Free to flout the rules

Originally, this blogpost was supposed to have been focused on the coronavirus pandemic and the way in which people’s non-compliance with all the anti-virus rules, not only ordinary, individualist rebels but also the much more well-connected, reactionary folks egging them on, has led to a truly disastrous situation worldwide. But that was before Donald Trump told his closest, neofascist supporters to go to the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and to make sure that the Democrats would not get away with “stealing” his re-election away from him. Everyone in the world who follows the news knows what happened next, their murderous, para-military storming of the US Congress being almost totally unprecedented in that country’s history. The only possible exception being the successful, British military invasion of the same Congress two centuries ago (1812).

The way in which I had planned my original article, I was going to start by explaining some of the many different ways that the people deliberately flouting all the rules were helping the virus kill off a much larger number of victims than it originally would have, if everyone had decided to support the worldwide fight for public health instead. Then I was going to follow that up by pointing out how similar the pandemic situation is to the way in which many of the same kind of people have also been flouting all the rules in several other, equally important fights, such as stopping the ever-increasing pollution of the natural environment, or reversing the ultra-elitist trend toward ever-greater social divisions between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor.

But as soon as I started focusing on the huge escalation of the US empire’s current political crisis, represented by the barbarian militia attack on the Capitol building, it became obvious to me that in spite of how extremely dangerous US politics has become, it is nevertheless yet another example of the same overall phenomenon: ultra-right-wing populists deliberately flouting all the rules in that situation as well. To be sure, not everyone who voted for Trump in November was an ultra-right-wing populist, nor do all the people who refuse to obey the anti-virus rules necessarily belong to that extreme political category. In both cases, however, millions of ordinary people (neither rich nor powerful) are being led to support different kinds of anti-social violence, blindly following the deliberately misleading guidance of people who are extremely rich and powerful, and who use that power to exert an ultra-conservative influence on everyone else.

What is so special about the most recent military invasion of the Congress is that the USA seems to be going through a period of history that is strangely similar to that which Germany went through during the late 1920s and the early 1930s. It is just so incredibly false-ingenue the way in which veteran political analysts in the USA, such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper, pretend to be so entirely surprised by the never-ending list of evil machinations that Donald Trump and his minions have been getting away with so very easily, ever since he first started his presidential campaign six years ago.

It seems to me that everyone in the establishment media should have admitted by now that the support that so many of the USA’s most important patricians (such as the ultra-rich, ultra-conservative, Koch brothers), have given over the years to enable Trump’s rise to power, and his attempts to “make America great again”, bear an uncanny ressemblance to the way in which just as many German patricians, such as Hindenburg and Von Papen, tried to manoeuvre a street-fighting leader of the Nazi Party, into helping them get rid of the German communist and social-democratic movements, almost a century ago.

People as well-informed and as well-connected as Cooper, belonging to the extremely rich Vanderbilt family, ought to have recalled finding out just how many US patricians during that same period, such as George W Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, were so very inclined to support the same kind of pro-fascist attempt to preserve the worst kind of unbridled, private capitalism. In the same, almost delirious, way that the German patricians also tried to do back then. Even Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, another well-known patrician, seemed to be supporting an ultra-conservative point of view during the first version of his “New Deal” (1933-1935), that only became a pro-labour second version (1935-1939), after the successful uprisings of pro-communist movements in San Francisco, Milwaukee and Toledo (Ohio) in 1934.

History never repeats itself, at least not in any of the particular details, but that does not mean that we cannot learn from the mistakes of the past. This is not the first time in history that fascist movements have started popping up all over the world, which happened back then not only in Italy and in Germany, but also in dozens of other places, including several other Western countries (Portugal, Spain, etc.), as well as several countries in East Asia (including militarist Japan and the “Blue-shirt” youth section of the Nationalist regime in China), many of the Muslim majority countries, and several Latin American countries (Brazil, Argentina, etc.). In fact, there were important fascist and pro-fascist movements in almost every country in the world back then, even if some of them never became strong enough to take power locally. Religious fundamentalism was also an important component of every popular fascist movement that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century.

