Overcoming the weight of the past

All the people alive and active today, as well as those soon to become alive and active, share a huge responsibility nowadays, that is completely unprecedented. Unfortunately for all of us, we only have a few decades left in order to correct all the accumulated wrongs of the past. This observation applies to every aspect of history and current events, that most observers erroneously treat as separate domains. The political, economic, social and cultural dimensions of our lives constantly interact with one another and should not be treated separately. Especially if we want to survive as a species for quite a long time to come.

We need to change our acquired prejudices completely, if we ever hope to deal properly with the challenges currently being posed by such inter-connected, existential threats as the massive recent increase in worldwide pollution, causing catastrophic global warming, the constantly accelerating proliferation of the weapons of mass destruction, the enormous expansion in mind control imposed on everyone by social media and the separation of the entire world into rival gangs of ultra-elitist political and religious fanatics.

The whole world’s health, education and welfare networks, public or private, are also in total disarray, even in the richest countries. Nor should we be at all complacent about the fact that the COVID pandemic seems slightly less threatening than it was before, although not for older people like myself, nor for anyone living in China. None of the epidemiological conditions leading to any one of the recent pandemics have in any way diminished. Entirely new, possibly more devastating, pandemics are waiting in the wings.

Corruption is at an all-time high everywhere, reaching increasingly dangerous levels, including worldwide tax evasion, organized crime, street-gang violence, as well as a huge number of other evil effects. The number of people choosing to commit suicide is much larger than it ever has been, many of them deliberately consuming vast quantities of “recreational” drugs, others killing themselves more quickly by using a huge variety of increasingly procurable weaponry. Instead of fighting against all these constantly accelerating forms of regression, each one of which feeds off the other, government agencies have chosen instead to encourage those reactionary trends. In many parts of the world, euthanasia has been authorized even for people suffering exclusively from mental-health problems.

Similarly negative trends are the ever-increasing reliance on child labour, human trafficking of all kinds and the mistreatment of older people, all of which are being encouraged, rather than banned by government intervention, once again even in rich countries. Public protection against fire hazards in overcrowded housing is also disappearing, especially in rental properties, resulting in many more needless deaths, such as those who died recently when Airbnb apartments were illegally rented out to tourists in Vieux-Montréal. New skyscrapers are also being erected in thousands of cities all over the world, even for rental housing. At the same time, no provisions are being made for building near-by schools, or parks, or stores located within walking distance. Maximum profit for billionaires and their huge corporations has come to be the only acceptable criterion these days, reinforcing inhuman definitions of what development is supposed to be about.

Each major world power, dominated by both private and state capitalism, spends an enormous amount of money to maintain an arsenal of chemical, bacteriological and nuclear weapons to “protect” each of them from similarly-equipped enemies. All those powers know very well that using any of those weapons would wipe out everyone on the planet. So we have to reject the kind of naive thinking that often shows up even in relatively well-informed sources. A recent example of this sort of thing can be found in the article by Aurélie Lanctôt, “La glace et le sang”, published in the Montréal newspaper, “Le Devoir” on March 24, 2023. After having referred to some of the same existential threats on which I have been focusing, she worried about out how much blood, coming from the much more numerous people living in the global South, that the much less numerous citizens of the global North were willing to spill anyway, just to selfishly preserve their own security and survival.

There are two things wrong with her approach. First, there is her implication that “we” of the global North, not only the few rich people living in that vast region, but also the much more numerous poor people also living here, are equally responsible for all that organized depravity. Her other naive assumption was to assume that the global North could possibly get away with greatly reducing the total number of people living in the global South, without setting off the kind of escalating chaos that would result in the complete annihilation of the entire human race. I much prefer the approach favoured by Gwynne Dyer in his 2008 book, “Climate Wars”, in which he predicted that massive loss of life in one part of the world would inevitably lead to massive loss of life in the entire world, in a very short time. Even though many of his specific projections back then were not always on the mark, his overall approach was considerably more realistic.

To give a particular example of how such a complete disaster could come about, consider the fact that even a “localized” war between two nuclear powers in the global South, such as India and Pakistan, could easily break out if each side accused the other one of setting off a huge regional famine. Any war between those two countries would almost certainly spiral into a worldwide conflagration. Such a regional famine could easily be brought on by drought, as a consequence of global warming, and each of those two countries could quite readily blame the other one for having caused it. In the event of a total war breaking out between them, the other nuclear powers in the world would probably line up on one side or the other, with catastrophic consequences for everyone. Both the First and the Second World Wars spiralled out of control in a quite similar fashion, but those wars took place before the widespread proliferation of the weapons of mass destruction.

During the global confrontation known as the Cold War, both sides threatened to unleash the weapons of mass destruction on several occasions, each one of which could easily have started a Third World War. The worst of those crises was the 1962 stand-off known as the Cuban missile crisis. In 1959, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement liberated Cuba, located right next door to the USA, from the kind of total domination that the US empire had imposed on that country during several prior decades. Two years later, US-backed forces invaded Cuba during the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Castro’s number one ally, the USSR, then installed medium-range nuclear missiles to protect that country from any new invasions. US president JFK then set up a naval blockade around Cuba, in an attempt to force the USSR into removing those missiles. The Third World War would certainly have broken out, eliminating every human being on this planet, if the Soviet Union had insisted on standing its ground in 1962.

That enormous crisis was resolved when Khrushchev agreed to remove those missiles, in exchange for getting the USA to remove similar missiles previously installed in Türkiye, right next door to the USSR. Kennedy agreed to those terms and the crisis was resolved. This is the kind of compromise that should also be sought during the current confrontation between the USA and the Russian Federation, following Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine. This time around, however, the US empire has decided to tough it out, rejecting any kind of compromise whatsoever. Vladimir Putin may soon decide to set off the Third World War, especially if he feels that his position is being threatened by Russian set-backs as important as the Wagner Group’s recent rebellion.

So it is not just regional powers like India and Pakistan that threaten to draw the entire world into Armageddon. The possibility of an enormous drought taking place in that part of the world was also suggested in another recent article (“Trop tard”), by Jean-Francis Lisée, published in “Le Devoir” on April 4, 2023. Lisée was referring to the worst heat-wave in India’s history, that is now devastating that country, especially dangerous for the ultra-poor majority of its enormous population. He linked that heat-wave directly to global warming, criticizing the most recent report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change for refusing to recognize that the so-called “window of opportunity”, to avoid an overall 1.5 degree increase in world temperatures, ran out at least ten years ago. Such an unprecedented heat wave, caused by climate change, in one of the world’s most vulnerable regions, could quickly lead to a massive drought in the same region, thereby quite easily setting off all the other catastrophic consequences mentioned earlier. These days, geopolitical confrontations between major powers tend to combine with other major crises like the onslaught of climate change, making the current situation even worse than it was during the Cold War, or any other time in the past.

Humanity’s overwhelming reliance for most of its energy on poisonous sources such as fossil fuels has also turned those products into newly-recognized “weapons of of mass destruction”. Unfortunately, all the alternative sources of energy considered to have the capacity to replace our massive reliance on fossil fuels (80% of current consumption), are only slightly less objectionable. The 2011 nuclear-reactor meltdown in central Japan, set off by a huge earthquake and tidal wave, was just one of a long series of “isolated incidents” that have broken out over the past several decades, demonstrating just now dangerous many of our “alternative” sources of energy really are.

The Fukushima event permanently wiped out Japan’s most illustrious industrial development of the post-war era, turning that site into a permanent wasteland. It was also a consequence of the reactionary hubris of neoliberalism, the private corporation (Tepco) that built the place taking total control of the rescue operations instead of the Japanese government, even in a crisis threatening Japan’s very existence as a nation. That event caused considerably more havoc than the 1986 Chernobyl “accident” in the Ukraine and could be easily be followed up by an even more devastating “isolated incident” during the current Russian invasion, at the  Zaporizhzhia nuclear-energy plant.

