Real conspiracies and fake conspiracies
One of the most important aspects of the recent US presidential election campaign was that it was often focused on a form of political insanity, namely the Trump campaign’s deliberate use of the totally fake “Q-Anon” conspiracy. That the Donald himself, and all his closest supporters, alternately took turns supporting, then officially disavowing, then supporting again, on several hundred different occasions. In the state of Georgia, the Republican candidate for the House of Representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has been elected, even though she is a fervent supporter of the Q-Anon delirium. A couple of dozen other Republican/Q-Anon candidates may also have been elected to the House as well. In the state of Oregon, the Republican candidate for senator, Jo Rae Perkins, equally well-known for being that state’s most ardent supporter of that extremely odd conspiracy, may also have been elected. Q-Anon being an ultra-right-wing form of idiocy, according to which the US governing elite’s “deep state”, via the “left-liberal” Democratic Party and several well-known actors, is itself engaged in an enormous, global conspiracy centred on child sex-trafficking and cannibalism! Which would only cease to exist once Trump himself succeeded in counter-attacking, thereby saving both the USA and the rest of the world by locking up all the plotters in that huge (non-existent) cabal. It would be hard to find something stupider than that in which to believe.
This became the number fake conspiracy of the world’s most disgusting political campaign, namely the phoney pretension that Donald Trump was genuinely trying to help save ordinary people in the USA from their ultra-elitist enemies. Looked at from the opposite point of view, the same pretension also simultaneously became one of the USA’s most important real conspiracies, namely Trump’s desperate attempt to prevent his less wealthy supporters from finding out that he was in reality the worst elitist enemy that those unfortunate people ever had. How could so many white working-class people, often living in small towns and rural areas, some of whom recently lost their formerly well-paying industrial jobs, possibly believe that a fake billionaire from Park Avenue (New York City), who reduced taxes for ultra-rich people and their corporations more than anyone else in US history, was really on their side?
Real conspiracies have always existed, everywhere in the world, throughout the ages. They are an integral part of ordinary politics in every country, as well as being inherent to both private and state capitalism. Huge banks and corporations are constantly plotting against each other all the time, stealing each other’s data, always desperately trying to take market share away from their most important competitors. Increasing one’s market share being by far the best possible strategy for making a whole lot more money than any of the other contenders. Up and coming empires like China are also always trying to steal trade secrets from more established empires like the USA, sometimes taking such secrets away from US satellites like Canada, as the Huawei corporation apparently did from Canada’s now defunct Nortel Networks. So there is nothing new about real conspiracies.
Fake conspiracies have also always existed, since forever. Such as the Catholic Church’s medieval “donation of Constantine” document, purporting to show that pro-Christian Roman emperor Constantine back in the fourth century considered the Catholic interpretation of Christian doctrine to be very much superior to the Orthodox Church’s rival version. Pope John Paul II (1978-2005) was the first Catholic pope in history to finally admit, a thousand years after the fact, that the “Constantine” document was in fact penned by Catholic monks during the Middle Ages. All the world’s fake conspiracies are also always real conspiracies as well, in the sense that they help to “muddy the waters”, or to (changing metaphors) “set up a smokescreen”, that gets targeted populations so confused that they never know what is really going on.
In order to believe such complete inventions, victimized people start out with a false idea of what kind of world in which they are really living, which, once thoroughly manipulated by utterly despicable ideologues, such as Trump associate Steve Bannon, often lead to totally unhinged interpretations of real events. Most people suffer from false consciousness, or alienation, and do not really know what lies directly in front of them. They often see only what they want to see, rather than what is. In some cases, the conspirators themselves are based in the same countries as the targeted populations, whereas in other cases they can also be based inside a rival empire, such as Russia in this particular instance. Which is precisely the kind of situation that the USA is going through right now, as are a whole lot of other countries.
As for the alleged sex-trafficking of children by members of the elite, the only real conspiracy of that overwhelming nature has been the Catholic Church’s equally desperate attempts to hide the fact that a large number of its priests, deprived from normal sexual relations with women since the Gregorian “reforms” of the twelfth century, have been caught molesting millions of young boys and girls all over the world, even more often in recent decades than they did in the more distant past. This being the same Catholic Church that, since the Republican-dominated Senate’s promotion of ultra-traditionalist circuit judge Amy Coney-Barrett, now controls two-thirds (six out of nine judges) of the USA’s Supreme Court. This in a country in which Catholics only make up 21% of the total US population, even less than the percentage of atheists in that same ultra-rich country, which also “boasts” one of the world’s highest levels of social inequality.
