Freedom from responsibility
The human race is desperately trying to face up to a long series of multiple moral dilemmas these days. Such as attempting to contain the still very dangerous SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, all over the world, without causing an economic depression and/or a total breakdown in social cohesion. Not to mention facing up to the very real possibility of many more such pandemics coming down the pike. While at the same time also trying to do something equally real, and necessarily very drastic, about the accelerating, and even more dangerous disaster of uncontrolled climate change, without also provoking an even greater increase in the already colossal, hierarchical gap between the world’s social classes. Which is still being promoted even nowadays, in spite of the pandemic, by the continually advancing, neoliberal counter-revolution of the “divine market”, that started taking over most of the world during the international “war on inflation”, back in the 1980s, and has never looked back. Robert Reich, a former labour secretary in the US federal government, pointed out recently that in his country the top one tenth of one percent of the population currently possesses as much wealth as the bottom 90% of the total population.
Extreme social-class divisions are also simultaneously exacerbating related divisions between, on the one hand, millions of misogynous men adhering to neofascist “traditional values”, by lording it over millions of supposedly acquiescing females (women and girls), and on the other hand, millions of “upstart” women getting beaten up or killed because they preferred to be treated like real people rather than like domestic servants or worse. To be sure, there are also quite a few domineering women mistreating men as well, in various different ways, whenever the opportunity arises, but they are outnumbered a hundred to one by the much more violent male perpetrators. Also being exacerbated by the same social-class hierarchy, in a vaguely similar way to the gender division, are long-lasting differences in social consideration, all over the world, between many different, biologically fictitious, racial groupings, that are nonetheless considered to be real entities by millions of true believers in racism. White supremacy is only the most obvious example of the various forms of cultural imperialism currently posing as “racial superiority”.
The potentially successful resolution of all the moral dilemmas so far mentioned is also being undermined, even more dangerously, by the worsening confrontations between the world’s leading imperialist powers, provoking dozens of regional wars, sometimes starting out as civil wars, as well as long-lasting, armed stand-offs between would-be belligerents, in many different parts of the world, that occasionally erupt into murderous violence. Many of those wars are being fought between extremely well-equipped regular armies, resorting to long-distance, mass terrorism, featuring missiles and drones, pitted against much less well-equipped, irregular militants, resorting to generally less murderous forms of terrorism, that are often (but not always) more localized in scope. Most of those armed confrontations are also being exacerbated by their intersection with several competing varieties of religious fundamentalism, and of ethnic exclusivism. The most obvious examples being the never-ending civil war in Syria, that has almost become a world proxy war, and the particularly unequal confrontation between Saudi Arabia and its allies, on one side, and the pro-Iranian Houthi militants in Yemen, on the other side.
In order to initiate any kind of decisive action toward resolving any of these inter-reacting moral dilemmas, leaders of all the world’s most important institutions, and ordinary people as well, have to become conscious of the fact that taking definitive action to overcome each one of those conundrums, or all of them at once, is being even more seriously undermined by the irresponsible attitudes currently being promulgated all over the place by the world’s most reactionary people. Who are being led, as they always have been in the past, by the brainless chieftains of the international kakistocracy, in which the worst possible people tend to dominate everything that moves. Antediluvian attitudes toward life, promoted as traditional (neofascist) values, are regularly trotted out whenever the perpetrators of any one of the different kinds of atavism need to find some kind of twisted “justification” for whatever it is that they feel like doing. In many different situations nowadays, the quest for fake “freedom” and phoney “liberty” is often synonymous with rank irresponsibility, denying the very existence of any common humanity. Such as by dividing the world up into one version or another of Donald Trump’s double-binary system (simultaneously neoliberal and neofascist) of “winners” and “losers”.
Some of the most obvious examples of self-centred calls for freedom from responsibility are the demonstrations taking place in many different countries against wearing masks and maintaining social distancing, to fight against the pandemic, even after mass vaccination campaigns have begun. Almost every country that has started vaccinating is still a long way from achieving “herd immunity”, which can only begin when at least 75% of any given population has received the number of shots required to become fully protected, not only from the original strain but also from all the newer ones. Each different kind of vaccine currently available varying considerably, not only in the number of shots required, but also according to competing levels of efficacy being claimed, but not necessarily realized, by each private-capitalist or state-capitalist pharmaceutical enterprise.
The fact that most of the world’s richer countries are also practising “vaccine nationalism” makes victory over the virus that much more difficult to attain. For the obvious reason that the constant spewing forth and dissemination of ever more dangerous forms of the disease means that even countries managing to inoculate most of their own people can still potentially be reinfected at some point by variants arising in poorer countries that have not yet been allowed to begin that process. A country like Israel, for example, needs to make sure that even after every “good” (Jewish) citizen is correctly vaccinated, all the neighbouring Palestinian, and Middle Eastern populations generally, also have to achieve similar success, one way or the other, if the Israeli campaign is to succeed for real.
