Survival of the biggest faker

All the world’s leading institutions currently seem to be practising the noble art of negative projection, imitating the ex-commander-in-chief of the USA (recently voted out of office), by accusing everyone else of propagating fake news. As a result, every manager is getting into the act of refusing to act, at every level of every government and of every business. Every kind of official bureaucrat in every country is spending a fortune on public relations and carefully-worded communications, explaining to all the ordinary peons that every time something goes wrong anywhere at all, in a hospital, in a school, in a care home, in a supply chain, or even in the recent construction of an enormous private villa located right next to the Black Sea, everyone in the world has to understand that the people in charge were not guilty of doing anything wrong, ever, and were in fact (at least, according to them) doing everything perfectly well at all times.

Ergo, the reason why so many less-important people (neither rich nor powerful) have suffered in some way, and seem to be considerably less well-treated than the VIPs are, must be their own fault, or perhaps some other unknown person’s fault. With the ironic result that everyone in charge of anything at all seems to be in competition with every possible rival in a concerted effort to root out the (fictitious) “non-performing element” in every institution who “should never have been hired in the first place”. Every time any journalist manages to ask any official why this or that unfortunate incident came to be, it was always an isolated, once-in-a-lifetime event, never to be repeated, occurring for some unexplained reason, in an otherwise very well-oiled machine. None of the people in charge will ever accept any responsibility for anything, unless whatever we are talking about turns out to have been something extremely rare, a good thing that benefited everyone (through no fault of their own).

None of the major problems at the world level, such as the current pandemic, or ever-worsening environmental degradation, or the ever-expanding nuclear arms race, or constantly multiplying gaps in income distribution, or the worldwide persistence of racist and misogynous violence, are ever given anything approaching adequate treatment by any of the people who are presumably supposed to deal with such things. Which means that the ever-increasing number of people (not belonging to any management circles), who fall by the wayside and feel completely left out of any significant decision-making, are becoming increasingly skeptical about the validity of their own future. Particularly because they have to put up with everyone in charge reacting to everything that happens, concerning the pandemic or any other equivalent problem, in the same, totally abysmal, eternally non-committal fashion. Always trying to be on both sides of every question, every single time, without ever doing anything about whatever it is they are supposed to be combatting.

Those few individuals possessing a great deal of wealth and power, who run every country in the world, do not seem the least bit interested in providing for the needs of those very numerous, “other people” who no longer function well in the formal, largely automated and virtualized economy, based as it is these days on joint, short-term, neoliberal-neofascist, profit maximization. This accelerating alienation of the vast majority of the world’s population applies just as much to countries pretending to be run as formal democracies, as in honestly authoritarian countries pretending to “consult all their citizens indirectly”, by banging them over the head whenever they protest against rotten living conditions.

Put in another way, this situation also applies just as much to the private-capitalist form of power and wealth accumulation as to the state-capitalist form of power and wealth accumulation, both of which are always present in every single country. The corporate people specializing in private capitalism know that the government officials specializing in state capitalism are just as corrupt as they are, because the private ones have been out there, trying very hard on every occasion, and succeeding so very often, in corrupting those very same officials. So that both groups can work together even more closely than before, to do an even better job at fleecing, and otherwise mistreating, the aforementioned ordinary people.

Although all the big-shots are participating in this universal evasion of responsibility, not every important person is as guilty as every other important person. In the USA, for example, Donald Trump cannot open his mouth for two seconds without lying, and still prides himself on being much more dishonest than any other rival for leadership of that not-so-great nation. His recently elected successor, Joe Biden, tells not tell nearly as many lies as Trump did, and still does. It is completely unrealistic, however, to declare that Biden never tells any lies at all, as so many fawning liberal journalists are currently pretending. Biden, after all, has been an active, high-level politician for the past fifty years or so, which means that his level of dishonesty has always been considerably higher than that of the average citizen. When he says, for example, that he fully intends to solve every one of the “important problems” of the “great democracy” that he currently leads, he has already told two or three lies, at the very beginning of his term.

Even though Biden and his collaborators will never be able to catch up with Donald Trump and his followers, in the lucrative business of telling particularly outrageous fibs to ordinary citizens, as a leading politician the new president of the USA, and the people around him, will undoubtedly continue telling more of their own, somewhat milder brand of deliberate misinformation, with every passing day. Even “Honest Abe” Lincoln was constantly lying about what he was doing, in contradiction with his totally undeserved reputation, although he too never lied as gloriously often as did his Confederate opponents. The Trump supporter carrying the Confederate flag in the Capitol building last month was also carrying on the white-supremacist tradition of southern slavery by joining the fight for “freedom” from being responsible to the whole population, and not just to a predetermined part of it.

