An alien universe
The universe in which I am living, along with everyone else, is an alien universe, and has been an alien universe, for me and for many other people like me, for quite a long period of time. Back in 1965, when I first set out on my adult life, I can distinctly remember having already adopted a series of progressive ideas that were diametrically opposed to the atavistic ideologies that dominated the entire world back then, and that are still dominating our increasingly beleaguered world even now. During all the intervening decades, therefore, the dominant world has been an alien world for me, as it has been for all those other people, of whatever age, who have been defending ideas similar to mine. We disagree completely with every one of the antediluvian ideologies left over from the distant, dismal past, that the world’s most reactionary people have succeeded in imposing on everyone else, not just since the 1960s, during the adult part of my lifetime, but also over the past several millennia.
The universe in which we are all forced to live is also an alien universe because it is in fact peopled by alien creatures, of religious and imperialist origins, that do not exist in the real, physical world. To be sure, these strange creatures are only metaphysical creations of overwrought human brains, vainly seeking some kind of other-worldly solace to deal with the very real problems that they themselves encountered at some point, in this world. In the process of trying to protect themselves from the often extremely uncomfortable aspects of reality, the founders of all the world’s most important religions transformed their mental anguish into extra-terrestrial projections of their own deeply disturbed personalities. Unfortunately for the deranged throngs of true believers belonging nowadays to one or another of those mutually exclusive, falsely universal religions, those several, competing versions of the astronomical freak show, featuring all-powerful and all-good “friends in high places”, conjured up over time on their behalf, do not really exist anywhere outside of their own heads.
We live instead in a physical universe that happens to contain only one planet on which human beings have so far been able to expand, although our ongoing expansion puts us increasingly at danger not only to ourselves but also to the rest of the natural (terrestrial) world. That same physical universe, however, does not contain any additional places anywhere, even remotely within reach, in order to save our bacon (so to speak) if we decide to screw everything up right here. Nor are any divine interventions of any other-worldly sort going to help real human beings fleeing from their fears by compulsively inventing, and believing in, dozens of false, pie-in-the-sky “solutions” for real-world problems.
The world’s current collection of unnatural religions, however, collectively constitute only the first batch of warring ideologies, dividing the entire world into hundreds of squabbling divinities and heavenly sects. Over the past several centuries, each one of those self-contained, obsessive-compulsive disorders (organized religions) has been trying to outmanoeuvre and to subdue every other kind of metaphysical projection being feverishly concocted all the time within the over-heated brains of the world’s most successful and most pretentious prophets.
Lumped in together, those religions make up the most esoteric variety of fake news, invented and reified over succeeding millennia, to turn billions of “ordinary”, poor and powerless people’s attention away from the reality of their own abject submission to tiny little coteries of “superiorly” rich and powerful people (slaveowners, feudal lords, private and state capitalists). Every one of the billions of deprived individuals who did not succeed in accumulating a huge fortune, or a great deal of political power, in the real world, at everyone else’s expense, is not supposed to get upset about any of those things. Every subordinated person in this world is supposed to be tranquilized instead into believing in a new “life after death”, during which he or she will be encouraged to accumulate un-real “riches in heaven”, rather than piling up very real, ill-gotten gains here on Earth.
I was reminded just a few weeks ago of the ongoing power of those horribly outdated religions, even in some of the world’s richest countries, when a number of cities in English Canada decided to directly intervene to help the anglophone minority in Québec in its fight against the provincial government’s laicity law (“Bill 21”). This little law, adopted back in 2019, was intended to prevent civil servants in positions of authority (judges, officers of the law, schoolteachers, etc.) from wearing religious symbols while at work. The law does not really do much for laicity in general, since it is not at all directed against the religious domination of Québec’s huge network of private schools, nor against tax exemptions for all sorts of religious buildings, and so on. It only applies to a small proportion of the entire civil service. Nevertheless, many cities in English-Canada have, hypocritically given their much smaller religious-school systems, recently begun sending large sums of money to help legal challenges against that law, sponsored mostly by institutions belonging to Québec’s officially recognized, English-speaking national minority.