Nowadays, neofascist governments have also taken power in many different places, including a few still officially communist countries, following Chairman Mao’s own prediction that any “revolutionary communist” leadership that stops supporting communism as a goal, but still remains in power, inevitably becomes a fascist dictatorship instead. Fascism has also become quite popular, once again, in dozens of countries currently controlled by governments relying for their popularity on ultra-right-wing movements promoting religious fundamentalism, coming from several competing religions. The parallels between what is happening in those countries and the Trump movement in the USA ought to be obvious, even though each country involved is obviously quite different, in many other ways, from all the others.

The focus on religious fundamentalism, for example, does not just apply to Trump’s evangelical Christian supporters, but also to the Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist varieties of religious fanaticism currently dominating dozens of other countries. Not to mention ultra-orthodox Judaism in Israel, as well as the Chinese “communist” revival of feudal Confucianism. An eerie  parallel can also be made between the evangelical Christianity of the Trump movement, providing the necessary ideological grounding for the 2021 domestic terrorist assault on the Capitol, and the Muslim fanaticism that provided the ideological underpinnings for Al-Qaeda’s foreign terrorist attack on American targets back in September 2001.

People in the Trump movement may imagine that they are all a bunch of freedom fighters trying to save their country from the onset of bureaucratic socialism, or in the more extreme delirium of the Q-Anon faction within the Trump nation, from the ridiculous liberal-pedophile conspiracy that they themselves invented. But in fact all the pro-Trump fanatics are not that different from the Muslim extremists who also imagine that they are somehow trying to free their own “true” religion from the Western imperialism of the “crusader states”, and their local lackeys in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Competing varieties of neofascist ideology all over the world are constantly coming up with clever slogans about how they are sincerely trying to free their people from some kind of powerful opposing force, while simultaneously imposing their own ultra-right-wing dictatorship on everyone around them instead.

Somewhere around 50 million US citizens constitute Trump’s base-support group, people who have been thoroughly radicalized by that totally barbarian Svengali. Just like the even larger number of ultra-right-wing extremists, all over the Muslim world, radicalized by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic state, the Trump nation will go on trying to take power by any means available, even when their original champion suffers a few temporary setbacks. The USA under Biden and Harris will not just be able to erase the past four years of history and go back to the way it was when Obama was still in power. Trump’s ultra-reactionary, neofascist bulldozing enormously intensified, to an unprecedented degree, the neoliberal (anti-social) laissez-faire of the preceding thirty-six years, for a total of forty years of constantly accelerating reaction, during which most of the new wealth created in that country was gobbled up by a very small number of ultra-rich people.

During that entire period, establishment Democrats like the Clintons, Obama, Biden and Harris, participated in reinforcing the total abandonment of the US industrial working-class, not to the same extent as the Republican patricians did, but almost as much. To be sure, if they had refused to help rich companies from avoiding government regulation, they would have been cut off from the millions of donation dollars that they (and the Republicans) rely upon to finance their elitist “political action committees”. During that time, most of the well-paying industrial jobs in the USA were shipped off to low-wage havens like the “People’s Republic” of China, and many other such places, especially during the Reagan years of the 1980s. An atavistic move that greatly contributed to the enormous, subsequent increase in the gap between the social classes in the USA, and many other Western countries, which have long pretended to represent beacons of democracy for social climbers relying on such mythical paths to paradise as “the American dream”.

From 1981 to 2021, the joint Republican/Democratic establishment put into place the initial, semi-barbarian onslaught on US society, that wiped out all the limited gains of the working-class during the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975 (a period known as democratic capitalism in West Germany), and led to the completely barbarian machinations of Trump’s (Proud Boy/QAnon/Boogaloo/Oath-keepers) neofascist hooligans. In other words, neoliberalism was the necessary antechamber of neofascism, not only in the USA but also in most of the other countries (such as China) belonging to our excessively elitist world.

