There are no lesser evils

The greatest mistake that progressive-minded people all over the world make when they are casting around for a political party or tendency that champions their goals, is to betray their intended message by pandering to the theory of the lesser evil. By progressive-minded people, I mean those who support social progress in all its forms. The best way to do this would be by greatly reducing the ever-increasing income gap between the social classes, by completing and reinforcing the modern welfare state, rather than eliminating it bit by bit. This obviously puts social progressives, in the trade unions as well in nominally socialist parties, on a collision course with the twenty-first century’s three dominant but also curiously complementary ideologies, neoliberalism, neofascism and religious atavism, that are getting perilously close to achieving their common goal of doing away with social development altogether.

Progressive people are also those who support feminism and complete equality between men and women, since nothing real can ever be done to reduce the yawning chasm between the social classes without simultaneously championing sexual liberation. The austerity programs of the neoliberal/neofascist/atavist coalition always hurt women more than men, making it impossible to approach social equality without also promoting sexual equality, and vice versa. By the same token, neither social nor sexual equality can ever be approximated without simultaneously defeating racism and cultural exclusivism. This is because real fraternity among all the peoples and cultures composing the world’s increasingly globalized population is a necessary prerequisite for social and sexual progress. If all the rival cultures in the world are constantly warring with each other over artificially induced identity crises, none of the solidarity required to effect real social change (permanent, world-wide) will ever be possible.

Unfortunately, most of the left-wing political parties, trade unions and socialist movements that have so far existed, which are theoretically supposed to be championing such progressive ideas, are run by people whose personal fears and ambitions induce them to seek a quick fix. They hate the feeling of relative political impotence that so often comes with running organizations frozen out of power for long periods of time, and are regularly tempted to join forces with falsely designated “lesser evils” that seem to be opposing some of the same people that they are opposing. That age-old geopolitical slogan, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, like a mind-altering drug, leads them right into the swamp of political opportunism, the inevitable prelude to ideological compromise, and the eventual abandonment of their socially progressive ideas altogether.

An article published last month in a Montreal newspaper (“Le Devoir”), by two normally progressive-minded intellectuals, philosopher Michel Seymour and historian Samir Saul, is an excellent example of the dangers involved in appearing to choose sides in any given crisis, geopolitical or otherwise. The article refers to the conflict that erupted a few months ago between Russia and Turkey, about how to participate in the ongoing Syrian civil war, which also implicates all the other world powers, and regional powers, involved in the Middle East. The main thrust of the Seymour-Saul article was to virulently denounce Turkish duplicity in that war, as a country that pretends to be fighting against the Islamic State movement while simultaneously providing IS with a kind of base camp inside its own territory.

Fair enough. Seymour and Saul’s description of all the different ways in which Turkey is carrying out its two-faced strategy appears to be entirely factual, if incomplete. In their article, they clearly indicate their opposition not only to Turkey’s curious role in that war, but also to that of its NATO allies, such as the USA and France, as well as such other indirect participants as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. So far, so good: from a socially progressive point of view, supporting the Western allies own duplicitous role in this conflict is no more useful than supporting the Turkish variety of deception, nor the even more obvious duplicity of the ultra-conservative Gulf states.

Instead, the problem with the Seymour-Saul article comes from their attitude toward Russia. For some strange reason, they seem to think that Russia’s role is somehow preferable to that of every other power involved. But why would the Russian dictatorship’s attempt to have a real influence again in the eastern Mediterranean, by shoring up the Assad dictatorship in Syria, deserve any more support from social progressives than the liberal-imperialist USA’s attempt to oust both Assad and the Islamic State, without endangering its perilous “partnership” with Turkey and Saudi Arabia? Seymour and Saul seem to have chosen Russia as their champion for the rather simplistic reason that it is successfully defying US “leadership” in that region, at least for the moment.

But in what way does supporting Russia, and/or Assad, against the hastily-cobbled “American-led” coalition, help the cause of progressive social change? And why underline many of the horrible things that Turkey is doing to help the Islamic State without any mention anywhere in the article about Iran’s similarly duplicitous role, albeit in a somewhat different direction, through its influence on the Syrian government, and the Iraqi one? Why target the obvious hypocrisy of the Western role in that conflict, or the even more disgusting Saudi role, or Israeli influence for that matter, any more than the Russian or the Iranian “contributions” to that disastrous conflict? What is to be gained by supporting, or at least appearing to support, any one of the dubious interventions of any of the rival imperialist powers?

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with socially-progressive people writing analytical articles about Middle Eastern geopolitics, and trying to figure out how that disgusting mess might be negatively influencing any attempts at ridding the world of the hegemonic ideological alliance between neoliberalism, neofascism and religious atavism. However, a more useful approach to the subject than the one suggested in the Seymour-Saul article would have been to adopt a much more honest “pox on all your houses” posture, showing that none of the world powers, or regional powers, involved in the Syrian civil war, directly or indirectly, are doing anything at all to help us get out of that murderous situation. Why not instead borrow the title of the 1948 Quebec artists manifesto, “le refus global”, which in this case could be transmogrified into meaning “total rejection” of every empire’s attempt to win the Syrian “civil” war against the interests of every other empire? Why not admit that none of the powers involved in that war are acting in any kind of responsible or fraternal way, that would help Syria recover from that horrible war rather than continuing to fight it down to the last living Syrian?

In its adherence to the lesser-evil dichotomy, the Seymour-Saul article on Turkey’s role in Syria also reminds me a lot of Michel Seymour’s role in the Quebec debate over the wearing of coverup religious garments in the public service, that became a decisive issue in Canada’s recent federal election campaign. He was one of the people who argued that there was nothing wrong with letting people like Zunera Ishaq, an Islamist sympathizer from Pakistan, wear her face-covering niqab at her swearing-in ceremony when she became a Canadian citizen. Since she showed her face privately to the court clerk, she could hide it during the public ceremony, since according to Seymour there was no longer any security problem. For people like Seymour, who identifies with the Québec solidaire party, anyone at all who supports any kind of restraint on anti-feminist scabs wanting to use their personal definitions of religion to make a political point in favor of voluntary female slavery, is necessarily suffering from what they choose to call “Islamophobia”.

Seymour and his friends like to promote the ideological multiculturalist amalgam of confounding the very real, ultra-right-wing prejudice against everything Muslim (à la Donald Trump), with the much more restrained, democratic and secular goal of establishing, or maintaining, a real division between religion and the state. For Seymour and company, everyone who thinks that individually-defined freedom of religion (rather than freedom from religion) is not considerably more important than women’s liberation, is necessarily a racist.

In his 2013 brief to the Quebec National Assembly’s parliamentary commission on the wearing of “ostentatious” religious symbols, Seymour tried to distinguish between what he called “individualist” religious belief and “communitarian” religious belief. According to him, governments that try to legislate on such matters can legitimately do so if they are dealing with people whose religious belief is individualist (such as today’s Christians, influenced by the Enlightenment), but not if they are dealing with people whose religious belief is still essentially communitarian (such as Muslims, Sikhs and Jews).

He seems to be very much under the influence of what French author Sophie Bessis called essentialism, in her 2014 book on the twin problems caused by both religious and commercial fundamentalism. In her use of the concept, religious essentialism is the idea according to which every group of people in the former Third World, who were colonized for several centuries by European empires (such as the Muslim community), have to get back to their precolonial roots (in this case, primitive Islam). Essentialists believe that all the former colonies, including economic satrapies like China used to be (1842-1943), are obliged to reconnect with precolonial ways of thinking in order to avoid “neocolonial contamination” from such “exclusively Western”, “falsely universal” concepts as liberty, equality, fraternity and laicity.

According to Bessis, even several extreme left-wing (Maoist and Trotskyist) organizations also decided during the 1960s and 1970s to adopt extreme right-wing definitions of “Eastern” religions like Islam, as part of their anti-Western bias. This was prompted by their grossly exaggerated belief that Western colonialism and neocolonialism were the exclusive source of evil in every non-Western country. They foolishly refused to admit that such social ills as extreme class divisions, slavery, genocide and misogyny, existed more or less equally inside every Eastern and Western culture, at least until recently. They mistakenly thought that all those social evils only became really important in “the East” (a concept extended to include all non-Western peoples, even native minorities within European settler colonies), only after the various Western empires began their global expansion back in the fifteenth century AD.

