The rule of law or the rule of class?

I read an article the other day in the Montreal newspaper, La Presse (May 13, 2017), about the rule of law. One of their regular columnists, Yves Boisvert, was trying to claim that the recently fired director of the FBI, James Comey, owed his allegiance to the US Constitution, not to that country’s ultra-egotistical president, because the USA is a democratic country, practising the rule of law. Unfortunately for Boisvert, and for Comey, “the rule of law” is really just another overworked expression, used by people who truly believe in the political ideology known as liberalism. Thoroughly convinced liberals contend instead that the rule of law has to be seen as some kind of absolute principle in all, self-proclaimed liberal-democratic countries. They obstinately refuse to recognize that it is in fact just another political slogan, like “the dictatorship of the proletariat” in self-proclaimed communist countries, or “the will of Allah” in the equally self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate.

In the real world, however, also known as “le monde tel qu’il est” (René Lévesque), expressions like “the rule of law” only work whenever some rich and/or powerful person, or group, wants them to work, but not at all whenever such a powerful individual, or group of powerful individuals, prefers to ignore them instead. It simply is not true that no one is above the law. No political document, such as the US Constitution or the Canadian Bill of Rights, whenever or wherever adopted, truly guarantees anything at all, but only possesses the force of persuasion that any particular VIP, or group of VIPs, allows it to possess. In other words, whenever it happens to be in the best political interests of some particular group of dominant people to follow that particular principle. While it it true that some countries apply such formulas more often than do other countries, since no country has ever been truly run by ordinary people, it is impossible to presume that any human institution of any sort will always do the right thing in every case.

Constitutions are always being interpreted differently from one powerful person to another, or even from one particular situation to another, during any given mandate. All over the world, constitutional “guarantees” are sometimes being observed, and sometimes being ignored, depending on which particular event is being analyzed. As many US citizens found out recently, when Donald Trump’s businesses were seen to be profiting from certain foreign emoluments, it turns out that even the article in the US Constitution prohibiting such emoluments has never been applied to any real situation since it was first written down. The written word only means something to people who want it to mean that particular something. It has nothing whatever to do with whether or not a given situation is more or less complicated than any other one. As Machiavelli pointed out several centuries ago, all political situations are always “complicated” by the fact that no VIP wants to be tied down to any predetermined course of action.

Unfortunately, no threshold exists beyond which it is impossible for some dominant individual, or organization, to go. In every case, not just in “failed states” or “straightforward” dictatorships, but also in self-proclaimed democracies, might makes right. The richer and the more powerful someone is, or some private or public organization is, the more that that individual or organization gets to ignore any kind of collective agreement. No matter whether it is just an “ordinary” collective agreement between a trade union and an employer, or a supposedly “much more important” UN Security Council resolution, or even an international climate treaty.

The only people who have to obey the law all the time are those who are too poor, or too powerless, to make their “equality before the law” plea heard in high places. Only “lesser” people cannot get away with ignoring any of the laws, established by their “betters” to keep them in their not-so-high places. For their part, higher-ups can pretty much do whatever they want. In some countries, even ruling-class people may have to maneuver a bit in order to get around theoretical restrictions, but the lesson of history is that they always manage to do so if they try hard enough. The rule of law is a lot like taxation, in that those who run the system can always find a way out of the maze.

This sort of thing is proved over and over again, all over the world, whenever some less fortunate person, or group of people, finds out that they simply do not have the money, or the clout, necessary to take someone to court and thus to obtain some sort of justice. Enormous differences in income or in social status make it impossible for most people to get anywhere near equal consideration in legal disputes. Even in the so-called rich countries, such as Canada or the USA, the vast majority of the population does not have anything like an equal chance, or an equal opportunity, to make their voices heard.

In the field of industrial relations, in particular, collective agreements are quite often ignored, much more often by companies, or by neoliberal governments, than by the unions involved. Some trusting souls try to argue that in certain countries, certain union appeals to the court system, to overturn some employer’s arbitrary decision, sometimes result in damages being awarded to some union. At least, once they have been accepted by a judge to have been in fact contrary to some collective agreement. Such cases, however, are quite rare, and in most of those rare cases, token damages are only awarded after the union has spent an enormous sum of money on litigation. Most of the time as well, such damages are only awarded twenty or thirty years after the litigation began, therefore rendering the final result totally irrelevant to the initial situation. Money makes the world go round, not principle. As the gospel according to Matthew tells it, the more money one has to start with, the more of it one gets later on, and the less one has in the beginning, even that small amount is eventually taken away.

Populist politicians all over the world, such as Montreal mayor Denis Coderre, honestly seem to believe that even traffic cops “belong to” their VIP employers, not that both low-ranking and high-ranking public officials are all supposed to serve the people together. In any particular situation, such as the disastrous floods that took place recently in and around the city of Montreal, such politicians are always heard proclaiming that “today is not about pointing fingers”, it is only about “coming together for the common good”. In other words, no one over a certain income level, certainly no one in power, is ever supposed to be blamed for anything at all, not today and not tomorrow either. So far as the VIP-serving legal system is concerned, the only people who should ever be held to account for their crimes are the ordinary John Does who always make up the vast majority of every country’s prison population.

In other words, the rule of law almost always turns out to be the rule of social class. This has become increasingly obvious in recent years, the news media in many parts of the world finally catching onto the fact that up-to-date “white-collar crime” has become a whole lot more damaging to society (and to the world economy) than old-fashioned “blue-collar crime”. The media have also started to catch onto the fact that white-collar criminals are much less often caught, or punished in any way, than the blue-collar kind. Some white-collar criminals, such as Bernard Madoff in the USA, have been sent to jail recently, in cases when their victims have included people even more powerful than themselves. But when the white-collar criminal turns out to be a billionaire “pillar of the community”, not to mention the president or the prime minister of some presumably liberal-democratic country, catching a crook suddenly becomes a whole lot more difficult. Even if caught red-handed, putting such a person in jail, especially for a period of time appropriate to the seriousness of the crime, is practically impossible.

Moreover, governments all over the world are constantly ignoring their own laws all the time. Almost every day, some journalist investigating some scandal somewhere or another discovers the existence of some obscure law that everyone had conveniently forgotten about ever since it was adopted. Governments are regularly being called to task for refusing to apply some law that they initially adopted five, ten, twenty or more years ago, in order to gain a lot of political mileage back then. Not actually implementing such laws later on simply means that legislation is often ignored in the same way as election promises are ignored once the election is over. Every day, international treaties are also being signed, without any guarantees that any of their particular clauses will ever be implemented. Big governments, like big businesses, have all been practising the art of “newspeak” (otherwise known as “alternative facts”) ever since they first came into being several millennia ago.

