Reverse racism rides again

A number of well-known intellectuals have recently been denouncing the Quebec government’s proposed “charter of values”, mostly because it would prohibit provincial civil servants from wearing ostentatious religious garments and symbols while on duty. Left-liberal philosophers like Michel Seymour and Georges Leroux have been particularly active in their criticisms of this project because they believe that the current Parti Québécois government is using ethnic nationalism to get re-elected, deliberately appealing to the prejudices of the French-Canadian majority against recent immigrants.

They feel that it is especially conservative Muslim women in Quebec who are being singled out for exclusion because an increasingly large number of them have begun wearing cover-up garments like the hijab, the niqab, the chador and the burqa. The afore-mentioned intellectuals think that those Muslim immigrants are covering up like that for reasons of cultural identification, and not necessarily because they support the ultra-chauvinist oppression of women that has become a world-wide trademark of Islamic fascism. No one, however, least of all the Muslim fundamentalists, wants to recognize that the culture that those women are identifying with is more tribal than Muslim, since it appears that the Koran has nothing to say about those particular female garments and merely admonishes women to be modest in their appearance.

But a more important point in this context is how odd it is that left-wing intellectuals feel called upon so often to support such ultra-right wing religious movements against “dictatorial” Western secularism. In this particular case, the PQ’s proposed legislation is decidedly hypocritical since they have decided not to include in their ban such rather obvious public symbols as the cross behind the speaker’s chair in the National Assembly and the opening of many municipal council meetings with a Christian prayer. But it is not the rather obvious contradictions in the PQ plan that has the philosophers upset.

These critics are angry at the provincial government because they belong to a rather different, world-wide ideological association known as the politically correct, who are deathly afraid that anyone might accuse them of supporting Western imperialism. Their way of avoiding the charge of racism is to join forces with whatever opposing government, political tendency or group that seems to be most against the prevailing policies of the world’s richest countries. Adhering totally to the Maoist slogan, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, they support any set of ideas that seems opposed to whatever the leaders of North America, Western Europe and Japan seem to be supporting. They are still stuck in the old Third World versus capitalist imperialism paradigm that dominated world politics during the second half of the twentieth century.

Their cultural relativist attitude was attacked as far back as 1983 by Pascal Bruckner, a French author who wrote a book about how many liberal-minded people in the West have abandoned Rudyard Kipling’s racist “white man’s burden” to adopt instead a reverse-racist “white man’s shame”. Bruckner focused on the many different ways in which those Western liberals always blamed their own culture whenever some Third World dictator horribly mistreated his (or her) own people. For them, every Asian, African or Latin American famine, civil war, genocide or manifestation of feudal or totalitarian oppression had to be exclusively blamed on the deleterious effects of Western colonialism and neocolonialism. Bruckner demonstrated instead that Third World leaders and their political movements were quite capable of mistreating their own populations for their own particular reasons, and did not always have to be acting entirely on behalf of Western puppet-masters.

Unfortunately, Bruckner considerably overstated his case and was not prepared to admit that most of those dictators and corrupt politicians were also operating as compradors, helping foreign investors extract as much wealth from their own countries as possible in exchange for a share in the profits. Even though a small minority of those Third World economies have since become much richer and more industrialized than they used to be, the overall situation has not changed all that much since the publication of Bruckner’s book. The ordinary people in those countries are still being exploited as much as they were before, albeit in slightly different ways, but nowadays some of the local political leaders and big-time investors are getting a significantly larger share of the pie than they did in days gone by.

The real world has therefore changed a little bit since the 1980s, but the emotional reactions of the would-be anti-racists have not changed at all. In the case of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, cultural relativists nowadays are still writing books twenty years after the event about how the poor innocent Tutsis and Hutus really got along quite well for eons, until racist theories imported from German and Belgian colonizers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned them all into bloodthirsty zealots. Romantic Western observers seem thoroughly incapable of realizing that mass killings of ethnic enemies have been going on all over the world ever since human beings became numerous enough to separate into warring tribes, and did not have to wait several millennia so that they could all be “caused by” Western imperialist social-Darwinism.

The reverse racism being practiced by the politically correct assumes in a very paternalistic way that people from non-Western origins are incapable of acting on their own and matching the ferocious intensity of planning and execution typical of European cultures. In Rwanda as in Cambodia, in the Congo as in Syria, in Guatemala as in Myanmar, the people doing most of the killing all had their own local reasons for committing mass murder. This does not mean, however, that the world’s largest political and economic empires, based in Europe, the USA, Japan and, more recently, China, were not also involved in every one of those horrific events. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, every single region in the world has been brought kicking and screaming into the global economy and geopolitics, and every local event has also become an international event.

But the same kind of analysis that applies to international relations and the growth of the world economy also applies to ethnic and cultural relations within those countries that have become more culturally diverse than they were before. The most obvious examples are places like Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Uruguay, where the expansion of European empires during the colonial period resulted in populations of mostly European origin becoming the majority. By hook or by crook, indigenous populations (as well as former slaves of African origin) were forced into a minority situation, largely dominated and mistreated by a “Creole” majority.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the cultural relativists from the politically correct crowd also glorify native peoples nowadays. Whenever some type of conflict occurs between European majorities and First-Nation minorities in any of those countries, such as the Oka crisis of 1990 in Quebec and the more recent Caledonian crisis in Ontario, the same kind of romantic fantasizing breaks out once again. Analyses of such events by the would-be anti-racists always assume that everything that the “Europeans” do in such situations is necessarily evil and that everything that native people do (except for a few traitors to the cause) is necessarily wonderful. Once again, cultural relativists seem unable to attribute any blame whatsoever to anyone on “their” side of the equation.

Needless to say, the same kind of misinterpretation also takes place whenever the same crowd has to deal with conflicts between European-origin majorities and more recent immigrants from the Third World, particularly those who are not Christian. Ever since many Western countries started admitting larger numbers than before of Asian, African and Latin American immigrants, during the 1960s, a new situation has sprung up to allow today’s cultural relativists another field in which to exercise their romantic delusions.

