The future may not last very long
Millions of people all over the world are coming to the conclusion that the future of humanity may not last very long. To be sure, fanatics from every religion on this planet have been warning everyone to repent their sinful ways for thousands of years, or else something very bad could happen to them. But that was just religious propaganda, intended for gullible people. It is only now that completely real, converging catastrophes have succeeded in convincing a huge number of people, many of them very well-educated, that this time around we humans may not have much of a future.
The realization that the human part of the universe could disappear altogether, within our own lifetimes, started to take shape in 1945. Towards the end of the Second World War, the USA became the first country to develop the atom bomb, easily beating out the only other possible contender, Nazi Germany, to the punch. Once Germany was no longer a threat, the leaders of the American colossus wasted no time in dropping a couple of those immensely powerful bombs on Japan, the USA’s other rival empire. Most of the very numerous victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were innocent civilians.
The fact that nuclear weapons have not been deliberately dropped on any other country since that time has obviously not prevented the world’s ever-increasing number of nuclear powers from rattling their sabres whenever they feel like it. As a result, during the not-so-Cold War, we went through a long series of near misses, particularly during the Korean War (1950-1953), the Cuban missile crisis (1962) and the Vietnam War (1957 to 1975), that escalated into Cambodia and Laos in 1969.
Now that the architect of that escalation, Henry Kissinger, has finally died, the rest of us should reflect on how such a disgusting warmonger could have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in spite of so eagerly contributing to one of the world’s deadliest colonial wars. Not to forget that the same Kissinger was also behind the USA’s “Condor” strategy for Latin America, helping to set up military dictatorships fifty years ago, not only in Chile, but also in Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina.
Not to mention his overwhelming support for the Suharto dictatorship’s takeover of Indonesia, Suharto’s murderous invasion of the East Timor enclave, the Turkish takeover of a large portion of Cyprus, and the creation of a phoney “liberation movement” in Angola that fought against the pro-Soviet government during that country’s exceptionally violent civil war. The same Kissinger also ran “Operation Nickel Grass”, that saved his Israeli friends from imminent defeat during the Yom Kippur war. (See Fabien Deglise, “Henry Kissinger, une vie d’influence et de cynisme”, in “Le Devoir”, November 30, 2023.)
Following the 1991 collapse of the USSR, and contrary to the expectations of most geopolitical experts, trying their best to emulate Henry Kissinger, the overall number of near misses has not declined at all since the end of the Cold War. With the result that we now only have a few seconds left on the atomic clock, putting us in fact much closer to the Third World War than we ever were before.
During the past 32 years, the same experts then tried to give everyone the impression that the overall number of geopolitical clashes in the world has been declining. Against all the evidence to the contrary, they argued that the “really important” empires were not directly involved in most of the “minor wars”, taking place in such “unfortunate” nations as Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Salvador, Panama, Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina and dozens of other countries. The same experts deliberately left out of the picture the officially indirect participation of the major powers in every one of those conflicts, especially those taking place in the poorer nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where most of the world’s people live. And also where they tend to die on a much “grander” scale than in the richer countries.
Through the process known as neocolonialism, the most powerful empires, led by the USA, have been trying very hard, for quite a long time now, to control everything that moves, in every region of the world, politically, economically, socially and culturally. They are all afraid of losing out to even more determined contenders. They continue to intervene not only in countries that have already been under their control for decades, but everywhere else as well. As a result, they never end up doing anything that the self-appointed experts predicted that they would do.
The worldwide confrontation between those rival empires moved up a notch in 2014, then again in 2022, when the Russian Federation launched a direct invasion of Ukraine. This was a desperate attempt to prevent the absorption of one of Russia’s former satrapies into the US-controlled NATO alliance and the European Union. This new war then led the falsely naive experts into proclaiming that geopolitics had “suddenly become” very real again.
That curious impression was again reinforced by the even more recent “return” of the Israel/Palestine conflict, that began long before the official founding of Israel in 1948. The real beginning was in 1917, with the proclamation of the British empire’s Balfour Declaration, that then became the 1922 Palestine mandate, granted by the League of Nations to what was then the world’s largest empire. The long process of “ethnic cleansing” has been going on for over 100 years now, turning a region largely dominated by Arab people into a region largely dominated by Jewish people. (See Zachaharie Goudreault, “Une guerre? Vraiment?, in “Le Devoir”, November 8, 2023.)
The even more recent, and highly “successful”, Hamas assault on mostly innocent Jewish citizens inside Israel was promptly followed up by Israel’s re-invasion of the Gaza enclave. Israeli soldiers have already killed a considerably larger number of mostly innocent civilians within that minuscule territory than the ones that Hamas managed to kill during its own rampage inside Israel. As of this writing, Israel’s post-1948 “kill ratio” of twenty to one over its numerous Middle Eastern adversaries has not quite been achieved. So we can expect to see the number of “collateral-damage” victims in Palestine continue to increase over the next few weeks, in order to attain that goal. The Israeli government, however, has currently decided to go much further than that, in a blatant attempt to match the official UN definition of genocide.
Hamas is only one of the militant-terrorist movements in Palestine, an organization practising an ultra-religious, ultra-right-wing populist form of Islam, in opposition to Yasser Arafat’s left-wing PLO. Israel has been encouraging the formation of such groups ever since its 1987 decision to support Hamas founder Ahmed Yassine’s branch of the ultra-right-wing Muslim Brotherhood. French journalist Charles Enderlin argued in a recently published book that this strategy was in fact inspired by Israeli historian Bension Netanyahu, the father of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to Enderlin, the elder Netanyahu’s writings were grounded in the same kind of neofascist theories now being put into practise by his son. (See Ismael Houdassine, “Le Hamas, un retour de bâton pour Israel”, in “Le Devoir”, November 20, 2023.)
Nothing about any of these recent events should be considered the least bit surprising. Militant organizations like Hamas commit terrorist acts, and imperialist countries like Israel commit state terrorism, all the time, all over the world. During the American Revolution, the colonists who founded the USA committed terrorist acts frequently, while the British Empire used state terrorism against them much more frequently. After the revolution succeeded anyway, the USA then used a form of state terrorism against the “American Indian” peoples that they encountered during their march westward, while those same “Indian” tribes resisted by themselves committing terrorist acts. By behaving in this way, the colonists of European origin, who called themselves “Americans” after 1783, were merely completing the long-term expansion into the Americas that the Portuguese, Spanish, French, British and Dutch empires had already begun several centuries before the USA decided to carry on that same tradition.
The same kinds of military exchanges between rival organizations also took place during the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and hundreds of others like it, before the founding of the USA and after it. The Euro-American empires that conquered the diverse peoples who lived in the Americas before the Europeans arrived, also conquered thousands of non-Euro-American empires and other nomadic peoples in Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific islands. Several other European latecomers also participated in some of the more recent conquests, such as Germany, Italy and Belgium.
If we go back even further in history, about five or six thousand years ago, the world’s first empires, some of which continued to compete with the Euro-American invaders before eventually succumbing to them, also used state terrorism against their own enemies, who also committed militant terrorism against every one of those empires. Similar kinds of events also took place even before the urban revolution, during the palaeolithic, mesolithic and neolithic periods of history. From the very beginning of our species, we have always had a tendency to look after our own little group of “chosen people”, and to mistreat outsiders.
