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.