How to be a good masochist

It never ceases to amaze me how so many people do things so often that seem to be totally contrary to their own best interests. These days, the world’s most amazing example of that kind of social masochism was the all-out support given by tens of millions of poor white, all-American machos for Donald Trump, a person who seems to me totally unsuited for those supporters chosen role. How can a billionaire possibly serve as a champion for ordinary, working-class people, who have been betrayed for the past 35 years by overclass monsters and traitors just like him, sending all the formerly best-paid American jobs to poverty-stricken paradises like China and Mexico? How can they think that a guy who makes obscene gobs of money in ultra-low wage, illegal-immigrant hotels and mafia-friendly casinos could possibly restore the USA’s world-class industrial economy from half a century ago? What do they think is going to happen to the social and economic fabric of their country if he ever really tries to deport eleven million illegal immigrants out of the USA, in some kind of crazy-nazi cattle drive? Why do they believe this jackass when he claims to be able to permanently solve every last domestic and foreign affairs crisis in only a few weeks time? How can anyone be so mind-bogglingly stupid as to say such things, or to support someone making such ridiculous claims?

Why do those millions of average Joes, and millions of average Janes as well, hate themselves so much? Why did most of them refuse to support someone with a much more appropriate plan to restore the USA to its former social and economic glory, by adopting instead a twenty-first century version of FDR’s “New Deal”? Someone like Bernie Sanders, for example, before he caved in to Hillary Clinton, in a vain attempt to keep Donald Trump out of the White House? If the majority of the US working-class had been standing up to Wall Street over the past three and a half decades, massively increasing both the size and the militancy of its trade unions, and supporting democratic socialists like Sanders the whole time, maybe they would not be in such a desperate situation nowadays. In fact, they ended up doing exactly what the ultra-conservative PAC financiers paid for them to do, by voting for a billionaire, neofascist rabble-rouser from Manhattan.

The only industry that could have benefited from all the promises DT made during the election was the fossil-fuels industry, which is probably the source of much of his unknown campaign financing. Just the sort of people one would expect to be upset with the Obama administration’s lukewarm support for the ecology movement. Unless one decides to count high finance as an “industry”, with Trump promising to lower taxes on big business even more than they have already been lowered, including a near-amnesty for all the multinational American corporations who have been keeping all their profits overseas instead of repatriating them back to the USA.

After all, the only thing that those poor wage-earning Trump supporters have in common with a monster like him is their visceral hatred of political correctness, which to them only means acting politely all the time, like sissies. They actually thought that Trump was one of their own when he imitated a handicapped, female journalist on national television, when he denounced everyone who would not let him get away with treating women like sexual garbage, when he accused Mexican immigrants of being rapists and thieves, and when he supported the white policemen emptying their weapons into the backs of black people trying to run away from them.

Those poor saps enjoyed Trump’s barbarian behaviour because they like to identify with the big, tough character in the “Sixteen Tons” country and western song, constantly threatening lesser men on the street with his enormous fists if they do not scurry out of his way like mice. In their eyes, Trump is so normal and so genuine because he refuses to behave in a civilized manner. For them, acting politely is an establishment way of doing things, conveniently forgetting that the ultra-right-wing billionaires who secretly bankrolled the ultra-right-wing Trump campaign are just as disgusting in private life as they are in their business dealings.

How can anyone truly believe the trump-ster (rhymes with “dumpster”) when he makes as if he wants to do away with the branch-plant state, ruled by an international financial overclass, by tearing up all the not-so-free trade agreements that the USA has signed and/or negotiated over the past several decades? Does he not himself belong to that same world-wide fraternity of multinational bankers and corporate chieftains who benefit from those same agreements every time that they sue every government that dares adopt any social or environmental legislation that threatens to lower their profit margins, anywhere in the world? As for the poor, dumb, white voters who hate “the system” so much, did they not themselves vote for Ronald Reagan, the guy they still think was “the best president ever in US history”, who convinced Americans to return to free trade and to economic liberalism after several decades of economic nationalism and a minimum program of social welfare? The same policies that have been upheld by all the US presidents, republicans and democrats alike, since 1981. How can those same voters nowadays honestly accuse the establishment of imposing the same system that they themselves have supported for the past 35 years?

After all, if Trump really intended to enable the US government to regain its lost sovereignty, he would have promised instead to completely eliminate tax evasion by billionaire bullies like himself, not promise to increase it drastically. Why do those dumb white mostly-males refuse to recognize that he is in fact lying on an even more colossal scale than Hillary Clinton ever has? In fact, no ultra-rich investor would ever want to bring back the kind of 92% maximum taxes on large fortunes that used to prevail in the USA before the onset of neoliberalism. Just like all the other, fake anti-capitalist leaders of the past, the fascist dictators, the military dictators and the phoney communist (state-capitalist) dictators, his opposition to the dictatorship of private (laissez-faire) capitalism is as unreal as his completely bogus official opposition (!) to racism and to sexism.

It seems obvious that the millions of “poor white trash” in the USA who support populist gangsters like DT do so because of their masochism, and not because of their fake machismo. These are the same kind of people all over the world, who vote for government austerity measures because they have been convinced by the professional lobbyists that the only way to fight for jobs these days is to further increase the already historically-large income gap between the social classes. The truth is that the world’s largest investors are playing all the world’s governments off one against the other. Sometimes they decide to move to wherever they are being offered the lowest possible taxes on enormous fortunes, other times they simply pocket the investment incentives being offered to them by almost every government in the world, foolishly competing against every other government for those same non-existent, well-paying, industrial jobs.

Some of those lying lobbyists occasionally claim to be against the widening of the horrendous, world-wide income gap, while at the same time arguing that every single method ever advanced for reducing that gap can never work for some particular reason. They claim that protectionism is not the way to go because free trade has made every country much richer than before, conveniently forgetting once again that most of the new-found wealth of the past 35 years has gone to the top one percent of one percent (one ten-thousandth) of the world’s population. The same extremely well-paid experts also claim that a 15$ per hour minimum wage is not the way to go because it would reduce the overall number of jobs available, and therefore hurt the very people it was supposed to help. And so on and so forth: every time someone comes up with some method or another to reduce the income gap between the social classes, the experts always agree that it is not the way to go. No method of reducing inequality ever works for them, for the simple reason that they do not really want to help the poor and the powerless at all, but only to make sure that their billionaire idols go on dominating the whole world forever.