So, if as recently alleged in some of the most well-informed sections of the US media, Trump is in fact working on behalf of the USA’s most long-lasting, full-fledged, deeply-embedded, evangelical-Protestant conspiracy, known as “The Family” or “The Fellowship”, it seems a bit odd that ultra-conservative Catholics like Coney-Barrett could help that very real conspiracy achieve at least some of its goals. Such as, soon enough, making it possible to outlaw all abortions in the USA, which, under current circumstances, is one of the worst possible things that could happen to the women’s liberation movement in that country. As well as making sure that poor people will get no more help from the government (via the “Affordable Care Act”) in their efforts to avoid paying huge sums to private health-insurance corporations.
Coney-Barrett could also become very useful to the forces of reaction in the USA by contributing to the most important fake conspiracy on a world scale, the one that denies the existence of climate change, or any of the other negative consequences arising from the recent arrival of what is now being called the Anthropocene. In spite of all these probable, soon-to-be-realized, contributions to the cause of Christian fundamentalism, we should never forget, however, that Catholics, even ultra-reactionary ones like Coney-Barrett, are not usually very well-liked by proselytizing, evangelical Protestants. Nor do Catholics of any political persuasion enjoy working all that much with their evangelical enemies.
On the other hand, all the ultra-right-wing Christian extremists in the USA might still want to band together and make common conspiratorial cause for a short time, if only to get rid of left-liberalism forever, at least in “America”. Once that is done, they can always go on a new crusade after that, and start yet another civil war between them, to determine once and for all which kind of Christianity is the “best” kind. Just like those other, equally fanatical, religious extremists in the Muslim part of the world, divided up into dozens of fiercely competing Sunni and Shiite factions, who, when they are not murdering unbelievers in as many different countries as possible, are also busy tearing each other apart in a fight to the finish. Once we get a winner from the wars of religion inside the ultra-Christian community, and a rival winner inside the ultra-Muslim community, not to mention winners between opposing gangs of equally neofascist fanatics imbedded within all the other religions in the world, then we can have a much bigger, global “war to end all wars”, each strain of religious fundamentalism seeking to physically eliminate all the other strains. What a wonderful perspective for a not too distant future!
But the selfsame US election campaign also underlined the importance of at least one other important set of conspiracies, both real ones and fake ones again, this time centring on the issue of democracy. In this case, the people who run the Democratic Party, and their bosom buddies in the traditional US media, are constantly bleating about how much danger “American democracy” is in because of the neo-nazi machinations of the Republican lunatics, and their up-start allies over at Fox News. While it is certain that whatever is left of formal democracy in the USA will undoubtedly disappear if the very real, pro-Trump conspiracy prevails for another four years, in spite of seeming to have lost the election, one must also not forget that genuine democracy has never been terribly well-defended inside the not-so-glorious American empire.
Just over the past ten or fifteen years, according to investigative reporter Greg Palast, over 16 million more eligible voters than before that time, most of them coming from racial minorities, have been deliberately taken off the US electoral lists by local officials using all sorts of conspiratorial methods. Such as several states’ bureaucratic machinations aimed at disqualifying all the people who did not vote in the most recent local elections, by sending them a misleading flyer deliberately designed to induce them to dump it into the garbage rather than replying to it, thereby “confirming” those potential voters’ “lack of interest in democracy”.
But there is also a considerably larger issue contributing much more substantially to the pathetic weakness of formal democracy, not just in the USA but all over the world, that most political commentators never mention. This is the unprecedentedly large gap between the world’s social classes, particularly the outrageous income division between a very small group of ultra-rich people and a very large group of ultra-poor people. Most experts on that subject, including those in the United Nations and in the People’s Republic of China, concentrate all their attention on what they call “extreme poverty”, which is to say those several hundred million people, mostly to be found in Asia, Africa and Latin America, who are still making less than two dollars a day. Quite a large group of people, after all, but which is getting larger all the time (at least 100 million more of them so far, according to the World Health Organization) because of the harmful effects of the current pandemic. None of those people, however, live in rich countries like the USA which, in spite of its extreme social divisions, does not seem to include anyone living on less than two dollars per day.
