Science versus social apartheid
During the current pandemic, scientists all over the world have developed a variety of different kinds of vaccines, including one form (mRNA) that had never been discovered before, but which has been demonstrated to be the most effective of them all. Together, these vaccines have started to help protect hundreds of millions of people from SARS-CoV-2, that has already killed several times as many people as the official tally of 3,7 million direct victims. The pandemic has also killed, or severely weakened, millions of other people suffering from dozens of other dangerous ailments, whose treatment has been put on hold, unfortunately for some of them not always temporarily. The enormous social and economic disruption resulting from the same pandemic has also greatly worsened working and living conditions in dozens of countries, on every continent. This has made daily life even more difficult than it was before, especially for the poor and the powerless, who make up about three-quarters of the entire world population of almost eight billion individuals.
A not-so-new form of social apartheid, vaccine nationalism, is greatly contributing to all that death and destruction by preventing equitable distribution of vaccines to everyone, especially in those parts of the world that need them most. As the World Health Organization (WHO) has repeatedly pointed out, however, the science of medicine is not just focused on pharmaceutical science. It has also determined that in order to protect any group of people from any of the diseases that have become pandemics, all groups of people everywhere have to be vaccinated. Letting the citizens of the world’s poorest countries, as well as huge clusters of poor people who also live even in the world’s richest countries, get sick and/or die off without any protection jeopardizes the health of the already inoculated, by encouraging the development of variants that are more contagious, and often more deadly, than the original strains of the disease. Until everyone is fully vaccinated everywhere, following the science also means vigorous adhesion to masking and social distancing, as well as complete refusal of any ridiculous folk remedies, or any other unscientific substitutes.
Major corporations that cling to their patent protection against all odds, and the richer countries that refuse to share available vaccines, as well as to provide the logistical support required to get those vaccines into the arms of the most needy people in the world, are practising an extremely dangerous form of social apartheid on an unprecedented scale. The very concept of herd immunity hits ultra-privileged people where it hurts the most, in their pocketbooks, by demonstrating beyond the shadow of a doubt that all human beings are in this together.
Each one of us possesses the same kind of overall biological mechanisms as each other one, regardless of whether we belong to the poor or the prosperous, the overclass or the underclass, the male population or the female population, the baby-boomers or the post-millennials, the true believers or the unbelievers, majority cultures or minority cultures, as well as everyone sporting a different shade of skin colour. The people on top of the world hate like hell to admit that the people on the bottom are really just like them, instead of belonging to the deliberately exclusive, jointly neoliberal and neofascist category of “useless eaters”.
The current pandemic has shown like nothing else before it how incredibly backward and unscientific ideologies like neoliberalism and neofascism really are, deliberately differentiating between acceptable and unacceptable people for the most ignorant reasons possible. Ultra-conservative leaders of some of the world’s poorest countries, like Norendra Modi in India and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, have enormously contributed to the unusually large death-toll among their own populations by treating SARS-CoV-2 as if it was only a minor ailment. Which is an extremely atavistic attitude that also applies just as much to similar leaders in some of the world’s richest countries, such as Donald Trump in the USA and Boris Johnson in the UK. Not to mention the corrupt prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who quickly vaccinated a large part of the Jewish population in his own bailiwick, while deliberately ignoring most of the Palestinian Arabs living in the occupied territories next door.
Trump behaved even more hypocritically than those other numbskulls, by deliberately encouraging the spread of fake, ultra-irrational conspiracy theories about everything, including the pandemic, among his cultish followers. At the same time, however, he officially supported the “warp-speed” development of the newest vaccines, and defeated the disease in his own body by getting the best, most scientific treatment available when he was president of the country that still has the largest number of well-trained doctors and scientists in the world.
Being able to control such pandemics also means that we have to know everything about how they got started as well, in order not to repeat the same mistakes in the future that were made in the recent past. A committee of experts brought together by the WHO has determined that the entire pandemic could have been avoided altogether if China had not tried so hard to ignore it completely before December 2019, and if the WHO itself had not decided to wait until January 30, 2020, before declaring that it had in fact become an international, public-health emergency. For their part, most of the world’s governments, even in the richest countries, waited until the WHO’s official, March 11 pandemic declaration before deciding to react very much to that information. It seems that there were cases reported even in Italy in October 2019, that were then interpreted as being something else altogether. Which would indicate that the disease had already been circulating in the world long before the Chinese government decided to inform everyone about what was going on.
