“It’s unacceptable”

“It’s unacceptable”. This was the reaction that many people in Canada had on June 6, 2021, when a terrorist in London, Ontario, drove his truck over a Muslim family, killing four of the five people he hit. Thereby adding to the number of recent Muslim victims of white supremacism, that also includes six people shot dead by another terrorist in an attack on a mosque in Québec City on January 29, 2017. Unfortunately, merely saying that acts of terrorism are unacceptable in society does not constitute an adequate reaction, because it is impossible for a rational person not to accept something that has just taken place right out in the open. Unless we decide to give up on reality altogether, as so many people falling under the control of social media have done, such as those cult victims denying the reality of the pandemic and thoroughly misinterpreting the positive intent of mass vaccination, masking and social-distancing.

However, “it’s unacceptable” is only one of the completely inappropriate reactions that disoriented people come up with in situations of this kind. “This is not who we are” is an equally irrational reaction, the event itself having negated that conclusion as well. “It cannot be tolerated” is another expression that is pronounced just as often, even though it is just another false description of reality. Those recently repeated expressions are also quite similar to saying “never again” every time that much larger numbers of people were exterminated in much more violent mass-murder events that took place in the past, such as the Nazi attempt to completely eliminate all the European Jews during the Second World War. Unfortunately, the whole idea of that slogan was negated several times after that, such as when the mass murders took place in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979), or when the Hutu government in Rwanda slaughtered a huge number of Tutsis in 1994. Which was then followed up by the less murderous, Tutsi retaliation on the Hutus, many of them participants in the 1994 genocide, seeking refuge in Congo-Kinshasa.

Or that other, even more classic, example of wishful thinking, “lest we forget”, repeated as a mantra since the extremely violent First World War ended in 1918, that was self-negated only 21 years later by the outbreak of the even more violent Second World War. The same empty slogan then being still further repudiated by the very numerous, mass-violence events committed all over the world during the Cold War, particularly in the so-called “third world” (Asia, Africa and Latin America). The most murderous events of all seem to have taken place in East Asia, particularly during the Korean War of 1950-1953, the mass extermination of the Indonesian communists in 1965 by the pro-US military dictatorship in that country, and the Vietnam War of 1957-1975.

A much more appropriate way of reacting to such horrendous events would be to condemn the whole lot of them completely, as larger or smaller forms of terrorism. Terrorism is terrorism, no matter who is doing it, no matter under what circumstances it is being done, how many victims were involved, or whether the perpetrators were “lone wolves”, members of a group of armed militants, or officially-motivated executioners acting on behalf of some particular state. The mass extermination of much larger numbers of people ought to be condemned even more strongly than the murder of significantly smaller numbers of people. But the whole idea of killing people on purpose, individually or collectively condemning some individual to death, or millions of people to death, ought to be anathema to every thinking person as a matter of elementary principle.

When the murders in London, Ontario and in Québec City took place, the total condemnation of white-supremacist terrorism directed against innocent Muslims, should only have been a starting point, and not the whole deal. That initial reaction should have been followed up immediately by an equally emphatic condemnation of Islamist terrorism as well, which is most often directed against apolitical Muslims, killed because they were considered to be “insufficiently fanatic”. Ultra-right-wing Islamist terrorists also regularly target dozens of different kinds of non-Muslim “unbelievers”, those practising rival religions, as well as those refusing to believe in any form of irrational religion.

There is nothing phobic about being just as afraid of Islamist terrorism as of white-supremacist terrorism, nor is it wrong to be just as firmly opposed to one kind of terrorism as to another kind. It is also just as important to recognize that the white-supremacist version of terrorism does not just involve the killing of innocent Muslims. It targets all sorts of people who happen to possess the wrong skin colour, which often takes the form of state-sanctioned terrorism practised by many different police forces, particularly in countries like the USA. Both Islamic terrorism and white-supremacist terrorism are constantly murdering real people, all around the world, all the time.

There is no reason to get more upset about either one of those competing sources of horror. The people being killed end up just as dead no matter who does the killing or for what reason. Ultra-right-wing terrorists of every sort, including those in comfortable government posts, are anti-social psychotics, really extreme narcissists, who are provoked by, rather than being put off by, politically-correct expressions like “it’s unacceptable” and “this is not who we are”. Reactions like those ones do not repel the terrorists at all, instead they induce them to want to kill even more people, as soon as they possibly can.