In a similar way, Michel Seymour, and other left-liberals like him, seem to be using “communitarian religion” as a convenient method of denying access to modern secular concepts to anyone from any of the “Eastern” religions. He appears to think that people coming from countries or religions that have not yet adopted the anticlerical ideas of the eighteenth-century Western Enlightenment, must be allowed to get away with doing at least some of the things that can no longer be tolerated from “individualist” Christians.

But, in his 2013 brief, he refused to acknowledge the continued existence of millions of Christian communitarians, such the “old” fundamentalists (the Amish and the Mennonites), the “new” fundamentalists (such as the much more numerous Pentecostals), and partly-Christian hybrids like the Mormons. Not to mention several hundred million Eastern Christians, coming mainly from the various Orthodox churches. Nor did he try to explain why he included all Jews as communitarians, rather than admitting that some of them may also have become “individualists” influenced by the Enlightenment. And what are we to do with all the believers in the other Eastern religions not mentioned in his list, such as Hindus, Buddhists, Confucianists and Shintoists? What about believers in any of the animist religions (totemism, shamanism, etc.), that are still important among many of the world’s native peoples, including the ones in Quebec? Are all those different kinds of believers supposed to be communitarians as well?

But aside from the obvious errors involved in his description of all Western Christians as being rank individualists, his “reverse racist” attitude toward many non-Christian religions would appear to mean that, according to him, all modern governments must refrain from criticizing any of the symbols that communitarian believers regularly use to proclaim their public identification with their own totalitarian religious sect. In the case of Islam, he also “forgot” that fundamentalism was relatively weak until quite recently, when it started started receiving a lot more money from the ultra-conservative Gulf states after the Yom Kippur War. Not to mention a lot more help from Western governments trying for several decades to rid the Middle East of communism and nationalism by promoting jihadism instead.

Strangely enough, however, Seymour also believes that modern societies should not tolerate such psychologically harmful religious practices as virginity testing, nor allowing a religious communitarian man to require that his wife be examined by a female doctor rather than a male one. He made no mention, however, in his 2013 brief, of even more harmful tribal practices such as excision, wife-beating, honor killings and forced marriages of under-age spouses. Moreover, his grounds for allowing state intervention against such psychologically harmful practices as virginity testing, without allowing it to also be used against the wearing of fundamentalist symbols in the public service, are extremely weak. They appear to be based exclusively on finding an appropriate balance between, on the one hand, social constraints legitimately applied to all citizens, and, on the other hand, the individual freedom of each and every religious communitarian to advertise his or her lack of respect for civic neutrality. Just one of the rather obvious sophisms to be found in his brief.

So it appears that Seymour’s essentialist attitude in the religious symbols debate has something in common with his geopolitical preferences in the article he co-authored with Samir Saul denouncing Turkey’s role in the Syrian civil war. In each case, he adopted a point of view that is not at all consistent with the usual ideological profile of his chosen political party, Québec solidaire, as a presumed defender of progressive social change. It turns out that the enemy of my enemy is not in fact my friend.

In the geopolitical article, the Seymour-Saul analysis was considerably weakened by their attempt to portray one side of the war (Assad, Russia, Iran, and other shiite forces, both “moderate” and fundamentalist) as being distinctly preferable to the other side (the curious situation in which the Western empires and the sunni Gulf states also find themselves strategically united with both “moderate” and fundamentalist forces). Similarly, in Seymour’s contributions to the religious symbols debate, he appears to be agreeing with the fundamentalists that only “communitarian” believers can properly represent Muslims, Sikhs and Jews, an opinion almost identical to the one being projected by many right-wing Western thinkers. They agree with him that the Enlightenment was an exclusively Western phenomenon, influencing (Western) Christians and non-believers only. (Although many of them also include Westernized Jews, of the Ashkenazy tradition, among the enlightened ones.)

But in what way do either of these opportunist stances help to further the cause of progressive social change? They seem in fact to be concessions to political strategy, in the first case by deciding which imperialist forces are preferable to opposing imperialist forces, making “our side” look a bit stronger than it really is. And, in the second case, using essentialist (communitarian) definitions of religion to help his chosen political party  carve out a position designed to be radically different from that of its main rivals. His convoluted theorizing on religious fundamentalism seems to have been crafted mainly to give Québec solidaire the opportunity to distinguish itself radically not only from the totally accommodating Liberal Party of Quebec, but also from the much less accommodating Parti Québécois.

Unfortunately, appeasement of neofascism does not weaken the ultra-conservative forces in this world, but instead strengthens them. Seymour’s left-liberal concessions to right-wing points of view are strangely similar, in fact, to those of such mainstream liberal organizations as the Democratic Party in the USA, which has often been the preferred target of self-proclaimed, left-wing intellectuals like himself. People like Seymour have been denouncing the Democrats since at least the Franklin Roosevelt presidency, for often combining relatively progressive social policies, such as Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” back in the 1960s, with reactionary attitudes on foreign policy, such as the same president’s radical escalation of the Vietnam War.

Since Bill Clinton’s period in office, they have also condemned the Democrats for cozying up to the country’s leading financial speculators, rather than trying to control them a little bit like FDR tried to do a long time ago. Seymour finds himself in the absurd position of copying the hypocrisy of mainstream liberals like Johnson, Clinton and Obama, rather than differentiating himself from them, at least in the realms of geopolitical and religious policy.

But above and beyond Michel Seymour’s convoluted sophisms, any political concessions by left-wing (socially progressive), left-liberal, or even mainstream liberal forces, to what they call lesser evils, are always incredibly dangerous. That is because none of those evil forces are ever significantly less evil than any of the other ones. Let us take a closer look at the triumvirate of ultra-reactionary ideologies that we identified earlier as currently dominating world politics: neoliberalism, neofascism and religious atavism.

Since its introduction in 1979, during the inflationary crisis, neoliberalism has been an attempt to turn back the clock so as to eliminate all the economic and social progress accomplished, especially in the Western world, since the Great Depression. This reactionary movement has been quite successful in curtailing the efforts of economic nationalism and social democracy, that started to combine forces between 1935 and 1979, and were then threatening to go world-wide with their joint alternative to laissez-faire.

Since 1979, neoliberalism’s goal has been to do away with all that “socialist nonsense” and to gradually reinstate the kind of extreme class divisions that used to exist during the “Gilded Age” of private capitalism (1885-1914). In other words, the original kind of “classical” economic liberalism, or laissez-faire, that has been depicted recently in such edulcorated television programs as “Upstairs/Downstairs” and “Downton Abbey”. Identified with such right-wing populist organizations as the Republican Party in the USA and the “reformed” Conservative Party of Canada, neoliberalism wants to reserve the use of state power exclusively for the benefit of large banks and large corporations, bailing out only those who are “too big to fail”, and paying for that enormous expense by doing away with every social program in the world except “self-help” and charity. They have taken collusion and corruption, between big business and big government, to a whole new level.

History has also been repeating itself these days, at least a little bit, with the rise of right-wing populist, neofascist movements all over the world, similar to the rise of the original kind of fascism in the period following the First World War. “Classical” fascism was also founded during the 1920s to help classical liberalism (laissez-faire) fight back against trade unionism, socialism, communism and the temptation among many liberal politicians to “save capitalism” by agreeing to a number of economic and social reforms such as those introduced by FDR in the USA between 1933 and 1945. The pre-World War Two kind of fascism was popular not only in those countries where it took state power (Italy and Germany), but also in dozens of other countries in the world, in the West as well as in many different parts of the colonial world. For example, pro-Mussolini Louisiana governor Huey Long probably had a good shot at winning the 1936 elections in the USA, if he had not been conveniently assassinated instead in 1935.

Since that time, the kind of State capitalism that people still call communism discredited itself completely by taking power not only in the USSR, but also in China and many other countries, only to engender totalitarian dictatorships without any significant working-class participation. In the end, those regimes were all considerably less socially-progressive than either the democratic socialism of the Scandinavian countries, or even the distinctly less interventionist social programs set up in such places as Britain and the USA. In the period from 1945 to 1979, many of the Western countries passed on some of their post-war riches to their own people, a little bit more than they had ever been tempted to do before. Unfortunately, none of their wealth ever made it as far as the pocketbooks of the ordinary people in the Third World, because of neocolonialism and the Western alliance with dozens of thoroughly corrupt, anti-communist political and military dictatorships.

