The quicksand effect: sinking in deeper and deeper

The coronavirus pandemic seems to be getting worse and worse with every passing day, hundreds of thousands more cases constantly being added just about everywhere, especially in the USA, and tens of thousands more deaths, in many different places, than those that have been officially reported. Especially in China, which seems to have chalked up at least 15 times more victims than what has so far been acknowledged, according to clandestine corpse-counters based inside that country. Even the name given to the virus seems to be wrong, since it apparently started as far back as last September, or maybe November, and not in December at all, which means that we ought to be referring to COVIS-19 or COVIN-19, instead of calling it COVID-19.

The Chinese government tried really hard to sweep the problem under the rug at the beginning, before finally dealing with it head on. The whole world would have been a lot better off, however, if the dictatorship had succeeded in banning wild-animal meat-markets before anyone started dying, even in the ultra-poor, central regions around Wuhan, belonging to the traditional Han-majority. Even recently, Chinese officials reported that they had been forced to backtrack on a projected return to “normalcy”, given the arrival of new infections apparently caused by overseas Chinese returning home. At the same time the Chinese regime is doing its very best trying to convince all the other countries in the world that it has the best political system available on this planet. But its reputation as a beacon of hope for everyone, everywhere, has suffered an enormous hit, from which it should not be allowed to recover. Nothing that Chinese officialdom says about anything can ever be relied upon at face value.

Which is not to say that any other country can legitimately claim to have a much better system, nor can any other large bureaucracy, public or private, legitimately claim to be consistently avoiding fake news. Especially not those currently denouncing other people’s fake news the loudest: Donald Trump and his millions of clones, more or less evenly scattered all over the world. Anyone following the news (real or fake) in any format (newspapers, television, Internet), is constantly being told by some of the experts that in this kind of situation, human beings have a built-in tendency to be overly optimistic. And by another group of experts that in this kind of situation, human beings have a built-in tendency to be overly pessimistic.

As a result, none of the current predictions about the pandemic starting to go away right now should be believed by anyone, not for a long time to come. Neither should anyone believe that the coronavirus is going to end up killing everyone on the planet, all by itself. People have to use their own judgement, to the best of their abilities. In situations like these, none of the experts end up being all that expert, and none of the large bureaucracies are genuinely interested in taking care of everyone under their official jurisdiction. In any case, not nearly as much as they clearly exhibit a genuine interest for taking care of their own interests first. After all, even many of the owners of small Mom and Dad shops in everyone’s local neighbourhood lie, cheat and steal pretty much all the time, albeit on a much smaller scale than do any of the large bureaucracies.

As usually happens with every other major calamity in this world, such as accelerated environmental degradation or austerity programs deliberately aimed at victimizing the poor, the virus especially affects people already suffering from previously existing conditions. Even some of the world’s major corporations, like those in the airline industry (“air sardine”), are also suffering more than others from the consequences of this contagion. Not only because of the airlines strong ties to the collapsed tourism business, but also because they were also already fragile even before the recent viral outbreak. Normally, the fragility of huge corporations, constantly seeking to maximize short-term profits at the expense of everyone else, should not concern people nearly as much as the fragility of hospitalized patients, especially those undergoing intensive care. Unfortunately, most large corporations always seem to possess an uncanny capacity for getting their victims to help them solve their problems, even in the midst of a murderous pandemic.

Most of the world’s medieval confinement strategies, currently affecting about 40% of the world’s population, were also put into place to cover up official denial and prior stupidity among all those countries that refused to, or were unable to, test large numbers of people right off the bat (so to speak) and thereby zero in on treating those who needed help the most. Every country, particularly in the West, that had succumbed to the neoliberal siren-call of just-in-time economies, not only for ordinary “widget-making” but also for health, education and social welfare, suddenly found itself unable to produce the tons of protective medical equipment, or ordinary medication, required in times of crisis.

Unlike South Korea and Taiwan, the world’s stupidest governments completely ignored the lessons of the SARS scare, occurring only about fifteen years ago, and decided to rely instead on imports from places like China and India, which (surprise, surprise) needed those same supplies for their own enormous populations. As usually happens in such cases, the worldwide war between ruthless buyers of those supplies offered an excellent opportunity for unscrupulous traders, most of them belonging to organized crime syndicates, to accumulate billions more dollars, profiting from the tremendous increase in the death rate, especially among older people. For their part, South Korea and Taiwan apparently used electronic tracking, including cellphone information, in order to test targeted populations, spying on their own citizens for their own good.

Autocratic Russia, and many other countries like it, also used electronic information to spy even more than before on their own populations, blaming it all on the virus as well. But without doing much at all in the way of testing after that, nor in taking care of the general population. Unfortunately, no government, just like no private corporation, can ever be trusted to use such information, or any other kind of information for that matter, exclusively in the public interest. Personalized dictatorships, like the one in Turkmenistan that banned even national-media use of the very word “coronavirus”, deliberately avoid doing anything at all about the much-maligned public interest. Preferring instead to concentrate on staying in power forever, and enjoying the perks that go along with not sharing anything good or valuable with anyone outside their number one honcho’s immediate circle.

True to form, the duly-elected, ultra-right wing populist government in Hungary also decided to use all the worldwide hype about the virus as a scapegoat for another power grab, banning future elections and reserving all decision-making for itself, without setting any time limit whatsoever. Which is quite similar to the same ruling party’s proclamation of a state of emergency during the European migration crisis of 2015. That is still in place nowadays even though that particular “emergency” was resolved very quickly, and never really affected Hungary at all. Even if the world manages to wipe out the coronavirus just as quickly, which does not seem remotely possible at this point, no one knows how many years it will take before the next pandemic breaks out.

In the meantime, the more strenuously that countries all over the world struggle to get out of the quicksand created by the coronavirus, the deeper they sink down into the morass. This is because most of the countries in the world are also suffering from a simultaneous scissors crisis. Vaguely similar to the first recorded scissors crisis, that took place in the USSR back in 1923, during Lenin’s semi-return to capitalism (“the new economic policy”), when industrial prices shot up much faster than agricultural prices. In the current, worldwide, scissors crisis, the ever-increasing number of deaths from the pandemic has forced most countries to adopt the kind of confinement strategies that result in a collapsed economy, with many of the world’s major industries and services shut down completely.

Dozens of governments have abandoned neoliberalism, at least for the time being, stepping in massively to offer necessary aid to private (and public) employers in hundreds of different industries and services. Such as the Canadian government’s numerous new programs for the duration of the crisis, including an offer to finance 75% of the private-sector salaries of millions of ordinary employees during a “carefully calculated period of transition” back to a “normal economy”. As well as similar programs currently being adopted by provincial and municipal governments in that country, and many others. Over the past forty years of neoliberalism, massive tax evasion by ultra-rich people and their corporations, backed up by complacent politicians in power, led to extremely serious austerity programs aimed at reducing (but not eliminating) government debt, that caused a great deal of suffering among ordinary citizens, through massive government cut-backs at all levels, all over the world. As well as employing millions of severely underpaid workers, in public and private services such as residences exclusively reserved for old people.

Now, however, the pandemic has forced all those governments (national, regional and local) to rack up a new, even more enormous debt load that will have to be paid back to the financiers at some point. In order to avoid the kind of complete meltdown of high finance that almost wiped out world money markets back in 2008. It would be nice if we did not have to worry about the God-forsaken financiers, either, but like the world’s other large corporations, they always seem to be able to get everyone else to pay for their excesses. True to form, almost all the big financial institutions in the world (banks, shadow banks, insurance companies and so on) have consistently refused to help out during the current crisis, by eliminating dividends completely, or by substantially reducing credit-card interest rates. But just because they refuse to help anyone right now does not mean that they are not looking forward to forcing everyone else to help them again a couple of months from now.