Getting back to the modern period, another one of those European empires, czarist Russia, did not succeed very well when it crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska, but it was quite successful before that in conquering the contiguous, Asian territories that lay between Russia and the Pacific Ocean The tsarist empire also used state terrorism against the militant terrorism of its own numerous opponents, just like all the other empires did. After the Bolshevik Revolution, a new Russian empire, that called itself the USSR, also used state terrorism just as extensively against its numerous adversaries, as did the Russian Federation after 1991. In other words, “there is nothing new under the sun”. No one has the right to willingly forget that history did not begin just a short time ago. Increasingly destructive wars have taken place for the past several millennia in every section of the world.
Like many other countries involved in similar situations, since its own inception in 1948 Israel has been an Eastern Mediterranean outpost, or bridgehead of a more powerful empire, in this case the US one. At the same time, Israel also became a mini-empire in its own right, using state terrorism just like every other imperialist state. Like its big brother, the USA, for quite a few years, the Zionist organizations operated as an anti-imperialist movement, using militant terrorism against the Ottoman and the British Empires. One year before the founding of modern Israel, Canadian judge Ivan Rand served as the most influential, pro-American member of the 11-man United Nations committee set up to draft a blueprint for the future of Palestine. A proud WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), he refused to have anything to do with those not like him, such as his sister’s francophone, Acadian-Catholic husband. (See Tom Blackwell, “The unlikely Canadian who helped create Israel”, in “The Montreal Gazette”, November 11, 2023.)
Although not specifically underlined in that article, it is easy to read between the lines to infer that bigots like Rand were eager to support the founding of Israel for their own reasons. He was after all a proud member of the same WASP elite to which belonged Canada’s longest-lasting Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King. Rand seems to have been the kind of Christian zealot that Israel later relied upon as “useful idiots”, whose brand of Christianity supported the total domination of Israel in that region. In their view, this was a necessary prelude to the coming-into-being of the “Kingdom of Heaven”, an imaginary situation in which the Jews would be forced by God to finally become good Christians, or die instead. Among many other ardent politicians over the years, Stalin also used the “useful idiots” expression to refer to “true believers” in communism, who naively agreed that the USSR was as genuinely communist as its own leaders had proclaimed.
Mackenzie King, the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada during most of the first half of the twentieth century, came to power several times during his long career, the longest stretch lasting from 1935 to 1948. Among his other claims to fame, he founded several social-democratic programs, including the first version of Canada’s Unemployment Insurance Commission. King also met with Adolf Hitler in 1938, praising parts of his friend’s national-socialist program, for being quite similar to some of his own ideas. When the Second World War broke out, King declared that he would refuse to bring Canada into the war unless Great Britain was directly invaded, full force, by Nazi Germany. After the war, he opposed letting any more Jewish immigrants into Canada, claiming that “none is too many”. His Liberal Party successor, and former Québec lieutenant, Louis Saint-Laurent, a Québec Catholic, ran Canada from 1948 to 1957, and continued to let former Nazis into the country, more readily and more often, than Jewish refugees. A tradition that Canada has continued to this day, accepting thousands of other truly odious “refugees” from other foreign conflicts into this country.
Since the founding of Israel, the USA and its allies have helped the Zionist entity win every one of its wars against its regional enemies, re-arming and re-equipping their subordinate with up-to-date weaponry at every juncture. As an overseas extension of the US empire, Israel has played a role similar to that of the Boer colony in South Africa, for the old Dutch empire. The Palestinian people, including the Arab minority inside Israel, is currently being treated to an updated version of “separate development”, another neocolonial weapon frequently used by many other empires around the world, long before the Boers ever existed. Over the past five or six thousand years, the world’s numerous settler empires treated their own internal minorities in the same ways that contemporary empires are doing nowadays.
Palestine has been suffering from both direct colonialism and neocolonialism, depending on which part of the former Palestinian territory to which we are referring. Also pretty much in the same manner that French colonies in North Africa and Indochina were treated between the 1830s and the 1950s. Israel has been seizing the best pieces of real estate from the officially-designated “occupied territories”, but also inside Israel itself, at the expense of non-Jewish populations deemed to be “culturally inferior”. The religious aspect of this colonial and neocolonial occupation is as obvious as the secular one.
The Israeli government maintains that it constitutes a Zionist return to the territory that used to belong to the original Jewish population living there in ancient times. However, according to eminent Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, the original Jews, residing in what Christians call the “Holy Land”, in fact abandoned Judaism and converted to Christianity several centuries later, before switching again to the Muslim religion even more recently. This means that today’s Israelis are really the descendants of peoples from outside ancient Israel, who abandoned their own original religions and converted to Judaism instead, at some specific time.
One of those groups of relative newcomers to Judaism was the nomadic Khazar people, who used to live in what is now called southern Russia. Back in the ninth century (during the European “Middle Ages”), the king of the Khazar people converted to Judaism, and brought everyone belonging to his ethnic group into his newly-adopted faith. The Khazar people went on to help found the Ashkenazy branch of modern Judaism. Several other peoples also converted to Judaism along the way, in several other parts of the world.
Ten centuries after the Khazar conversion, and shortly after the modern Zionist movement was born, many ultra-orthodox Jews adopted an anti-Zionist point of view. They argued that the Zionists must be imposters because the “land of Israel” could only be restored by the return of the Messiah, which they believed had not yet happened. Then, in 2017, French president Emmanuel Macron claimed that anti-Zionism had become the new face of anti-Semitism. Shlomo Sand publicly denounced Macron right after that, defending his own anti-Zionist point of view as having nothing at all to do with any kind of anti-Semitism. It seems to me that Macron was trying to support whatever Israel was officially proclaiming at the time, in the same way that the USA and other Western countries have also been doing.
According to the Gouch Emounim group of Israeli zealots, the Messiah can only show up when the ancient “land of Israel” falls under the exclusive control of Jewish people, which means no longer sharing any of that territory with non-Jewish people. (See Louis Gill, “L’Aut’journal”, November 10, 2023.) Given the fact that the government of Israel, run by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is currently dominated by a group of ultra-religious, ultra-right-wing populist cabinet ministers, does that mean that those ministers think that Netanyahu ought to be proclaimed as the de facto Messiah? Does Netanyahu himself agree with that strategy?
To be sure, when trying to understand the ongoing war between Palestine and Israel, today’s historians should make sure that they are not indulging in any form of genuine anti-Semitism. Israel’s ruling politicians are constantly accusing anyone, anywhere, who disagrees with anything that they decide to do, of being “anti-Semitic” by definition. For them, any person criticizing any of their policies, for any reason whatsoever, is necessarily advocating a return to Nazi-German rhetoric, based on exterminating Jews as an ongoing threat to “Aryan civilization”. More than a few people belonging to the Jewish diaspora, living in several other parts of the world, have also taken up the mantra according to which “anti-Israel always means anti-Semitic”. Fortunately for everyone, however, millions of anti-Netanyahu Jews, both inside and outside Israel, have not been so easily duped.