For its part, the virus itself does not give a damn about ethnic, nationalist or religious boundaries, or even about varying degrees of wealth and poverty, anywhere in the world. Herd immunity in a large region like the Middle East can be undermined, at some point later on, by insufficient vaccination and insufficient social distancing being practised in some other parts of the world. In other words, everyone everywhere should be following the recommendations of the World Health Organization to the letter, at least whenever that illustrious body succeeds in making sure that it is genuinely “following the science”, rather than relying on some particular, geopolitical preference. Arguing in favour of non-compliance, on the spurious grounds of freedom from responsibility, is a good way of making sure that everyone ends up dead. If not directly from the virus, then from all the other dangerous diseases that are no longer being adequately treated in order to deal with SARS-CoV-2 instead. And, if they are still alive after being exposed to those two dangers, from all the other pandemics waiting in the wings.
Following the recent visit of a WHO delegation to China, ostensibly to figure out how this particular pandemic really began, the debate has been re-ignited between those who accept China’s official point of view, and those who do not accept it at all. China prefers to blame everything on a spurious claim about the importation of the virus in frozen agricultural produce from abroad. But then they nevertheless admit that it could have happened in China itself because an earlier version of the virus was transferred from bats to humans, naturally altered and transmitted over many months via some intermediate animal flesh, that was being sold in wild-animal meat-markets in Wuhan. The alternate hypothesis being that an already-produced, ready-to-attack-humans version of the virus escaped from Wuhan’s very up-to-date, scientific laboratory designed to study ways of controlling such viruses. Unfortunately, the lab-produced hypothesis has become a geopolitical football, associated with such anti-Chinese officials as Robert Redfield, the former head of the USA’s CDC (“Centres for Disease Control and Protection”), under Donald Trump.
Trying to figure out what really happened has therefore become extremely difficult, everyone’s point of view on the subject being classified as necessarily pro-Chinese or anti-Chinese. However, in spite of the fact that the lab theory seems to be a lot worse for the Chinese government’s reputation than the meat-market theory, both hypotheses are devastating. Authorities in that country could have gotten rid of the meat-markets a long time ago if they had so decided, just like they could have prevented any sorcerer’s apprentices in the lab from fooling around with viruses without taking the necessary precautions. This is a country, after all, in which over 11 million people in the Wuhan area suffered through a total lockdown lasting 76 days without apparently uttering a peep of protest.
The historical context that helps to understand how China became the type of ultra-authoritarian country that it has now become starts with the 10 000 kilometre, zig-zag, “Long March” across China during the 1930s. That was when over 100 000 Communist Party of China (CPC) members fled from one Chinese region to another, under constant pursuit by the regular army of Chinese dictator Tchang, only about 10 000 of those CPC members arriving at their final destination. This being the second time that the same dictator had tried to finish off the same CPC (founded in 1921) in the same fashion, the first time having occurred in 1926-1927.
In 1937, the Long March survivors were saved from total annihilation by the Japanese invasion of all of China, following up on the 1931 Japanese occupation of the Manchuria region, as well as its ongoing colonization of Taiwan (1895-1945). During the same period (1912-1949) of history, when the country was under the official control of Tchang’s Nationalist Party, the largely peasant population also had to put up with several large-scale famines, some of them apparently induced or exacerbated by local authorities. During the third civil war of 1945-1949, the CPC, with help from the Soviet Union, finally defeated the Nationalist Party dictator, supported by the USA, who fled to Taiwan with the remainder of his army. Several million ordinary civilians also died during that war.
The survivors of the Long March then became the leaders of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of China (PRC), the founders of which had learned from their ultra-severe trials and tribulations to become exceptionally tough and extremely ruthless. A toughening-up that also continued during the inconclusive Korean civil war (1950-1953), leading to the death of several million Korean citizens (mostly on the communist side). Not to mention the death of over 900 000 Chinese soldiers helping save the North Korean regime from being wiped out by the pro-Western South Korean regime, supported to a very considerable extent by the USA and its UN allies (including Canada and Australia).
The CPC then proceeded to “toughen up” its own peasant population as well, wiping out somewhere around 30 million of them (mostly through famine) during Chairman Mao’s failed attempt (the “Great Leap Forward” of 1958-1961) at industrializing the Chinese countryside. Government control of the population was also reinforced during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, that lasted from 1965 all the way up to Mao’s death in 1976, during which “only” a few more million people died.
In other words, the CPC and the PRC have profited from exactly one hundred years of Chinese history in order to produce the kind of almost completely totalitarian regime that currently exists in that country. The founding generation, veterans of the Long March, have since been replaced by their sons and daughters, carrying on the CPC’s same ruthless attitudes, those “red-diaper babies” either running the government, or becoming “red billionaires” running private capitalist empires instead. Because the ultra-authoritarian tradition was passed on so successfully, this means that the current pandemic, produced in China in one way or another, in spite of having killed off an unknown number of ordinary Chinese people, has not harmed the PRC as a whole, nor its ruling political party, very much at all, except insofar as its international reputation, and its international trade, are concerned.