However, if we take a closer look at poverty all over the world, like the Oxfam organization has done, and enlarge the definition to include not just everyone living on less than two dollars per day, but instead focus on what the world’s richer countries define as living in poverty, it becomes obvious that over two-thirds of the world’s total population ought to be listed as poor. Rich people in general (and not just the super-rich) only account for somewhat less (according to conflicting definitions of what being rich means), than one percent of the world’s population, with the rest of the world’s people belonging to the so-called “middle class”. Which, in countries like the USA starts at about 25 or 30 000 US dollars per year (according to which one of the 50 US states is doing the calculating), or about 70-80 dollars per day, but in countries like China the selfsame “middle” class starts at less than ten percent of either of those figures. Poverty is therefore by far the most common socio-economic condition of human beings living in every part of the world.
The overall gap between the rich and the poor has been increasing at a much greater rate over the past several decades, mostly because of the worldwide revival of laissez-faire policies (neoliberalism) that started in 1979. When both the UK’s Margaret Thatcher and China’s Deng Xiao-ping first came to power, followed by the USA’s Ronald Reagan (who came to power in 1981), and most of the other ruling politicians in the world. Neoliberalism, which has been practised by almost all the governing parties in the formally democratic countries since that time, as well as in most of the world’s proudly authoritarian countries, has always focused on putting the emphasis back on such things as “shareholders’ rights”, rather than on the rights of any of the other “stakeholders” in the world economy. As well as by paying much larger sums to corporate directors, often through the use of stock options, than in days gone by, thereby making sure that the world’s largest owners of capital would get the lion’s share of all the new wealth being created over the past forty years.
As part of their own worldwide conspiracy, the rich and powerful people promoting neoliberalism also included a concerted effort to greatly reduce the power of trade unions, social-democratic parties, non-ruling communist parties, nationalist (interventionist) governments, as well as ecology movements, to siphon off more than a small percentage of that wealth to serve the needs of all those people who were not classified as being rich. From 1979 to 1989, the world’s most important central banks fought the “war against inflation” by raising interest rates from about 5% to about 20%, deliberately causing an enormous worldwide recession. Which was followed by an even bigger recession in 2008, also largely created by the effects of rampant neoliberalism, as well as by the even more harmful effects stemming from the current pandemic. In both these more recent cases, this led many of the same central banks to divert even more enormous sums into programs like “quantitative easing”, not terribly well understood by most ordinary people, that also greatly contributed to enlarging the income gap even more.
As a result, neoliberalism has brought about an enormous deterioration in working-class living conditions all over the world, even in the richer countries. In Québec, for example, that deterioration, which started long before the pandemic did but has become even worse since its arrival, is typified by the extreme suffering of tens of thousands of public-sector nurses, forced to work under a compulsory overtime scheme, often leading to several 16-hour shifts per week, per person. Therefore becoming one of the most important examples of how neoliberalism is constantly morphing into neofascism. This kind of thing just keeps on getting worse and worse with every year that goes by, in both the private and the public sectors of every economy. Huge corporations all over the world are always protecting themselves from even minimal taxation by transferring assets back and forth all the time, from one country to another, in an ever-increasing spiral, with the result that most of the tax burden has been shifted onto the backs of the very same class of overworked citizens that has to put up with all the neofascist nonsense as well.
Establishment observers, however, refuse to talk about the very obvious link between this ever-increasing social gap and the simultaneous, ever-accelerating decline of democracy. Which has left the field open for authoritarian regimes in every part of the world to point out to everyone just how weak all the governments in the (self-proclaimed) democratic countries have become, given the neoliberal transfer of most of the wealth and power in those countries to the top echelons of the private-capitalist class. To a much greater extent than what those same ultra-rich people already possessed during the previous period of history (the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975).
What the world’s very numerous, openly authoritarian regimes conspiratorially “forgot” to mention, however, was that they also participated quite actively since 1979 in that very same transfer of wealth and power to private capitalists, although not to the same extent as the formally democratic countries did. All of which became much less democratic, and therefore much more similar to the authoritarian countries, as a result. What has to be emphasized here is that regardless of where it takes place, unprecedentedly high income and power divisions between the social classes always make any attempt at running any kind of democracy much more difficult than it was when those same social divisions were not so glaringly obvious.
It really is incredibly stupid for those who continue to support the democratic illusion, sometimes called “the American way of life”, such as the leaders of the Democratic Party in the USA, to exclusively blame their increasingly successful, authoritarian adversaries (people like Donald Trump), for the decline of democracy in all their countries. Their current candidate, Joe Biden, besides having recently been Barack Obama’s vice-president, spent most of his career as a pro-establishment senator from Delaware, the tax-evasion capital of the USA, where “free enterprise” for huge corporations is part of the state psyche. Biden himself actively participated in helping the USA’s largest credit-card companies escape from any kind of government supervision. Every US government of the past four decades, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, whether Republican or Democrat, has supported neoliberalism in thousands of different ways, creating precisely the kind of “zombie nation”, turning inward against itself, that has been depicted in several recent horror movies, as well as in the recent elections.