The Wall Street Journal report about how three Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019 also re-introduced the theory that the virus escaped from that lab rather than being naturally produced in a substandard Chinese meat-market. Even more recently, the number-one public-health official in the USA, Anthony Fauci, also started raising questions about six Chinese miners who got sick (three of them died) with a disease similar to the coronavirus in 2012, after cleaning bat guano out of an abandoned copper-mine in southwest China. Which means that SARS-CoV-2 either could have originated naturally from that event or that it could have escaped from the Wuhan Virology Institute, after that lab was involved in conducting tests on samples brought in from the mine incident. The fact that some people in the USA are digging up new facts, and reviving the lab hypothesis as well, should not just be dismissed as anti-Chinese propaganda aimed at taking the heat off the USA’s own dismally high death toll from the pandemic, and its own vaccine imperialism.
The ultra-authoritarian Chinese regime is just as capable as the even more powerful US regime in manipulating information for its own imperial reasons. It is after all highly unlikely that China’s original story, about rapid transmission of the disease to humans from bats and other creatures being sold in a wild-animal meat-market, would take place quickly and naturally only a very short distance away from the Wuhan Institute. Apparently, that BSL-4 certified lab already had a reputation (among other such labs) for carelessly handling some of the most dangerous pathogens in the world. Which did not prevent a couple of friendly scientists working at an equivalent lab in Winnipeg, Canada, from sending other, unrelated pathogens to Wuhan, both of them being subsequently fired by that lab in October, 2019. The world needs to know exactly what happened back then, and in what order, to make sure that we are not going to go through a long series of similar disasters during the next several decades.
Neoliberal globalization is also very much on the defensive these days, having set up an exclusively short-term, maximum-profit-oriented system of international, “just-in-time” production and distribution, not only for manufacturing cars and trucks but also for running just about everything else, including the pharmaceutical industry. Dozens of countries all over the world have found out that relying on only a few nations still capable of producing up-to-date vaccines has left them out in the cold, having to spend enormous sums of money to buy other people’s products, if they are rich enough to do so. Or if they are too poor to do that, having to wait three or four more years, and to lose millions of lives during the interim, before managing to get their own people properly protected.
The entire disgusting reality of having a world divided up into a very few ultra-rich countries, slightly more in-between countries and a much larger number of ultra-poor ones, has become even more obvious than it was before. Which also simultaneously emphasizes the equally ugly and equally dangerous fact that every country in the world, no matter how rich or how poor it may be as a whole, is also divided up in a similar way, a very small number of ultra-rich people always spreading out on top and a very large number of ultra-poor people always jammed together at the bottom. A world which, after forty years of neoliberalism, has never been so deeply divided on social-class lines as it is now.
Economic science is not really scientific at all when it favours neoliberalism, taking private investment as a model for all of society, focusing on “shareholder rights” for the fortunate few rather than “stakeholder rights” for everyone else, including the vast majority of the world’s population. In the real world, economic and social prosperity always increases the most when equal status for everyone is promoted, such as by treating women just as well as men are being treated, and promoting equal access for everyone to all the newer intellectual skills that have to be mastered in order for anyone to perform well in the “post-modern” world. Even already acquired skills, not only in poorer countries but also in some of the world’s more fortunate countries, such as basic literacy and the mastery of simple arithmetic, have been allowed to decline drastically in recent years.
Over-privileged people on every continent refuse to allow ostracized minorities to get access to all those skills, the old ones as well as the new ones, and also refuse to include millions of under-educated people, even among those belonging to majority ethnic or religious populations. The reason given being that it has “become just too expensive” to include “all those people” in economic and social development, given the threefold increase in the total world population, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7.7 billion in 2019.