One of the more recent inventions in the long list of methods involving deliberate, official ignorance of the law has been the increasing inefficiency of the legal system in dozens of different countries. The recent trend of settling every possible difference of opinion between VIPs in court, and of corporate defence lawyers coming up with hundreds of increasingly complicated delaying tactics in every case, has bogged the “legal industry” down in totally unrealistic wait times. In Canada, the Supreme Court has come up with equally inapplicable guidelines, designating periods of months or years during which all cases must be decided upon, before being abandoned. Unfortunately, the only discernible outcome of such guidelines has been the freeing of hundreds of probably guilty criminals, including more than a few accused murderers connected to organized crime.

It should not be too difficult to imagine what that sort of thing has done to the already sufficiently undermined, liberal pretensions about the rule of law, not only in Canada but in most other places. This is in addition to all the social laws being ignored by certain immigrant populations, at least within the group of countries that allow any type of immigration to exist. The more tolerant countries often end up allowing such immigrant populations to ignore their own established laws, importing instead “barbarian cultural practices” from abroad such as female excision, forced marriages and the use of both modern and traditional methods to ensure that most families within those immigrant populations end up with thirty or forty percent more boys than girls. Most of those practices are also theoretically illegal in most of the home countries where such practices originate.

Even though, on the face of it, those practices seem to be impervious to social divisions within those communities, a deeper understanding of the social realities within such populations reveals that they are all symptoms of ultra-severe control over subject populations. Control ingrained for centuries in those selfsame populations by ultra-conservative VIPs who make Donald Trump look like a rank amateur by comparison. What initially seems to be an exception to the rule of social class triumphing over the rule of law, turns out to be merely the world’s most extreme example of that same VIP domination.

To be sure, the world might seem be a much better place in which to live if the rule of law really did triumph over the rule of class. Unfortunately, it does no one any good whatsoever to pretend that it really does.

Fake facts forever

Trump adviser Kelly-Anne Conway’s recent “invention” of alternative facts is not much of a discovery, since fake facts have been around just about forever. For at least the past 6000 years, since the first urban-based civilizations started setting up shop all over the world, ideological controversies have broken out between the aristocratic rulers of succeeding dynasties and rival empires. As well as between those same secular rulers and the equally aristocratic power bases constructed by the priestly elites controlling each succeeding religion, embedded within each one of those empires.

Over the centuries, those rivalries have generated millions of conflicting messages constantly being sent out, in every form of iconographic communication known to exist during each succeeding period of history, to firmly impress on every subject population just how much more glorious each ruler “obviously” was when compared with each real or potential challenger. In every part of the world, history has been invented, and re-invented, over and over again, the wealth and the power of each succeeding empire and religion always depending on its capacity to convince millions of ordinary people that the universe itself was created precisely so that each competing group of rulers could always demonstrate, beyond the shadow of any popular doubt, just how incredibly appropriate its control of everything important in their lives really was. As Percy Shelley pointed out so succinctly in his poem, “Ozymandias”, each succeeding message from each ruler was nothing but an enormous ego-projection, always based on constructed “facts” that did not really prove what they were intended to prove.

As far back as ancient Greece, more than 2500 years ago, the founders of rationalist philosophy first began attacking the foundations of all this official narcissism by emphasizing the colossal differences between natural, material explanations of reality and the faith-based anthropomorphism of traditional Greek mythology. This led directly to the well-known ideological showdown between Socrates and the Athenian rulers, who forced that early philosopher to drink poison as punishment for his alleged “moral corruption” of Athenian youth. A similar confrontation also took place many centuries later between the Italian Renaissance scientist, Galileo Galilei, and the equally powerful inquisitors of the Catholic Church. Not to mention the “monkey-trial” condemnation of American schoolteacher, John Scopes, for having illegally taught Darwin’s theory of evolution to high-school students in Tennessee back in 1925.

Science and religion have therefore been presenting alternative sets of facts for thousands of years, with more and more civilizations gradually joining in to add their own contributions to that ongoing war between competing visions of reality. Starting out in the physical sciences, this same conflict also eventually spread to most of the social sciences, non-scientific secular ideologies soon receiving the same skeptical treatment from the scientific community that all the world’s religious mythologies had previously received. In the scientific presentation of reality, no particular facts are accepted as such unless initial hypotheses, based on William of Ockham’s practice of presenting the simplest possible hypotheses first, are tested over and over again by independent researchers all over the world. All of them, or almost all of them, as a family of researchers, have to reach similar conclusions after confronting each successive hypothesis with multiple interrogations grounded in the observation of nature and the duplication of extremely well-prepared experiments. Only then do some of those proposed facts become real facts, at least until the next scientific revolution, instead of fake ones.

On the other hand, in religious discourse, or in any other unfounded ideological interpretations of presumed reality, true believers are expected to accept such outlandish concepts as, for example, the virgin birth of the son of God (Christianity), or as a second example, the “sui generis” formation of public virtue arising spontaneously out of private vice, “as if by an invisible hand” (Adam Smith). In all such cases, unnatural concepts like those ones are always given or revealed by some “higher power”, without any of those lazy people having to use the much more laborious scientific method. For its part, religious belief is based entirely on faith, which means, as Martin Luther explained it, the voluntary renunciation of human reason common to all truly religious communities. It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone that political concepts such as Conway’s “alternative facts” have a tendency to crop up nowadays especially in regions of the world most afflicted by the presence of large concentrations of religious fundamentalists, offering literal interpretations of sacred writings, such as the Bible Belt in the USA and similar areas of “rural idiocy” inside dozens of other countries.

Faith is also the main ingredient involved in the ideological concoctions of such secular religions as Adam Smith’s economic liberalism (founded back in the eighteenth century) and its current offspring, known as neoliberalism. In spite of its universal pretensions, most of today’s economic “science”, like “Christian science” or “Islamic science”, is still almost exclusively based on attempting to “prove” an assumption that is scientifically impossible to prove, like economic liberalism’s contention that the world’s largest accumulations of capital were gathered together in a humanitarian attempt to provide jobs for the unemployed! Rather than to admit that profit maximization and capital accumulation in reality have a lot more to do with the cynical erection of Ozymandian phallic symbols of egotistical, brand-name power, such as Donald Trump’s ubiquitous towers.

True believers in religious fiction, and other non-scientific alternative facts, are constantly being trotted out to provide enormous doses of competing varieties of ideological opium, in order to help unscrupulous political rulers control hundreds of millions of ordinary people, and keep them “in their place” socially speaking. Nowadays, all the world’s most important concentrations of wealth and power are always run by extremely “radicalized”, professional propagandists whose single-minded dedication to profit maximization and state power help “maintain order”, and ensure that democracy in any real sense is never allowed to take power and privilege away from those who are convinced that only they truly deserve to dominate others. Alternative facts are absolutely necessary, therefore, if one’s goal is to present authoritarian and/or totalitarian regimes as being somehow synonymous with freedom from social constraint and the tranquil practice of individual human rights uncorrupted by collectivist chimeras. Even in theoretically socialist and communist countries, such chimeras are only supposed to be gobbled up by ordinary working people, not by their “more intelligent”, elitist rulers.