In the charter debate in Quebec, Left-liberals like Michel Seymour and Georges Leroux are once again using so-called reverse racism, paternalistically defending religious minorities, particularly conservative Muslim women, from their Christian-European tormentors. They assume that most of those women are naive victims of cultural identification with their communities of origin, unable to realize the implications in today’s world of showing off their vehement rejection of women’s liberation and their obvious promotion of Islamic extremism. According to the politically correct, the Quebec government should leave those unfortunate women alone, not because a ban on people’s clothing is difficult to enforce, nor because the PQ is practicing a throughly hypocritical kind of secularism. The cultural relativists feel instead that the only way to fight such unacceptable “racism” is to allow all minorities, even ultra-conservative religious minorities, to do whatever they want. For them, anything less would be unconscionable.

In point of fact, however, reverse racism is just a paternalist form of ordinary racism. The cultural relativists in the charter debate act as if well-educated immigrants from the Third World had never heard of secularism or anticlericalism before they arrived in the West. They conveniently forget that even countries as presumably backward as Afghanistan were already governed by home-grown modernizers like Amanullah Khan during the 1920s and the communist government of the 1980s.

Politically correct proselytism also seems to have affected the judges in several recent Canadian cases who decided to give much lighter sentences to rapists of Haitian origins, or wife beaters of native origin, ostensibly because those perpetrators grew up in horrible conditions. According to this theory, it was the living conditions during these people’s formative years that “caused” their attitudes towards women and not their individual decisions to solve their personal problems through sexist violence.

However, belonging to an oppressed group of people does not give someone the right to oppress others around him, any more than belonging to an oppressor group gives someone the right to oppress socially “inferior” people. British judges should not be punishing workers of Irish origin more because some of them hate the Irish individually, nor less because the British have been collectively oppressing the Irish for several centuries. Judges in the USA should not be giving heavier sentences to Black murderers than to White murderers because they hate Black people, nor lighter sentences to compensate for four centuries of White oppression of Afro-Americans.

Similarly, pro-socialist workers should not be allowed to get away with mistreating their women any more than anti-socialist workers should. Victims of wife-beating do not have the right to beat up their children in protest against their husbands violence against them. ANC leaders in South Africa do not have the right to mistreat their own people, like their Boer predecessors did, just because those leaders fought against apartheid thirty years ago. Communist totalitarianism is not better than fascist totalitarianism just because the proclaimed goals of the communist movement were superior to the proclaimed goals of the fascist movement. People have to be judged by what they do, not by what they say that they are doing. Oppression is oppression, bad behavior is bad behavior, racism is racism, no matter what the source.

None of this means that people should therefore ignore important differences in the severity of the crimes being committed. The bankers and the traders who stole trillions of dollars from the world economy during the 2008 crisis should not be treated in the same way as are treated ordinary con artists who defraud their own victims of mere thousands of dollars. Fraud is the name of the crime is both those cases, but a trillion dollars is still millions of times greater than a thousand dollars. Those who commit the greatest crimes are much more reprehensible than those who commit lesser crimes. But when the crimes have exactly the same effect on the intended victims, the punishment should be equal, regardless of the social or cultural origins of the perpetrator.

Those who wish to denounce the PQ’s charter of values in Quebec, therefore, should be denouncing it for several appropriate reasons, but those do not include supporting Islamic extremism. The Left-liberal cultural relativists in Quebec are a lot like the equally naive Left-liberal elements in the Arab spring movement, who fought hard against political and military dictatorships in alliance with Muslim extremists, only to see the Muslim extremists set up new dictatorships as bad as the old ones.

Unfortunately for the politically correct, Islamic fascism has become an enormous problem in many different parts of the world, including the Western countries, and is not just confined to countries possessing a Muslim majority. It is true that several Western intelligence agencies spent hundreds of millions of dollars decades ago promoting Islamic fundamentalism, to help them fight against communist and nationalist movements threatening Western political and economic domination. That is one of the reasons why that ideology has become so dangerous nowadays, but it is not the only reason. Intelligence personnel cannot create such a movement out of nothing, and such movements only become dangerous when they are well anchored within the victims own culture.

After neoliberalism, religious fundamentalism as a whole is probably the most dangerous ideology in today’s world. Not just Islamic extremism, but also the even more  dangerous Christian varieties, not to mention the Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist and Shintoist versions. Tribal animism of antediluvian origins is also still damaging millions of other people’s lives, often in combination with many of the afore-mentioned kinds of extremism. Progressive intellectuals all over the world should avoid naively helping any ultra-conservative ideology, thereby bringing world domination by the extreme right-wing closer to victory. If they do, they may soon find out that the individual rights for everyone that they so eagerly want to protect may soon be abolished for everyone, everywhere, by some of the very people that they tried so hard to save from their would-be oppressors.

Rot in your rights

Prior to the 1970s, if the local authorities thought that they were sick enough, hundreds of thousands of mental patients in North America and many other parts of the world used to be confined to what were then called lunatic asylums. In some of those institutions, most patients were treated reasonably well, according to the standards of the day, but in many other places thousands of people were treated very poorly indeed. The trend then became to move almost all those patients out of the asylums, the intention being that more appropriate treatment would take place instead in hundreds of newly created community centers and outpatient clinics.

During the 1980s, however, the world was overtaken by the individualist ideology known as neoliberalism, according to which all governments were supposed to cut back on ever expanding public expenditures and free everyone from “creeping socialism”. Overall government spending never really declined at any point, but was instead gradually shifted toward other more worthy objectives, such as conducting hugely expensive foreign wars and giving incredibly generous tax breaks to large investors. As a result, a large number of social programs were adversely affected, among which were most of the community based alternatives to asylums.

At the same time, the individually based neoliberal disease also deeply infected the justice system, making it very difficult to confine anyone, even very sick people, to any kind of compulsory treatment. And thus it came to be that the downtown areas of most major cities and towns were overrun by thousands of homeless people, many of whom were former inmates of asylums, or newer patients who would have been sent to asylums in days gone by. It soon became obvious to the rare numbers of horribly overworked health professionals, and to the police officers forced to take up the slack, that many thousands of mental patients were being allowed to “rot in their rights” by not receiving any serious treatment at all.