The result of all that exclusion has been an equally enormous increase in ultra-right-wing populism, significantly compounded by the social-media invention of dozens of cock-eyed conspiracy theories, such as the ridiculous idea that vaccines, masks and social distancing were all developed in order to enslave ordinary people rather than to save them from dying. The gradual enslavement of ordinary people is real enough, as an empirical observation, but it was caused by the rise of neoliberalism, and by the increasing popularity of neofascism, especially in the form of religious fundamentalism (evangelical Christianity, political Islamism, and similar kinds of Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist, Shintoist and Jewish extremism), in every part of today’s world.
Political science is also not being terribly scientific when it is conscripted into helping to uphold completely one-sided, imperial domination of large and powerful nations over smaller states, in addition to denying the right of self-determination to distinct but constitutionally subordinated populations, such as in Québec, Scotland and Catalonia. Countries that pretend to be “beacons of democracy”, such as the USA, Canada, the UK, France, Germany and Israel, are promoting their own varieties of political hegemony as actively as are the world’s “honestly authoritarian” countries, including such notable examples as China, India, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Morocco and Turkey. Both groups of countries are also actively promoting militarism at the same time, and denouncing the world-peace movement at every available opportunity.
Not to be outdone, many wayward political scientists in US universities are promoting the absurd idea that “American democracy” genuinely requires the adoption of “bipartisan approaches” to the resolution of political differences between that country’s two dominant political parties. Thereby advocating reconciliation between the Democratic Party currently in power and the ultra-right-wing Trump faction still very much in control of the Republican Party, which continues to detest formal democracy and to promote populist irrationalism instead. A much more fruitful approach for political scientists in that country would be to advocate in favour of abandoning the USA’s absurd love affair with reserving political power for only two enormous, pro-establishment parties, the main purpose of which is to keep progressive-minded people as far away from power as possible.
The recent return to a brief period of active warfare between Israel and the Hamas movement in Gaza is also the most obvious example of the worldwide confrontation between super-rich countries and super-poor countries. Although a large number of people denounce Israel all the time for anti-Semitic reasons, other people who are not the least bit anti-Semitic also criticize that country because it has become so stridently neofascist. Both sides in the eleven-day exchange of fire that ended on May 21, 2021, bombarded each other’s civilian populations from the air, but the Israeli airstrikes ended up killing many more ordinary people than did the substandard rockets fired (or misfired) by the Hamas organization. Thereby maintaining the usual 20 to 1 kill ratio that Israel has continually achieved over the past 73 years. It is impossible to think of any other long-standing military confrontation anywhere else in the world that is so obviously and so enormously unequal as that one. State terrorism on Israel’s part was, as usual, much more “efficient” at killing people than the much less murderous, much less well-organized, Islamist form of terrorism.
In fact, the never-ending war between Israel and Palestine (including the Palestinian national minority living inside Israel) has currently become a conflict between two rival forms of neofascism, with an ultra-right-wing Israel confronting a section (Hamas) of the ultra-right-wing, Islamist movement controlling Gaza. For its part, the moribund Palestinian “Authority” in the occupied West Bank did not participate at all in the recent flare-up of violence. The Israel/Gaza exchange is similar in some ways to other confrontations going on elsewhere, such as the war between the state terrorism of the Saudi Arabia-United Arab Emirates coalition, pitted against the pro-Iranian, ultra-right-wing Islamist, Houthi movement in Yemen. Judging from the various accounts of that war that have been published in world media, the kill ratio in that conflict seems quite similar to the one in Israel/Gaza.
The dominant forces in both those confrontations also seem to be adopting an overall strategy of “separate development” for the opposing communities of people involved, in other words, apartheid. Still another conflict that is also somewhat similar (at least so far as kill ratios are concerned) is the one taking place inside the official borders of Myanmar, between the military dictatorship controlling that country and the long-established guerrilla movements belonging to several of the non-Burmese minorities, currently allying themselves with whatever remains of the democratic movement within the majority population.
Another interesting comparison can also be made between the eternally erupting Israel-Palestine wars and the considerably more murderous war in Vietnam, between 1957 and 1975, part of the worldwide ideological confrontation known as the Cold War (1947-1991), that also included the even more violent Korean War (1950-1953). In the Vietnamese conflict, the USA committed all-out military support to the right-wing, Catholic-dominated, South Vietnamese dictatorship in its civil war against the pro-communist insurrection in the southern half of that country, which was supported by the already-established, officially communist government in North Vietnam, allied with the USSR and the PRC. The 1975 victory of the nominally communist side in that war, and the expulsion of the US forces, was only accomplished by an enormous loss of life (two to three million victims), most of them on the communist side, the vast majority of whom were ordinary civilians killed by massive US bombardments from the air.