A good example of “alternative facts” being used nowadays, “even” by anti-Trump forces in the USA, was the recent attempt by liberal scribes in that country to provide a diplomatic justification, to explain why American leaders over the past forty years avoided accusing the People’s Republic of China of committing highly successful currency manipulation. According to the liberal media, the USA’s laissez-faire attitude toward Chinese economic policy in the past was only adopted in order to help that country enter peacefully into the “international community”, led by the USA, and therefore to contribute greatly to world economic and political progress. The real reason for that deliberate policy vacuum, however, had nothing to do with promoting democracy or development. It was done simply to encourage the use of cheap foreign labour, making thousands of billions of dollars more money for unpatriotic American investors, by reversing the tendency that US workers had developed before the Chinese onslaught, towards improving their overall wages and working conditions. As Calvin Coolidge pointed out back in the 1920s, “the business of America is business”, it has nothing to do with making the world a better place in which to live for “inferior” people. In the real world, neither the liberal-Democratic nor the conservative-Republican tendencies within American politics are genuinely concerned with democracy as such, but only with its usefulness as a manipulative slogan to help out their respective friends in the business community.

I got my own introduction to the use of alternative facts 50 years ago, in April of 1967, when I was arrested along with several other people, for trying to burn a US flag during an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in Toronto. When my arrest came to trial, the police attempted to present the burning of that flag as a crime, not because there was any law in Canada about committing such a symbolic deed. Instead, their take was that burning that foreign flag could have become a public danger, setting fire to the flowers growing in the concrete bins the city had planted in the median separating the four lanes of traffic on University Avenue, next to the US consulate! Which only goes to show, just like in the previous example, that the reasons why people in power claim to be doing whatever they are doing are not always terribly convincing, in spite of their self-proclaimed tendency to describe themselves as generally more intelligent than everyone else. Nowadays, Donald Trump has been coming up with dozens of similar explanations for his own erratic behaviour, that are not any closer to reality than the arguments invented by the Toronto police force during the incredibly violent Vietnam War, most of whose millions of victims were killed from the air by US forces.

Which does not necessarily mean that people opposed to the current domination of most of the world by private capitalism are always less inclined to use alternative facts in their own propaganda. I just finished reading a recently-published book by Gilles Morand, L’époque était rouge: Militer au Québec pour un avenir radieux dans un parti marxiste-léniniste, about the five years he spent as a young man in Quebec during the late 1970s and early 1980s trying to help build the Workers’ Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), before it fell apart shortly thereafter. He was one of several hundred young people lured into one of the tiny ultra-communist groups in Quebec during that period, some of whom sincerely thought that they could actually bring about a radiant new future for the Canadian working-class. Most of them ended up following the teachings of such people as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, while others accepted the first three guys, but substituted Trotsky for both Stalin and Mao. None of those groups ever got anywhere near their intended goals, their main effect on the history of Quebec probably being to slightly diminish the nationalist influence of the Parti Québécois prior to and during the 1980 referendum on Quebec sovereignty.

As Morand himself points out in his book, Marxism-Leninism was only a pipe-dream in North America, even during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the subsequent liberal-communist alliance during the latter phase (1941-1945) of the Second World War. Nevertheless, militants like him did manage in a few cases to get themselves elected, sometimes openly, into positions of trade-union leadership among select groups of real workers, even during his period of militancy. In his case, it seems that he actually managed to contribute to a successful union campaign for job-site safety in a munitions plant in the city of Valleyfield, well-known at the time for frequent explosions that killed several workers. For awhile, according to his account, the workers managed to force the company to drastically change its extremely unsafe practices that had caused those explosions. Later on, however, the collapse in union militancy throughout North America during the rise of neoliberalism (starting in 1979 and continuing to this day), that also contributed to a decline in the already-weak popular support for socialism and communism, resulted in the subsequent return of traditionally lax company attitudes toward on-the-job safety.

I remember reading several newspaper reports back then about how industrial safety was strengthened in Quebec throughout the 1980s, but I strongly suspect that any decline in industrial accidents and deaths during recent decades, in any of those industries, was caused instead by the closing down of most of the important factories in Quebec, and in the rest of the Western world, because of delocalization and de-industrialization. Nowadays, after several decades of neoliberalism, on-the-job deaths are definitely on the rise again in Quebec and in most other places. Many new deaths are also being caused by increasingly unsafe conditions in the transportation of dangerous chemicals, as in the 2013 deaths of 47 citizens in the village of Lac-Mégantic, when a petroleum train left unattended wiped out most of the downtown core. As was the case in Valleyfield almost forty years ago, most company officials and their government allies are blaming that “accident” on negligent workers, rather than on their own corporate negligence.

Government and company promises to re-route the train tracks around the village, rather than right through it, have been totally ignored since that horrendous event and it certainly does not look at this point in time that anything will ever be done, anywhere, to prevent any future “incidents” of this kind. Union militancy in Quebec may still be slightly greater than elsewhere in North America, but it remains a shadow of its former self. Part of the problem, as in most of the other continents, is in the much greater efficiency of today’s “alternative facts” in inducing everyone to accept their fate, most of the time, without getting terribly upset about supposedly “inevitable” accidents, or any other negative events. The problem with that attitude is, as it always has been, that most of the world’s “accidents”, including “ordinary” car accidents, happen for a reason. Quite often, they are nothing but “accidents waiting to happen”, caused by “collective” (i. e., official) negligence much more often than by individual negligence.

To be sure, a large part of the forty-year decline in on-the-job militancy, in most parts of the world, was also caused by the tremendous hypocrisy of totalitarian communism. The Leninist “dictatorship of the proletariat” has always been just another slogan invented by professional liars every bit as cynical as Donald Trump, long before he or his favourite groupie, Kelly-Ann Conway, were ever born. None of the Leninist governments in the world have ever been anything but State-capitalist caricatures of private capitalism, government bureaucrats simply replacing the private bureaucrats of “regular” capitalism, and behaving just as badly toward the 99.99% of the population who do not belong to the privileged minority.

I visited the incredibly beautiful city of Prague recently as a tourist and went to their “Museum of Communism”, set up not so long ago by an ultra-right-wing American political science professor whose ludicrous display of primitive anti-communism was just as insanely one-sided as the equally dumb-ass, pro-Soviet propaganda that the Czech communist regime was displaying during its period of totalitarian power. Neither the official communist point of view presented in the displays, nor the official anti-communist point of view written on the side panels in that museum, would help any intelligent person figure out why anyone in his or her right mind could ever be so asinine as to support either one of those two completely unrealistic systems of belief.

How are we supposed to choose between the Bhopal “accident” of 1984, in an American chemical factory situated in India, and the Chernobyl “accident” of 1986, in a nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine? In what way has the world improved since the fall of totalitarian communism, if similar “accidents” are still killing thousands of people in countries like Bangladesh, which specializes in making textile products for Western companies? As if this was not already a big enough problem, in tragically real terms even more than in the illicit use of propaganda, it has also been complicated a bit further recently by Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, getting into the act. Her own line of clothing, produced in the same incredibly hypocritical, Third World sweatshop conditions as the clothing lines of all the other foreign producers, turns out to be in total contrast with her own stated goal of trying to help salaried women “liberate” themselves from their own self-imposed wardrobe limitations. She does not seem to be terribly worried about the rather more serious “shopping issues” of the severely underpaid women she exploits every day.