As in the period between the first and the second world wars, today’s neoliberalism also finds itself working along quite well with a large number of more or less populist, authoritarian, and/or neofascist regimes spread out all over the world (such as in Turkey). As well as with similar authoritarian-populist movements that have yet to completely triumph over much-weakened forms of liberal democracy (such as in the USA). All of those neofascist regimes and/or movements also rely heavily on atavistic, fundamentalist religious movements (established within the different branches of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc.), which are as important to the “neofascist” definition of those various regimes and movements as are their populist and authoritarian characteristics.

Each one of the world’s most reactionary regimes and movements is not just motivated by its own internal development. Each of them is also trying to compete for commercial and geopolitical domination, of the whole world and/or of its own particular region. Each one also competes with each of its designated adversaries on the religious, cultural-identity level, periodically rewriting its own history or “brand” in order to help it project its own “bat signal”. First inwards, to rally its own skeptical population, then outwards against “inferior” rival brands, much in the same way as rival banks or large corporations do with their commercial logos.

In the Middle East, for example, the Islamic State movement decided to set itself up as a “caliphate”, ostensibly to restore the “golden-age purity” of the early Muslim empires, but conveniently forgot in the process that most of the cultural achievements of those empires (just like in the early Christian empires) were made in spite of their religion, rather than because of it. Similarly, in the same region, the government of Israel has also decided to refer to the occupied West Bank as “Judea and Samaria”, as if nothing else important had happened in that area of the world over the past 2000 years.

The “tribal geocentrism” (Shlomo Sand) of the reinvented Jewish people has been thrust onto the world stage in the same pre-fabricated manner as the tribal-based caliphate’s reconstructed version of primitive Islam. Today’s Israeli government represents the descendants of different peoples converted to Judaism over the last several centuries, and hates the Palestinian people not only because of everyday terrorism but also because today’s Palestinians are considered to be apostates, the descendants of the Biblical Jewish population who converted to Islam rather than remain faithful to their original religious heritage.

But, as Bessis emphasized in her 2014 book, today’s radical Muslims also fully participate in the “us” versus “them” dichotomy, notably through virulent antisemitism magnified by the partly successful Nazi attempt to cultivate an ideological bond with anti-Western Muslims during the Second World War. With the result that Hitler’s 1924 book, “Mein Kampf”, is apparently more popular reading in the Middle East than in any other region. In many different ways, all over the world, countries, cultures and religions that were originally founded on the reinvention of history and the reification of tribal systems of belief, have also recently intensified their efforts to develop even stronger brands in order to compete even more actively than before in the constantly recycled identity business known as “heritage”.

Unfortunately, liberal or nominally-socialist tolerance of all the different kinds of parochial neofascism, for commercial, geopolitical and ideological reasons, is having a devastating effect on what is left of social progress, not only in the West but also in all the other regions of the world. In Europe for example, the huge recent influx of refugees, mostly from Muslim countries, is provoking a crisis of epic proportions, mostly because of misguided reactions to neofascist behavior. On the one hand, restricting individual liberties for everyone, as the nominally-socialist president of France decided to do recently, may not turn out to be the best way of winning the war on terrorism. Especially since the proclaimed goal of the terrorists is precisely to do away with individual liberty altogether for their own “communitarian” reasons.

On the other hand, the same Socialist Party in France that got François Hollande elected as president has also been one of the main political forces in recent years to have accommodated every single attempt that the Islamists have made in many French suburbs to ensure that local Muslims, and everyone else, kowtow to their particular, ultra-conservative version of Islam. According to Nadia Remadna, an anti-Islamist Muslim from Algeria living in one of those suburbs, and founder of the local “Mothers Brigade”, left-wing mayors (mostly from the Socialist Party) in those same suburbs have been so afraid of being accused of racism and “Islamophobia” that they have allowed the Islamists to eliminate laicity and feminism completely, in total contradiction with what used to be called “French national values”.

Oddly enough, in the same copy of the Montreal newspaper (“Le Devoir”) in which I first read an article a couple of weeks ago about Remadna’s denunciation of that peculiar situation, there was a column by a well-known Quebec feminist, Francine Pelletier, reacting to the newest kind of Islamic terrorism in Europe. Namely the rape-and-groping attacks on hundreds of women that took place first in Sweden, then in a coordinated fashion on New Year’s Eve in many German cities by gangs of young Muslim immigrants, mostly officially rejected refugees not yet physically expelled from that country. Pelletier reacted to those disgusting attacks in a rather strange manner, that echoed Michel Seymour’s, and the French Socialist Party’s, morbid fear of Islamophobia.

She started out honestly enough by denouncing the cultural aspect of those attacks, comparing the sexist actions of those violent young Islamists in Germany with similar misogynous behavior in Egypt during the “Arab spring” uprising of 2011. But then she devoted the last part of her column to putting the emphasis on a demographic cause, the fact that according to her most of the refugee claimants in Europe these days are young males. She also hinted that such attacks would not have taken place if the European countries had deliberately tried to admit as many women as men, like Canada apparently did.

And she concluded her column by accusing “Everyman” (“monsieur Tout-le-monde”) of being sexually aggressive, not just young Islamic refugees in Europe, completely ignoring the fact that the “communitarian” varieties of Islam have yet to adopt modern attitudes toward women in the same proportion as the “individualist” Christians. Of course there are millions of misogynists all over the world, even in Canada where our egotistical prime minister recently sent out millions of copies of a photo of him fondling his wife in public.

Nevertheless, Pelletier’s approach is a blatant example of the method of argument that French-speaking people call “noyer le poisson” (literally, “drown the fish”). In other words making the Islamist rape attacks look less disgusting than they really were by accusing every single man on this planet as being as misogynist as any of the New Year’s Eve sexual assaulters in Germany. Asserting that every male human being is inherently a violent sexist, at least in the last part of her text, seems to have been her way of avoiding being accused of harboring a “racist” attitude toward all Muslims.

So what do the Seymour-Saul article on the Syrian civil war, Seymour’s analysis of the religious symbols debate in Quebec, the French Socialist Party’s attitude toward Islamism, or Pelletier’s analysis of the sex-terrorism attacks in Western Europe, all have in common? The answer is capitulation and appeasement, inventing excuses for the crimes and the disgusting beliefs of the group considered to be the lesser evil, while refusing to invent similar excuses for the group considered to be the greater evil. While misogyny is to be found in every culture, as is glorification of violence in general (as in the USA’s obsessive gun culture), large numbers of people who act in a more civilized manner than others (fewer guns per capita, or a less tolerant attitude toward rape and groping) ought to be considered as relatively good people, not just as greater or lesser perpetrators of evil. People who support social progress, in any one of its forms, should not, individually or collectively, be lumped in together with genuine reactionaries.

It is the world’s most important reactionary ideologies, neoliberalism, neofascism and religious atavism, that are indeed equivalent and complementary evils, none of which is lesser than any of the others. From the point of view of social progress, Russia is not a lesser evil than France, nor is Islamism a lesser evil than Islamophobia. The crimes that the Islamic terrorists have committed over the past several years, killing mostly Muslim victims, cannot possibly be excused by accusing Westerners, or anyone else, of fearing all Muslims rather than just the guilty ones.

Sure, different groups of Christians (Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox), as well as different groups of Hindus and Buddhists, are attacking and killing thousands of Muslims (and vice versa), particularly through majority-Christian countries bombing raids in places like Syria and Iraq. But none of that justifies any of the Islamic terrorist attacks, nor the total indoctrination of Muslim youth to get them to hate everyone else in the world. Most of the Christian bombs are being dropped in the name of God, while most of the Islamist victims are being killed in the name of Allah, but wiser people realize that God and Allah are just pseudonyms to cover the tracks of individual morons (be they soldiers or military commanders).

The goal of socially-progressive people in all of this should be to condemn all equivalent crimes equally, no matter who commits them, and not to invent excuses for some of the criminals, and not for the others. What neoliberalism, neofascism and religious atavism have in common is that they all seem to be engendered by a kind of a world-wide epidemic of extreme egoism, which produces different kinds of diseases among different kinds of sick people. But which is always based on hatred and aggression toward the lower classes, as well as toward rival corporations, geopolitical rivals and rival ego-projections that people call religions and/or ideologies. In other words, the competing manifestations of evil, self-centered, satanic behavior, present in all countries and in all cultures but taking specific forms among specific groups of people, is currently drowning out the unifying power of godly (God=good), or cooperative, behavior, based on universal values such as liberty, equality, fraternity and laicity.