It is difficult to see how we could bring about any kind of peaceful “transition” to any of those “alternative” energy technologies without severely reducing overall world consumption of energy at the same time. Nowadays, however, our widespread and totally idiotic dependence on extreme forms of exclusion and censorship, in the false hope of doing away forever with negative opinions about everything, makes it practically impossible for most people to get real about any of those alarming challenges. Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, as well as many other world leaders, have succumbed along with everyone else to extremely dangerous outbreaks of collective mental disfunction.

Both right-wing and ultra-right-wing politicians in Canada and the USA have recently launched ideological crusades against any kind of carbon tax, because according to them such a tax could cut into the ever-expanding profit margins of huge corporations, and reduce “our” capacity to compete against less interventionist countries. An article (“Carbon tax is a loser for Liberals)”, written by conservative columnist Tasha Kheiriddin, was published in the Montréal Gazette on June 7, 2023, arguing that opposition Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilièvre was doing the right thing after all, by denouncing the ruling Liberal Party’s carbon tax.

More discerning critics have lambasted the same Liberal government for being hypocritical instead, because while imposing a modest carbon tax, it is simultaneously investing huge sums of government money in further expanding the Canadian fossil-fuel industry. In Kheiriddin’s view, however, any carbon tax at all is a bad idea; she tried to bolster her opinion by adding that the USA has no such carbon tax, “for fear of hurting the poor”. It seems to me, however, that US politicians opposed to such a tax are really acting in that thoroughly atavistic way in order to help the USA’s own fossil-fuel industry, even more than Canada. I think that if the Americans really wanted to protect their poor people, they could make sure that minimum wage laws were reinforced all over the country, and set at much higher levels than they are now. They could also spend a great deal more on programs like Medicare and Medicaid, rather than a great deal less as most of the states are now doing.

Ridiculous neoliberal fantasies about privatizing the entire world economy do not seem to be diminishing anywhere. The ultimate, ultra-elitist goal of the people promoting such fantasies is to make sure that private enterprise is never allowed to help ordinary people get ahead in any significant way. In their view, private investment must be eternally focused on maintaining and reinforcing the world-wide domination of everyone else by a small coterie of rich and powerful individuals. The equally ultra-elitist goal of the neofascist state-capitalists, all over the world, is to make sure that no government can never be allowed to help ordinary people in any significant way either. Not to forget that the USA is home to the world’s largest concentration of private-capitalist corporations, as well as to the world’s largest concentration of state-capitalist organizations, such as the Pentagon. All the world’s ultra-elitists are working together to forever maintain establishment control over the general population, in every country.

Ruling private and public elites everywhere are also trying harder than ever before to get many more millions of severely misled “ordinary Joes and Janes” into supporting right-wing, ultra-right-wing, fake-left-wing and/or fake-ultra-left-wing politicians. Thought control has become much more invasive than it ever was in the past. In today’s world, representative democracy is even less democratic than it was in days gone by, social-democracy has become both less socialist and less democratic, while political oligarchies like the one in China are even further away from real socialism than they already were before. The whole world’s theoretically independent countries are also further  away from genuine independence than they ever were in the past.

Fake democracy was denounced in a two-minute take that appeared recently in a Netflix film, about the legal team that the government of the USA assembled after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Its job was to put a price on how much the families of the victims ought to be paid to compensate them for the loss of their loved ones. At one point in that film, one of the participants pointed out how much more rapidly the US Congress was willing to change its own laws in a hurry, in order to accommodate the excessive demands of giant corporations, than it was to change its laws in order to accommodate any lesser folk, even a little bit. In the real events upon which that fictional account was based, without being specifically identified as such, both neoliberalism and neofascism were prominently featured as equally dangerous ideologies. They motivate the world’s most powerful politicians and corporate moguls into attempting to forever eliminate any kind of movement that could benefit anyone in the world except themselves.

Since the beginning of our existence on this planet, the sustained accumulation over time of backward attitudes like these stand out nowadays, even more than they did in the past, as destructive and reactionary. It is this garbage-dump of antediluvian systems of behaviour, gradually accumulating over several millennia, that is currently combining to prevent us from adopting much more appropriate attitudes, focused on overcoming today’s thoroughly unprecedented threats. Everywhere on this planet, what seemed to some of our ancestors to have been the right thing to do in the past, ought now to be interpreted in an entirely different way.

In the first place, we have to stop treating the entire, non-human part of the natural world as enemies that deserve to be exploited, oppressed, or killed off. This applies not only to all the world’s plants and animals, but also to the air, the water, the soil and everything else that sustains life. We should also stop treating huge groups of human beings in exactly the same destructive ways. Rather than constantly denying the extremely negative effect of both of those  backward-looking attitudes, we should be admitting that such behaviour has existed for a long time and is currently dominating us even more than it did in days gone by. We have no choice but to completely change our ways of doing things and avoid endlessly reproducing the stupid mistakes of the past, even to the point of accepting as inevitable the imminent extinction of our entire species. We have to recognize that this is in fact the first time in history that such dire, end-of-the-world predictions have been based exclusively on scientifically established criteria.

Unfortunately, the scientific method itself is also being called into question these days. Pure scientific research is being largely abandoned, in favour of applied science. Large corporations all over the world cannot make huge sums of money in a short period of time by exploiting purely theoretical discoveries, whose practical implications do not often become obvious right away. They want scientific research in the world’s universities to be exclusively devoted to coming up with innovations that are immediately useful to their bottom line. (See the article by Michel Lacroix, “L’unversité soumise aux entreprises”, published in “Le Devoir” on June 12, 2023.)

An equally dangerous recent trend was also denounced in an article by Pauline Gravel, “La moralisation de la science”, published in the same newspaper, in its June 10-11 weekend edition. In that article, Gravel interviewed a well-known, University of Québec at Montréal (UQAM) professor of the history and sociology of science, Yves Gingras, concerning several recent attempts at corrupting social-science research by imposing so-called “moral limits” on scientific discovery. The examples that Gingras mentioned in that interview came from a paper that he wrote for the recent convention of the “Association canadienne-française pour l’avancement des sciences” in Québec.

In this context, we should not forget that the curiously-designated “moral limits” involved often vary from one part of the world to another, depending on the dominant ideology present in each country. In China, for example, the expression “moral limits” is interpreted to mean agreeing completely with that country’s currently dominant slogan, “the Chinese path to socialism”. In Western countries like Canada, Québec and the USA, at least when neofascist reactionaries like Donald Trump are not in power, “moral limits” means promoting the liberal-democratic point of view instead.

Gingras cited the case of an academic journal that recently published an article showing that the impact of studies conducted by women in the social sciences did not have nearly as much of an impact in each field as did similar studies conducted by men. The editorial board of that same journal, however, then decided to retract that article on the grounds that it was a “criticism of women”, whereas in reality exactly the opposite was true. It seems that the editors  came to that thoroughly idiotic conclusion under the influence of the “Equality, Diversity, Inclusion” movement. By turning truth upside down, they concluded that their own already-published article had somehow undermined rather than promoted the role of women in science.

Another example that Gingras mentioned was the equally strange influence of EDI on Canadian government agencies giving grants to researchers. Those organizations decided not to authorize such grants, for example, if the history and social-science researchers investigating the treatment of indigenous peoples in Canada came to any scientific conclusion that did not concur with whatever point of view that any particular indigenous group currently holds about its own past. For example, even if someone receiving such a grant found out that some indigenous group has not always lived in the same area as they now do, from the very beginning of time, those results could not be published if that indigenous group was currently pretending to have lived in that region forever.

A third example that Gingras mentioned dealt with the current geopolitical gulf between the world’s self-proclaimed democracies and the world’s admittedly authoritarian regimes, such as Russia and China. The situation now is that any researchers on “our” side are obliged to fill out a huge number of documents demonstrating beyond the shadow of a doubt that anything they find out about in such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, biotechnology or quantum mechanics, could never be used by any authoritarian country against “our side”, no matter how scientific any of those contributions turned out to be. The question that then arises is that If scientific research has to concord with prevailing ideology, how are we supposed to prove that “our” side is indeed behaving in a more democratic manner than “their” side?