The total contrast between ideology and reality not only applies to all the propaganda debates between private capitalism and state capitalism, it also applies just as much to the current propaganda exchanges between “Eastern” and Western varieties of neofascism. The National Front party, for example, is once again threatening to take over the French Republic with its incredibly unrealistic claims to help reverse the neoliberal, globalization trend in the European Union by re-imposing an old-fashioned, “united Gaullist” vision of an exclusively Western-Christian France. Apparently, they intend to achieve that goal by simply expelling all the corrupting immigrants from the Muslim countries and Eastern Europe (especially the Roms). Neofascism is indeed a lot worse than neoliberalism, but neoliberalism is definitely part of the problem, because it has succeeded quite admirably in making neofascism popular again.

Which plays quite nicely into the hands of the radical Islamic denunciation of Western ethnocentrism, promoted by such movements as “Les indigènes de la République” in France, who do not think that “racialized minorities” such as Muslims or Black people living in the West should have to live up to the same standards as their White, European-origin, counterparts. They think that Black women, for example, should be “allowed” by White feminists to spend a lot more money on beauty products because White racists have always thought that Blacks could never be beautiful. They also claim that Muslim women in the West should not be criticized for wearing symbols of female oppression, such as the hijab, because they are only wearing such garments to push back against White-racist rejection of their Islamic culture. The same organization also believes that it is quite all right to accuse the cartoonist victims of Islamic terrorism at Charlie Hebdo as “Zionists”, to condemn all forms of “deviant” sexuality, and to oppose inter-racial marriages for reasons of cultural preservation.

In reality, those reactionary people are simply using “reverse racism” to slightly disguise their own “Eastern” forms of neofascism. Even White judges in Western countries, for example in the Canadian province of Ontario, are also (astonishingly) guilty of the selfsame “reverse racism”. Especially when they deliberately give lighter sentences to wife-beaters and to spouse murderers of Black or of indigenous origins, than to Whites convicted of similar crimes, in order to “compensate” for the negative effects of White racism on minority males.

In the final analysis, all the competing ideologies mentioned in this text, such as religion, neoliberalism, State capitalism and neofascism, are merely non-scientific manifestations of competing varieties of philosophical idealism. Each “ideal” world-view tries to substitute invented (manufactured) facts for natural (material) facts, always trying to impose its projected will or wish fulfilment not only on reality, but also on all the other, competing visions. Ideological history then becomes nothing else than a kind of vector analysis of the relative strengths of all those competing forces, at any particular place or time. According to each one of those ideologies, the best possible situation that professional ideologues can provoke is when the perceived contrast is greatest between material reality and idealistic projection, provided that the latter wins the day in spite of everything.

An example of such a “perfect” confrontation would be showing of a group of jihadists preparing to cut off an innocent “unbeliever’s” head, while forcing their victim to recite the verses in the Koran that proclaim that Islam is one hundred percent opposed to the massacre of innocent people. The violent contrast between what is really happening, Islamists deliberately killing an innocent person, and their religious projection of its idealistic opposite, “this is for Allah and not just to make us feel like dominant males”, then becomes the highest possible realization of “alternative facts”, for that particular ideology. Much in the same way as what happens when a rapist’s lawyer succeeds in getting him off by arguing that the victim “provoked” the rape by wearing a short skirt, or something to that effect.

What is important to the fabricator of fake facts is total success in imposing his or her will on reality. Not only must the victim be successfully victimized, but he or she must be seen to be “enjoying” or “agreeing with” his or her own victimization. This is what the psychopathic behaviour of every successful ideologue depends on, getting each individual and society as a whole to accept the turning of reality on its head as being “normal”, and to condemn material reality itself as being the pathological interpretation of events, instead. Total victory for passionate untruth.

People should therefore be proud of such abominations as ethnic imperialism, religious fundamentalism, capitalist exploitation, tax evasion, elitist “communism”, neoliberalism, neofascism, "reverse" racism, sexist “equality”, and all the other different kinds of alternative facts, rather than being proud of their undying opposition to any of those things. All the theoretically opposite varieties of reactionary behaviour have precisely the same roots, which is to say doing the most violence possible to the largest possible number of innocent people, with the added pleasure of getting them to admit that their suffering is, after all, only for their own good. Which is why apologists for evil always run around proclaiming that everyone is equally guilty of every sin, and not just the obvious perpetrators.

Religious culture and neofascist ethics

I just finished reading a book about a compulsory course, or rather program, called “Ethics and Religious Culture”, that has been imposed on all primary and secondary students in Quebec since 2008. The book, La face caché du cours “Éthique et culture religieuse”, (literal translation: (The hidden face of the course on “Ethics and Religious Culture”) was published in 2016 and edited by Daniel Baril and Normand Baillargeon. It is in fact a series of a dozen critical essays, written singly or collectively by a total of 14 different authors, seven of those texts severely criticizing many different aspects of the ECR program and five more texts proposing different ways of replacing that program with something much more appropriate. Most of the authors are Quebec educators, philosophers and freethinkers well-known for their support of laicity, secularism and critical thinking.

Another contributor, Sylvie Midavaine, is a teacher and freethinker from France whose text describes the various different ways by which France’s historically rigorous separation of Church and State (since 1905), particularly in that nation’s schools, has been undermined recently by revisionist consultants like Régis Debray. Since 2001, while pretending to do a better job of teaching students about religion, as an ordinary fact of life, those revisionists have really decided to promote religion as a remedy for current social problems instead. The other non-Québécois contributor, philosopher Christopher DiCarlo from Ontario, suggests that every Canadian province, including Quebec, should reject any program similar to the one adopted in Quebec, and replace it with a much more progressive program aimed at teaching critical thinking instead, that has recently been developed, and approved, for secondary schools in Ontario.

The main argument of the ten essays focused on the Quebec program, is that it is an enormous step backward for that province’s schools to have reintroduced religious education only eight years after they were finally liberated from the grip of the previously existing Catholic and Protestant school boards. Even though Quebec replaced its largely private, Christian school system, originally adopted in 1875, with a much more modern, state-run Ministry of Education back in 1964, an enormous effort still had to made to overcome all sorts of complicated constitutional hurdles protecting the denominational school boards up until the year 2000.

For a brief period of time, parents in Quebec had a choice between registering their children in a traditional religious course, or sending them instead to a non-religious, “personal and social development” program. During the opening years of this century, however, the highly emotional political debate concerning to what extent Quebec should accommodate an ever-increasing number of demands for special treatment in public institutions, coming from several different kinds of fundamentalist religious groups, spilled over into the education sector. Even though the Quebec government initially promised that it would not promote religion openly, but would adopt a more neutral approach, it decided instead in 2008 to introduce the “Ethics and Religious Culture” program into all of its schools. This compulsory course has in fact eliminated all pretences at overall government neutrality toward religion.

