The virus of power

Clifford Lincoln is a retired politician who used to be a well-known minister of the environment, at first (1985-1989) in the provincial (Québécois) Liberal government of Robert Bourassa, and then again (1993-1996) in the federal (Canadian) Liberal government of Jean Chrétien. At the ripe old age of 92, he has just written an article published in “The Montréal Gazette” (April 21, 2020): “What COVID-19 teaches about governance: Our leaders need to do better at planning and addressing long-term challenges”. He started out by describing the panicked reaction of governments and institutions all over the world, most of them responding to the current coronavirus crisis like the proverbial emperor without any clothes, “afraid, unsafe and unsure”.

Then he went on to underline that “the challenges we face as a collectivity are increasingly long-term ones”, challenges like the population explosion, the constant desecration of nature, huge social and regional disparities, incessant conflicts over ethnicity and faith, much larger numbers of environmental and geopolitical refugees all over the world, as well as multiple epidemics, some of them turning into exceptionally murderous pandemics. His main message being that governments and institutions in every part of today’s world desperately need to get beyond short-term, crowd-pleasing strategies in order to concentrate on adopting “long-term anticipatory, preventive and reformative planning”.

On that point, I could not agree with him more, as anyone capturing the gist of my blog postings over the past seven years can attest. Unfortunately, I was not overly impressed as a citizen with the legacy of Mr. Lincoln’s tenure as an environment minister, surrounded as he was by much more pragmatic politicians like Bourassa and Chrétien, who certainly did not share his own apparent commitment to “compassionate liberalism”. Those folks, like most of the other politicians in power, in Canada and in Québec, participated after all in the worldwide neoliberal onslaught of total governmental subordination to giant corporations, that began back in the early 1980s. At the federal level, the most intensive period of helping big business focus exclusively on short-term profit maximization took place during the Steven Harper government, when the Conservative Party reigned uninterrupted between 2006 and 2015.

But in Canada, just like in dozens of other countries all over the world, it would not be appropriate to put all the blame on such intentionally elitist organizations as the Conservative Party of Canada, or the much larger Conservative Party in the UK, or even the fake-populist Republican Party in the USA. Donald Trump’s occasional attempts to portray himself as a friend of the people, or as an economic nationalist, are completely bogus and ineffectual, especially because of his enormous tax-cuts for ultra-rich corporations and humungous individual fortunes.

The neoliberal, “soak-the-poor” approach was also perfectly represented by several Liberal parties as well, in various different countries. Not only the Liberal Party of Canada, during Jean Chrétien’s reign (1993-2003) and Paul Martin’s reign (2003-2006), but also the Liberal Party of Québec, which became even less government-interventionist than before during the tenures of Jean Charest (2003-2012) and Philippe Couillard (2014-2018). Both of those premiers were also involved in encouraging, rather than fighting against, the corruption of various provincial and municipal institutions by a particularly sleazy group of organized “entrepreneurs”.

As if that were not bad enough, the federal Liberal regime of Justin Trudeau (2015 to the present) also harbours more than a few short-sighted, elitist friends of big business, such as Transport Minister Marc Garneau. While Garneau does not seem to be quite as reactionary as some of his Conservative predecessors, he has nevertheless done everything in his power, at least prior to the arrival of the virus, to make sure that giant corporations like the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Canadian National Railway and Air Canada can always get away with being as unsafe and as rate-gouging as they want to be. In order to present a truly honest picture of the situation, therefore, Clifford Lincoln should have also lambasted many of his fellow Liberals for having deliberately rejected any kind of long-term planning, aimed at ensuring a better future for everyone, rather than for just a tiny, select, group of upper-class cronies.

I also did not agree with the decision that most people in Québec think about whenever they remember Clifford Lincoln nowadays. Namely, his decision to leave the Bourassa government back in 1989, in protest against his boss’s attempt to preserve the integrity of the French Language Charter in Québec from the assaults launched against it by the Supreme Court of Canada. In my “right-honourable” opinion, one of the most important things that all government leaders, in all countries and at all levels, should also be doing, in addition to long-term anti-elitist planning, is to refuse to simultaneously promote imperialist attitudes toward less-powerful jurisdictions. That means not only making sure that mid-sized empires like (English) Canada do not succeed in dominating and mistreating smaller jurisdictions like francophone Québec, but also in making sure that middle powers like Canada (including Québec, for the time being) are not simultaneously being dominated by much larger, world-dominating empires, such as the one in the USA (located right next door), but also including the “People’s” Republic of China.