It seems to me that if human beings in competing parts of the world are constantly getting so easily confused, in such obvious ways, how is everyone in every part of the world supposed to avoid letting any particular ideology get in the way of unprejudiced scientific research? How do we go about developing a world-view that is genuinely worldwide, encompassing everyone in a way that will enable all of us together to adequately deal with the existential threats that I outlined earlier? The tendency of Western civilization to project its own “worldview” on the entire universe is obviously bogus. The same set of thoughts cannot be simultaneously Western and universal, nor Western and worldwide.

By the same token, of course, neither Russian nor Chinese world-views can be considered truly universal either, not back when Russia was using the USSR in order to control the world communist movement, nor when China proclaimed its Cultural Revolution as representing the  entire worldwide proletariat, nor when that same country pretends nowadays to be following a “Chinese path” to worldwide socialism. It is impossible to confine such concepts as socialism,  communism, or the proletariat to any particular place or regime.

Similarly, none of the other imperialist cultures, past or present, can pretend to be following any  genuine world-views that apply to everyone on this planet. None of the current attempts at universalizing regional or worldwide domination over everyone else can possibly succeed, whether such goals are proclaimed by the USA, Germany, Russia, China, India, Türkiye, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Ethiopia, or any other pretenders. This observation applies to every country, regardless of which political tendency is currently dominating that country.

The same observation also applies to indigenous peoples: no particular indigenous group of people can ever lay an uncontested claim to any particular part of the world. Since people of every possible culture have been moving all around the globe for eons, no specific territory in any part of the world belongs to any particular people for all time. Which does not mean that the world’s less-powerful constituencies should therefore always be forced to bow down to the world’s more-powerful constituencies. We have to come up with a whole new way of doing things, that does not leave anyone out.

If we could stop being weighed down by all the different kinds of ultra-egotistical, super-selfish attitudes inherited from the past, we could instead adopt up-to-date, generous, genuinely empathetic and altruistic attitudes toward each other. That is to say, not just in one part of the world but in every part of the world. We ought to be trying in every way possible to make sure that people all over the world participate fully in genuinely sustainable development. Instead, we are trying to do away with that possibility forever, deliberately abandoning any form of development, research, or geopolitical cooperation, that does not allow each separate nation, or firm, to impose its parochial, prejudiced, short-term gains on everyone else.

To accomplish that immense assignment, however, we have to go way back to our animal origins, to find much more appropriate ways of proceeding. I once stumbled upon a hawk slowly devouring a starling, on the other side of a body of water, only a few metres away from me. The hawk was calmly consuming its prey, bite by delicious bite, while the starling was still very much alive, struggling to get away, but slowly bleeding to death instead. The much larger and stronger bird was completely oblivious, or totally indifferent, to the plight of the much smaller and weaker bird.

As a bird of prey, the hawk had no biological option but to behave in that thoroughly disturbing manner. Human beings, however, have always pretended to have a choice so far as their own behaviour is concerned. Many of us continue to believe, or pretend to believe, that we do not have to copy hawkish behaviour any more. Certainly not in the way that most people in power used to do during the past two to three thousand years, deliberating mistreating thousands of other species, in every possible way, as well as deliberately mistreating most of their fellow humans in similar ways.

By rejecting what reactionary people consider to be “idealist sentiment”, the small minority of rich and powerful perpetrators in this world act like cannibals even more than they did before, at least figuratively eating their “inferior” rivals. It is true that extremely parochial ways of looking at the world have recently received a lot of bad publicity. In spite of that, small groups of dominant individuals still go on killing off much larger groups of human “enemies”, even more often than in the past, while exploiting or oppressing much larger groups of  “weak” people, in an infinite variety of sub-cannibal ways.

To “justify” this kind of behaviour, the rival clusters of domination that have controlled the world over the past several millennia have always pretended that their ways of doing things are quite efficient at producing wealth. In reality, however, the powerful ones always hoard most of that wealth for themselves, making sure that their system is not efficient for everyone, but instead serves to prevent “inferior” billions of deprived people from getting anywhere in life. Keeping the majority of us from participating fully in the world economy, even more than before, greatly reduces the overall capacity of our species to create much larger amounts of wealth than is currently being created, or that ever has been created at any time in the past.

Following our initial successes at group survival, way back when, that were not at all obvious in the beginning, we gradually grew more numerous than we were before. Some of us got a lot bigger and more resistant, at the expense of most of the other animals, as well as of most of their fellow humans. During the very long-lasting palaeolithic, mesolithic and neolithic periods, the strongest individuals dominated the weaker ones on an ever increasing scale. Many of our selfish ancestors delighted in deliberately mistreating “lesser beings” in as many different ways as possible. To make those thoroughly disgusting systems of domination work the way that they were intended to work, the “lesser beings” who persisted in looking a lot like the dominant ones did were promptly re-defined as being only sub-human instead.

During each succeeding period, the most narcissistic, self-centred individuals among us became more and more successful, as well as more and more ambitious. The pace of that onward onslaught, of small groups of “superior” human beings “managing” much large groups of “inferior” humans, speeded up considerably during the relatively recent rise of urban-based societies. About five to six thousand hears ago, apparently beginning in the eastern Mediterranean region, many of the world’s leading brigands gradually transformed themselves into rich and powerful aristocrats, self-proclaimed champions of what they chose to call “civilization”. Most people, those doing all the dirty and difficult work, were relegated to the inferior social classes of slaves, peons and domestic servants.

During that same process, those self-satisfied elites also took advantage of biological differences, or invented differences, between men and women in order to impose toxic-masculine domination over most of those belonging to “the weaker sex”, officially described as being “naturally submissive”. At the same time, the overwhelmingly male aristocrats in every part of the world also began dividing people up in yet another way, creating what came to be known as proprietary and slave “races”, based on perceived cultural differences that emerged over the millennia between neighbouring peoples. The concept of “race” itself, however, was only an invented misnomer, one of the original kinds of “fake news”, not at all based on any kind of truly biological origins.

In every part of this planet, those former bands of brigands gradually reorganized themselves into aristocratic societies, or competing civilizations. Over the centuries, this process slowly spread into almost every area, leaving behind only a few large regions still inhabited by pre-aristocratic populations. Most of those “pre-historic” groups of people, however, were not as genuinely indigenous as some of them later claimed to be. Following the origins of our species in the East African part of the world, thousands of increasingly separated peoples started moving around all over the globe, from one continent to another, during the millennia preceding their arrival in the contiguous areas in which they eventually settled down, much later on.

The next earth-shaking change that took place, between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries (according to the Christian calendar), was the successful conquest, for the first time, by a small group of European countries, of most parts of the entire planet. Those European empires eventually transformed all the previously existing, equally aristocratic, independent states and regional empires into formal colonies or semi-autonomous satrapies. Along the way, they gradually changed their overall focus of exploitation, from slave or feudal societies basing most of their wealth on the ownership of real estate, to capitalist empires basing most of their wealth on accumulating a huge profit, using any method whatsoever, at everyone else’s expense.

Towards the end of that same period, a few million recent settlers of European origin, in what came to be known as the USA, broke away from the British empire to set up their own independent empire. In the process, they created the curious concept of “Western civilization”, gradually combining Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand into one artificial “region”, that also included “associated states” like the Boer colony in South Africa and the Zionist outpost in Western Asia.

A few of the semi-colonies that had initially succumbed to that “Western” onslaught, such as the Russian empire (larger or smaller under the tsarist regime, the USSR and the Russian Federation), the Japanese empire (at least before the Second World War) and the Chinese empire (especially after the founding of the People’s Republic), also managed along the way to re-establish regional empires in their own parts of the world.

Most of the “Outlines” of that entire historical process, that have been written since H. G. Wells created the genre back in 1920, have been highly influenced by the overall worldview of the world’s leading elites, based on glorifying their freedom to dominate. Some of the more recent history books, however, have focused on a somewhat less biased point of view. Unfortunately, most of those more recent, and more balanced histories, were written about only one particular country. This probably came about because of the extreme amount of work required for any one historian to pretend to any kind of expertise concerning all the extremely varied civilizations that have been set up over the years, in every part of the world.