The US presidential election results also put the lie to all the big talk about “American values”, or “Western values” in general, things like belief in democracy, equality between men and women, racial equality, minority rights, and all the other righteous pretensions. What is so democratic about choosing between a tax-avoiding billionaire and a friend of Goldman-Sachs? If the losing half of the voting population supports feminism and the winning half opposes it, what does that say about overall support for sexual equality? What about the 50-50 popular-vote split between racism and anti-racism, or between xenophobia and tolerance? If the American people hate each other so much, is that not a reflection of their own self-hatred as a disunited people? If the USA is not any more in favour of Western values than the German people were during the dying days of the Weimar Republic, or the Italian people voting for DT’s buffoon-like, fascism-founding predecessor, what does that say about “Western values” as a political slogan?

To be sure, this does not at all mean that the political correctness that Trump supporters hate so much is really a good thing, just that their definition of it is so completely out of whack. Political correctness is indeed at work in another well-known example of collective masochism, namely whenever liberal-minded people in the West argue that we cannot let ourselves get too upset about the world’s most disgusting Islamic terrorists lest demagogues like Trump turn that “negative emotion” into Islamophobia. They claim quite reasonably that not all Muslims are terrorists, but then they transform that simple fact into its opposite by laying all the blame for the rise of Islamic fascism on the rotten treatment of Muslims by Western armies in dozens of Muslim-majority countries, as well as in Muslim immigrant ghettos inside North America and Western Europe.

The truth is that the Western empires and their ultra-conservative Muslim allies, like the Wahhabi government of Saudi Arabia, did indeed contribute to the coming into being of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, using islamism as a weapon in order to fight against the influence of both nationalism and communism inside most of the Muslim-majority countries. Muslim immigrant populations in the West have also been ghettoized just as much as have any of the other minority populations. But these contributing factors to the rise of Islamic terrorism do not by themselves explain the enormous recent increase in terrorist activity of Muslim origin. It is also true that every religion in the world also possesses its own ultra-reactionary, fundamentalist factions, like the Salafi movement within Islam, but the fact remains that only the Muslim religion is currently being afflicted by such a huge tendency to impose jihad terrorism on so many different countries. Why do the liberal-minded masochists try to prevent targeted populations from getting as upset as they have every right to be at jihadist violence?

The victims of that terrorism, who are mostly less-conservative Muslims anyway, should be able to denounce jihadism virulently without being accused of promoting racism. Just because Western fascists like Donald Trump want to kick all the Muslims out of their own countries does not mean that “Eastern” fascists like the Islamic State cannot be denounced in no uncertain terms by any of its victims. Nor is it “illegal” to point out that the Koran itself also makes its own contribution to the jihadi movement by containing a much higher number of disturbingly violent denunciations of non-Muslims than it contains verses preaching tolerance instead.

Which means that criticizing islamism is not the same as condoning Islamophobia, no more than criticizing Israel is the same as being anti-Semitic. Nor is it racist to point out that the true believers in all the world’s most conservative religious movements are themselves suffering from masochism, just like those poor-white Trump supporters in the USA. The Salafi and Wahhabi Muslims, at least those whose suffering is not forced on them against their will, voluntarily suffer tremendously from their own ultra-rigid, self-imposed ideology.

As in many other such extremist sects, like the Amish, the Mennonites and many of the other fundamentalist movements inside Christianity, or the Hassidim and Lev Tahor within Judaism, the women inside these Muslim movements suffer a great deal more than the men, being confined to exclusively “feminine” roles inside the home, forbidden to communicate with “outsiders”, as well as being obliged to wear extremely uncomfortable, cover-up clothing wherever they go out. Some extremist sects also suffer from ridiculous rules dangerous to their members health, such as refusing vaccination, or blood transfusions, or being treated by a doctor from (heaven forbid) the opposite sex. Or from refusing to educate their children about the modern world, rather than just having them memorize ancient religious texts. Not to mention observing completely outdated, ancient rituals concerning food consumption, and sometimes succeeding in imposing those rituals on non-believers in ultra-tolerant states, using such subterfuges as universal kosher labelling. Many states also subsidize religious education, even for “mainstream” religions, to the detriment of the non-religious population, which also suffers from universal tax exemptions granted to private religious buildings only.

Yet another variety of social masochism is the overwhelming tolerance currently being observed all over the world for increasingly dangerous acts of political, economic and social corruption. No matter how many such disgusting acts are carried out by the world’s leading elites in every country, none of the big shots involved ever seem to get anywhere near adequate punishment for the horrible things that they are constantly doing. All the media commentators treat all of this increasingly damaging and expensive corruption as if it was normal and inevitable, apparently believing that every time some well-placed individual has the opportunity to do something illegal, with a reasonable hope of getting away with it, it is unreasonable for ordinary people to expect that individual not to go ahead and do it. Nor is it useful to send the perpetrators to jail, whenever they are caught, nor to at least oblige them to resign and replace them with anyone else, because corruption is considered to be inevitable among such people.

High-placed leaders like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, for example, have never been punished in any way for invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, knowing full well that the reasons stated for justifying that invasion were complete fabrications from the beginning. The realization that the overthrow of Hussein led directly to the rise of the horrendous Islamic State movement does not seem to have had the slightest effect on either of their illustrious careers. Nor have the considerably less implicating, but nevertheless disturbingly similar, roles of such Western leaders as Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton and Alain Juppé in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, had any great effect on their careers, in spite of providing the Islamic State with yet another major region in which to expand its ultra-reactionary, imperialist influence.

It would be relatively easy to compile a list of several thousand other such examples of excessively misguided political hubris, in hundreds of different countries, that have taken place over the past few decades. What they all have in common is an extremely disappointing tendency not only among the perpetrators, but also among all the other leading authorities in the world, not to want to do anything about any of this kind of megalomaniac behaviour and exaggerated self-justification. Nor does there seem to exist any kind of credible, independent and/or popular tribunal to which cases like these could presumably be referred.

But geopolitics is hardly the only domain in society in which corruption has become endemic. None of the people involved in causing the extremely destructive 2007-2009 world-wide recession have ever been punished to anything near the extent that they ought to have been punished, given the enormity of their crimes. At the same time, none of the measures put in place ostensibly to make it more difficult for this kind of thing to happen all over again, have anywhere near the kind of severity that would make them really useful in any future disaster caused by financial corruption. Everywhere in the world, the people in power act as if whatever the world’s most corrupt investment bankers do is out of bounds to anyone wanting to impose any kind of genuine control on them. Ordinary people accepting this situation continue to vote for the same politicians who advocate letting all the bankers get away with all the damage to the world economy that they have so illustriously accomplished, so why would anyone still want to go after those monsters for real?

The tens of thousands of particular scandals concerning most of the world’s leading multinational corporations are also handled in the same mollycoddling ways. None of the executives of any those firms, whether they be huge automobile companies (Volkswagen), or pharmaceutical companies (Valeant), or pipeline companies involved in oil spills (Enbridge), or railway firms involved in oil-transportation disasters (CPR), or engineering and construction firms that did illegal work for Middle Eastern dictators (SNC-Lavalin), or mining companies ruining different ecosystems all over the world (Barrick Gold), have ever been punished either anywhere near to the extent that they have also damaged the real world economy.