In all those conflicts, state terrorism, especially when carried out by enormously rich countries, has always been much more murderous than the much less well-organized terrorism carried out by militant guerrilla movements. A judge in the Canadian province of Ontario just recently condemned Iran’s downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane carrying many Canadian citizens, in January 2020, as a form of state terrorism. The attack on those civilians having been deliberately executed as part of the ongoing conflict between the ultra-right-wing, Islamist government of Iran and the still very imperialist government of the USA, which over the years has installed about 800 military bases in dozens of other countries. In this case the US was operating out of bases located in Iran’s neighbour, Iraq, a country that both the USA and Iran are currently trying to control. Another example of a powerful, neofascist state imitating guerrilla movements, that used to hijack dozens of commercial airplanes not so long ago, is the state piracy of the Lukashenko dictatorship in Belarus. It used a military jet to force an airliner flying over that country to land there instead, so that an opposition journalist on that plane could be arrested and jailed on the charge of organizing a recent series of popular demonstrations.
All the world’s most reactionary ideologies, not only neoliberalism and neofascism, but also social-class elitism, racism, sexism and age-ism, imperialism, militarism and terrorism, religious fundamentalism and ethnic exclusivism, as well as anti-environmental extractivism, are all closely related and intertwined. They are also practised all over the world, and not just by predominantly white-skinned, Western nations (the USA, Europe, etc.), as the thoroughly naive and misguided people in the politically-correct, anti-racist/anti-colonial and woke movements seem to believe.
Colonial empires were founded in every major region on this planet thousands of years before the Western variety of imperialism and colonialism came into being. The founders of all those earlier empires were not just white-skinned people, as in ancient Greece and Rome, but were also established by people sporting every possible shade of human skin, in all the regions of the world, not just in Europe but also in every part of Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas. Even during the so-called “colonial period” (from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries), when the empires founded by people of European origin gradually took over a large part of the world, other non-Western empires also simultaneously continued to exist in dozens of non-Western countries.
Imperialism, colonialism and economic neo-colonialism also continue to exist right up to the present day, dominated not only by “Western” (European-origin) nations like the USA, the UK, France and the Russian Federation, but also by non-Western nations like the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, India, Morocco and Nigeria. Most of those imperial nations are not nearly as powerful as the USA still is, but they are nevertheless imperial nations, doing their very best to dominate all the other countries and ethnic minorities within their respective regions of expansion.
Aside from imperialism and colonialism, all the other reactionary ideologies listed above are also just as popular in non-Western countries as they are in Western ones. Religious and ethnic minorities belonging to diaspora populations that have decided to emigrate to other parts of the world, or that have been forced to emigrate to other places by imperialist countries, also practise most of those same reactionary ideologies. As do indigenous communities dominated by all the world’s imperial nations, just like the dominant ethnic groups inside the imperial nations do.
Unfortunately, all religious and ethnic entities on this planet, whether belonging to a majority population in some particular region, or to a minority population of some sort, practise most of the different kinds of reactionary behaviour. All people who exist are, and always have been, real people, always combining progressive behaviour and reactionary behaviour, in various different degrees, following more or less similar trends over time. As in the unequal wars between state terrorism and guerrilla terrorism mentioned above, however, the dominant groups possessing much greater access to state power always succeed in doing a lot more damage to the dominated groups than the less powerful ones succeed in doing, either in trying to fight back against the oppression of the dominant groups, or by also participating quite often in subordinate disputes between rival minority groups.
In Canada, for example, indigenous communities all over the country are in shock once again after the recent discovery of the bodies of 215 children surreptitiously buried in a makeshift cemetery next to one of the residential schools (in Kamloops, British Columbia), that were established all over Canada, starting in the late nineteenth century, with the express purpose of committing cultural genocide against indigenous people. Those schools mistreated many of the children of indigenous peoples, in some cases as recently as the 1990s, taking a total of about 150 000 young people away from their families by force, and subjecting them to all kinds of racist oppression, including rape and malnutrition, resulting in a much higher death rate for the indigenous children than for the general population. Many of those schools even refused to register the names of any of the children who were killed off in this way, while others made only an incomplete, messed-up effort in writing down the lists of names, of what seems to be at least six thousand young people, over all, who died at an early age.