When the PRC was first established, it was initially an extremely important ally of the Russian-dominated USSR and its gradually increasing bloc of theoretically “communist” countries, in Eastern Europe, in several East Asian countries close to China, such as North Korea, North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, with the latest addition (1960) becoming Cuba, only a few kilometres away from the USA. Not to mention the adhesion of dozens of other allies, run by anti-Western-imperialist dictators not yet officially “communist”, in many other parts of the Third World (Asia, Africa and Latin America).
The second most important Soviet ally, which remained loyal right up to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, was the “Democratic” Republic of (North) Vietnam, which almost single-handedly defeated the equally dictatorial, but anti-communist, Republic of (South) Vietnam during the Vietnamese civil war (1957-1975). Which they accomplished in the face of truly massive US military support for South Vietnam, with the result that most of the several million Vietnamese deaths in that war also came from the communist side. The division of the world communist movement into pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions was also underlined by a genuine border war between the USSR and the PRC in 1969, as well as an unsuccessful Chinese attack on Vietnam in 1979, to punish it for having invaded and overturned the excessively murderous, pro-Chinese, Pol-Pot regime (1975-1979) in Cambodia.
The Maoist regime in China, however, was not at all satisfied with its subordinate role within the pro-Soviet alliance, and desperately sought a way out of that situation. The way out being provided by the USA during the 1970s, when the Nixon administration began courting the PRC leadership, a process that eventually led, after Mao’s death, to the takeover of that country by the “capitalist roaders” in the CPC. As well as severely weakening the Soviet bloc, which eventually collapsed altogether, egged on by the USA’s highly successful “Star Wars” campaign of advanced military expenditure.
After which the PRC finally succeeded in completely industrializing quite a large portion of China, by providing a low-wage paradise not only for the USA’s most important (and completely unpatriotic) corporations, engaged in a “feeding frenzy” based on neoliberal “shareholder rights”, but also for many similar investors in Western Europe, Japan, and several other countries. An utterly amazing turn of events that made the PRC immensely stronger than it was before, while also leading to the deindustrialization of large parts of some of those unpatriotic countries, particularly affecting the “Rust Belt” in the USA, populated since then by tens of millions of unemployed and under-employed, formerly well-paid, working-class citizens.
All these fundamental, economic and geopolitical facts have to be recalled in order for anyone to understand why China has become such an astonishingly ultra-authoritarian country. Which has not been affected by the pandemic to anywhere near the same extent that the same pandemic has played havoc with such considerably different countries as the USA, Brazil, India, Iran, the Russian Federation, Great Britain, Canada, and many of the countries in the European Union. Since several of the nations in that list are also considered to be authoritarian countries, formal democracy does not seem to be a significant culprit causing an enormous increase in the overall death toll resulting from the PRC’s virus. Well-disciplined citizens in several authoritarian countries (not only the PRC but also the DRV) and in several formal democracies (Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand), not all of them located in East Asia, have also managed to avoid major loss of life.
Ultra-right-wing populism seems to have been a very significant factor in countries with much larger numbers of victims, most obviously in the cases of the USA and Brazil, where neofascist leaders Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro mimicked the favourite slogan of the USA’s most popular joke magazine (“Mad”) by adopting a “What, me worry” attitude toward the pandemic. Bolsonaro is still at it nowadays, with the result that Brazil is probably going to end up with more dead people than the USA’s 500 000 victims (and counting). Dozens of other countries adopted a similar strategy, as in Tanzania, where “the bulldozer” strongman John Magufuli, apparently died of the disease himself after having strenuously avoided acknowledging any of its adverse effects on the ordinary people in his own country. Which at least in his mind belonged to him, after all, not to any foreign imports.
Confinement strategies being practised in many parts of the world, during the first, the second and the third waves of the pandemic, have also resulted in a great deal of economic and social distress. Most of the social stress caused by the forced curtailment of economic activity has also been foisted mainly onto each country’s more vulnerable populations, which is to say most of the women, a large number of religious and ethnic minorities, handicapped people of all sorts, and the poorer parts of every population generally. This has fostered decreased standards of living in all those populations, including the USA’s “Rust Belt”, illustrated by greatly decreased levels of physical and mental health, as well as a huge increase in violent forms of misogyny.
All these negative effects of the pandemic have been rendered much worse by the fact that most of the world’s countries were also suffering from increasingly neoliberal forms of “governance”, during the forty years preceding the arrival of the pandemic. “Just-in-time” methods of production and distribution, supposedly appropriate to the automobile industry in Japan, were also applied to pharmaceutical production and distribution, as well as to the overall health, education and welfare of the entire population, in both the private and the public sectors of the economy.
Which contributed enormously to all the recent, accelerated suffering stemming from the pandemic, not only in most of the world’s richer countries, but even more so in all the world’s considerably poorer countries. A category that also includes more than a few recently industrialized nations, such as India and China, all of which have been separated into equally large, much-more-industrialized and much-less-industrialized regions, that are also much richer, or much poorer, than the other sections of each country. Even the most important of those countries, the PRC, has suffered from the pandemic, not so much directly as indirectly, through its greatly reduced world reputation, as well as reduced exportation possibilities, caused by a significant decline in the health of the overall world economy.