But the rot in your rights strategy has not by any means been confined to the under treatment of homeless people. It has also been extensively used in many other, seemingly unrelated, aspects of public policy. The multicultural lobby, for example, is currently using a rot in your rights approach as a neat way of protecting religious extremists from the separation of church and state. Charters such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights were initially designed to protect individual rights from the enormous excesses of totalitarian and theocratic governments. Recently, however, in many different countries such charters are being deliberately misinterpreted by the politically correct as a weapon to help the world’s fundamentalists succeed in reviving religious control of the state.

For example, in Quebec the multicultural lobby raised an enormous outcry against the provincial government’s attempt to enact a secularist statement of principles that would include a ban on civil servants wearing ostentatious religious symbols. If the government’s charter ever gets passed into law, the multicultural individualists threaten to invoke the Canadian or the Quebec charter of rights to get the courts to block the alleged attack on religion. Similar conflicts have also popped up in many other countries, notably in France, Britain and Germany.

The kind of extremist behavior that seems to draw the most attention in these debates is the tendency on the part of a growing number of Muslim women to wear some kind of religious garb in public. All over the world, female cover-up garments such as the hijab, the niqab, the chador and the burqa have been identified with an extremist, male chauvinist, nominally Muslim insistence on controlling female attire as a way of returning to an antediluvian, almost tribal level of social control. On the opposite side of this debate, secular attempts at thwarting extremism put the emphasis instead on upholding the equality of rights between men and women.

Curiously, no one on the multicultural side seems to have recognized the incredible irony of trying to use a charter of rights in order to uphold the flaunting of “voluntary slavery”. In Germany, a similar sort of symbol promotion would be a neofascist argument in favor of wearing the swastika based on an individual’s right to support the ideology of his choice. An even closer equivalent would be letting collaborationist Jews in today’s Germany wear the Nazi-imposed, yellow Star of David on their clothes as a form of perverse identification with their former aggressors. For some odd reason, people in the politically correct, multicultural lobby think that proclaiming female submission in public is an inalienable religious right, whereas promoting racial submission in public is much more disgusting.

In fact, condoning female submission in public is just another way of getting people to rot in their rights, by refusing to do anything that might be seen by fundamentalists as anti religious. Somehow or other, the refusal on the part of millions of more moderate Muslim women to wear such garments in public is not seen by the political correctness lobby as being even more anti religious than government attempts to control such behavior. But if each religious extremist is supposed to be allowed to follow his or her own conscience, regardless of symbolism, why does the same right not apply to extremist political symbols? Why allow some people to rot in their rights, but not others?

Another argument that has to be dismissed in the same debate is the contention that it is unfair for either side to focus on religious attire. To be sure, any government attempt at controlling something as personal as one’s fetish was bound to elicit enormous resistance from people who simply oppose government intervention of any kind, for any reason whatsoever. But those supposedly more reasonable secularists who do not want to focus the debate on symbols have instead suggested that governments would be better advised to focus on more important things, such as rejecting government funding of religious schools, or taxing religious property. In many parts of the world, including Quebec, most “private” schools are in fact not all that private, since they receive 50 or 60% of their overall funding in order to compete against 100% public schools, while most religious property remains 100% tax exempt.

However, that argument also turns out to be bogus, but only in this particular context, because the people making those suggestions do not seem to have realized how colossally bigger a stink the politically correct, multicultural lobby would raise if ever anyone tried to get serious about controlling public spending on religion. The amount of hatred directed against any secular government making such an attempt would be a thousand times more virulent, even violent, than what we have so far heard in the current debates over symbols. Religious people certainly enjoy “rotting” in those particular rights, since non religious people are also forced to help them pay for exclusively religious privilege.

But once again, this by no means the only other recent application of the “rot in your rights” approach to public policy. Even though it is not immediately obvious, the increasing number of train derailments in North America is also indirectly affected by the same social trend. Big corporations continue to fight against the “creeping socialism” that I mentioned earlier by refusing to allow governments to regulate their activities sufficiently. And they get a lot of support from millions of ordinary people, who continue to use their democratic right to vote in order to elect pro-business governments like the Conservative government of Canada, or to support pro-business lobbies in the USA like the Tea Party movement. In this case, through the democratic process, massive manipulation of popular opinion by rich lobbyists is being successfully used to overcome government regulations against all sorts of dangerous activity. The transport of oil products by rail, which was relatively rare until very recently, is just one of the environmental issues being affected by powerful lobbies successful control of millions of alienated minds.

As a result, millions of ordinary people have come to hate government regulation of anything at all because they have been convinced that it makes the things they want to buy that much more expensive. According to them, letting people in poorer countries get higher wages is bad because it increases the prices at large discount stores in Europe, North America and Japan. Many short-sighted working-class and middle-class people have come to support deregulation because it is too humiliating for them to accept the fact that real incomes for most people in the so-called “rich” countries have not increased at all since 1972, whereas the incomes of the genuinely rich have multiplied hundreds of times over.

They have also been convinced to support the contention that fighting against the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas is bad because it means relying on higher-priced oil from the OPEC countries. Using public transit more often is bad because it takes away from spending more on the upkeep of roads and highways. Refusing to allow large pipelines to be built, even though they are constantly rupturing all over the place, is bad because it is the only viable alternative to shipping large quantities of oil by much more dangerous methods.

The rail companies who transport all that oil, as well as the petroleum companies and the neoliberal governments who egg them on, therefore get to do whatever they feel like doing. The July 2013 Lac Megantic derailment in Quebec, that killed 47 people, was caused by a perfect storm of “rot in your rights” collusion between several different perpetrators. The railway companies in between North Dakota and Quebec were allowed to use defective cars and operate with insufficient staff, the oil companies were allowed to label the shipment with an inferior classification of the dangerous goods being transported, and the pro-business governments refused to do anything to protect the millions of people living right beside the rail lines in order to promote a rather obvious form of unsustainable economic development.

