Civilization versus barbarism: current trends

This month’s blogpost comes about as a result of all the reading that I did while on a recent vacation. To begin with, I managed to finish reading Chris Harman’s huge opus, “A people’s history of the world: from the stone age to the new millennium”, originally published in 1999. This book is an amazing achievement, even if its title seems a bit more ambitious than its contents. The very long period from the Neolithic age through to the eighteenth century is condensed into the first half of the book, while the second half is devoted exclusively to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Harman’s reasons for concentrating most of his attention on these more recent centuries have to do with how much more dynamic, and occasionally beneficial, human societies have become for the vast majority of people belonging to the “inferior” (downtrodden) social classes, than they ever were before (page 619 in the 2017 Verso version of the book). An additional argument for describing those two centuries in much greater detail, that has been suggested by several other specialists in world history, is demographic acceleration. The fact that the overall human population has increased exponentially since 1800, much more rapidly than ever before, means that of all the human beings who ever lived, most of them lived during these more recent times, or are still alive right now.

One of Harman’s main themes (page 385), for the history of the last two completed centuries, was that at least some of the highly civilized (anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-elitist) goals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which were definitely not being put into practise anywhere in the world back then (page 248), have been at least partially realized, in some parts of the world, in the past two hundred years or so. A conclusion that seems to me to be very much challenged by much of what has been going on during the first twenty years of the new millennium, in which barbarism, unfortunately, seems to be making a significant comeback. A trend that had already begun during the 1980s, with the advent of neoliberalism and neofascism (page 607), but the entirely negative consequences of which did not seem to have had as much of an effect as they should have had on Harman’s somewhat over-optimistic conclusions about the recent past.

Several other books that I read during the same vacation might not seem at first glance to have much in common with the contents of Harman’s work, but it turns out that they all touch on many of the same themes. One of those books was a biography written by Alain Frerejean, “Robert et Élisabeth Badinter: Deux enfants (two children) de la République”, published in 2018, about two very well-known French intellectuals who had quite a large impact on that country, particularly during the tenure of president François Mitterrand (1981-1996). Another book that I read during the same period was a 2019 collection, entitled “Notre laïcité” (“Our laicity”), of recently published articles about the laicity debate in Québec. It was written by Nadia El-Mabrouk, a professor of information technology at the Université de Montréal, who has made almost a second career of her contributions to that highly controversial polemic. The last book that I read while on vacation was the one perhaps least likely to be included in my common theme of “civilization versus barbarism”, but that I still find highly pertinent nevertheless. Its title was “How can I help? A week in my life as a psychiatrist”, by Toronto psychiatrist David Goldbloom and his co-author, Pier Bryden, published in 2016.

When I use the term “civilization” in this context, it refers to the gradual progress in the levels of human civilization that many observers of the recent past have attributed to contemporary society. According to this relatively optimistic point of view, during the last half of the twentieth century, many “ordinary” people’s standard of living considerably improved, at least in what is called the developed part of the world. In comparison with the much more horrible living and working conditions that most people were suffering through, in those same countries, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A positive development that Harman describes quite well in a section entitled “the shortest golden age” (pages 548-551), that initially took place mostly within the Western world (and Japan) during what other historians have called the “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975). Some of the characteristics of which were still in place for a few years after that, in spite of the “best” anti-social efforts of the barbarian partisans of neoliberalism and neofascism, two reactionary ideologies that began taking over most parts of the world during the 1980s.

No one should forget, however, that those improved living and working conditions were by no means universal, not even in the developed part of the world. Millions of people in those same countries, designated as being “below the poverty line” (an elitist expression), did not share in any of those benefits, including the people that right-wing pundits in the USA call “poor white trash”, as well as victims of what is currently being called “systemic racism” (black people, indigenous people, recent immigrants). To which ought to be added, “systemic sexism”, the women in those same groups being much more likely to be among “the poorest of the poor” than the men. As Harman points out (pages 606-607), those improvements in living and working conditions were undermined by the pro-capitalist trend of neoliberalism, resulting in longer average hours of work, such as in the USA (164 more hours worked per year in 1996 than in 1976), and by a much wider income gap between the social classes than what had been the norm before that time.

Those same improvements also depended to an enormous extent on the systemic “under-development” of the so-called “third world” (neocolonial domination of Asia, Africa and Latin America), which were used mainly as sources of raw materials and of fossil fuels in a process that is now being called “extractivism”. Harman does not often refer in his book to the post-1972 ecology crisis, but it seems obvious to me that a great deal of the relative prosperity of a rather small part of the world after the Second World War largely depended on the over-exploitation of resources extracted in huge quantities from nature, resulting in an ever-increasing deluge of all the different kinds of industrial and agricultural pollution. Which were concentrated, like the almost total absence of social progress, in the very same third world. 

Even though technological change is theoretically capable of solving the “scarce resources” problem, by changing the very nature of the resources being extracted, the ongoing, worldwide fixation on fossil fuels nowadays (for example), all over the world, underlines the fact that revolutionary technological change is not happening nearly fast enough, especially not in the energy sector of the world economy. Probably because some of the most important investors in those more backward sectors are not the least bit interested in financing either the discovery, or the adoption, of more advanced technologies.

Massive industrialization, and even more massive levels of pollution, also started to spread during the 1980s to such former third world countries as China, India, Brazil and several other “newly industrialized countries”. Even though the industrial workers in those places are not nearly as well off as many of those in the developed world have become, hundreds of millions of them nevertheless managed to leave behind the considerably bleaker living and working conditions that they used to suffer from when most of them were still poor peasants. Before the 1980s, ultra-poor peasants constituted the vast majority of the population in most of those third world countries, back when the expression ‘third world’ also included all the newly industrialized countries just mentioned.

Nowadays, hundreds of millions of less fortunate people have remained poor peasants in dozens of other countries, those with very little industrialization, or have become ultra-poor, urban slum dwellers living on whatever they can scrape together in the “informal economy”. This description also applies to hundreds of millions of people left behind by recent progress even in the newly-industrialized countries, or in the recently de-industrialized regions of several long-since-industrialized countries, that have fallen behind quite drastically since the 1980s. But at least in the newly industrialized countries, the ultra-deprived category of poor peasants no longer applies to at least 90% of the population, as used to be the case in those partly industrialized countries, and still is the case in dozens of eternally ‘underdeveloped’ countries. The newly-industrialized countries, however, are simply joining the long-since-industrialized countries by also extracting large portions of their raw materials from all those ultra-poor, neocolonial countries that have not yet managed to industrialize to any significant extent.

In this context, the term “barbarism” in my title therefore applies to any recent regressive tendencies, such as the reactionary trends of neoliberalism and neofascism, that threaten to reverse all the social progress so far realized, in those parts of the world that have experienced such (limited) progress. And, left unchecked, to bring back the kind of extreme poverty for almost everyone that characterized all the world’s “traditional” societies prior to the second or third industrial revolutions. It also refers to revived versions of previously existing, ultra-conservative, atavistic ideologies—not only racism, sexism, elitism and extractivism, but also religious fundamentalism, ethnic exclusivism, imperialism and militarism. All these more “traditional”, backward ideologies are being currently reinforced by neoliberalism and by neofascism, in what seems to be a concerted attempt to do away with any forms of social progress whatsoever, for all eternity. And, in the process, making sure that no new, improved versions of genuine, democratic socialism, or of non-totalitarian communism, can be reconstructed so as to introduce more long-lasting social change.