None of the leading politicians involved in helping them cheat and steal and pollute on a massive scale, and worm their way out of every legal situation they find themselves in, not to mention subsidizing their “recovery” programs with public money, have ever ended up with long prison terms either. The former mayor of Montréal, Gérald Tremblay, the former premier of Québec, Jean Charest, the former prime minister of Canada, Jean Chrétien, are not in jail several years after having committed their crimes, and not about to be sent there either. Nor are the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, nor the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, nor the president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, nor the interim leader of Brazil, Michel Temer, who seems to be a lot guiltier of corruption than that country’s disgraced president, Dilma Rousseff, who he has recently replaced. Nor any of the other ultra-corrupt politicians in practically every other city, province and country in the world. Somebody ought to try making a list of all of these people, all over the place, just to show how incredibly long it would turn out to be.

Still another long list could also be drawn up, of all the different ways that journalists are being mistreated all over the world, all the way from the assassination of journalists being carried out in many different countries (Russia), to the large-scale jailing of journalists in many other countries (Turkey), and finally to the numerous cases of judges granting police warrants to spy on journalists all the time (Quebec). Judges in Quebec, and dozens of other places, also regularly go on temper-tantrum power-trips, and throw out criminal cases, even murder cases involving the Hell’s Angels, because the police or the prosecutors make dozens of mistakes, or take too long to bring people to trial, or whatever. The different kinds of corruption going on simultaneously in today’s world are probably more numerous nowadays than they were before, if only because the world’s population has expanded enormously in recent decades, therefore providing that many more opportunities for important people to do evil, in so many creative ways.

What the otherwise unrelated Trump fiasco in the USA, the false amalgam between criticizing islamism and contributing to Islamophobia, and the various different kinds of high-level corruption all over the world, have in common is popular masochism. Ordinary people everywhere are tolerating all of this disgusting overclass behaviour either because they have no choice in the matter, or because they let their own faults and foibles blind them to the fact that their “betters” are much worse people than they are themselves, and not at all deserving of their support.

Canadian exceptionalism and other ikons

I finally got around to reading James Daschuk’s book, Clearing the Plains: Disease, politics of starvation and the loss of aboriginal life, which caused quite a stir when it was published back in 2013. It is a truly informative and original history of the health of indigenous peoples over the past several centuries, in the Canadian plains that eventually became the Prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Daschuk’s main purpose in writing this book seems to have been to eliminate several important myths about the extremely high death rates suffered by those peoples not only during the colonial period of North American history, but also most emphatically during the early years of the “Dominion”, or “Kingdom” of Canada, from Confederation (1867) to the end of the nineteenth century.

Among the many myths destroyed by Daschuk’s research was the curious idea that there were no infectious diseases among native peoples prior to initial contact with imported European microbes during the colonial period. In fact, as Daschuk and several other researchers have shown, many of the common diseases from the “Old World” (Asia, Africa and Europe) did indeed exist in the “New World” (now known as the Americas), while others did not. However, those diseases that did exist do not seem to have ruined the health of those indigenous peoples nearly as much as the newly-introduced diseases, and the quite different, imported, strains of the older ones. Not only in “Latin” America (south of the current US-Mexican border), but also north of that line, the mortality rates of all the native Americans increased enormously during the colonial period.

Daschuk also demonstrated that in the case of the (future) “Canadian Indian” populations, those rates of mortality began their ascent long before initial, face to face, contact between the native peoples and the European fur traders who came to bargain with them. This was because microbes introduced into the Americas from the previously established Iberian colonies to the south made their way into the “Great Plains” of the future USA, and the future Canadian Prairies, much faster than the French or British fur traders. Those diseases often began pushing up mortality rates as soon as many of the indigenous peoples started using horses of Iberian origin to hunt bison.

Another one of the myths attacked by Daschuk’s research was the common pretension, often enunciated by uninformed people in our time, that the “First Nations” peoples currently living in the Canadian reserves, or US reservations, have always lived for the past several millennia in exactly the same regions where those reserves are to be found nowadays. To start with, there is the still not disproved possibility (ignored by Daschuk) that not all the indigenous peoples in the Americas were of exclusively Siberian origins, an idea which became the subject of heated controversy during the recent “Kennewick skeleton” controversy in the USA’s state of Washington.

More importantly, however, Daschuk showed that many of the native peoples (such as the Cree) living in the plains just prior to the founding of the Dominion of Canada were in fact native “refugees” from the boreal forest regions east of the Prairies, who had survived destruction much earlier from European microbes after having gradually developed their own antibodies. They replaced the much more unfortunate Assiniboine peoples, who had dominated the plains for centuries before the European traders arrived, but then succumbed very quickly, and almost completely, to those same microbes shortly after initial contact.

The idea that the indigenous peoples, before and during the colonial period, were forced by circumstance to move far away, mostly westward, from their regions of origin, has also been demonstrated by dozens of other historians, not only for the so-called “Indians” of the regions that became the USA and Canada, but also for the Inuit in the far north. One of those historians was Roland Viau, whose 1997 book on the Iroquois in the region that became central Canada and the north-central region of the USA, Enfants du néant et mangers d’âmes: Guerre, culture et société en Iroquoisie ancienne, I read shortly after it was published. In that book, Viau also pointed out that today’s “Indians” could not have been exactly the same ones as those established in any particular region several thousand years ago, not only because they were moving around all the time, but also because captured enemies in wartime, those that were not killed and eaten whenever they were brave enough to have induced “emulation”, were adopted instead as new band members to replace warriors killed in battle. With the inevitable result was that there was a great deal of biological “overlap” between competing bands, or tribes, even before they came into contact with any Europeans. Since reading that book, I also found out that women from enemy bands were often captured, and traded as slaves, among competing groups, which reinforces the overlap thesis.

Daschuk’s research also corroborated Viau’s point according to which the indigenous peoples in North America were by no means living on the land in the ecology-conscious way that they are often being described in utopian myths concocted nowadays. It seems that quite a few of the larger mammals were over-hunted and wiped out of existence in several different regions, long before the nineteenth century, when white hunters, especially in the USA, killed most of the plains bison for their hides, on a much more massive scale. Even though the Iroquois peoples, among others, also relied on extensive agriculture for their food needs, they apparently made their own contribution to the overall decline in game animals.

But the most important recent myth completely demolished in Daschuk’s book was the popular pretension that Canada has never been involved in anything like the USA’s extremely racist and violent repression, not only of Southern black slaves and sharecroppers, but also of their own indigenous peoples. Even though it is true that the great republic to the south undoubtedly killed off a lot more “Siberian-Americans” during its territorial expansion than did the constitutional monarchy of Canada, this was only because they encountered a much larger indigenous population than the considerably smaller groups then living in Canada.