One of the municipal governments spearheading this campaign has been the city of Brampton, in Ontario, which is the relatively recent home of tens of thousands of people of mainly South Asian origin, belonging mostly to the Hindu, Sikh and Muslim communities. Collectively, those people constitute relatively small national minorities in Ontario and in the rest of English Canada, but they make up about half the current population of over 600 000 people in Brampton itself. Québec’s “Bill 21”, a relatively insignificant law insofar as promoting laicity is concerned, has therefore become a major issue in the ongoing ideological war between English-Canadian imperialism and Québécois anti-imperialism (which has recently been favouring provincial autonomy over genuine independence). The fact that the most ultra-right-wing, proselytizing branches of several other religions have decided to join with the most ultra-right-wing, evangelical branches of the Christian religion, in total opposition to that relatively symbolic law, is just one more proof of how immensely rich and powerful those ultra-religious lobbies have really become.
To make matters even worse, not just in Canada but throughout the world, a whole other variety of fake news has also been concocted and continually refined to produce a second batch of fake news, this one concentrating on inventing somewhat less esoteric, but equally unreal apologies for imperialism. In addition to being asked to regurgitate irrational religious nonsense, ordinary (poor and powerless) people are also constantly being asked by their “superior” rulers to make common cause with them by supporting the coming into being and the subsequent expansion of dozens of competing empires. Each one of those empires is constantly trying to carve off a piece, or pieces, of surrounding geography falling “naturally” under its control, notably via the extraction of natural resources, at first within its original, militarily-established borders and then from all its targeted colonies. Ordinary people in the immediate vicinity of the inventors of every one of those imperial projects, who fall for those projections against their better judgement, end up being ideologically (“racially”) separated from other ordinary people in the dominated regions.
They are then induced to help the rich and the powerful clique of individuals, literally or figuratively “speaking their own language”, by adopting artificial value systems imposed on them by their superiors, deemed necessary for the smooth functioning of each warring regime and its corresponding empire. In today’s world, every currently established nation-state has developed its own piece of false history designed to explain the “legitimacy” of its claim on some particular piece of geography, as well as on the adjacent or overseas territories required to guarantee access to all the raw materials that have to be extracted in order to ensure each empire’s long-lasting survival.
Curiously enough, many of the empires that have been founded over the past 6000 years or so started out as the result of an uprising directed against a previously established empire by a theoretically “anti-imperialist” elite based in one particular part of the initial empire. In every case that I have so far examined, the new elite had originally participated in setting up the older empire, but over the years came to feel that it would be better off taking power for itself by setting up a new dynasty based in its own particular region. Relatively recent examples of this sort of “anti-imperialist” founding of new empires include such modern countries as the USA, that broke away from the initially much larger, worldwide British empire, before itself becoming an even bigger, undeclared empire in its own right.
It did this, however, not solely by relying on its own strength, nor solely by relying on help from Britain’s enemies (such as the French or the Spanish empires), but also by concocting a series of new myths about how “different” the USA was, in so many ways, from every other prior imperial arrangement. Such as by pretending, against all odds, not to be an empire at all, as well as by pretending to be a totally “free” country, not at all semi-feudal like the UK, a point of view that was vigorously maintained in spite of the USA’s thoroughly consistent mistreatment of millions of indigenous peoples and imported slaves as much as any other empire ever has.
In more recent decades, it has also claimed to have become “a shining beacon on a hill” for world democracy, hypocritically supporting multilateralism for every other imperial power in this world, while simultaneously reserving the right to take authoritarian, unilateral action whenever it was deemed necessary. From the beginning to the present day, the same USA has also invented several hundred other ridiculously unreal, relatively minor ideological concoctions, to cover for every particular assault on “unruly elements” within its own population. As well as for every specific attack on dozens of rival powers that happened to get in its way at some point, by obstinately refusing to give it free access to whatever resources it happened to want, or need, during any particular period.
The USA, however, was only the most obnoxious and the most hypocritical ex-colony of a prior empire that rapidly progressed from anti-imperialism against a foreign power to the founding of its own variety of imperialism. Every other successful, formerly anti-imperialist elite in this world has also adopted its own particular version of this very same process, becoming a real empire in its own right, although in recent times none of them have ever been as successful at doing so as the USA has. So far as I can tell, every single country known to mankind, past and present, started out complaining about its rotten treatment by some previously established imperial force before becoming one of those empires on its own. The most recent anti-American contender in today’s world being the formerly anti-imperialist “People’s Republic” of China, which certainly seems to be getting closer and closer with every passing year to overtaking the USA’s still current greater domination of the entire world, before substituting its own imperial domination of the world instead, sometime during the immediate future.