Not to forget that any anti-imperialist strategy like this one would also have to include making sure that all countries, including Canada and Québec, are also not dominating and mistreating even smaller ethnic and linguistic nations, particularly indigenous peoples like the Innu (Montagnais) population, in northeastern Québec and in the neighbouring Labrador section of Newfoundland. In other words, nothing that any government anywhere does to develop the kind of long-term, all-inclusive planning that Clifford Lincoln is suggesting should be contributing to any strategy that is not truly all-inclusive. Inclusive, that is, not in the sense of every group of people having to put up with whatever neofascist crap that every other group of people wishes to throw at them, but in the sense of trying to collectively develop some kind of worldwide, multifaceted, social-democratic, “cooperative commonwealth federation”. (An expression borrowed from the 1932-1961 “CCF” party, that first introduced Canada’s currently mismanaged public-health system.) Doing all of those things simultaneously, while still surviving the current corona crisis, is, to say the least, a very tall order indeed.

A major reason why everyone ought to be as anti-imperialist as possible is that in order to overcome any massive threat on a worldwide scale like the COVID-19 invasion, international cooperation is absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, as we are finding out once again at the present time, making world cooperation work is extremely difficult, when practically every country, and practically every region of every country, refuses to trust every other jurisdiction (representing a separate people). All that mistrust is, however, entirely justified, because of all the incredibly self-centred jockeying for power among rival big-time financiers and their close friends in politics and organized crime, from every part of the world, that has always gone on in the past, especially in the recent past. While there is no doubt that China made a monstrous mistake by failing to completely shut down its wild-animal meat-markets (and/or by letting that particular animal virus escape from a nearby laboratory), there is also no doubt that the worst possible way to react to that horrible error was when the USA’s dumb-ass president cut off the most important source of funding to the World Heath Organization (WHO).

In spite of all its very numerous shortcomings, the WHO is a necessary part of preventing the world’s poorest countries from suffering even more immensely from the virus than any of the world’s richer nations. And also thereby at least trying to make sure that no matter what any reasonably well-off jurisdiction manages to accomplish in controlling the onslaught of the disease, will not then be completely undone by its subsequent re-importation from any one of a large number of much poorer, much more afflicted, regions. To be sure, it is always possible that some of the more anti-democratic leaders of the poorer countries could just keep all that help from the WHO for themselves, and refuse to share any of it with the poor people under their respective jurisdictions. Nevertheless, we still have to at least try internationally to do the right thing, because we are all in this together, regardless of how many ultra-individualistic profiteers, and confinement-busting egomaniacs, any particular country, rich or poor, may harbour in its midst.

I also have to underline a fundamental fact that did not show up anywhere in Clifford Lincoln’s article. That is the very important concept according to which all the different crises that he mentioned are constantly intersecting with, and negatively influencing each other all the time. One of the most devastating ways in which this happens is the constant expansion of human habitats, caused by combining an ever-increasing human population with short-term profit maximization, practised by an ever-expanding number of private and state-capitalist firms, all over the world. Thereby taking over more and more regions, or ecosystems, that used to be inhabited only by plants and wild animals, and bringing ever-increasing numbers of human beings into direct contact with animal pathogens that none of us ever had to face before.

We should also never forget that the vast majority of all the popularly elected regimes in the world, as well as the vast majority of all the factions ruling the world’s authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, are equally guilty of having adopted quite similar, short-term, crowd-pleasing strategies. Almost all of them combining varying doses of elitist neoliberalism and ultra-right-wing populism (otherwise known as neofascism), in one way or another. Which means that in a country like the USA, for example, it is abundantly insufficient to promote the election of the Democratic Party’s neoliberal Joe Biden as a “decent” alternative to the more neofascist Republican Party’s Donald Trump. Like the well-known Canadian cartoonist, Terry Mosher, did in “The Montreal Gazette” on April 16, 2020, when he depicted Biden wearing a cap reading “Make America decent again”, in an obvious parody of Trump’s own “Make America great again” cap.

The problem with supporting someone like Biden comes from the fact that neoliberalism is not just a strategy popularized back in the 1980s by right-wing populist politicians like the UK’s Margaret Thatcher and the USA’s Ronald Reagan. It has in fact been supported over the past forty years by every successive US regime (and many other regimes in many other countries), including the Barack Obama administration (2009-2017), when Joe Biden was the vice-president. To be sure, the “Obama-care” program in the health sector, although wholly inadequate to deal with the problem that it was addressing, was at least a small step in the right direction. The USA is obviously even more under the control of neoliberalism nowadays than it was under Obama, and not just because of the Republican Party’s total rejection of Obama-care. In reality, Donald Trump’s obsessive-compulsive fixation on pretending that he does not also belong to the “liberal establishment”, is totally fictional.