For example, in the “ethics” part of the program, children are taught that whereas in the past Quebec society was heavily biased in favour of men (sexism), nowadays gender equality has been accepted as the new norm. However, in the “religious culture” part of the program, the whole idea of sexual equality is totally ignored in the textual part of the manuals made available to teachers, while the very numerous illustrations used in those same manuals almost always show girls and women engaged in “traditional” occupations like cooking and cleaning, rather than in going to work every day like the men do. The same misogynist bias also shows up in practically all the projects being proposed to pupils, in order to get their grades. The number one preoccupation of the authors of those manuals seems to be to studiously avoid all possible criticism of the traditional religious bias against gender equality. The refusal to criticize any religion, in any way at all, supposedly being justified by the need to present every religion in an entirely “positive” light, so as to naively make every religious community “feel good” about every other religious community. All teachers are instructed to always promote the slogan “vivre ensemble”, in other words “live together (harmoniously)”.

The authors of the essays directly criticizing the ECR program have come up with hundreds of examples taken from that program to show just how incredibly biased it is in favour of religion, particularly in favour of the more fundamentalist interpretations of each designated religion. The program is heavily focused on the Christian religion, and only uses references to the Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu and indigenous religions in a vain attempt to appear unbiased, while making no reference to such other religions as Confucianism or Shintoism. No attempt whatsoever is made to accommodate unbelievers, who according to recent polls make up about 12% of the total Quebec population. Nor does the program take into account the fact that most of the people in Quebec, from every religious community, are only “cultural believers”, who say that they belong to some particular religious denomination, such as Catholicism or Sunni Islam, for reasons of cultural identity, but who are not the least bit interested in actually practising whatever religion to which they claim to adhere.

As in the religious accommodations debate, the Quebec government has been heavily influenced by such anti-Enlightenment philosophers as Charles Taylor, Canada’s number one advocate of multiculturalism, as well as by a large number of like-minded civil servants in the Ministry of Education, left over from the previously existing, confessional administration. Taylor and his followers believe that Western civilization made a major mistake after the Middle Ages by going back to the ancient Greek philosophers rejection of religion in favour of rationalism and critical thinking, then going on to develop modern science instead. They are convinced that a major emphasis on traditional spirituality is the only way to save every separate culture from the moral and social “collapse” that they feel is inevitably brought on by the loss of traditional cultural landmarks. They also believe that each religious community should always remain entirely separate from every other such community, even when living side by side, and that all such communities should not allow any impious elements to try to foist any possible universal or secular values on any of them.

In other words, Quebec’s ECR program has become a sort of “moral rearmament” policy aimed at saving society from materialist perdition, in the same hypocritical way that the ultra-conservative, and ultra-corrupt, Duplessis government tried to promote a similar, ultra-Catholic, political program during the “Grande Noirceur”. Which is to say, during the “dark age” of Quebec history, at first from 1936 to 1939 and then from 1944 to 1959, when Maurice Duplessis was the provincial premier. In a recent article in Quebec’s Le Devoir newspaper (March 19, 2017), doctoral student Jérôme Blanchet-Gravel also referenced Taylor’s multiculturalism as being quite similar to the “total renovation” of Western society that was being proposed several decades ago by such reactionary thinkers as René Guénon, using traditional, religious-identity attitudes imported from Oriental countries in order to save the West from its supposedly unfortunate modernism.

For Daniel Baril, the ECR program also closely resembles Isiah Berlin’s “Counter-Enlightenment” philosophy, which treated all possible points of view as if they had equal value. I would add that many aspects of the program also seem quite similar to the efforts being made nowadays by the recently elected Trump administration in the USA, using slogans like “alternative facts” in order to appear to give minimal support to physical science and technology, but only for the defence industry, while rapidly eliminating all the social and biological sciences, as well as the humanities, and replacing them with a massive return to old-time religion. From a scientific point of view, however, religious belief in totally imagined heavenly fathers and heavenly mandates in fact possesses about the same degree of (in)credibility as belief in magic and other paranormal nonsense. Which is entirely different from the rigorous testing of hypotheses through observation of nature and experimentation that are the hallmarks of modern science. Expressions like “Christian science”, “Islamic science”, “a democratic Jewish state”, and so on, also have to be seen for what they really are, that is as propaganda attempts at deliberately confusing fact with fiction.

Another major shortcoming of this program, that was also thoroughly denounced in the book, is its ridiculous attempt to present morality as if it were entirely dependent on religion. This is another incredibly bogus idea, which seems strangely out of place in today’s world, when innocent victims are being massacred every day, all over the world, not only by hundreds of thousands of paramilitary religious fanatics but also by their regular-military enemies, constantly bombing civilians from the air instead of confronting the terrorists head on. Any serious student of history, as well as of current events, has to laugh out loud at any suggestion that religious ideologies could possibly have anything whatever to do with improving the world’s overall level of morality. This is equivalent to trying to suggest that the totalitarian communist program of “militant atheism” turned all the former communist (or state-capitalist) countries into bastions of moral superiority. Today’s most important, proselytizing ideologies, neoliberalism and neofascism, are just as bad, or even worse, from a moral standpoint.

The entire thrust of Quebec’s ECR program seems to be aimed, as essayist André Gagné pointed out, at “radicalizing” as many young Québécois as possible, turning them into out and out, raving-lunatic, religious fanatics. His solution, teaching the history of religion instead from an uncompromising, scientifically accurate point of view, is an excellent idea since it would certainly discourage the formation of fundamentalist extremism, rather than encouraging it like the present program does.

As I pointed out in the article (“Gare au racisme raisonnable”) that I published ten years ago (September 16, 2007) in the Quebec newspaper, La Presse, there are already far too many true believers in religious fundamentalism, spread out all over the world. Millions of people in the West are already reacting in a “racialized”, Islamophobic way toward Muslims, treating every Muslim as a terrorist and refusing to recognize that most of the world’s Muslims are in fact “moderate” or “cultural” believers, rather than fanatics. Millions more people in the Muslim-majority countries have also been reacting for quite some time in the same, “racialized” fashion toward Christians (“Christianophobia”), Jews (anti-semitism) and all the other religious minorities in their midst (such as Yazidis or Druzes). Millions of Hindus in India are also reacting to religious minorities in that country (Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, etc.), in the same “racialized” fashion. The same thing goes for Buddhist majorities treatment of their own religious minorities in predominantly Buddhist countries and Jewish treatment of their minorities in Israel. And so on and so forth, all over the world.

The last bloody thing that this world needs now is yet another country (or province like Alberta) deliberately fomenting religious fanaticism inside its education system. Every neofascist country and movement on this blighted planet, from the USA to Turkey, from Hungary to Myanmar (Burma), from Russia to Malaysia, from Brazil to Nigeria, from Bangladesh to Australia, needs to turn its public schools into another crucible for fundamentalism even less than it needs to embark on such equally reactionary projects as building a new, or much-expanded, nuclear-weapons, or fossil-fuels, program.