Trump’s white-supremacist neofascism, directed against every one of the USA’s minority groups (of Afro-American, Latino, Asian and indigenous origins) is part and parcel of the real conspiracy in this scenario. While a very important part of the same demagogue’s fake conspiracy is his completely bogus pretension at becoming the champion of anti-Chinese protectionism and economic nationalism in general. Which he spends a great deal of time sounding off about, without ever adopting any kind of national economic program, instead constantly lowering taxes for financiers and doing away with any kind of protection for the natural environment. As a result, the US economy today, the manufacturing industries as well as the service industries, are even more dependent on China, and on the entire worldwide, free-trade, economy, than they were under his presidential predecessors. The guy is a total fake, his populism being exclusively focused on building up a cult of the personality for himself, a kind of ultra-right-wing version of the ultra-left “cultural revolution” (1966-1976) in China, during the last ten years of Chairman Mao’s reign.
Donald Trump (“Delirium Tremens” himself) really enjoys the loving, cheering crowds of total idiots who really think that he is their saviour, rather than their grave-digger. As he pointed out several years ago when he first began thinking about his future candidacy, he deliberately chose the Republican Party because he was convinced that those “dumb asses” would believe everything he said, no matter how crazy it turned out to be. He truly enjoys putting one over on them, a lot like the pied piper of Hamelin was supposed to have done. The comparison with the pied piper being particularly appropriate, since most of the people who voted for Trump are constantly acting like children, refusing to accept any responsibility whatsoever, for their wives or for their children, for democracy, or for any other “sissy” preoccupations like those ones. Trump himself may be looked down upon by all the intellectuals in the world, but he still knows that he can manipulate that enormous crowd of super-dummies, and make them turn in any which direction he pleases. What a rush! In the USA, he even seems to have stolen every modern nation-state’s monopoly on violence (the police, the army, etc.), by substituting his own individual “proud boy” militias for those of “we the people”. Calling him a neofascist is not any kind of an exaggeration.
Every Democratic attempt at counter-attacking, such as sending in Barack Obama or invoking the hundreds of thousands of dead people killed by Trump’s refusal to do anything to stop the pandemic, blew up in their faces. The millions of people who voted for the Donald once again, mostly white and mostly men, justified their support by quite literally invoking the New Hampshire state slogan: “Live free or die!” They all want freedom from all the rules: freedom to be racist, freedom to be sexist, freedom to piss on the environment, freedom from wearing anti-viral masks, freedom to bear arms, freedom to shoot people they do not like, freedom to drive their pick-ups over other people’s dead bodies, freedom to pick their noses in public, all the world’s most important freedoms.
Meanwhile, “up in” Canada, the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau fears Donald Trump’s zombie nation every bit as much as the Biden camp in the USA does, without really doing all that much to prevent that dangerous virus from crossing the border. The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau has decided to temporarily abandon its party’s previous obsession with austerity, in order to face up to the current pandemic, but still gives the lion’s share of all that government aid to the business class. The same government also refuses to regulate the all-important transportation sector of the economy, or to live up to its international obligations aimed at limiting, instead of encouraging, the ever-expanding use of fossil fuels.
It is true, however, that after the Trudeau government introduced the (temporary) “Canada Emergency Response Benefit” to help poor people survive the pandemic, independent researchers discovered that the CERB recipients became the only Canadian social grouping whose level of anxiety declined for awhile, in spite of the pandemic, because they no longer had to put up with choosing between two forms of abject poverty, totally inadequate social welfare and the almost-as-bad minimum wage. That sort of government largesse (CERB) is not destined to survive for very long, unfortunately, the entire business class (big business, medium-size business and small business) being totally and permanently opposed to any kind of post-pandemic program of that sort.
In a capitalist society, “corporate welfare bums” are very much preferred to poor people refusing to be satisfied with the minimum wage. If the Trudeau government (God forbid) ever tries to make such a thing permanent, via Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland (who wrote a book several years ago about the divisive nature of huge personal fortunes), the business class will soon find a way to replace them with a much more accommodating, Conservative-Party regime. Capitalism thrives on the systemic poverty of ultra-elitism and cannot survive without it. It has even become a form of quasi-religious observation in the USA, especially among Trump supporters, with their visceral hatred of anything that smacks of socialism.