Some political commentators have underlined the leading role of Catholic missionaries from Québec in running many of those reactionary schools, established among indigenous minorities all over Canada, seeming to forget that the Catholic priests in Québec itself, prior to the secular “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, also targeted the majority (non-indigenous) francophone population for another portion of their reactionary behaviour. A good example of which being the extremely poor treatment meted out to thousands of abandoned children of unwed mothers. Twenty thousand of those children, known as “Duplessis orphans” after the ultra-Catholic premier of the provincial government (1936-1939 and 1944-1959), were designated as mentally ill patients and wrongly assigned to psychiatric institutions, where they were subjected to all kinds of thoroughly inappropriate treatment, so that the Duplessis government could receive federal government funds allocated for the mentally disturbed. The ways in which the bishops of the Catholic Church and its political allies treated its “core community” back then was still better overall than the ways in which they treated indigenous people, but the differences between the two kinds of treatment meted out were not as clear-cut as some biased pundits have suggested.
Meanwhile, in today’s Québec, which is still a poorer, largely francophone nation located inside the still richer, largely anglophone nation known as Canada, another scandal similar to the residential schools revelations has also broken out, centring on poor treatment meted out to an indigenous woman, Joyce Echaquan. She died on September 28, 2020, after having been horribly treated in a Québec hospital located near the poverty-stricken village of Manawan, an indigenous community initially set up like so many other such communities as a Canadian “Indian reserve”. A coroner’s inquiry into the causes of her death has been dominating the news media for the past several months, focused on the kind of systemic racism that such events have been uncovering in many different parts of Québec, in recent years.
The Echaquan case is one more deplorable consequence of the fact that the public services in both today’s Canada and the “subordinate nation” of Québec are constantly being confronted with the unmet need of serving two quite different groups of people, the majority of the population now enjoying most of the benefits of belonging to the first world, and the indigenous minority within each country belonging instead to the third world, and therefore prevented from enjoying most of those same benefits. Many of the ailments affecting indigenous people like Joyce Echaquan have long since disappeared from both majority populations.
The hospital in which that patient was mistreated, like all the other public hospitals in Québec, is suffering from an enormous problem of under-staffing, brought on by the low wages and lousy working conditions imposed by the government, particularly for nurses, in comparison with what those same people can find in the private sector. A situation that was caused by chronic government under-funding of the entire public sector, particularly in public health but also in public education and welfare, getting gradually worse during forty years of neoliberalism. The government itself is also horribly under-funded, part of the worldwide situation recently underlined (believe it nor not) by the International Monetary Fund, which has determined that world governments would have collected a total of 500 to 600 billion dollars more in tax money, per year (!), than they are currently collecting, if large multinational corporations were being taxed to the same extent that they were back in the mid 1980s.
The situation is particularly dire in hospital emergency rooms, where people have to work under tremendous pressure, all the time, having to put up with (among other things) compulsory overtime and cancelled vacations, even before the COVID crisis broke out, but which has become much worse nowadays. Similar things are happening in other hospitals all over the world. None of all that, however, justifies the kind of racist comments and lousy treatment that indigenous patients, especially, are forced to endure. A person like Joyce Echaquan, who died when she was only 37, having suffered from several major ailments for quite some time, including heart disease, should probably not have had seven children in rapid succession, but that does not change the reactionary nature of the ways in which she was mistreated. In theory, people working in modern hospitals are supposed to treat all people equally, regardless of their behaviour, no matter how poorly they are themselves being treated by the hospital administration.
Events like the Kamloops discovery and the Echaquan case are further evidence of the fact that both Canada and Québec have systematically been committing social apartheid toward their indigenous populations, similar in many ways to the other kinds of apartheid mentioned earlier in this text, including the vaccine apartheid of rich countries being much better treated than poor countries, and of the Jewish population being much better treated by the Israeli government than the Palestinians in the occupied territories, or inside Israel itself. There are of course dozens of other examples of social apartheid that occur everywhere else in the world as well, in all the “honestly authoritarian” countries listed above but also in other relatively rich, theoretically democratic countries like Australia and New Zealand.