The world-wide identity politics sweepstakes

The most curious observation that can be made about today’s world is that at the same time it has never been so intensely globalized, it has also never witnessed such an enormous outpouring of identity politics. All over the world, every single identifiable group of human beings is currently involved in a sort of undeclared, international competition aimed at asserting each and every cultural and/or ideological form of separate identity that currently exists.

For the past several thousand years, our species was initially concentrated on spreading out all over the globe, gradually establishing hundreds of different cultures, religions, empires, nations and political traditions, some of which have disappeared along the way, but many of which still attract deeply-felt pledges of allegiance nowadays. In some of those cases, certain traditions have managed to cooperate with each other and to settle down in adjacent spaces without necessarily being involved in violent conflict. During those same years, however, many other competing world-views have also been periodically going to war with each other in order to control disparate clumps of imperial territory, as geographical bases of operations for several of those intensely diverging ideological outlooks. To the extent that historians have been unable to find any single year since the beginning of recorded, or reconstructed, time during which several different clusters of people, in several different parts of the world, were not bashing each other’s brains out for some expansionist, identity-oriented reason or another.

Now, all of a sudden, the human beings belonging to all those diverging orientations have woken up to a brave new world of advanced communication systems that put every kind of separate existence into constant contact, and quite often reiterated conflict, with every other competing form of identity. Each existing variety of group togetherness currently feels obliged to project its own version of humanity onto every other version, all of them simultaneously trying to prove each one’s supposedly inherent superiority over every other definition of togetherness.

Nevertheless, I do not think that there would necessarily be anything wrong with such a world-wide competition between competing identities if it was conducted in a civilized way, and if at least some of the participants tried to put the accent on at least a few more progressive points of view, instead of constantly emphasizing dozens of more atavistic outlooks. It would certainly be a lot less demoralizing if at least some of the identities being projected were not exclusively based on dominating the rest of the world.

In order for concerned citizens to keep track of every relevant debate between all the different kinds of extant identity, I therefore propose that some group of dedicated people with considerable resources set up an official, world-wide, identity politics sweepstakes. This could work more or less along the lines of Amnesty International’s numerous, and most of the time entirely justified, denunciations of the rotten ways in which political dissidents all over the world are so often being mistreated by various reactionary regimes and authorities. The language that AI uses in its denunciations is almost always oriented in a hierarchical way, indicating to what extent that organization feels that the targeted regime has transgressed. Going all the way from relatively mild imprecations in some cases, to total condemnation in those other cases in which many different, antediluvian regimes completely refuse to recognize the very existence of any individual or collective human rights whatsoever. Unfortunately, we do not hear very often from that source about governments or movements that have been exemplary in their peaceful recognition of dissident opinions.

An even more obvious example of how one could go about setting up such an official log-book of identity politics would be to adopt something like Transparency International’s list instead. That organization explicitly (though not always perfectly) classifies countries in a top-down fashion, going all the way from the world’s (relatively) most honest and above-board countries to the world’s most opaque and dishonest governments. But in order to adapt such a list to the much more complicated world of identity politics, the people working on such a log-book would first have to take a long time scouring the world media in order to identify all the different kinds of human identity currently being propagated. Unlike Amnesty International or Transparency International, the kinds of propagated clusters involved in identity politics certainly include regimes and governments from all the world’s countries, but go far beyond those to also include cultural, religious and ideological entities within each country, as well as many others that transcend established national borders in many different ways.

All the world’s major religions, for example, are divided up into dozens of different identity groups, some of whom, like the Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant and other assorted movements within Christianity, or the different varieties of Sunni and Shiite traditions within Islam, have existed for centuries, while others are of more recent invention. All the other religions in the world, including not only but also Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism, as well as indigenous religions like totemism and shamanism, are also divided up into dozens of competing confessions. Just to complicate matters further, within each one of those religious traditions, there also exist competing “shades” of belief, opposing “moderate” or “mainstream” groups to different kinds of fundamentalist, evangelical or revivalist movements, as well as more esoteric forms of belief such as sufism within Islam.

For their part, the fundamentalist elements inside every religion are currently attempting to convince all their co-believers to adopt a more radicalized vision of what they currently presume that their religion’s founders were trying to do when they initially set up those religions, many centuries ago. Hence the Salafi movement within Islam, which is the controlling ideology inside various countries, such as Saudi Arabia, as well as of various political organizations, such as the Islamic State. Another such ideology is the Pentecostal form of evangelism within Christianity, having developed a considerable political influence all over the Christian world, but which seems to be especially strong inside such countries as the USA and Canada.

Once again, however, examples of religious tolerance and cooperation do not seem to be as well known as more dogmatic attitudes. When competing religious authorities do work together, they often do so merely to denounce governments, movements or individual thinkers promoting freedom from religion, a philosophical point of view that relies on critical thinking, rationalism, modern science, humanism and atheism for its inspiration.

But cultural identities are not just confined to religious forms of propaganda, like those mentioned above. Another kind of cultural identity that also forms part of the world-wide configuration of competing sets of ideas these days is the kind that is linked to certain specific civilizations, such as Western civilization. In that particular ideological construct, the Western world often likes to project an image of itself as being a bastion of liberty, democracy and human rights, particularly individual rights but also including collective rights, such as equality between men and women. From the Western point of view, the world’s non-Western civilizations, such as the Chinese one for example, are not nearly as free or as democratic as it is because of the relative absence of such liberating characteristics. Different parts of the Western world, including not only established nation-states like the USA, Canada, Britain, Spain, France and Germany, but also currently dependent geographical entities like Quebec, Scotland, Catalonia and Corsica, often attribute those characteristics to themselves more than to rival constitutional entities, but in reality they are all part of a common Western heritage. This includes such contributions as the scientific revolution, the secular Enlightenment of the eighteenth-century, and the development of evolution and natural selection as a biological replacement for divine intervention.

To be sure, the Western world’s projection of itself, like every other such projection, does not always have to jibe with the facts. In Donald Trump’s USA, for example, “alternative facts” are often trotted out so that blatantly racist, sexist and anti-democratic policies can still be presented as somehow or another upholding the above-mentioned Western principles of civilization. In France, the extreme right-wing National Front has covered up its ultra-Catholic origins, hypocritically trying to use the republican tradition of laicity (secularism) as a weapon against Muslim immigration. Both of those reinterpretations of reality, however, are just more or less sophisticated ways of hiding the fact that Western civilization has not always supported democratic principles anyway, not so much inside the Western group of countries, and not at all in its colonial and neocolonial dealings with the rest of the world. Not to mention the fact that totalitarian ideologies like fascism and communism also share distinctly Western origins.