Without taking the time that I would need here to similarly chronicle the dozens of examples of every other formerly-dominated section of the world’s own particular transformation from anti-imperialist colony into successful empire, let me focus briefly instead on one of the most recent cases, which has only just begun its own projected, hoped-for transformation toward regional greatness. I am referring here to the national liberation of the Republic of South Africa, that only succeeded in throwing off the settler, Boer-apartheid yoke between 1991 and 1994, putting the current African National Congress government in its place. However, as the now-deceased Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, pointed out over and over again, between 1994 and 2021, the ANC leadership betrayed the anti-apartheid cause in a very significant way.
At first, they succeeded quite well in their anti-imperialism by setting up a new “rainbow” regime which did not take away any of the economic power of the white minority, but which forced the Boers to accept the autonomy of other multiracial minorities like the Asian ones as well. More importantly, the Boers were also forced to accept the fact that the country would henceforth and from now on be run by a political elite composed mainly of indigenous black people (Xhosa, Zulu, etc.). However, only a tiny group of ANC leaders ever managed to enter the country’s ruling class, the vast majority of the black population being kept in its original place as ordinary (poor and powerless) people, the same role that they had also played under the previous regime.
The “national liberation” of South Africa, therefore, like the national liberation of hundreds of other, formerly subordinated colonies, turned out to be a “racial” liberation of sorts, but not a truly “national” liberation, since the major part of the black majority did not change its status at all. Letting a few thousand, middle-class black faces into the government, while simultaneously maintaining the subordinate status of millions of people in the lower classes, did not turn out to be such a major transformation after all. In South Africa, as in practically every other former “third world” colony, neocolonialism took over from colonialism, and is still very much ensconced nowadays. The Republic of South Africa, therefore, seems well on its way to replicating every other national liberation movement’s (ancient as well as recent) transformation from anti-imperialist movement into newly-founded empire in its own right.
Intersecting those two over-arching varieties of fake news, of overlapping religious and imperialist origins, are dozens of different kinds of systemic, ideological adjuncts, each one of them invented, developed and re-developed over the centuries to make sure that everything did indeed end up working more or less in the way that it was originally intended to work. Those essential adjuncts included such additional ideological weapons as racism (many different varieties of racism in fact), but also multiple varieties of misogyny (toxic masculinity), age-ism, militarism and terrorism (both private-militant and state versions), as well as fake-progressive avatars pretending to be genuinely socialist (“democratic socialism”, “revolutionary socialism”, and the more recent “woke socialism”). In recent decades, those converging kinds of ideological poison have made major contributions toward the coming-into-being and the subsequent triumph of the convergence that took place during the 1970s and the 1980s between neoliberalism (a return to the kind of short-term profit maximization invented in the UK back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and neofascism (the post-war revival of the “classical” form of fascism that first emerged during the 1922-1945 period).
However, what appeared to naive observers to be some kind of merger movement between two rival ideologies, turned out in reality to be just two sides of the same jointly private-capitalist and state-capitalist coin. The fake merger of both aspects of that two-headed ideology, already unified at the very beginning, was actively promoted during the 1980s by an internationally coordinated “war on inflation”, initiated by the world’s most powerful central bankers. From a political point of view, the movement encompassing those ideologically identical twins emerged first in 1973 in Chile (the Pinochet dictatorship’s alliance with the “Chicago boys”), the UK (dominated by Margaret Thatcher from 1979 to 1990), the USA (dominated by Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1989) and the “People’s” Republic of China (dominated by Deng Xiao-ping between 1978 and 1989). After a short period of resistance, notably in France during the first two years of François Mitterrand’s presidency (1981-1995), that joint revival of economic liberalism and of political fascism went on to subsequently take over practically the entire world.