What historians all over the world need to do now, as in the past, is to place this violent polemic, and every other extreme ideological division of this kind, into a worldwide context. In the real world, the many forms of fascism that have become popular today have in fact been spawned by a wide variety of movements and organizations. One of the most important sources of neofascism nowadays was the closely related ideology of neoliberalism. This atavistic tendency was originally created back in the 1950s by a small group of reactionary intellectuals led by Walter Lippmann, Ludwig van Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite thinker.
They set out to revive not only nineteenth-century economic liberalism, but also to resuscitate equally reactionary patterns of popular behaviour that had already existed, for centuries past, in every part of the world. Their long-term goal was to mould such revived patterns into an up-to-date, ultra-right-wing populist variety of neofascism, all around the world. They wanted to eliminate Keynesian economics, and “ethnically-neutral” forms of social-democracy, in an “open conspiracy” aimed at bringing back the total domination of economic liberalism. But they were also convinced that the only way that they could accomplish such a huge task was by turning ultra-right-wing populism into an enormous battering ram for their cause. Neoliberalism and neofascism were therefore set up as two sides of the same antediluvian coin. (See Pierre Dardot, Haud Guégen, Christian Laval and Pierre Sauvêtre, “Le choix de la guerre civile: Une autre histoire du néolibéralisme”, 2021).
Unfortunately, that ardent little group of fanatics succeeded far beyond their wildest dreams. Over time, they managed to convince hundreds of thousands of corporate executives, and like-minded politicians running pro-capitalist governments, into becoming the power base of neoliberalism. This took place not only in the Western world, but also in every other part of the world. Since the late 1970s, ultra-right-wing populist (neofascist) movements that the founders of neoliberalism helped to resuscitate have succeeded in taking over almost the entire planet.
Today, they not only run dozens of ultra-religious states like Netanyahu’s Israel, but also hundreds of ultra-religious militant groups like the Hamas movement in Palestine. Even militant movements not currently in power, like the exceedingly dangerous Trump Republicans in the USA, belong to the same worldwide trend. It turns out, therefore, that the current domination of ultra-right-wing extremism really does have a lot in common with “classical fascism”, that also tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to take over the entire world during the two decades preceding the Second World War.
Jointly neoliberal and neofascist organizations running governments, corporations and ultra-right-wing militant groups, are currently dominating many other countries in the Middle East, such as Tay-yip Erdogan’s Sunni Muslim regime in Turkey. In spite of considerable opposition within that proud nation, Erdogan’s repeatedly elected regime continues to belong to the US-dominated NATO alliance, while also attempting to revive the old Ottoman Empire. In servile imitation of Donald Trump’s main slogan, Erdogan is earnestly attempting to “Make Turkey Great Again”, as well as trying to play catch-up with such other radical-religious, pro-American countries as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
At the same time, Iran, the leader of a large number of Shiite Muslim countries and movements in the same region, is trying to revive the old Persian Empire. It is also relying heavily on anti-Christian and anti-Jewish sentiment to maintain popular support for its own ultra-religious, ultra-reactionary program. Nothing pleases the Iranian regime more than the most recent flare-up between Palestine and Israel, not to mention unnerving rival Muslim states like Saudi Arabia, which was previously trying to establish official diplomatic relations with Israel, for the first time in its history. Other, mainly Sunni, Muslim countries behaving in a similar fashion can be found throughout North Africa, Central Asia and and South-East Asia.
The same ideological tendencies also show up repeatedly within Muslim-minority populations living in India, Europe, North America and many other places. However, as in the case of Israel, and Jews living outside Israel, not all Muslims in the world adhere to that kind of extremist agenda. Millions of other practising Muslims, as well as “cultural Muslims” who no longer identify with that religion, do not support any of those varieties of ultra-right-wing populism.
Of course, it is not only within the Muslim and the Jewish religions that this kind of polarizing polemic has been so widely diffused recently. The world’s largest religion, Christianity, has also been affected by the same kind of radicalization, the most obvious example being the overwhelming Christian support for the Trump Republicans in the USA. Most of those Trump supporters undoubtedly belong to evangelical Protestant churches, while others identify themselves with the Catholic or Orthodox branches of Christianity.
For their part, Christian Orthodox churches in Russia, Belarus and Serbia tend to be ultra-reactionary nowadays, while a minority neofascist element also exists within the Christian Orthodox community in Ukraine as well. In all those countries, ethnic minorities belonging to competing religions are being mistreated, to a greater or a lesser extent, as in every other part of the world in which this same, “true-believer” tendency prevails.
The Catholic Church nowadays is divided into two almost equal sections. Those supporting the current pope, who chose to call himself Francis, tend to be less reactionary than those who supported the previous pope, who chose the name Benedict XVI. Even though Benedict XVI died recently, a short time after his resignation as pope, his followers are still opposing many of the policies with which Francis is identified. The reality of today’s Catholicism is somewhat analogous to the horrendous political division in the USA, the Biden Democrats also tending to be less reactionary than the Trump Republicans. In a large number of other countries, however, the Catholic Church blatantly supports even more reactionary, autocratic politicians, as much as any other kind of religious fanatics do.
Once again, however, all the different branches of the Christian religion, whether Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox or evangelical, also include millions of other believers who thoroughly reject ultra-right-wing fanaticism. Millions of other people have also become “cultural Christians”, their ancestors having been believers in one form or another of Christianity, while they personally have left that religion, or in some cases any other religion, for good.
Unfortunately, the same extremist tendencies also affect all the other religions on this planet, including traditional, animist (or shamanist) religions still being practised by many peoples who identify as indigenous, all over the world. In India, for example, the Hindu majority forms the bulk of support for the Modi regime, currently mistreating the minority religions in that country, not only the large Muslim minority, but also the smaller Sikh, Buddhist, Christian and shamanist minorities. Like Netanyahu and Erdogan, Modi also enthusiastically supports neoliberalism. The same kind of Hindu extremism has also taken root among the Hindu diaspora outside India, as has Sikh extremism. Once again, however, not all Hindus, nor all Sikhs, in the world are currently supporting those extremist tendencies, not only in India but also within the Hindu and the Sikh diasporas.
At the same time, not all the world’s believers in Buddhism are currently behaving in the same reactionary manner as are the ruling regimes in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, two other countries in which the majority of the population are fervent believers in Buddhism. Ultra-right-wing varieties of Buddhism and Christianity also flourish in Japan, alongside Shintoist reactionaries. Today’s Japan seems so fearful of Chinese expansion, and so dependent on the US empire’s “benevolent domination”, that it is no longer a serious contender for world power, in the way that the same country used to be in the decades following the Japanese destruction of the Russian Pacific fleet in the 1904-1905 war.
Many supporters of religious Confucianism in China have also been affected by the same worldwide, political/religious process of radicalization. The official “Communist” Party in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has recently been encouraging this sort of thing, as part of its own long-term attempt to “Make China Great Again”. In China’s case, however, following in the footsteps of Donald Trump means replacing US domination of the world with its own form of imperialism, on the same world scale as the still dominant US empire.
Minority ethnic groups within official Chinese territory, practising their own minority religions, are suffering as much as they ever were in the past, their every attempt at developing their own varieties of religious fanaticism being crushed by the Chinese colossus. Off the coast of the PRC, the island of Taiwan is also considered to be an integral part of China by the ruling regime, even though a large part of its population is not of Chinese origin. Officially protected since 1949 by the US empire, Taiwan could easily become the epicentre of another super-important geopolitical confrontation within the very near future.