This also means that dozens of countries that could presumably have activated already-planned, long-term strategies to save the natural environment from any further calamities are now in the process of cancelling those plans for quite a long time to come. Which means that any small progress that any country may have made in the past to avoid climate change on a global scale has now been wiped out. In the same way, countries all over the world that were also debating, prior to the pandemic, about whether or not to embark on bold new programs to spend a lot more government money helping ordinary people (rather than just underwriting the world’s biggest personal fortunes), will now be mothballing all those ideas as well. Meaning that the USA, for example, may very well never adopt Bernie Sanders proposal for installing a public health system like the one that Canada already possesses, while Canada may never go one step further by adopting a previously discussed, nation-wide, public drug-paying program.

Other, much poorer, countries like India will probably never succeed in providing indoor toilets for all of their enormous populations, and may not not even succeed in getting half-way to that laudable goal. Similarly, China may never get anywhere close to what, at least until recently, used to be called “Western levels” of average wages and salaries. Brazil (as well as many other countries) may never be able to clean up its enormous urban slum neighbourhoods (favelas). South Africa may never succeed in seeing its black-majority population become equally as prosperous as its white-minority population, which still controls most of the national economy, a quarter-century after apartheid. Algeria, and dozens of other unfortunate countries, may never be able to get rid of their ultra-corrupt, post-independence ruling elites. And so on and so forth, in practically every single country in the world.

For at least the past 50 years, anti-democratic control over the general population has continuously been intensified as a consequence of every difficult situation that arose, from the war on inflation, through the war on terrorism, all the way over to the war on the coronavirus. In some countries at least, some of that authoritarianism has also been accompanied by the adoption of a few beneficial interventions. While in other cases, such as that of the federal government of the USA, the national authorities try their best to do as little as possible, while still becoming much more authoritarian than they were before, anyway.

Some honest observers have come to the conclusion that despite several earlier reports about people banding together in solidarity to help the less fortunate during the crisis, the overall effect of the pandemic on every continent will most probably be a deepening of social rifts within the general population. Krzysztof Pelc, for example, a professor of political science at McGill University, recently predicted (in the “Montreal Gazette” on March 26, 2020) that the rift between white-collar and blue-collar workers will probably get even worse than it already has been getting, as will the rift between larger and smaller firms, and the one between younger people and older people.

Thereby adding to, and intensifying, negative effects on those already huge groups of people that have been downtrodden since just about forever: the lower classes of society, such as the poor and the chronically unemployed, as well as most of the female population all over the world, and a very large number of ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities in various different countries. Not to mention dozens of mistreated ethnic majorities as well, such as the black South Africans that were referenced earlier. Or even the francophone majority in the province of Québec, which has lost a lot of ground recently to the anglophone minority. Even though it is not nearly as far behind its more prosperous minority as is the black majority in South Africa.

Not to forget either the fact that many countries are not just divided into one ethnic and/or religious majority and several different kinds of minorities. A large number of those minorities are also divided up into even smaller minorities, that are even more downtrodden and exploited than most of the other people in their region, such as the “Khoi-San” minority in the southern part of Africa. Indigenous peoples all over the world do not just have to deal with much larger, “settler” populations (themselves often divided into dominant and dominated sections as in Canada/Québec), they also have to deal with political divisions between rival, dominant and dominated indigenous groupings. In many different parts of the world, such as China, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Brazil and Algeria, an ethnic-religious form of fundamentalism (regional imperialism) is still trying to wipe out minority populations altogether, by absorbing them all into some kind of  imagined “common origin”, imposed from above.

Reacting to the idiocy of recent neoliberal globalization, some observers have been proposing a new kind of world characterized by what one citizen has called “altruistic nationalism” (see Marc Boucher’s letter to the editor in the March 26, 2020, edition of the Montréal daily, “Le Devoir”). In other words, a new variety of all-round nation-building (political, economic, social and cultural nationalism) that is not at all an old-fashioned cover-up for some gang of corrupt politicians trying to grab everything for themselves. But instead putting into place a government that is extremely kind to the natural environment in every country, as well as to every one of its citizens, no matter which social class, sex, ethnic group, religion or absence of religion, to which they all belong. I wrote a 200-page book about this kind of thing back in 1992, that I called “Universal Nationalism”, but I never succeeded in getting it published anywhere. The least that can be said, however, is that the world we live in does not seem to be moving in that rather utopian direction, not even a little bit.

Strangely enough, all the horrible things already mentioned, up to and including the coronavirus outbreak, are taking place in the real world, in spite of the fact that all the world’s ruling elites were repeatedly informed in advance about all those developing crises, including the likelihood of a new pandemic. As Éric Desrosiers pointed out in an article in another edition of “Le Devoir” (“Ces crises inattendues qui n’en sont pas”, April 3, 2020), a group of highly intelligent people at the World Economic Forum (WEF) have been sending out extensive planning reports over the past several years, expressly aimed at the ruling elites, about all the different kinds of major crises currently facing humanity, specifically including pandemics. Another reasonably well-informed individual, by the name of Bill Gates, also sent out a similar reminder five years ago.

Not only that, but the WEF reports have also been putting the accent on how inter-connected all these different crises really are, just like I have been pointing out, over and over again, in my blogposts. It is not as though any of those ruling-class people can legitimately claim that they have not been made aware of all those constantly accelerating and cross-infecting dangers, the ones that we have already experienced as well as those that are yet to come.

What kind of blithering idiot does such a major decision-maker have to be, in order to ignore all those warning signs completely, at least since the neoliberal tandem of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan first came to power, forty years ago? How can anyone in the West, in particular, have been so dim-witted as to have handed over control of a very large portion of the entire world supply of manufactured goods, including medical supplies and disease-controlling pills, to the oddly-named “People’s” Republic of China? A grade three level reader like Donald Trump did not, after all, become president of the USA, still the world’s most important country, back in 1979 or 1980, but only in 2017. So not all of this incredible stupidity can be blamed exclusively on people like the USA’s current, completely idiotic “criminal-in-chief” (see Élisabeth Vallet’s excellent article, “Le petit président” in “Le Devoir”, 4-5 avril 2020).

Other leaders as well, such as the UK’s Boris Johnson, who has also caught the coronavirus, and is currently being treated in an intensive care unit, are nevertheless being hypocritical whenever they make public pronouncements these days about how a few ignorant people are putting other people’s lives in danger when they flout the current rules of confinement. On the one hand, it is certainly true, like Johnson said, that everyone ought to be following those rules to the letter, in every part of the world where governments have decided to put those rules into place. Even people living in parts of the world where the local governments are too delinquent to have adopted those policies should also try to observe the same rules anyway.

But a guy like Johnson, even though he has now been stricken by the disease, spent his entire life before that as a member of the ruling elite, and has been a Conservative Party stalwart for the past couple of decades. Which means that he is hardly well-placed to be accusing others of being inconsiderate of people whose lives are on the line (an endangered group of people to which Johnson now unfortunately belongs). Tory governments in the UK have been mistreating vulnerable people in that country since that party was founded several centuries ago, in a particularly intense way during Margaret Thatcher’s reign (1979-1990), and as recently as Theresa May’s period in power (2016-2019), not to mention during the early days of the Johnson regime. Millions of people in the UK have lived much more miserable lives than they otherwise would have lived if the Conservative Party had not been in power so often between 1979 and the present day. Many thousands of them have also died prematurely as a result of their austerity attacks on the poor, the unemployed and the physically and mentally disabled parts of the British population.