Some commentators in Canada are also guilty of having suggested that Québec’s laicity law, directed against the wearing of religious symbols by civil servants in positions of authority, had something to do with provoking the white-supremacist attacks in Ontario. This false amalgam represents a total lack of comprehension, particularly when it comes to Muslim women wearing cover-up clothing like the hijab, as a symbol of their identification with ultra-reactionary forms of Islam and of their masochistic support for female domination by men. People who claim to support women’s liberation should be supporting it all the time, and should not simultaneously be also supporting female submission, reserved for those who have turned religion into a completely retrograde political statement.

The laicity law in Québec is merely aimed at seeking religious neutrality for people representing the government in positions of authority, for the same reason that it also bans the wearing of political symbols, such as election campaign buttons, for the same groups of civil servants, while they are at work. This kind of religious neutrality is a very mild affair, after all, nothing like the kind of laicity that every government in the world should also be practising, such as by authorizing cash-strapped municipalities to tax religious property in the same way that commercial property is being taxed, or by cutting off all subsidies to private religious schools.

Another thing that has to be recognized in this context is that Islam is not the only religion in this world which is regularly conscripted by ultra-right-wing politicians practising either militant-group terrorism or state terrorism. This latter category is by far the most murderous kind of terrorism, and it is not just confined to rogue regimes like the ones in Iran and Saudi Arabia, but also applies to many of the world’s most powerful countries. Evangelical Christianity often provides ideological fuel for white supremacist governments in many parts of the world, in Russia, Poland and Hungary for example, as well as in the USA, particularly when the Trump Republicans were dominating that country.

Evangelical Christianity also serves the same purpose in many non-white countries. A good example of that is to be found in several African countries, particularly in the trans-continental Sahel region, in which the Christian section of the population often goes to war against the Muslim population, and vice versa, both sides being egged on by religious fanatics who are always eager to kill as many people “on the wrong side” as they possibly can.

Ultra-right-wing Zionists in Israel get a great deal of support from ultra-orthodox Judaism in their ongoing war with Muslim fanatics, such as those running the Hamas organization in Gaza and the Islamist government of Iran. Confucianist feudalism also helps to prop up the nominally communist Chinese government’s crackdown on several different minorities, notably the Uighur minority in the western part of China’s official territory, some of whom also practise Islamic terrorism. Hindu fanatics supporting the Modi regime in India also provide fuel for constant government assaults, often including a great deal of violence, on several religious minorities in that country. The same accusation can also be levelled at government forces in many Buddhist-majority countries as well, such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar. In short, all the world’s leading religions are currently attracting attention from ultra-right-wing, neofascist movements that are all quite fond of using the terrorist weapon.

These enormous ideological divisions between people all over the world result in a lack of confidence, or trust, between opposing sections of the world population that make it very difficult for everyone to come together and help solve such universal dilemmas as the pandemic, or the ongoing destruction of the natural environment. Geopolitical confrontations between nuclear-armed states are also exacerbated by the same divergent religious ideologies, that apply not only to more or less openly authoritarian governments but also to self-proclaimed, officially democratic regimes. Liberal-democratic governments tolerate a limited amount of freedom of expression within their own populations, but those same limited democracies also promote extreme differences of income and political power between the social classes, especially since neoliberalism took over, back in the 1980s.

The social-class divisions in every part of the world, however, have become so extreme as to engender a lack of trust between the classes as well. Even in the richest countries, millions of ordinary people are currently using social media to spread around all sorts of strange conspiracy theories about just about everything, such as the one about the pandemic being used to foster total social control. According to a recent series of articles (the “Info-demic”), by Matthew Lapierre, published in the “Montreal Gazette”, between June 14 and June 18, 2021, a very large number of ordinary people are so convinced that the pandemic is being used against them that they go around trying to collect “evidence” of what they believe is “really going on”, in a futile attempt to prove their absurd allegations. Such as by taking pictures of “empty hospitals”, during the early days of the pandemic, that were not really empty at all.

It should be pointed out, however, that a tiny percentage of the allegations spread around by some of those people may turn out to be true after all. The world’s most prolific fact-checkers have had to eat crow at least a little bit recently, such as by being forced to admit the possibility that the pandemic could have been caused by an altered virus that managed to escape from the Wuhan Virology Institute, rather than being gradually transmitted naturally from bats to human beings via some kind of intermediate creature being sold in a nearby, wild-animal meat market.