It is also highly pertinent to point out that the recent history of the PRC intersected quite well with the triumph of neoliberalism. In 1979, collaborating with imperialist degenerates like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the then leader of the PRC, Deng Xiao-ping, decided to join the worldwide realignment of economic policy by adopting the same strategy as that chosen by such ultra-right-wing politicians as Margaret Thatcher (1979) and Ronald Reagan (1981).
In China’s case, that economic realignment was not only supported for the usual reasons, but also because it helped the PRC win its long-lasting struggle against the USSR’s hegemony over the world Communist movement. Although the current leader of the PRC, Xi Jinping, is not quite as neoliberal as Deng used to be, Xi has by no means given up on the Sino-American partnership, nor on the worldwide expansion of Chinese influence. He has offered many former Third World countries highly competitive rates of capitalist investment, as well as his Belt and Road Initiative, a multinational project combing colonialism and neocolonialism at one and the same time.
Personally, I do not believe that the USSR, the PRC or any other officially Communist country in the world (Vietnam, Laos, Kampuchea, Cuba, etc.) ever came close to any kind of communism, as it was originally defined. From the very beginning of their existence, all those Leninist regimes abandoned any attempt at eliminating any of the different varieties of inequality. Even Trotsky began denouncing “socialism in a single state” only after he was kicked out of power by Stalin. Since that time, the world’s officially Communist countries have conceded on every front, accepting ethnic or racial domination inside each country, creating a “new class” of Party bureaucrats to replace the working-class, supporting the domination of men over women, as well as favouring certain religions over any of the other ones.
Since the founding of the USSR in 1922, both the officially-communist countries and the officially-communist parties operating within anti-communist countries, have oscillated back and forth between succeeding varieties of “ultra-communism” and “liberal communism”, each phase lasting for a longer or a shorter period of time. Throughout all those drastic changes, the Communist Party in every country tried to make each disciple believe that every zig was just as ideologically correct as every zag. This back and forth pattern affected both foreign and domestic policy, turning the officially-communist countries into what liberal observers classified as either “ultra-left-wing authoritarianism” or “ultra-left-wing totalitarianism”.
The same liberal observers then contrasted all the world’s ultra-left-wing countries and parties with the “ultra-right-wing authoritarianism” and “ultra-right-wing totalitarianism” of the fascist countries and parties. Nowadays, however, even most of the liberal experts admit that the number of ostensibly ultra-left regimes in power is quite small, compared with the much larger number of countries currently being run by ultra-right-wing populist (neofascist) forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
However, this same zig-zag pattern also applies quite well to the constant changes in foreign and domestic policy practised by the large number of countries falsely claiming to be democratic. No matter which political party is in charge of any particular country making that claim, at any particular time, every one of the self-designated democracies is as far removed from real democracy as the countries pretending to be communist are from genuine communism. This is because, according to their original definitions, the words “democracy” and “communism” were not opposites at all, but in fact synonyms.
Originally, the word “communism” conveyed the same meaning as related words like commonwealth, common decency and the common good, never including anything as anti-democratic as authoritarianism or totalitarianism. Democracy originally meant rule by the people, as expressed in such modern terms as, “one adult, one vote”. As far back as 1863, in his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln defined it as a system “of the people, by the people and for the people”. Interpreted in this fashion, democracy does not have anything to do with ruling-class tyranny, expressed in either aristocratic or capitalist domination of the world’s “inferior” classes. Democracy and communism ought to be seen as quite similar concepts, divided only by deliberate misinterpretation (“fake news”).
Capitalism came into its own as a system with the rise of economic and social liberalism, which treated the entire world in the same way that workers were treated during the first Industrial Revolution, that began in Britain between 1760 and 1830, then spread to dozens of other countries, such as the USA and Germany. Britain tried unsuccessfully to prevent other Western countries from industrializing, but it was more successful with its settler colonies, such as Canada and Australia, for a short time. Since then, English Canada has also tried to prevent francophone Québec from industrializing. All of these attempts are similar to the Western world’s more recent efforts at preventing Asian, African and Latin American countries from industrializing their economies.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, economic and social liberalism was gradually de-emphasized in such countries as the USA, Germany, France and Belgium, reflecting the rise of limited forms of protectionism and increasing geopolitical tensions. A century later, however, that same economic and social liberalism was successfully restored to complete ideological hegemony by the rise of neoliberalism, put firmly into place first by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, in 1979, and copied all around the world since that time.
Neoliberalism is just as opposed to any kind of real democracy as Lenin’s revolutionary-socialism was to any kind of real communism. Restricting the benefits of economic development exclusively to huge investors of capital, and their hangers-on, has once again become just another variety of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, closer to fascism than to any other ideology. Ironically enough, the anti-communist deviations of Leninism became particularly evident since Deng Xiao-ping officially brought the People’s Republic of China into the neoliberal era of capitalism, during the very same year that Margaret Thatcher effectuated her own restoration in Great Britain.
In recent years, I started reading a series of books on “democratic capitalism”, that its proponents consider to be an alternative to neoliberalism, without being able to prove their thesis. The first book that I read on the subject was by German author Wolfgang Streeck, that I analyzed in a previous blogpost. Both the first and the second of Streeck’s books were originally published in German, the first in 2012 and the second in 2021. Since I do not understand German, I had to read both of them in French translation, the first translation being published in 2014 and the second one in 2023. The title of Streeck’s first book was “Du temps acheté: La crise sans cesse ajournée du capitalisme démocratique”, while the title of his more recent, and much longer work, was “Entre globalism et démocratie: L’ économie politique à l’âge du néolibéralisme finissant”.
After that, I read another book on the same subject, “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism”. This one was written by British-born analyst and author Martin Wolf, of the “Financial Times”, and published in the USA in 2023. I also read a book on a related topic by Québec author Claude Vaillancourt (“La fin du néo-libéralisme: regard sur un virage discret”), also published earlier in 2023, but from a distinctly anti-capitalist point of view.
The first two authors, Streeck and Wolf, are both true believers in democratic capitalism, but not from the same perspective. Streeck interpreted this concept from a social-democratic point of view, favouring an equal partnership between capital and labour (“Mitbestimung”) in the running of the national economy. He based his analysis mostly on countries like Germany, Britain and France, where left-wing political parties tended to come to power as often as conservative ones did.
This often gives large sections of the working-class, especially those with well-established trade unions, the opportunity to make their voices heard, and even to participate sometimes in government decisions. Something that the much weaker unions in countries like the USA have a hard time achieving, their influence being confined to the left-wing minority of the Democratic Party. In Canada and in Québec, countries not often mentioned in Streeck’s books, mildly social-democratic parties have also had a bit of influence on government decision-making from time to time.
The recent trend around the world, however, has been toward abandoning most of what Streeck was talking about. From the beginning, the Marxist critique of social-democracy has always emphasized the fact that union bureaucrats occasionally involved in government have always had a much smaller influence than that wielded by corporate bureaucrats. According to these Marxist authors, social-democratic union leaders are merely practising what they call class collaboration. It turns out that the social-democrats never represent more than a tiny fraction of the entire working-class, even in the most economically-advanced countries.