In an increasingly globalized world like this one, encouraging all the cultures and religions to indulge in total war against each other, is a recipe for disaster. People whose proclaimed goal is social progress should not be caving in to reactionary forces every time that they are confronted with some form or another of monstrous behavior. If the bad people keep on getting worse, and the good people keep on hiding behind euphemisms, the future of the human race is really bleak.

Potentially catastrophic events such as a repeat of the Great Recession of 2008 are entirely plausible in the near future, given the fact that no one controls the egotistical monsters of speculative capitalism nowadays, any more than they did eight years ago. Given the current incapacity of the world’s much weakened (and much poorer) governments nowadays to contain such a chaotic event, the next great recession could easily become the next great depression. If that happens, and there is no reason to presume that it never will, then the neofascist and atavistic tendencies of so many opposing powers could easily take us all down the road to Armageddon. Which would make all the world’s crazy religious fanatics deliriously happy, since they all look forward to such an event as the only possible port of entry into what they call heaven.

Not to mention the fact that those who fear most of all that if nothing is done now to protect the natural environment, humanity could be facing a series of catastrophic events touched off by a four-degree increase in global warming by 2100, should reflect on how far off 2100 really is from 2016. Global warming could certainly kill off a good proportion of the human race because the evil (egotistical) people mentioned earlier, particularly concentrated among the richest and the most powerful individuals, managed to prevent anyone from stopping it. But if nuclear winter comes first, there will not be any catastrophic global warming after that. In short, nothing good is going to happen on this planet, certainly not for the vast majority of the population, if we keep on letting ourselves be dominated by speculators, tax evaders, right-wing populists and religious troglodytes.

Narcissism forever

I read a newspaper story last week about how a financial action group of investigators set up back in 1989 by the economically powerful G20 countries, has been complaining recently that the world’s 194 governments have largely failed to use any of the legal instruments that most of them possess to crack down not only on tax evasion but also on the financing of terrorism. Only a handful of governments have ever condemned any financiers caught in the act of raising money for terrorist groups, and the few cases acted upon only involved relatively small amounts of money. Apparently in the wake of the recent Paris massacres, the French finance minister, Michel Sapin, thinks that it is high time that every country made a real effort to prevent the world’s leading financial criminals from supporting their prodigies billion-dollar terror operations.

As most people realize, since 9-11(2001) in the USA, by far the most important sources of non-governmental terrorism in the world have been the ultra-conservative Islamic organizations, Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and their various subsidiaries. In theory, a large coalition of armed forces are supposed to be trying to eliminate those terrorist entities, a coalition that currently includes not only the USA and France, but also Russia, Britain, Germany, most of the Arab countries and many other places. That coalition’s attempts to eliminate the terrorists have so far been mainly military, focusing on poorly targeted bombing and drone strikes from afar (state terrorism), as well as arming and training various, presumably anti-terrorist, local militias. None of those efforts have succeeded in curtailing private Islamic terrorism (quite the contrary), not only in Muslim-majority countries but also in the so-called “crusader” (Christian-majority) countries.

So why have the coalition states not tried to attack terrorist financing as well? The answer to that question does not seem to have anything to do with the usual official bleating about how difficult it is to track terrorist communications. A much more likely reply is to point to the evident lack of resolve on the part of the coalition governments themselves. Many of the Muslim-majority nations, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, have regularly been condemned in the world media for their two-faced attitudes toward Islamic terrorism. The guilty countries officially fight against the terrorist groups but secretly support them, either directly by investing millions of dollars of seed money, or indirectly by refusing to crack down on the trafficking of fighters, slaves, weapons, illegal drugs, illicit petroleum, looted antiquities and the various other international sources of terrorist income.

But the Muslim-majority members of the coalition are not the only ones lacking resolve in the anti-terrorism campaign. Major partners in the coalition whose populations are not mostly Muslim (such as the USA, Britain, France and Russia) also seem terribly reluctant to go all out in fighting terrorism. They are not only refusing to commit large numbers of their own soldiers outside their own borders, but also refusing to openly condemn their two-faced allies, and refusing to make a serious commitment to eliminating international terrorist financing.

By itself, this kind of behavior is hardly surprising, given the fact that for the past hundred years or so, the Western empires have, at various different times and in various different countries in the Middle East, allied themselves temporarily with nationalist organizations like the Baath movement in Syria and in Iraq against the communists, or allied themselves with the Islamist movements, also temporarily, to defeat the nationalists and the communists. Up until 1956, they even played Zionist nationalism off against Arab nationalism. Being two-faced, or even three or four-faced in not anything really new for the Western countries, any more than it has been for the USSR and Russia.

As has been pointed out by dozens of political commentators all over the world, the post-1979 radicalization of modern capitalism, aka the return of laissez-faire, aka neoliberalism, has also helped pave the way for the formation, or the return of, such other forms of extreme radicalization as Islamic terrorism. Starting in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher was first elected to power in Great Britain, most capitalist countries began severely reducing state intervention in economic or social development, outsourcing national industrial strength and substituting globalized, speculative “investment” in its place. Leading politicians in the West made a big show of denouncing the rise of Eastern forms of fascism and imperialism, while simultaneously increasing the dependence of their own imperial economies on the very countries they were so strenuously denouncing! Some of those Western countries, including Canada, even decided to cut way back on military expenditures, hypocritically without cutting back at all on belligerent rhetoric.

The most intriguing case of such two-faced behavior was the USA’s constant refusal to do anything at all about “allies” like Saudi Arabia, with its trillion-dollar expenditures (especially since the Yom Kippur War of 1973) on promoting ultra-Islamic Wahhabism all over the world. The USA also chose to ignore the involvement of hundreds of Saudi citizens, and citizens of many other two-faced countries, in some of the most important terrorist attacks, starting with 9-11. Even nowadays, with the USA and Saudi Arabia actively engaged in an economic world war over the control of petroleum supplies, no changes to their official relationship are currently being planned by any of the declared candidates in the current presidential election race.

But the influence of laissez-faire neoliberalism has recently become much more extensive than it was initially. Ever since the 2007-2009 world financial crisis, the world’s leading financiers, and their political backers, seem increasingly reluctant to do anything at all about world-wide flows of capital, legal or illegal, lest anything they do touch off a new round of financial collapse. They do not want to do anything real or serious about international terrorist financing for the same reason that they do not want to do anything real or serious about international tax evasion, shadow banking or totally unproductive financial speculation. They fear that any attempt whatsoever at getting serious about any large flows of capital anywhere, for whatever reason, would touch off an international panic among the world’s increasingly skittish, big-time investors.

Unfortunately, the world’s most important capitalists seem to be suffering from an extreme form of individualist narcissism that makes each one of them deathly afraid of what each other one might do to his (or her) power-base, or accumulated fortune. In other words, they have lost any trust, or confidence, whatsoever in their fellow conspirators, each individual trader thinking that each other trader has become capable of even more large-scale cheating and backstabbing than they already practiced in the past. It is like imagining the projection into the present of the ultra Machiavellian attitudes already described by James Clavell, in his novel “Noble House”, about the 1960s machinations of the directors of fictitious firms, based on the operations of real trading companies like Jardine Matheson and the Hong Kong-Shanghai Banking Corporation.

Now more than ever, the whole world seems to be divided up into competing gangs like those ones, half big business, half big politics, their simultaneously public and private empires in perpetual Hobbesian warfare of each against all, for maximum power and profit, completely ignoring nominal differences of nation, religion or ideology among all the leading players. All the “democratic” capitalists, the “proletarian” communists, the “independent” terrorists, the Islamists and the crusaders, are ideologically joined together hand in hand, ignoring the real needs of ordinary peons (clay pigeons) everywhere.

Instead, they are substituting ultra cynical manipulation of masses of people into Us and Them categories that are systematically ignored by all the real players, who continue trying to outmaneuver each other in pop-cult games that are not limited by any reference to any real countries, religions, ideologies or cultures. Each gang of players simply uses its own particular religious, cultural, and/or patriotic slogans to keep the ignorant masses in line, without actually believing in any of its own ridiculous propaganda.

This, however, has not prevented a few multicultural sycophants in the West from continuing to flog a dead horse, to the effect that ancient Islam not only inspires the terrorists but also the anti-imperialists in the Arab spring movement. In an article updated and republished recently in a Montreal newspaper (“Le Devoir”), a prolific author and editor from a Jesuit periodical (“Relations”), while pretending to attack the racist prophecy of Samuel Huntingdon (1993) about the supposedly ongoing clash between Christian and Islamic civilizations, managed to do exactly the opposite!