Neoliberalism and neofascism together are still being promoted all over the world even now, Including in Québec where the provincial government is still furiously mistreating most of those who work on the frontline in its health system, still imposing compulsory overtime, still refusing to allow them to go on vacation from time to time, and still moving them around (against the rules) from one viral hot-spot to another. At the same time also, the enormous gap between the social classes is constantly being further enlarged by the fact that most scientific research is still being conducted by private corporations, who are only interested in the kinds of applied-science, industrial innovation that lead to more automation, and even fewer, well-paying industrial jobs. All of which has prompted some observers to fear that the whole world may soon be engulfed, once again, in a planetary economic depression.

Nevertheless, there could be something unexpectedly positive about the microscopic monster that causes the pandemic, an idea that I will introduce shortly. But certainly, on the face of it, it is extremely upsetting the way in which a very large number of people, in every country, have consciously decided to exercise their “basic freedoms” by flouting all the rules. Which is really a very stupid thing to do, since by acting in this way, they are helping the coronavirus get around all the obstacles that much more responsible people are using to fight against the pandemic, such as by putting into place confinement strategies and vaccines to contain its spread. The “freedom to flout” has therefore become the main ally that the virus possesses in its ultra-primitive desire to eventually infect every human being on this planet, without any regard for “race”, religion, sex or social status, until everyone has finally succumbed.

True, the world’s poorest people have suffered much more from the virus than have the world’s richest people, just like they suffer much more from every other kind of major social problem that exists. But that is because the people who flout the rules the most egregiously, not just the public-health, anti-virus rules but also all the rules concerning the environmental and social aspects of “good governance”, are precisely the world’s richest and most powerful people. It is not the virus that makes such obvious class distinctions, but human societies that set up those  disgusting divisions, that do more to help spread the virus, and every other kind of misfortune, than any other source. At the same time, while always pretending to do exactly the opposite, most of the rich and the powerful people in this world could not really care less about adopting any truly effective defence of the general population against any of those ills, since most of those being helped are obviously much less fortunate than rich people are, and are therefore considered to be totally undeserving of that help, from an ultra-elitist point of view. The virus itself, however, has a truly “socialist” attitude toward human diseases, targeting everyone on this planet who has not yet caught the disease. Not just once but many times over.

So the only thing paradoxically positive about this extremely dangerous form of human irresponsibility is the way in which it definitively underlines for all of us, the current victims as well as the potential victims, just what is wrong with adopting a devil-may-care attitude toward most of those suffering from every important social crisis. Ironically, inside the country with the largest number of pandemic cases, and of deaths, in the world, the Trump movement has graciously provided all of us, not just the citizens of the USA, with the greatest learning opportunity ever offered. Which is, to prove to everyone in the world, once and for all, that attacking the reality of collective human existence, the “horrible beast” that Trump supporters call socialism, is the best way to ruin everything, for everyone, by promoting ultra-individualist egoism, instead. A fact that ultra-right-wing populists in Canada seem to have realized by engaging in their current Internet chatter, focused on attacking all the anti-virus vaccine distribution centres that are being set up, in a potentially upcoming attempt to prevent everyone from getting protected against the virus.

In this context, it is quite fascinating to realize how many different countries, theoretically sporting “entirely different” and opposing ideologies, have nevertheless come up with the same strange combination of neoliberalism and neofascism, all at the same time. The most important examples of which are precisely the world’s two most powerful countries, the USA and China. Which is why I have to so strongly disagree with Postmedia columnist Tasha Kheiriddin, who wrote an article, “American conservatives must disavow Trumpism”, that was published in the Montréal Gazette one week after the horrendous invasion of the Capitol in Washington, DC. She started her article by quoting Ronald Reagan’s speech that was delivered on the eve of the 1980 presidential campaign, about how “America” was supposed to have represented an exceptional “ideal of freedom and equality”, run from “the city on the Potomac”, known the world over as a “shining city on a hill.”

According to her, that wonderful “tradition of American conservatism”, an idea that Reagan borrowed from Puritan settler John Winthrop, was reinforced by the anti-racist legacy of the Civil War, that “still remains” alive in the USA today. A tradition that became particularly glorious, in her view, during the Cold War (1945-1991), when America “stood for freedom against its greatest threat, the communist regime of the USSR”. However, claiming to base her account on historian Isabel Wilkerson’s “brilliant work, ‘Caste: the origins of our discontents’”, Kheiriddin claims that all of this American goodness came apart recently because “racist sentiments that were never extinguished” have flared up in the USA, mostly because “manufacturing jobs have disappeared”. Leading to the triumph of Trumpism and the siege of the Capitol. She concludes her column by asserting that, as a result, American conservatives have to redeem themselves from their recent fall from grace, “rediscover their roots and rebuild in the image of the shining city”, not only for their own benefit, but for the benefit of “conservatives the world over.”