Wolf’s point of view is different from Streeck’s, since he thinks that capital and labour are what he calls “complementary opposites”, that come together often in spite of their fundamental differences. Each one of them contributes to overall economic development, ostensibly for the common good. His argument is based on a wide-ranging analysis of how capitalist markets function, according to him, in the real world.
At least, that is, in the Western part of the world, on which Wolf quite openly focuses his entire theory. He recognizes, however, that his democratic capitalism has recently been very much under attack from both “predatory capitalism” and “demagogic politics”. In his view, the survival of democratic capitalism, in any form, is very much in doubt these days. According to him, even the “rule of law”, that liberal democracies proclaim as their greatest advantage over the arbitrary decision-making of authoritarian and totalitarian states (from the extreme left or the extreme right), is not holding up well nowadays.
An article by Québec columnist Patrick Moreau (“Le règne de l’arbritraire”), that appeared in “Le Devoir” (December 30-31, 2023), was an even more recent attempt to defend the rule of law from arbitrary decision-making. What prompted Moreau to write his article was the Québec government’s decision to strip French actor Gérard Depardieu of the honours bestowed upon him by a previous government. Moreau pointed out that the current government had not followed the established legal procedures necessary to carry out such a decision, since such people are not supposed to be de-throned until after they have been convicted in court.
Moreau’s argument, however, was undermined by his own honest admission that under the rule of law, those laws are presumed to be applied equally to everyone, and to be known to everyone. Although Moreau noted this fact in passing, without dwelling on it, this admission by itself turns the rule of law into just another utopian dream, unrealizable in the real world. Millions of people, those living in the world’s richest countries as well as in the poorest ones, do not succeed very well in understanding exactly how the rule of law is supposed to work.
They cannot therefore participate fully, as informed citizens, in the due-process decision-making that is at the heart of the rule of law. This is because they either work all the time at drudge jobs, of because they get completely caught up in the spider-web of mass consumption. As a result, most such people do not really know what is going on, and therefore cannot genuinely validate the theory known as the rule of law. According to the popular American slogan of days gone by, “Close, but no cigar.”
All three of the books that I read recently were published in 2023. Streeck’s second work, Wolf’s analysis and Vaillancourt’s essay, all zeroed in on what they see as a recent decline in the popularity of neoliberalism. They believe that today’s neoliberalism has not been nearly as successful in imposing itself on the world as it was back in the 1990s, when it seemed that almost everyone believed in that ideology wholeheartedly. In my view, however, even though neoliberalism may seem to be slightly less popular than it was during the late twentieth century, it is still very much in the driver’s seat. This is true not only in the countries still pretending to favour liberal democracy, but also in the much more numerous countries openly practising either left-wing or right-wing varieties of authoritarianism and/or totalitarianism.
I was particularly impressed by the hundreds of well-explained examples that Wolf lined up in his book, about how the “rule of law” is so often ignored, even in the officially liberal-democratic countries, not to mention in “ill-liberal” democracies like Russia, Turkey and India, et al., as well as in authoritarian/totalitarian states like China. In the real world, however, officially designated, ultra-left-wing countries like China and North Korea do not differ fundamentally from officially-designated, ultra-right-wing, authoritarian/totalitarian regimes like Israel, Saudi Arabia or Iran. Other regimes, such as the USA under Trump, Brazil under Bolsonaro, Italy under Meloni, Britain under Sunak, Argentina under Milei, or the Netherlands, that currently seems to be falling under Wilders control, have more characteristics in common than most of the world’s self-appointed experts seem capable of understanding.
In reality, the main, over-all, backward-looking principle in today’s world, applying to every one of the threats to our continued existence on this planet, whether of geopolitical, environmental, or economic origin, is the almost universal adhesion of human beings to some form or another of parochialism. Even artificial intelligence seems to have become just the most recent, and the most powerful weapon currently being used to further promote, and consolidate, the neoliberal and neofascist takeover of the entire world. In order to make real progress in dealing with any of the enormous challenges to our continued survival, our main objective as responsible human beings must be devoted to overcoming narrow-minded, short-term parochialism, in every aspect of society and in every part of the world.
Unfortunately, for the past several thousand years, every society in every period has been afflicted with parochialism (“esprit de clocher” in French), literally meaning focusing on one’s own parish, within hearing distance of the local church bells (“clochers”). Each local community always concentrates on itself, not just nowadays in Christian countries, but throughout past history and in every part of the world. The relatively recent, Muslim equivalent is answering the call to prayer sent out several times a day by the local muezzin. Every other religion in every period also broadcasts the same kind of message, as frequently and as loudly as it possibly can, to keep its own practitioners faithful.
But parochialism is not just confined to the realm of religion. It is also practised just as much by every one of the world’s ethnic groups, whether they are in the process of setting up neolithic societies, locally-based empires, feudal territories or nation-states practising imperialism on a world scale. In every region of this planet. minority groups under the control of increasingly larger political entities also prefer to live exclusively under their own suzerainty, rather than having to submit to foreign domination.
From the very beginning of our collective history, people all over the world have been inventing mythical narratives to explain their own origins. British anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow called this process “schismogenesis”, which is to say the deliberate creation of seemingly fundamental differences between neighbouring tribes. According to them, schismogenesis has been around from the outset, during the palaeolithic, mesolithic and neolithic periods of history, as well as in all the more recent developments in human society, right up to the present day.
During the modern and contemporary periods, national and/or imperial myths designed to preserve separate communitarian identities from any possible adversaries, external or internal, have also been added. The long list of relatively recent myths includes such well-known slogans as “British liberty”, “the American dream”, “liberty, equality and fraternity (in the French Republic)”, “the love of Mother Russia”, “the return of Zion to ancient Israel”, “the Chinese path to socialism”, “Make America Great Again”, and thousands of similar projections. None of those slogans ever live up to their stated ideals. The other thing that they all have in common is how historically inaccurate each one of them really is. In the USA, for example, from 1783 to the present, millions more of its citizens have experienced “the American nightmare” than they have experienced “the American dream.”
To be sure, this has not prevented millions of ardent propagandists, all over the world, from deliberately misinterpreting what parochialism really means. A recent example of this sort of thing was former Québec politician Clifford Lincoln, a militant anglophone, who published an article on October 28, 2023, in “The Montreal Gazette” entitled “Small-minded, regressive—and silly: Protection of French a convenient CAQ mantra”. He denounced the Québec government currently in power, belonging to the neoliberal “Coalition Avenir Québec”, for its recently-adopted law officially designed to protect the French language in Québec from being swallowed up by the English language. Disagreeing completely with Lincoln, most of Québec’s opposition politicians lambasted the same government for window-dressing on the language front. According to them, for economic reasons the CAQ government was deliberately trying to avoid making any proposal that would really succeed in preserving French from the overwhelming onslaught of North American English.
In my opinion, Lincoln’s denunciation sounded a lot like the attitude adopted by former Canadian prime minister Pierre-Elliott Trudeau (the father of the current PM), who was always denouncing Québec “tribalism” when he was in power (1968-1979 and 1980-1984). Lincoln’s way of saying the same thing was to accuse the current Québec government of practising parochialism and “l’esprit de clocher”, defining both expressions as “that confining narrowness of thought and vision which ignores the wide horizons beyond one’s own backyard”.