Since that time, many more derailments have taken place at an ever increasing rate, thereby causing all the companies and the governments involved to bombard the media with ads and mission statements about how they certainly intend to do something about all this in the very near future. But given the intensity of those very powerful people’s long-term commitments to neoliberalism and letting the masses rot in their rights, the chances are quite good that many more ordinary people will die before any kind of real control is put into place, if ever.

The best recent justification for adopting such a skeptical attitude toward official bleating about oil transport has been the way that the 2008 world-wide financial meltdown was handled by many of the same class of people. It was also another excellent example of how millions of less well-off people were allowed to rot in their rights in order to buy homes that most of them could not afford. In that case as well, the most important financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s was caused by the collusion of several deregulating governments, most of the world’s most important banks, thousands of traders in derivative financial products, hundreds of private and semi-public real-estate firms, car company executives and many other VIPs, spread out over dozens of different countries.

After “investing” thirty or forty trillion dollars in helping all those too big to fail, and letting ordinary homeowners rot in their rights once again, the world’s leading governments and financial regulators kept right on helping big business survive its ongoing crisis of confidence, by pumping hundreds of billions more borrowed dollars into the system, month after month, year after year, right up to the present day. They also tried to placate public opinion over vastly expanded public debt by fining some of the larger banks involved in the crisis, those “huge, unprecedented” fines collectively amounting to about three or four months worth of overall bank profits. Then they started a massive propaganda campaign to convince ordinary taxpayers that all the rules were going to change so that such a crisis could never happen again. Which is what they had already said the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that, all the way back to the royal bankruptcies that preceded the Black Death of the fourteenth century.

None of those otherwise unconnected events, however, seem to have any effect on the millions of ordinary conservatives, all over the world, who continue supporting deregulating governments, using their hard-won right to vote to make sure that those who wish them the most harm can keep on doing whatever they want, whenever they want. “The beat goes on.”

The Meeting of Extremes

I saw in the newspapers that Ken Stone, described as a longtime peace activist in Hamilton, Ontario, became very upset about having been recently visited by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Apparently, he had written a public letter roundly criticizing the Harper government for describing Iran as the world’s most serious threat to international peace and security. According to the newspaper reports, Stone felt that the Canadian government’s description of Iran contributed to a fear of Muslims among Canadians, since for him Iran is a country that lives in peace with its neighbors. Apparently, he made this observation when he was visiting that country a couple of years ago to attend an international conference supporting the Palestinian cause.

Later, he was also reported to have complained to the independent Security Intelligence Review Committee about the CSIS visit, saying that the interview was an obvious attempt to intimidate him and to keep people like him from exercising their freedom of speech. It seems that CSIS also refused to release their records of their visit to him on the grounds that his opinion constituted a threat to national security.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing has been going on since this country was founded. Canada belongs to a large group of nations proclaiming their formal adhesion to the principles of democracy and human rights, while simultaneously reneging on those principles whenever they feel the need to do so. Whenever they want to get around the freedom of speech barrier, they invoke the national security excuse instead. Then they feel that they can do whatever they want with anyone who criticizes some aspect of their official foreign policy.

Unless Stone did something else that was not mentioned in the newspaper reports I read, just the fact of disagreeing with the government’s attitude toward Iran or Palestine is not nearly enough to justify the allegation of a threat to Canada’s national security. If the Canadian government really adhered to the principle of freedom of speech, CSIS would not be bothering critics of its foreign policy any more than it is supposed to be bothering Canadians who disagree with the government’s domestic policies. Personally, I find the Iranian government’s attitude toward its own citizens to be considerably more totalitarian than the Canadian government’s own attempts at intimidation. But the difference between these two governments seems to be one of degree rather than one of principle.

For me, those newspaper reports were also a blast from the past since Stone used to belong to the same radical socialist organization, known as the Canadian Party of Labor, that I was in more than forty years ago. The only thing that I can remember now about him, however, is being impressed by a small booklet that he wrote on the history of the Hamilton steel strike of 1946. As I pointed out in the autobiographical part of my blog, the CPL was one of several  tiny outfits back then that thought that private capitalism was the source of all evil, including class oppression, racism, sexism, war, famine and frequent economic depressions. In those days, we were convinced that supporting the Maoist version of the Marxist-Leninist alternative was the only way to get rid of all those horrible things once and for all. How wrong we were! It turns out that Chairman Mao was not at all the progressive leader that we thought he was, but in fact one of the worst people who ever lived, not only in his public policies but also in his private life.

All we ended up supporting was an extreme version of state capitalism that was just as evil, sometimes even more so, than the disgusting private system. To make things even worse, many of those little groups of extreme leftists also adopted Mao’s slogan according to which “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. As a result, in 1979, many of them supported the Islamic revolution in Iran, apparently believing that any radical opponent of both the USA and the USSR must be doing something good. Doing that, however, only meant replacing one horrible, totalitarian dictatorship with another one, the Islamic theocracy turning out to be somewhat better than the CIA-imposed Shah’s regime in some respects, and a whole lot worse in many other respects.

In my case, I left the CPL quite a few years before the Iranian counter-revolution and ended up briefly joining what I thought then was a much more intelligent socialist organization, then called the International Caucus of Labor Committees. Unfortunately for me, that outfit promptly got involved in an ongoing war of fisticuffs with all the rival leftist groups, becoming more and more paranoid as time went on. I quit that group two years after I entered it, along with a large number of other supporters. Their leader, Lyndon Larouche, then followed in the footsteps of Benito Mussolini by gradually turning his ultra-leftist organization into an ultra-rightist formation. By the early 1980s, he had adopted a form of ultra-patriotic Americanism and styled himself as a conservative Democrat, favoring extreme forms of economic nationalism rather than free-enterprise libertarianism.

What those two separate political developments, Iran and Larouche, have in common is a meeting of extremes. Whenever extreme leftists support extreme rightists, or themselves decide to become extreme rightists, they are not contributing anything at all toward what were supposed to have been their original goals. No one can in fact get rid of class oppression, racism, sexism, war and depression by supporting state capitalism. Neither can anyone get rid of any of those evils by supporting Islamic extremism, or patriotic extremism or any other “true-believer” philosophy.