One such work that I read recently was written by French journalist François Reynaert about the history of his country: “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois et autres fadaises” (2010). In that particular book, he decided not to attempt an official, exhaustive history of his own nation, but instead to write a series of short summaries about each succeeding period. For each one of those periods, he first summed up the official version that was being taught in most parts of that country when he was going to school. Then he added a much more realistic account about what really took place during those same centuries. His book became a series of ironic denunciations of how the kind of official history taught in most French schools depended very heavily on highly inaccurate accounts, based almost exclusively on the adoption of a dominant mythology.

In the French case, the most recent such myth centred on the “liberty, equality, fraternity” slogan that was gradually put into place between the founding of the First Republic (1792-1799) and the subsequent decision to permanently adopt the republican form of government, during the Third Republic (1870-1940). Reynaert divided the entire period between 1789 and 1870 into several shorter periods that included the short-lived Second Republic, as well as several unsuccessful attempts at returning to the previously dominant monarchical system. Since 1871, France has also adopted two more re-writes of official republicanism, the Fourth Republic being a bit more parliamentarian than the third one was, and the Fifth Republic returning to a more presidential stance instead.

This sort of complicated back and forth between rival constitutional systems, often radically different from each other, did not just happen in France, but also took place, at one time or another, in every other country in the world. During that entire process, each elite in every nation or empire has always attempted to use history teaching in order to disseminate official propaganda, aimed at building up support for the ruling establishment. Every ruling class always tries to convince everyone in every particular country, and in every particular period, that the place-time in which each individual happens to land at birth is in fact the “world’s best” place-time in which anyone could possibly hope to live. That is to say, even if it differs radically from what was going on in the past, or from what was going on in other countries during that same period. In each particular case, every ruling elite everywhere deliberately refuses to consider how far from the truth every one of those mythical accounts inevitably turns out to be. A complicated process that always turns periods of concentrated constitutional change into decades, or even centuries, of extremely stressful, often violent, internal conflict.

Reynaert started his book by writing fifteen successive chapters about a long initial period, during which most of the official accounts had projected the unified existence of a country that in reality their authors only imagined to have existed, before any truly national unity was actually achieved. They all tried to make believe that the modern French nation started out during the Roman empire’s expansion, under Julius Caesar, into territory lying just beyond its western border, initially occupied by a section of Europe’s Celtic peoples, “les Gaulois”. According to Reynaert, nothing resembling today’s France actually existed until about fifteen centuries later, when French kings like Louis XI initiated the real unification process towards the end of the European “Middle Ages”.

Everything that had happened in that region before that time therefore amounted to an artificial projection of the concept of the modern “French nation” into much earlier periods, when it made no sense at all to speak in that fashion. One of the contributing justifications that Reynaert gave for his more realistic interpretation of those events was the fact that after the Norman-French invasion of England in 1066, right up until the mid-fifteenth century, the French-speaking kings of England also held a considerable amount of territory situated inside today’s France. Until the end of that period, therefore, it was not at all obvious that England and France would end up as two separate nations. Throughout his entire book, Reynaert’s method of getting at the truth was to compare the history of France with the history of several other contemporary European countries. He showed in many different ways that such comparisons can be used to help puncture national myths based on “head-in-the-sand” attitudes about national exclusivity.

Reynaert then wrote another thirteen chapters about the history of the French monarchy, from Louis XI to Louis XVI, corresponding to the period of overall European history known as the early-modern one, from the mid-fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. During that period, France gradually became much more important than it previously was within the overall history of European civilization. This became especially obvious during the reign of Louis XIV, “the Sun King”, who effectively ruled that nation from 1661 to 1715, after he became old enough to take power for himself.

When treating that particular period, Reynaert not only continued to compare French history with that of other European nations, he also started to compare the devastating effects of European imperial expansion around the world. France participated quite actively back then in many of those colonial adventures, conquering several different regions, including parts of North and South America, as well as parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands. He devoted a specific chapter to the French presence in the Caribbean, particularly involving the sugar trade, and to the thoroughly disgusting “codes noirs” set up by the monarchy to control black African slaves in colonies like Haiti. According to him, any pretension on the part of today’s historians, that the French empire may have taken a less reactionary attitude toward slaves than did any of the other European empires, has to be decisively rejected.

Reynaert then divided the last part of his text, on the history of France since the 1789 revolution, into another thirteen chapters. In that last section, he continued with the same critical attitudes that he had adopted earlier, condemning several new French colonial adventures that took place between 1789 and 1945. He also briefly analyzed the ultra-reactionary wars that the French empire undertook against independence movements after 1945, notably in Indochina and in Algeria. He then devoted a couple of other chapters to describing how very poorly the French working-class was being treated by French rulers during most of that same period, with the possible exception of the “Popular Front” alliance between the Socialist and the Communist Parties, that only lasted from 1936 to 1938.

Along the way, he devoted a separate chapter to the Dreyfus affair (1894-1906), in which a patriotic army captain of Jewish origin was falsely accused, for strictly antisemitic reasons, of collaboration with the German enemy, before being totally exonerated. Reynaert compared the political storm that broke out back then with the similar turmoil caused by the collaborationist, pro-fascist stance of the Vichy regime, following the French army’s ignominious defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940. He went on to describe how both the Dreyfus affair and the Vichy regime can be compared to the ideological divisions that have again emerged, all over the world, during the current period of history.

Although I liked most of Reynaert’s numerous criticisms about how French history is usually written, I do not always agree with everything that he wrote in his book. For example, I think that he significantly downplayed some of his own critiques; in many instances, I would have denounced those same situations much more thoroughly than he did. Among other things, I also disagree with his overall support for the recent policies of the European Union, that I consider to be much too complacent toward neoliberalism, as well as (in many instances) toward ultra-right-wing populism (neofascism).

In the conclusion of his book, Reynaert maintained his support for the French Revolution’s “liberty, equality, fraternity” slogan as still being appropriate for today’s France, notwithstanding  everything else that he wrote about the most recent period of French history. That seems to me to have been a rather naive thing to do. It is true that all three of those words, together, would make up a good slogan for almost any country in today’s world, if only one of those countries ever truly supported every one of those three principles. I do not believe that any of those concepts truly apply to most of what has been going on in France, or anywhere else, during the “late-modern” or “contemporary” period of history, since the late eighteenth century. Every country in today’s world is still quite a long way from achieving any of those ideals right now. It seems to me that we are currently moving in the opposite direction instead, even further away from any kind of real liberty, real equality or real fraternity.

There is always an enormous gap between what the ultra-individualist people who dominate the world say that they believe, and what their day-to-day actions demonstrate that they really believe. Ultra-egotistical people may claim to believe in equality, for example, if they think that doing so could be useful in a particular conversation, while still behaving in ways that prove that they really think that they should continue dominating everyone around them. Their extreme identification with their own “self-evident” superiority makes it impossible for them to genuinely share with anyone else, or to identify with any “inferior” person’s suffering.

From their point of view, any psychological harm caused to any “lesser humans” by such behaviour can only come about whenever some “inferior” person suddenly owns up the “fact” that he, or she, really is inferior after all. In other words, the dominant ones do not perceive the outside world as it really is, but only as it appears to their own over-sized egos. They behave just like the “true believers” in any one of a large number of extremist religious sects, who think that everyone who does not belong to their brand of belief is an infidel enemy who must be defeated on the battlefield, as depicted in the song “Onward Christian Soldiers”. In the real world, militant religious terrorism has to be decisively rejected, at the same time as the much more murderous state terrorism (“counter-insurgency”) that inevitably accompanies it.

We all have to decisively reject any kind of barbarian behaviour that results in people considered to be “weaker” than others being thoroughly mistreated by people considered to be “stronger”. All the world’s religious fanatics, from no matter which religion or which culture, are constantly attacking designated groups of people within their own society, as well as in competing societies. No one “side” of any of those disputes comes out of this comparison legitimately free of blame.