This was quite a good definition, but unfortunately it was not at all appropriate in this case. Just like Pierre Trudeau’s accusation of tribalism was not appropriate back in the 1970s and 1980s. The reason in both cases being that Trudeau and Lincoln were only pretending to be attacking the Québec version of parochialism. Their real goal was to hide their own pan-Canadian parochialism, dishonestly attributing that ideology exclusively to their number-one political adversary. Nowadays, we refer to such an approach as gas-lighting.
To be sure, this sort of thing has been going on all over the world, for quite a long time, way before gas-lighting meant anything more than starting a fire by using gas. Today, practically every ruling regime and every political party in every country is constantly accusing every other regime and party of one form or another of parochialism, often but not always with a considerable degree of accuracy. In this case, the fact that a large proportion of worldwide business is currently being conducted in English is not a sufficient reason to abandon any of the other, equally viable languages in the world. In some countries, the ruling regimes abandon their own languages quite readily, like Québec seems to be doing, while others manage to preserve their languages quite well, against every successive challenger.
It seems to me that cultural and linguistic diversity are just as important to preserve in our world as are biological diversity, racial diversity and any of the other kinds of diversity. I am not referring, however, to fake cultural diversity, that moves some masochistic people to “accommodate” every kind of reactionary behaviour in the world, as long as it does not come from within their own culture. Real cultural diversity never refrains from criticizing every kind of antediluvian behaviour, whether it comes from one’s own backyard or from some neighbouring backyard. It ought to be obvious to everyone that just because each particular society is deficient in one way or another, is no reason to assume that any other society cannot also be just as deficient, or even more so in some cases.
Cultural diversity has also had an enormous influence, for obvious reasons, on the 75th anniversary of the 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, the first draft of which was originally drawn up by John Humphrey, a professor from McGill University, Québec’s number-one anglophone university. Humphrey has often been quoted in the past as having much preferred individual rights to collective rights. Back in 1948, however, the influence of theoretical champions of collectivism like the USSR resulted in adding socio-economic rights, such as the right of collective bargaining for workers, to the original list that had focused on individual rights. Later on, and until his death, Humphrey often repeated his admonition to “not let them convince you to give up individual rights in favour of collective rights”.
Nowadays, many of the celebrants of the 1948 Declaration, such as those belonging to Québec’s “Ligue des droits et libertés”, often repeat Humphrey’s approach by condemning what they call Québec’s “nationalisme identitaire”, that they accuse of questioning certain fundamental” rights, ostensibly in “defence of the nation and its values”. The fundamental rights that have been denied, according to them, include the freedom of religion, such as in Québec’s laicity law, condemning the wearing of religious garb in public, by “persons in positions of authority”, who are employed by the Québec government. Those people feel that laicity has to be condemned because it does not include the right to propagate one’s religion openly, even when serving as “servants of the state”. At the same time, one does not see them openly condemning religious fanatics who advocate using violence against anyone that they detest for religious reasons. (See Alexandra Pierre and Diane Lamoureux, “75 ans, plusieurs rides, mais toujours pertinente”, in “Le Devoir”, December 9-10, 2023.)
This is the same kind of universal logic that ought also to apply to every other brand of diversity. Gender diversity, for example, has also been deliberately misinterpreted, particularly in recent times. Nowadays, a handful of individuals claiming to represent the trans-gender community often make totally inadequate comparisons between real events from the past and current social tendencies. A fascinating example was the article written by Martine Delvaux, “La chasse aux sorcières trans”, published in “Le Devoir” on October 7-8, 2023.
Delvaux started out by citing a recently-published book by Silvia Federici, about the very real witch-hunts that took place in Europe during the early-modern period (1500-1800). Back then, millions of ordinary women, often of peasant origin, were wrongly accused of witch-craft for incredibly stupid reasons, just like similar women are being accused of witchcraft in other parts of the world right now. During the European witch-hunts, those women were subjected to a prolonged reign of terror organized by prominent members of society, which is also going on in some parts of the world nowadays.
After describing quite well what happened back then to those millions of European women, Delvaux then made a completely unjustified comparison with what she thinks has been happening recently to people belonging to the trans community. She made it seem as though those witch-hunts from the past were being repeated nowadays, only this time directed against “non binaires, trans, queers et féministes”. Her article was published alongside a September, 2023 photo of someone from the “1MillionMarch4Children” movement in Canada, kicking a flag being held by people involved in a demonstration supporting trans-gender pride.
The historical inadequacy of that comparison ought to be obvious to everyone, because of the much larger number of victims involved back then than the number of genuine victims nowadays. Another major difference between those two events was Delvaux’s claim that the trans movement can somehow be classified as a form of feminism. In reality, the vast majority of today’s women are not at all represented by either the trans or the queer communities. The real women, that they often refer to as “people with vaginas”, are much more often victims of the trans or the queer movements, than they are perpetrators of this form of discrimination.
Another example of this sort of thing came from a Netflix program about Bayard Rustin, the black, homosexual guy who did most of the organizing for Martin Luther King’s 1963 rally in Washington, DC, during which King made his famous “I have a dream” speech. The program put a lot of emphasis on how horrible it was for Rustin to have been intensely disliked, even within his own movement, for being a homosexual. However, the bias in that program became a good deal less convincing for me when I remembered that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who organized the extremely violent repression of the Black movement in the USA, was also a well-known homosexual. In other words, intersectionality does not apply in every case. Racial discrimination and discrimination against homosexuality do not necessarily converge every time, only some of the time.
Yet another example was underlined by newspaper columnist Tasha Kheiriddin, in an article, “We’ve become a grievance factory”, that appeared in the November 8, 2023 edition of “The Montreal Gazette”. I do not agree very often with most of Kheiriddin’s opinions, but this time out she did a reasonably good job describing identity politics. She pointed to the fact that “immigrants of colour” are usually lumped together as allies of Canada’s indigenous peoples, “regardless of whether they may have, ironically, oppressed other groups in their own country of origin.” In my opinion, once we include class discrimination, misogyny, and all the other forms of non-racial discrimination, we can easily find thousands of specific examples of people that we often assume to be oppressed, but who instead themselves oppress downtrodden people under their control.
Black people in power who harm members of their own community exist in dozens of different countries nowadays, and also existed during every other period in history, just like dominant people sporting every other possible skin colour have also done. It turns out that white people have not always been on top throughout history, and that millions of white people nowadays are also victims of prejudice and discrimination. Not every white person in the world is rich and powerful, not even in the world’s richest, most powerful, white-majority countries, such as the USA, Russia, Britain, France, and so on. In spite of that, dishonest people all over the world are constantly throwing around totally inappropriate claims about their own designated enemies. This takes place frequently, but not always, in the traditional media. On social media, however, thoroughly disgusting charges are being hurled around all the time, most of the time by millions of ultra-right-wing populist trolls, a billion times more often and a million times worse than those that show up from time to time in the traditional media.