When radical socialism does not work, it is not a credible alternative to substitute the extreme right for the extreme left. Nor is it a credible alternative to become a sycophant instead, and lapse back into saying that private capitalism is not that bad after all. This was proved once again back in 2008, when truly enormous dollops of private greed led to a world financial crisis that is still very much with us five years later. If it were not for major government intervention, such as the so-called quantitative easing (in the USA alone to the tune of 85 billion dollars a month), the entire private capitalist system would have fallen apart completely, taking the rest of the world economy with it.

So there does not seem to be any way that any of the evils identified by the leftist radicals during the 1960s and 1970s can be eliminated, or even lessened, by supporting private capitalism, or state capitalism, or religious extremism, or extreme patriotism or ultra-individualism. These days, neither the moderate left nor the extreme left, neither the moderate right nor the extreme right, and most certainly not the God-forsaken political center, seem able to deal adequately with any of humanity’s major evils. Most of today’s political parties and movements, all over the world, are either supporting the kind of wrong-headed policies already identified, or are much too weak or compromised to solve any of those horrific problems.

So far as I can tell, the only thing that can be done nowadays by people who still believe in some kind of progress is to keep on supporting whatever democratic freedoms that still exist, keep on denouncing the ever-increasing gap between the social classes, denouncing racism, sexism, religion and belief in magic, keep on supporting secular skepticism and critical thinking. And hoping that the next financial crisis will not become the kind of uncontrollable disaster that will convince all the world’s governments to do away with freedom of speech altogether.

The Conspiracy against Progress

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, “Religious Identity Crises”, the province of Quebec has been recently divided over the government’s attempt to ban the wearing of ostentatious religious symbols by public employees, particularly those in positions of authority. About half the population is opposed, on the grounds that this would infringe on freedom of religion and minority rights. The other half of the population supports the move, believing that government employees should be neutral and avoid trying to win everyone over to their cause by showing off their own religious affiliations in public.

Unfortunately, the entire debate has been undermined by several factors, not the least of which is the enormous difficulty governments always have in trying to control people’s religious behavior through legislation. This time around, the government initially weakened its own case by refusing to ban the crucifix attached to the wall behind the speaker in the National Assembly, as well as the Christian prayers that still often precede meetings at the municipal level of government. The constitutional division in Canada also interferes in a clear understanding of the debate, with most federalists opposing the government’s position and most separatists upholding it.

Among all the various religious symbols targeted by this initiative, the one that seems to upset most government supporters is the head scarf (hijab) worn by a minority of Muslim women, as well as the far less frequent face mask (niqab) and the even rarer burqa that covers a woman from head to toe. This particular practice of hiding various parts of the female body from public view has also divided the feminist movement. The more orthodox feminists think that all those garments are in fact religious symbols of female oppression, rather like the yellow Stars of David that Jews were required to wear  in Nazi-occupied Europe. The more revisionist feminists, on the other hand, think that banning those garments among public employees would simply isolate those particular Muslim women even more than they are now (a minority within a minority).

Opponents of the government’s point of view, as well as some of its supporters, also believe that it is wrong to focus on such superficial issues, instead of controlling much more serious problems involving mainly immigrant minorities, such as female excision, female infanticide, attempts to impose sharia even when that would mean breaking dozens of Canadian laws, virginity checks being performed on young girls, religious schools refusing to cover the government curriculum even when they are being highly subsidized with public money, and so on and so forth. In other words, so far as religion is concerned, should we have majority rule or minority rule?

Many of the government’s adversaries on the religious symbols debate are also upset because they think that many of those supporting the ban are racists. According to them, too many people assimilate all Muslims with religious fanatics currently terrorizing many of the world’s Muslim majorities. They say that it may be necessary to condemn fanaticism in those countries, but it is irrelevant to do so in secularized Christian countries where Muslims are as yet still in a small minority. Even in today’s globalized world, they refuse to admit that everything that Muslims do in any country necessarily affects other people’s attitudes towards them everywhere just as much as everything that Christians, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists do anywhere at all also affects everyone else’s attitudes towards them.

Unfortunately, the millions of people belonging to any one of the world’s major religions do not have all that much control over their fellow believers’ behavior. Most Muslims, like most other believers, tend to support anyone from their community who is being attacked by outsiders, just as anyone who believes in such “secular religions” as patriotism or libertarianism also tends to react in the same way. The world-wide reluctance among all believers to criticize anyone from within, even when those other believers are doing something that is not recommended by their religion, is in fact very similar to the patriotic maxim: “May my country always be right, but my country right or wrong.”

As a result, Muslim majorities often refuse to condemn Muslim terrorists even though the Koran apparently denounces terrorism quite specifically. At the same time, in the case of women wearing coverup clothing, moderate Muslims often refuse to criticize such garb even though it seems that the only relevant reference in the Koran is an admonition that women should strive for modesty when appearing in public. Do those Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab, along with tight-fitting clothes and a lot of makeup, really expect others to believe in their hypocritical attempts at modesty?

On the other hand, it is certainly true that many of those wearing such clothing are probably doing so for reasons of personal identity with their culture, as I pointed out in my previous article on the subject. However, it is insulting everyone’s intelligence to ask anyone to believe that those women are not aware that covering up like that is part and parcel of the message of all ultra-conservative religious factions, for which any kind of feminism is anathema. Even more laughable is the recent attempt by some Quebec feminists to claim that hijab wearers have somehow chosen to follow their own separate (but equal) path toward women’s liberation!

Many of the problems caused by this kind of cultural identity all over the world, including the much more serious problems already mentioned, are also greatly exacerbated by the incomplete conversion of many ethnic populations to most of the world’s official religions. As I pointed out in my autobiography, when various peoples previously holding to some animist or polytheist religion were converted to such religions as Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism, much of that conversion was incomplete. Often, cultural characteristics from the prior religious affiliations were not totally eradicated, with the result that millions of people nowadays in fact adhere to hybrid, or syncretic, beliefs.