Although the international, neoliberal-neofascist alliance is currently being resisted by the revival of several, relatively new, left-wing movements, the capacity of such regimes, like the one elected in Peru last summer and the one even more recently elected in Chile, but not yet officially installed in power, to fend off neofascist counter-attacks in the new future, is by no means certain. Both of them could soon succumb to a new version of the 1973 military dictatorship in Chile, that also overthrew an elected socialist government, or it could become instead a toothless, fake-revolutionary regime like the one that was also elected in Mexico in 2018. Or a relatively weak and corrupted leftist government like the one that ran Brazil between 2003 and 2016. Another option being the establishment of much beleaguered, totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, like the ones in Cuba and Venezuela, that never succeeded in solving any of their initial weaknesses. Not to mention the recent, counter-revolutionary flip-flop in Nicaragua. The least that can be said is that overthrowing neocolonialism has always been extremely difficult, all over the world, with the result that the domination of the Siamese twins, neoliberalism and neofascism, is still very much in place.
Instead of getting better, the current situation seems to be getting even worse. Initially in reaction to the “Rust Belt” phenomenon induced by partial or complete deindustrialization in many parts of the world’s previously most prosperous countries, still another form of fake news has also emerged, the “deep-swamp” variety. This latest version was invented in the USA by former president Donald Trump (2017-2021), his ultra-Christian sidekick, Vice-President Mike Pence (who abandoned ship at the last possible moment) and their still very active representatives, such as Marjorie Taylor-Greene (recently banned for life from Twitter but still going strong nevertheless). This is a particularly destabilizing form of ideological malformation, in which the initial perpetrators pretended to be fighting against the “liberal swamp” (identified in the ultra-polarized, Republican USA with the Democratic Party).
Instead of leaving the bog altogether, however, those ultra-reactionary (neofascist) people simply sank to the bottom of the very same quagmire (half liberal and half conservative), their bodies dissolving into the surrounding filth and their minds being completely overcome with ultra-right-wing populism of the most disgusting kind. Those swamp creatures in the USA have also recently engendered more or less identical, ideological monsters in other ultra-Christian countries like Brazil, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, and so on. And that may very soon be taking over many more such countries, such as France and Germany, as well. Not to mention the likely return of Donald Trump, or someone like him, in 2024-2025. Several more kinds of swamp creatures were also simultaneously created within several other religious traditions, such as in the very numerous countries participating in the ultra-Islamist movement (from Morocco to Indonesia), as well as in the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucianist, Shintoist and indigenous (totemism, shamanism) forms of religious fundamentalism, spread out all over the inhabited world.
All these different, seemingly opposed, manifestations of fake news have combined together in today’s world, trying to make sure that no genuinely progressive ideas can ever take hold for real, anywhere at all. Which means that for people like me, the past several decades have meant watching the somewhat more progressive trends of the 1960s and the 1970s dissolve before our very eyes, and be replaced instead by the imposed return of ultra-reactionary, ultra-capitalist ideas, not only in those parts of the world pretending to favour private capitalism, but also in those other parts of the world pretending to favour state capitalism, and everything in between.
During the late 1960s, I distinctly remember the head honcho of the tiny, Maoist, Progressive Labor Party (USA), Milton Rosen, proclaiming to his not very numerous friends in the US working-class that “It’s bad, it’s getting worse, you have no friends in high places, and you gotta fight”. A cute little slogan that managed to last as long as it was possible to pretend that the Maoist upheaval in China, responsible for the organized famines that claimed the lives of about 50 million rebellious peasants, would succeed nevertheless in capturing the adhesion of all the world’s downtrodden people, in every region of this planet, and liberate them forever from all the different kinds of capitalist accumulation, even the ones that had unfortunately taken over the “revisionist” Soviet bloc. A vision of the world that I also, very naively and very unfortunately, supported during those same years.
However, instead of that exceedingly unrealistic ideological projection ever coming to pass, it turned out that not only did working people in the USA not have any friends in high places (not in the Democratic Party any more than in the Republican Party), but their fellow workers in all the other countries, including the “People’s” Republic of China, did not have any friends in high places either. In fact, it seems that none of the poor and downtrodden people anywhere in the world have ever had any real friends in high places. Even the religious fundamentalists do not have any real friends in high heaven itself, “God”, or “Allah”, or “Jehovah” as he is sometimes called, having also become a non-existent entity in real terms, completely incapable of saving the world from everything that ails it, including the current pandemic and the ongoing consequences of climate change. In the final analysis, it turns out that all the real people in high places, all over the world, are only interested in themselves. None of the ideological projections of the religious ideologies ever produced any tangible results, but neither did any of the equally unreal projections of the more secular ideologies come to pass either. All over the world, every honest believer in every such projection has had to eat crow, instead.