It has to be frequently repeated that neoliberalism was not just set up from the beginning in order to help private capitalism reassert control over some of the world’s richest countries, that had supposedly drifted too far away from old-fashioned, nineteenth-century laissez-faire (based on short-term profit maximization), under the influence of various left-wing nationalist, communist and social-democratic parties, all over the world. Neoliberalism also surreptitiously reintroduced a new form of fascism (or ultra right-wing populism) into the more or less democratically-elected part of the world, by ensuring that the most vulnerable people in every country would have to pay for the revival of neoliberal “shareholders’ rights”. In other words, today’s astronomical gap between the world’s very few richest people and the world’s very numerous poorest people did not just happen. It was deliberately amplified and distended over the past forty years, to an extent never before witnessed on this planet. A remarkable sort of “social distancing”, after all, although not exactly the same kind as the one now being used against the coronavirus!

The incredible error that some people are making, about not treating neoliberalism as an antechamber of neofascism, became very obvious to me when I was reading the book, “Hamilton: The Revolution”, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, about the hugely successful musical first performed in New York City in 2015, during the Obama administration. One of the most important aspects of that musical was the frequent use of black actors and singers to portray several of the most important figures in the life of one of the USA’s “founding fathers”, Alexander Hamilton, including such lily-white characters as the first US president, “Indian” fighter and unrepentant slaveowner, George Washington. A kind of reverse “cultural appropriation” that became immensely popular, at least in theoretically “compassionate liberal” circles, when Barack Obama was president.

The dominant, mainstream, wing in the Democratic Party, currently being led by Joe Biden, would have everyone believe that they represent a more progressive kind of capitalism than the kind favoured by Donald Trump and his ultra-conservative minions. Unlike their isolationist Republican adversaries, they claim to be fervently anti-racist and anti-sexist, as well as being less elitist, less militarist and even less imperialist than those other jerks. Which sounds like it could be true, at least to a certain extent, whenever Donald Trump starts sounding off, as he is constantly doing, about how wonderful he thinks all the white supremacists in the USA really are, or about how good it is to go around grabbing women by the pussy, or about how what a great guy Vladimir Putin really is, or about how pro-Chinese the WHO leaders unfortunately are, or about how we should be injecting people nowadays with disinfectants, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

The problem with those Democratic Party pretensions is that the kind of neoliberal policies that have often been promoted in the past by leaders like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, cooperating in a “bipartisan” way with the Republicans by agreeing to cut back on various social-welfare programs, is completely unacceptable. The underprivileged people in the USA have had their backs against the wall with extreme poverty of neoliberal origin for the past forty years, and it does not help them in the slightest for elitist Democrats to “occasionally” side with even more elitist Republicans, just in order to “make it possible to cooperate on running the country in these polarized times”.

In reality, neoliberalism is nothing but “fascism with a human face”, falsely anti-elitist, falsely anti-racist and falsely anti-sexist. In the USA as in so many other countries, the people at the bottom of the heap are constantly having to put up with even more difficult living and working conditions nowadays than they already had back when neoliberalism was first introduced. This has been obvious from the very beginning for people with a democratic socialist point of view, and has become ten times more obvious for everyone during the current pandemic, which unfortunately includes the extremely negative, economic and social consequences of such old-fashioned, but still absolutely necessary, virus-control policies as the “social distancing” mentioned above.

What some people refer to nowadays as “racialized” populations, like the USA’s black and Latino minorities, not to mention the “native American” population, are suffering much more intensely from neoliberalism, and from the corona crisis, than are people belonging to the white majority. Although, as usual in such discussions, it must also never be forgotten that poor whites are also suffering in even greater numbers, if not to the same degree, simply because there are so many more millions of them than there are millions of people belonging to specific minority populations. Women are also suffering much more intensely than men, all over the world, for the simple reason that they too tend to be much more often situated at the bottom of the heap, working in excessively difficult, less well-paid jobs more frequently than most men do. Particularly when it comes to taking care of most of the world’s children, and also taking care of older, handicapped people, many of whom are now living in chronically under-staffed care homes.