The most commonly recognized example of such hybrids is in Haiti, where millions of people adhere simultaneously to two very different forms of religious belief, Catholicism and voodoo. But dozens of other such hybrids also exist in many other countries, with the result that hundreds of millions of people all over the world who are supposed to be Christians or Muslims or Buddhists, in fact simultaneously believe in pre-conversion deities, or magic, or some other practice that is not at all consistent with what is normally considered to be characteristic of those official religions. “Even” in the USA, “even” nowadays, millions of people officially call themselves Christians, while also believing in such totally un-Christian ideas as magic, sorcery, speaking in tongues or the use of amulets to ward off evil spirits.

As a result of this, many of the cultural practices referred to earlier in this article do not in fact exclusively belong to the religions with which they are often being associated. Everyone knows that head scarves, veils and total body coverings are not just worn by some Muslim women, but also by some women of other religious affiliations, such as the more traditionalist orders of Catholic nuns. However, in most Muslim societies, it seems that most women who choose to wear those garments do so mostly for cultural reasons that in fact predate the arrival of Islam, and were not originally imposed for strictly Islamic reasons. The same argument applies to excision in various parts of Africa and the Middle East, as well as to dozens of other cultural practices such as forced marriages, female infanticide and so on. It is quite possible that many of the founders of those religions would be horrified to find out how many such “tribal” practices are currently being identified as part of their faith, in today’s world.

Another very important point in this whole debate is that the fundamentalist sects that promote those reactionary forms of behavior owe a lot of their current support to Western counter-insurgency. As far back as the nineteenth century, the British empire often promoted Islamic fundamentalism in particular as part of its attempt to take and to hold onto power in many different Muslim countries. This was all part of the empire’s “Negro king” strategy, incorporating militarily defeated kings or chieftains of indigenous populations, not only in Africa but also in many other parts of the colonial world, as local administrators of conquered ethnic groups under ultimate British rule. After the Second World War, the USA took over this counter-insurgency strategy to help control dozens of other countries, using local collaborators and religious traditionalists to help defeat world communism, as well as every nationalist economic strategy adopted at one point or another by practically every Third World country.

Islamic fundamentalism under various different disguises has also been actively promoted by well-heeled, ultra-conservative, comprador countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, whose enormous wealth usually comes from supplying industrial countries with natural resources and financial services. So the fact that Islamic fundamentalism has become almost as powerful in today’s world as Christian fundamentalism, is largely dependent on huge supplies of money rather than on its own intrinsic attraction to millions of ordinary Muslims. All over the Muslim world, it has become practically impossible for local dissent to support severely weakened nationalist or communist movements, leaving ultra-radical Islam as the only useful alternative to comprador (collaborator) governments.

Like the Tea Party movement in the USA, Islamic fundamentalism has become immensely powerful largely because of its “inherited” wealth from outside sources. Popular organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah also run large social-welfare schemes for their peoples because every local government is under some kind of foreign control, for which “socialism” or “government intervention” have become very dirty words. Christian fundamentalism, as well as Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalism, have also become popular for similar reasons in dozens of other countries.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that many immigrant Muslim women in Quebec, and many other countries, find identification with Islamic fundamentalism to be so intoxicating? The multicultural lobby in Canada is also egging on the more extremist factions of all the major religions as part of its ultra individualist strategy. At least in this country, multiculturalism has taken on a libertarian stance, encouraging the recent trend among religious believers to decide for themselves which sort of religion they want to support. Instead of expressing their religious faith in the original sense, through submission to a higher authority, today’s believers can themselves decide, individually, what constitutes appropriate behavior.

The Quebec government’s initiative is therefore being challenged by constant references to the universal charter of rights and freedoms (1948), as well as its more recent Quebec (1975) and Canadian (1982) versions. Freedom of religion is now being interpreted not as a choice among several collectively constituted, authoritarian religions, as was originally envisioned, but as a personal choice, in which each individual believer gets to choose whichever religious idea he or she considers to be most satisfying. Since religious beliefs are supposed to be much more deeply felt than non-religious beliefs like nationalism or socialism, everyone expressing sacred beliefs gets to be protected by the charters, even when such individualized beliefs have no particular grounding in any established religion.

Debates like the one in Quebec have now become a universal phenomenon, every country in the world being forced to adopt some particular attitude toward this kind of controversy. Curiously enough, in some countries, apostasy is still punishable by death, while in other parts of the world, people get to cherry-pick whatever kind of religious permutation or combination that satisfies their own personal egos.

The Science of Psychotherapy

Recently, I read a special issue of a French magazine that was mostly about the history of psychotherapy. Whether talking about history or psychology or any of the other human sciences, the professional journalists who work for that magazine always try to do a good job of presenting to the general public the gist of recent work from scientists all over the world. In this particular issue, they reported on on all the different ways that mental illness has been treated over the centuries, focusing on the various kinds of psychotherapy that have been developed since the scientific method began to be applied back in the nineteenth century.

Their survey confirmed many of the suspicions that I had already gleaned from reading dozens of other articles and books on the subject in the past. The coordinated efforts of hundreds of researchers and clinical practitioners in the field of mental illness have not produced anything like the kind of progress that has taken place in most of the physical sciences, or in treating most physical diseases. Although some progress has been made in treating some kinds of mental illness, using various branches of psychotherapy and quite a few useful drugs, the advances made so far have been quite disappointing.

Unfortunately, it seems that more than a few people in that field have reacted to that relative lack of progress by themselves regressing like some of their patients often do.

Many of them have gone so far as to abandon the scientific method itself, and have let themselves be influenced by ancient religions, particularly the buddhist religion, and even in some cases by shamanism and other prehistoric methods of “treatment”.