The Tony Blair faction of the British Labour Party (“New Labour”) also supported a somewhat milder version of neoliberalism during its periods in power as well. To be sure, the same kind of neoliberal garbage was also practised in dozens of other countries, such as in all the nations of the European Union as well as in Canada and the USA. Mostly by other Conservative parties (Canada) and by certain Republican parties (the USA), not to mention being also practised, to a slightly lesser extent, by other Liberal parties (Canada and Québec) and by certain Democratic parties (the USA). (For their part, the names of the leading political parties in the EU countries keep changing all the time, without a noticeable effect on the outcome.)

Flouting the rules of confinement is also not the exclusive prerogative of active young men in various different countries. Fundamentalist religion has also raised its ugly head once again, in many different parts of the world, seeking to participate as strongly as possible in ignoring the rules on social distancing. Acting as if all the world’s religious zealots wanted to go back to the old-fashioned way of dealing with epidemics, by proclaiming that mass death is just the “Heavenly Father”’s way of punishing us all for not believing in the common religious mythology of accepting great suffering in the (only) real world. So that all the true believers can be saved instead in the (unfortunately non-existent) “next world”. Different versions of this kind of nonsense characterize not only the fundamentalist factions within the world’s monotheist religions, but also all the similar factions inside all the other religions as well (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, animism and so on).

Hence the refusal of several backward states, mostly in the rural “Bible Belt” regions of the USA, to embark on that country’s national confinement program. Which is readily tolerated in that nation because its equally backward president keeps on desperately proclaiming that he wants to fill up all the churches, if not by Easter, then as soon as possible after that. Since he knows that most of his electoral base belongs to the huge gang of “redeemed sinners” who cling to religion so fiercely because they know deep down inside that they do not really live in a “truly Christian” way all that often. Church service on Sunday being absolutely necessary to atone for what they have been doing to their “fellow man” during the other six days of the week. Which is also why Brazil’s born-again neofascist, Jair Bolsonaro, got a step ahead of the US president by declaring churches in his country to be “essential services” during the coronavirus pandemic. Reacting more quickly than the NRA (Neanderthal Rifle Association) in the USA, which wants gun shops (of all things) to be also declared essential services.

Not to be outdone, fundamentalist Muslims in Iran have recently been shown on national and international television deliberately licking religious icons in their country, over and over again. In order to prove once and for all that because of their faith it is “absolutely certain” that Allah will be preserving their lives for a long time to come, while the unbelievers will all be dying off like flies. Such behaviour also being replicated in the kissing of similar icons currently going on in Christian Orthodox churches in Russia, as well as in other parts of Eastern Europe. One Orthodox Jewish city in Israel has also recently been cordoned off by the Israeli government because of the much higher incidence of the disease in that particularly religious place as well. Which may indicate that during the course of the pandemic all sorts of different people’s faith may turn out to be sorely tested, if true believers all over the the world end up dying just as often, rather than less often, than all the God-forsaken miscreants.

The same sort of thing has also been taking place in parts of the Montréal region of Québec, where the virus has been particularly virulent inside several Jewish congregations, especially among ultra-orthodox, Hassidic, communities. Some of which were getting together in synagogues, for well-attended weddings, up to and including the second week of March, three months after the official beginning of the pandemic. All such activity has since been severely condemned, if not necessarily eliminated, by officials representing al the different factions of the Jewish community. But not before quite a few people got sick, even though the numbers involved were considerably lower than the much more serious situations caused by the holding of large sporting events, during the same period, in countries like Italy and Spain. Many Jewish people in the Montréal region were also affected by their close ties with Jewish communities in hard-hit New York City. As well as by the return of several thousand Canadians (many of them belonging to the Jewish faith) from southern Florida, known as “snowbirds” (older Canadians who spend the winter months of every year in the warmer parts of the USA).

Non-Jewish people in Québec have also been duly reminded recently that they ought not to be indulging in anti-Semitism, as some of them so often do, since anti-Semitism, like all the other forms of racism, always makes every bad situation even worse than it was before. However, racism does not just consist of indulging in increasingly negative reactions toward constantly targeted people, often in the form of (scapegoat) conspiracy theories. It also consists in deliberately exonerating people, for religious reasons, who are indeed exhibiting dangerous behaviour. People who choose to congregate in large numbers three months after the official outbreak of a pandemic, even if they did so prior to the promulgation of strict confinement rules by a nearby government, are nevertheless putting other people’s lives in danger. As do ultra-religious people from any religion, such as evangelical Christians, who put human “herd immunity” in danger whenever they refuse to get their children properly vaccinated.

Unfortunately, nothing that has been going on during the pandemic, just like nothing that happened during other enormous crises in the past (such as the Great Depression or the Second World War), ever seems to convince people to change the system in any real way. Even the fact of having millions of old people die off a lot more rapidly than usual, in thousands of private and public retirement homes, does not seem to be enough. All we have so far put into place as a result of all the great catastrophes of the past, is either an almost completely privatized world in which practically everything is run for the exclusive benefit of a very small number of ultra-rich people, or a much less privatized system run by huge state bureaucracies that often treat almost everyone almost as poorly as the ultra-privatized systems do. Or something half-way in between those two extremes. As a species, we do not seem to have the capacity to put into place a world-system of some sort that really works for the benefit of the vast majority of the entire world’s population, erring neither on the side of total confinement nor on the side of a chaotic free-for-all.

Pandemics are not parochial

I began to write this blogpost a little over a week ago, on March 11, 2020, the day that the World Health Organization finally got around to admitting that the coronavirus outbreak had indeed become a global pandemic. This is one of those worldwide epidemics that many observers like myself have been predicting over the past few years, that would break out over and over again as a result of most top-level big-shots refusal to prepare for any type of crisis that did not initially seem to threaten their own domineering control over every possible form of human activity. The kind of pandemics, like the coronavirus, that would inevitably intersect with every other known variety of international crisis, such as the enormous recent expansion in the emission of greenhouse gases, or the increasingly dangerous escalation in the number of countries possessing ever greater quantities of nuclear weapons. To provoke a perfect storm of mutually reinforcing threats to the quality, and even to the duration, of human life on this planet.

This is the kind of world we are entering right now, when it is becoming increasingly difficult to figure out how we can get any kind of hold on what is happening to all of us these days. Six years ago, when Canadian social activist Naomi Klein published her book about how “This changes everything”, she assumed that people’s worldwide reaction to the reality of climate change would be more than enough incentive to, in fact, change everything drastically. To finally realize that we had to dump our much too long-lasting, eternally hegemonic system of capital accumulation into the garbage. And to come up instead with an entirely different approach to running a modern, “cooperative commonwealth” of almost eight billion highly interdependent human beings.

In place of that , what we got in the real world was even more regression than we had already accumulated since the late 1970s, when the coordinated juggernaut of neoliberalism (deregulation of everything) and neofascism (ultra-religious, ultra-ethnic communitarianism) was unleashed on the world by the central banks monetarist “war on inflation”. The worldwide recession that they deliberately created in the early 1980s inaugurated a period of forty years during which private and state forms of capitalist empire-building combined together to make sure that no one anywhere would be able to escape their total control over world politics, the world economy and subordinated social conditions.