The truth, however, does not seem to be setting very many people free, since it has not won out very much throughout human history. Which means that for the past several decades, I have been one of those people who have refused to belong to the group designated by Donald Trump as “the winners”, who support every kind of neoliberal and neofascist ideology imaginable. Instead, I and everyone else like me have been relegated to the group designated by that same illustrious, ultra-elitist, American philosopher-king as “the losers”, who do not support any kind of neoliberal or neofascist ideology whatsoever. This also means, however, that people who do not support neoliberalism or neofascism in any way, have never had to feel any guilt, or any regrets, or any responsibility for any of the horrible things that Trump has done, nor with any of the other horrible things being done by all the other people also supporting one or another of the different kinds of fake news mentioned above. This also means that my friends and I do not have to succumb to any of the demeaning propaganda emanating from the “woke” variety of fake news, since we do not belong to any of their uniquely absurd, “reverse” categories of all the world’s reactionary ideologies, either.
The idea that no one in any of the lower classes of society has any real friends in high places anywhere, also has another really major consequence. It means that in reality none of the people belonging to any of the poorer or the less powerful classes also does not have to shoulder a great deal of guilt, or regret, or responsibility for most of the horrible things being committed all the time by the upper classes of society. Most of the problems in this world were created by those few people possessing a great deal of money, or of power, or of both those things together. They are the perpetrators of most of what is going wrong in this world, since they are the ones responsible for setting up the kinds of society in which people doing harm to others, including ordinary people doing to harm to other ordinary people, are quite often not punished for their crimes to any significant extent, largely because the people who run the world behave like those ordinary perpetrators do all the time, and in so doing set a very poor example indeed. Nor do they often require seeing people behaving just like them getting poorly treated by the legal establishment.
This, however, does not mean that ordinary malfeasance should not be punished, quite the contrary, but that everyone who does harm to others, especially rich and powerful people, should also be punished for their crimes. Not to the “fullest extent of the law”, since the law is an ass belonging to those who are rich and powerful, but to much more than that. If none of the varieties of fake news I have been underlining in this text had any real influence on people’s thinking, we could perhaps begin to see what doing things in a truly honest fashion might look like. But we are still light-years away, even more so than before, from that kind of realization.
I was reminded of the extent of the abyss into which most human beings have recently fallen, even more in 2022 than in 1965, when I was watching “The Crown” on Netflix. This television series, that began broadcasting in 2016 and has not yet finished its intended run (season 5 is yet to come), is a fictionalized account of the reign of Elisabeth II in the UK from 1952 to the present, that sometimes seems to be quite close to what really happened, but sometimes also seems quite far from the real thing. The part that captured my attention the most, for obvious reasons, came from season 4, the part dealing with Margaret Thatcher’s period as prime minister of the UK (1979 to 1990), when she introduced her unfortunate country to the ideology of neoliberalism, the first version of which, classical economic liberalism, was also born in the UK over two centuries ago.
In the series, Thatcher is depicted as if she was only a particularly obnoxious crusader for the private sector, promoting everything that business people wanted and cutting all the budgets of previous programs, adopted mainly by Labour Party governments, aimed at protecting the working-class from the excesses of capitalism. As the fiercely devoted daughter of Alfred Roberts, a typical English shopkeeper and preacher, she felt that it was her mission to rid her country, and whatever was left over at that time of the British empire, from all the mollycoddling attitudes of her predecessors, including some of those from within the ranks of her own Conservative Party.
She was also depicted as having weathered quite a few political storms quite well, beating back the trade unions at every particular junction, and being saved from political defeat especially when she prosecuted the war to “re-liberate” the British colony of the Falkland Islands from the nearby but equally reactionary Argentine military, that had briefly “stolen” it away from the UK. Which, of course, did not prevent Mrs. Thatcher from identifying completely with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who had already crossed swords with the neighbouring Argentinian military, concerning several other disputed islands in the same general vicinity, not easily defined as belonging to either one of them.