Some of the richer countries, such as the USA and Canada, have recently begun to react to the pandemic in a positive way, at least at the federal level of government, by spending, or planning to spend, trillions of dollars of mostly borrowed money to help all sorts of people adversely affected by the coronavirus, not only the owners of leading corporations in particularly devastated sectors of the economy, but also millions of ordinary (poor and middle-class) people. Which has led some politicians (such as Bernie Sanders) to claim that those countries have left neoliberalism behind completely and begun something akin to Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” (the second, pro-labour version of his plan to fight against the effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s). Such, however, is not the case, since some of the other aspects of neoliberalism, causing even greater social divisions than those that had been put into place before the pandemic arrived, are still being adopted even now.
One example of that is the refusal on the part of all the world’s rich countries to allow poor countries to ignore the patents belonging to the enormous pharmaceutical corporations during the pandemic. Canada’s government tried to get on the good side of that trend by participating financially in the COVAX attempt at provoking international cooperation to help ordinary people in poor countries get vaccinated. But then the same government also decided to become one of the few rich countries in the world to reserve for itself some of the vaccine set aside for that program, to add to Canada’s own giant purchase of foreign vaccine, from every possible source. Presumably because Canada is also suffering from other less-generous rich countries, that may indeed contribute money to COVAX but also practise “vaccine nationalism” anyway, at least sporadically (such as the USA and the European Union). Canada made the horrendous mistake of also becoming one of the few rich countries that completely abandoned its own capacity to produce such vaccines by adopting an ultra-neoliberal, pharmaceutical-import policy during the decades preceding the pandemic.
There are in fact hundreds of other ways by which both Canada and the USA also continue to practise neoliberalism, in spite of greatly increasing their already considerable levels of national debt. Such as Canada’s decision not to provide any help for foreign temporary workers (mostly from Guatemala and Mexico), that do most of the back-breaking, low-paid agricultural labour that Canadian citizens themselves refuse to undertake. For example, by refusing to help those workers test for the presence of the virus after their arrival in Canada, by providing information available in the Spanish language, or by providing nursing services to make sure that those workers get protected for real.
Canada’s provincial governments, which bear most of the responsibility for health, education and welfare, are also finding various different ways to avoid abandoning neoliberalism altogether. The province of Québec, for example, put the emphasis in its recent budget on a traditional program of government aid to infrastructure (construction), benefiting mostly male workers, rather than trying to help the much harder-hit, mainly female workers in the health and education sectors, as well as in retail. A result that has also been reinforced by a backwards “reform” of the existing Québec law that had been originally designed to protect the health and the safety of workers on the job.
US president Joe Biden has recently come up with a similar infrastructure-spending program, but on a much, much larger scale, though it will probably not get through Congress without being considerably watered down, if not rejected outright, by the ultra-conservative Republican Party and a small minority of still neoliberal Democrats. For their part, state governments in the USA are often in the same situation as Canadian provinces, along with most of the municipal governments in both countries. Not to mention all the multinational corporations in both nations, not just those in the pharmaceutical industry, as well as all the small and medium-sized companies that gravitate around the activities of the much larger firms. Amazon and Walmart being the two largest and the two worst corporations in that country (and abroad), currently mistreating as many ordinary workers as possible.
Particularly galling in this context are all the hypocritical politicians in those countries who pretend not to have participated in the neoliberal feeding frenzy in the past. Such as president Joe Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris in the USA, pushing their current reinvestment strategy with such dedication that they seem to have forgotten that they helped several huge multinational corporations in the USA flee from government regulation during Donald Trump’s period in power. Or those other hypocrites in the Québec Liberal Party, so eagerly criticizing the very real inadequacies of the current Québec government, in its economic program, while also conveniently forgetting that several years ago, when they were in power, they were some of the most reactionary proponents of government austerity.
In 2005, the “common-front” unions in the public sector in Québec went on strike against neoliberalism, managing for the last time to truly mobilize their 500 000 members. They were, however, denounced and humiliated as a bunch of dummies by the leaders of the Liberal Party, who succeeded in stonewalling them completely. Even though those workers are still unionized nowadays, unlike in the USA and several parts of Canada, they are much less powerful now than they were back then. They have not been able to do much at all to help their members fight against the current government’s imposition of such neofascist constraints as compulsory overtime, cancelled vacations, and so on, completely ignoring their still legally valid collective agreements in a thousand different ways. Hospitals in Québec have only just recently adopted a plan to recruit new nurses, for their emergency rooms, to replace thousands of nurses who left their posts because they wanted to stay alive. The new “nurses” to be hired being in fact secondary school graduates who are not expected to get more than a couple of months training in that profession before starting to work on some of the sickest patients in the entire system!
Meanwhile, the third wave of the pandemic, already extremely well-advanced in Ontario, Canada’s largest province, is also catching on very quickly in Québec, the second-largest province, where new outbreaks of the virus are constantly occurring, especially in dozens of different workplaces. People wearing masks at work nevertheless remove their masks while eating in often poorly ventilated kitchens and dining rooms, blithely talking and laughing with each other in order to spread the virus around as much as possible, acting as if they did not have a care in the world. Québec schools are quite often just as poorly ventilated, making a mockery of all the rules about masking and social distancing.