Neoliberalism is particularly dangerous from an ideological point of view, since it is often supported by theoretically pro-democratic, conservative-minded individuals who try to pass off ultra-rich people as merely being “successful entrepreneurs”. Supporters of neoliberalism also try to “remind” everyone that if governments spend too much trying to help ordinary people, and not just rich people, we will end up with an enormous load of public debt, which is not in anyone’s best interests. Ultra-conservative Canadian columnist Diane Francis, for example, constantly tries to soft-pedal neoliberalism’s systemic elitism as mere wealth creation, rather than as the antechamber of neofascism that it has currently become. Even though Diane Francis seems to sincerely detest people like mafia chieftain Donald Trump and his severely under-educated followers, it was (after all) forty years of neoliberalism, and partial deindustrialization, practised in a significantly more intense manner in the USA than in Canada, that turned at least half the US population (as in Russia and in several other countries) into the conspiratorial vigilantes that they have now become.

People like Francis do not seem to realize that neoliberalism is simply a kind of neofascism that was originally reserved for rich investors only, who were fed up with having to share the wealth, even minimally, with ordinary people, during the slightly more progressive period (the thirty glorious years) that preceded the neoliberal onslaught. They wanted to return to a system in which they could concentrate all their efforts on maximizing short-term profit forever, and keeping all the wealth that they “created”, or that they inherited from their predecessors (as in Donald Trump’s case), exclusively for themselves. They did not want to have to worry about sharing with any poorer people inside their own countries, nor with the much more numerous poor people in any other parts of the world, especially not with people who did not resemble them, in “racial” or sexual terms. They also wanted to avoid having to deal with any ethical concerns about environmental pollution, or with any other value systems than the strictly quantitative value of “filthy lucre” (money).

For its part, neofascism, which has taken over dozens of countries all over the world, was reintroduced into the world by ultra-right-wing populist politicians like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, who came to power by convincing millions of ordinary people that they too could copy the anti-social, neoliberal habits of the world’s leading billionaires by denouncing socialism and communism even more loudly than the ultra-rich, ultra-egotistical supporters of neoliberalism have been doing. And by adopting neofascist behaviour instead, supporting racism, sexism, imperialism and militarism every bit as much as rich narcissists like Trump have always been doing. Thereby making sure that ultra-elitist, private capitalists (in countries like the USA) and ultra-elitist state capitalists (in countries like China) could continue to dominate the world together, by accentuating every possible division separating ordinary people all over the world into rival “races”, rival sexes, rival cultures, rival religions, rival empires and rival military systems. Which is to say getting rid of socialism and of communism by getting rid of everything that ordinary people have in common (“common” as in “communism”). The neofascism that people like Francis pretend to hate so much turns out to be nothing but the populist version of the neoliberalism that people like her love so much.

Harman’s very useful book helps to explain how we got into such a horrible mess in the first place. However, his description of the semi-nomadic, Neolithic world is rather old-fashioned, as is his description of how class society got started (in chapter 3 on “the first class divisions”).  For him, early, sedentary, agricultural societies in Mesopotamia, faced with extremely dangerous, control-over-nature issues such as famine and floods, were the first human societies to become divided into distinct social classes. Whereas most historians nowadays are convinced that an initial division, characterized by the domination of genuine aristocrats over the rest of the population, including a significant portion of people reduced to slavery, had already been established in many different Neolithic societies. Harman’s description of that process in Mesopotamia is probably quite accurate, but it does seem that other aristocrats figured out how to get those same results before the agricultural societies in Mesopotamia did, using quite similar methods. Not to forget that Neolithic societies continued to exist in many parts of the world, long after the first agricultural societies (dominated by city-dwelling aristocrats) were set up in the Middle East.

In Harman’s view, classes arose when very small groups of people in those early agricultural societies, who seemed to be proposing solutions to “natural disasters” like famines and floods, opportunistically turned those proposals into what eventually became a developed political program of social control over the vast majority of the population. Through massive exploitation and oppression, they came up with a system whereby the undeserved gratitude of the lower classes was transformed into a method of keeping those tiny groups of narcissistic big-shots fit and healthy when everyone else was starving (page 25). In other words, those ruling elites managed to convince all the “lesser people”, through a sustained campaign of extremely egotistical propaganda (as in Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias”), that their control over society was essential to the preservation of society as a whole.

Which could be seen as a kind of leitmotif for the rest of the book, covering Harman’s entire survey of world history, since the arrival of the first urban civilizations about 5000 years ago. (Many other historians I have consulted over the years think that the first civilizations, at least in Mesopotamia, came into being about 6000 years ago, rather than 5000 years ago, but that controversy has no effect on Harman’s overall argument.) According to him, every major culture so far established in every part of the world, is largely about how similar ruling elites have taken power, following the same general pattern inaugurated in Mesopotamia, over and over again, right up to the present day. Such as in the vast, often slave-owning, empires that were set up one after the other, on almost every continent, during the ancient world, collectively covering the first several millennia of recorded history.

Or in the feudal systems of aristocratic domination over millions of serfs that were established during the thousand-year-old medieval period in Europe (from the fifth century through to the fifteenth century). Similar feudal systems were also founded during the same period, as well as before and after the European “Middle Ages”, whenever large empires, in many other parts of the world (such as China), also broke down for protracted periods of time into similarly tiny pieces of seigneurial autonomy. Which often lasted for as long in non-European cultures as they did in many different parts of Europe.

This same pattern of aggravated elitism was also repeated in the capitalist empires of modern colonialism, that eventually came to dominate most of the rest of the world during the five-hundred-year period of Western expansion (from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries). Which often co-existed alongside the remnants of previously existing, non-European empires (such as the Mughal empire in India), as well as alongside the remnants of non-European feudal systems in many of those same places.

Some historians (not including Harman) have also divided the capitalist period of Western expansion into sub-periods of contrasting tendencies, starting with mercantilism (or commercial capitalism), from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, characterized by joint state/private control over society. This was then followed by three shorter periods: laissez-faire liberalism (industrial capitalism), reinforcing private control over society, at the expense of the state, that largely dominated most of the nineteenth century; neomercantilism, a return to joint private/state control over society, that lasted from the late 1880s through to the early 1980s; and neoliberalism, a largely successful rerun of laissez-faire austerity that has dominated the world over the most recent forty years of history.

As his title indicates, Harman’s focus is on popular history, while the more traditional compendiums of historical events insist on treating everything that ever happened as being the exclusive result of the outstanding contributions to society of a very limited number of “great men” (occasionally including a few “great women”). Instead, Harman tried to put the emphasis on what was happening to the much more numerous people in the lower classes of society during every period, and in every region, who did not just follow along slavishly (so to speak) with everything that the great ones were proposing along the way. In other words, he made a concerted attempt in his book to avoid the overwhelming elitism of traditional history writing, which amounts to a chronicle of history directly concerning only a very small percentage of the overall human population.