Daschuk demonstrates very convincingly that the much higher rates of mortality on the Canadian plains, right after Canada’s 1870 takeover of the huge western region known as “Rupert’s Land”, were caused by direct Canadian government intervention. That region, officially run for two centuries before that on a charter granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) by the King of England, was given by the British government to the newly constituted Canadian “Dominion”, as part of Britain’s imminent military and political withdrawal from North America. Canada’s first prime minister, John A. MacDonald, who ran the country for most of the 24 years between Confederation (1867) and his death (1891), was also his own minister of Indian affairs, and sought to “clear the plains” of indigenous peoples in order to open them up to large-scale agricultural development by much greater numbers of European immigrants.

After the total disappearance of all the plains bison, MacDonald personally ordered his Indian agents to limit native access to vaccination against disease, that had already been introduced to the region by the HBC and some missionaries prior to the Dominion takeover. At the same time, he also instructed them to use the food weapon so as to force all the surviving Indians onto reserves and, once installed on those reserves, to withhold subsequent food handouts so as to not only reduce government expenditure, but also induce his indigenous “wards” to become self-sufficient in subsistence agriculture, deliberately isolated from any commercial contact with non-natives. The result was a colossal increase in native death rates, especially after MacDonald decided to intensify his repression in order to punish those tribes that had joined the abortive,1885 Métis armed rebellion against the Canadian government.

Daschuk’s decision not to write anything about that rebellion, nor about the previous 1870-1871 rebellion, both of them under the leadership of the French-speaking, Québec-educated, Métis leader, Louis Riel, is the only major weakness I have been able to find in his book. Though it is true, as he points out, that the military and political aspects of those rebellions have already been much discussed in Canadian historiography, it would have been very useful to his readers for him to have at least commented on how the politics of those rebellions fit into the overall picture of the deliberate destruction of non-European, or incompletely European, populations that he describes. By not doing so, he risked letting his readers assume that he may have been influenced by the kind of central-Canada (Ontario and Québec) bashing that is often encountered in western Canada. His account of the commercial war between the upstart, Montreal-based, North-West Company and the London-based HBC, for several decades prior to the latter’s absorption of the former in 1821, also seems to emphasize how relatively “pro-Indian” the British traders were compared to the Canadian ones.

Nevertheless, for historians of that period of Canadian history, Daschuk has made an extremely important contribution, not only to the history of the indigenous peoples involved, but also to the theme of nation-building. As was pointed out in his book, in MacDonald’s view the clearing of the plains was a necessary prerequisite to the implementation of his government’s 1879 “National Policy” of economic development, centred on three major prongs: the protective tariff favouring Canadian industry, huge government subsidies toward the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway (1881-1885), and large government expenditures on propaganda in Europe designed to convince hundreds of thousands of destitute Europeans to become farmers in western Canada. Among many other such writings, my own doctoral thesis (UQAM, 1991) on economic nationalism in central Canada between 1846 and 1885, has to be seen in a new light now, after Daschuk’s addition of a fourth “prong” to the National Policy, namely the deliberate destruction of what was left of the indigenous population in the Prairies.

Much more than Daschuk’s revelations about indigenous mortality prior to Confederation, it was his account of Canada’s own repression of plains Indians after Confederation that scandalized the many thousands of Canadians who read his book. None of those people could believe that liberal-minded Canada could possibly have done such a horrible thing. It was also very difficult for politically-correct Canadians to realize that their country had largely succeeded in hiding that story from public view for over a century after that, even though MacDonald himself had used explicitly racist language in public debate at the time, notably in the Canadian House of Commons. The myth of Canadian exceptionalism has always held that the European colonial empires were certainly guilty of racism and genocide, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, as was the USA, but that Canada had somehow avoided having done the same. Up until the publication of Daschuk’s book, most Canadians even managed to feel superior to the “much more racist” Australians and New Zealanders.

All this came at a time when Canada was also involved in a massive “truth and reconciliation” charade with all the country’s native peoples, from every Canadian region, who had also suffered since Confederation through the adoption of the residential schools program. Beginning with parliamentary approval of the highly paternalist “Indian Act” of 1876 and continuing right up to the 1990s, tens of thousands of indigenous children were taken away from their families and sent to various Christian schools in order to be “civilized” through deliberate attempts to deprive them of their “Indian-ness”. This, combined with several other ongoing scandals about the “Third-World” living conditions that have long prevailed on most of the Canadian reserves, and a long-awaited inquiry into the violent deaths of hundreds of indigenous women in recent years, does not make Canada look good, to say the least.

In this debate, it is not enough to argue, as some commentators used to do, that after all the “professional Indian” representatives of native bands rejected the Trudeau government’s attempt to do away with the “apartheid” of the reserve system in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Most indigenous leaders back then apparently felt that they had a much better chance influencing Canadian aboriginal policy from inside the reserves than if all of those still living on the reserves were simply merged into the general population.

In other words, Daschuk’s historical revelations could not have come at a worse time for Canada’s internal and external image as an “exceptional” Western country, governed by political correctness rather than by racism and repression. Daschuk’s research is even more damning than that of such other historians as Marcel Trudel, who was one of the first historians to demonstrate that many of the settlers during the French regime in Canada (1608-1763) also possessed slaves, which is another important “exception” to Canadian exceptionalism. One of Trudel’s books on that subject was translated and published in English, in the same year (2013) as Daschuk’s book was published.

Much more than Daschuk’s historical revelations, however, it is the agonized and astonished reaction to those revelations that is by far the larger story. For some peculiar reason, today’s Canadians seem to have forgotten that their country was simply a small part of the six-century long European conquest of the rest of the world (most of Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia and most of the islands in the world’s oceans). Given the extremely violent, explicitly racist and imperialist nature of sustained Western expansionism, it is hard to believe that any particular group of European settlers could have completely avoided all those characteristics.

Even many of the British officials who governed, or misgoverned, Canada prior to Confederation, such as Lord Elgin, also participated in the British domination of many other colonies, such as Jamaica and India (in Elgin’s case), as well as in economic satrapies like China (Elgin again). Several modern historians, such as Mike Davis, have also written extensively about the British use of the food weapon in India, where the number of victims was measured in the millions, rather than the thousands of victims among the eternally misnamed Canadian “Indians”.

In all the Western empires, the method of “divide and conquer” was also used over and over again, the various imperial leaders over the centuries temporarily allying themselves with one particular group of indigenous peoples against some other group, the better to further imperial ambitions. It made no difference to them if their allies changed periodically, one ethnic group being exchanged for another, one region, one religion or one competing empire, set for a time against another one, so long as their particular empire triumphed in the end. In western Canada, as in India, the Middle East, or wherever else, the idea always has been to never let any of the local populations unite in opposition to imperial domination. Not during the colonial period, and not during the more recent neocolonial period, either. Nowadays, the Western method of divide and conquer has also been passed on to several emergent, “Eastern” empires.