The proof of which being the fact that most of the new wealth created in the world over the past forty years has gone to an extremely small group of people, centred on the 2000-plus billionaires to be found spread out all over today’s world. Resulting in an ever-increasing gap between a handful of extremely rich people (some of them “earning” up to 100 million US dollars per day) and hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people (still barely surviving on only one or two dollars per day). An income gap that is dozens of times greater than it used to be, as recently as fifty years ago.

Now, however, it looks very much like their coordinated control of everything has broken down completely, not just because of the pandemic itself but also because of their hyper-ridiculous reaction to this latest crisis. Especially in the USA, still the world’s largest economy, where their “striatum president” deliberately dragged his feet for several weeks, obstinately refusing to do anything at all capable of containing the spread of the virus. Even after that, his idea of an appropriate response was to declare a “national emergency” that focused on merely blocking individual travel for 30 days between the USA and the European Union. Initially leaving out the UK and Ireland, even though their exposure to the coronavirus was as dangerous as that of the designated 26 EU countries overall average. Which idiotic reaction set off an unprecedented meltdown in the world’s stock markets, that all began falling apart faster than they ever have before, weak little rallies never coming close to catching up with much greater losses. Not just 1987 but even 1929 do not seem to have been this bad, if not for any other reason than that of the much more inter-dependent nature of recent economic globalization.

This is where we find ourselves nowadays, in a hyper-individualist period of history during which the most egotistical members of the ruling elites, against all odds, are still deliberately trying to ignore not only the laws of physics (notwithstanding Greta Thunberg’s reminder that “You cannot make deals with physics”), but also to ignore the laws of biology as well. Not to mention specifically ignoring what is euphemistically known as “the rule of law”, a series of agreed-upon rules among elitist rulers that underly any possible attempts at international coordination against exactly this kind of threat. Even though a few eternal optimists are still trying to argue that “everyone seems to be pulling together” against the coronavirus, it ought to be obvious to everyone now that completely disconnected, hyper-narcissistic maniacs like  Donald Trump, and all the other ultra right-wing populists currently in power in dozens of other unfortunate countries, are again doing their best to use the fight against the virus as just another way of preserving their own personal hold on power. Creating even more chaos by constantly trying to convince their extremely foolish supporters that they are in fact god-kings, always automatically doing the right thing from the outset, without even breaking a sweat.

Even in the UK, prime minister Boris Johnson, who seemed to be intelligent enough to have finally set aside the extreme neoliberalism left over from Margaret Thatcher’s antediluvian approach, has nevertheless decided to constantly downplay the coronavirus threat, at first openly refusing to do anything at all about the spread of that disease into his unfortunate country. Then trying to play catch-up with the French quarantine a few days later by talking about (!) taking much more drastic action. More or less in the same way that the Canadian government caved into Québec’s criticism about not doing anything about controlling foreign visitors, by shutting out most countries, while still exempting the USA for a few days, as if it were not also a foreign country. Now that the border with the USA has finally been closed, by mutual agreement, Canada still seems to be sharing with its huge neighbour, and with Germany, the absurd notion that most people do not have to be tested for the virus, not even those arriving at airports from abroad. How long is that ridiculous idea going to last?

For their part, the rest of the world’s only slightly less self-centred chieftains, those who still claim like France’s Emmanuel Macron to be “doing something real” about the crisis, making a big show about “getting tough”, are nevertheless coming up with the same kind of “one quarter, or maybe half of the way” solutions. Just like they have always been doing in every other crisis situation that has arisen over the past several decades, since at least as far back as when everyone started hearing about the concept of “climate change” for the first time.

However, none of the official reactions to the current crisis, be they totally or partially inadequate, in no way justified the completely opposite kind of hyper-individualist reactions to the pandemic, committed by millions of panic-stricken ordinary shoppers. Who demonstrated their total indifference to the needs of everyone else in their respective neighbourhoods by at least temporarily cleaning out local stores completely. Stocking up with such weird choices as an entire year’s supply of toilet paper!

All of which has brought at least one major change throughout the world, namely a whole lot of speculation (in those places where it has not already gone way beyond that stage) about hospital triage setting in. In other words, public and private health systems becoming so overwhelmed by treating victims of the coronavirus that they deliberately decide not to treat selected groups of “ordinary patients”, such as everyone over 80 years old and/or anyone at all suffering from life-threatening problems not related to the virus itself!

In fact, governments all over the world have also been proclaiming in the last few days a similar kind of political triage, namely their intention to “put off” doing anything at all about such “unrelated” problems as climate change, until the coronavirus itself has been defeated once and for all. Which, given the way that such governments have functioned over the past few decades, could mean doing nothing about anything else for a very long time. Long enough for any one of those “other” problems, or all of them ganging up together, to turn our eventual triumph over the virus (if ever that happens) into a pyrrhic victory, the effect of those other crises making it totally impossible for anyone to celebrate the projected end of this particular epidemic.

The recent geopolitical spat between the USA and China over the origins of the virus has underlined just how easy it is for diplomatic quarrels between rival nuclear powers to affect their judgement about other things. The USA chose to emphasize over and over again the Chinese origins of the virus by reminding everyone how dozens of other major epidemics in the past have begun in those parts of central China where the poorest peasants have always been in close proximity with wild animals as a source of food. And China chose to reply to those endlessly repeated taunts by claiming that it was in fact the US Army that initially planted the virus in that particular region!

But the problems being constantly magnified by the world’s most important propagators of deliberate ignorance are not just the ones already mentioned: the pandemic itself, unprecedented levels of environmental degradation, equally unprecedented levels of nuclear proliferation, record-level income differentiation and the stock-market pandemonium, all of them resulting in the extremely negative effect of all of those things together on the fragile world economy. Recent reports attempting to estimate just how disastrous the economic effects of the COVID-19 crisis have been, in every one of the affected countries as well as throughout the globe, have emphasized the fact that both local and international recovery efforts will be  blocked for quite some time by the intersecting effects of the pandemic.

It does not seem possible to overcome the effects of the coronavirus merely by government intervention, nor indeed by central-bank intervention, as several previous financial crises and economic recessions were overcome. For the simple reason that most world governments have lost much of the power, and most of the financial clout that they used to possess. Having gradually abandoned anywhere between one-half and three-quarters of their former strength, even in countries like China, after forty years of neoliberal deregulation of practically everything. All the world’s public authorities seem nowadays to be acting a lot like older, already-sick people succumbing to the virus more than anyone else, because those public authorities have also been greatly weakened before the coronavirus itself came into being.

In any case, even government largesse in dire circumstances always goes mainly to relatively well-off people in every affected region, in spite of official fake-news messages claiming that the most underprivileged people among us are being helped the most. Just like some wit pointed out a few years back about foreign aid, which in spite of government propaganda to the contrary, usually ends up with “poor people in rich countries helping rich people in poor countries”. Commentators like Craig Kielburger, the WE-Movement co-founder who writes a column published by a Canadian newspaper chain, has tried to argue that the pandemic could have been avoided if all the world’s richest governments and richest individuals had combined together over the past few decades, to spend the 5 trillion dollars necessary in order to attain the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Thereby eliminating poverty in the poorest parts of the world and avoiding the pandemic altogether; see his article, “Complicit in COVID-19”, “The Montreal Gazette”, March 17, 2020. What Kielburger left out of the equation, however, is the fact that even the world’s richest countries are not at all well prepared to face up to the virus, since even they cannot control poverty in their own countries, let alone in the rest of the world.