Harman’s account, however, does not always succeed in doing what it was originally intended to do. His treatment of the peasantry, for example, by far the largest social class in the world until quite recently, is not nearly as well developed as is his treatment of the working-class, particularly the industrial workers. It is only within the past fifty years or so that the entire working-class (agricultural, industrial and service workers counted altogether), have become more numerous than peasants within the world’s total population. Nevertheless, as I pointed out earlier, over three-quarters of the entire world’s population are still ultra-poor, either persisting as rural peasants, or by becoming urban slum-dwellers instead, just managing to stay alive in today’s world, by hook or by crook, without access to full-time, paid employment.

Harman’s treatment of the history of women is even more severely under-developed, in spite of several valiant efforts made along the way (such as on pages 29-30). His first significant mention of such primary issues as concern over premarital sex and contraception, for example, only appear during his treatment of the twentieth century (page 382). Which he attempts to justify by claiming that women’s active participation in society has, after all, only become possible within the past one or two centuries (page 551). Without a doubt, a large part of his inadequate treatment of women’s history comes from a relative paucity of sources from which to draw, since history writing as a whole has long suffered from the same gender gap. But it seems to me that even in 1999 (first publication), the sources existed by that time, in women’s history, to offer a more thorough account of what was happening to fifty percent of the entire world’s population, during every period.

Harman’s book also suffers from a much too accommodating attitude toward organized religion. Although it is obvious that, like any good Marxist, he does not appreciate religion or superstition very much (page 385), his account of the coming-into-being of Christianity (pages 91-100) puts a lot of emphasis on how attractive it initially was to poor and middle-class people (especially women) living within the Roman Empire. He goes on to explain how the imperial administration, that initially fought against Christianity, started promoting it instead as part of its own ideological world-view toward the end of the fourth century.

But he never comes to any general conclusion, anywhere in the rest of the book, about how important all the most important Christian doctrines eventually became, in upholding imperial strategies of domination throughout its more recent history, whether in the Orthodox Christian empires, the Catholic empires, or the Protestant empires. Nor does he touch upon fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity’s current love-affair with any of the ultra-right-wing populist movements that started becoming a great deal more important during the last twenty years of the twentieth century. A phenomenon that has, admittedly, become much easier to spot nowadays, eleven years after Harman’s death, with the rise to power of such ultra-Christian demagogues as Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban, Andrzej Duda and all the others.

The social-Darwinist version of ultra-individualist Christianity (“God helps those who help themselves”) is, however, not the same as the Madison Avenue version of Christianity that Harman himself seems to have encountered when he was a child in Sunday school (page 629, note 127). Nowadays, an ultra-right-wing Christian would refuse to help the proverbial old, handicapped lady cross the street, on the grounds that if God had wanted her to stay alive, he would not have made her so vulnerable in the first place. These people think that anyone who possesses even a limited kind of social conscience (Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau), or pretends to do so, is necessarily a communist.

Harman’s treatment of some of the other religions also suffers from understatement of their inherently reactionary attitudes toward political power, which could at least partly be a consequence of his tendency to discuss the history of Christianity in significantly greater detail than the history of any of the other major religions. Which mostly enter into his text only when he has to deal with such major events as the Crusades, or the 1947 division of British India into the separated republics of India and Pakistan. His most recent references to Islam have to do with such events as the war between Iran and Iraq during the 1980s. In which he saw Islam as being largely irrelevant in dynamic terms, divided into political factions not having much to do with religion, such as between the equally Islamic rulers of Iraq (Saddam Hussein an Islamic ruler?) and the ultra-Islamic rulers of Iran (page 598). For him, the ultra-conservative movements that sprang up all over the Muslim world since the Iranian revolution of 1979 were caused much more by frustration among young people unable to get secure employment (page 600), than by anything fundamentally religious.

In my opinion, this analysis radically understates the importance of Islamic fundamentalism itself, that like all the other major religions has experienced succeeding waves of religious revival throughout history, always with disastrous consequences so far as the ongoing development of civilization is concerned. The current rise of similar kinds of ultra-right-wing populist movements within Islam are quite similar to those associated during this same period with Christian fundamentalism. Not to mention Hindu and Sikh fundamentalism (along with the Muslim kind) in today’s India, Buddhist fundamentalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Confucianist fundamentalism in China and Shintoist fundamentalism in Japan. Most of today’s neofascist movements on every continent, that started their current revival during the 1970s, have as much to do with religious fundamentalism as they have to do with ethnic exclusivism, or with any other contributing factor. Neofascism, one of the major causes of today’s barbarian backlash against everything civilized, cannot simply be attributed to the effects of high levels of unemployment, any more than similar social disturbances caused twentieth century fascism, all by themselves.

But in spite of all these necessary criticisms, Harman’s book is still chock full of inspired analysis, some of which he often borrowed, or further developed, from the very numerous sources mentioned in his extremely extensive footnotes and bibliography. As in his comparison (page 32) between the way that impressive buildings constructed by the ancient empires, such as the Mesopotamian ziggurats or the Egyptian pyramids, were used to reinforce the ideological domination of early rulers just as much as more recent monuments such as the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building are currently being used for the same purpose. The millions of ordinary tourists visiting some of those same structures nowadays seem to me to be spending a large part of their vacation money on finding out just how many millions of their ancestors were starved to death, or perished in horrendous construction “accidents”, for the greater glory of all those dominant, ultra-egotistical, toxic personalities from the distant, or not-so-distant past.

Another example of good analysis in his book lies in the number of times that he offers such useful information as the fact (page 167) that there were more indigenous warriors on the Spanish side than on the Aztec side, during the final battle (1519) that destroyed that particular regional empire. Or the fact (page 395) that half the “Italian” soldiers in the battle of Adowa (1896), by which Ethiopia maintained its independence from Italy until 1935, were Eritrean and Tigrayan militants, fighting against the oppressive Ethiopian empire. And that many of the “British” troops fighting in the Sudan were of Egyptian or Sudanese origin. This is another important aspect about European imperialism taking over most of the rest of the world during the “colonial period” (from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries). Every European empire was always supported by hundreds of local minorities, fighting against previously existing regional empires. In other words, all the non-European empires all over the world, from the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia down to the most recent empires operating in China (whether of Chinese or of other-Asian origin), were just as imperialist, and as colonialist, as the European empires were, only on a more limited (regional) scale.

Because of its worldwide scale, however, Western imperialism (Europe and the USA) has been a lot more destructive than any of the more regional forms of non-European imperialism. For example, Harman also points out in his book (page 249) that although two million Europeans emigrated to the Americas between 1492 and 1820, and ten million African slaves were forced to migrate to the Americas during the same period, the white population of the Americas in 1820 was 12 million people, twice the number of black people. Which is an excellent way of emphasizing just how murderous chattel slavery foisted on African populations really was back then, killing a lot more people than did the extreme poverty engendered by the practice of indentured servitude also forced on several million European immigrants during the same period.