To be sure, downplaying Western imperialist ideological attitudes, as the Canadians have often done, is not any less biased than the attempts of some modern Third-World apologists to say just the opposite, often claiming that their own ancient civilizations or neolithic communities, prior to being conquered or dominated by the Western empires, were almost perfect, and indeed morally superior to any of the European civilizations. In reality, it is hard to find any human community, whether those referred to as urban-based “civilizations” or those known only as neolithic “societies”, that can truly claim any type of moral superiority. Not only nowadays, but also since forever.

In his book, Daschuk also attacked presentism, the often erroneous idea according to which today’s historians should not criticize societies or individuals in the past for doing things that were acceptable then, but not at all nowadays. Apparently, well-known Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson tried to lambaste Daschuk’s book for just that reason, in a piece written on the bicentenary (2015) of MacDonald’s birth. But Daschuk had already anticipated that kind of assault on his work, when he showed how MacDonald’s anti-indigenous actions and opinions were already being regularly denounced during his own lifetime, as not equal to the standards of the day.

Equally fascinating is the recent attempt by Phil Fontaine, the former Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, to get the United Nations to condemn Canada’s nineteenth-century attempt to wipe out all the Western native peoples as the “sixth official genocide”, after the Holocaust, Srebrenica, Armenia, Rwanda and Holodomor. Unfortunately for that official list, however, the real number of genocides in world history is much higher than five or six. It also includes the settlers attempt in the British colony of Newfoundland to get rid of the remaining Beothuks, that also took place in the nineteenth century. Not to mention the German attack on native peoples in Namibia in 1904-1905, an event that puts the lie to several journalistic attempts to classify the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire (1915-1916) as the “first genocide of the twentieth century”. Any serious attempt to list all the genocides in human history is a monumental task, as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn described it in their 1990 book, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies.

Unfortunately, all world history has not just been characterized by racism, imperialism and genocide, it has also been equally full of innumerable attempts to deny any wrongdoing. After rotten treatment of millions of people considered “inferior”, whether they be “inferior” social classes, the “inferior” female gender or an endless list of “inferior” minorities, myth making has always been the most important characteristic of all human societies. Which makes iconoclasm, not in its original sense of deliberately smashing other people’s physical ikons, as in the Islamic State movement’s breaking of “un-Islamic” statues and buildings in Mali, but in its modern sense of a deliberate intellectual “demolition” of previously unassailable ideological myths, as Daschuk has done for the western Canadian plains.

So, by all means, let us all continue to demolish every myth of every country, every religion and every ideology, most emphatically including literal belief in whatever was written down several centuries ago in some sacred text or another. More or less in the way depicted in the Lawrence of Arabia movie, in which the hero’s answer to a local leader’s claim that something or other cannot be done because “it is written”, the reply always has to be “nothing is written”. Honest research is what we need the most, not more myth-making.

One of the most interesting examples of the kind of attitude that needs to be adopted towards the deliberate invention of unreality is from René Magritte’s 1928-9 work called “The Treachery of Images”, which consists of a perfectly realistic painting of a pipe, followed by the caption “This is not a pipe”. In other words, the painting is only an image, a mere representation of a pipe, not the real physical object. Similarly, none of the patriotic, religious or ideological representations of reality are in fact real, they are only mythical representations. None of them deserves to be worshipped as if it were the real thing.

To take another example, in Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution in China, a photo of Mao or a copy of his selected quotations (“the little red book”), were both considered to represent Mao’s personal liberation of hundreds of millions of Chinese people from the horrors of Western (including Russian) capitalism and imperialism. A message that was conveyed at the time not only to the Chinese, but was also used to create true believers in Maoism in every other country in the world. However, that message was only another enormous lie, the reality being that Mao himself was one of the greatest villains in world history, in fact a self-appointed prophet of his own personal brand of imperialism.

The Canadian exceptionalism denounced in Daschuk’s book is yet another example of the enormous difference between a concocted myth about what happened in one particular place at one particular time (the birth of the Dominion of Canada), and what was really discovered about that time and place by one particularly iconoclastic, professional historian. Dozens of other examples spring to mind concerning the enormous differences between myth and reality in all kinds of other cases: the Islamic State’s “caliphate” pretending to carry out the will of Allah rather than just copying Genghis Khan’s barbarian slaughter of innocents, the “ten days that shook the world” when the Russian Revolution was supposed to have inaugurated an inevitable march toward world communism, the billion people who are all still counted as “Catholics” even though half of them have not been faithful to most of the Church’s most important teachings for at least the past sixty years, the patriotism of all the neoliberal presidents of the USA since Ronald Reagan who gave away two-thirds of their country’s industrial strength to “communist” billionaires in the People’s Republic of China. How many other such examples could any reasonably well-informed person come up with after a few hours reflection? Past and present, us and them, every human institution in the world has been churning out thousands of such unbelievable myths ever since human beings started believing in their own deliberate misrepresentations.

It was probably Douglas Adams who got the closest humanly possible to an accurate definition of intellectual iconoclasm with his “total perspective vortex”. We need to imagine ourselves being capable of fully knowing and understanding the consequences of every imperialist strategy that has ever been concocted over the centuries, and subsequently covered up, by the world’s richest and most powerful myth-makers. We need to get a complete picture of just exactly what is and has been going wrong inside every dominant or dominated society, before we can hope to be able to do anything about that. Incomplete (partial) knowledge, and incomplete understanding, only result in being partial towards, or being biased in favour of, those who have concocted the less well known and the less well understood acts of domination and submission.

There is no salvation

It seems to me that the main reason why so many people get all caught up in promoting some parochial system of belief, whether it be a religion, a secular ideology, or a philosophical point of view, is that they so often fall under the control of their own negative emotions, based primarily on ego-projection. In every culture and in every region, millions of people in today’s world, as well as throughout history, have succumbed to heteronymic interpretations of events that are not at all based on reason, or science, or well-researched analysis of the real world.

Most of these people get themselves trapped into identifying with unfounded passions that lead them far away from reality, into the mystical realms of philosophical idealism, convincing themselves that they have to “sincerely believe” in some kind of artificial construct that will presumably “give meaning to their lives”. They want to find something that they think will provide them with “the answers” designed to alleviate their underlying anxiety about the temporary and uncertain nature of the real world, as it is gradually being uncovered by scientific discovery. They seek “salvation” of some kind, any kind, to put an end to deep-rooted feelings of alienation and “incompleteness”, and provide them with a “sense of belonging” to some concocted, paranormal entity “much greater than themselves”.