What the people who wrote the scenario for “The Crown” deliberately left out of the picture, however, was that Margaret Thatcher was not just a British reactionary, who hated trade unions and most foreign countries with a passion. She was also one of the leaders of an international, open conspiracy, set up by the jointly neoliberal and neofascist network of power all over the world. Much more honest than the writers of “The Crown”, the real Mrs. Thatcher underlined over and over again, to anyone who would care to listen, that she had borrowed her program for running the Conservative Party of Great Britain from the aristocratic Austrian economist, Friedrich von Hayek. As I pointed out in several previous blogposts, Hayek, along with like-minded people like Walter Lippmann in the USA, developed their jointly neoliberal-neofascist strategy during the previous period of history. Known as the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975, that period was dominated by a much more paternalist, less strident form of private capitalism, that had prosecuted the Second World War against fascism in alliance with the state-capitalist USSR.
The intellectual founders of neoliberalism were not just promoting the return to a much more intense form of capitalist accumulation, based on short-term profit maximization, they were also stridently in favour of bringing back a complete and total alliance with the most ultra-reactionary forms of religion and imperialism as well. They needed those ultra-right-wing ideologies, as I explained earlier, to provide the necessary props required to provide their very numerous victims with all the kinds of false solace, and fake freedom from their submissive fate, that had already been offered to their working-class predecessors back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (during the first industrial revolution).
Hayek, Lippmann and all the other founders of neoliberalism considered neofascism, from the very beginning, to be a fundamental, essential element in their ideological counter-revolution. Margaret Thatcher borrowed her entire strategy from those people, as did Ronald Reagan, Augusto Pinochet and Deng Xiao-ping. We are talking worldwide conspiracy here, not just a minor “tweaking” of ideas, which was still, nevertheless, a completely open conspiracy. People who try to hide the deliberately ultra-reactionary nature of this particular conspiracy, like the folks who wrote the scenario for “The Crown”, ended up being a great deal more dishonest than Mrs. Thatcher or her intellectual mentors ever were. In spite of its other-worldly veneer, today’s ultra-elitist, trans-humanist movement sounds very much like an updated, neoliberal version of Benito Mussolini’s equally elitist “new man” movement. Which also seems to have had quite a large impact on many people in the UK, including Winston Churchill (before 1936), who liked fascism’s ideological identification with the classical, ancient Roman empire every bit as much as did the Scottish-schoolteacher character in the well-thought-out, 1969 British film, “The prime of Miss Jean Brodie”.
In 1982, when the ordinary, unemployed intruder, Michael Fagan, managed to climb into Elizabeth II’s bedroom for an uninvited chat, during the night, according to the scenarists of “The Crown”, they talked mainly about how Mrs. Thatcher took away from ordinary, working-class Englishmen like himself, almost all the government help for unemployed people that the previous, mostly Labour Party governments, had introduced before Thatcher took power. According to several sources that I looked up on the Internet, the content of Fagan’s real conversation with the queen is unknown, but that it was probably not focused on Thatcher’s policies. Instead, that content was inserted into the Season 4 program because it was definitely the main thing that ordinary, working-class people were upset about with the Thatcher government at the time.
The program also asserted that Fagan was not at all severely punished for his crime, as several important people back then wanted, but that he was sent instead to a mental-health institution for a few months, before being released, and has lived in London as an ordinary, private citizen ever since. One wonders if what he may have told Elizabeth could have been something to the effect that 90% of the problems that ordinary working people like himself have in this world comes from the way that they are being treated by the people who run the world, with only 10% of their problems stemming from their own personal behaviour. One also wonders if the mental-health professionals that he was forced to stay with after his release did not try to convince him instead that 90% (or more) of his problems were caused by his own behaviour and only 10% (or less) were caused by neoliberal and neofascist people like Margaret Thatcher.
What I took away from that controversy about Mr. Fagan is that Elizabeth II was definitely not any more of a “friend in high places” for ordinary, working-class people than any other such person. A conclusion that I reached not just because no one else anywhere else in the world ever seems to have qualified for that role either, but also because the queen of the UK seems to have had a reasonably good relationship with Mrs. Thatcher, apparently bestowing on her at the end of her period in power a personally-designated, order-of-merit award for her numerous “positive contributions” to the country. According to another part of “The Crown” scenario, the one thing that Elizabeth II did intensely disagree about with Margaret Thatcher was the latter’s perceived disdain for the black leaders of various African countries at that time. Elizabeth Windsor seems to have thought that Mrs. Thatcher was being racist, which also seems consistent with the prime minister’s negative attitude toward “the British Commonwealth of Nations”, presided over by the very same queen.