Harman’s treatment of slavery in Africa (pages 248-256), however, appears to put a bit too much emphasis on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, rather than on the intra-African slave trade or on the Muslim empires’ slave trade, also based in Africa, both of which also involved millions of victims, started earlier and lasted longer than the trans-Atlantic trade. There is considerable evidence demonstrating that the slave system still exists in some parts of Africa even today. Without ignoring the fact (page 256), nevertheless, that the more intensive, trans-Atlantic trade caused overall population decline in many regions of Africa, particularly between 1750 and 1850, and, with neocolonialism replacing old-fashioned colonialism, has held Africa back considerably since that time. Japan and China, however, are also currently participating in neocolonialism, alongside most of the Western countries (including Canadian and Australian mining companies), in Africa and in many other parts of the world.

In the second half of the book, on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Harman also devotes a considerable part of his analysis to the numerous inadequacies of what might be called the “false friends” of the working-class in various different parts of the world, meaning self-centred elements within the trade-union bureaucracy, the social-democratic parties and the leaders of the (self-proclaimed) communist parties. In case after case after case, starting with the French Revolution but especially using twentieth-century examples, he shows in great detail how often ultra-narcissistic leaders inside those three groups of competing bureaucracies sold out the workers’ cause to their capitalist adversaries. According to Harman, even when radical masses of workers managed to win several major confrontations with their employers, and with the pro-capitalist governments that supported those employers, over and over again those false friends of the working-class decided to hand power back to the very people who had just been defeated on the social battlefield.

The most horrible example of this kind of navel-gazing being the communists in Germany, whose complete disdain for joint action with the so-called “social fascists” in the reformist Social-Democratic Party led to the victory of the Third Reich (pages 489-490). Even in the Soviet Union, the leaders of that initially successful revolution (in 1917) ended up merely recreating a new-class (bureaucratic) version of the Ancien Régime. The Soviet leaders (i.e., Stalin) initiated the disastrous “social-fascist” strategy during the USSR’s very brief, ultra-communist Third Period (1928-1934), and imposed it on all the other communist parties under their control. Which led not only to the victory of real fascism in Nazi Germany, but also in many other countries. Such as in Spain, for example, which led Harman to denounce as total hogwash the erroneous interpretation of a rival Marxist historian in Britain, Eric Hobsbawm, according to whom Franco was not really a fascist after all (page 509).

To be sure, Harman’s radical treatment of the false friends of the working-class (with friends like that, who needs enemies?) is a straightforward consequence of his life’s work as one of the leading lights in the Trotskyist movement worldwide, and the “Socialist Workers Party” in Britain. So it should come as no surprise to any reader that he did everything he could to put down and denounce every non-Trotskyist actor with ties to the working-class, or to the national liberation movements in the colonial and neocolonial countries, especially those who had a lot more popular support than most of the tiny Trotskyist movements ever had. According to the Internet, Harman seems to be best known, at least outside his home country, for his denunciation of Ho Chi Minh, who had the leader of the Trotskyist movement in Vietnam put to death in 1945. Harman also shows his devotion to the Trotskyist cause by including the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary (1956) and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the 1968 one in Czechoslovakia (pages 564-566), as genuine workers’ rebellions against state capitalism. To make matters worse, Harman does not deal in any direct way with Leon Trotsky’s own probable complicity in the Bolshevik assault on the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 (page 447).

Personally, I have never had a great deal of contact with anyone from the Trotskyist movement. However, I think it would be completely absurd to just dismiss the dozens of pages in his book that Harman devotes to this issue as being completely bogus. Although I do not think that all the trade-union, social-democratic, or communist (Stalinist) leaders in history did everything they could to sabotage every genuine, working-class rebellion, or even every genuine national liberation movement, I also think that Harman is on to something here. I am certainly not nearly as well-read as he is in order to argue for or against his point of view in any specific case. He also acknowledges that at least the Vietnamese communists, who initially accepted Soviet advice about refusing to take over all of Vietnam after their total defeat of the French empire during the Indochinese war (1946-1954), nevertheless resolutely went on to total victory over the US empire (and their Catholic allies in South Vietnam) in 1975, although at an enormous cost (page 572).

  

But I do get the general impression, from my own limited political experience as well as from my own extensive readings over the past fifty years or so, that more than a few leaders of all those movements have become much more involved in ideological posturing, and in a kind of perverted “office politics”, by concentrating most of their attention on fighting against rival movements, or rival factions within their own movements (including inside Trotskyist movements), rather than on doing what they were theoretically supposed to be doing. In other words, as the people in the black liberation movement in the USA often say, they “took their eyes off the prize”, for purely opportunistic reasons.

To the extent that it does indeed seem that those theoretically left-wing leaders often ended up using the support they got from millions of ordinary people to manoeuvre around politically and to enjoy being important, rather than sticking to the far more difficult, original goal of effecting genuine social change. Which means that they very much betrayed the millions of militant martyrs who died quite honestly in the pursuit of what they foolishly thought was everyone’s common goal. In that sense, it might even be appropriate to include the false friends of the working-class, or the false friends of the ordinary citizens of the “developing world”, among those tiny groups of opportunist narcissists that Harman was referring to in his third chapter, on the class divisions in the early, Mesopotamian agricultural societies. Which would also bring the entire history of “ordinary people” full circle, back to the beginning of rural/urban civilization, if we accept the idea that those left-wing sellouts were simply replicating the narcissistic big-shot, opportunism that took place in those early civilizations, almost 6000 years ago!

Another, truly impressive, way in which Harman argues his case are the straightforward, no-strings-attached denunciations that he so often makes of undisputedly reactionary leaders, who constantly mistreated “ordinary people” in dozens of different ways, just to take power, or to stay in power. Such as Julius Cesar’s killing or enslaving over a million Gauls, for the greater glory of the Roman empire (page 78), which was already a huge empire long before modern, establishment historians officially designated it as an official Empire, with a capital “E”. Or the “Thirty Years War” in seventeenth century Europe, which started out as a war of religion between Catholic and Protestant aristocrats, before resulting in the killing off of one-third of the entire German population at that time (page 196). Or with some of the more cynical Enlightenment philosophers, along with certain “revolutionary” leaders in the USA, who were capable of declaring that “all men are created equal”, while simultaneously upholding the ridiculous idea that non-whites were not men (page 253). Or the “200-year litany of complaints about the executions of (a relatively small number of) aristocrats and royalists” during the French Revolution (page 294), contrasted with the millions of peasants killed off (mostly through famine) during the Ancien Régime: “as Mark Twain once put it, ‘there were two reigns of terror: one lasted several months, the other a 1000 years’”.

Or the British takeover of India after the Seven Years’ War, whose imposition of industrial  textiles on the Indian market rapidly led to the collapse of the very prosperous, hand-woven textile trade in that country. An overall colonization process by which a previously very rich country ended up becoming very poor instead, millions of people subsequently dying off in various famines and epidemics, along with the reinforcement of already existing caste and religious differences (pages 356-359). Or the fact that Egyptian strongman Mohamed Ali’s attempted industrialization of his country during the nineteenth century was ruined by the British army and navy (page 363). Or the fact that improvements in workers’ living standards in countries like Britain, during the ‘Gilded Age’ at the end of the nineteenth century, depended very much on imperial expansion in the colonial world (page 398).

