other skin colours.

Not to mention the fact that anyone at all who keeps up with the international news nowadays, even minimally, will have heard over and over again about Chinese racism in Africa, or about South African black people rioting over the presence in their midst of “job-stealing” immigrants from other African countries, or about Sri Lankan Buddhist racism against the Tamil (Hindu) population, or about Burmese buddhist racism against the Rohingya (Muslim) minority, or about anti-indigenous racism being practised regularly all over Latin America, as well as in such “whiter” places as North America, Australia and the Russian Federation. “Even” inside the USA, white racism is most definitely not the only kind of racism currently being practised in every part of that country. People who refuse to recognize that racism is a universal scourge all over the world, practised all throughout history, are just going berserk. This whole thing is completely unreal and is just another example of the delirium mentioned earlier.

Only a few days ago, I also read another article (“Interculturalism versus multiculturalism”), published in the “Montreal Gazette” (October 1, 2019), in which the author, Rahul Varma, specifically denounced something called “majoritarianism”, which seems to refer to rule by the majority of the population. It seems that any majority coming from any kind of demographically dominant population (ethnic, cultural, religious, etc.), anywhere in the world, necessarily commits the sin of “hierarchy” whenever they make any decision at all that could even theoretically be challenged by any kind of minority population. On the grounds that any kind of minority whatsoever would necessarily feel “marginalized”, “disempowered” and suffering from “second-class citizenship”, in any situation in which each and every minority point of view was not equal to each and every majority point of view. Which is an impossible goal, even on the face of it, there being a very large number of different kinds of minorities, in every country in the world, none of which can be expected to agree with every other minority, let alone every majority.

A recent case in point being the ongoing discussion all over Canada about the very poor treatment of indigenous peoples, particularly when they come before the courts. Which led to the development of the “Gladue reports” often used in bail and pre-sentencing hearings, so that judges would not be overly harsh any more, as they often have been in the past, toward such people as indigenous men convicted of committing violent crimes against indigenous women. No one seems to have noticed, however, that whenever an indigenous man gets a reduced sentence (less than what a white man would get in similar circumstances) for having viciously attacked an indigenous woman, the woman ends up being twice victimized, not only by the majority society that mistreated the man, but also by the violent man involved. A situation that seems to parallel the equally deplorable situation in which any woman (of any ethnic origin) finds herself, whenever she is initially victimized by any man who committed some particular sexual crime against her, and again by the surrounding society whenever it decides, as so often happens, to dismiss, or to downplay, her complaint because of a similar, pro-male prejudice.

In “The Gazette” piece, Rahul Varma even went so far as to claim that multicultural Canada was doing the right thing by refusing to be “majoritarian”, while intercultural Québec was not! Which would probably come as a complete surprise to most (or all) of the Canadian minorities, such as any of the indigenous peoples living within its borders, not to mention any of the francophone minorities living in any of the nine anglophone-majority provinces, or the three northern territories. Even the francophone majority in Québec is, after all, just a larger part of the overall francophone minority in Canada (23% of the total population). It is absolutely amazing nowadays just how incredibly foolish, and downright delirious, some of the practitioners of political rectitude have recently become.

Another very interesting example of political correctness gone awry, in a radically different context, is the ongoing debate between the supporters and the enemies of Israel. In that particular debate, people on the Israeli side choose to focus their vitriol exclusively against the mostly-Muslim terrorists operating in that particular theatre of war, whether it be the Hamas organization in Gaza, the Hezbollah organization based in Lebanon, or the Iranian revolutionary guards supposedly controlling those other movements. Their adversaries, however, choose to focus all of their vitriol exclusively against “the Zionist entity” that they  regularly accuse of practising state terrorism and attempted genocide.

Applying the reality principle to that debate, however, does not mean taking a fake-compromise position by blaming both sides equally. It is after all Israel that is the main aggressor in this case, gradually taking over more and more territory that used to be occupied during the colonial period by the Palestinian people. (Who, according to some Israeli historians, may very well be the converted descendants of most of the original Jewish population that used to live in that same region thousands of years ago.) Since its inception in 1948, modern Israel has also managed to maintain a “comfortable” kill ratio of about twenty to one against its regional adversaries, with the help of such extremely well-armed foreign allies as the “Christian Zionists” in the USA.

Opponents of Israel, however, cannot just unthinkingly condone whatever military actions that non-state organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah take against their common enemy. Firing totally un-targeted rockets randomly into Israeli territory is not, after all, a morally neutral method of attack, even if it is considerably less “efficient” than the much more deadly Israeli government counter-attacks. Simply by the force of numbers, the people in Israel being killed by Hamas and Hezbollah are much more likely to be ordinary Israeli civilians than they are to be Israeli soldiers, or Israeli leaders. Not to mention the fact that the victims of those rockets could also include Israeli pacifists, as well as members of Israel’s Arab minority.