In my professional life, that ended in 2014, I was involved in teaching history courses to students at the college level in Québec (17, 18 and 19 years old), as well as at the university level, also in Québec and in Ontario (Ottawa). At one point in that career, I was briefly sidetracked during a debate about competency or outcome-based teaching, as opposed to teaching historical knowledge. The experts favouring the competency approach swore up and down in the books that I read back then, that their approach subsumed the direct transmission of knowledge, which would definitely be included, and not at all abandoned, by teachers adopting their method. As it turns out, however, the privately or publicly run bureaucracies that control the teaching profession ended up using competency as a way of “dumbing down” education, in fact removing much of its real content.
Back then, I naively thought that I could adopt this approach without taking the emphasis off of the transmission of real knowledge, and I tried quite sincerely to do just that. Nevertheless, I had to admit later on that most of what was being taught, by everyone using the “competency” jargon, did in fact severely downplay what we should have been teaching instead. The same trend has continued right up to the present day, getting worse and worse all the time, not only in Québec but also in dozens of other neoliberal countries.
Several months ago, I noticed that Normand Baillargeon, a philosopher and well-known expert in the educational sciences, started supporting the current Québec government’s attempt to create a “National Institute for Excellence in Education”. Critics of that concept are accusing the government of making a very cynical attempt to use the idea of promoting “excellence” merely as a way of controlling the teachers under their “tutelage”. They want everyone involved to kow-tow to their desire to spend a lot less money on education, notably by accepting increasingly difficult working conditions. The whole public sector in Québec is currently being run by a small-minded government that just like many other such institutions wants education (as well as health and welfare) to become even more devoted to helping the large multinational corporations make even higher profits than they have so far succeeded in doing. Nothing else matters so far as pro-capitalist governments are concerned.
This brings me back to what I was writing about in some of the first paragraphs of this blogpost. Many well-educated people nowadays are indeed convinced that we are currently involved in an enormous historical regression. However, many other well-educated people do not agree at all with that contention, since their own post-secondary education has been devoted to turning them into managerial bureaucrats, capable of making sure that everyone dependent on them (workers, suppliers, customers, robots), accept their “well-informed” leadership. In other words, half the well-educated people in today’s world are receiving an education aimed at manipulating the rest of us, rather than helping society become more progressive. What they call “progress” is what truly progressive people refer to as regression. A large part of today’s political polarization is therefore of a commercial origin, but at a much higher level than old-fashioned “Mom and Pop shops”.
A fascinating consequence of the enormous, accompanying barrage of commercial propaganda is that ordinary people all over the world can currently be separated into two huge groups. The largest number of them (six or seven billion people) are still being treated as they always have been in the past, receiving very small incomes, zero opportunities for advancement, experiencing extremely limited lives of constant toil. Most of those people nowadays live in the poorer countries of the world, mostly in Asia, Africa and Latin America, while a smaller proportion of them, but still involving millions of poorly-treated people, live in the hidden recesses (“pockets of poverty”) of the world’s richest countries.
Another group of ordinary citizens, comprising an estimated total of about one or two billion people, make up what is referred to as the “middle-class”. The definition of the “middle” class varies considerably from one country or another, and from one region to another. Their incomes are much larger than the incomes of those belonging to the first group of ordinary people, but they are also much smaller than the gargantuan incomes of the world’s tiny coterie of ultra-rich and ultra-powerful people. In other words, being in the middle class is much better than being in the lower classes, but it is not anywhere even close to “living in the lap of luxury”, an expression summing up the lives of those belonging to the world’s dominant upper classes.
Like everyone else nowadays, submitting to the regimen of neoliberalism and neofascism, most middle-class people live in the world’s more privileged countries, whereas many others have become “exceptions to the rule” inside the world’s very numerous under-privileged countries. All the middle-class people, no matter where they live, are nevertheless under the firm control of totalitarian capitalism. The old division between falsely-communist countries, straightforward fascist countries and fake democratic-capitalist countries no longer holds. Practically every country in today’s world in fact practises totalitarian capitalism, no matter which false label behind which some of them may still be hiding.
The libertarian disease known as totalitarian capitalism is actually being practised, in one way or another, by every country on this planet, even in those countries clinging desperately to some sort of “progressive” trope. Back in the 1950s, a few thinkers like Hannah Arendt realized that nineteenth-century economic liberalism could easily be restored in the form now known as neoliberalism, and become just as totalitarian as the fascist and “communist” varieties already were. Their words of caution were drowned out, however, by the much more enticing allure of “democratic capitalism”.
The current false-consensus promoting totalitarian capitalism has managed to convince most middle-class people into spending billions of dollars every year, not on what used to be called “basic necessities”, but on joining the huge new throngs of consumers currently addicted to some kind of extravagant expenditure. That is, not only by buying the same harmful substances (“recreational drugs”) that used to be consumed in the past by smaller numbers of victimized people, but also by adding thousands of newly-developed “needs”, consisting of products and services that never existed anywhere in the world prior to the twenty-first century.
An enormous new market has been created all over the world, but especially in the richest parts of the richest countries, for anything that can possibly be bought and sold, on any kind of market, whether legal or illegal, real or virtual. No one cares any more about such out-of-date definitions. As long as whatever is being marketed can help the new managerial bureaucrats to realize their short-term goal, ensuring that the “bottom line” of every major corporation, whether financed exclusively by private investors, or partly by public funds, is constantly increased, into the “distant future” of five or ten years from now. Nothing else counts. They will go on trying to achieve their goal for as long as their system lasts, without any regard to any of the consequences that people who still believe in critical thinking may be pointing out, over the clattering din of the universal cash register.
As a result, the very few ultra-rich people and the quite numerous middle-class people are collectively spending trillions of dollars on nothing that is genuinely useful to anyone except them. The middle-class hangers-on, for whom the rich people “never give a sucker an even break”, are spending their fair share of those trillions of dollars on their own entirely false pretensions. Trillions that could have been spent on helping any of the genuinely poor people in the world get out of the horrible ruts into which they have been confined. There will be no genuine progress of any kind whatsoever so long as totalitarian capitalism rules the world.
Getting back to my overall theme of converging catastrophes, I want to emphasize that the increasingly dangerous, world-wide connection between nuclear proliferation and geopolitical conflict, is only the most obvious of the existential threats to our continuing existence that I want to address in this blogpost. In my view, what makes the over-all world situation increasingly desperate is the convergence of the geopolitical threats already mentioned with a large number of other, equally dangerous, threats that everyone the least bit conscious is worrying anxiously about nowadays.
Humanity’s worldwide dependence on fossil fuels for about 80% of its total energy supply, for military and civilian uses alike, is almost as dangerous a threat to future human existence, that only ultra-right-wing populists consistently deny. Recent examples of this kind of reactionary thinking are the newly-elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, as well as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. In Milei’s case, he promised to ruin his country not only by becoming significantly more odious than his predecessors in economic and social policy, but also on the geopolitical front. It seems that he wants to revive his country’s longstanding conflict with the British empire over the Falkland Islands (“Islas Malvinas”). Ironically, the last time that that particular dispute degenerated into military confrontation was during the reign of Margaret Thatcher, Milei’s number-one idol!
Some very well-informed observers think that the accelerating trend toward ever more dangerous forms of thought control, boosted exponentially by unethical uses of artificial intelligence, could become just as dangerous as any of those other threats to human existence. In my opinion, however, unethical AI is not a separate threat at all, but rather an even more powerful weapon than those previously used, wielded by the same neoliberal and neofascist people that I have been targeting from the beginning of this blogpost.