Emiliano Arpin-Simonetti’s way of “fighting against” cultural shock was to deny Muslims any access to “Western-imposed” universalism (either liberal or socialist), and to insist that they had to go through Islam to find the mystical resources necessary to solve their culturally exclusive problems. This seems to be an application of Catholic liberation theology (with situationist and/or gnostic tendencies thrown in) to “help” progressive-minded people from formerly colonized cultures, every one of them being induced to go way back to the primeval sources of their local religions, before being allowed to move on to more modern ways of thinking. Or is this just a back-handed way of getting people in the West to go back to their mystical Christian origins as well, and to convince everybody in the world to leave aside such modern secular slogans as liberty, equality and fraternity, in favor of a massive return to belief in magic?

The same ultra-cynical attitudes also seem to apply to the political and economic refugee crisis, which has seen millions of people simultaneously trying to get out of several failed states in western Asia and northern Africa, and dozens of other countries (in the Middle East as well as in the West) either refusing to take any of them in, or trying to take in as few of them as possible. The worst case of all seems to be in the Republican half of the USA, with leading politicians from that party not only wanting to keep any more Old World refugees out, but also wanting to simultaneously deport millions of illegal citizens of Latin American origin. In Canada, the new Liberal government seems open to receiving a few thousand more Old World immigrants, but only if they can be shown not to have any terrorist tendencies. No one in Canada has so far bothered to point out to the government what everyone in Europe already knows, that it only takes a few months of radicalization to transform a mentally unstable person into a suicide bomber, no matter in which country that person starts out.

But refusing to fight terrorism or racism for real, or refusing to fight tax evasion for real, and imposing austerity on all the little people instead, are not the only manifestations of the extreme narcissism that seems to have infected so many people, whether VIPs or their intellectual sycophants. All over the world, pollution and climate change are also being treated in the same two-faced manner as terrorism and the refugee crisis, with all the major players (examples like Volkswagen and India come to mind) blaming every ecological crime on someone else, or claiming to be doing something constructive while actually doing nothing of the sort.

Trying to defend democracy, such as it is, by fighting against corruption, is another case in point, in which ultra-radical and ultra-cynical attitudes are again preventing people from moving forward. In Quebec for example, the Charbonneau commission on corruption in the construction industry finally handed down its report, making all kinds of neat suggestions while simultaneously refusing to attribute any blame to the real ringleaders, such as former premier Jean Charest. Every country, region and city in the entire world seems to be going through very similar corruption crises at the present time, with very similar results. In every case, commentaries in the media about what is going on serve to reinforce the same observation made earlier, that none of the real players genuinely want to doing anything real about this problem either. Especially since in this case, as in so many other cases, they created the problem in the first place, and really do identify strongly with their own corrupt selves.

Neoliberal thinking on this subject exhibits the same libertarian or nihilist attitude as with every other major crisis, by downplaying what happened and emphasizing how disruptive it would be to society if anyone ever decided to actually do anything about any of these situations. Another sycophantic commentator in another Montreal newspaper went so far as to create an artificial boundary between corruption and cronyism, pretending that Quebec has suffered from very little real corruption, which could be easily rectified, and a great deal of cronyism, which is okay because according to him it has never been a real problem after all.

Other commentators followed this up by saying that the construction scandal showed that Quebec suffers from too much democracy, rather than not enough, because the commission recommended that elected politicians be separated from public construction projects as much as possible, since they are so easily corrupted, and that provincial and municipal construction projects be handled exclusively by much less corruptible, “independent” experts. The incredible idiocy of that observation did not seem to have occurred to any of the people who brought it forward, since none of them seems to have realized that all the so-called independent experts were actually hired by the private contractors who participated in the entire sting operation from the beginning.

The same method of defending democracy from corruption also occurred recently to defenders of Donald Trump in the USA, who said that their man avoided corruption altogether by using his own millions to pay for his presidential campaign! But the USA is certainly not the only country in the world where this kind of beleaguered logic is being tried out these days. For example, the good people in Quebec’s main opposition party, the Parti Québécois, also recently voted to take out the middleman between politics and business in their organization by electing their own neoliberal millionaire, Pierre Karl Péladeau, as their current chief. Péladeau, however, has been trying to transform himself into a social democrat, at least in public, ever since his internal election, which is certainly not true of Donald Trump. Nevertheless, the Quebec population in the next provincial election will still have to choose between premier Philippe Couillard’s 100% austerity-minded Liberal Party and the PQ’s lesser brand of libertarianism, since none of the smaller opposition parties seems capable of getting elected. Every other country in the world seems stuck in the same kind of political vise.

Other major problems being treated with the same nonchalant attitude include the enormous recent increase in the income gap between the social classes, all over the world, accompanied by a ridiculous claim that the social classes themselves have all disappeared. Not to mention the rip tide against women’s liberation, stemming from the largely anti-female effects of both austerity and religious atavism. To sum it all up, most of the world’s countries, in every major civilization, seem to be getting less and less democratic, more and more socially divided, and more and more corrupt, as time goes on. Unfortunately, our world is combining massive declines in real democracy, and in real ecology, with massive increases in real terrorism, real tax evasion, real austerity and real corruption. None of these manifestations of VIP narcissism, on every continent, seem to augur well for humanity’s immediate future, not to mention its long-term survival.

Eastern fascism is as bad as Western fascism

For some strange reason, holier-than-thou partisans of political correctness in the West do not get nearly as upset about Eastern fascism and neofascism as they do about Western fascism and neofascism. The most obvious example of this curious attitude is the tendency among self-proclaimed, broad-minded multiculturalists in the West to denounce Islamophobia much more often, and with much greater virulence, than they ever dare to denounce Islamic terrorism. For them, Western neofascist populism is what they call a “racist” reaction to Islamic violence, even though Islam is a universal religion open to all the world’s “races”. The multiculturalists nevertheless consider Western populism to be much more dangerous than Islamic terrorism itself because it incorrectly assumes that all Muslims are potential terrorists.

The fact that the ultra-Islamic terrorists themselves have considerable popular support throughout the world-wide community of Muslims, in some countries much more than in others, does not seem to faze them at all. Nor does the fact that the ultra-reactionary Islamic movements supporting those terrorists also believe that all Westerners are inherently anti-Muslim. Nevertheless, the multicultural sycophants, posing as professional anti-racists, refuse to simultaneously denounce all the other kinds of racial or cultural discrimination that exist in this world. Nor will they admit that every kind of ultra-conservative amalgam, no matter of which cultural origin, is just as bad as every other kind. In so doing, they are being just as “racist” as any of the populists that they pretend to detest so much.

Ultra-orthodox factions inside every religion (not only Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but also Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, animism, etc.) believe that everyone who does not think exactly the same way as they do are necessarily out to get them. Similar fanatics in all the secular ideologies (neoliberalism, ultra-conservative nationalism, totalitarian socialism, etc.), are also just as paranoiac about every rival system of belief, religious or secular.

Some of those ultra-believers even manage to combine some particular form of religious fanaticism, such as fundamentalist Christianity, with some other particular form of secular fanaticism, such as ultra-conservative nationalism (aka imperialism), and develop complicated phobias against anyone not afflicted with both of those thought diseases at the same time. They believe in both of them so much that they do not feel it is possible that any decent human being could possibly not think the same way. The fact that those two systems of belief are based on totally opposite and contradictory principles (a universal religion versus a geographically-limited empire) does not even occur to them. As one such true believer in both those ultra ideologies, former US president George W. Bush, expressed it not so long ago, “You are either for us or against us”.

Based mainly in Western countries, politically correct intellectuals of the ultra-liberal persuasion are constantly denouncing powerful Western leaders like George Bush as fascists, imperialists and state-terrorists. But because those same intellectuals are trying their very best to accommodate every kind of non-Western immigrant and/or First Nations minority possible, they strongly object to the use of words like “fascism” or “imperialism” in any non-Western (non-European-origin) context. They are a lot like those anal-retentive historical purists who claim that only Italian fascism from the first half of the twentieth century should be considered real fascism, and even exclude German nazism and Japanese militarism during the same period, or Italian neofascism nowadays, from their ultra-discreet definition of that concept.

Unfortunately for the multicultural purists, however, most people using the English language nowadays have adopted a much larger definition of such words. Judging from all the mainstream media outlets that I have been consulting over the past several years, the word “fascism” now refers to any ultra-conservative form of ideological atavism that glorifies any one of a number of imaginary, “golden-age” tribal, ancient or medieval approaches to contemporary problems. Even if it does not fully manifest every specific characteristic of Benito Mussolini’s twentieth-century political formation.