Not to mention the fact that a whole series of other major crises, that particularly insensitive people consider “less important” or “totally unrelated” to the ones already mentioned, are also taking place right now, and also depend for their own propagation on the same completely narcissistic, irrational and irresponsible attitudes. Another example of which being the recent, atavistic revival of male chauvinism, all over the world, resulting in a whole new wave of targeted attacks on most of the world’s female population, including a recrudescence of “feminicide”, wife battering, gang rape, excision, forced marriage imposed on really young girls, trafficking of millions of sex slaves, and ever more degrading forms of domination pornography than those that already existed in all the earlier periods of history.

Even though, paradoxically enough in the USA, Harvey Weinstein, the extremely powerful film producer, serial rapist and Trump clone, was finally brought down, in France the equally well-known film director Roman Polanski got rewarded instead. In spite of having accumulated an almost equivalent pedigree of sexual violence over the past several decades. He won a “César” award for best film, an event that set off a fire-storm of denunciation of sexual predators in that country. Including the publication in the “Libération” newspaper of an extremely hard-hitting article by novelist Virginie Despentes, accusing the “clan of powerful people” using their “financial fire-power” to glorify one of their own. Thereby spitting in the faces of millions of innocent victims, in France even more than in any of the other Western countries. Her analysis of that excessively painful event was particularly insightful, when she accused her country of proudly exhibiting its true nature as a class-based society, bent on deliberately mistreating everyone not belonging to the ruling circles of power, either because they belong to “inferior” social classes, or to the “weaker” sex, or to the wrong political orientation.

What made the whole thing so incredibly poignant was the fact that the Polanski film that won the national award, “J’accuse” (“An officer and a spy” in English), was in fact a reasonably accurate depiction of the Dreyfus affair in France, during the years leading up to the First World War. When Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army, was falsely accused of spying for the Germans and sent off to a prison camp in French Guyana, before being eventually reinstated after an immensely important national debate over that very anti-Semitic affair. In other words, today’s ruling elite in France is quite content to pretend to repudiate one small part of their predecessors racist attitudes, just so long as they are allowed to continue to crush, dominate and exploit most of the rest of the population. Exactly the same kind of flamboyant hypocrisy that people like Donald Trump (and Harvey Weinstein before his fall from grace) exhibit whenever they also laughingly pretend to support social equality (“equal opportunity”), gender equality and/or “racial” equality.

Yet another excellent example of the convergence of these seemingly independent crises, all of them stemming from the same sources of hyper-individualism, is the eternally head-in-the-sand attitude of many otherwise intelligent observers, especially in Western countries, to the ongoing threat of religious fundamentalism, particularly virulent these days in the Muslim world. And not at all unrelated to the revival of those extreme forms of male-chauvinism in the preceding example. In Canada, Don Macpherson, a columnist for the Montreal Gazette, followed up recently (March 7, 2020) on his 50-year career of Quebec-bashing by again attacking Québec’s “Bill 21”, an  attempt to shore up provincial laicity, ever so slightly, by making it illegal for civil servants “in positions of authority” to wear proselytizing religious garments and symbols while at work.

His column was published just after it was revealed in the news that two fundamentalist Muslim daycare workers in Montréal were observed trying to convince Muslim-origin girls in a daycare facility attached to a public school to be “good Muslims” by wearing the hijab, praising Allah at every available opportunity and getting their parents to complain about the absence of halal food in the school cafeteria. The parents of the children affected, however, were Tunisian immigrants who came to Canada specifically to get away from just that kind of religious propaganda. Instead of complaining about no halal, they complained to the authorities about how their children were being brainwashed, and threatened to go to court if need be to put an end to such practices. In his column, Macpherson, like many other such commentators from English Canada, downplayed the significance of this latest development by claiming that it failed to “make the case for Bill 21”, since Islamic fundamentalism in Québec only represents a minority opinion, even inside the relatively small Muslim minority currently living in Québec.

What Macpherson and all the other commentators like him refuse to recognize, however, is that even though the Muslim minority in Québec is still quite small by comparison with the Muslim minority living in such countries as France, increasingly fundamentalist control over the entire Muslim world is quite capable of doing a considerable amount of damage to human rights wherever it shows its ugly head. Macpherson and his crowd like to think that they live in some kind of near-perfect Canadian society, completely isolated from the horrible things going on in all the Muslim-majority countries spread out from northwestern Africa all the way over to southeast Asia, not to mention Muslim-minority countries like France.

In fact, many of the things that people like Macpherson fear so much are also taking place right now in France, whose Muslim minority of almost six million people, constituting slightly less than nine percent of the total population, is hugely affected by the current wave of fundamentalist sentiment, and by its terrorist offshoot, to the same proportional extent as in every other part of the Muslim world. France’s well-known and long-lasting laicity laws, much more extensive than any such legislation in Québec, have not succeeded all that much in blunting many of the negative effects of Muslim fundamentalism. Which, after all, is merely the hyper-violent Muslim equivalent of the kind of ultra-right-wing populism, and white supremacy, that has affected all the European, and European-origin, Christian populations spread out over many other parts of the  world.

As president Emmanuel Macron put it in a recent speech denouncing “political Islam”, also known as “Islamic separatism”, the French republic finds it inacceptable whenever someone refuses to shake hands with a woman simply because she is a woman, or refuses to be cared for or educated by a woman, or refuses to be educated at all for the same reason, or imposes virginity certificates on women before they are allowed to marry, or considers the laws of religion to be superior to those of the republic. (See “Macron s’engage contre l’islam politique” in “Le Devoir”, February 19, 2020.) In hundreds of different neighbourhoods in France, particularly in those suburban regions in which the majority of the local population is Muslim, the apolitical, “moderate” Muslims of days gone by have been largely replaced by militant Muslim fundamentalists, who insist on making life very difficult indeed not only for every Muslim, or person of Muslim origin, who does not want to kowtow to their deliberately backward way of doing things. But also for every other French citizen living in the same area, regardless of his or her ethnic background, religious affiliation, or lack of a religious affiliation.

Wherever ultra-right-wing populists congregate, in whatever part of the world, they always produce local situations just like the ones that Macron was denouncing in the fundamentalist regions of France. It makes no difference whatsoever if the neofascist movement inside any particular country or region is of imperial-Western/evangelical-Christian/white-supremacist origins, or if it originates among colonial-Eastern/Muslim-fundamentalist/non-white-supremacist origins, or for that matter in any other combination of world regions, religions and forms of racism anywhere else in the world (including Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucian, Shintoist and animist communities) . Intolerance toward ethnic and religious majorities or minorities, intolerance toward women or other “inferior” genders, intolerance toward “inferior” social classes: all the different kinds of intolerance are equally spread out all over the world, and are not just reserved, or even particularly concentrated, as some ultra-alienated, Western “anti-colonialists” imagine, uniquely or exclusively in the Western world.

So, as I have been pointing out over and over again in my blog, human beings have to drastically repudiate, very quickly indeed, this jointly neoliberal and neofascist trajectory that we have all been on for the past forty years. Otherwise, we are going to self-destruct, not because of any particular kind of epidemic, economic crisis, environmental degradation, geopolitical confrontation, or social atavism, but because of what happens when all of those crises come at us all at once. It is highly unlikely that we are all going to be saved in the nick of time, by some unforeseen miracle, without changing our own attitudes in a major way. As Johnny Cash put it, during his Folsom Prison concert more than 50 years ago, in his song about a jailed murderer waiting for a pardon: “But this ain’t the movies, so forget about me.” We all have to become much better people than we were before, right away quick, but that certainly does not seem to be happening nearly often enough at the moment.