There are so many things wrong with her analysis of those events that it is hard to know where to begin. Suffice it to say that I completely disagree with her contention that the USA ever constituted any kind of shining beacon for freedom. Certainly not during the Cold War, when that country allied itself with over a hundred ultra-right-wing dictatorships, all over the world, in order to physically eliminate tens of millions of ordinary people, for having supported pro-communist or anti-imperialist regimes. It seems to me that the whole point of the historical reference to the USA being based on a racist caste system, from the very beginning, is to thoroughly discredit the kind of American exceptionalism embodied in the entirely mythical idea of a “shining city on a hill.” Just like the USSR and the “People’s Republic” of China, which also eliminated tens of millions of ordinary opponents of their own misbegotten system, the USA and its allies never came within a billion light-years of realizing any of their radically overblown historical pretensions.

More to the point, after having denounced “Red” China for several decades, the USA turned right around and handed most of its manufacturing jobs over to China’s tender mercies, as well as to a dozen other low-wage countries, especially during the years when Ronald Reagan was in power (1981-1989). Reagan became the USA’s number-one champion of neoliberalism, helping already super-rich American industrialists, and similar patricians running the Federal Reserve’s “war on inflation”, become much richer than they ever were before. Thereby inaugurating the forty years of ultra-conservative, anti-labour reaction that culminated in the constantly accelerating neofascism of the entire Trump presidency. Which means that everything that Kheiriddin wrote about all those things is completely off-base.

That said, however, I also disagree with an entirely different columnist, Robin Philpot, who wrote an article, “Relations avec la Chine: le Québec n’est pas le Canada”, published on December 18 (2020), in a left-wing Montréal newspaper, “L’Aut’journal”, that also favours Québec independence. In that text, Philpot started out by saying that the federal government of Canada has abandoned its own sovereignty in its relations with China, ever since the 2018 arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, accused by the USA of fraud because of that company’s allegedly friendly relations with Iran. He then points out that recent opinion polls have determined that the Québec population is significantly less inclined to adopt anti-China points of view than is the population of English Canada, in spite of all the recent anti-China rhetoric coming from the Canadian government. In his opinion, therefore, it would be wrong for the Québécois to support the participation of Taiwan in the trans-Pacific free-trade deal in which Canada is involved, since that would be seen by China, quite rightly according to Philpot, as a violation of its own national sovereignty.

I think that Philpot’s analysis of recent Canada-China relations, while not nearly as far off-base as Kheiriddin’s point of view, is much too complacent toward China. Philpot, like many other leftists, seems to be treating Chinese imperialism in a more indulgent manner than he treats US imperialism, presumably because the US empire still dominates a lot more countries than the Chinese empire does. Nevertheless, it seems to me that people supporting Québec independence from Canada put themselves in a strange position when they refuse to support Taiwan’s independence from China. In spite of all the obvious differences between Taiwan’s historical status and Québec’s historical status, I get the impression that Philpot does not like Taiwan all that much because of its close ties to the US empire, and not because it used to be a Chinese province during a significant portion of its history.

The same kind of complacency toward China was also expressed in another recent article, “À propos de l’espionnage chinois”, also published in “L’Aut’journal” (January 15, 2021), downplaying the importance of Chinese spying on Western companies (such as Canada’s own Northern Telecom). According to its author, Paul Lavoie, China’s recent technological advances have much more to do with the superiority of its own educational system than with any unusual Chinese emphasis on spying. Even if that is true, however, I do not see why anyone in Québec would want to defend China’s imperial ambitions any more than anyone in Québec would want to defend the USA’s imperial ambitions.