Another excellent example of rank hypocrisy in supposedly liberal-democratic countries has to do with the current resurgence of the anti-racism movement in the USA, particularly after the 2020 murder of a black man (George Floyd) accused of a minor infraction, by a white policeman (Derek Chauvin) in Minneapolis. An event that contrasts perfectly with the 1995 murder, in the same USA, by an extremely jealous, but very well-known black footballer and actor, O. J. Simpson, of his white ex-wife and her white companion. Back then, Simpson beat the rap by himself, since he was from the upper class and had more than enough money to pay several good lawyers. In the 2020 case, it is theoretically possible that the white cop will be convicted of something, even if it is not for (well-deserved) first-degree murder, because the way in which he killed his black victim was recorded in a dozen different videos, shown on the news over and over again, and became a cause célèbre not only in the USA, but everywhere else as well.
Dozens of other black people in the USA also died recently, under similar circumstances, without anyone outside any of the police forces knowing anything about their fates. Several people of East Asian origins, living in the USA, have also been attacked and killed, since Donald Trump first began talking about “the Chinese virus”, by racist idiots who could not care less about the fact that none of the “Chinese-looking” individuals that they might happen to meet on the street, near where they live, could possibly have had any connection with the CPC leadership. Given the systemic nature of racism in the USA, not only against black people and East Asians, but also against indigenous people and dozens of other “racialized” minorities, it is highly doubtful that this latest upsurge of anti-racist sentiment will actually result in any significant, long-lasting changes in that country’s racist profile.
It should never be forgotten, however, that the ideological pandemic of racism is by no means confined exclusively to the USA. Nor is it at all confined exclusively to white people, as the ruling elites of dozens of countries with very small white populations, all over the world, such as the PRC, Myanmar, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have also abundantly proved over and over again. So-called “reverse racism” also exists in many different cases, such as in the recent University of Ottawa case in Canada, the administration of which refused to support an anti-racist professor, Verushka Lieutenant-Duval, who used the “n-word” in class for educational purposes, while almost simultaneously refusing to condemn a thoroughly racist professor, Amir Attaran, for (among other things) calling Québec “the Alabama of the north” because of its racially-neutral, laicity law banning the use of religious symbols, that often promote sexism, among government employees in positions of authority. (See the Brian Myles editorial in “Le Devoir”, March 27-28, 2021).
It is also extremely interesting to take note of the fact that all the “cancel culture” people opposed to using the n-word in any context do not seem to have any objection at all to the frequent use of derogatory terms that have also been invented, in various different countries, for any of the other minorities, such as people of Italian origin, or of Jewish origin, or of French-Canadian origin, or whatever. When asked why they put all the emphasis on the n-word in this context, they reply that black people were much more poorly treated in the past than any of those other people because of the millions of black people who were worked to death, or perished in many other ways, from slavery and the slave trade. In so doing, however, the cancel-culture crowd forget that millions of Jewish people were physically eliminated by the Nazi regime in Germany (1933-1945), and by their pro-Nazi, European allies, a fate that is certainly as bad as what the black people had to endure. To be sure, the number of victims was a lot higher for the black slaves, slavery having lasted for a much longer time than the mass extermination of the European Jews…
People who put the emphasis on the slave trade between Africa and the European colonies in the Americas also conveniently forget that intra-African slavery, between rival African peoples, was also practised to a very considerable extent, as was the equally horrendous slave trade between the Muslim empires in the Middle East and their African colonies, long before the Europeans began conquering most of that continent. And that the number of victims involved in each one of those three, very long-lasting, slave trades was in fact quite similar. Also conveniently forgotten by the same, self-righteous people is the fact that the word “slave” itself comes from the white-skinned, Slav peoples in Eastern Europe, who were also victims of slavery before the European empires moved the bulk of their slave trade into Africa and the Americas.
Not to forget either that racism is by no means confined to skin colour, but also applies to such other characteristics of cultural imperialism as linguistic hegemony. In Canada, the English-Canadian majority has been trying to rid the country of its francophone minority, in Québec as well as in the rest of the country, ever since Canada was officially set up, through what is known as “Confederation”, back in 1867. Not so much by killing people off because of the colour of their skin, which is considerably more “popular” in the USA than it is north of the border, as by long-term linguistic assimilation. After having succeeded in greatly reducing francophone populations outside Québec, that same anglophone majority in Canada has become quite enthused recently, when they found out that most young francophones in Québec, succumbing not only to government largesse toward the English-speaking minority in Québec, but also to the overwhelming influence of US popular culture, have begun communicating among themselves in English more than in French.