Those influenced by buddhism seem mostly to be concentrated within one of the more recent branches of therapy, sometimes described as the third generation of the combined cognitive-behavioral approach. Many of those people are using meditation techniques to treat their patients, particularly  a method called mindfulness, which appears to be an attempt to induce patients to concentrate all their efforts on their own immediate problems and not to let themselves be influenced any more by anything going on in the larger world that surrounds them. Cutting oneself off mentally from the rest of humanity, however, looks quite similar to ancient monastic attempts to get away from the corrupting effects of urban-based civilization by living in self-sufficient agricultural settlements (monasteries) far away from normal society.

It is difficult to see how those professional therapists can reconcile such an approach with the scientific training that many of them received during their university education in modern psychology or clinical psychiatry. Even more dumbfounding is how the university faculties or hospitals to which those people are still often administratively attached could possibly condone such obvious atavism. After having spent the past few centuries since the Enlightenment trying to free human thought from religious and ideological prejudices, it is hard to imagine why the people who are supposed to be running those programs allow this kind of regression to continue moving farther and farther away from more obviously evidence-based methods of intervention.

Even more disturbing are some of the more recent trends within what is sometimes called ethnic psychiatry. One of the articles in the French magazine I was referring to earlier was a polemic in favor of treating people under the influence of shamans from animist religions, in a different way than those used when treating people coming from a Western-oriented, post-Christian, secular tradition. The idea being promoted in that article was that psychologists and psychiatrists trying to treat people from an animist culture should temporarily pretend to support the use of magic and incantations in order to help mentally unbalanced people from those cultures overcome their psychological problems. This was seen as a method of gaining such people’s trust, who would presumably never accept advice from anyone openly promoting any kind of scientifically based approach. The author of that article also felt that people living within an animist culture were simply not capable of identifying with any rational approach, or being helped by it in any way.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that this sort of thing is just a special case of the negative influence of politically correct ways of thinking. What is implied in articles like this one is that anyone trying to use scientifically based methods with people from animist cultures is necessarily a racist. To fight this racism, a culturally accommodating therapist must therefore be someone who accepts the “fact” that science is just another competing method of human communication, not any more nor less effective against mental illness than trying to drive away evil spirits with magic incantations.

Clinical practitioners under the influence of such cultural relativism seem to believe that modern science is not a universal method that all cultures have been adopting, at least recently, but is instead an exclusively Western-based anomaly that must necessarily produce racist attitudes when used outside post-Christian, secular societies. The cultural relativists seem to have entirely forgotten that all the Western countries themselves left behind firmly established belief in ancient religions and/or animist beliefs only very recently. Most of those countries also include large populations of true believers even nowadays, not only because of recent immigration from various parts of the Third World, but also because they all harbor their own home-grown animist populations. Not to mention millions of fundamentalists, combining forms of Christian literalism with magical beliefs of prehistoric origin such as speaking in tongues.

Instead of trying to accommodate themselves to pre-scientific modes of thought, the ethnic psychiatrists would be better off trying to gradually integrate their patients into a more up-to-date way of ascertaining reality. Taking the cultural relativist short-cut is nothing but a dead-end. The very definition of mental illness, after all, lies in losing touch with human society as it is currently constituted. Neither mindfulness nor cultural relativism are capable of helping someone connect properly with today’s world, but instead lead people in quite the opposite direction.

Canada’s 1960s

I have just finished reading Bryan D. Palmer’s book, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era, published back in 2009. It is quite a long book, over 600 pages all told, but eminently readable and chock full of pertinent information and extensive end-notes. Over the years, I have found Palmer’s numerous contributions to Canadian history very useful. I used one of his earlier books to help me remember some of the events that I was personally involved in during the 1960s and the 1970s, in order to write part of my political and intellectual autobiography, “A life full of lies” (2013). A couple of his other works were also among the references that I used to write my doctoral thesis back in 1991, “The Doctrine of Economic Nationalism in Central Canada, 1846-1885”.

As the title of Palmer’s book suggests, most of his text about Canada during the 1960s is focused on the various kinds of rebellious movements that took place back then, such as the wave of wildcat strikes in various different industries across the country, the emergence of the New Left, the student movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, the rise of radical Quebec nationalism and the development of Red Power among Canada’s native peoples. Palmer did an impressive job bringing together material from a wide variety of sources on those events, including works like Myrna Kostach’s Long Way from Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada (1980). I am definitely going to have to read some of those other texts as well, many of which I did not even know existed.

To provide period background for his book, Palmer also decided to add quite a bit of material about such people as Gerda Munsinger, George Chuvalo, Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Trudeau. Personally, I thought that some of those references, while interesting, were not nearly as useful to his text as would have been his inclusion of the way that the Canadian justice system blundered through the wrongful condemnation of 14-year-old Steven Truscott for the rape and murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper, back in 1959. The horribly botched Truscott trial was thoroughly denounced not only in Isabel Lebourdais’s 1966 book on the subject, but also in hundreds of other articles published at the time. Since then, this has become the most important criminal case in Canadian history, going all the way to the Supreme Court, a saga that includes the original death sentence, the many years Truscott spent languishing in prison, several million dollars in government compensation for wrongful conviction, and hundreds more articles, books and television programs.

Why didn’t Palmer make any reference whatsoever to that incredible story? It seems to me that one of the best ways to show how truly unjust former justice minister Pierre Trudeau’s so-called “Just Society” really was back then would have been to underline how thoroughly disgusting the official Canadian response to that rural travesty turned out to be. Even nowadays, the justice system still refuses to declare Truscott officially innocent, probably to protect a number of VIPs involved at the time, such as the junior Ontario Provincial Police officer investigating the case, who later climbed up the ladder to become the head of the force.

But my main criticism of the Palmer book has nothing to do with his decision not to include anything about Truscott. What upsets me more is the utopian socialist approach adopted by Palmer towards “the people”, that is anyone who is not part of the upper-class establishment blamed by Palmer for almost everything rotten that happens in society. As a Trotskyist scholar, Palmer builds his case for rebellion by pointing out how the world’s most important investors and politicians are constantly conspiring to make sure that they always end up on top of everyone else. They are members of what Palmer calls the capitalist ruling class and he quite correctly holds them mainly responsible for the very poor working and living conditions that many poorer, less powerful people had to put up with back then, as well as more recently. Industrial workers across Canada during the 1950s, most of the francophone population of Quebec before the “Quiet Revolution”, an even larger percentage of the native peoples in every province, most Black people throughout North America, all of those groups suffered greatly, some more than others, prior to the rebellious era of the 1960s. (For many of those same people, not much has changed since that time.)