Another obvious example being the way in which most black people in the extremely rich, but also extremely divided, USA are generally treated in a much worse fashion than white people, for the same kind of racist reasons that indigenous people are also mistreated in the same country, which harbours a much larger system of “Indian reserves” than Canada and Québec possess. Along with many other minorities, black people and indigenous people are regularly mistreated all over North America, as well as in most of the other parts of the world, such as China and Russia. However, racially motivated oppression of minorities is “only” a particularly severe form of exploitation. All the “inferior” social classes in every country, making up as I pointed out earlier about three-quarters of the total world population, are treated poorly by the rich and powerful people who control all the different forms of apartheid, including the social-class variety. Exploitation and oppression are two sides of the same coin, and continue to exist in spite of many people’s fervent desire to deny some of the simple facts of human life on this beleaguered planet.
None of these examples of social apartheid being practised in a systemic fashion by mainly white-skinned majorities in dozens of “Western” (European-origin) countries, should be used to deny the fact that all the same reactionary ideologies are also being practised by all the other rulers of all the other peoples in all the non-Western parts of the world, although not always to the same extent. This kind of comparison is quite similar to the argument that I made earlier, about how US government criticism of China’s dangerous delay in reacting to the coronavirus crisis cannot just be put down to US attempts at hiding their own very poor response to the pandemic. Both the USA and China can be legitimately accused of having succumbed to the influence of reactionary ideologies like neoliberalism and neofascism in dozens of different ways. That observation, however, also applies to all the Western nations, not just the USA, as well as to all the non-Western nations in the world, in fact to all the majority and minority populations in every country.
The most obvious example of that reality is the oppression of women by men, sometimes called sexism and sometimes called misogyny, being one of the main reactionary ideologies that is extremely widespread all over the world. Even though a small number of women also manage to mistreat a small number of men, toxic masculinity is a much, much bigger form of oppression and exploitation, that includes a very wide range of reactionary behaviour. In countries like China and India, for example, there are hundreds of millions more men than women, resulting in all sorts of horrible social problems, because traditional families use selective abortions and infanticide to favour male children over female ones. In every region of the world, men are much more likely than women to beat their partners, often killing them in ultra-violent displays of rage, especially whenever those women dare to leave those men, because the women were being mistreated in so many different ways.
Moreover, in dozens of countries all over the world, men belonging to mistreated minority groups often treat their women in even worse fashion than they are treated by men belonging to the dominant majority. This is just another statistical fact of life that many people refuse to acknowledge. Being oneself a victim of racial or social-class oppression does not prevent quite a large number of men from appearing to “take it out on” their wives, who sometimes but not nearly as often, also “pass it on” to their children. There are also more than a few men, belonging instead to the very pinnacle of the rich and the powerful, such as Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew, who mistreat (or used to mistreat) women all the time, because it makes them feel good all over, similar to the way they feel when they make a good business deal, or sock away a large sum of money.
Many oppressed women have also incorporated their domination by men into their own psyches, like the millions of women in North Africa, in western Asia, and in many diaspora populations, who practise excision on young girls within their own communities. For the exclusive benefit of their men, since greatly reducing women’s sexual pleasure helps to emphasize even more than usual the sexual pleasure, and the sexual domination, of men instead. Excision being only one of the many different ways by which self-alienation is being practised by dominated women all over the world.
Most of the people belonging to ultra-right-wing, fundamentalist religious sects, like Christian evangelicals and political Islamists, come from the ordinary, working-class or farming populations, rather than from the upper crust. Even though they are obviously manipulated into doing so by leaders like Donald Trump in the USA and Ali Khameni in Iran, they nevertheless act as willing perpetrators, as well as willing victims of those reactionary ideologies. An observation that accurately describes not only the sectarian followers of such religious formations imbedded among majority populations in places like the USA and Iran, but also among minority populations belonging to sectarian diasporas installed in Europe, in North America and in dozens of other countries, once again including China and Russia. A small portion of those ultra-religious people also commit terrorist acts from time to time, like the ones who attacked the “Charlie Hebdo” journalists in France in 2015, even though the number of their victims is quite a bit smaller than the number of victims of state terrorism, in every part of the world.