Or the fact that the UK’s oldest colony, Ireland, suffered as much as any part of Africa or Asia during the mid nineteenth century (page 450), notably from what the “Hibernian Society” has denounced as a deliberately induced famine, killing off a million people and forcing another million people into exile. Or the Stalinist-induced famine during the 1930s, in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, that killed off at least three million peasants (page 478). Or Harman’s total rejection of Eric Hobsbawm’s claim (page 524) that the Second World War was an example of “progress versus reaction”, among other reasons because Winston Churchill, who while not nearly as disgusting as Adolf Hitler, was nevertheless an imperialist reactionary for most of his long political career.

Churchill started out supporting British imperialism as a soldier in the Sudan at the outset of his adult life, then went on to support the shooting of striking miners in the UK, as well as the use of poison gas against the Kurds in Iraq, and quite often heaped heartfelt praise on Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy from the seizure of power in 1922, right up to that dictator’s 1938 alliance with Hitler (page 524). Not to mention Churchill’s support for British troops crushing anti-imperialist demonstrations in India during World War II, his refusal to concede even the principle of future independence in India, which brought about the formation of a pro-Japanese “liberation army” in Bengal (led by ex-Congress president Chandra Bose) and the death of three million peasants in a famine inside that same region (page 527). And Churchill’s totally unrealistic 1945 plan, to eliminate his former Russian ally by rearming millions of defeated German soldiers in order to invade the USSR (page 543).

In spite of all this skulduggery, Harman nevertheless acknowledges Churchill’s one positive contribution to history by pointing out that at least half the British ruling class in 1940 favoured making a deal with Hitler (pages 525-526), though Harman seems to have been unaware (page 513) of how at least half the patricians in the USA (such as George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush) held the same opinion at the time. Nor does he seem to realize (page 517) that the first version (1933-1935) of FDR’s ‘New Deal’ was a lot more reactionary than his much more liberal-democratic second version (1935-1939), which included the pro-union Wagner Act. A change of direction that may have had something to do with the pro-communist general strikes of 1934 (page 514), in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo (Ohio). Which did not prevent the same US administration later on from dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, mostly to prevent Soviet troops from occupying the northern half of that country (page 527).

Harman also goes on to describe the “ethnic cleansing” that killed between 250 000 and a million people, after the UK’s decision to play the Muslim card in its not-so-non-violent decolonization of India and Pakistan (pages 551-554). While also pointing out that food production per person in India during the 1950s was no higher than it already had been during Akbar’s reign 400 years earlier (page 560). During the same period, further east, the ‘Cold War’ between rival imperial ideologies also led to the killing of two million civilians during the Korean War of 1950-1953, as well as another two million soldiers, most of them on the communist side (page 547). Similar “results” were also obtained during the Vietnam War (1957-1975), both wars involving direct US military intervention, while the killing of at least five hundred thousand Communist Party members in Indonesia (1965) was carried out by military allies of the USA within that country (page 571). Needless to say, Harman did not shy away from also describing the People’s Republic of China’s own induced famines, that killed off at least thirty million peasants, particularly during the “Great Leap Forward” of 1958-1961 (pages 572-576).

Harman also cites US historian Gabriel Kolko’s denunciation of Eric Hobsbawm’s assertion that the post-war communists in France, Italy or Greece could not have taken power in any of those countries because they would have been crushed by joint military action taken by the USA and the UK (page 538). For the simple reason that the vast majority of the American and British soldiers and citizenry in 1946 desperately wanted to stop fighting and to “bring the boys home” right away. He also underlines just how much the Soviet communists and the Chinese communists hated each other, especially after Stalin advised Mao Ze dong to forget about trying to take all of China away from the “Nationalist” Party in the late 1940s (pages 554-556). To the extent that it was only the USA’s curious obsession with “the world communist conspiracy” that convinced the USSR and the PRC to cooperate at all together during the 1950s.

Needless to say, he also lambastes the Western imperialist attempts to hang on to most of their colonial possessions, often with great loss of life in many different countries. Including atrocities committed “even” by the British, who, among other delicacies, cut off the heads of “terrorists” in Malaya and used concentration camps against nationalists in Kenya (pages 556-558), as they had already done during the Boer War in South Africa (against white people) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Curiously, however, he did not mention at all the very considerable role in Kenya of British general Frank Kitson (who later became Queen Elizabeth’s aide-de-camp), especially his duplicitous tactic of using fake “counter gangs” of “anti-British” militants. Inducing them to imitate the real Mau-Mau revolutionaries by also committing terrorist acts against the colonial population, in a bid to get the reluctant British government to send a much larger counter-insurgency force into that country. A tactic that Kitson apparently also used in Ireland later on, and that was also apparently copied by the federal police in Canada (the RCMP) in their fight against the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec).

He did, however, thoroughly denounce the secret services and the armed forces in Italy, during the 1970s, who worked with known fascists to plant bombs around the country, in an attempt to provoke an ultra-right-wing coup d’état (page 539). And he warned the world about the dangers of adopting the ultra-cynical, “post-modernist” attitude, for which all points of view are equally valid, and according to which social classes no longer exist (page 589). He ended the main part of his book by once again denouncing the incredible gall of the world’s most important (and very real) ruling classes: “They will defend the existing capitalist order to the end—even if it is the end of organized life” (page 620).

All in all, in spite of a number of significant weaknesses, Harman’s book is quite an important achievement, by an author who fully realizes how precious human civilization really is. Even though he is not at all taken in by any of the ridiculous claims of traditional, pro-establishment historians, for whom everything civilized has to be the exclusive property of (who else?) people of considerable property.

The second book that I read during my recent vacation, after finishing Harman’s huge book, was Alain Frerejean’s biography of Robert and Élisabeth Badinter. These two intellectuals had a considerable influence on French politics, especially during the presidency of Socialist Party leader François Mitterrand, from 1981 to 1996. Robert Badinter was initially a well-known criminal lawyer in France, who used his new government post as “Garde des sceaux” (minister of justice) under Mitterrand to successfully lobby in favour of the abolition of the death penalty. A barbarian relic of days gone by that is still, unfortunately, very much in place in countries like the USA and China. He also interpreted the clash between the principles of the Enlightenment, favouring abolition, and the literal interpretations of the Koran by radical Islamic supporters of the death penalty (page 226), as a “dialogue de sourds” (which can be translated as an impossible debate between two ideologically “deaf” people).

His wife, Élisabeth, inherited a considerable fortune from her father, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, but spent most of her life trying to put into practice the anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-elitist principles of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the very same principles that Chris Harman also supported. According to Frerejean (pages 30-31), she also “inherited” that somewhat contradictory point of view from her great grandfather, Édouard Vaillant, a heroic figure for leftists in France because of his participation in the legendary Commune de Paris (1870-1871), as well as being one of the founders of the SFIO (“Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière”) (“the French section of the Workers’ International”) in 1905.