A related controversy going on in Canada these days, as well as in many other countries, concerns China’s domination of its Sinkiang province, the historical homeland of the Uyghur national minority. China has been accused, mostly by the Western countries, of committing cultural genocide on the Uyghur population, notably by forcing millions of them to work in slave-labour camps, producing a large proportion of the world’s cotton products. China’s official reply to those accusations focuses on how those labour camps have nothing to do with slavery, and are merely Chinese attempts to fight against the popularity of Islamic extremism within that minority group. The Uyghur are also a Turkish-speaking people, currently being courted by the leaders of the Turkish empire, promoting an alliance of all the Turkish-speaking peoples in Asia, under its own “benign” leadership. In my opinion, however, China’s role in Sinkiang, as well as in Tibet, not to mention its attitude toward Taiwan, are much more imperial than they are benign. There is also nothing benign about Turkish imperialism either, nor about US imperialism, any more than there is anything benign about the rising influence of Islamic extremism inside any of the Muslim-majority countries in this world.

I would also like to take issue with another, more mainstream, supporter of Québec independence, former Parti Québécois finance minister Nicolas Marceau, who published another recent article, this one entitled “Le surplace canadien”, in the Montréal newspaper, “Le Devoir”, on January 9, 2021. In that article, Marceau began by supporting globalization, which according to him has provided many Québec companies with the foreign markets on which they depend for their survival. But then he went on to denounce a whole series of thoroughly negative consequences of that same globalization, such as rising social inequality, increasing cultural uniformity, insufficient taxation of capital inputs, fiscal evasion, inadequate environmental protection, loss of state sovereignty, insufficient government regulation of the huge tech corporations and the related crisis in the print media. He concluded his article by asserting that Québec independence is every bit as necessary as it ever was in the past, because the Canadian federal government seems to be incapable of doing anything about all those unfortunate consequences of globalization.

It seems to me that Marceau was describing neoliberalism in his article, particularly its very important free-trade component, rather than globalization as such, which does not necessarily, or even exclusively, have to depend on laissez-faire capitalism for its very existence. In theory at least, the world could set up an alternative form of globalization to the currently existing kind, which would still be based on large-scale trade and cooperation between competing countries, without having to put up with the predatory excesses of the current system, in which “shareholders’ rights” constantly take precedence over every other consideration. Instead, independent, anti-imperialist countries the world over (a larger number of them than those that currently exist) could compete among themselves at providing more services for their ordinary citizens than the other nations provide, rather than compete among themselves, as they do now, in order to provide fewer such services than their neighbours do.

Personally, I do not see how an independent Québec, run by people doing all the things that Marceau wants them to do, could possibly succeed if all the other countries in the world continue to operate under the prevailing system, based as it is on the philosophy of “the devil take the hindmost”. Marceau seems to belong to the wing of the Québec independence movement that supported former PQ premier Bernard Landry’s wholehearted enthusiasm for the 1988-1989 Canada/US free trade deal, as a way of weakening the Canadian empire by deliberately boosting the American empire instead. In that sense, Marceau’s article reads a bit like a more conservative version of Philpot’s article, both of which seem to favour one kind of foreign imperialism over another kind. It seems to me much more appropriate for anyone supporting Québec independence to avoid taking sides between rival imperial strategies.

We are all living nowadays in an increasingly complicated world, in which it is extremely difficult for anyone trying to do the right thing, or even advocating the right thing, when there are so many “right things” competing with each other for our attention. For example, many well-meaning people, such as Daniel R. Rousse of the Québec-based group of experts known as “Des Universitaires”, are currently advocating negative economic growth as a method of protecting what is left of the natural environment, by reducing commercial, industrial and agricultural pollution at the source (“Les changements climatiques: bénédiction ou malédiction?”, in “L’Aut’journal”, 11 décembre 2020).