Another fascinating example of reverse racism was the Émilie Nicolas column (“La honte”, “Shame” in English) published in “Le Devoir” on April 1, 2021. Nicolas was reacting to the current campaign recently launched in Québec to reinforce the French-language Charter because of the recent decline of the use of French even by Québec francophones. Her column was entirely dedicated to explaining the history of how “Parisian” French managed to eliminate all the local dialects that used to exist in the different regions of France in days gone by. And also, by the same token, how that same Parisian French was exported to Canada and to Québec during the colonial period. Which was also exported to all the other French colonies around the world, some of which (mostly in Africa) are still using the French language even nowadays, instead of the indigenous languages that they used to speak. The title of her article being a put-down of the way in which French imperialism imposed the “Parisian dialect” in France, and in the colonies, by convincing all those people, whether they were French-speaking settlers in the colonies, or indigenous peoples speaking their own languages before the French invasions, to be ashamed of their own local or regional tongues.
So far as I can tell, nothing in that particular column was entirely false, from a historical point of view. The way in which Émilie Nicolas committed reverse racism was instead through the slightly more subtle form of the sin of omission, deliberately leaving out of the equation the fact that all the other European countries that founded colonial empires back then, the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch (Netherlands), the Russian, the German and the Italian empires, used exactly the same methods of imposing their own official languages inside their own nation-states and inside their own colonies. The French nation and its empire were by no means the only ones who went about shaming everyone else into adopting their own official versions of their own languages, leaving behind them millions of people outside Europe speaking English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch (the Boers in South Africa), and Russian, even nowadays. The German and the Italian languages were not nearly so successful, possibly because their imperialist adventures outside Europe did not last as long.
As a matter of fact, the British and the Spanish empires were more successful in imposing linguistic imperialism than either the French, the Russian, the Portuguese (Brazil) or the Dutch empires. Most of the indigenous languages in the USA were replaced by English, as well as in the area known today as “English Canada”. English is also regularly used by millions of people in India, as a sort of “lingua franca” of communication between people who also speak their own indigenous languages, but use English instead of accepting the linguistic domination of only one of those indigenous languages (such as Hindi). Which is quite similar to the way in which French is currently being used as another lingua franca in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where people also retain various, competing, indigenous languages. Spanish has also replaced even more indigenous languages, particularly in “Latin America”, than French has replaced such languages in Africa, while English has also replaced just as many indigenous languages in other parts of Africa as the French language has. Russian has also replaced hundreds of indigenous languages in those parts of today’s Russian Federation that did not speak that language at all before the Russian empire began its continental, colonizing push eastward to the Pacific Ocean.
There is, therefore, no more reason for the Québécois population to be ashamed to be speaking French nowadays than there is for most of the citizens of the USA to be ashamed of speaking English. Most of the Québécois are descended from French settlers from the colonial period (but by no means all of them), just like most of the US population (also by no means all of them) are descended from British settlers. French is also being spoken (along with Creole) by the Haitian minority in Québec, along with several other immigrants who came here more recently from Africa. Quite a large number of the citizens of the USA speak Spanish as well as English, their bilingualism stemming from their “Latin American” origins, while a large percentage of the francophone Québécois population is also bilingual, as are a significant portion of the English-speaking minority in Québec. Bilingualism, however, has become a dangerous reality in Québec, at least for French since it is very much a minority language in most of North America, much more so than Spanish, and immensely more so than English.
Émilie Nicolas is most likely aware of all those realities, but chose to ignore them in her article. As a black bilingual person, she seems to identify with the English-Canadian pretence of supporting multiculturalism, except when it applies to the French-speaking Québécois. People who support the use of the French language, in North America or in Africa, are not, however, any more imperialist than those who support the continued use of any of the other European languages, outside Europe. It is also just as important to point out that all dominant languages in every part of the world, not just the ones that originated in Europe, also tend to be just as imperialist.
Mandarin, the official variety of Chinese being spoken throughout China nowadays, as the name itself suggests, has also replaced dozens of other Chinese dialects, as well as dozens of other indigenous languages, in that country. Not to mention the fact that even though 96% of the current PRC population is of Han origin, most of the people currently identifying as “Han” nowadays were not considered to be of Han origin when the first Chinese empires were being set up, over two thousand years ago. Back then, the Han were a much smaller group, occupying a much smaller territory, that became immensely larger during succeeding centuries, mostly through the assimilation of other peoples, some of them being related peoples and others not so much.
In other words, Western imperialism, and colonialism, were most definitely not the only kinds of imperialism, linguistic and otherwise, that have existed throughout human history. Every part of the world in fact, not just Europe and not just China but everywhere else as well, has gone through the same kinds of conflict between competing empires. That is, at least since the first historically recognized empire was established in Western Asia, when the Akkadian people, belonging to the Semitic family of languages, conquered the first, urban-based, Sumerian civilization in 2234 BC (4255 years ago). Since that time, thousands of different kinds of imperialism have been leaving in their wakes thousands of dominant and dominated peoples, as well as dominant and dominated languages, not to mention dominant and dominated religions, many of which still exist nowadays. There is not now, nor has there ever been, any part of the world that has not gone through one version or another of the process described in the Nicolas article.