Robert and Élisabeth Badinter participated in the same Mitterrand government that was also one of the early victims of the rise of neoliberalism during the early 1980s. Being elected into office for the first time, in 1981, Mitterrand promptly nationalized several important French corporations, following the traditional program of the Socialist Party. That move, however, was very severely attacked by the same leaders of international capitalism, and of the most important French corporations, who had used the “war against inflation” as a method of initiating a whole new period of history, neoliberalism. Which successfully replaced the more progressive Keynesian regimes of the post-war period (the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975), and reinstalled the laissez-faire liberalism of the nineteenth century, that has come to dominate the entire world (including China) since 1979. Mitterrand’s government lost the battle against neoliberalism in 1983 and re-privatized all the French corporations that had previously been nationalized.

There is nothing at all in Frerejean’s biography about any of that, but it seems obvious that the Badinter couple, who were quite popular in France at that time, greatly contributed to politically reviving Mitterrand’s regime after the inglorious defeat of its original socio-economic program. As justice minister, besides abolishing the death penalty, Robert Badinter also adopted several other social reforms, such as abolishing the “crime” of homosexuality. Even though the previous law condemning homosexuality did not seem to have had any dissuasive effect (page 190), in this case abolition appears to have meant that the French state officially condoned not only sexual relations between consenting adults, but also between adult homosexuals and adolescent boys (between the ages of 15 and 18). Not, in my opinion, the best way to go about discouraging pedophilia. After his stint as justice minister, Badinter was also appointed for several years to the very important Conseil constitutionnel in France, where he participated (page 208) in eliminating a law that would have recognized the Corsican people as being distinct from the people of France. Another error in my opinion, but which was difficult to oppose, given the rigid definition of popular sovereignty that has always been an important characteristic of French republicanism.

It is also very interesting to note that, like Ernest Renan and Arthur Koestler, Badinter believes that the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe were largely descended from the nomadic Khazar people, originally living near the (future) “borderline” between Europe and Asia, who were converted en masse to Judaism in 740 (page 285). Although Frerejean does not underline this fact, such a belief contradicts Zionist propaganda, according to which most of the world’s Jews nowadays, including the ones in Europe, are direct descendants of the Biblical (Semitic) Jews, living in the same geographical region as today’s Israel. Badinter’s point of view therefore seems to put him on an ideological collision course with the current, ethnic-exclusivist, leaders of Israel, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, and could help to explain his own French republican sympathies. If we also reference Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s recent theory, according to which today’s Palestinians are the modern representatives of the original Jewish population of Israel in the ancient world (who converted first to Christianity, and then to Islam), this puts a whole new perspective on things.

Robert Badinter was also very much involved, along with Mitterrand, in the enormous controversy surrounding the trial of Klaus Barbie, the Nazi “butcher of Lyon”, who had become a CIA agent in South America (Peru and Bolivia) after the Second World War (page 230), but was eventually found by a couple of very clever Nazi hunters and brought back to France. Badinter was especially eager to condemn Barbie (whose guilt was only contested by neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers) in the 1987 trial, because his own father had been killed in a Nazi gas chamber after having been deported from Lyon as a Jew. It turned out, however, that François Mitterrand himself had been one of the French politicians during the war who had collaborated with the Nazi occupation of their country, although in a relatively minor role. The same Mitterrand, however, made things a lot worse during his period as president, when he also became Robert Badinter’s best friend, by being seen in public quite often, socializing with such much more important ex-collaborators as René Bousquet and Jean-Paul Martin (pages 235-243). Which, although Frerejean never uses that term in his book, seems to me to mean that Mitterrand was betraying Badinter in a very personal and a very hurtful way.

For her part, Élisabeth Badinter, although never participating in the Mitterrand government like her husband did, nevertheless contributed greatly to the popularity of that regime during the same period, publishing several well-received books and articles on feminism and laicity. Like Robert Badinter, she also very firmly supported French republicanism, rather naively believing that the rich and the poor, men and women, believers in religion as well as unbelievers, recent immigrants as well as people whose families had lived in France for generations, could all be good, French-speaking republicans together (page 274). Which nevertheless precluded capitulating to fundamentalist Islam’s anti-feminist arguments in favour of encouraging female believers to wear the hijab and all the other kinds of cover-up clothing, ostensibly to help prevent male lewdness (page 275). She went so far as to compare French submission to radical Islam in recent years to the French Communist Party’s habit, between 1936 and 1956, of refusing to criticize the Stalinist purge trials that resulted in the deaths of thousands of (theoretically) non-conforming party members. She also condemned false-leftist support for Muslim “victims of colonization”, because in so doing they created an unnatural amalgam between the terrorists and the victims of terrorism (page 280).

The one part of her feminism that I did not like so much, however, is when she criticized the “new wave” of feminist militants who she thought were treating women like children, by ostensibly encouraging them to see themselves as victims, incapable of saying “no” to men and therefore being reduced to taking those men to court instead (page 272). Personally, I do not feel that genuinely victimized women should refuse “state paternalism” (what Americans call “the nanny state”) and do their fighting against toxic masculinity all by themselves. That sort of do-it-yourself attitude seems to me be similar to the attitude of those ultra-individualist, macho workers who refuse to join trade unions because they feel that they can deal with the bosses on their own, without any help from others.

The third book that I read during my very productive vacation was Nadia El-Mabrouk’s “Notre laïcité” (“Our laicity”), published in 2019. As I pointed out earlier, this is a collection of articles for the most part already published in francophone newspapers, about the laicity debate in Québec. Which particularly focuses on what is called “Bill 21”, a law reinforcing Québec’s official commitment to religious neutrality by banning the wearing of religious garb at work for provincial employees deemed to be in positions of authority. Nadia El-Mabrouk is a professor of information technology at the Université de Montréal, who was born in Tunisia and is a leading member of an association of former North Africans actively promoting the cause of laicity in Québec, and therefore thoroughly opposed to ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Islam. She is also just as fervent in her promotion of feminism, denouncing such incredibly stupid decisions as that made by one Québec school, preventing a young girl from listening to music produced by the other students in her class, by forcing her to wear an anti-noise helmet, because her Islamic fundamentalist parents forbade her to listen to anything as sinful as music (page 125).

I am quite sure, therefore, that El-Mabrouk would completely agree with my criticism of Élisabeth Badinter’s “state paternalism” point of view in the above paragraph. Most of the pages of El-Mabrouk’s book are full of passionate denunciations of the bogus “individual choice” argument, which is constantly being used in Québec, and in dozens of other countries, as a way of attempting to legitimize antediluvian attitudes toward society. In her opinion, it is the worst kind of neoliberalism (“néolibéralisme sauvage”) to use a slogan like “free choice” in order to prevent any government from trying to preserve the collective rights of any society, in order to protect itself from any kind of reactionary behaviour. Not only concerning such fake “fundamental rights” as being allowed to wear the hijab, in any circumstances whatsoever, but also by using the same slogans to defend, on the same individualist grounds, such other harmful practices as prostitution and surrogate motherhood.