The entire, worldwide system of sado-masochistic relations between small numbers of dominant people and huge numbers of dominated people includes social-class divisions, divisions between imperialist countries and dominated countries, as well as divisions between dominant “races” and dominated ones, which exist sociologically even though they have no basis in biological science. Not to mention the divisions between dominant men and dominated women that were mentioned above. Even though all the dominated groups of people in every one of those categories participate in those reactionary ideologies through a peculiar syndrome of self-alienation, this fact does not take anything away from the more important fact that billions of subordinated people are being mistreated, in one way or the other, by the much smaller number of people who dominate them.
In practically every country in the world, all the rotten situations described above are also being rendered even more disastrous than before by the constant increase in neoliberal-induced, organized crime. Large sections of territory are falling under the exclusive control of criminal gangs, a situation particularly dire in countries like Mexico, where cartels funnelling dangerous drugs like cocaine from places like Colombia, to serve the ever-increasing community of zonked-out people in the enormous US market, have taken military control of major regions away from the Mexican government and its increasingly unreliable army. The problem is particularly severe in all the world’s “failed states”, most of which are to be found in Africa and in Asia, as well as in partly-failed states like Mexico, but it is also much worse than it was before even in relatively less affected countries like Canada and Québec. Not much can ever be done about any of the forms of oppression and exploitation mentioned above if criminal gangs end up controlling the entire world, as depicted in dozens of dystopian novels and films.
One huge area of concern, perhaps the most important such concern of them all, over the relationship between science and social apartheid, that has not yet been analyzed in this text, is the fight against extractivism, and the defence of the natural environment against the ever-increasing tendency toward human spoliation. Climate change is only one of the enormous problems caused by the tendency of both private capitalism and of state capitalism to maximize short-term profits by producing almost all the world’s over-abundant supply of goods, especially consumer goods, through the process known as extractivism.
Instead of matching the supply of goods to people’s real needs, a colossal system of disinformation has been created to induce everyone to buy goods and services above and beyond those needs, as well as quite often above and beyond ordinary people’s capacity to pay as well, thereby creating a huge problem of spiralling debt and enslavement to compound interest. Most of those goods are being produced most of the time from raw materials extracted directly from nature, quite often coming from the world’s poorest countries and regions, rather than putting the accent on repairing and recycling already purchased items, or doing without many of those artificial goods, in what is now being called the circulatory economy. An alternative that has also been blocked off by the practise of planned obsolescence, to ensure that short-term profits are constantly increasing.
In addition to the enormous problems being caused in every country by constantly accelerating climate change (much more frequent episodes of drought, forest and brush fires, intensified hurricane damage, flooding and the melting of the polar ice caps) this super-profit approach results in dozens of different kinds of uncontrolled pollution, such as rapid depletion of forests, soils and fish stocks in the oceans, widespread contamination of mining and drilling sites, and the worldwide accumulation of enormous piles of garbage all over the place, such as the huge quantities of plastic products polluting shorelines and the world’s oceans. A process that also applies to the atmosphere, from which rainfall is spreading millions of tons of micro-plastics over every surface on the planet, even those situated thousands of kilometres away from areas of industrial concentration. Newer forms of waste, such as the rise of the horribly energy-consuming bitcoin phenomenon, often promoted by organized crime, are also making everything else that much worse.
What to do about all the different situations that have been described in this text is the remaining item on the agenda. The first part of the reply is by encouraging different people to write articles, and books, on the same general theme as this one and getting them distributed to as many other people as possible. Just the idea of presenting all the world’s most important problems in short form, altogether in one summarized text, is extremely useful by itself. In presenting these different kinds of problems all at once, the general idea that comes out of those presentations is that the extremely varied forms of reactionary thought are different facets of the same overall cause. In other words, they are all outcomes of egotistical or narcissistic behaviour on a grand scale. The kind of general attitude toward life being promoted by this behaviour, has to do with spending one’s time figuring out how to profit from the exploitation and the oppression of other people’s lives, a process in which dominant individuals, or gangs of powerful people, deliberately degrade other individuals, or large groups of other people, as much as possible.