Which would seem to indicate something similar to what I was referring to earlier, in relation to South African history. Elizabeth II, as depicted, strikes me as being one of those people who puts more emphasis on the fight against individual acts of racism than on the fight against discrimination aimed at people belonging to the “lower classes” of society, of whatever racial origin. Like the ANC, whose government also adheres to the same Commonwealth, she seems to prefer to “fight racism” only for rich and powerful, non-white people rather than for the world’s proletarian masses of people, some of whom also happen to have black skins, as well as every other skin colour known to mankind. This is the very same, old-fashioned, “token black person” cliché that has been going on for thousands of years. Very similar to the idea of a woman running the British monarchy, rather than a man, or a woman becoming the prime minister of the UK, rather some other man, in this particular case a woman who deliberately refused to choose any other woman to become a cabinet minister, because (according to “The Crown”) women are so emotional most of the time.
Ardent tokenism once again, for a small number of rich and powerful women, just as long as it does apply to most women, and therefore to genuine equality between the sexes. All the truly hypocritical people in this world want racial equality and gender equality, for individual upper-crust cases, so long as that does not mean equality between the social classes. Heaven forbid! No one in power wants to pay the “toiling masses”, men and women, workers, peasants and so on, a decent salary and provide them with decent working conditions, not only some of them and not only in some countries, but for all them everywhere. Of course, being nice to everyone all over the world and not just to a few chosen people would cost an enormous amount of money, and would therefore make it much more difficult for the world’s richest and most powerful people to enjoy keeping complete control over the entire world under their wings. The wings of those who “deserve” it the most, namely themselves.
As many different journalists all over the world have explained it recently, the current pandemic, which has by no means run its course, has taught everyone a very important lesson. That the world’s most vulnerable people, already mistreated in the past, were also those most likely to suffer the greatest from the pandemic, because they have always been the ones to suffer the most from every other calamity. Their suffering was also constantly being made a great deal worse by the thoroughly inadequate ways in which most of the world’s countries have reacted to that same pandemic. Those vulnerable people, “the elderly, those living alone, the homeless, immigrant workers, low-income earners” particularly suffered whenever they found themselves living in non-egalitarian countries. As the city of Montreal’s chief public health officer, Mylène Drouin put it recently, “an egalitarian society responds much better to crises.” Both of those quotes coming from René Bruemmer’s article, “What COVID-19 has taught us”, published in “The Montreal Gazette” on January 8, 2022.
Previous articles published in the same newspaper, as well as in the other Montréal daily that I read all the time (“Le Devoir”), have also had very similar things to say about the climate change crisis as well, which is also causing incredible damage to human beings right now, all over the world. In my opinion, both of those catastrophes, in addition to such other, long-standing crises as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, are all presenting humanity these days with ongoing threats to our very existence on this planet. See also David Bensoussan’s article, “L’autre pandémie” (“The other pandemic”), published in “Le Devoir” on December 31, 2021, about how the thermonuclear arms race has become just as much out of control as the pandemic has.
In my opinion, the one thing that has made millions of people susceptible to all those reactionary events has been the equally reactionary tradition imbedded in almost all human societies of constantly failing to tell the truth about everything. Fake news coming from other-worldly religions, particularly from the ultra-right-wing, fundamentalist branches of those religions, are the first set of exceptionally unreal, dishonest ways of interpreting the world. Fake news coming from equally dishonest tall tales invented in order to prop up all the world’s empires constitute the second enormous batch of misinterpretations, of history and of current events, deliberately concocted by apologists for imperialism, just like the ones invented by religious apologists, to turn ordinary people away from getting upset at their treatment by rich and powerful people, and turning their anger against themselves instead. The last collection of fake news being those invented by such denizens of the deep-swamp as Donald Trump and others like him all over the world (Xi Jinping, Vladimir Poutin, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, Éric Zemmour, Norendra Modi, Recep Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, etc.).
It would be nice to finish this blogpost by claiming that if we could only become much more honest now, because of all these current crises, none of which are going to go away all by themselves, than we ever have been in the past, we could solve all these enormous problems in due course. As a political militant, that is what I would like to happen. But as an analyst of history and of current events, I am forced instead to conclude that becoming collectively honest for the first time in history, and therefore becoming capable of dealing with all these crises, is most likely not going to happen. It is unfortunately much more likely that our immediate future will turn out to be the worst period of human history ever.