In order to solve any of the existential threats to our survival that I underlined earlier, within a very short period of time, we have to do away with all those different kinds of fanaticism, as well as with all the kinds of wishful thinking that also keep popping up all over the place. To prevent themselves from getting serious about revolutionary change nowadays, many people choose to interpret all human history in an overwhelmingly positive manner. Because we started out a long time ago with a very small number of human beings, but still succeed (even if just barely) in keeping over eight billion humans alive these days, it seems inconceivable to them that we could nevertheless lose everything that we have built up over the centuries, within the next few decades. Millions of people think that it is just ridiculous to say something like that, because it seems obvious to them that “someone will come up with something”, such as a technological fix of some sort, for every one of those threats, within the next few years.

After all, such people say, many of the technologies that dominate the world today, such as the very recent arrival of the Internet and the social media, means that we can avoid any possible “1984” or “Brave New World” scenario simply by inventing something much better. According to them, all we have to do is to replace mind control with trans-humanist “mind expansion” instead, which sounds a lot like what psychedelic guru Timothy Leary was preaching back in the 1970s. The same sort of thing is taking place nowadays with artificial intelligence, which, like so many other recent innovations, seems to be very much under the joint control of neoliberalism and neofascism.

In the meantime, a large number of individuals who were instrumental in making the discoveries that led to artificial intelligence have called upon everyone to halt its ongoing development, until such time as we figure out how to do so ethically. Those governments and giant corporations that want to ignore those warnings and to go all-out right away, in spite of everything, may very well end up creating the kind of self-replicating robots that decide on their own to eliminate human beings altogether. Completely un-ethical machines could indeed soon become even more dangerous for us than nuclear weapons, or any of the other existential threats mentioned above.

Ordinary people watching all of this despise feeling helpless, or inadequate, or uncertain, they hate not possessing all the answers, or not having an instant explanation for everything, and therefore choose to believe in “alternative explanations” as perfectly inane and inadequate as  “God will provide”, “it’s God’s will”, or “may my country always be right, but my country right or wrong”. This is the same kind of ridiculous answer that such people have been coming up with for centuries, constantly inventing misleading slogans that the dominant ones have always used to convince ordinary citizens to overcome their frequent “anxiety attacks” about ruling-class domination. Self-deception has become the predominant ideological deviation of our age, all over the world, even more widespread than it ever was in the past.

Today’s supporters of both neoliberalism and neofascism (otherwise known as ultra-right-wing populism), think that all we have to do is to clear away the “swamp of liberal democracy” that has been oppressing people all these years. They refuse to realize that “the swamp” includes everything that the leadership of almost every country, and of every private corporation, have been proposing ever since aristocratic domination (“uncivilized civilization”) started taking over the entire world. That is why I believe that nowadays everything has to change so completely, toward considerably greater reliance on genuine (not fake) cooperation, altruism and empathy, if human beings want to survive for much longer than a few additional decades.

When I talk about cooperation, I do not mean phoney cooperation, such as dividing up a given market between two rival “co-operative movements”, both of which dominate part of that  market. This seems to be the case at the moment in the pork industry in Québec, the duopoly involved imposing its will on their customers as well as on their employees. Real cooperation is the only way to go, that would include all the world’s oppressed and exploited people, as well as all those suffering from any kind of real (not fake) gender prejudice, race prejudice, or imperialist domination. Reactionary gurus should not be able to get away with playing off one group of mistreated, ordinary people against another such group, as has so often happened in the past, and is happening even more often nowadays.

There is no other way out of our very numerous conundrums except to do all those things properly, avoiding not only refusal to help any of those mistreated populations, but also avoiding only half-assed approaches. However, we cannot ignore the fact that it is extremely difficult to make such enormous changes in so little time. One of the main reasons why this is so is because it does not just come down to a fight between ultra-elitism (neoliberalism and neofascism combined) at the top levels of society, versus popular opposition to the establishment.

Many people’s natural inclination to do away with everything, and everyone, that have been oppressing them in the past, and in the present, is constantly being undermined by the antediluvian collaboration of millions of self-centred social climbers. That is to say, those who identify with the established aggressors (the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie) because they feel that their own personal interests could be better served by launching similar attacks, albeit at a lower level, against the same kinds of victims that the world’s leading dominators have always controlled in the past.

To figure out who most of those collaborators are, and where they operate, in every country and in every time period, one has only to follow the money. Whenever there are reasonably large sums of money to be made, or defended from potential rivals, copy-cat opportunists will inevitably show up. This is constantly taking place, even if some of those people had not previously played such a harmful role, prior to the moment in time when they came across a particular opportunity for short-term enrichment. Anyone who wants to find out who most of them are likely to be in any particular region simply has to find out where the largest concentrations of money exist.

More than ever before in the past, it is not only ultra-rich and ultra-powerful people who are involved, but also “upper-middle-class” professionals, such as lawyers, judges, doctors, accountants, engineers, university professors and so on, all of whom often come across opportunities that many of them allow to corrupt their soul. As in every other profession, the university professors most likely to go down this slippery slope are most often found in the richest universities and affiliated departments, rather than in those universities and departments that are considerably less well-funded, whether by private or public sources.

In a similar fashion, some of the young people growing up in families that, at the death of their reasonably well-off parents, inherit property worth quite a bit of money, such as a large family home, or a vacation property, are often incited to attack their rival siblings in dozens of different ways, often quite viciously. Most of the time, the eldest heirs, or the heirs not “suffering” from any particular disadvantage, such as being a woman rather than a man, or not belonging to the dominant “race” in any particular area, or not possessing any genuine handicap, end up taking over the entire family estate, at everyone else’s expense.

To be sure, it is not only people inheriting significant property, or coming from the upper-middle-class, who regularly come up with creative ways of “blaming the system” for whatever set-backs that may occur during their life-times. Ordinary working-class people (proletarians in Marxist lingo), and those coming from the “lumpen proletariat” (criminals, members of street gangs, professional prostitutes and so on), often blame others (whether higher-ups, people at their own level, or people lower down on the social ladder) for all their problems, when in reality they were individually responsible for most of their own set-backs. Even people vaguely familiar with Marxist lingo sometimes accuse “the capitalist system” for their self-inflicted wounds, including people guilty of committing major crimes, that had nothing whatsoever to do with them “fighting back” against any real oppressors.

This sort of thing can happen anywhere in the world, even in very poor countries, whenever there exists (as it alway does) a local hierarchy separating a small number of higher-up people from a much larger number of lower-down ones. Whole countries do not have to possess any kind of well-developed upper-middle-class in order to convince some of their people to engage in collaborationist behaviour. This is what happens, for example, when the leaders of some national liberation movements choose to act in opportunist ways. Often enough, even when they succeed in booting out the foreign imperialists who used to oppress everyone in the past, instead of putting into place policies designed to help out the entire liberated population in a real way, they replace the old oppressors with new ones instead, creating (or rather re-creating) their own brand of hierarchical domination.

Recent events, that either took place since my last blogpost was published, or that the implications of which did not become obvious until recently, help me to buttress many of the observations that I have been making in this blogpost. For example, the recent decision of the International Criminal Court to condemn Russia for its perfectly unjustified invasion of the Ukraine, helps to underline the fact that several other countries, that should have been condemned using similar language by the same kind of international authority, were not in fact condemned in the same manner back then.

For example, the joint invasion of Iraq by the governments of the USA and the UK, in 2003, in spite of being denounced by the United Nations, did not suffer from anywhere near the same degree of reprobation that Russia has recently received for its current assault on the Ukraine. In spite of the fact that some of the characteristics of the more recent invasion closely resemble those of the US-UK attack on Iraq, such as bald-faced lying about the real motivations lying behind each of those invasions.