To help explain why the world we live in these days seems to be working in such strange ways, many of us still manage to find some of the answers from the regular media. For example, on January 10 last, there was a program that aired on Québec television (“Découverte”), which attempted to explain from a neurological point of view, where false conspiracy theories come from. According to Marc Boucher, the author of a letter to the editor published in the Montréal newspaper, “Le Devoir”, on January 21, the producers of that program reminded everyone that the “primitive” part of the brain known as the amygdale, is in fact coming up with fake explanations of reality all the time, as part of the same neurological process that also engenders every kind of religious belief. Which certainly seems to be the scientific consensus on that subject.

Boucher completed his letter by explaining, also quite rightly, that in order to fight against such false ideas, we need to rely on the more profound sections of the brain, then use those parts of each normal brain to get a decent education. The kind of education that will enable us to acquire the all-important capacity for critical thinking, in order to overcome much more primitive ways of reacting to events, as those that lie behind religious belief and false conspiracy theories. This approach corresponds quite well with my own point of view, that I have also expressed several times in my blog, notably in my November 22, 2019, post, “Sapiens: cortex versus striatum”. The striatum being what some might call the worst part of the amygdale and the better part of the brain being the cortex.

Connecting the way in which all the people in charge are denying responsibility, in varying degrees, for any of the world’s major problems, with the way in which the primitive part of the human brain is contradicting its more intelligent part, is not as hard as it may seem at first glance. What is required here is to adopt exclusively rational, scientifically grounded, universal, all-inclusive approaches to world problems, leaving nothing pertinent out of the equation, and including nothing that is not pertinent. As opposed to irrational, irresponsible, religious, identity-projecting, ultra-individualist approaches that so often prevent millions of people, at all levels of society, from coming up with intelligent solutions to the way in which those world problems apply to every particular situation that arises in every particular country.

An excellent example of the completely irrational approach is what happened last month In the USA. The pro-fascist Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol were definitely domestic terrorists, intent on killing as many of their saviour’s opponents as possible, not only such obvious adversaries as Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but also “insufficiently dedicated traitors” like Mike Pence. Following that obviously neofascist event, the culmination of everything that Donald Trump has stood for from the very beginning, everyone involved in that deliberately anti-democratic conspiracy should be charged, tried and, if found guilty, convicted of participating in domestic terrorism. The guilty ones, beginning at the top of the pyramid, should then be sentenced to very long prison terms, the kind that are reserved for that sort of particularly heinous crime. Trump himself should be jailed for life, rather than any of his designated adversaries, such as Hillary Clinton (“lock her up”), that he has been so eagerly trying to put into prison for the past six years.

The neofascist people being dealt with in this fashion should include not only those who actually entered the Capitol with murderous intent, but also the thousands of other misguided insurrectionists providing back-up, just outside the building. Not to mention the leaders of that very real conspiracy, those who invented the false conspiracy about election fraud, and then used that hoax to plan and to carry out their very real rebellion against a “Satanic” entity that never really existed. The real Satan (according to the rules of negative projection) having been Donald J. Trump himself, and all the lesser devils running the Republican Party, without whose active leadership none of those anti-democratic events would ever have taken place. The Capitol event, after all, was only the most outrageous of the anti-democratic activities of the ex-president, who should have been impeached long ago. He would never have been elected in the first place if the leaders of the Republican Party, with the help of the Supreme Court, had not already gone down the rabbit-hole of supporting authoritarian deviants like him.

None of those conspiratorial leaders, and none of the active participants in that conspiracy, should be allowed to get away with using Joe Biden’s desire for national unity, or the return to business as usual, as if the things that they did never really happened. Most certainly not ultra-idiotic, Q-Anon nut-cases like Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (recently stripped of her House committee memberships), nor any of the armed, street-gang Nazis belonging to Donald Trump’s private military machine.

Nothing should be done nowadays either to placate any of the ultra-conservative Republican politicians, who still prefer, even now, giving billions of dollars in public funds to their billionaire friends, rather than to the masses of ordinary people who have suffered the most from the pandemic. In spite of the fact that it was the neoliberal stinginess of those same Republicans, as well as that of the more mainstream politicians still running the Democratic Party, that put an end to the “American dream” of social ascension once and for all, which in turn provided most of the fuel for the rise of the Trump version of neofascism.