In one way or another, all the world’s liberal democrats continue to support the still ongoing triumph of neoliberalism, because they have no other pro-capitalist choice. They are all obliged to pretend, in their entirely conspiratorial manner, that that incredible transfer of ever more money and ever more power to people who were already dominating most of the world even before the advent of neoliberalism, has nothing whatever to do with the global decline of democracy. On what planet do all these “deplorable democrats” live, exactly? The incompatibility of private capitalism with any kind of genuine democracy is unfortunately not something that they can ever succeed in getting their heads around.
Which, however, does not in any way justify the idea that it is somehow preferable, so far as the world’s ordinary people (those with no power and very little money) are concerned, for them to support openly authoritarian regimes instead. As already indicated, the world’s state-capitalist regimes, in which governments still possess as much power and clout as the private-capitalist elites possess, are even less inclined than the self-proclaimed democracies to spend very much money on ordinary people’s needs. The “People’s” Republic of China, for example, still does not possess any kind of decent social welfare system, despite the fact that “the people” have theoretically been in power for the past 71 years. It turns out that ultra-individualist reactionaries in the USA, who abhor social welfare, have much more in common with “Red” China than any of them would care to admit!
Back in the day, some of today’s authoritarian (state-capitalist) regimes, such as China, used to support the totalitarian, falsely “communist” ideology of the 1950s and 1960s, which still seems to exist in North Korea, but has long been abandoned not only in China, but also in such other, still officially “communist” countries as Vietnam, Laos and Cuba. Many more of today’s authoritarian regimes are largely based on some form of religious fanaticism, such as Poland, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Brazil. While dozens more such regimes are simply military or political dictatorships, often practising ethnic exclusivism, a common characteristic that also applies to most of the ultra-right-wing religious states. Wherever state capitalism exists, however, the people who run those countries are almost entirely focused on controlling an important regional empire, conspiratorially pretending to be trying to make their country great again, using the same slogan that Donald Trump is using, their leaders (Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Norendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, etc.) also adopting the same, ultra-egotistical kind of self-aggrandizement (“If it wasn’t for me, we wouldn’t be important at all”).
Yet another very important controversy also exists, in one version or another, in almost every country in the world, wherever ethnic and religious majorities live alongside ethnic and religious minorities. Even though its very real connection with the ever-increasing use of real and fake conspiracies does not seem to be obvious at first glance. This is the recently exacerbated division between two forms of extremist belief about the issue of “race”, a concept that has no scientific basis in biological reality but which nevertheless is constantly being treated as something real by professional ideologues all over the world. It is centred on the supposedly inherent differences between “colonialists” (often falsely considered to be of exclusively European origin) and “victims” (just as often falsely considered to be exclusively of non-European origin).
In the real world, imperialism and colonialism do not “belong” exclusively to Europe at all, and have in fact been practised over and over again since ancient times, by various different empires based in Asia, in Africa and in what is now called Latin America, as well as those based in the Western world (Europe, North America, Australasia). Non-Western empires also continue to exist nowadays, not just in China and in Russia (partly European, partly Asian), but also in smaller, more regional empires like the one in Turkey. The controversy over racism that I am referring to here falsely assumes that only people of European origin can possibly be imperialist, or colonialist. It is a fascinating example of two equally deviant but nevertheless conflicting interpretations of reality, pitting supposedly “colonialist” people who refuse to believe in the concept of systemic racism, against supposedly “racialized victims of colonialism”, who refuse to believe that any of the people falsely designated as “colonialist” can ever be considered anti-racist.
As has already happened in dozens of other places, particularly in the USA, this conspiratorial virus has recently infected various different people in Québec, and has become all mixed up (as so often happens vis-à-vis practically every other issue) with the “national question” in Canada, over whether or not Québec should some day become an independent country. Many francophone politicians who are currently supporting Québec autonomy within Canada, such as premier François Legault (himself a former supporter of independence), as well as a significant portion of the professional politicians who still support Québec independence nowadays, refuse to recognize the existence of systemic racism in Québec.
These politicians self-identify with the European origins of the Québec majority and feel that any recognition of systemic racism as part of Québec reality somehow amounts to a blanket accusation directed against their own constituency. An accusation that, according to them, is also being used by the largely anglophone, Canadian empire to deny the Québécois either autonomy or independence. This part of their analysis is entirely true, the Canadian state having long ago decided to include Québec-based minorities in its communitarian conspiracy against “separatism”, disguised as nothing more than the “innocent” application of ordinary multiculturalism. Each participating culture in the Canadian mosaic always being defined by federal ideologues according to the exaggerated pretensions of religious fundamentalism. The same conspiratorial approach to multiculturalism that also (curiously enough) characterizes one of the Québec education ministry’s own courses, the one called “Ethics and religious culture”.