A possibility also reinforced by revelations about how the memo signed by several leading scientists, pooh-poohing the escaped-virus theory, and published by “The Lancet” in February 2020, was apparently written at the instigation of a US lab, the EcoHealth Alliance, that had close ties with the Wuhan lab. (See the article by Francine Pelletier, “Le bout du tunnel”, published in “Le Devoir”, on June 16, 2021.) Much of the scientific research into health problems is often subsidized by huge medical conglomerates, after all, with the result that those diseases taking the lion’s share of all the world’s medical research, such as cancer and heart disease, are the same ones that generate the most important profits for those same corporations. (See the article by Marc-André Gagnon, “Des intérêts commerciaux liés de près à la recherche médicale”, “Le Devoir”, June 25, 2021.)

Nevertheless, those facts do not take anything away from the observation that social media is chock full of completely irrational assertions about everything, very much including the pandemic, that is causing a great deal of anxiety among the very numerous, ordinary people (neither rich nor powerful) who dominate that forum. This strange new phenomenon seems to have been caused by the fact that those ordinary people, even those in the rich countries, have discovered that they can no longer rely on the world’s ruling elites to let them participate, even a little bit, in economic progress, by gradually becoming better off than they were before, and expecting their children to also become slightly more prosperous than they were. This form of mistrust is therefore very much deserved, although not at all for the false-conspiracy reasons being invoked in the social media.

In reality, it was the paradigm shift brought on by the neoliberal counter-revolution of the past four decades, focusing on short-term profit-maximization to the exclusion of everything else, that brought an end to the increase in real incomes for working-class people that had taken place in many countries during the “thirty glorious years” following the Second World War. Demoralized and destabilized, many ordinary people in those countries now seem to be attributing their current lack of social mobility to totally bogus conspiracy theories, that they substitute for the very real, “open conspiracy” of neoliberalism.

What has happened to most working-class people in such countries has been quite thoroughly analyzed by a prolific French author, Christophe Guilluy, in his book, “Le temps des gens ordinaires”  (“The age of ordinary people”), that was published in 2020. In chapter after chapter, Guilluy chronicled the many different aspects of that total abandonment of the traditional working-class, not only in France, where the majority of the population has been pushed out of the cities into the totally demoralized suburbs (“la France périphérique”), where the “gilets jaunes” (“yellow jackets”) live and work, but also in the USA, the UK and many other parts of the Western world, where a similar process has taken place.

The globalized economy of neoliberalism is not only pitting the very few, richer regions of the world against the very numerous, poorer regions, it has also taken on a geographic aspect inside many of the richer nations. Most of the wealth generated since the 1980s has been confined to huge metropolitan cities peopled by post-modern elites, rather than being also distributed throughout the national territory, as such countries used to at least attempt to accomplish during the immediate, post-war period. Those metropolitan elites are now surrounding themselves with a huge influx of recent immigrants from impoverished, former colonies pouring into those cities and performing many of the more menial tasks that used to be assigned to traditional (mostly white) workers.

The result of that enormous paradigm change has been to convince many of those traditional workers, who still constitute the majority of the overall population of the richer countries, to abandon the official left-wing, social-democratic and communist parties that many of them used to support during the previous period. Many of those same people are now supporting right-wing political organizations instead, including ultra-right-wing parties like the National Rally in France, the Northern League in Italy (now just called the League) and the Trump Republicans in the USA.

For the simple reason that the right-wing parties, particularly the ultra-right-wing ones, are much less inclined, or not at all inclined, to support the continued arrival of large numbers of immigrants, many of whom are quite willing to work for lower wages and salaries than those that are considered satisfactory by traditional workers. For their part, the formerly left-wing organizations have also abandoned their traditional working-class base, choosing to concentrate their limited attention on the metropolitan areas, and losing most of the support that they used to enjoy, in many of those countries, in days gone by.

In his book, Guilluy also argues that during the sanitary crisis caused by the pandemic, the “deplorable” ordinary people, once denounced by establishment politicians like Hillary Clinton, have recently become “heroes” instead, receiving a great deal of media attention for the ordinary work that they do, as well as for their traditional values of attachment to their nation and to their working-class culture. It seems to me, however, that none of that transient media attention has done anything to change the overall situation, neoliberalism still remaining the dominant ideology in all those countries, as well as almost everywhere else in the world.