In her view, the ultra-individualist approach would also make it impossible for Québec to defend its French-language Charter (“Bill 101”) against creeping anglicization (page 114). In her book, she often denounces the false-leftist political party called “Québec solidaire” (QS) for its constant use of the “individual choice” argument in this debate. Which leads me to wonder exactly how an organization like QS, if it ever succeeds in getting elected to government, is supposed to put any part of its social-democratic program into effect. That is, if it continues to insist on getting every single citizen’s individual agreement with every law it proposes to adopt, such as eliminating tax evasion on the part of ultra-rich, individual investors.

El-Mabrouk also cites a retired judge from the Supreme Court of Canada, Claire L’Heureux-Dubé, to the effect that no “fundamental right” can be considered reasonable if it is not compatible with the notion of equality (page 110). According to El-Mabrouk, it is completely ridiculous to consider completely reactionary points of view as being “feminist” just because some misguided women also hold such views, such as women opposed to getting the right to vote, or women supporting polygamy, or women supporting excision, or women supporting selective abortion (favouring boys over girls), and so on (page 116). In my opinion, this is just another proof that neoliberalism is very much the antechamber of neofascism. When “individual rights” are used in this absurd way, they become a projection of some reactionary minority group’s collective opposition to the equally collective rights of the majority.

As El-Mabrouk puts it, emancipation is not the same thing as submission (page 122), and autonomy of judgement really is a prerequisite for freedom of conscience (page 123). In fact, the whole neoliberal attempt to use individual rights against collective rights is just another form of Orwellian falsification, in which liberty is slavery, “living together” means living apart (in eternally separated, religious communities), equality is confounded with alienation, neutrality is confounded with religious favouritism and inclusion is redefined to mean that “the other person” must always remain an eternal stranger (page 31). Self-proclaimed “false feminists” can write as many articles as they want, even in theoretically feminist journals (like Québec’s “Gazette des femmes”), about letting women have the right to “choose” to be as reactionary as they want to be, their deliberately convoluted points of view are still supremely anti-feminist.

The one part of El-Mabrouk’s overall argument that I do not agree with, at least not entirely, is when she claims that Québec, as an entity, is not racist or in favour of “Islamophobia” (page 81). Or when she rejects accusations of systemic racism against Western society in general (page 84). In my opinion, what she ought to have said is that Québec is not any more racist, nor any more inclined toward Islamophobia, than is any other part of the world. Even though the concept of race has no biological validity, there are more than a few racists living in Québec, just like there are more than a few such people living in every other country. Some of those racists living all over the world can also be found among government people, as well as in the general population.

I also believe that every human being ought to be afraid of every religion, not just Islam, because all of them are constantly preaching in favour of completely non-existent, supernatural concepts that are no more real than the non-existent, biological validity of race. People also ought to be particularly afraid of the fundamentalist kind of religious belief, because it is always accompanied by the proselytizing of completely reactionary ideas, as well as by imposing barbarian religious practices. However, there is no doctrinal reason to be more afraid of Islam than of any other religion, even though Islam is, after all, going through a particularly anti-liberal, atavistic phase at the present time, like the one that the Catholic Church suffered through during the reign of Pope Pius IX (1846-1878).

I also think that racism is systemic everywhere on this planet, not just in Québec or in any other part of the Western world. So far as I can tell, racism is systemic because it is in fact an ideological disease affecting the entire human system of life, all over the world. The most obvious proof of which being that the people identified by reactionaries as belonging to so-called “inferior races” always end up at the bottom of human society, doing the worst possible jobs and living the worst possible lives. Sexism, however, is just as systemic as racism, since it is the women of all the (false) races pre-designated by any given social majority as being “inferior”, who end up further down the totem pole than do the men supposedly belonging to those same “races”.

Elitism is also systemic, because it is no accident that some people, namely the richest, the most powerful and the most influential people, have been running the world since the whole system of social classes was invented. Which is why the people at the bottom of the heap (those who tend to belong to socially-defined “inferior” races, and to “the weaker sex”) are always (once again) those forced to do the worst jobs and are treated the worst by everyone else in dozens of other ways. Many of the people belonging to the category known as “poor white trash” in the USA, for example, support elitist racism and sexism, because it allows them, in spite of their extreme poverty, to still feel superior to at least somebody, even closer to the bottom of society than they are. All of this is horrible and disgusting, but has also been the way of the world, most of the time, at least since the Neolithic period.

All the other reactionary ideologies that I identified earlier in this blogpost (extractivism, ethnic exclusivism, religious fundamentalism, imperialism, militarism, neoliberalism and neofascism) are also eminently systemic. Moreover, all those reactionary ideologies (including racism, sexism and elitism) work together all the time, reinforcing each other. So, in my opinion, it is not an accurate description of reality for anyone to deny that systemic racism really exists, or to pretend that it is only being supported as a concept by ultra-radical, anti-white racists.

However, many of the people who recognize the existence of systemic racism, such as Québec citizens Émilie Nicolas and Dominique Anglade, do indeed use that term in an often inappropriate, opportunist way. Émilie Nicolas, whose father was of Haitian origin, is a journalist and an anti-racist militant, who was a leading member of the Québec Liberal Party’s Youth Commission during the early part of the 2010-2019 decade. She was also a co-founder of the “Québec inclusif” movement, that was thoroughly opposed to the Parti Québécois government’s controversial “Charter of Québec values” in 2013-2014 (since abandoned). Which many people nowadays see as the “ancestor” of the current Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government’s much more modest “Bill 21” law, already mentioned. I also agree with Nadia El-Mabrouk that it was totally unjustified on Émilie Nicolas’ part, to refuse to appear on the same television program with her, back in 2017, in spite of their opposing attitudes toward systemic racism. (See page 83, note 50, in El-Mabrouk’s book.)

For her part, Dominique Anglade, both of whose parents were of Haitian origin, after having initially supported the CAQ, has recently become the president of the Québec Liberal Party (PLQ in French), after having served as a Minister of Economic Development, Innovation and Export Trade in 2016-2018, during the Liberal régime of Philippe Couillard. She also serves on the boards of governors of about a dozen major corporations.

What I find genuinely inappropriate in the way that both Émilie Nicolas and Dominique Anglade are using the concept of systemic racism is the fact that they are both politically aligned with the Québec Liberal Party. Which may have had a relatively progressive role in Québec politics several decades ago, during the first part of Québec’s “Quiet Revolution” (in the 1960s and the 1970s), that many observers consider to be the Québec version of the Keynesian “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975. However, ever since neoliberalism was introduced into the world, during the 1980s, the PLQ switched over to complete and total devotion to neoliberal austerity, particularly during the regimes of premiers Jean Charest (2003-2012) and Philippe Couillard (2014-2018). These were governments that did everything they could to help private investors get richer and richer, while simultaneously also doing everything they could to deny such generosity to the rest of the population, whose annual incomes either fell, or stagnated, during the same period.