Another excellent example of political negative projection is the worldwide conspiracy of Islamic fascism, directed as it is not only against the “crusader states” associated with rival religions, but also against the “insufficiently dedicated traitors” to Islam who do not practice the Muslim religion in the same fake, “ultra-rigorous”, way that they do. Not to mention the “apostates” from Muslim-origin communities who do not practice it any more at all. These ultra-right-wing Muslim terrorists, like the ones who attacked well-selected targets in the USA back in “9-11” (2001), are using falsely “literal” interpretations of the Koran in order to “justify” (in their eyes) thousands of murderous assaults on their own designated enemies. Most of their now-dead victims having once lived in Muslim-majority countries. A smaller, but constantly increasing number of their victims also used to live in European countries before they died, such as those who were murdered in France in 2015, including the “Charlie Hebdo” cartoonists. The Muslim terrorists use their own, ultra-reactionary misinterpretations of false-Muslim, tribal doctrine in the same way that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators used the false “election-fraud” gambit, in order to provide ideological cover for murdering all their designated victims.

Liberal-minded people in many of the Western countries have tried over the years to make excuses for the Islamic form of neofascism by blaming Western colonialism for having caused all this mayhem, such as by violently establishing all the more recent Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine, and the even more murderous, US-led invasions of Iraq in 1991 and in 2003, as well as by the still more deadly economic boycott of that same country in between those two invasions. To be sure, aggressions of that sort have most certainly constituted a kind of antechamber for Islamic terrorism, more or less in the same way that the past forty years of neoliberal austerity, particularly virulent in the USA, have become the antechamber of the Trump movement’s own variety of neofascism.

Many people in Québec recently recalled with horror what happened at the Grande Mosquée in Sainte-Foy, on January 29, 2017, when the anti-Muslim, white supremacist Alexandre Bissonnette murdered six Muslim worshippers and attempted to murder several others. During the commemoration of that horrible event, a Canadian politician, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, was quoted in the media as saying that the federal government should censor Internet messages coming from the extreme right. Whether or not that would be a good idea, however, is not at all obvious, given the unforeseen consequences that a too zealous interpretation of such government censorship might entail for freedom of expression.

More importantly, however, what people who make such comments seem to forget is that the ultra-radicalized, Islamic extremists also belong to the political category of “the extreme right”, every bit as much as do Bissonnette and all the other ultra-radicalized, white supremacists in this world, including those who attacked the Capitol building in the USA. The expression “extreme right” ought also to include Republican Party big-wigs like Donald Trump who launched that assault, as well as the leaders of several other varieties of neofascism, all around the world. Such as those promoting other religious forms of extremism (including “Hindu nationalism”, “Buddhist nationalism” and primitive forms of Christianity), not to mention those imbedded within the ruling classes of such authoritarian, post-communist countries as China and Russia.

Bissonnette, of course, was also accused from the outset as being motivated by Islamophobia, as well as by white supremacy. The use of that word, however, has also become an issue in Québec, with the government refusing to use the word “Islamophobia” very much, while also refusing to admit that systemic racism also exists here. Presumably because both “Islamophobia” and “systemic racism” have become political footballs, the federalist movement in Québec using those terms for its own political purposes, and not at all to really defend minority victims of discrimination, such as Muslims living in Québec, as well as Black people (whether francophone or anglophone) and indigenous people.

These terms are being used to help the federalists establish the idea that the Québec independence movement, as well as the currently “autonomist” government of Québec, should be opposed by everyone else, not just because complete independence, or too much autonomy, would break up Canada (which is, according to them, “the greatest country in the world”), or at least weaken it. But also because, in their opinion, the “separatists” and the autonomists are all a gang of racists and white supremacists, anyway. Some of the people in the independence movement, opposed to the “merely autonomous” provincial government, have also fallen into that trap by claiming that indigenous people are the only ones in the long list of Québec minorities who have really been treated over the years in a racist fashion. Rather than admitting that systemic racism, as well as systemic sexism, both exist after all in every country in the world, whether or not it has attained the status of an independent nation. And also admitting that like British colonialism, French colonialism in North America also supported the slave system in a major way, and not just peripherally.