Unfortunately, some of the people currently supporting the independence option, or the autonomy option, seem to have forgotten the broader definition of the Québec people as simply being anyone currently living in Québec, which includes not only francophone Québécois of various cultural origins (European-origin francophones, indigenous francophones, Haitian francophones, and so on), but also anglophone and allophone people combining the same kind of widely differing geographical origins for their ancestors. This used to be the official view of the pro-independence, and the pro-autonomy, militants during both the 1980 and the 1995 referendums, the last one of which was almost won by the “Oui” (“Yes”) side.
In my opinion, recognizing that various groups of people living in Québec do in fact suffer from systemic racism, in various different ways, does not make the Québécois nation unworthy of independence, in any way, shape or form. Acknowledging the reality of systemic racism should never have been allowed to infect the debate between federalism and Québec nationalism in the first place, regardless of where those minority people’s ancestors came from: indigenous origins, people of African descent (whether directly from Africa, or by way of Haiti, Jamaica, or some other extra-African nation), or people whose ancestors came from some Muslim-majority country, or any other similar origin.
For the simple reason that all the other nations in this world, including those currently independent (or considered to be independent), as well as all the other ones still struggling to achieve the status of independence (dozens of such places still exist all over the world), are also contributing to systemic racism, every bit as much or even more so in some cases, than is Québec. If Québec became independent from Canada, “the rest of” Canada would still be practising systemic racism, towards the very same groups of people. All the people living in an independent Québec would have escaped from the domination of the English-Canadian empire, but both Canada and Québec would still be practising systemic racism.
Which is because all the world’s nations are, after all, just so many “imagined communities”, every one of which (including, paradoxically, English-Canada itself) officially projects the image of its own majority population onto the world scene. The faction within the Québec independence movement, and the Québec autonomy movement, that refuses to recognize systemic racism in its midst, has quite simply fallen into the trap laid by the federal conspiracy of fundamentalist multiculturalism, abandoning the much more inclusive strategy that both those movements used to support, during the two referendum campaigns.
In reality, systemic racism, just like even more prevalent systemic sexism (inside every cultural community), both exist in every country in the world, and are not at all related to any particular country’s constitutional status. Both racism and sexism are part and parcel of the worldwide division of human beings into distinct social classes, which is the most fundamental characteristic of every human civilization. They both play very important roles in the (undeclared) class war, dominant classes, even more than dominated ones, using racism and sexism, as well as religious and cultural differences, as pawns in their constant battle over the control of more (on the dominant side), or less (on the dominated side), income, power and prestige, in every part of the world and during every period of history.
As pointed out earlier, we are currently living in a period characterized by the largest social divisions ever experienced, both neoliberalism and neofascism using every available, atavistic, ideological weapon (racism, sexism, class-based elitism, imperialism, militarism, religious fundamentalism, ethnic exclusivism and environment-destroying extractivism) to make absolutely sure that the dominant social classes will always succeed in controlling all the dominated social classes. The dominated people are considered by the dominant ones as belonging to various different herds of domesticated sheep, to be conveniently fleeced at regular intervals. All the real and the fake conspiracies, originating from all the reactionary ideologies listed above, are all currently being promoted from the dominant classes’ point of view. As Donald Trump would put it, everyone in the world is either a “winner” or a “loser”, belonging to the dominant classes or to the dominated ones. That is the disgusting way that the world-system actually works, whether we like it or not.
Many of the dominated people in the world, no matter in which official country (members of the General Assembly of the United Nations) that they may reside, often self-identify as belonging to some minority, whether indigenous, or “black”, or Muslim, or Christian, or any of the several hundred other minority denominations currently existing in some part of the world or another. Every single world minority is itself an imagined community living inside some officially designated, independent country, based on its own majority culture, which therefore becomes a somewhat larger, imagined community. As pointed out earlier in this text, “races” and all the other kinds of socio-cultural adhesion, do not exist in any kind of scientific, biological sense. Only the common species, homo sapiens, belongs to a proven, biological definition. Even most of the world’s indigenous peoples are not really “indigenous” in the dictionary sense of the word, that is, still belonging nowadays to the very first ethnic group that ever lived in any particular geographical location. Even the Inuit, living in Canada’s (and Québec’s) far-northern, polar regions, arrived later on the scene than the now-extinct Dorset people.