The major source of all evil is profiting from the very numerous people designated as “outsiders”, not just financially but in every other way as well, like Donald Trump does when he talks about belonging to the group known as “winners” rather than the group known as “losers”. All the “inferior” people being dominated by some other person or group, include the poor and the powerless, workers as opposed to owners, men as opposed to women, imperial nations as opposed to colonized people, racists as opposed to victims of racism, and so on.
Once that general idea is out in the open, helped along by the “in-your-face method” of expressing reactionary behaviour that showmen like Trump proudly represent, it is much easier to figure out which side one ought to be on. The anti-Trump side being anyone who puts the emphasis on what all human beings have in common, common goals, common decency, communism in the original sense of that much mis-used word rather than in the stupid sense of hating everything that the so-called “communist” countries ever did, or are still doing. Especially when one realizes that everything that uninformed people associate with the word “communism” is not communist at all, because none of the totalitarian “communist” countries ever got within a billion light-years of doing what communism was supposed to have been all about. Instead, the original idea was to practise genuinely democratic socialism all over the world, not by abolishing the creation of wealth but by making sure that the world’s wealth was being used for everyone’s benefit and not just to serve the voracious appetites of only a handful of wealthy individuals and powerful political chieftains.
Another step in the right direction for doing away with all that domination would have been if at least a majority of the world’s governments had made a decision to adopt a decent, minimum taxation rate for multinational corporations, particularly the relatively new tech corporations who have taken over most world advertising revenues. So that non-criminal governments could accumulate the funds necessary to take care of all the real needs of real people, without regard to their social status. But in order to be useful, that decision would have had to be made by a much larger number of governments than the tax proposal recently made by the G-7 nations (the USA, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Canada), and the minimum tax adopted would have had to have been at least twice as much as the miserable 15% that they decided upon. The picayune G-7 decision merely gives a false sense of security to millions of ordinary people, who mistakenly believe that that decision is “democratic” in the original sense of including everyone for real.
A third move that ought to be accomplished in order to reply to the question, “What is to be done about the horrible situation in which we find ourselves right now?”, is to call for a worldwide movement of “moral rearmament”. Not, to be sure, the fake Moral Re-Armament of the ultra-reactionary, evangelical-christian movement that used to exist in the USA, the UK and a few other countries back in the mid-twentieth century, which was completely and entirely reactionary and anti-communist in the extreme, even when we realize that the “communists” that those people were denouncing were not genuine communists after all.
The kind of moral rearmament that is required nowadays would be an outlook based on firmly condemning all the different kinds of oppression and exploitation mentioned earlier in this text, and proposing instead a world in much the word “morality” became synonymous with concerted opposition to all the reactionary ideologies already identified: neoliberalism, neofascism, class-based elitism, racism, sexism, age-ism, imperialism, militarism, terrorism, ethnic exclusivism, religious fundamentalism, and anti-environmental extractivism. The kind of morality that emphatically does not include any attitudes remotely related to any of those right-wing and ultra-right-wing, atavistic ideologies, is the kind of morality that could make the kind of democratic socialism being proposed function well in the real world.
In the past, human beings have depended on mistreating each other all the time, an attitude that has characterized all the different forms of civilization that have been established in this world since the neolithic revolution began thousands of years ago. In the final analysis, if one dominant group after another (tribal chieftains, slaveholder empires, feudal empires, capitalist empires and so on) could not found its expansion and development exclusively on dominating some other group of people designated as “sub-human”, at least they could depend on mistreating the natural environment as well, in order to save those succeeding civilizations from total annihilation.
This, however, has now become much more difficult to accomplish, even impossible, the natural world no longer being capable of contributing anything new to those dominant empires, since everything that could be taken away from nature has already been taken away. We need a new type of civilization to arise, right away, in order to save the world from all the reactionary ideologies that make most people’s lives so difficult, and that threaten to put all human beings on the endangered species list. The least that can be said, by way of conclusion, is that this new type of civilization does not seem to be arising very much at all, at the moment.