Unfortunately, in today’s world, the people suffering the most from pollution, and from climate change, tend to be the world’s poorest, most downtrodden people, who as I pointed out earlier, are the same people also suffering the most from every other kind of crisis situation that currently afflicts our world. Although I have nothing against advocating negative economic growth, as such, I think that anyone supporting that goal, as a method of dealing with ever-expanding pollution at the source, ought to make sure, in every such article, to include at least a few paragraphs about how the goal here is not to make life a lot worse for the enormous numbers of people suffering from extreme poverty, but to channel negative growth toward eliminating all the ugly excesses of extremely rich people instead. Nothing creates support for ultra-right-wing populism, neofascism, and widespread rule-flouting as well, more quickly than refusing to provide downtrodden people with any way of escaping from the rotten conditions forced upon them by the over-fortunate.

Lastly, I would also like to take this opportunity to lambast one other miscellaneous group of rule-flouters, namely those who try to have their cake and eat it too, by constantly coming up with “fake news” versions of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, “the emperor’s new clothes”. One of the examples of which has to do with the pretensions of those people in Québec who try to condemn the provincial government for attacking human rights, because of its secularist law prohibiting wearers of religious garb, such as the hijab, the cross or the skull-cap, from becoming government employees “in positions of authority”. Those who insist on wearing those things anyway seem to feel that anyone who wants to do that should be allowed to do so entirely on individualist grounds, thereby promoting freedom for anti-social behaviour. In the case of the hijab, the women wearing it act as if it did not in fact represent an attack on women’s liberation, nor constitute a symbol of Islamic extremism. All the ostentatious wearers of such garb seem to be much more interested in using those tribal symbols as a form of in-your-face, “wearing of the colours” propaganda, aimed at deliberately provoking negative reactions from unbelievers. In other words constituting an admittedly much milder version of the Trump supporters’ tribal-symbolic attack on the US Capitol.

What the religious-symbol wearers are really doing, however, is trying to force non-believers into refusing to see what they do in fact see, just like in the Andersen tale. In other words, everyone in society is supposed to adopt their point of view about what they are doing, and, like them, refuse to admit that what is happening is really happening, after all. A situation that, curiously enough, does not arise whenever some ultra-right-wing fanatic paints a swastika on a synagogue. In the case of the swastika symbol, everyone seems to be quite rightly denouncing that kind of neofascist activity honestly, and no one is ever called upon to deny the evidence coming before everyone’s eyes.

Another example of a fake-news attitude, similar to that often exhibited by the wearers of religious garb, comes from some of the non-binary people, who have made up their minds to eschew any of the biological differences between men and women. A few such people, born with male bodies in this case, have come to the conclusion that they are in fact women, at least from their own personal points of view. So they dress up as women, grow long hair and, in some cases, take hormones in order to grow female breasts. Most of the time, this kind of behaviour is tolerated by others, except in a tiny number of exceptional cases. In one such situation, certain, non-binary individuals insist on getting their genital regions shaved by women who normally practice on other women (born biologically female). In those cases, the non-binary person gets extremely upset if that individual is not being treated just like any other female in the room.

Or, in other similar cases, an individual athlete, born male, will insist on keeping prizes won in competition with other athletes, born female, even if that individual’s born-male muscles may have had something to do with that person’s superior performance. In both these kinds of cases, genital shaving and sports competitions, the born-male person once again insists, just like the religious-symbol person above, that every other person alive must see the world in exactly the same way that that individual sees the world. Everyone is supposed to copy each one of those excessively individualistic kinds of people, by refusing to admit that biology is any way part of universal reality.

In all these cases of extreme rule-flouting, hyper individualists try to oblige people who do not share their particular fantasy about the world, to share it anyway, in spite of what they themselves actually experience. Just like in the case of Trump supporters, these hyper individuals denounce as “fake news” everything that every non-believer in their cause will do, whereas in the real world it is the Trump supporter, or the hyper individualist, who is in fact the real bearer of fake news, using a kind of “negative projection” of that person’s psychological characteristics. In other words, all these different kinds of rule-flouters, the Trump supporters inside the Capitol, people all over the world who insist on spreading around the coronavirus as much as they want, the different kinds of people imposing neoliberal and neofascist “solutions” to the world’s most important problems, those who prefer one rotten empire over another one, and the hyper individuals within the religious-symbol and the non-binary movements, all have at least one thing in common. They all want to make sure that everyone in this world be obliged to deform reality, or to deny it altogether, in exactly the same way as they do.