In addition, the neoliberal ideology, adopted by all the Western governments for the past forty years, as well as by most non-Western governments, has consistently been used to help all those governments ultra-rich citizens mistreat their less fortunate citizens. Democracy, sexual equality and minority rights have never really been upheld in the consistent way that the Western mythology has regularly projected itself as having always supported them. Today’s right-wing populist and neofascist movements and governments are also incorporating a large number of neoliberal policies (such as even more tax cuts and financial deregulation for the ultra-rich) into their programs. Nevertheless, even though the Western world does not always support any of “its” declared principles, it still repeatedly projects them as if those principles really mean something more for the West than for any of the other civilizations.

Neoliberalism and neofascism are also very important examples of ideologies that transcend national borders, religious borders and the borders of competing civilizations, currently dominating political discourse all over the world. Just like classical liberalism, twentieth-century fascism, totalitarian communism and democratic socialism (social-democracy) used to dominate identity politics all over the world, for previous generations. Not to mention the two different varieties of political nationalism, anti-imperialist nationalism (associated with less powerful countries) and imperialist nationalism (associated with more powerful countries). It should not come as a surprise that the anti-imperialist form of nationalist identity has a tendency to promote progressive ideas more often than does the imperialist variety.

Just because those more secular ideologies transcend different kinds of geographical borders does not mean, however, that they are not part of identity politics. Human beings are just as likely to invest deeply-felt emotions in those ways of thinking as they are to invest similar emotions in religious identities, or those related to competing civilizations. The most well-known example of this sort of thing being the extremely intense feelings associated with the widespread Chinese adoration of Chairman Mao’s teachings during the Cultural Revolution back in the 1960s and 1970s.

The centuries long debate, first inside Western civilization, then throughout the world, between economic nationalism and economic liberalism (culminating in neoliberalism), also demonstrates that economic ideologies, as well as strictly political ones, have to be included in any list of identity politics. For example, even though the kind of protectionism and isolationism currently associated with Donald Trump’s administration in the USA may be severely truncated and delusional, it is still, after all, a very emotional kind of economic nationalism. Economic policy therefore has to be included within identity politics, as does the kind of conflicting and highly polarized social policies that led, in one direction, toward the different kinds of socialism, and, in the opposite direction, to the different kinds of social Darwinism, currently known as libertarianism (the social aspect of neoliberalism). No one can deny that those policy differences also engender highly charged forms of identity politics.

There is of course a great deal of overlap between the different kinds of identity politics. The Western world, for example, has been much more influenced by the Christian religion than by any of the other ones. To be sure, Judaism has also had a considerable influence on the West, notably through the mediation of the Christian Zionist movement, but also through the influence of the nation of Israel, originally founded mostly by European Jews, from the Ashkenazi tradition. But Christianity, like Judaism, has never been an exclusively Western religion, not even if we take into account the role of missionaries from various Western countries in spreading different kinds of Christianity to other parts of the world, notably but not exclusively during the colonial period of history.

For its part, the Chinese civilization also likes to project certain other ideas onto the rest of the world, which are either quite different from any of the other cultural projections currently being propagated, or quite similar, depending on one’s point of view. The Chinese ideology puts a great deal of emphasis on national unity, the dominant Han people within China downplaying the historical roles of any of the current nation’s minority peoples, such as the Tibetans or the Turkish-speaking, Muslim element (Ouigours). To the extent that today’s China seems to many foreign historians, who the Chinese government seems to think do not understand such things as well as they should, as being more of a multinational empire than as a single-people nation. Which is more or less similar, after all, to the way that many Western countries, such as Trump’s America, put the emphasis on White Christians as the core group within each one of their nations, without explicitly excluding national minorities, or recent immigrants, from each projection.

Another element within the official Chinese projection of itself is the idea of combining several, previously-competing religious traditions, notably Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, into a harmonious cultural ensemble under the enlightened leadership of many of the more successful dynastic emperors. Today’s “perfectly representative” Communist Party is still projected as enjoying the same mandate from heaven that was handed down to it by its imperial predecessors. Which, at least officially, does not include the less successful would-be emperors, like the one who exiled himself several decades ago to Taiwan, officially an unfortunate Chinese province still suffering under foreign imperial domination. The relative prosperity of the Chinese economy nowadays is also officially promoted as constituting proof of the veracity of the current Communist Party mandate to rule that particular imperial nation. Like the West, however, China also oscillates between economic nationalism and neoliberalism, as well as between totalitarian communism and libertarianism (at least for the ultra-rich “red diaper babies” currently in power).

Russia is another obvious example of an imperial country presenting itself as an alternative civilization, bridging the gap between the Asian East and the European West. The current regime governing the Russian Federation (or imperial nation) takes approximately the same approach toward Russian domination of all the national minorities within that federation as the Chinese regime does toward its own minorities. Its favoured religion is Orthodox Christianity, which is still trying to project Moscow as the “Third Rome”, following the collapse of Constantinople (the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman empire) back in the fifteenth century.

Russia’s main claim to fame nowadays seems to be its pretension that it has succeeded where many other competing civilizations have failed, in managing to control Islamic radicalism within its own borders. Its method in so doing having been mainly to fight violence with violence, overcoming foreign-sponsored terrorism with a firestorm of state-sponsored terrorism. This seems to be the project that the Russian Federation is currently proposing to the Russian-influenced Trump administration in the USA, as a means of pacifying Islamic terrorism not only in North Africa and Western Asia, but wherever else that it raises its ugly head. All that is required for such cooperation to succeed is for the Western powers to stop trying to crowd Russia out of its traditional sphere of influence (i.e., the countries that used to be part of the old Soviet bloc during the Cold War).

There are several other competing civilizations currently projecting their own world views onto everyone else, the most important of which is obviously the Muslim world. However, the enormous conflicts between the Sunni and the Shiite branches of Islam, themselves divided into several opposing factions, make it well nigh impossible for the Muslim civilization to present itself as a united front. Several competing regional sources of power, based on the most powerful (imperial) nation-states within the Muslim community, complicate those divisions even further.

Still, the Gulf-state-sponsored Islamic terrorist movement has nevertheless managed to create what almost amounts to a civil war all over the Muslim world, extending its malignant influence even into immigrant communities in Western Europe and North America. Its ultimate goal is to rekindle the Islamic caliphates (political-religious empires) of days gone by, provoke a Samuel Huntington style clash of civilizations and eventually impose an antediluvian version of the will of Allah over the entire world. Unfortunately, as has already happened several times in the past, “the will of Allah” always turn out to be whatever the most powerful strongman among those competing for that post wants it to be. Even if most Muslims do not currently agree with him.

So, given the existence of all these partly independent, partly overlapping, projected forces bubbling around these days inside the superheated caldron of conflicting human ideologies, on what basis could the “group of dedicated people with considerable resources” that I talked about earlier, possibly set up the kind of world-wide identity politics sweepstakes that I am proposing? Such an organization would surely require the adoption of a set of agreed-upon criteria for determining which of the competing collective-ego projections currently in the running are the closest, or the furthest away, from proposing something that could presumably be useful to humanity as a whole, and not just to some particular section of it.