So why do multiculturalists like Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor look at the world according to this binary system of greater Western evil versus lesser Eastern evil? One possible explanation comes from the classical liberal definition of good government as being based on “keeping the peace”, in the sense of seeing police officers as peace officers and judges in the liberal system of justice as “justices of the peace”. This idea leads them to believe that people who have often been mistreated by “our side” in the past, such as native peoples and immigrants from non-Christian countries, need to be over-compensated for that poor treatment, not so much with money as with a “turn the other cheek” kind of mentality.

Those goody-goody liberals want so much to be seen as kind, benevolent and ultra-inclusive friends and neighbors to every “non-Western” person they can find, that they are willing to practically turn themselves inside-out to accommodate everyone not belonging to their own cultural group of evil sinners. This ridiculous way of thinking has the same kind of antisocial origins as the tendency among many like-minded Western jurists to identify with aggressors (criminals), rather than with victims of crime, giving the bad guys dozens of advantages in court over their much less interesting victims, just in order to prove those jurists own pretentious magnanimity.

Keeping the peace, however, like every other liberal principle, is not really what it initially seems to be. In our class-based global village called human society, hundreds of millions of under-privileged people make only one dollar per day while a few thousand over-privileged people make millions of dollars per day. In such a world, keeping the peace really means using the justice system to make sure that those near the bottom of the heap do not get so upset at their inferior status that they start rioting in the streets, or making “unrealistic” demands on their more prosperous betters. Paternalist liberal politicians try to show everyone that we all can live together peacefully in spite of our income differences, or our cultural differences, and let their equally benevolent friends in big business get on with the job of “creating wealth for everyone”. So, you under-privileged ones, please don’t rock the boat and get so angry all the time. We are doing our best, after all, to make sure that there is room for everyone under the sun.

Another way of explaining this peculiar kind of politically-correct liberalism comes from exceptionally perspicacious analysts like French author Sophie Bessis, who wrote a book recently called “La double impasse: l’universel à l’épreuve des fondamentalismes religieux et marchand” (“The double impasse: universal values challenged by religious and market fundamentalisms”). Unfortunately, like many other people, I have not been able to read most of her book because there seems to be a considerable delay in getting it into Quebec bookstores. So in the following paragraphs, I have had to rely on a long book review written by journalist Pierre Dubuc that appeared in “L’Aut’Journal”, a pro-union and pro-independence newspaper published here in Montreal.

As reported by Dubuc, Bessis began her analysis of Eastern varieties of religious and secular fundamentalism with the national liberation movements against Western colonialism during the 1960s and 1970s. In those days, a large number of former Muslim colonies, such as Algeria, based their definitions of their emerging nationalities on the Muslim religion. In such places, “the nation” was deemed to exclude any national minorities living in those countries, which is to say all those who did not have the same religious and ethnic origins as the majority group. In Algeria’s case that meant any people residing in that country, no matter for how many generations, who were not, or did not consider themselves to be, 100% Arab Muslims.

According to Bessis, back then the Maoist wing of the world communist movement, in its fight against both Western imperialism and Soviet “revisionism”, adopted an ultra-populist strategy of “support for the masses” (“from the masses, to the masses”) that led them to believe in a socialist form of international globalization. According to them, national liberation in every country could only take place if the people there totally eliminated any ideological influence coming from Western “cultural imperialism”, most emphatically including such concepts as democracy, liberty, fraternity and secularism. Such ideas were necessarily foreign to the various peoples in the colonies because according to the Maoists they were not compatible with the ultra-conservative versions of formerly dominant religions and ideologies, such as Islam, in which the vast majority of ordinary people (the masses) still fervently believed.

Combined with the simultaneous rise of laissez-faire globalization (aka neoliberalism), Christian fundamentalism and liberal multiculturalism in the West, that led many people in left-wing politics to become “altermondialists” instead, favoring an anti-capitalist form of globalization. Even though Maoism itself soon disappeared completely, it left in its wake the belief that every people in the former Third World had to repudiate Western imperialism completely by harking back to the feudal ideologies that they had supported prior to the onslaught of European colonialism. By mixing up several conflicting ideologies in this way, millions of left-wingers in the West became convinced that they had to hold their noses and support Eastern forms of fascism, lest they be accused of supporting Western neocolonialism instead!

Sophie Bessis’s book is largely concentrated on what happened in Muslim-majority countries, particularly during the recent “Arab spring” uprisings. She also demonstrated how the ultra-radical Islamic movements in those countries simultaneously adopted neoliberal ideas of “governance”, to replace the largely interventionist national governments that had existed for a time right after independence. As a result, the Islamic Brotherhood organizations and the even more radical terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, have largely abandoned economic nationalism and social-democracy to concentrate on developing their ultra-reactionary, cultural counter-revolutions. Even formerly “moderate” kinds of Islamic reaction, such as the Erdogan government in Turkey, are gradually becoming just as radical as their terrorist neighbors.

So far as I can tell, the Bessis thesis also readily lends itself to an analysis of many different kinds of Eastern atavism, not just Islamic fundamentalism. In India for example, the recently re-elected Hindu nationalist movement, that sees only Hindus as being true patriots, has also fervently embraced big-business neoliberalism as the focus of its economic policy. In China, the current Communist Party leadership has itself become the world’s most obvious example of an alter-globalization state, combining great Han chauvinism with a large and ever-increasing dose of billionaire domination of government.

The Western countries are also drifting towards less and less democratic brands of government. The Netanyahu regime in Israel is the most obvious example, as are some of the post-Soviet Eastern European states, such as Hungary, that have made it into the European Union in spite of their increasing authoritarianism. Since before the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberal attempts at balancing national and regional budgets at the expense of everyone except the ultra-rich, have enormously undermined European social policy. Needless to say, the current refugee crisis is also making mincemeat out of Europe’s open borders strategy, exacerbated every day by the ongoing atrocities of the Syrian civil war and the only slightly less violent situations in other parts of western Asia as well as in Africa.

North American politics has also degenerated under similar pressures, most notably by the same combination of big-business tax evasion and austerity-driven pauperization as in Europe. In the USA, neofascist elements inside the Republican Party are threatening to completely eliminate that country’s long-standing policy of accepting large numbers of immigrants, making a mockery out of the original definition of a democratic republic as a place where anyone can become a useful citizen. In Canada, the authoritarian nightmare of the former Conservative government has been replaced by the return of the Liberal Party under Trudeau the Younger. But it remains to be seen if he will not simply follow in his father’s footsteps by calling out the army to control dissent, and thereby make things even worse than the Harper Conservatives did.

The entire world therefore seems to be moving closer and closer to a bewildering variety of antediluvian political ideologies that can all be legitimately classified as pro-fascist or neofascist. But confining oneself to denouncing Western forms of fascism, while simultaneously accommodating the Eastern kinds, like the politically-correct multiculturalists do, is not going to prevent reactionary movements from setting up completely anti-democratic, inegalitarian, thought-control regimes all over the world. All that is going to do is to encourage those people to take over even more quickly than they were already planning to do.

Of scabs and niqabs

During the last phase of the current election campaign in Canada, millions of people, most of them not Muslim, are up in arms again about radical Islamic women’s clothing. This was touched off when the ruling Conservative Party, initially declining in the polls, managed to make political hay out of a court case involving the right of one Pakistani immigrant to take the oath of Canadian citizenship while wearing a niqab, a special kind of head-scarf, or hijab, that leaves only the eyes visible. All of a sudden, the niqab issue became important, even though very few people in Canada ever wear that garment, and only two women have ever wanted to become a citizen in one of them.

Immediately thereafter, the normally underdog New Democratic Party, which had made a valiant effort to win a federal election for the first time in history by repudiating socialism and moving to the center of mainstream Canadian politics instead, dropped from first place to third place in the polls (after both the Conservatives and the federal Liberal Party). Although the outcome of the election will not be known until October 19, and there are several issues considered by all to be much more important than that one, there is now a very real possibility that the right to wear, or not to wear, a face covering in a public ceremony will decide who gets to run the next federal government!

Most of those Canadian citizens reacting to the niqab were from Quebec, where the NDP has been the preferred federal party since 2011, replacing the previously dominant Bloc Québécois (a federal emanation of the “separatist” Parti Québécois). Until recently, most Quebecers had given up on the Liberals because of the corruption scandal that tainted them severely during the 1995 referendum campaign for independence. For their part, the Conservatives have not had much of an impact in that province since their enormous loss of influence following the English-Canadian repudiation of the 1992 constitutional compromise, a repudiation that almost resulted in a victory for the “separatists” in the referendum.