Mainstream Democrats in the USA, and people like them in every other country in the world, may still want to argue that their “fascism with a human face” is still preferable to the “fascism with an ape face” being supported by almost everyone in the Republican Party, and other parties like it, all over the world. And it is nice, after all, for world leaders everywhere to at least pretend not to support such disgusting ideologies as racism and sexism, like most of the leaders of the USA used to do when the “Hamilton” musical was first performed five years ago. But the fact remains that neoliberal/neofascist elitism automatically begets racism, sexism, militarism, imperialism and all the other rotten political attitudes. Which means that merely having black people play the roles of white revolutionaries from the past is not really such a good idea after all.

Especially when the revolutionaries being portrayed were only opposed to direct control of their fortunes by the British monarchy and its empire. Those (temporary) American anti-imperialists included people like Alexander Hamilton who advocated for economic nationalism (the infant industry argument) in order to escape from indirect British economic control, but also people like Thomas Jefferson who advocated for the much more dangerous attitude of economic liberalism (laissez-faire). None of those revolutionaries, however, had the slightest intention of setting up a nation that would be entirely free from racism, sexism, or elitism in general, nor, for that matter, free from militarism or free from post-revolutionary, expansionist imperialism.

Getting back to our own period of history, the neoliberal/neofascist virus has infected practically all the world’s political organizations, not just most of those operating in the USA, and not just the ones belonging to the traditional, conservative or liberal spectrums. The world’s remaining “communist” parties, or at least those still in power, have also long since abandoned any pretensions that they may have had when they first started out, about being genuinely in favour of worker-peasant control over their countries. The ruling party in China being the most important example of an organization still officially using the word “communist” in its title while practising a curious combination of “red-billionaire” neoliberalism and neofascism instead. Another fascinating example of retaining one’s initial title while still doing exactly the opposite also applies to almost every (formerly) social-democratic organization on this planet, particularly those also retaining power, or any large degree of popular support in any particular country.

Right here in Québec, we are also living through a very horrendous period of history, particularly because of the tens of thousands of seniors already living with numerous kinds of severe health problems, prior to the arrival of the even more murderous coronavirus, and now dying off like flies in government-run, as well as in private-capitalist, care homes. Just like in the rest of the Western world, the vast majority of those now dying from COVID-19 come from those disgusting places euphemistically called “care” centres. Particularly since the provincial government made the initial mistake of concentrating all of its anti-viral strategy on the hospitals, postponing “non-essential” treatment of non-viral diseases for a later date, rather than on the considerably more dangerous care centres. Before coming up with the even more irrational idea of trying to convince hundreds of other people, including medical specialists who are currently under-employed in the hospitals, into helping the extremely overworked nurses and orderlies still toiling away, and also sometimes dying on the job, in those antediluvian care centres.

Where the under-staffing remains so severe that most of Québec’s disabled seniors are nevertheless still being treated like garbage in both the public and the private sections of that network, which have been denounced for decades as the most horrible institutions in Québec for anyone having to work there, let alone for anyone having to live there. This is the worst possible example of neoliberalism morphing into neofascism that currently exists in Québec, as well as underlining perfectly well Clifford Lincoln’s point about short-term political strategies. Simply because everyone in power in the entire world knew at least since the 1980s that a significant percentage of the hundreds of millions of pre-baby-boomers (born before 1945), and the baby-boomers themselves (born between 1945 and 1965), would need urgent medical help right now, forty years after neoliberalism began. To be sure, the majority of the world’s seniors, those living alongside their younger relatives in poorer countries (or poorer regions) where very few people of any age have access to modern medical care, are not necessarily better off.

Once again, in Québec just like everywhere else, the politicians responsible for this sorry state of affairs do not just come from the officially conservative, or officially liberal, parties mentioned above. They also came from governments run in the past by the Parti Québécois, a mildly left-wing nationalist party that has now been reduced to a tiny shadow of its former self. The PQ was originally founded in 1968, and started out promoting a program combining the long-term goals of Québec independence and social-democracy. It managed to get itself elected to provincial power, under various different leaders, from 1976 to 1985, as well as from 1994 to 2003 and, most recently, from 2012 to 2014.

From the very beginning, however, the PQ’s devotion to both of its original principles constantly wavered, under the ongoing barrage of pro-federalist and pro-business lobbies, that not only controlled anti-PQ parties like the Québec Liberal Party but also influenced several indecisive PQ leaders as well. I was also briefly involved with the PQ from 1981, when I served as an unsuccessful electoral candidate, until 1983, when I left the party to protest against its anti-labour stance, adopted during the worldwide recession caused by the central bankers’ monetarist “war on inflation”.