A similar kind of comparison can also be made with the invasion of parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Rwandan forces, and their local allies, that took place right after the  Rwandan genocide of 1994. Back then, the majority Hutu government that was running the country in those days massacred close to one million of their Tutsi enemies (and their allies) during the decisive part of the civil war between those two peoples. Following the military overthrow of that Hutu-dominated government, by Tutsi forces that up until then had been holed up in neighbouring countries like Uganda, the new government subsequently succeeded in pushing most of their Hutu enemies (the perpetrators of the previous genocide) into another neighbouring country, the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo.

Ever since then, those Hutu refugees in the DRC have been tracked down and similarly massacred. Both the Hutu and the Tutsi forces in the DRC allied themselves with opposing forces within the DRC, involved in that country’s own civil war, that had already been going on for a long time before the arrival of the Rwandans. As a result, since 1996, over six million people have been killed inside that unfortunate nation. The Tutsi rulers in today’s Rwanda received considerable help in doing so from many Western countries, since they were instrumental in helping Western nations find many of the mining resources (such as cobalt and coltan) inside the DRC that have become crucial to the functioning of many recently-developed computer applications.

Those Western nations no longer want to rely on their formerly-communist ally, the “People’s” Republic of China, for most of the worldwide “rare earths” that the PRC currently controls. Those Western nations want everyone to forget what a stupid decision that the USA and its allies made when they first convinced China to abandon the only theoretically communist movement, dominated by Russia, and join the worldwide anti-Soviet coalition that was launched back in the 1970s. Not that the USSR was being significantly less devious during most of its own history, constantly zig-zagging as it did between some form or another of all-out “war communism”, and some form or another of more “liberal communism”.

Western nations, that have a considerable influence over such bodies as the International Criminal Court, do not want to admit how similar the Hutu massacre of the Tutsi during the Rwandan civil war has been to the current, Tutsi government’s ongoing military operations inside the DRC. Any more than they admitted any of the similarities between the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and the US-UK invasion of Iraq. In reality, none of the world’s countries ever adhere to the principles that are supposed to lie behind their slogans, such as the close association Western countries have always been making between “Western democracy” and the “rule of law”.

It turns out that Western nations like the USA do not consistently observe the rule of law, even within their own home countries. Another Netflix program that I was watching recently helped me to further develop my own understanding of that particular slogan. It was about the ultra-religious Jewish sect called the Hassidim, one of the world’s most fanatical congregations of which resides in the Williamsburg district, part of Brooklyn, New York. Young people recently trying to escape from the quasi-totalitarian control of that sect have had a very difficult time indeed. The women in that community have no personal freedom whatsoever, at least until recently, being entirely dominated by their husbands, who in turn are completely under the thumb of the ultra-religious grey-beards who maintain rigid discipline over everyone. Wives exist in that community for one purpose only, to produce as many children as possible, in as little time as possible. They describe themselves as “baby machines”.

According to the official propaganda of the most extremist elements within that sect, since the Holocaust Jewish women’s only purpose in life has been to replace every single one of the European Jews who were massacred by the Nazis and their allies during the Second World War. Which seems to be a curious way of punishing women born into the tiny Hassidic community for the horrendous crimes committed by the Nazis, not only against ultra-religious Jews but also against secular Jews. Apparently, whenever young women in that Brooklyn community try to gain their freedom, they end up being tried in the US courts, every one of which consistently sides in favour of “established Jewish tradition”, as it applies to that community. In other words, the grey-beards win every time.

It seems that this sort of thing has been going on for generations in spite of the fact that it is theoretically against the law in the USA, also for generations, to keep any woman under lock and key in that extreme fashion. In the Brooklyn case in particular, it turns out that the “rule of law” systematically translates into upholding total submission to religious authority, no questions asked. In other words, the USA’s own human-rights laws are not being upheld in those cases, but instead are being “out-voted” by established tradition.

   

To be sure, this is not necessarily typical of what happens to most Jewish women belonging to that sect in the USA, nor in some of the Hassidic communities in other countries, which are not always as strict as the one in Brooklyn. Nevertheless, the deliberate refusal by jurists to uphold laws that are supposed to apply to everyone has by no means been confined to ultra-religious Jews, nor only to the USA. Many of the other laws in favour of basic human rights are also being systematically ignored, all over the “democratic” world, quite often to “accommodate” other fanatics belonging to practically every other religious community, particularly when it comes to women’s rights. For example, the massive ongoing adhesion of most people in India to the caste system, even among some non-Hindu communities, also underlines the extreme weakness of the rule of law in “the world’s largest democracy”. This has been going on for decades In spite of the fact that the caste system has been officially illegal since way back in Nehru’s time.

Another example of the weakness of the “rule of law” concept is the fact that such “barbarian cultural practices” as clitoral excision are not only practised in some parts of Asia and Africa, but also in many of the diaspora countries. Completely un-democratic legal procedures of this kind are also quite often directed against atheists, or against homosexuals, or against many other groups of people, coming from many different parts of the world. “Home-grown” religious sects such as the Mormons and the Amish in the USA, or the Mennonites in Canada and in several Latin American countries, also participate in the same kinds of sectarian exclusion. The fact that theoretically democratic countries often tolerate such behaviour means that the “rule of law” does not always apply to everyone in the way that people who consider themselves to be proud of that slogan would normally think that it should.

The rule of law is not even properly observed when it comes to constitutional matters. I also recently watched another television program about the USA’s constitution, which put the emphasis on how the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War,  decided for the first time which people living in that country qualify as citizens, defining them as anyone born in the USA. In other words, the Constitution may have started to take shape as far back as 1776, but it did not include any definition of citizenship until 1865.

That same program also pointed out dozens of other ways by which what seem to be self-evident consequences of such an amendment were not even truly applied since that time, notably concerning the black population. Right up to the present day, the decision to send a very large number of mostly poor black men to jail, in a much higher proportion than for the white population, could be seen as an indirect way of denying real citizenship to most of the people that lily-white American conservatives do not really want to include. I have also noticed by following the news that quite a few other provisions included in the Constitution of the USA, such as preventing any president of that country from receiving foreign emoluments, are quite often ignored as well.

But it is not only in the USA that “fake news” have had an effect on constitutional matters. In 2013, Québec college professor Frédéric Bastien, who recently died of a heart attack, published a book called “La bataille de Londres”, about how Canada’s federal government, during the early 1980s, succeeded in replacing the defunct “British North America Act” of 1867. The 1867 law was originally written and authorized in London, England, but was  replaced in 1981 with a newer version that included a Charter of Rights based exclusively on individual rights, completely ignoring collective rights. The Canadian prime minister at the time, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, father of the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, even convinced the Queen of England to fly over to Ottawa to officially endorse the slightly up-dated “transfer of power”.

Bastien demonstrated in his book, by digging up material (using the Canadian version of the Freedom of Information Act) that showed that judges Willard Estey and Bora Laskin of the Supreme Court of Canada not only re-wrote the initial version of the new constitution, drawn up by jurists from the Justice Department, but also succeeded in getting their version accepted as the final document that was signed by the Prime Minister of Canada and the Queen of England. In so doing, they deliberately ignored “the rule of law”, according to which Supreme Court judges are not supposed to write the very legislation that they end up approving.

They pulled this off in spite of the initial opposition to that same process by eight out of the ten Canadian provincial governments, that had previously been fighting against federal encroachment on their own fields of jurisdiction. At one point, every province except Québec caved in overnight (“the night of the long knives”), leaving the premier of Québec, René Lévesque, as the only long-term adversary to the new Canadian constitution, a situation that has continued to prevail to this day through several successive administrations. Current attempts on getting the federal government to publish every one of the secret documents leading up to the final decision, in order to test whether or not Bastien’s accusations were founded, will probably never succeed in convincing those people to come clean. (See Jean-François Lisée, “Les combats d’outre-tombe de Frédéric”, in “Le Devoir”, May 20-21, 2023).