From their side of the fence, the federalists, as well as some of the people in those minority groups, regularly “forget” to include the francophone Québécois as a whole (most of whom, but not all of whom, are white people) as themselves constituting an important minority group within Canada, as well as within all of North America. That has often been discriminated against in the past, and is still being discriminated against at the present. The Québécois, and all the other “French Canadians” who have not yet disappeared into the anglophone magma, having the dubious distinction, that they share with the Irish, of having often been treated as poorly as many other colonial minorities all over the world, in spite of the predominantly white colour of their skins.

As for Islamophobia, it ought to be obvious to everyone that it is an appropriate expression to use, if one is referring to people who are afraid of all Muslims, the more moderate, non-violent ones as well as the ultra-fundamentalist, violent ones. Being afraid of Muslim terrorists, however, does not qualify as a phobia, since the word phobia means an irrational fear, whereas being afraid of extremely violent people is a rational response. Which means that the federalists in Québec, as well as many of the pro-independence and the pro-autonomy people, are all misusing the word Islamophobia, in opposing ways and for opposite reasons.

When using words and expressions, especially emotionally-charged ones like “Islamophobia” and “systemic racism”, everyone involved in political debate should stop taking short-cuts and decide to use such terms wherever they are appropriate, while refusing to use them when they are not appropriate. In other words, responsible people should indeed behave in a responsible fashion at all times, and avoid modulating their discourse to suit dishonest political objectives. Ultra-right-wing Islamic terrorists did not mainly get that way because they were pushed into it by Western imperialism, they got that way mainly for their own ideological reasons, using fundamentalism and tribalism as methods of controlling the entire Muslim community.

Once they attain that necessary control, their constantly repeated intention is to proclaim holy war on the rest of the world, forcing everyone to convert to Islam by the sword, just like they imagine that the founders of their religion did many centuries ago. Convincing “their women”, by hook or by crook, to wear sexist, cover-up clothing like the hijab, has also become a necessary, symbolic gesture designed to help advance the cause. It is similar to the way in which the Maoists in China, and in dozens of other countries, wore Mao buttons on their clothing during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (1966-1976). Islamic neofascism also resembles the Trump movement’s neofascism in the sense that violent Trump supporters did not just get that way because of the enormous job losses caused by neoliberalism, they also became violent to get their champion ensconced, by hook or by crook, as the permanent president of the world’s most powerful country (“MAGA”). With the ultimate goal of making the world safe for ultra-conservative, white, Christian-fundamentalist supremacists forever, who in their view deserve to lord it over the rest of the world.

Another fascinating way in which some of the people in power in this world misuse their positions has to do with the state of Israel’s relatively recent, official definition of anti-Semitism. Which is quite important all over the world, and not just in Israel, because the anti-Semitic form of racism has been exceptionally virulent in many different countries, and has existed for thousands of years. Among other places, it has become part and parcel of ultra-reactionary forms of Christianity, and of Islam, in every part of the world that has been influenced by those two major religions, both of which affect many more people than those directly influenced by Judaism as such. On the other hand, there are also millions of Christians, called “Christian Zionists” in the USA, who are quite happy with their country’s support for Israel, because of Biblical predictions about how the re-establishment of Israel is a necessary pre-condition for the (supposedly imminent) second coming of Jesus Christ (“Christ” being derived from the Greek word for “Messiah”).

The main problem with the Israeli definition is the part of it having to do, some might say inevitably, with the state of Israel itself. Which is usually interpreted as claiming that it is inevitably anti-Semitic even to question the establishment of modern Israel on the same territory in which ancient Israel was established, by coming up with the false idea that doing so would be “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” (see the Montréal weekly, “The Suburban”, February 3, 2021). The first group of people having a problem with this part of the definition being religious Jews who believe that Israel could only be re-established after the coming of the Messiah. There having been no such Messiah, from their point of view, not Jesus of Nazareth nor anyone else, the establishment of modern Israel is therefore entirely illegitimate.

To be sure, the Palestinian, Arab-speaking people living in the modern territory taken over by the state of Israel in 1948 also objected to that state of affairs, and received the military backing of many other Arab states during several, unsuccessful, wars against Israel. As a result of having lost each one of those wars, over the years, several Arab states let fall their opposition to modern Israel’s existence, a trend that has accelerated quite recently, having been helped along by some ultra-imperialist people serving in the recent Trump administration in the USA.