It is not just the hyenas like Warren Buffett who have been profiting from every “lesser” person’s problems, even mistreating other tycoons possessing somewhat less money than he does, over the past few decades. It is also the fact that the example provided by such billionaires has been replicated at all levels of society, even among middle-class and lower-class people, sadistic copycats in even “ordinary” circles constantly mistreating their more masochistic neighbours and family members, keeping everything for themselves (goods and services) that were supposed to have been shared with everyone else in their particular social group. Even people in the union movement, at least those practising what is called “business unionism”, try to keep for themselves all the crumbs that regularly fall off the big investors tables, rather than sharing whatever is left over of the world’s wealth with unorganized labour, weaker unions or retirees.

Liberation from all of these multiple crises coming together at the same time has to be coordinated world-wide and become universal, rather than parochial, if any of us can hope to survive this particularly disappointing period of history.

A tidal wave of misinformation

I just finished reading Daniel J. Levitin’s book, “A field guide to lies: Critical thinking in the information age”, published in 2016. It fitted in quite nicely with my own research on the same general subject, that began with the writing of three related books, “Taking the lying out of living”, “Universal skepticism” and “Billions of big babies”, published in 2001, 2003 and 2006. To which I have since added a slew of related articles, in various magazines and newspapers, as well as my current blog, with monthly postings since 2013. A good twenty years of research and commentary on what is probably the world’s most important topic, indispensable for explaining what has gone wrong with our collective mishandling of every single major issue currently afflicting human society. Or all of them together, at the same time.

More than anything else, it is the misinformation constantly being created by millions of ultra-right-wing trolls all over the world, that explains more than any other common cause why we have not been able to deal even minimally with any of the recent, escalating, ecological, financial and geopolitical crises. Nor with the highly related, extremely serious, partly neoliberal and partly neofascist wave of barbarian atavism, taking over every part of the world as well as threatening our collective future as a species. The trolls are not only the anonymous jackasses polluting social media but also the very well-known, and very prolific, creators of fake news currently running most of our governments, political organizations and multinational corporations, as well as most of our religious and cultural institutions. Relatively rational explanations of reality have been almost completely submerged by thousands of irrational fabrications, many of them based on the re-emergence of long discredited, replacement myths dredged up from the distant past. The entire homo sapiens part of the biosphere has been inundated over the past few decades with a gigantic tidal wave of misinformation that threatens to put us all out of commission permanently.

Levitin’s book, as the title suggests, mostly deals with the technical aspects of misinformation, about all the different ways in which human beings manage to misinterpret all kinds of data, such as quantitative (statistical) data, accidentally or deliberately misunderstanding plausibility, averages, graphic representations, reporting biases, sampling biases and probabilities. As well as qualitative misevaluations involving such things as expertise, alternative explanations, counter-factual “knowledge”, and several of the most common logical fallacies. My favourite fallacy in his list has always been “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (“after this, therefore because of this”), that crops up all the time in historical discourse. Which does not mean that succeeding events never have a cause and effect relationship, but rather that they are not necessarily related in that way.

Levitin does not focus very much, however, on what I consider to be the most psychologically damaging kind of mangling of the facts, namely deliberate, official attempts to fool ordinary people into going along with whatever their leaders have previously decided to do (before consulting them), no matter how dangerous the consequences could turn out to be. For example, his reference (page 129) to the U. S. government’s claim about the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq prior to the 2003 American invasion of that unfortunate country. Which he refers to as a “mistake”, even though it has since been admitted that it was a deliberate fabrication to get the U. S. population onside, in a predetermined effort to remove a rival dictator in that region. Somewhat similar to the 1964 “Gulf of Tonkin incident”, involving a supposedly “completely unprovoked” North Vietnamese attack on an American warship, that the U.S. government now admits to have been a deliberate misinterpretation of events, intended to justify major escalation in that earlier war.

Just as I was finishing the Levitin book, I also stumbled upon an earlier work, “The influencing machine” (published in 2011) by U. S. public radio personality Brooke Gladstone, a kind of adult comic book (graphic non-fiction), abundantly illustrated by Josh Neufeld. This book is a very impressionistic, liberal-minded history of the media, almost exclusively focused on “the American exception” (the title of chapter 2), the idea according to which the U. S. constitution guarantees freedom of speech like no other country does, even if the U. S. media and “the American people” in general are constantly forgetting what freedom of expression genuinely entails. Her general proposition is that the media interprets the news the way that “people” (big shots as well as ordinary people) want it to do, so that “we get the media that we deserve”. Which means that according to her, there is nothing particular going on these days that has not been going on before, at least not since the coming into being of the modern media (during the nineteenth century). Except perhaps for her own projection of a future tainted with artificial intelligence (see chapter 15, “I, robot”).

Gladstone, however, is not nearly as naive as Levitin about U. S. government attempts to control the media, readily admitting all sorts of official misinformation, such as the observation (page 72) that U. S. involvement in the Spanish-American war, the First World War, the Vietnam war and the invasions of Iraq (1991 as well as 2003), were all prepared in advance by total media fabrications to make sure that “the American people” would want to go to war as much as its government did. Gladstone, however, very carefully avoids providing any information that could have gotten her into trouble with her publisher, or with her radio audience, about fundamental problems that go far beyond her discussion of the different kinds of media bias on which she focuses her attention (commercial bias, status quo bias, access bias, visual bias and fairness bias).

In her treatment of objectivity, for example, she agrees that “the Communist menace is real” (page 104) before going on to denounce those Americans who dropped all pretence at objectivity in their treatment of the U. S. role in the Vietnam war. Even though she details dozens of horrible examples of all sorts of people being constantly mistreated by those who care only about profits, she never specifically denounces private capitalism as such. She has nothing to say about why so many people all over the world became communists in the first place. Nor does she explicitly state anywhere in her text that private capitalism has in fact been much more menacing to the extremely inadequate kind of democracy that still exists in this world, than the kind of fake communism practised by the geographically-limited Soviet bloc (really only a variety of state capitalism), lasting for a relatively short period of time.

She also readily admits that things happening to people in every country in the world have an enormous impact on people’s lives in every other country, but she nevertheless has nothing whatever to say about how the media works in such places as Russia, China, India, Nigeria,  Brazil, or any other non-Western country. As if the relationship between the media and the people in those “faraway” places has no effect whatsoever on what is going on with the media inside Western nations like the USA. In most of her text, she treats the USA as if it was some kind of microcosm of the whole world. Imagine how much more controversial, and difficult to publish, her book would have been if she had included several chapters about the even more incredible media distortions going on in regions like the Middle East. Or if she had included in her text several chapters about the enormous damage being done to democracy in every major region by what is currently happening to the world’s most important religions. More specifically  by the current wave of ultra-right-wing fundamentalism that has so dramatically contributed to the political and social atavism, all over the world, that I was mentioning earlier.

Every government on this planet, past and present, misuses information on purpose, pretty much all the time, to serve whatever political purpose it may have, on any particular occasion. As do all the world’s major banks and corporations, private capitalism since its inception always having been (congenitally) focused on using hidden or prefabricated information in order to keep ahead of competitors, legislators, customers, employees and pretty much everyone else. It is also true that conspiracy theories as such first came into being long before the capitalist system was invented, like the Catholic Church’s fabrication of a document supposedly dictated by fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine, giving the Catholic version of the Christian message precedence over the Orthodox version. It was not until very recently that Pope John Paul II finally admitted (a thousand years after the fact) that it was in reality a medieval forgery. Nevertheless, it is completely ridiculous to conclude, as Gladstone has done, that misinformation nowadays is just “business as usual”, thereby refusing to admit that it has become a genuine, worldwide tidal wave and not just the normal ebb and flow of ordinary seawater.