The federal government of Canada has also recently adopted a fake-left-wing approach designed in theory to “protect” some of its citizens presumed to be “suffering” from laws adopted in only one province, most of the time in Québec. Ever since the 1995 referendum defeat of the Québec independence movement, the constitutional rights of that province to adopt laws falling under its previously-accepted jurisdiction, have been challenged. For example, Québec’s very mild laicity law, adopted in 2019, prohibiting civil servants in positions of authority from wearing any clothing or symbols while at work, specifically designed to foster religious proselytism, has been contested by several minority groups in Québec. Even anti-French anglophone militants have been supported by numerous federal politicians, in their attacks on other Québec laws, very much including those currently in power in Ottawa.

The same sort of refusal of Québec legislation has also been recently extended to the trans-gender issue. In this case, the Québec law giving the parents of children attending school “jurisdiction” over their own children has recently been challenged by several school boards, and school officials, notably some of the anglophone ones. Fake-left-wing people running some of those local institutions have fallen under the influence of the ultra-individualist movement, according to which any trans person wanting to act as if he or she could change his or her sexual status completely, ought to have the right to do so.

That is to say, even if real and complete sex change remains totally impossible at the present time, the currently applied, but extremely limited “hormone therapy”, for example, having very little effect, for real, on a male trans person’s attempt to become a totally functioning female, or vice versa. Those same fake-left-wing people also claim the right to completely ignore the provincial government’s control over educational policy, affecting both private and public schools. Also overlooked in the same setting is the serious ethical problem that frequently occurs whenever children suffering from certain psychological disorders react to all the recent publicity about changing one’s sex as a false “explanation” for their own unrelated malaise. (See Nadia Mabrouk, et al., “Identité de genre: Les parents ont droit à la transparence”, L’Aut’journal, 31 mai 2023.)

I think that it is not at all by chance that most of the attempts to affect gender change nowadays, and to promote that form of extreme individualism against provincial law, are mostly directed against the rights of real women, i. e., those capable of giving birth to children. This whole movement seems to be part of the same kind of thinking that divides the entire homosexual community into unequal parts, gays always ending up dominating lesbians. A similar controversy also divides the trans community in two, trans people born male often dominating trans people born female, the born-male people continuing to use their not-yet-eradicated muscle advantage, for example, to out-perform real women in competitive sports, as well as trans people born female. The same sort of sexist logic also applies to those relatively well-off, all-male parents “renting” the wombs of less-well-off surrogate mothers. In the final analysis, none of those fake-left-wing fads end up genuinely promoting women’s liberation from male oppression and exploitation. It is amazing the number of different social controversies in which the open-ended nature of the “rule of law” concept has been involved.

In a not unrelated sense, we should not forget that both the USA and Canada were originally founded as Western off-shoots of the British Empire, that has been officially ruled for over a thousand years by the British monarchy. Originally, those monarchs ruled the country and the empire directly, under either Norman-French, Welsh (“Tudor”), Scottish (“Stuart”) or German (“Windsor”) dynasties. In more recent times, the British Parliament (Lords and Commons) intervened to gradually set up a “constitutional monarchy”, leaving the ruling monarch reduced (residual) powers.

The current reigning monarchs, of mostly German origin, have included a depressing series of problematical personalities, such as Edward VIII, the “Duke of Windsor”, who supported Adolph Hitler’s ideas for a very long time, during his period of power as well as long after he committed suicide. Since Edward VIII died, his place has been taken by such worthies as Prince Andrew, Prince Harry and so on. Even the least problematical of those people, Elizabeth II, was nevertheless instrumental in setting up the thoroughly neocolonial institution known as “the British Commonwealth”. Millions of people in the UK still support the monarchy, however, in spite of all the controversies, and in spite of the extremely high price that the British public has to pay for keeping the Royal Family so immensely rich.

Recently, the Postmedia chain of newspapers in Canada published an article comparing all the world’s currently existing monarchies, choosing the absolute, Saudi Arabian monarchy as being the worst in today’s world, both towards its own people and towards its unfortunate neighbours. But we should never forget that the world’s constitutional monarchies, such as the one still officially ruling the United Kingdom, the “Kingdom” of Canada and several other countries belonging to the former British Empire, are also not setting any records for honesty and integrity.

To be sure, it is obvious that the countries in the world that have chosen republicanism over monarchy have also not set any such records. However, it seems to me that much of that thoroughly inadequate, only faintly republican, behaviour stems from the fact that most modern republics are still very much under the influence of each country’s prior, imperial and monarchical traditions. Most countries in the world are run by regimes that give far too much power to executive functions (kings, presidents, prime ministers), and far too little power to “lesser folks” holding legislative functions. Almost all the world’s republics are run as if they were only slightly-disguised monarchies. We seem to be a long way away from figuring out how to build constitutions that could function a lot better, in every possible situation, than the ones that currently exist.

I would also like to refer briefly to another television program, this one having been recently re-broadcast, about a fictional character called Émilie Bordeleau, based on the real history of nineteenth-century Québec. That was when millions of people calling themselves “French Canadians” were living under the thumb of the Catholic Church. Many of their priests in those days had left revolutionary France in order to seek a much more traditional (antediluvian) way of practising their faith. The Bordeleau character herself was depicted as being a teacher, which means that she was much better educated than most Québec women back then. Nevertheless, she actively promoted the practise of confining most women to a life focused entirely on churning out as many pregnancies as possible, most of the time followed by as many children as possible. This inevitably resulted in unusually large numbers of children being born in almost every French-Canadian family in the nineteenth century. At least half of those children ended up dying before they became adults.

Unfortunately, that nineteenth-century Québec situation is still quite common in many parts of the world today, especially in the world’s poorest countries, where most of today’s eight-billion-plus people currently live. The same scenario now prevails in those places as well: ultra-right-wing religious fanaticism particularly targets most of the women in every such country, most of whom are also extremely poor. Needless to say, that practise also brings about the same kind of tragic results for most of the world’s children.

Another article by Jean-François Lisée, “L’étincelle autochtone des Lumières”, published in “Le Devoir” (June 11-12, 2023), also caught my eye because it referred to the same subject that I dealt with in another recent blogpost. Lisée was commenting on the 2021 book, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, in which those authors offered a comparative analysis of a huge number of palaeolithic, mesolithic and neolithic societies, from every part of the world, mostly focusing on the Iron Age. The only part of that book that attracted Lisée’s attention was Graeber and Wengrow’s contention that several indigenous peoples from the Eastern Woodlands of North America had made a major contribution to the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

My take on that idea, however, was a good deal less enthusiastic than what Lisée had to say. I think that it is entirely plausible to conclude that quite a few indigenous North Americans, such as the Huron-Wendat sage Kondiaronk, had a direct ideological influence on several intellectuals in France back then, after having spent several months as war captives in that country. It seems quite clear that Kondiaronk’s well-publicized criticisms of French society had a real impact back then, focusing as they did on the horrible treatment that people in the lower classes, particularly women, were receiving at that time. The Wendat apparently believed that everyone in a particular community should try to help each other out as much as possible, even to the extent of assimilating most of their captured slaves, rather than killing them.

However, we should not forget that the Wendat were also part of the Iroquoian group of peoples, running their own confederation in violent confrontation with the rival Iroquoian Confederacy. They also thought that all their enemies, not only the Algonquians, but also those belonging to the opposing Confederacy, should be treated as badly as possible, including long-drawn-out torture of captured enemies who refused to join their side. In historical context, this may not have been an entirely unreasonable point of view back then, considering the fact that almost all the Wendat were wiped out shortly after that by their similarly Iroquoian adversaries. However, neither the Wendat nor the rival confederation in fact favoured any kind of shared repudiation of violent warfare taking place between neighbouring peoples, not even among those belonging to the same lineage.

Lisée concluded his article by exclaiming that he had put Kondiaronk into his “pantheon of heroes”. That reaction seems to me to be to be a little bit over the top. In fact, the way Western people tend to react nowadays to the entire European Enlightenment is also over the top. To be sure, it is true that many European philosophers of the eighteenth century made major contributions to humanity by coming up with quite a few thoroughly enlightened ideas. Those ideas are also quite similar to the ones that many other people nowadays, including myself, have been advocating recently, favouring the adoption of much greater levels of empathy and altruism than those that have prevailed during most of human history.