Misogyny, otherwise known as sexism, that I was also talking about earlier in this blogpost, is just as important a form of discrimination as is racism, and it has also been practised in practically every human culture in the world, for the past several eons, as well as being also practised just as extensively nowadays. I am not aware of any country in today’s world that does not treat most women (or girls) worse than it treats most men (or boys), regardless of whether or not those women belong to ethnic or religious majority populations, or the same kinds of minority populations. The only exceptions being upper-class women occasionally breaking through the “glass ceilings” set up by “old boys’ clubs” of rich and powerful men.
In Chile, for example, on International Women’s Day, there was considerable police violence once again, directed against peaceful demonstrators protesting against misogyny in that country, indicating that Chile has not changed all that much since the neoliberal, neofascist Pinochet dictatorship disappeared several decades ago. Demonstrators in Poland have also been mistreated by the police quite recently, for protesting against that country’s medieval attitude toward abortions. Women all over the world, including in “liberal-democratic” countries, are constantly being forced out of their homes and into women’s shelters (if they are lucky enough to find one). Meanwhile, the men that attack them are allowed to remain at home until the courts finally decide what to do about them, hypocritically dropping some of those cases after some of those women fail to show up in court, often because they have been murdered in the meantime.
I also found out just recently that Israel, in spite of the liberal, pro-Western pretensions of its leadership, is much more dominated by religious orthodoxy than I had originally suspected. Ultra-orthodox Jews are just as dominant in that country, or almost as much, as are similar forms of religious fundamentalism in most of the Muslim-majority countries in the world. Ultra-misogynous attitudes toward women being one of the main ways by which ultra-orthodox, fundamentalist religions have always treated women, in Israel as well as everywhere else in the world, even more nowadays than they did before. (See the article by Revital Madar, “Le pouvoir politique israélien dominé par les orthodoxes”, in “Le Devoir”, April 6, 2021, that was reprinted from the current, Spring edition of the “Relations” periodical.)
Western countries generally, a group that includes the USA, Canada, the European Union, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, as well as Israel, are also quite good at being just as hypocritical in their geopolitical relations with the rest of the world. They often use sanctions directed against the leaders of many particularly repressive regimes, such as those of China and Myanmar, whenever those regimes seem to be mistreating their own populations, or national minorities, more than usual. Those sanctions, however, can only be useful if the leading figures targeted have been involved in enormously corrupt business dealings with Western companies, visit Western countries frequently for their own personal pleasure, or stash away billions of dollars in personal income in Western banks. Which means that those particularly repressive big-shots are not at all sincere patriots in their own nations, as they so often claim to be, steadfastly refusing all “truck or trade” with their theoretically more (internally) democratic enemies.
On the other side of the equation, that description also applies to the chieftains of the Western corporations, backed up by the self-defined, “democratic” leaders of Western countries, who also ignore all the rules against allowing such truck or trade, whenever they exist. The whole stinking mess of worldwide corruption being just another good example of big-wigs on both sides who also practise freedom from responsibility in their own inimitable fashion.
In this context, an interesting comparison can be made between how heredity and environment (“nature and nurture”) influence relations between rich countries and poor countries, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how competing strains of the coronavirus, created by mutations, are also influenced by the natural environment. Newly-formed strains of SARS-CoV-2 that come into being over time prosper whenever environmental conditions are most appropriate, just like tin-pot dictators in poor countries prosper whenever multinational corporations encourage such anti-democratic kinds of behaviour. Which they do in order to make it a lot easier for those imperialist (private-capitalist) firms to exploit the ordinary citizens of all those very numerous poorer countries, forcing them to submit to foreign, natural-resource extractivism. Even in countries like Bolivia, which is currently being run by a national government trying to be as socially-conscious, and as anti-imperialist, as possible.
China has recently become the most important country in the world to be targeted for sanctions being applied by the the Western bloc of nations. The PRC’s persecution of the Uyghur people in its “western province” of Sinkiang, where at least a million people have been forced into re-education camps, is only one of the many ways in which China has been functioning in a neofascist manner. The PRC claims that those massive efforts to make “good pro-Chinese citizens” out of the people in Sinkiang became necessary when a large number of Uyghur militants began to imitate the kind of Islamic neofascism that has become the hallmark of fundamentalist extremists throughout the Muslim world, including such terrorist organizations as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State movement. There is no doubt about the fact that such organizations are, unfortunately, still continuing to attract more and more support from ordinary Muslims in dozens of different countries, including a large proportion of the Muslim population in France. It is true, therefore, that Islamic neofascism poses a very real threat to life and limb, wherever it has raised its ugly head.
But opposing Chinese neofascism to Islamic neofascism is not going to make the world a better place in which to live. Any more than it is useful to oppose Islamic neofascism by using white supremacy and evangelical Christianity, in countries like the USA, France and Canada. A world made up exclusively of fifteen or twenty different kinds of neofascism (currently being practised by the PRC, the pro-Trump faction in the USA, European countries such as Hungary and Poland, the Russian Federation, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and so on), competing one against the other for world hegemony, is not going to help matters much. Conflict between rival neofascist forces is certainly not going to help defeat the SARS-CoV-2 virus, nor in overcoming any of the other ecological, geopolitical, economic or social crises mentioned above.