The ease with which gullible people all over the world are so easily fooled nowadays was emphasized in Daniel Levitin’s section on expertise, when he referred to numerous individuals who took their medical advice from someone who plays a doctor on television (page 135). Which eerily predates the subsequent election of “presidential” actor Volodymyr Zelensky as the current (real-world) president of the Ukraine. The same Zelensky for whom fake-news U. S. president Donald Trump threatened to cut off military aid if he refused to investigate rival Joe Biden’s possible involvement with political corruption in one of the Ukraine’s most important corporations. Also the same, Russian-supported, “DJ” Trump who recently survived an attempted impeachment over the Zelensky affair by bullying his party’s senators into refusing (for the first time in U. S. history) to call any witnesses or to table any documents during his trial. Also the same neoliberal-neofascist numbskull who was photographed making the raised-fist salute, of the world communist movement, to celebrate his victory over everyone else. As they so crassly say in the USA, “you can’t make up this kind of s—t”!

Thousands of commentators all over the world wonder why the millions of evangelical Christians who support Trump do so in spite of the fact that he seems to stand for absolutely everything that they are supposed to abhor the most. Such as encouraging as many men as possible to mistreat as many women as possible, by promoting promiscuity, prostitution and pornography (“grab them by the pussy!”). Or by encouraging as many white people as possible to mistreat as many “coloured” people as possible by refusing to distinguish between supporters and opponents of white supremacy, during a recent confrontation between rival groups of demonstrators. Not to mention every other ultra-stupid, ultra-reactionary comment that he has made even more recently, on every possible subject, or his unforgivable pardons of a dozen of his favourite underworld collaborators. With the result that he is currently being denounced by the anti-Trump media as himself personifying the same behaviour displayed by the thoroughly corrupt leaders of all the nations that he calls “sh—hole countries”, most of them to be found in the poorer regions of the world.

Could it be that those evangelicals are in fact trying to hasten the onset of Armageddon, provoking their God’s supreme displeasure by deliberately contributing to the rapidly accelerating moral degeneracy of human society? More or less in the same way that such people also support “Christian Zionism” because the Book of Revelations apparently says that at the end of time, the Jews have to first take over the Middle East completely, in order to finally prompt “the Lord” into forcibly converting them at last into good, evangelical Christians? In other words, as Trump himself was reported to have said about recent Muslim radicalism, don’t we want to really “find out what the hell is going on” with all of these antediluvian, fundamentalist movements?

It is very odd, to say the least, that all the ultra-right-wing populist leaders in every region seem to think that the best way to fight corruption at the highest levels (“the deep state”) is by encouraging even greater corruption, at still higher levels than before. Which may help to explain why the Gates foundation recently honoured the increasingly autocratic prime minister of India (Norendra Modi) for building millions of toilets, thereby ignoring one of the most important goals in the United Nations list of requirements for sustainable development, i. e., the need “to promote peace, human rights and the rule of law”. It might also help to explain why the people who run the Nobel Prize for economics recently honoured several neoliberal economists, like climate-change skeptic William Nordhaus, thereby betraying the overall Nobel mantra of only recognizing those giving the greatest possible benefit to all humankind, and not just to a very small section of it.

We currently live in the kind of world in which after every well-publicized incident involving charges of corruption and incompetence, the public relations department of every large corporation or government service always issues a press release about how their particular institution is “committed to the highest possible standards” in doing whatever it is they were supposed to be doing. No matter how many such “incidents” have been recently reported. Deliberate misinformation has therefore become institutionalized at the very highest levels of every sector of every society and of every culture. Typically, very few of the people responsible for any of those incidents ever gets blamed, or punished, for any fault whatsoever.

This same, thoroughly dishonest, denial mentality permeates every kind of discussion concerning every one of the world’s most important problems. This upside-down attitude is particularly obvious whenever the conversation happens to touch on the ever-worsening degradation of the natural environment, not only regarding such imminently dangerous realities as climate change, or the accumulation of toxic waste products in the world’s oceans, but also the increasingly deadly pollution of the air, the water and the soil conveniently situated, most of the time, right next to most of the world’s highly populated neighbourhoods. Far away from where most of the rich people live. Which is happening more and more often, not less and less often, not only in countries like Paraguay and Bangladesh, but also in places like Canada and Japan. Mountains of abandoned mine tailings, forgotten oil wells and decaying industrial sites proliferate all over the world, as the world’s most impervious investors move on from one region to another, leaving death and destruction in their wake, in millions of different localities.

Not that phoney, post-modern, left-wing discourse is necessarily coming up with any more accurate depictions of reality. In an article published in the Montreal newspaper “Le Devoir” (February 1, 2020), about the debate over dogmatism in Western universities, author Stéphane Baillargeon quoted Concordia University sociology professor Jean-Philippe Warren commenting on left-wing dogmatism in the social sciences. To the effect that in order to fight against the hierarchization of knowledge in today’s society, the post-modern leftist interpretation of reality has been to claim, for example, that science and shamanism are equivalent forms of discourse. Imagine that: scientists claiming that the scientific method does not get us anywhere closer to the truth than shamanism, which is based on somehow communicating with “the spirit world” in order to be able to import those spirits’ (non-existent) “transcendental energy” into our own world.

This seems to me to be the worst possible way of fighting against elitism and the enormous, ever-accelerating gap between the social classes, all over the world. Which was created by the alliance of private (neoliberal) capitalism and state (neofascist) capitalism, not by science as such. To be sure, all the world’s ultra-rich and ultra-powerful elitists have been using the discoveries of modern science, including social-science research into the different methods of ideological manipulation, in order to reinforce their control over “the lower classes”. But cutting all the world’s poorer and less powerful people off from those scientific discoveries, by equating the scientific method with the methods being used by shamans, and all the other religious fundamentalists, is not going to get us anywhere at all in the fight against elitism. Just like in the case of the ultra-right-wing populists mentioned earlier, it is only going to make things a lot worse: replacing existing ideological corruption with even more ideological corruption, on a whole new level.

Another case in point being well described in an article published recently in “The Montreal Gazette” (February 13, 2020) by social entrepreneur (and former prostitute) Valérie Pelletier, “Sex work isn’t work, it’s sexual exploitation”. In that article, Pelletier lambasted all the recent, post-modern attempts at treating prostitutes as “sex workers”, who supposedly have the right to ply their trade in a “free” society just like everyone else. She pointed out that in the real world there are very few happy ‘sex workers’, because sexual exploitation of overwhelmingly poverty-stricken women is not at all joyful, but “bleak and identity stealing”.

To which I might add that interpreting prostitution as sex work is just another kind of deliberately fake-feminist misinformation, a lot like the equally false feminism of people who claim that the Muslim-fundamentalist hijab is “not really” a symbol of male domination over women. Or those who believe that the Super Bowl half-time show in the USA, featuring Latino performers Jennifer Lopez and Shakira dressed in ultra-revealing costumes, was not a good example of hyper-sexualization because they were just celebrating Latin culture (and Middle Eastern culture as well in Shakira’s case). As if sexism only applies to Western culture, and everything emanating from “oppressed” cultures has to be supported, no matter how debilitating its content.