In the meantime, however, an Israeli historian, Shlomo Sand, came up with the fascinating theory (the English version of his book, “The invention of the Jewish people”, having been published in 2009) that today’s Palestinians constitute in fact a majority of the descendants of the original Jewish population of Israel, who were later converted, first into Christianity and later into Islam. A quite disturbing point of view, to say the least, so far as the state of Israel is concerned. Which was also accompanied by another historical idea, which became popular among some well-known Jewish people, such as the Badinter couple in France (quite influential during the Mitterrand administration), that many of the world’s modern Jews are descended from the nomadic Khazar people (mostly from southeastern Europe), converted en masse to Judaism during the ninth century. Other people have also pointed to many other, non-Semitic groups of converts to Judaism, such as people of Chinese and Black African origins, as well. All of those ideas certainly seem to be undermining most of the historical, and ideological, foundations upon which is built modern Israel’s territorial claim.

As I pointed out earlier, however, this particular controversy over the official Israeli definition of Israel, is by no means confined to the groups of people so far mentioned. Only last week, the Côte-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough inside the city of Montréal, decided to adopt the Israeli definition of anti-Semitism as well, ostensibly because that borough, like several other boroughs nearby, has one of the largest Jewish-minority populations in Québec. It may very well be true that most of the Jewish people in and around Montréal support the Israeli definition of anti-Semitism, although it is also true that quite a few of those communities seem to be very religious indeed.

However, it is also true that the same borough, as well as many other parts of the greater Montréal region, are also home to various other groups of non-Christian-origin people, some of whom are of Muslim origin, most likely including among them many people who may have quite negative reactions to the CDN/NDG borough’s decision. Some of those people may very well be among those Muslim “apostates” mentioned earlier, who came to this country in order to get away from religious fundamentalism altogether, but who would most probably not want to support Israeli imperialism in the Middle East, either. Others, of course, could also be practising Muslims, some of whom could certainly be died-in-the-wool anti-Semites themselves, who could not care less about where any of the world’s Jews come from, because they hate them all anyway, for their own totally irrational, ultra-Islamic reasons.

My main argument here, however, is to point out how completely inappropriate it is for any Montréal borough, or any other group of politicians anywhere else, to adopt a 100% pro-imperialist point of view on this subject, without worrying at all about any of the possible implications of so doing. It seems to me that everyone should be telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, about situations of this sort. No one should be allowed to get away with adopting the official Israeli definition of anti-Semitism without pointing out all the consequences of so doing that I have listed above. Just like in the debates about the right ways to deal with the pandemic, or with environmental degradation, or with the January 6 invasion of the US Capitol, or with the rise of Islamic terrorism, everyone should be “following the science” (Greta Thunberg’s expression) and not trying to use misinformation in order to achieve these various kinds of dishonest, opportunistic political goals.

In my opinion, following the science is most definitely the thing to do in every situation, not just in the worldwide fight against pollution, nor only when it comes to dealing with the coronavirus pandemic (one of many competing pandemics, like cancer), but all the time. To be sure, as we have all experienced during the SARS-2 pandemic, governments, corporations and all sorts of other official institutions, often get all mixed up trying to follow medical science which, like every other kind of science, is not nearly so easy to follow as it is sometimes assumed to be. Uncertainty is a necessary ingredient in every scientific inquiry, so it is not always possible to know exactly what to do in every given circumstance.

Which means that it is extremely important, as many different people have already pointed out, for every decision-making organization to be as transparent as possible, to make sure that  ideologically handicapped people, like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, do not go off half-cocked all the time, and come up with the world’s most bizarre and thoroughly nonsensical “explanations” for everything that moves. As many such people already did at various times in the past, such as with the crazy series of “UFO” sightings during the extremely dangerous Cold War.

People all over the world should also stop putting the emphasis on one cause over another cause, for example by saying that we should all concentrate on defeating the viral pandemic right how, and deal with all the other problems later. The problem with that approach being that all these extremely disturbing crises (the pandemic, the environment, the next economic depression, the nuclear arms race, etc.) are all linked to each other all the time, each one of them (most certainly the pandemic) making each other one much worse than it otherwise would be, all by itself. We all have to be rational and progressive, trying to get rid of every one of the world’s most reactionary ideologies in one fell swoop: neoliberalism, neofascism, extractivism, imperialism, militarism, racism, sexism, social-class elitism (sometimes called “class-ism”), religious fundamentalism and ethnic exclusivism. A program that is obviously extremely difficult to accomplish, as well as being absolutely necessary, since all these problems are, constantly and increasingly, inter-connected. They are all merely different kinds of irrational behaviour, all of them proceeding, unfortunately, from the same, primitive parts of every human brain.