In addition, most of the world’s black people are not really “black” in any exclusivist sense. Barack Obama, the USA’s first “black president” was (and still is) just as white as he was (is) black. All the world’s religious minorities, no matter from which religion, nor from which branch of any particular religion, can self-identify however they please, in whichever country they are currently residing, they are still considered to be citizens of that country. Not only by the officials of that country, but also by the officials of whichever country their (often multiple) ancestors came from.
Even some of the more extremist Muslim minorities in France, those belonging to what French president Emmanuel Macron has called the “Islamic separatist movement”, who have taken over several hundred suburban districts all over France, and run them practically as independent countries, still officially reside in the Republic of France. Even the ones who hate the God-forsaken republic, and spit on the graves of all those unbelievers (“mécréants”) that they have recently assassinated. They can only be stopped by the kind of all-out opposition to their conspiracy as that now being waged by the French Republic, which is certainly not being helped by wishy-washy “allies” like Justin Trudeau, who seems to think that freedom of expression should not include doing anything or saying anything that any ultra-right-wing fanatics in the Muslim world might conceivably disapprove. He did try to walk back his opposition to freedom of expression a couple of days after he opposed it, without really convincing anyone about his re-conversion. But this sort of thing is what Justin T. always does on every issue, trying to simultaneously support both opposing views at the same time.
Even the authors of a 41-page brief presented recently (September 21, 2020) to the Québec government’s “Groupe d’action centre le racisme”, that call themselves the “Groupe de reflexion sur le racisme et l’integration”, got it wrong when they also tried to deny the existence of systemic racism in Québec. Those authors (the main contributor, André Lamoureux, as well as Djamila Adar, Léon Onaknine and Michèle Sirois) seem to think that ideologies such as racism cannot possibly be expressed passively (subconsciously or by accident), as well as actively. In order to arrive at that conclusion, they seem to have confused institutional racism, which may be reduced somewhat through the adoption of corrective legislation, with systemic racism, which can continue to function in spite of legislation, being practised even by people working for the government. As has been proven over and over again, as in the application of Québec’s Charter of the French language (“Bill 101”), as well as, everywhere in the world, in humanity’s losing fight against the current pandemic.
The only way to make any sense of all these conflicting definitions of “race” and racism is to see them for what they really are, and not just to accept the authors of each conflicting definition’s own official projections of what they are all about. It is also entirely possible for at least some of the individual people in any particular cultural community, dominant or dominated, to hold an anti-racist point of view, regardless of the reality of systemic racism being actively practised within that society. Nothing gets me more upset than to read some of the texts being written all the time by particularly intransigent people, in which every single individual belonging to any particular community, or even to all those belonging to every cultural community except the one with which that particular author self-identifies, is accused of being guilty of some horrible ideological crime, such as racism, even when they are in fact (at least in some cases) being anti-racist.
So it came as quite a shock to me when I read a text (“L’arme”, “The weapon”) written by Émilie Nicolas, a columnist for the Montréal newspaper “Le Devoir” (October 21, 2020). This was one of the first comments made in the context of the infamous “n-word” debate, that has spilled over recently into Québec from its origins in the USA. In that text, Nicolas denounced in no uncertain terms every single person on the planet who does not belong to the community designated by the n-word itself, as being guilty as charged. Even though that word is in itself only a derogatory derivative (“nigger”) of the Spanish word for “black” (“negra” is the feminine version, and “negro” the masculine version of the same word). According to Nicolas, no one can ever be allowed to use that word, regardless of the reasons being offered for using it in some particular context, even if it is for educational purposes, and even it is used merely in citing the title of some well-known literary work.
Such as “Les nègres blancs d’Amérique”, (“White niggers of America”) written by FLQ leader Pierre Vallières in 1968. That book is precisely the same kind of left-wing exaggeration to which the Émilie Nicolas’ article also belongs. In his case, he was trying to argue that the francophone Québécois majority of the 1960s was every bit as mistreated inside anglophone Canada as was the black minority in the USA, because the Québec majority population back then had an average income well below that of the average English-Canadian, to the same extent that the average income of the black people in the USA was inferior to the average income of its white population. An argument that does not stand up to historical scrutiny since, among other things, it does not refer to the existence of slavery in the USA (from colonial origins in 1619 to its removal after the Civil War), that also existed (though it involved far fewer people) in the French and British colonial regions that later became Canada and Québec, for almost as long.