Of all the PQ leaders who came to power between 1976 and 2014, the least social-democratic (as well as the least nationalist) may very well have been premier Lucien Bouchard (1996-2001), who helped set up the system of partly public and partly private care homes for handicapped seniors that is currently responsible for almost all the COVID-19 deaths in Québec. Bouchard’s initial “contribution” to today’s care-home tragedy, as well as that of more recent PQ governments, however, was completely overshadowed by the much more bureaucratic machinations of the Québec Liberal Party’s health and social services ministers, particularly during Dr. Gaétan Barrette’s period of office (2014-2018).

But many of the other PQ leaders over the years also wavered from their original leftwing nationalist points of view, such as premier Bernard Landry (2001-2003), who was an enthusiastic supporter of the 1988 Canada-US (neoliberal) free-trade deal that eventually became NAFTA when Mexico joined (in 1994). Québec’s current premier since 2018, François Legault, was also a former PQ health minister (2002-2003), before quitting the PQ and founding his own political party, the Coalition Action Québec (CAQ), in 2011. The CAQ does not officially support either Québec independence or social-democracy as such, although it does not seem to be quite as firmly opposed to those two ideas as is the number one party in the official opposition, the aforementioned Québec Liberal Party, at least not until recently.

The PQ and the CAQ also belong to the same set of non-traditional political parties in the electoral part of the world that I was mentioning earlier, that are not part of the traditional set of parties possessing official titles like “Liberal” or “Conservative”, or titles often associated with such other old-fashioned, elitist-sounding words as “Republican”. Active politicians nowadays like François Legault therefore also seem to belong to the set of somewhat less fanatic allies of private or state capitalism, such as the Democratic Party’s main leaders, who do not seem to be quite as neoliberal, or as neofascist, as professional goofballs like Donald Trump.

Be that as it may, it would be just another mistake to conclude this blogpost on any kind of positive note, like those constantly being proposed by all the world’s eternal optimists. Who are always suggesting that we should be profiting from the current pandemic in order to do everything completely differently, “after the crisis is over”. Things like dumping neoliberalism and neofascism into the garbage once and for all, making sure that the health system is functioning properly and not just for rich people, as well as the education system and all the other social services. Getting rid of short-term electioneering and short-term profit maximization forever, and replacing all of that with the kind of “anticipatory, preventive and reformative planning” that Clifford Lincoln was talking about. And just basically behaving in a completely different way from that of the ultra-right-wing protester in front of the legislature in Albany, New York, last week, who held up an utterly pathetic poster accusing Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo of being a “communist”, because he too may have used the word “planning” in one of his speeches about the virus attack.

Of course I agree with Lincoln and all those other optimistic people that we should be using the crisis in order to do all those things. But social change of a fundamental nature can never be brought about simply by wishing that it were so. Personally, I am not aware of anything going on right now that could convince me that most human beings nowadays are truly ready to agitate in a really major way, for any or all of the things that we most definitely ought to be doing in the coming months, years and decades. In order to get rid of the legacy of the garbage policies that most of the world’s private and state capitalists have been following for the past forty years.

It seems to me that most of the people running the world nowadays are either complete and total reactionaries, or almost complete and total reactionaries. The people at the top, or near the top, do not seem to be willing to give up their numerous economic, political, social and/or cultural privileges so that the people on the bottom, or near the bottom, will be able to live decent lives again, in some cases, or to live decent lives for the first time ever, in many other cases. Most of the people possessing much more money, much more power and much more influence than everyone else, really and truly enjoy the current situation of facing a fake opposition, rather than the true and honest opponents that they used to face fifty or a hundred years ago. Way back when most of the communists really were communists, the social-democrats really were socialists, the left-wing nationalists really were left-wing nationalists and most of the union leaders really acted like union leaders. Rather than nowadays when most of those people have given up on all of those things, or do not truly believe in any of them any more.

Why help out the really old people, the really sick or handicapped people, the really poor people, the really oppressed people, the poorly educated people (aside from those who manage to get elected to office anyway), the people who never get to eat much, the people out of work for for the past several decades, the people constantly working compulsory overtime, the people getting murdered or beat up or shoved onto the ground all the time, the people who never receive adequate quantities of protective medical equipment, or sufficient quantities of any other useful kind of equipment no matter what they do—when no one is forcing folks on the top, or near the top, to do any of those things? In other words, the coronavirus is just another consequence of the virus of power.

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.