As I pointed out earlier, systemic racism and systemic sexism do indeed exist just about everywhere on this planet, and always work together to make their designated victims’ lives a lot worse than everyone else’s lives. Which is what has been happening to quite a large percentage of the nurses and orderlies working compulsory overtime right now, fighting against the coronavirus, in Québec’s hospitals. And even more particularly in its residential care homes for elderly people, where some of the same nurses and orderlies were switched around from one place to another all the time without any consideration for how Covid-19 spreads from one victim to the next. The same residential centres that housed most of the almost 6000 people who have so far died in Québec during the current pandemic.

So, my question is, if people, including black women like Émilie Nicolas and Dominique Anglade, want to fight fiercely against system racism, how are they supposed to do that, in a real way rather than in an only token fashion, by supporting the PLQ? Even though it was not the PLQ that has been in power since the pandemic started, most of the neoliberal decisions that so thoroughly undermined Québec’s hospitals and retirement homes’ capacity to deal with the pandemic, were put into place by PLQ austerity. True, most of the other political parties in Québec have not done nearly enough to welcome black people, indigenous people and recent immigrants into their midst. But because of its neoliberalism, in order to do anything real about systemic racism, the PLQ would have to go through an enormous internal revolution, and repudiate practically every policy for which they have stood since the beginning of the 1980s. Failing which, people like Nicolas and Anglade will be totally hamstrung in their efforts to end systemic racism, and end up merely posturing, acting like political figureheads, with no possibility of genuinely accomplishing anything at all.

Finally, the last book that I read during my recent vacation is Dr. David Goldbloom’s autobiographical text, “How can I help? A week in my life as a psychiatrist”, that he and co-author Pier Bryden published in 2016. It tells how he came to be a psychiatrist at the University of Toronto, as well as about the kinds of problems that he encounters regularly in his chosen profession. As I pointed out already, it does not seem at first glance to have much in common with any of the other books that I was talking about earlier, but turns out to be focused on exactly the same sort of “civilization versus barbarism” issues.

Before getting into some of the more positive contributions this book makes to my theme, I would like to concentrate first on something that it does not do, but that it in my opinion it certainly should have done. This missing ingredient would have fitted in very well in Goldbloom’s opening chapter, which is about why so many people are wary about the psychiatric profession itself. Although Goldbloom has spent most of his professional life in Toronto, he in fact started his training in Montreal, at McGill University, in 1980. Which was only fifteen years after Dr. Ewen Cameron was forced to resign from his post, as McGill’s leading psychiatrist, after the MK-Ultra scandal erupted. It seems obvious that Goldbloom must have known about this, but there is not a word about that scandal anywhere in his text, even though it seems to me that if anyone wants to talk about why so many people are wary about psychiatry nowadays, that would be a really good place to start.

In fact, from 1950 to 1965, Dr. Ewen Cameron participated very actively in the Central Intelligence Agency’s “MK-Ultra” project, which was a concerted attempt to find some way of controlling people’s behaviour. Such as the behaviour of CIA agents operating in the field, so that they would not (or could not) fall under the control of rival intelligence agencies instead, such as those of Cold War enemies like Russia (the USSR) and China (the PRC). Cameron used several of his own patients, a large percentage of whom happened to be Jewish, as guinea pigs in his search for total thought control, using any number of what passed for psychiatric “treatments” in those days, such as administering extremely large doses of new “wonder drugs” like LSD. In so doing, he ruined the lives of quite a few of those patients, many of whom launched extensive lawsuits against Cameron, McGill University and the CIA itself when all of those horrible things were made public.

It is curious that Goldbloom does not refer at all to that project, which was thoroughly denounced dozens of times over the years in all the Canadian media, though he did make a couple of off-hand comments in his book about how some of his own patients were falsely imagining that the CIA had something to do with their own personal problems. Whereas the real machinations of the real CIA go unmentioned in what seems to have been a case of passive censorship. This odd bit of oversight, however, does not prevent Goldbloom from complaining later on in his text, quite appropriately this time, about how mental health in Canada is horribly under-funded in comparison with cancer treatments, though both of them cause just as much damage to society as the other one does. He also offers his very well-substantiated opinion about how today’s society, under the influence of certain Hollywood movies, has gone a bit too far in the direction of permissiveness toward psychiatric patients, many of whom do have to be treated against their will from time to time, in order to protect the collective rights of society.

Even more to the point of my contrast between civilization and barbarism, Goldbloom quite often states in his book that poverty, poor housing, chronic unemployment and the general mistreatment of millions of underprivileged people all contribute to huge outbreaks of mental illness. In my opinion, he could have gone even further in that direction, underlining the causal importance of extreme inequality throughout his psychiatric practice, since he often refers to his own experience with patients who were experiencing a great deal of trauma as a result of truly extreme degrees of inequality. Such as when he practised for awhile among the Inuit in far northern Canada (Baffin Island), or when he treated people who were still suffering from having spent too much time in such disgusting places as the Cook County Jail (Chicago), or who had experienced third world extremes in their countries of origin, such as the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo.

So, to sum up. I think that I have shown in this blogpost what Chris Harman’s book on the popular history of the world has in common with Alain Frerejean’s biography of Robert and Élisabeth Badinter, Nadia El-Mabrouk’s militant account of the laicity debate in Québec and David Goldbloom’s book, co-authored by Pier Bryden, about a typical week in his life as a psychiatrist. Which is to say that in spite of a number of significant improvements in the levels of human civilization over the past several decades, it seems obvious that recent progress toward greater social equality and the fight against all the different kinds of completely unjustified discrimination, are not faring very well. Since the early 1980s, the combined, reactionary effects of neoliberalism and neofascism have inaugurated a period of regression, and the reinforcement of such more traditional, but equally atavistic ideologies as racism, sexism, elitism, extractivism, religious fundamentalism, ethnic exclusivism, imperialism and militarism.

This backward tendency has also been enormously reinforced by the negative effects of the current coronavirus pandemic. Which recently prompted one think-tank to conclude that the pandemic has forced at least 100 million people back into the same level of extreme poverty that they had previously escaped from, if only for a short time. If the pandemic continues for any length of time, as it currently seems to be doing, that figure of 100 million could easily expand very rapidly indeed. Especially given the fact that the entire world economy could just as easily enter into a period of prolonged depression if the second wave of the pandemic (and an even more drastic degree of confinement) turns out to be as devastating as what many of the experts are currently predicting.

The other current wave, the ideological wave of extreme individualism, typified by the extraordinarily egotistical speeches that were heard during the USA’s 2020 Republican convention, is precisely the kind of deliberate incivility that could set off a major expansion of the pandemic. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world are currently engaging in an orgy of simplistic bombast, and fake conspiracy theories, directed against all sorts of progressive rules, including the rules being used to fight against the pandemic, such as the wearing of masks in public, social distancing and frequent hand washing. Exactly the sorts of things that are required on a massive scale if we are to beat the pandemic, but also exactly the sorts of things that narcissistic monsters hate like hell to have to do the most. Barbarism certainly seems to be winning out over civilization, which means that all of us may very soon be going through the worst period of human history that any group of human beings has ever experienced.