We should never forget, however, that the people in power in Europe during the “age of enlightenment”, among them the so-called “enlightened despots”, were much more despotic than they were enlightened. Most of the rich and powerful people in the eighteenth century, not only in Europe but everywhere else as well, thought a lot more along the lines of Thomas Hobbes, supporting concepts such as the “war of each against all”. It seems to me that the richest and the most powerful individuals living in every period of human history, and in every part of the world, have always been opposed to any kind of genuine enlightenment. Some of them may sometimes pretend to agree with some of those ideas, but the vast majority of them end up behaving in totally different ways. In the past, most of them behaved in the same way as do most dominant people nowadays, even more than before, turning our own period of human history into what is quickly becoming the most dangerous period of our entire existence on this planet.

I would also like to comment an even more recent contribution that Lisée wrote about the way in which the federal government is currently treating indigenous people in Canada. This concerns the discoveries that many indigenous peoples made recently of geo-radar anomalies that they thought might uncover bodies buried underground a long time ago near several sites scattered across Canada, sites that were once used by residential schools run by religious organizations or provincial governments mistreating indigenous children. Lisée wrote that many of those indigenous authorities have recently hesitated to call for immediate digging to be conducted on those sites, to find out once and for all if there really are a large number of bodies of indigenous children to be found down there.

Apparently, the federal government now wants to pass a law making it illegal for journalists in Canada to speculate on why those indigenous groups do not want to begin digging. The new law would include language preventing such skeptics from criticizing any indigenous decisions. To be sure, most journalists, including Lisée himself, very much agree with the fact that residential schools did indeed mistreat indigenous children, in order to “take the Indian out of the Indians”, according to the colonial language that was being used back then. If, however, those same journalists nevertheless choose to question the fact many indigenous groups are not in favour of digging after all, those journalists could be arrested and imprisoned for being too critical.

In other words, Lisée thinks that the federal government wants to prevent non-indigenous Canadians from criticizing any indigenous decisions about this issue, regardless of their content. The government seems to think that one way for atoning for the past mistreatment of indigenous children would be to let today’s indigenous peoples decide for themselves what they should or should not be doing next. Non-indigenous Canadians should therefore be prevented by law from opposing anything that indigenous people may decide. He asks why non-indigenous people nowadays should be prevented by their own government from criticizing anything that indigenous people do, just because they are indigenous. (See Jean-François Lisée, “Cette chronique, bientôt illégale”, “Le Devoir”, June 21, 2023.)

In my opinion, the federal government would be better advised to help indigenous people directly instead, by investing much more money than is currently being spent on providing every one of their communities with greatly improved housing and living conditions. Most of the very real problems that indigenous people have nowadays are caused by the fact that most of them, especially in regions located far away from any major urban centres, are forced to put up with extremely poor conditions. What happened during the colonial period is in fact being continued by ongoing colonialism. Conditions in those communities should be improved right now, much greater federal investment should be combining with much greater provincial and territorial-government contributions, all over Canada. Fooling around with identity politics and censorship, instead, is not really helping. It is just another way of refusing to do anything real.

Once those massive programs aimed at helping indigenous communities directly are genuinely underway, those same governments should also begin greatly improving housing and living conditions for the general population as well. The most dire examples of under-investment are currently concentrated, by far, in the vast majority of indigenous communities, but those communities only make up only a small percentage of the overall Canadian population. Somewhat less dire situations, however, also exist in every part of Canada, in every one of the country’s isolated areas, rural areas and urban areas, involving a much larger number of Canadian citizens.

The same federal government has also announced that it wants to expand Canada’s current  population from 40 million to 100 million, by the year 2100, without changing anything else. This is an extremely unwise decision, not just because there is probably not going to be much of a world left by then. It is particularly wrong to make such projections without drastically improving housing and living conditions all over the country, before the newly-arrived immigrants are forced to live in the same kind of extremely over-crowded conditions as those that now prevail among indigenous people. The same general argument also applies to every other country on this planet.

To sum up, what every problem analyzed in this blogpost has in common is the fact that human communications, even more now than in the past, function in ways that are similar to what constantly takes place between conflicting physical forces in the natural world, the stronger physical forces tending to cancel out the weaker ones. Human beings bombarded with billions of communications always trying to convince them to do the same thing, tend to move in the direction indicated by the most often-repeated communications, rather than in the direction indicated by much less frequently received ones. Everyone is currently being bombarded with billions of reactionary messages, commercial ones promoting adhesion to neoliberalism, and political ones promoting adhesion to neofascism. Opposing them are a much tinier number of truly progressive messages, that are constantly being drowned out in the process.

Messages like the ones provided in my blog are put out by people like me, who are neither rich nor powerful, people who favour concepts like critical thinking, empathy and altruism, trying their best to compete for attention with messages instead favouring the absent-minded gobbling up of whatever is being promoted by the world’s richest, most powerful and most reactionary people. Unfortunately, most ordinary people in every country end up swallowing whatever commercial or political garbage that is being offered by those making by far the most noice. Only a small minority of people choose to be enlightened, rather than being controlled. The more thoughtful messages are being drowned out by the more strident messages, repeated billions of times over in quick succession. Most people gobble down their daily pablum at places like McDonald’s, rather than choosing any kind of healthier alternatives.

The private capitalists and the state capitalists who run today’s world never try to anticipate the future in any kind of realistic way. In spite of often pretending to be aware of the dangers lying ahead and the need to change direction immediately, before the ship of Earth runs into the iceberg of climate change, for example, they choose full steam ahead, “business as usual”. They are quite similar to those silly rich folks who died in a sub-standard submarine recently, on a very poorly planned mission that only succeeded in repeating history, by copying the 1912 Titanic tragedy itself, produced by the same kind of upper-crust hubris.

The people in charge of today’s world try to cover their tracks by talking a lot about “action plans” and “transition programs”, deliberately avoiding doing anything real. Corporations and governments all over the world are constantly trying to “solve” problems in the way that the French military prepared for the German onslaught in 1940, by preparing instead for a repeat of the 1914 invasion (“the Maginot line”). In the same way, governments all over the world are constantly relying on programs designed to deal with the problems of the past. Their criteria in so doing mirror Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity, by expecting the same methods to do the job “once more”. Those methods, however, simply fail all over again, like they already did the first time out.

As a result, it looks very much like we are in the final stages of the decline and fall of the human race. If the world does not change direction completely, very soon, we are not going to make it into the next century. It is true that, scientifically speaking, we cannot be sure about the final outcome of world history until after it has taken place. But the problem with that observation is that there will be no scientists left around then to testify as to what just happened, scientists tending to be human beings, after all, just like everyone else. It is only in fairy tales like “The Wizard of Oz” that the local authorities, religious and secular, get to officially point out the obvious after any such event, such as the fact that the wicked witch at the beginning of the movie was really and truly dead. In the real world, we could all turn out to be wicked witches.

We have no way of knowing, either, whether or not any other life-forms, that may or may not also exist somewhere else in the universe, will ever find out that creatures that called themselves human beings once existed. If we look at things from the perspective of the entire universe, it is so immensely huge that the several thousand years during which homo sapiens lived may not even register on any other life-forms overall scale of things. It is entirely possible that no other intelligent entities will ever know that we existed, or even that any other life on the planet Earth ever existed, before, during and after our own demise. The first intelligent visitors to this part of the universe may not even show up before our planet is absorbed by the sun, several million years from now.

We would be much better off trying to mend our own ways, right now, before it is too late. Otherwise, everything that we are now, that we ever did, or that we may yet do, will not only disappear forever, without a trace. Our past existence may even become unknown to any other kind of intelligence for all eternity. Another possibility that we should also consider is that we may turn out to be the only halfway intelligent life-form that ever existed in the entire universe. I don’t know which of those two possibilities gives me the creeps more than the other one.

Do we really want our final, collective decision in this world to be that we preferred to disappear forever, kowtowing to the individual will of a few thousand insane billionaires? Would it not be preferable to get rid of their domination over every aspect of our lives, once and for all? Why choose death, rather than life?