In spite of the publishing of recent revelations about how many of the world’s most important billionaires, such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn and George Soros, did not pay any income tax at all, to any government, during several recent years, there is no indication whatsoever than any of this disgusting behaviour is going to change, in any foreseeable future. The enormous debt caused by the extraordinary government expenditure of borrowed money, caused by the pandemic, seems destined once again to further enrich the world’s leading bankers, at the expense of everyone else, over the next several decades. The metropolitan cities will most likely keep on expanding at the expense of the outlying regions, and the overall working-class, whether traditional-white or immigrant, looks like it is going to remain divided into opposing factions for a long time to come.

This extraordinary situation amounts to a tremendous setback, not only for the Western world but also for the whole world, to have such a large number of people become considerably less inclined to support social-democratic policies like the welfare state, than they used to do. Many of the immigrant populations are also every bit as right-wing-oriented as are large sections of the white working-class, in a truly deplorable situation that mirrors the equally alarming situation described earlier, with the simultaneous expansion of extremist support for white-supremacist terrorism, as well as for Islamist terrorism and many other kinds of state terrorism, not at all confined only to Muslim-majority countries.

The ultra-rich elites running the metropolitan regions have succeeded in pushing the more extreme sections of both those working-class populations into fighting each other rather than uniting against the jointly neoliberal and neofascist elites that refuse to share any of their excessive accumulation of wealth with any “lesser” beings. Reactionary sentiment among minority populations includes not only increasing support for Islamist extremism inside the Muslim minorities in those same countries, but also increasing support for similar varieties of ultra-right-wing politics among the Latino population in the USA (led by ultra-conservative senators like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio), as well as within the black minorities, the Hindu diaspora, and the East Asian minorities in various different parts of North America and Europe.

As Guilluy pointed out in his book, many of the same elitists still imposing neoliberalism nowadays, such as in the housing market (causing unprecedentedly high prices and rent charges), are also projecting phoney support for “progressive politics”, pretending to deplore the undisguised racism and sexism of the ultra-right-wing populists. Many of them are also criticizing ordinary people whenever they oppose increases in gasoline taxes as part of a totally inadequate program to “help save the natural environment”, while simultaneously supporting a life-style still based on tolerating much higher carbon footprints for the urban elite than for the “low-life” suburban population.

Those metropolitan elites have decided to promote a tiny, upper-crust proportion of those minority populations, and an equally small proportion of rich women, to join them in the dominant classes, while preserving much lower wages and salaries for most of the people belonging to those same populations. None of their support for progressive politics is real, the absence of any real content being eerily similar to the same vacuous reasoning lying behind the phoney conspiracy theories about the pandemic and the deranged, ultra-right-wing populist attack on “dangerous, experimental vaccines”.

At the same time, the metropolitan elites in all the richest “democracies”, as well as the collaborating elites running the much more numerous, and much less prosperous authoritarian nations and empires, are also preserving the most depressing scandal of them all. Which is precisely this horrible, ongoing division between the world’s very few rich countries and its very many poor countries. This is the fundamental flaw that more than anything else is preventing any kind of successful mobilization of everyone in favour of making common cause against such universal dilemmas as the coronavirus and environmental degradation.

People in the rich countries are being doubly vaccinated much, much faster than those in the poor countries, with the result that the entire world is grossly, and dangerously under-vaccinated, for the simple reason that so many more people live in the poorer regions of the world  than in the richer regions. As usual, everything that happens to ordinary people in the world’s poorest regions is always a thousand times worse than the already horrible way in which ordinary people are also being treated even in the richest countries.

Whenever any attempt is made at dealing with either of those sanitary or ecological threats to the ongoing existence of human beings everywhere, instead of trying to help every part of the world equally, the ruling elites always copy the same divided approach that they are constantly applying to the “inferior” social classes, making sure that every effort is as unequal as it possibly can be. Doing the wrong thing on purpose, every time, like some poor schmuck stricken with a particularly severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, is the only approach that they are capable of recognizing.

However, in so doing, they are effectively shooting themselves in the foot by refusing to realize that every part of the human race belongs to the same overall, social organism (herd immunity). Instead, the ruling elites always seem to be doing whatever they can to ensure that neither the ongoing sanitary crises nor the ongoing ecological crises will ever be overcome before it is too late. Exactly the same approach that all the world’s competing terrorist organizations, practised by militant groups as well as by wayward governments, are constantly adopting. Unfortunately, the fact that the world is getting more and more reactionary all the time, in dozens of different ways, means that the same world is constantly getting more and more dangerous, putting our future as a species at risk.

No one seems capable of learning anything from similar mistakes that were made in the past.