Nevertheless, fossil-fuel pollution, by itself, is slightly less dangerous than geopolitical confrontation, as an overall threat to humanity, unless of course someone succeeds in using artificial intelligence to set off a nuclear war sometime in the near future. Fossil-fuel pollution is, after all, the most important cause of climate change, including extremely dangerous global warming and a huge decline in global biodiversity. Unfortunately for us all, replacing fossil fuels with significantly less polluting forms of energy does not seem to be working out very well. It turns out that all the other currently available sources of energy seem to have almost as many drawbacks as do fossil fuels. As the recent COP-28 proved again, more than ever before, no one anywhere is doing much to replace these fuels with any other kind of genuinely non-polluting fuel source. Most countries and giant corporations are trying to hide the problem instead, with fake carbon-capture schemes, such as burying CO2 in underground caves, using technologies that have yet to be developed.
Journalist Jean-François Lisée, in one of his recent columns in “Le Devoir”, “Meurtres au 2,5e degré”, published on December 6, 2023, recalled the fact that well-informed people in the USA have known for quite some time now that the leaders of the major fossil-fuel corporations in that country knew decades ago just about everything that everyone else has come to realize these days about the massive amounts of pollution that caused all those huge problems. In his column, Lisée also relayed the recent decision of the “Harvard Law Review”, according to which the chief executives of those companies should in fact be tried and brought to justice for all the harm that they have been causing in their own country, as well as in dozens of other much poorer countries, dependent on those very same extractive firms.
He concluded his column by suggesting that those corporate executives should also be punished for deliberately disseminating false information, and sentenced to jail for their accumulated crimes. It seems to me that the chief executives of the US government, over the past fifty years, should also be added to the growing list of bad guys, past and present, who ought to be duly charged, tried and convicted. However, even with the potential assent of the prestigious “Harvard Law Review”, I am certain that none of those things will ever come to pass.
This kind of reckoning never takes place in the real world of human beings, no matter which geopolitical, socio-economic or environmental crime some entity or other may have committed, either a long time ago or more recently. This is just another example of parochialism, since the huge capitalist corporations, and the governments that they control, have always qualified such problems as “externalities”, supposedly having nothing whatever to do with their intentions as investors, or as imperialists, or as both at the same time. A typical neoliberal and neofascist attitude if ever there was one. Walter Lippmann and Friedrich von Hayek would have been so proud!
To be sure, none of those perpetrators ever take an over-all, genuinely universal world-view that ought to include every single human being in it, on an equal footing. They only think about the interests of their own little community of quite similar people, in this case the tiny minority composed exclusively of the richest and the most powerful people in the world.
Martin Wolf, in his book on democratic capitalism, included in his text a 1924 quote from Leon Trotsky, that I would like to reproduce here. “Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the height of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a high biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.” While I would agree with Wolf that Trotsky himself never got within a billion light-years of his stated goal, what is important to me is that coming up with this kind of elevated intention for human beings has not only been similarly stated by thousands of other thinkers, quite different from Trotsky, over the years. It is also highly pertinent to what people should be trying to achieve nowadays.
If any of us truly intend to deal appropriately with any of the enormous challenges that I have been underlining in this blogpost, we will have to go way beyond all the picayune responses that we have been recently receiving from the coterie of “Very Important People” ruling today’s world. We should be putting the emphasis on true empathy, not the false kind that makes us believe that sending a small number of gift boxes to a few poor people in our own neighbourhood constitutes a sufficient response to these worldwide, intersecting catastrophes. An excellent gesture, gift boxes by themselves cannot solve world poverty, any more than carbon capture can solve global warming. We need to go way beyond those things, into uncharted waters. Using Trotsky as an example of what to do is not very useful, however, since his name is associated with the kind of “useful idiots” that Stalin used to convince the masses that his intentions were honourable.
But in this case, using the words that Wolf cited from Trotsky could become useful if properly interpreted. In order to overcome the short-term, small-minded goals being preferred in the geopolitical confrontations (Russia versus Ukraine, Israel versus Palestine and so on) that I was referring to in the first part of the blogpost, we have to do something radically different. The same diagnostic applies to the quite similar, short-term, small-minded goals used in today’s deliberately-weak responses to the worldwide consequences of fossil-fuel pollution, or the equally short-term, small-minded goals of libertarian capitalism. The goals underlined in the Trotsky quote ought to be implemented forthwith, for real and not in a fake way, if we are ever to defeat the ultra-right-wing populist definition of “democracy”, as expressed in Donald Trump’s “give the people what they want”. We have to come up with something much, much better than that.
The stumbling block that we run into all the time is the realization that although millions of people all over the world are currently proposing broad-minded, long-term, truly all-inclusive (not falsely inclusive) solutions to all these ongoing disasters, none of the people advocating those appropriate responses have the slightest bit of influence on any of the real decision-makers. We are all like Trotsky in 1924, proposing things that Stalin did not really believe in at all. The people who decide everything nowadays, as in the past, are all from the short-term, narrow-minded, parochial group. Like Clifford Lincoln, they may sometimes suggest “looking at the bigger picture”, but they only do so as a slightly-disguised way of proposing the opposite. They are not the least bit sincere in their convictions.
So we are left with the sickening realization that the closer we get to the end of everything that we hold dear, we cannot see our way forward to any kind of better future, or even to any future at all. We may agree with Australian philosopher Clive Hamilton that people find it extremely difficult to accept even the possibility of the total self-annihilation of the human race. But we still seem to be unable to come up with anything at all that lights our path forward, for real instead of in some phoney way.
I am therefore obliged to conclude this thoroughly dismal text with a disgusting bit of doggerel. It is vaguely based on Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. The original poem was written a few weeks after the Battle of Balaclava that took place during the 1853-1856 Crimean War, pitting the Russian Empire against an allied coalition, composed of the British, French and Ottoman Empires, and a few smaller states like Sardinia-Piedmont.
In 1854, 600 British cavalry, led by a small group of idiotic commanders, rode their lightly-armed brigade into a valley situated in-between two ridges chock full of dozens of Russian cannon. The result of which Tennyson depicted as a kind of collective suicide: “Ours is not to reason why, Ours is but to do and die.” Today, the Crimean War brings to mind the much more recent war (2014-2024) during which the Russian Federation again seized control of the Crimean Peninsula, even though that territory is theoretically supposed to belong to the Ukrainian Republic.
My up-to-date re-write of the Tennyson poem indirectly recalls both Crimean events (1853-1856 and 2014-2024) . I attempted to contrast them as a deliberately absurd metaphor for everything that I have been writing about in this blogpost. My original goal here was to try to sum up the history of humanity, especially during the past 100 years, as having concluded in a series of disastrous impasses that collectively represent today’s truly catastrophic world.
“Corruption to the right of them,
Corruption to the left of them.
Into the valley of mega-death
Rode the eight billion.”
In other words, since our world started out, about 300 000 years ago, a rapidly increasing population of human beings, made up mostly of “ordinary people”, has continually and ever more decisively been falling under the totalitarian control of a very small coterie of more and more idiotic local commanders.
Alea jacta est.