The NDP, which has some support all across Canada but not enough to win a federal election without most of Quebec behind it, was supposed to have been the party that brought the francophone Québécois majority back into the Canadian federation for real by “eliminating” the Bloc. Now, however, the Bloc’s opposition to the niqab and their own  reasonableness on other issues have also resulted in their return to significant popular support in Quebec. The federal Liberals, whose point of view on the niqab is quite similar to that of the NDP, have not suffered nearly as much from that in Quebec mostly because they did not have that much to lose in the first place.

On the face of it, this whole federal controversy seems to be quite similar to the one that erupted within Quebec provincial politics back in 2013, when the Parti Québécois government introduced its Charter of Values, then lost the 2014 elections to the Liberal Party of Quebec. Although that charter was hardly the only issue in that election either, the fact that the PQ tried to promote official government neutrality for its personnel by trying to ban the wearing of “conspicuous” religious symbols, especially cover-up clothing, certainly contributed to its defeat. It would be highly ironic if it turns out that the officially laissez-faire Conservative government in Canada, gets to deny power to the formerly social-democratic NDP because of Tory opposition to the wearing of radical Muslim women’s clothing during public ceremonies, while the formerly social-democratic PQ lost power for wanting to uphold very similar ideas! A Liberal return to power in Canada, on that issue, would be even more ironic.

These curious electoral foibles in Canada serve to underline some of the basic facts about the nature of “democratic” elections everywhere. In the first place, as in many other parts of the world, the political differences between the leading parties at both the federal and provincial levels have become much less important, even on the surface of things, than they used to be in the somewhat less uniform past. Issues such as the niqab can only become important when all the major parties seem to have adopted the same neoliberal approach to economic and social questions, and do not have much to fight over except largely symbolic differences. In reality, most governments nowadays have given up trying to have any real control over domestic policy, as many of them tried to do at least a little bit in days gone by. Which means that big time private investors now run pretty much everything important to them (“the bottom line”) from behind the scenes, even more than they did in the past.

Nevertheless, the niqab issue is not totally meaningless, even though only a handful of women in Canada have currently chosen to wear such a radically isolating garment in public. The wearing of cover-up clothing, from the ordinary hijab, which hides only the hair, to the totally isolating burqa, that makes the entire body, even the eyes, invisible to outsiders, is supposed to symbolically convey an ultra-Islamic message of female submission to male domination. It is the most radical interpretation possible of the Koranic admonition favoring modesty in women, which millions of ordinary Muslim women have shown can easily be attained without resorting to such ridiculous excess. Every form of cover-up clothing except the horrendous burqa violates the modesty provision anyway when the person supposedly trying to hide from the world always wears a lot of attractive make-up at the same time.

Interestingly enough, most of the anti-feminist, religious militants who favor male domination over women like them, are not meek, mild-mannered wimps, but are every bit as well-informed, dedicated, organized and seemingly intelligent as are most of the world’s feminist militants. To be sure, these ultra-conservative true believers do not mindlessly run around talking openly about the need for female submission as such, but speak instead of the need for social order, harmony, tradition and the sexual division of labor. In other words, they use the same kind of euphemisms for voluntary slavery that were already used a century ago by the equally well-educated, aristocratic ladies in Western society who also argued strongly against giving equal rights to women.

In any case, ultra-reactionary opposition to women’s liberation is certainly the leading characteristic of fundamentalist fanaticism within every religion in the world, including Islam. To make an intriguing analogy, advocating voluntary slavery looks a lot like the anti-feminist equivalent of the sociopathic libertarian movement, particularly strong in the USA, that supports right-to-work legislation aimed at silencing, and ultimately eliminating, the labor movement once and for all. Trade unionists use the word “scab” to designate people within the working-class who oppose all forms of collective resistance to private capitalism, particularly those determined individualists who identify so strongly with the bosses that they continue to work while their fellow wage-slaves are on strike. To complete the analogy, those female scabs sporting cover-up garments use them as publicly displayed ideological weapons for advocating female submission, with the ultimate goal of silencing the feminist revolution, all over the world, forever.

A large number of well-intentioned people have, however, made the very interesting point that religious clothing is no more a sign of male domination over women than is the often much more popular tendency that many unfortunate women have to under-dress instead of over-dressing. It is certainly true that those women who eschew modesty completely by leaving most of their clothes at home when walking on the street or in a suburban mall, are just as much under the influence of the ideology of male domination as are the ultra-religious women who do just the opposite. These two forms of extreme behavior do indeed have something in common, even though sexist over-dressing most often has a religious motivation (not just within Islam), while sexist under-dressing is usually associated with consumerism. In both cases, however, individual egoism, calling attention to oneself in the most immodest ways possible, is their most important shared characteristic.

Unfortunately, other seemingly well-intentioned people have taken to condemning all criticism of such religious over-dressing as being a form of Islamophobia. The National Assembly in Quebec, for example, recently adopted a unanimous resolution to that effect, rejecting what they consider to be irrational fear of the Muslim religion on the part of the Quebec population, and refusing to simultaneously condemn the ultra-Islamic ideology as well. By adopting this politically correct attitude, the elected representatives of the people at the National Assembly seem to have been aiming at populist xenophobes who apparently believe that all Muslim immigrants in Quebec are potential terrorists, just like the ones who recently assassinated thousands of innocent people all over the world.

It is true that millions of people in the West associate Islam not only with terrorism, but also with such things as honor killings, forced marriages, severely limited female access to education, complicit attitudes toward rape and pedophilia, and every other kind of female oppression possible. These Western xenophobes refuse to realize that millions of ordinary Muslims have also rejected the disgusting excesses of the Islamist ultra-conservatives, and that every other religion in the world also possesses ideologically similar fundamentalist factions.

Nevertheless, condemning Islamophobia without condemning Islamic fundamentalism gives the impression that Quebec politicians are bending over backwards to accommodate even those very numerous radical Muslims in many parts of the world who do indeed support such ultra-reactionary attitudes and policies. While it is obvious to everyone who follows the media that the majority of Muslims living in the West are not religious fanatics, some of them definitely are. If the good people at the Quebec National Assembly and those involved in the Canadian election campaign really wanted to support women’s liberation from religious fundamentalism, they would avoid both over-reacting to the symbolic content of the niqab issue, and also avoid trying to ignore it altogether.

The appropriate attitude would be to recognize that all kinds of religious fundamentalism, including the Islamic kind, are very harmful political ideologies, that cannot be successfully accommodated without destroying human rights, democracy, science, liberty, equality, fraternity, and all the other universal values that millions of people have adopted since they stopped supporting absolutism and totalitarianism. The same admonition also applies to every kind of racist or populist rejection of other people’s right to exist, whether it is rooted in some kind of self-contained religious mythology, or in some kind of politically-based populist xenophobia.

People all over the world also have to free themselves from the ridiculous notion that such values as liberty, equality and fraternity only exist within the Western tradition and do not apply to any of the world’s other cultures. In the first place, as the fascist and neofascist movements have proven over and over again, ultra-religious fantasies and barbarian tribal traditions have always been just as popular in the West as in any other part of the world.

Both ultra-right wing and ultra-left wing movements and intellectuals in the West are also dead wrong in assuming that everyone living in or coming from the Third World cannot possibly understand universal political or social values because of their Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucianist, Taoist, Shintoist, animist, totemist or shamanist traditions. It is the worst kind of racism to adopt any kind of Western exceptionalism towards every other culture. In reality, Christians and Jews, coming from the same Middle Eastern origins as Islam, are every bit as inclined as any other religious tradition to ultra-idiotic forms of fundamentalism, literal interpretations of religious texts, oppression of women, terrorism and the entire disgusting list of barbarian cultural practices.

Most of the leaders of the Conservative Party in Canada are also closet fundamentalists, pretending to reject the niqab for feminist reasons but really doing so for strictly opportunist, electoral reasons. In reality, they are not the least bit feminist, as every one of their economic and social policies attest. Electoral opportunism is also the only reason why they have so far refused to abolish abortions altogether, to revive the death penalty, to reject same-sex marriages and to plunge the entire country back into the same medieval conditions as currently characterize some of the more reactionary Muslim countries.