Palmer does quite a good job documenting all of that, as well as lambasting the global geopolitical conflict of the Cold War that lay behind the amassing of huge stockpiles of atomic, bacteriological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, as well as the incredibly violent proxy wars in places like Korea and Vietnam. Most of that analysis is certainly true, relevant and pertinent to his case that much of the rebelliousness of the 1960s was appropriately directed against the big shots whose overbearing egoism lay behind all of those situations. It is also true, though Palmer leaves this out, that though they ruled many fewer countries, the state capitalists of the so-called communist countries treated their populations at least as poorly as did the private capitalists and their own stables of compliant politicians.

What I do not like about Palmer’s analysis, along with that of many of his sources, is his attempt to explain or justify every negative aspect of those rebellious movements by referring back to the ruling class. It is not a good idea, for example, to exclusively blame large anglophone companies and their political cronies for the mostly innocent people killed by the FLQ during their ten years of violent activity in Quebec. (Unless of course the rumors are true and the entire FLQ was under the complete control of the RCMP, or some other secret service, at the time.) Nor do rotten living and working conditions completely explain or justify such crimes as arson, drug trafficking, sexual exploitation, and so on, not only when they are carried out by rich white men, but also when they are carried out by people from within the more oppressed communities (poorly-paid workers, most women, Blacks, natives, etc.). Just belonging to a group of oppressed people does not give any individual the right to mistreat those around him. The fact that the world’s richest and most powerful people do all of those things on a much more massive scale, all the time, does not exonerate any of the poorer and less powerful people from trying to copy them.

Religious identity crises

I started my blog in August 2012 by writing up a preliminary version of my political and intellectual autobiography, “A life full of lies”, that I then replaced in April 2013 with a more complete version. That text was essentially an account of all the different controversies that I was involved in during the past several decades, beginning as far back as 1965. Now I would like to add occasional commentaries based on the more recent evolution of many of those same controversies, whenever I feel that I have something to contribute to those ongoing debates, that no one else seems to have thought about.

One such debate that resurfaced in August 2013 is the Quebec government’s newest attempt at trying to impose a more secular approach toward religion, notably by getting public sector employees to refrain from wearing religious insignia when dealing with the public. The minority Parti Quebecois government, re-elected several months ago after a long hiatus, is profiting from the popularity of such a move among francophone Quebecers to force all the other political parties into re-aligning their competing stances on this issue. It looks as if the main focus of the debate is about whether or not to confine this move to only persons in legal authority, such as judges, or to all public sector employees including hospital staff and teachers. Should provincial or municipal personnel be banned from wearing crosses, skull caps, head scarfs and so on, because in so doing they seem to be proselytizing for some particular religion when they ought to be proclaiming ideological neutrality?

I was involved in a similar debate several years ago, in 2007, when I managed to get an article published in a francophone daily denouncing the masochistic attitude of the multicultural experts, trying so hard to “reasonably accommodate” every ultra-conservative religious group’s attempt at imposing its own ideological agenda on the more moderate majority. Unfortunately, then as now the whole controversy about how society is supposed to react in these situations has been sullied by the tendency among most English Canadians to use all-inclusive multiculturalism as a weapon against Quebec separatism, and the opposing tendency to use provincial government neutrality toward religion as a fundamental characteristic of what currently makes French-speaking Quebec different from the rest of Canada.

This time around, however, it suddenly occurred to me that this whole debate ostensibly focused on minority rights and freedom of religion is not really about those things at all. Nor should it be considered as just another part of the ongoing constitutional conundrum. In fact, as I implied in several of my past writings, this religious insignia phenomenon is just a special case of ego identification, all over the world, of people trying to solve their own personal identity crises at everyone else’s expense. Throughout history, the people who become religious fanatics, or ideological fanatics, are constantly attempting to convert everyone else to their own very particular world-view. They really want to turn the world upside down, to get the tail to wag the dog so to speak, thereby enabling the extremist minorities to dictate overall political and social behavior to the moderate majority.

People who ostentatiously attach religious insignia to their person do so for the very same reasons that other attention seekers insist on wearing their nation’s flag on their clothing and their property all the time, even when traveling in a foreign country. Their behavior is also quite similar to that of the Maoists I was involved with back in the 1960s, who always wore their Mao buttons whenever they went out, not to mention waving their copies of the Little Red Book in the faces of everyone they met. Many of today’s religious fanatics insist on showing off their colors even when they are supposed to be dealing with the general public as elected representatives or as appointed officials of government. Then they insult other people’s intelligence by claiming that their religious ostentation has no effect whatsoever on their own professional neutrality.

These toxic personalities are particularly interested in bolstering their over-weaning egos by forcing everyone else to adapt to their way of thinking, rather than the other way around. They are part and parcel of the currently dominant wave of libertarian individualism, as in the Tea Party movement in the USA, claiming blatant proselytism as a fundamental human right rather than the more obvious right of normal people to be left alone. Women sporting head scarves, face masks or even overall body armor, are also insulting others by trying to pretend that the very sight of their unadorned beauty would automatically turn every nearby male into a significant threat to their own security.

Moderate practitioners of the various religions that these extremists profess are particularly targeted by such blatant ostentation. They are required to constantly defend their religions by pointing out to non-believers that it is really quite possible, after all, to be a good Christian, or a good Jew, or a good Muslim, etc., without putting on a ceremonial costume in public, particularly when they find themselves in a position of authority.

Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely that the Quebec government, or any other secular administration, will ever be able to prevail in this debate. In a world chock full of unabashed super-egos, including multi-billion-dollar vulture capitalists, arrogant big-time polluters and mass-murdering dictators, any attempt at controlling such a relatively insignificant form of social bullying is probably doomed to fail.