They eagerly search for “something special” that goes far beyond a much more prosaic attachment to the ordinary human condition, socially and culturally evolving out of a strictly material universe. This seems to me to be the fundamental underpinning of what people mistakenly call “spiritual needs”, that is the desire of the isolated individual lost in an enormous and frightening universe, to locate himself or herself inside a much more comforting environment, similar to that provided to infants in the mother’s womb, or to adult infants who enjoy living in patriarchal societies.

Accepting the material universe as it really is, and the human race’s relatively small place in it, is not just a cartesian error of perception caused by pitting strictly negative, primitive emotions against superior reason. Positive emotions do indeed exist, as exemplified in any individual’s socialized participation in any particular civilization, or period of history. No one just exists all alone in the physical universe, and everyone always completely depends on being surrounded by millions of other people without whom he or she could never survive. But adopting myths that alienate any particular community from material or social reality threatens collective survival, more or less in the same way that poisoning the natural environment also threatens individual and group survival.

Positive emotions like the well-known “Aha! experience”, that occasionally brightens the lives of such people as research scientists, inventors and other genuine innovators, are also totally necessary for human societies to better their condition over time. The concept known as progress is still as necessary as it ever was, if it does indeed result in truly sustainable development, socially and environmentally, and not just in some temporary, parochial gain reserved for a small group of privileged people. Real progress is totally dependent on positive emotions and positive goals, thoroughly grounded in the real world, and not on some immaterial, extra-terrestrial phantasm or another.

What we need to do is to stop looking for salvation, which is to say unreal, artificial, anthropomorphic, unintelligent “ways out”, or false solutions to our problems that do not really exist anywhere in the universe. No one anywhere has ever been able to find any real evidence for the existence of such ideologically constructed entities as “Christian science”, or “Islamic science”, or a “mandate from heaven”, or a “level playing field” for capital investment, or a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, or any other kind of invented nonsense that is supposed to make all our problems go away all by themselves. Nor should we try to convince ourselves that any country nowadays, or at any time in the past, has ever come close to achieving any real democracy, or any truly “libertarian-communist”, socialist, or social-democratic society genuinely promoting the interests of ordinary people. All over the world, since modern capitalism (whether private capitalism or state capitalism) replaced previous systems of elitist rule, such as feudalism, all human societies have been governed for the almost exclusive benefit of elite investors. Which means that slogans like “democracy” and “socialism” are most often every bit as chimeric as any of the other false prophecies already listed.

Various governments in every region have often claimed to represent the majority of the people, but it ought to be obvious to everyone that at no time or place have any majorities, such as industrial workers, or service workers, ever had a government that always acted in their best interests. Instead, a very small minority of rich and/or powerful people have usually managed to rule the roost, no matter what the official belief system was supposed to be. Slogans like the ones cited above are all just concepts invented by clever professionals in order to misgovern masses of mainly downtrodden and exploited people.

Like the hundreds of millions of industrial workers in Asia, Africa and Latin America, who have largely replaced the industrial working-class in the West, in order to push labor costs way down and therefore to boost the profit margins of “post-industrial” financiers. These newer workers are better off than the hundreds of millions of other people in the former Third World who have remained poor peasants, but they do not earn nearly enough to justify their official inclusion in the “middle class”, which is just another false idea invented by pro-business politicians supporting neoliberal austerity. Once again, none of the philosophically idealist projections of ordinary political discourse exist as such in the real world. All of them have been made up by professional sycophants (lobbyists, PR specialists and other madmen from the artificial world of publicity). Even in “communist” countries like the People’s Republic of China is still officially supposed to be.

This was precisely the point being made in another little book that I read recently, Les passagers clandestins: Métaphores et trompe-l’oeil de l’économie (2016). This  book was written by Ianic Marcil, an independent economist specializing in social justice, who explains quite nicely how all the laissez-faire and neoliberal economists who have dominated that profession since the days of Adam Smith, have managed to invent dozens of completely unreal slogans to keep people from finding out what is really going on. Slogans like “the invisible hand”, “the law of supply and demand”, “general equilibrium”, “the creation of wealth”, “there is no such thing as a free lunch” and “there is no such thing as society”, were all designed to promote the idea that everything that big business does is necessarily good for everyone all the time.

The title slogan in that book, “free rider” (“le passager clandestin”), is most often used nowadays by austerity-minded governments to justify their incredibly arrogant claim that everyone (even poor people) have to “do their part” in order to “balance the budget”. While at the same time competing with each other to cut taxes way down for rich people, and then allowing all the world’s most important banks and multinational corporations to avoid paying even those taxes that still theoretically remain.

But my point about the invention of slogans to make problems go away by denying their very existence is not just confined to PR specialists from the world of official economics. Another book that I read recently, or rather re-read a newer version of an older classic, makes methodologically similar points about a very different subject, from a radically different point of view. This was Benedict Anderson’s incredibly well-researched book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, originally published in 1983 and updated in 2006. Unlike most of the other writers about the origins of nationalist ideology, with their common emphasis on a strictly European genesis, Anderson argues that nationalism started out in the (North and South) American colonies of the various European empires, before being adopted by popular movements in the rising European nation-states, then by the imperialist powers themselves, and finally by the anti-imperialist resistance movements in Asia and Africa. In other words, as I found out myself by doing the preliminary research for my own doctoral dissertation (UQAM,1991) on Canadian economic nationalism in the nineteenth century, nationalism came into being as a result of European imperial expansion into the rest of the world, and not just as a post-feudal ideological development within Europe itself.

But Anderson’s main contribution to our understanding of this extremely important secular religion is in fact quite similar to that of another one of my favourite authors, David Lowenthal, in his book, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1996). Both of these extremely well-informed authors emphasized the enormous contrast between the fake, or imagined, histories invented by the political elites of each emerging nation, from the fifteenth century onward, and the real histories of what genuinely took place during the development of each separate, nationalist ideology. What the “founding fathers” of each national identity claimed to be doing, as well as what each official interpretation of events currently offers in commemoration of each such national origin, are most often largely fictionalized accounts of heroic, patriarchal, ego-projections. The most well-known example being the thoroughly hypocritical “fight for liberty and freedom” that was waged against the British Empire during the “American Revolution” of 1775-1783, led by liberal-minded slaveholders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Another book that I read recently was even more radically different from the ones so far mentioned, namely Mathieu Bock-Côté’s Le multiculturalisme comme religion politique (2016). Bock-Côté is a relatively young, self-proclaimed conservative nationalist, promoting Quebec independence from a Gaullist perspective. Personally, I can see no reason why anyone would want to be a conservative nationalist, given the universal tendency of that particular point of view to identify with obscurantism on the one hand, and imperialism on the other. It seems to me that nationalism only becomes a positive force when it can be used as a rallying cry against someone else’s empire, in order to build a vibrant, productive, locally-based economy, and to ensure that everyone who resides within the borders of that nation benefits from universal, social-democratic programs aimed at instituting a successful redistribution of national wealth.