Which is also quite similar to the so-called “intersectional” argument according to which feminists should be concentrating on helping the world’s most oppressed women (poor, non-white, etc.) rather than fighting against sexism directed at all women in general. With the result that the intersectional crowd end up having no idea what to do whenever they are faced with a conflict between two opposing groups of oppressed women. As in the case of transgender activist Jessica Yaniv’s denunciation of South Asian (Sikh) women in a British Columbia beauty salon, who refused to shave (his/her) decidedly male genitalia. To what extent are people supposed to believe that a person self-identifying as a woman really is a woman, in the original sense of the word, if that person is unable to become pregnant, or to bear children? In other words, how is the real world supposed to interact with the imagined world these days?

Yet another fascinating example of how weird ideological misinterpretation can become these days is how some of Canada’s Jewish leaders, who should know better, have gotten extremely upset about Montréal mayor Valérie Plante’s refusal to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-semitism. It seems that a small minority of revisionist Jews had a certain influence on the mayor’s decision, since they believe that the proposed definition could include banning any discussion of Israel’s origins. Which is certainly plausible given the enormous controversy that erupted inside Israel when historian Shlomo Sand published a book (“The invention of the Jewish people”, 2008) according to which today’s Palestinian population are largely the descendants of the Jewish population of ancient Israel, most of whom converted to Islam later on.

He also argued that most of today’s Jews, the majority of whom currently support Zionism, are in fact descendants of various different peoples who converted en masse to Judaism at various different times, and that the forced dispersion (diaspora) of the Jews in the ancient world never happened. In addition, he has accused Israel of having adopted an increasingly ethnocentric attitude over the past few years, “doubling down” (like Donald Trump likes to do) on its colonialist attitude towards the Palestinians. A fact that prompted emeritus history professor Yakov Rabkin, of the University of Montréal, to describe today’s Israel as having become an inspiration for all the white supremacists in the world, from Poland to Bolivia.

Needless to say, Sand’s version of Jewish history has been completely rejected and denounced by dozens of other mainstream historians who support the official point of view, and therefore consider Sand to be a traitor to the Jewish cause, that they equate with the Zionist cause. The Jewish leaders in Montréal who denounced mayor Plante undoubtedly know all about that controversy, but they curiously do not refer to it at all (the sin of omission) in any of the newspaper references to that controversy that I have read, preferring instead to make it appear as if the city administration is merely being anti-semitic. This is a truly excellent example of how even such a serious charge as anti-semitism can be turned on its head by thoroughly dishonest people who have no interest in partaking in any kind of civilized debate about anything whatsoever.

To be sure, identity myths like the Israeli one are currently being revived and refashioned all over the world nowadays. Canada, for example, was originally founded in 1867 by the imperial parliament’s “British North America Act”, accompanied by a historical myth about how the new nation was based on the “peaceful coming together” of two founding “races”, the “English” and the “French”, later replaced by “the anglophone and the francophone communities”. When Prime Minister Pierre-Elliott Trudeau got the Queen of England to sign an ideological reconstruction of Confederation in 1982, he reworked the original Canadian myth, replacing the “two founding races” with a “multicultural Canada”, theoretically combining all the indigenous peoples living north of the U. S. border, all the descendants of the English and French “races” that settled in the same region before 1867, and all the (immigrant) “cultural communities” that have set up shop in this country since that time.

The only people consulted directly by P.-E. Trudeau (the father of Canada’s current P. M.) for his 1982 Canadian constitution being the premiers of the nine (mostly) anglophone provinces, the one (mostly) francophone province (Québec) never having signed on. But then, neither did any of the indigenous peoples of Canada, since they were not invited to the reconstruction conference in the first place. Nor, for that matter, were any of the immigrant (cultural) communities specifically invited. Such are the workings of modern, representative “democracy”, a situation that has only gotten even worse since that time, not only in Canada but also in every other country that likes to brag about being so very democratic.

Canada’s treatment of its indigenous peoples has generally been a lot worse than its treatment of any of its other minority populations, such as the Québécois, the francophone minorities living outside of Québec, or any of the immigrant groups. Most of the indigenous communities spread out all over Canada are still living in very backward conditions, like the ones that still prevail in most “Third World” countries, lacking such basic necessities of modern life as drinking water, readily available health care and high-school graduation. Not to mention such abominations as the residential schools, designed to “take the Indian out of the Indians”, or the deliberately botched inquiry into what happened to thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women. It is not much of a consolation to any of those communities that indigenous peoples in other countries, such as the USA, Australia, the Russian Federation, China, India, and practically every other country in the world, are not treated any better.

This world-wide mistreatment of indigenous populations is also another good example of misinformation as well, since very few of all the countries harbouring these peoples have ever honestly acknowledged their own colonial responsibility for this extremely unequal treatment. The misinformation aspect is particularly galling in Canada, whose current government seems to be the world’s most glaring example of an enormous contrast between what the government says that it is doing to rectify this situation (a lot), and what it is really doing instead (not much). As can be readily observed during the current crisis over the very serious indigenous blockades of Canadian railroads, to protest against pipeline construction in the province of British Columbia (B. C.), primarily to move natural gas to Asian markets.

Nevertheless, it must not be thought that indigenous peoples are not also themselves participating in this global tidal-wave of misinformation. About a year and a half ago (September 17, 2018), I published a blogpost called “Holistic remedies for narrow-minded communitarianism”, in which I presented the main ideas contained in a book, “First Nations 101: Tons of stuff you need to know about First Nations people” written by Lynda Gray, an indigenous author from B. C. In my blogpost, I was quite sympathetic to most of what Gray had to say about Canadian ethnic and cultural genocide aimed at the indigenous peoples in this country.

However, I also included extensive criticism of what I considered to be her naive presentation of pre-contact indigenous culture as being totally devoid of war, sexism, the killing-off of large mammals, or anything else that most people nowadays might define as objectionable behaviour. Useful Information that historians of all the other cultures and civilizations in the world normally include in their works. It seemed to me to be practically impossible that none of the indigenous groups living in what is now called Canada, before the modern European invasions, ever did anything at all that anyone living nowadays might not like very much.

The use of the term “First Nations” itself could also be easily misconstrued, if it is used to suggest that each one of the indigenous peoples currently living in some particular region have always been living in that very same region since time began. The history of so-called “prehistorical societies”, prior to the invention of writing or some other arbitrary criterion, is changing all the time, with each additional discovery about what was really going on during the first 200 000 years of human existence on this planet. But one of the characteristics of that history that seems certain, alongside the intermingling of our species with various other kinds of (now extinct) human beings, is that every last one of the world’s identifiable cultures all belong to that same (homo sapiens) species, the various cultural groups of which have been moving back and forth across the planet for thousands of years.

Making it extremely unlikely that more than a few currently existing cultures live in exactly the same region nowadays as they did when our species first arrived in any given area. Which means that even the expression “indigenous peoples” should not be used to imply permanent occupation of any predetermined geographical setting. History is one thing and mythology is another, in spite of what any particular identity quest for complete and total ethnic purity might come up with, as an “alternate reality”.

There are, obviously, hundreds of thousands of other examples of deliberate misinformation being foisted on everyone these days, by all kinds of ideological manipulators pretty much evenly spread out all over the world. They are all contributing to the current tidal wave of alternative realities now being proposed by everyone out there with an axe to grind. Deliberate denial of the existence of an identifiable real world is just the most convenient way that all those axe-grinders have of refusing to come to terms with any of humanity’s most pressing problems. If someone judges some particular reality as being too much for that someone to handle, that person just has to pretend not to see it, nor to hear, smell, touch or feel it. Which, unfortunately, will not be enough to make it disappear for real.