It seems to me that the only such criteria would have to universal ones, that is to say ways of measuring human achievement that are not at all dependent on any parochial policy goals that appear to be the private property of any one of the opposing ideological contraptions identified earlier. So far as I am concerned, only socially-based criteria, which have largely been forgotten since the onslaught of neoliberalism back in the 1980s, would satisfy such a request. Every one of those social concerns has engendered policy goals common to all human beings currently living on this planet.

The first such criterion would be to measure to what extent each ideological force seems to be trying to diminish, or instead to further increase, the enormous income gap between the social classes that the neoliberal ideology has reinforced over the past several decades. At the moment, all the world’s poor people, and middle-class people, have been thoroughly alienated from the massive recent expansion in wealth that has taken place since the 1970s. Even though several hundred million people in places like China and India are not as extremely poor as they used to be prior to those countries belated entry into the industrial revolution, they still remain much poorer than the approximately 30 000 dollar (US) (per year) threshold for entry into the genuinely middle class.

Unfortunately, the United Nations definition of “middle class” starts much lower than that more appropriate figure, artificially including millions of poor people inside its overly optimistic interpretation of reality. Hundreds of millions of agricultural or service workers in all those only partly-industrialized countries still remain as poor as they ever were, while millions of definitely middle-class people currently spread out all over today’s world still have exactly the same purchasing power as the middle classes (in the West and Japan) had already achieved back in the 1970s. In other words, all the recently-created wealth in the entire world has been soaked up by a very small minority of the world’s total population.

This fact is probably the number one reason that has pushed millions of economically alienated people into supporting the ultra-reactionary forms of identity politics currently being offered by all the neofascist, and/or right-wing populist, movements that have grown much stronger all over the world. In days gone by, most of those people would presumably have supported instead some kind of progressive, or social-democratic, kind of movement, like the Sanders campaign in the USA might have become had it cut its ties with neoliberal Democrats. The fact that most of them did not, and still do not, support such a movement, not only in the USA but also in many other countries, is a testimony not only to the deleterious effect of reactionary, laissez-faire propaganda. It also owes a lot to the negative example of totalitarian communism, as well as to the democratic socialist abandonment of the working-class and their evolution into opportunistic extensions of ordinary liberal political parties.

The second criterion for the proposed identity politics sweepstakes would be showing to what extent each religious or secular ideology supports, or opposes, gender equality all over the world. Of course, the people in the proposed organization sponsoring the intercontinental sweepstakes would have to be able to distinguish between political forces that genuinely uphold women’s liberation in every one of its different aspects, and those other forces that only pay lip-service to such a goal. Including not only such easy to decipher elements as the Trump administration in the USA, but also such less obviously opposed, but still not entirely sincere, supporters as the Trudeau government in Canada. All neoliberal movements and governments would have to be placed on the antediluvian side of this debate, because of austerity’s more devastating effects on women than on men. So would most of the world’s unreformed religious organizations. This would make it possible to distinguish between ideological formations totally in favour of gender equality, those totally opposed, and everything in between.

The third criterion would be showing how much each political force opposes, or reinforces, racism. This latest category would have to include not only very obvious kinds of “traditional” racism, that come right out and denounce racial equality completely, but also those that instead support a less traditional, more disguised, form of racism, sometimes called “reverse racism”. Racism, after all, is not just confined, as some naive people still seem to think, to the Western powers involved in promoting colonialism, slavery, neocolonialism, or racial segregation, over the past several centuries. It is also, unfortunately, very much “alive and kicking” all over the rest of the world, including in such officially anti-apartheid countries as South Africa.

Reverse racism also includes such “reverse amalgams” as the current Western liberal tendency to denounce any critique of socially conservative religions, like Islam still tends to be, as belonging to those liberals artificially enlarged definition of Islamophobia. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with anyone denouncing the Western-based, right-wing populist refusal to distinguish between “moderate”, or “mainstream” Islam, and radical-fundamentalist, or even terrorist forms of Islam, also known as Islamo-fascism. Nor, for that matter, to extend that analysis to similar divisions operating within any of the other religions.

“Islamophobia”, or an irrational fear of Islam, does indeed exist within right-wing political opinion in general, especially in the Western countries. Millions of naive people all over the world, as well as many professional manipulators of popular opinion, fail to realize, deliberately or not, that most Muslims nowadays are not extremists, nor are they terrorists. It is also true that many right-wing people have indeed “racialized” Muslims, treating Islam as if its was an inferior “race” of people, conveniently forgetting that many Muslims do not hail, not even originally, from the Muslim-majority countries situated somewhere in between Morocco and Indonesia, but from every other part of the world as well. The right-wing populists also refuse to accept not only the idea that Muslims do not belong to any particular “race”, but also that “race” itself does not exist as a scientific fact. In reality, “race” is a category invented by racists, not something that really exists from a biological point of view.

Unfortunately, for their own opportunist political purposes, many Western liberals often include any criticism of Islam whatsoever as being a form of “Islamophobia”, the “reverse amalgam” mentioned above. They are so intent at trying to prove to everyone that they are not themselves racists, that they constantly downplay all the negative aspects of Islam as a religion, and not just the entirely negative aspects of Islamism, which is a political ideology, not a religion. Islam itself, however, is not very often a progressive force in human society for various other reasons, the most important of which is that it is a religion like all the others, that is to say an inherently irrational and unscientific way of interpreting reality. It is constantly being used, again like all the other religions, as the “opium of the people”, a weapon used by ultra-rich and ultra-powerful people inside the Muslim community, to keep poor and middle-class people in their (undemocratic) place, underneath their “superiors”.

There is also no doubt about the fact that most of the factions within Islam do indeed generally treat women as being inferior to men, in the same way that most Christian factions, and those within most of the other religions, either used to do several decades ago, or still do nowadays. Muslim countries, or immigrant communities, using sharia law in their social relations, cannot avoid misogyny without overhauling that entire system. Even in those places that have adopted some reforms, divorce, for example, still seems to be much easier for most Muslim men to accomplish than it is for most Muslim women. In order for even “moderate”, or “mainstream”, Islam to be classified as progressive, rather than reactionary, a lot more change would have to take place. In other words, criticism of Islam as a whole is not necessarily a form of Islamophobia. All religions, as well as all other ideological projections, can be criticized in a rational way, so long as the reasons given for that criticism are not irrational, or deliberately “racialized”.

So, even if no one takes up my proposal to create a functioning, world-wide, identity politics sweepstakes, I really do think that it would be a very good idea if everyone started judging all the world’s currently projected ideologies according to their relative effect on those three, universal criteria. Diminishing, or further enlarging, the income gap between the social classes; fighting for, or against, gender equality; and encouraging racism, or denouncing it, not only directly but indirectly. In other words, will the world of the future become more progressive, or more reactionary? Even without an official sweepstakes, the prize for winning is still a choice between advancing what is good or accepting what is evil. Is reaction better than progress, after all? I don’t think so.