In Émilie Nicolas’ case, no use of the n-word should ever appear in print, or in any other form of communication, because all such usage is necessarily racist. In reality, however, it is no more racist to use that expression than it is to use such other expressions as “people of colour”, since white is just as much a colour as is black, or any other colour that can be found on the surface of human skin. Her point of view is truly extreme because, as pointed out by Québec author Pierre Nepveu, in another article also published in “Le Devoir” (October 23, 2020), the very fact of accusing an anti-racist person of being racist instead is what people from ultra-right-wing identity groups are always doing. The genuinely anti-racist person in this case being Verushka Lieutenant-Duval, a professor at the University of Ottawa, who touched off the whole n-word debate in Québec when she innocently used the word that Nicolas hates so much during a class specifically directed against the derogatory use of that very term!
The totally exaggerated nature of that deliberate misinterpretation made me think right away of the attitudes I used to support for awhile myself, during the late 1960s, coming from people like Mao zedong and his supporters during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China. An extreme left-wing point of view, called “Mao zedong Thought” at the time, that I decided to completely repudiate back in 1971, as described in my 2013 autobiography (the first seven posts in my blog). When I was working as a history teacher, mostly in Québec but also in Ontario, between 1980 and 2014, I avoided using any of the racially derogatory terms, not only the word for black but also all the other words invented over the years to put down all sorts of other cultural or ethnic groups, all over the world. But avoiding the use of such a word even in an anti-racist context, seems to me to be the kind of extreme intransigence that progressive people should avoid like the plague. Equating every single use of the black word as being necessarily the same as supporting white supremacy, as some people in the USA are doing, is a completely unjustified over-reaction.
It was also fascinating to read, towards the end of the very same Nicolas article, when, not satisfied with denouncing all the so-called white people in the universe as being necessarily guilty of anti-black racism, she also went on to denounce all the men in the world for always being anti-feminist as well. Using precisely the same intransigence for any male supporters of feminism out there as she also used for any white people pretending to be anti-racist. What is more, she seems to have thought that she could get away with all these blanket accusations by claiming in the conclusion of her article that if white people (or, more specifically, white men) really want to be seen as genuine progressives, all they have to do is to turn over a new leaf and immediately rectify every single horrible thing that all the white people have ever done to all the black people in the past. Thereby magically making racism and slavery disappear forever afterwards, from history as well as from current events. As if the category of “white people” (particularly white men) was some kind of singular, monolithic entity in which every member of the group had an “equal opportunity” to achieve whatever they set out to achieve, for better or for worse, regardless of the enormity of the task being set out in front of them.
One of my early blogposts (“I plead not guilty”, March 4, 2014) was all about how incredibly absurd it was for people like myself, who have never had any power, nor a whole lot of money, nor a great deal of recognition in life, to be considered by someone else to be nevertheless guilty of causing something, or helping to cause something, that we never had the slightest chance of influencing, let alone causing. Some younger people nowadays have even opined that everyone born during the baby-boom (1945-1965) is necessarily guilty of having caused, or helped to cause, all the problems that those younger people have to deal with in their daily lives these days, which presumably began during the baby-boom period. Because we obviously benefited from not having to deal with such problems back then, things like the much higher cost of rent, or the lower levels of unemployment (at least before 1980), or the lower cost of a university education back then, or whatever. Personally, I really do not see how I could have had any influence on the coming-into-being of neoliberalism, or the extremely high interest rates of the 1980s, or the onslaught of neofascism for that matter, than I personally had the capacity to do away with systemic racism and with systemic sexism, forever, all by myself. Although I do remember denouncing all of those things back then, and I also have the newspaper and magazine clippings to prove it.
The fact is that almost all ordinary people, not only poor people but also the vast majority of those in the middle class, cannot be held collectively responsible for any of the major decisions being made all the time in the world by people in the dominant classes (big business and world leaders in every political, economic, social and cultural branch of power). Ordinary people can and should oppose every disgusting reality that already existed before they were born and still continues to exist during their lifetimes. They also can and should denounce every disgusting decision to make things even worse, that was taken by all the big-shots during their own lifetimes, such as choosing to inaugurate neoliberalism and neofascism (both of which began simultaneously in Chile, when the Pinochet dictatorship was jointly launched in 1973 by the Chilean army and the Central Intelligence Agency of the USA). But inventing false groupings, such as the category known as “all the white people in the world”, or the category of “eternally anti-feminist men”, or the category of “guilty baby-boomers”, is just a symbolic, conspiratorial, way of looking at the world. It is not the way that things really work, in the real material world.