Be that as it may, Bock-Côté instead wrote a rather long-winded compendium of the points of view of dozens of well-known, conservative-minded French authors about the dangers of what they perceive to be the current politically-correct tendency in the West to downplay the cultural contributions of Western civilization, the European nation-state and the Enlightenment. According to them, politically-correct people concentrate instead on the promotion of the human rights of all sorts of minority groups, especially non-European religious and ethnic minorities living in the West.

Bock-Côté then tries to show that this multicultural globalization trend is nothing but a post-communist plot, a political invention of the “radical sixties” generation in order to help left-wingers get over their abandonment by the industrial working-class, that used to be so hugely important in all the Western countries. He writes as if he really believes that left-wing socialists and sociologists from the hippie counter-culture successfully took over all Western political discourse since the 1960s, and resolutely steered it towards a hegemonic, anti-colonial and anti-Western “third way” ideology, neither capitalist nor communist. As he describes it, these same deconstructionist demagogues also deliberately invented anti-racism in order to replace stable, republican democracy with anarchic, multiple-minority rule, subverting the social harmony of all the Western nation-states in the balance!

Incredibly, Bock-Côté was able to write 299 pages of this kind of vitriol before arriving at his first, very brief, mention of neoliberalism, that he rejects in spite of its official opposition to socialism, because it is also too materialistic, and indifferent to human passions as well as to historical traditions. However, dismissing neoliberalism in one or two sentences, in a 366-page book, is unbelievably naive and short-sighted. In reality, the globalization and the multiculturalism that Bock-Côté denounces all the time, were specific consequences of the rise of neoliberalism, the world’s dominant ideology since Margaret Thatcher first adopted Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek’s totally individualist worldview back in 1979. It was neoliberalism, much more than radical socialism, that invented all the tendencies that Bock-Côté hates the most.

More importantly, economic liberalism, also called laissez-faire as well as neoliberalism, was simultaneously “rediscovered” by the same finance-capitalist monetarists who broke the inflation crisis of the 1970s by raising interest rates 400% and thus deliberately creating the world-wide recession of the 1980s. All the other neoliberal policies (privatization of previously nationalized companies, government austerity for poor people, financial speculation, delocalization, removing the barriers to investment banking controls set up during the Great Depression of the 1930s, etc.) were then put into place in an ongoing attempt to enforce complete and total finance-capitalist control of the entire world economy. The result of which was the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the continuing stagnation of the world economy since then.

The globalization and the multiculturalism so disliked by Bock-Côté were not really part of any imagined, idealistic, socialist plot to take over Western society, they were much more a necessary part of a materialistic, capitalist “open conspiracy” to take over the whole world. Unfortunately, people like Bock-Côté still like to think in old-fashioned terms of philosophical idealism, as if political ideas come into being exclusively through the influence of creative thinkers, without any contamination by material considerations. These people deliberately ignore the fact that all the official religions and ideologies adopted during each succeeding epoch were really developed in order to serve the interests of rich and/or powerful people (slaveowners, feudal aristocrats, leading investors of private or state capital), dominating the poor and the powerless in various different ways.

The other major shortcoming of Bock-Côte's book was the total absence of any kind of comparison between “Western values” and those of all the “Eastern” civilizations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the first place, it ought to be obvious to everyone nowadays that none of the Western countries, not only the more powerful ones such as Britain and the USA that founded vast political and economic empires over the past several centuries, but also the less powerful ones (such as Canada and Australia), have never really been very convincing practitioners of the values considered to be “Western”.

These so-called Western values that many wishful thinkers would like to see become universal values at some point, such as political and social democracy, equality between men and women, separation of Church and State, protection of minorities, and so on, have only become important parts of official Western identity since the second half of the twentieth century. Besides having entered in varying degrees into both official and popular identity-definitions of the Western countries over the past several decades, none of those values have ever been systematically put into practice, not so much in any of the “homeland” countries and definitely not in any of the colonial or neocolonial regions that the West used to dominate, or still dominates nowadays. Most of those values have also been deliberately rejected from time to time in many Western countries, not only by countries like Italy and Germany during the fascist period, but also by thousands of very popular neofascist politicians and movements nowadays.

That being said, however, no one should think that any of the other modern civilizations, in the formerly colonial or neocolonial regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America, have done any better than the Western countries in either ideologically promoting, or truly observing, any of those same values. This is not just because, as several historians have claimed, that before the rise of Western imperialism many non-Western parts of the world were spontaneously developing “democratic” or “socialist” tendencies, that were then systematically destroyed by the Western invaders. In fact, when I was preparing and periodically updating my course on the history of the Third World that I gave for several decades, I got the impression instead that it would be closer to reality to claim that prior to the Western invasions, none of the non-Western neolithic societies or urban-based civilizations ever truly developed any of the so-called Western values mentioned above.

When I was also preparing and updating my course on the history of Western civilization that I gave even more often than the one on the Third World, I also got the impression that prior to the modern or contemporary periods of history, the European countries themselves never really came close either. Ancient Greek democracy, for example, was confined to only one or two cities, and lasted no more than a century and a half, hardly typical of the thousand-year period of Greek civilization prior to its forced incorporation into the Roman Empire. As for the Roman Republic, I was never able to find anything that justified the claims that some other authors made for the existence of genuine democratic tendencies there either. Instead, I agree with the revisionist historians that many of the traditional histories of Western civilization were often marred by systematic anachronisms.

Certainly, the Western empires during the colonial period of history did everything they could, officially and unofficially, to control or to crush any of the numerous attempts at rebellion against their rule, or what eventually came to be called the national liberation movements during the twentieth century. Towards the end of that period, there were even a few, usually feeble, attempts to eradicate what some people in the West now call “barbaric cultural practices” in the non-Western countries, such as the Hindu practice of sati. Since the nationalist elites replaced the imperialist elites at the end of the colonial period, many other attempts, sometimes less feeble, have also been made to get rid of many of those same practices.

Nowadays, many of those nationalist governments are still desperately trying to rid their countries of such abominations as using the death penalty to punish apostasy, forced marriages of young girls with much older men, slavery, excision, honour killings and a hundred other similar practices. In other parts of the former Third World, however, various different kinds of ultra-authoritarian, neofascist movements are attempting to turn back the clock again, imitating or anticipating similar ultra-conservative, fundamentalist movements in the West. These antediluvian organizations include the so-called Islamic State movement, but also well-established governments like the one in Saudi Arabia. The majority Muslim countries (Sunni and Shiite) are particularly afflicted with this reactionary disease, but such atavistic movements are also quite popular once again among some Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist populations, as well as among many other ultra-authoritarian, paternalist ideologies, of nationalist or ethnic origins.