If the Western countries were at all sincere about their policy of sanctions, they would also be applying such sanctions even to such unlikely countries as Mexico. Not for the racist reasons that currently exist, as when ultra-conservative politicians in the USA, like Donald Trump, get upset because so many Mexicans are trying to get into the USA illegally, nor because they think that Mexico is not trying hard enough to prevent people from Central American countries from crossing Mexico in order to also try to enter the USA. If sanctions were really meant to be used against any country not defending its people from authoritarianism, and if the USA and its Western allies were really as democratic as they pretend to be, they would sanction the rather complacent Mexican government for failing to prevent the drug cartels established in that country from killing off tens of thousands of Mexican citizens all the time, including those unfortunate soldiers in the Mexican army who have not yet caved in to the cartels altogether.
The USA and its Western allies will never sanction Mexico, however, because everyone knows that the Mexican cartels are just supplying millions of US citizens with illegal drugs, mostly by importing Colombian cocaine and transferring it to the US market. US politicians would look like idiots (even more than they do now) if they used sanctions against that extremely lucrative market, serving their own wayward citizens. The same US politicians, and media people in the USA, might also have to admit that Mexican citizens, as well as those in Central America, have been suffering from US imperialism as well, dominating their economies, and constantly interfering in those countries whenever nationalist leaders, or pro-communist movements, threatened US geopolitical hegemony in the region. The economies of those countries, particularly in Central America, are not just suffering from recent hurricanes, nor only from the pandemic, as has been reported in the US media, but also from anti-nationalist and anti-communist US interference, not only during the Cold War against the now-defunct Soviet empire, but also right up to the present time.
The USA and its Western allies, if they wanted to be honest, should even more seriously be using sanctions against countries like Saudi Arabia, for reasons that are even more obvious than the ones that they are now using against Iran. Islamic neofascism, which is just as well-established in extremist Sunni countries as it is in extremist Shiite ones, is just as harmful to the citizens of those countries, as it as to the designated enemies of either one of them. The Canadian government got itself into hot water with the PRC by arresting Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the founder of the Chinese multinational corporation, Huawei, in 2018, at the behest of the USA, which has accused her of using her position to try to undermine the US economic boycott of Iran. At the same time, the USA and Canada, as well as many of their other allies, hypocritically sell billions of dollars worth of arms supplies to Saudi Arabia, to be used against recalcitrant elements within its own population as well as against other nearby countries, such as Yemen.
Leading lights in dozens of different countries, all over the world, also claim to be entirely sincere when they talk about the need to avoid any further environmental degradation, which is extremely dangerous to human survival especially because of climate change, while continuing to invest heavily in fossil fuels anyway. Some of them have also come up with the bright idea of promoting a so-called “transition economy” by investing in natural gas, rather than oil or coal, because it is theoretically less polluting. In so doing, however, they choose to ignore the fact that in most cases, different kinds of greenhouse gases being produced in the natural gas industry end up being just as polluting, after all, as any of the other fossil fuels. A description that also applies to such other fake “transition” industries as that of producing hydrogen, most of which comes into being through industrial processes every bit as polluting as any of the other ones. Not to mention the fact that the land surface of every country in the world is polluted with hundreds of thousands of abandoned industrial and mining sites, the clean-up of which has been foisted onto already beleaguered governments held hostage by private corporations.
In this blogpost, I have touched on many different topics of concern in today’s world. But what many people refuse to recognize is that all these competing crises, the pandemic, the enormous divisions between the social classes, the huge problems being created all over the world by competing varieties of imperialism, militarism, racism, sexism, religious fundamentalism, ethnic exclusivism, neoliberalism and neofascism, as well as the ever-accelerating degradation of the natural environment, are all inter-related and inter-active. Freedom from responsibility motivates millions of people, the rulers and the ruled, to avoid having to face up to all those crises, at the same time. It would be incredibly good if we could find some way to divert the trillions of dollars being salted away every year, through legal and illegal forms of tax evasion, by the world’s largest millionaires and billionaires, running their private-capitalist empires, and their state-capitalist empires imitating private capitalism, on every continent. So that we could begin using those enormous sums of money, instead, to help solve some of the moral dilemmas mentioned in this text.
Far too many people, in every country, are allowing themselves to be misled and hoodwinked by the world’s richest and most powerful people into avoiding their responsibilities, even if it is only to stay alive longer and to live much better, by foolishly worshipping undeserving, ultra-right-wing populist leaders. Instead, all the reactionary chieftains, in every domain, continue to be supported by their adoring followers, who are all acting like a gang of drug addicts, doing everything they can to get their fix, so that they will not have to go cold turkey for awhile, and dump their competing addictions into the garbage-recycling can. Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, the world’s richest and most powerful people nowadays do not truly deserve popular support anywhere, although some of those big-shots are a great deal more reactionary, and therefore more harmful, than others. Unfortunately for the future of the human race, short-term and long-term, there does not seem to be any kind of large-scale, popular movement in existence these days that seems the least bit inclined to get off this ridiculous bandwagon of freedom from responsibility, and to move in a more appropriate direction instead.