As for terrorism, the Canadian government, along with the American, British, French and sundry other Western governments are not at all opposed to using terror from time to time to achieve their foreign-policy goals. Western military machines, including Israel, regularly use “counter-terrorism” raids, particularly bombing attacks, as a method of convincing civilian populations not to support anti-Western terrorists in many parts of the world. In so doing, they are not that different from most of the non-Western countries, all of which have either supported terrorist organizations themselves, or punished their own civilians for supporting “illegal” terrorist organizations in their own (theoretically) counter-terrorism campaigns.

Governments, movements, religions and every other kind of human institution on this planet regularly distinguish between “our” terrorists, who are always good people, and “their” terrorists, who are always evil people. Even the Quebec independence movement regularly denounces bad terrorists everywhere else, such as the Canadian Army soldiers during the October crisis, while making an exception for the good terrorists from the FLQ. Even the First Nations like their own Warriors, while hating everyone else’s warriors. As for American citizens, they refuse to realize that they are supporting their own kind of internal terrorism as well with their utterly ridiculous gun culture. To be sure, killing millions of people, through legal or illegal terrorism, is much more devastating to human civilization than killing thousands of people, or even only a handful of people. But supporting terrorism of any kind is not morally defensible.

So the amazing entry of the niqab issue into the current federal election campaign in Canada is just a symptom of a much larger disease, affecting the whole world. The anti-feminist scabs in the pro-niqab section of the radical Islamist movement are a lot like the anti-feminist manipulators of public opinion in the Conservative government of Canada.

Neither group deserves anyone’s support. But there are also very few politicians or militants of any kind, anywhere, who play a completely blameless role in this kind of live theater.

L’amalgame à rebours

Cet article a été publié dans le site Internet de “L’Aut’journal”, le 5 mars 2015.

Depuis les attentats terroristes contre les caricaturistes à Paris et à Copenhague, les fantassins de la rectitude politique ne cessent de nous mettre en garde contre la tentation de l’amalgame. Pour ces bien-pensants, le mot amalgame dans ce contexte veut dire la reaction primaire de la part de certains non-musulmans, voulant faire de chaque musulman dans ce monde un fanatique islamiste et un terroriste potentiel.

Nos partisans de la rectitude dénoncent aussi l’islamophobie, c’est-à-dire la peur déraisonnable de tout ce qui concerne l’islam, dans ses diverses versions modérées aussi bien que dans ses nombreuses versions radicales. Toutefois, ils vont trop loin dans cette direction, accusant de racisme non seulement les islamophobes primaires, mais aussi tous ceux qui refusent d’adopter une attitude accommodante envers les intégristes.

Tous ces bien-pensants, au Québec et ailleurs, ont la fâcheuse tendance à toujours vouloir blâmer l’Occident pour tout, même pour tout ce qui relève plutôt des islamistes eux-mêmes. En d’autres mots, ils font ce qu’on pourrait appeler un amalgame à rebours, en essayant de culpabiliser l’ensemble des Occidentaux pour avoir créé les conditions nécessaires à la montée de l’islamisme et de ses dérives terroristes.

Or, ça prend un peu plus qu’un terreau fertile pour expliquer vraiment pourquoi les musulmans les plus radicaux ont décidé de passer à l’acte et d’assassiner de plus en plus de victimes civiles, dans des pays occidentaux aussi bien que dans des pays à majorité musulmane. Bien sûr, il faut quand même reconnaître que l’Occident n’est pas du tout sans faute dans ce dossier. Les dirigeants des empires occidentaux ont souvent envoyé plusieurs de leurs soldats dans des pays musulmans, pendant plusieurs siècles.

Leurs interventions les plus récentes, même celles en théorie dirigées contre des dictatures militaires ou contre les mouvements islamistes les plus meurtriers, ont souvent dérapé. Ces interventions ont tué beaucoup de non-combattants et laissé ces pays avec davantage de problèmes que ces mêmes pays en possédaient auparavant. De plus, le soutien inconditionnel de l’Occident envers Israël, pas du tout conforme à une prétendue neutralité entre l’état sioniste et le peuple palestinien, a laissé une blessure permanente entre l’Occident et l’ensemble des pays musulmans.

À l’intérieur des pays occidentaux aussi, les dirigeants n’ont pas souvent travaillé très fort, parfois pas du tout, pour essayer de bien intégrer les immigrants musulmans. Le résultat a souvent été de créer des ghettos périurbains, dégoûtants, insalubres et sans espoir, pour beaucoup de ces immigrants. Ainsi, il n’y a pas de doute, les dirigeants occidentaux ont effectivement créé un terreau fertile pour l’émergence de dérives violentes, surtout celles d’origine islamiste.

Toutefois, il est absurde, encore davantage qu’autrefois, de tout mettre sur le dos des puissances occidentales. Même si d’un point de vue militaire, les pays occidentaux semblent encore posséder un certain avantage, ce n’est plus le cas du point de vue économique. De nos jours, avec la montée économique de plusieurs pays de l’ancien tiers-monde, il y a autant de millionnaires et de milliardaires dans le monde non-occidental qu’il y en a dans le monde occidental.

En Asie, en Afrique et en Amérique latine, de dépit des prétentions de leurs politiciens quant à leur indépendance décisionnelle vis-à-vis des grands investisseurs, ces gens riches contrôlent quasiment tout ce qui se passe dans leurs pays, autant sinon plus qu’en Occident.

Comme on pouvait s’y attendre, la grande majorité de ces richissismes ont autant tendance qu’en Occident de faire absolument tout pour garder leurs privilèges sociaux, avec tous les mpyens à leur disposition. La plupart des dirigeants de ces pays se concentrent aussi fortement qu’en Occident sur leurs “vraies affaires”, ignorant les besoins de leurs populations pour s’occuper exclusivement de leur propre accumulation du capital.

Pour réaliser cet objectif, comme partout ailleurs, ces dirigeants doivent manipuler l’opinion publique, pour convaincre les gens ordinaires de laisser tomber leurs propres revendications sociales. Hier comme aujourd’hui, le moyen de contrôle idéologique de masse le plus efficace, est encore la religion, toujours utilisée par les dirigeants en tant qu’opium du peuple.

Ainsi, les terroristes islamistes ne sont devenus que les petits soldats de ces mêmes milliardaires ultra-puissants qui, eux, ne semblent pas aussi croyants que leurs subalternes. C’est quand même l’argent des ultra-riches des pays musulmans qui financent tous les mouvements islamistes les plus meurtriers.

Autrefois, quand des idéologies collectivistes d’origine occidentale, telles que le nationalisme et le communisme, possédaient un peu d’influence dans ces mêmes pays, les puissances occidentales ont souvent aidé les islamistes à éliminer cette influence. De nos jours, suite à l’affaiblissement radical de ces idéologies séculières dans ces régions, l’influence que les puissances occidentales possédaient sur ces mouvements religieux, ultra-réactionnaires, a rapidement disparu.

Bien sûr, cet islamisme n’a pas nécessairement grand-chose à voir avec l’islam historique, en tant que tel. Comme c’est le cas de tous les fondamentalistes des autres grandes religions, les islamistes préfèrent ne choisir que les caractéristiques historiques de leur religion qui font leur affaire, laissant tomber d’autres caractéristiques moins intéressantes à leurs yeux.

C’est ce qui explique, par exemple, leur opposition totale à toute représentation illustrée du prophète Mohamed, une admonition qui semble avoir été ignorée dans la plupart du monde musulman avant la montée en puissance de l’empire ottoman, au XVIe siècle. La capacité démontrée des terroristes islamistes à convaincre les opportunistes occidentaux de laisser tomber leurs propres principes laïcs, est ainsi devenue une sorte d’idolâtrie à rebours, les militants préférant adorer leur nouvelle puissance militaire davantage que leur Dieu théorique.

Pour toutes ces raisons, nos bien-pensants en Occident font fausse route en essayant de nous culpabiliser quant à l’origine exclusivement occidentale du terrorisme islamiste. Les dévots musulmans ne sont pas des enfants et ils n’ont pas besoin des mères-patries occidentales pour les aider à adopter, ou à rejeter, une version extrêmement violente de leur religion.

Ils ont la capacité humaine, comme tout le monde, à choisir entre les idées progressistes et les idées réactionnaires. Ils ont choisi, en toute connaissance de cause, d’ignorer l’interdiction officielle de leur religion contre le meurtre, et de tuer des innocents, aussi souvent que les soldats des armées occidentales.