It ought not to be presumed, however, that these barbaric cultural practices exist only in non-Western countries. Slavery, for example, was very much a part of most Western societies until relatively recently, much longer in fact than is usually admitted. Even today, various Western governments and multinational corporations are guilty of, or at least complicit in, allowing such practices to continue to exist in many different parts of the world, as well as among diaspora populations immigrating into the West from those same regions. But allowing such abominations to continue to exist inside relatively “enlightened” countries, or even to encourage such behaviour in order to falsely “accommodate diversity”, is a particularly dangerous and disgusting strategy.

Moreover, many Western countries have gone a step farther into iniquity by inventing some newer forms of barbarism, such as dropping bombs on civilian populations from the air. Since the beginning of the Second World War, Western countries have used it to kill many millions more people using this method than have all the other regions of the world put together. Since the end of the Cold War, a more sophisticated American method of killing people from the air, known as the drone, has also done a lot more “collateral damage” than is usually admitted.

Since 1939, the number of people killed by the West from the air, in various different regions, has only been matched by the number of Chinese people killed for political reasons within their own country, in much more prosaic, old-fashioned ways, such as provoked starvation, during the first three decades of the People’s Republic. But the equally barbaric food weapon has also been used even more recently, by the United Nations this time, under mostly Western influence, during the 1991-2003 “boycott” of the Hussein regime in Iraq. In assessing the impact of various different religions and ideologies on relatively recent world events, admitting the pertinence to the argument of such basely “material” developments as those given above cannot be arbitrarily excluded if we want to make any real sense of the whole discussion.

Given all these things, and others like them, I obviously cannot agree with Bock-Côte's decision not to include any of this background information into his analysis. The Western world does not live in total isolation from the rest of the world, not now and not in fact, ever, no matter how far back we go into history. Many of the conservative French authors he cited in his book were obviously very much influenced by the post-1945 influx of millions of former colonial peoples into much of the Western world, and by atavistic tendencies rising up (not always spontaneously) among those populations. In fact, the ultra-conservative writings and media pronouncements of all the Western reactionaries have influenced, and been influenced by, similar writings and public declarations on the part of all the world’s non-Western reactionaries. Each group of “radicalized” neofascist ideologues feeds off all the others, in a world-wide spiral of increasingly barbaric points of view, rushing down together toward oblivion inside that ideological black hole known as ultra-conservative populism.

As a result, I cannot agree either with Bock-Côte’s opinion that people nowadays should stop supporting the rights of minority groups so much, not only in the West but also in the rest of the world, in order to bring back the (fictitious) days of the harmonious nation-state. Neither Western neofascism nor “Eastern” neofascism, inside functioning nation-states or inside failed states, deserves anyone’s support. In my opinion, progressive people everywhere should be united in their concerted opposition to any of the different ways in which some human beings persist in horribly mistreating other human beings. So far as I can tell, it is still the divisions between the social classes that result in more suffering from needless death and destruction than any other kind of division, with gender divisions coming in a close second so far as causing much of human misery and mistreatment, while the rotten treatment of ethnic and religious minorities is only the third most important part of the analytical pattern. However, none of those “different kinds” of sadomasochistic social behaviour in fact separate out well within real-life situations, and are almost always all mixed up together. Fighting against one of them means fighting against all of them.

Unfortunately, it is often quite difficult to do that without getting bogged down in many different real-life situations. For example, when it comes to tolerating minorities, progressive movements and governments all over the world cannot simply bend over backwards trying to accommodate every exaggerated demand that people from every ethnic and religious minority that exists could possibly want to impose on them. Even politically correct people have to live with “radicalized” manipulation of minority populations and the often unintended consequences of adopting a naive attitude toward every possible demand.

The most obvious example of this kind of thing is the completely hypocritical and opportunistic strategy that has currently been foisted on unsuspecting liberals in the Western countries by the Islamist tendency, currently corrupting large and growing numbers of people all over the world. Those horrible people have quite explicitly opted to use the politically-correct rejection of “Islamophobia” in order to further their own neofascist agenda. On the one hand, they temporarily pretend to support the “rights of minorities” whenever they find themselves in a minority situation, as long as the only minority being accommodated is their own. At the same time, in countries where Muslims are in the majority, the Islamists there totally refuse to accept any tolerance of non-Muslim minorities among them, and instead try everything they can to get rid of those “foreign elements” forever, by driving them out of the country, or simply by killing every last one of them.

In other words, the international movement of Islamic-fascist organizations is not the least bit interested in any kind of universal tolerance of ethnic or religious minorities as a principle. What they want to do instead, and they have been extremely forthcoming about this, is to use the tolerance of minorities as a temporary slogan, whenever they feel that it is strategically useful to do so. Their ultimate goal, repeated over and over again on every possible occasion, is to take over the entire world, in the process hypocritically forcing everyone to become as Islamic as they are, and thereby doing away with all religious minorities forever. In that sense, they are a lot like the Nazi Party in Germany, before they took over that country, who used the liberal-democratic laws and judgements of the social-democratic Weimar Republic (1918-1933), until they (the Nazis) became powerful enough to do away with democracy altogether, for a time.

But the Islamic fascists are not the only ultra-authoritarian movement that acts in this fashion. “Radicalized” people in dozens of other ultra-right-wing movements, all over the Western world as well as all over the rest of the world, are also guilty of the same kind of strategy. Many Christian activists in the West also temporarily support minority rights for Muslims in the extremely dangerous belief that the Islamic militants within the Muslim minority will become “the thin edge of the wedge” for bringing Western societies themselves back to the kind of near-total religious domination that used to exist in all the Western countries several decades ago. These sorcerer’s apprentices foolishly seem to think that they can manipulate everyone involved toward bringing about some kind of future Christian victory over mankind, which is ultimately very similar to the apocalyptic Islamist phantasm.

The neoliberal movement is also playing with fire in the same excessively dangerous fashion. Not to mention dozens of other right-wing nationalist, imperialist/or and ethnic racists based in many different parts of the world. Completely self-centred thinking has also become much more popular than before, even among aboriginal, “First Nations” native peoples, like those in the USA and many other countries who reject even anthropological testing of recently-discovered, 9000 year old skeletons lest they reveal something that those obscurantists also do not want to uncover.

Once again, we unfortunately find ourselves in another period of history dominated by various religious and ideological reactionaries who want everyone else to conform to their own heteronymic ways of thinking. Increasing numbers of people all over the world are simultaneously trying to impose their own particular brands of reductionist “salvation” on everyone else, in a time when what all we humans really need to do is to develop genuinely universal values that are not based on one group’s domination over another.