To be sure, bombing people from the air, like both Israel and its Western allies often do, is considerably worse. Even Barack Obama’s military drones aimed specifically at pro-terrorist targets in many different parts of the Muslim world ended up killing many more civilians than they did genuine “bad guys”. Identification with the aggressor is not a very comfortable ideological position to adopt, from a moral standpoint, not only in the Middle East but also in every other part of the world in which non-state terrorism has been pitted, over the years, against state terrorism. Which even includes such relatively less well-known events as the Canadian government’s war with the FLQ terrorists in Québec fifty years ago.

Identification with the aggressor also seems to have overtaken politically-correct people operating in numerous other recent situations. Such as the two female lawyers in the USA who apparently helped big-time (and thoroughly corrupt) financier Jeffrey Epstein get away with some of the rape and sexual aggression charges that he faced over the years, especially from underage girls, before his tragic suicide in a prison cell.

Still another example would be many of the different supporters of anarchism, all over the world, who claim that they are trying to fight against evil behaviour through their opposition to any form of government, or state control, over ordinary people’s lives. Many of those anarchists, however, are also libertarians, which means that they are not nearly so eager to condemn the machinations of large private corporations over the same common folk. Even nowadays when “private enterprise”, in many different parts of the world, is trying to control the thoughts and the spending habits of all the less rich and less powerful people in the world, even more than most governments are. With the possible exception of the People’s Republic of China, where current leader Xi Jinping, seen bowing three times recently over the grave of Mao Ze dong, is also the same leader who not so long ago adopted Mao’s own particular delirium of requiring everyone in China to follow his every train of thought, “for the good of the country, and the world”.

These sometimes wildly different examples of political rectitude gone rogue all seem to have at least one thing in common, which is the increasing difficulty millions of people have when trying to react rationally to all the enormous challenges of living in today’s increasingly dangerous world. Flying off the handle in so many different ways is making it even harder to deal with any of these problems, as well as the ever-increasing tendency for all these competing kinds of crises (industrial pollution, enormous social inequality, ever-worsening geopolitical confrontations, ever-increasing economic instability and thought control) to reinforce each other as they unfold together. We need to develop some kind of considered approach to all of these peculiar, post-modern situations if we are to have any hope whatever of resolving any of these crises (or all of them together, if need be) before it is too late.

A much more intelligent response than delirium to any of these different kinds of situations (or all of them at once) would be for everyone making political statements to resolutely avoid overstating one’s case, from an ultra-right as well as from an ultra-left point of view. Not, however, as I pointed out just now regarding Israel’s position in the Middle East, by adopting a ridiculously inappropriate  “compromise solution” to every possible ideological conflict. It is not by avoiding what mainstream, middle-of-the-road politicians mistakenly refer to as a “radical” or an “extremist” point of view, which in their deliberate misinterpretation means any analysis of any political situation that comes too close to genuinely criticizing, or even regularly denouncing, any of their favourite billionaires or rogue governments. It is not some individual’s or group’s position on the left-centre-right yardstick in any particular country that should determine one’s attitude toward the situations in which those people find themselves.

What is important instead is to avoid outrageous over-estimation of any critical characteristic in any given political situation, while at the same time also avoiding equally inaccurate under-estimation of reality, in order to favour some previously-chosen point of view. In other words, to avoid prejudice as much as humanly possible, and to arrive at some particular conclusion concerning some particular situation from the standpoint of a universal-humanist ethic. An ethic that does not discriminate against, or in favour of, any particular empire, country, region, majority or minority culture, religion, social class, or gender, by putting the genuine (and not just the self-perceived) interests of human beings as a whole to the forefront, or at least the greatest possible number of human beings under consideration at any one given time. Which is obviously a very difficult thing to do properly. But for which I submit all the great variety of examples mentioned in this blogpost so as to illustrate my point. Anyone reading my blog has probably already figured out that I am very much an "equal opportunity denouncer" of wrongdoing.

The only kind of political correctness that is acceptable nowadays ought to be the kind that is as close as possible to an objective estimation of the relative importance of all the real, verifiable facts that are currently available to us. Which cannot be merely made up as we go along, like the “fake-news” ramblings of a professional demagogue like Donald Trump, who seems himself to be the most delirious, unreal personality currently alive on this God-forsaken planet. In other words, could everyone just try a little harder to use their brains more often, and to avoid trying to out-Trump the Donald himself, as often as possible? Thank you very much.