Faith alone: the origin of fake news

A very interesting controversy broke out recently in Quebec. Apparently, Patrick Beauchesne, deputy minister of the environment for the provincial government, wrote a letter several weeks ago to the federal environment minister, expressing concern that the upcoming overhaul of the “Canadian Environmental Assessment Act” might be giving the “traditional knowledge” of indigenous peoples in Canada too broad a definition, thereby placing it on an equal footing with scientific knowledge, when assessing the social acceptability of resource development. As soon as he found out about that letter, Ghislain Picard, chief of the Quebec and Labrador region of the Assembly of First Nations, reacted by accusing the Quebec government of plunging Quebec’s relations with indigenous peoples back 50 years.

So far as he was concerned, any attempt to define traditional knowledge or to limit its scope was necessarily a return to European colonialism, since traditional knowledge was whatever indigenous peoples wanted it to be, to be used by them whenever they felt it to be appropriate. During the ensuing controversy, both the federal and the provincial governments apologized for the deputy minister’s letter, following which a group of law professors from the University of Ottawa, led by Thomas Burelli, accused the Quebec government of racism for having even suggested that there might be any conflict between the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples and the scientific knowledge of the colonialists.

However, as Yves Gingras, a well-known professor of the history of science at the University of Quebec at Montreal, pointed out, the whole idea of attributing “traditional” knowledge exclusively to indigenous peoples, and scientific knowledge exclusively to Western civilization, is completely bogus. Science, in fact, belongs to everyone, and always questions the fundamental assumptions of all kinds of knowledge, of whatever origin. To which I would add that many different indigenous peoples, all over the world, have often used scientific knowledge for their own purposes, when dealing with governments or private corporations involved in resource development schemes in their respective regions. Like human rights and laicity, scientific knowledge is supposed to be universal and to belong to all human beings equally. In an ideal world that was truly democratic, especially socially democratic (neither elitist, nor sexist, nor racist), it would be equally accessible to everyone on this planet.

Unfortunately for indigenous bureaucrats like Picard, reserving traditional knowledge exclusively for indigenous populations is in fact the most obviously colonialist way of participating in this controversy. Which is not to say that non-indigenous bureaucrats, from the private or the public sectors of the economy, in any part of the world, ever take a more scientific, or rational, stance when planning resource development, than the indigenous bureaucrats do. Most resource development has to do with the extractive industries (fossil fuels, minerals, wood, seafood, etc.), that exploit enormous areas of the Earth’s surface mainly for the maximization of private profit. By far the largest part of which ends up in the pockets of a tiny group of extremely rich people, rather than becoming a terribly efficient source of income for the millions of people who end up doing most of the work.

In mainly private-capitalist, neoliberal countries like Canada, most of the governments involved in developing natural resources spend a relatively large portion of public funds providing services for the extractive industries (building roads, cleaning up waste, etc.) and end up getting very little back from the private companies in the form of taxes or royalty fees. Whereas in mainly state-capitalist countries like China and Saudi Arabia, most of which profess various anti-democratic ideologies (such as totalitarian “communism”, absolute monarchy, theocracy, military dictatorship or “guided democracy”), resource extraction, like everything else, exists mainly to benefit the empire-building strategies of a very small number of extremely powerful oligarchs.

In any case, traditional knowledge also belongs to all the world’s peoples, not just those currently considered to be indigenous. Everyone seems to forget the fact that since human populations started spreading out all over the globe several hundred thousand years ago, it is not at all obvious which peoples truly arrived first in any given region, within any one of the world’s continents. Even European peoples (regardless of when their respective ancestors may have originally arrived in whatever part of Europe) possess traditional knowledge, as anyone can find out by reading such popular books as The lost art of reading nature’s signs: Use outdoor clues to find your way, predict the weather, locate water, track animals—and other forgotten skills, by Tristan Dooley (2014). A book in which the author is continually citing examples of traditional knowledge taken not only from his own homeland surroundings in England, with additional material from the USA, but also from his numerous visits with indigenous peoples in many other parts of the world.

There is also a delicious bit of irony to be found in the fact that the government of Canada is apparently promoting traditional knowledge only for indigenous people, and also presumably agreeing with the judgement of the Ottawa law professors that the government of Quebec is being racist for not always behaving in the same way. Particularly when we consider that the same federal government of Canada also believes that anyone who disagrees with having police officers and other authority figures wear religious garb while at work, or supports official laicity in any other form, is also being necessarily racist and anti-immigrant.

In other words, they are making the same kind of error in deliberately misinterpreting the separation of church and state that the indigenous leaders mentioned earlier were making with the distinction between traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge. By assuming that laicity, like science, is a “racist” concept that is only used by rational (anti-religious) Westerners against “traditional” (pro-religious) societies and peoples coming from outside the Western world. As if there were no true believers in fundamentalist religions among the long-established, majority-Christian, Canadians of various European origins!

According to the multicultural ideology adopted by the Liberal government of Canada, it would seem, therefore, that only Canadians of European origin, Canada’s “original immigrants” from an indigenous point of view, can possibly be racist, since both indigenous peoples and recent immigrants from non-European countries are officially excluded. In reality, however, millions of individuals all over the world, coming from any one of the world’s numerous peoples (indigenous or otherwise), are in fact racist, while millions of other individuals, coming from all the same multiple origins, are not. In other words, the ideology of racism is not at all linked to any particular “race”, but is in fact a universal category (albeit an extremely negative one), just like elitism and sexism.

Still, the main point I wanted to make in this article is that this particular controversy about traditional knowledge versus science, like the one about religious garb versus laicity, are in fact fascinating examples of what is now being called “fake news”. In spite of the recent appearance of this particular slogan, fake news have been around for as long as human beings have been around. One of the most interesting earlier versions of this type of concept was put forward almost exactly five hundred years ago, when a former Catholic priest named Martin Luther decided to inaugurate what soon became the Protestant reformation. He began this major upset in ideological history by calling on all good Christians to return to the “golden age” of early (fundamentalist) Christianity, and to fight against corrupt papal indulgences toward rich donors, by recognizing “faith alone”, considered to be absolutely and totally pure, as being the only legitimate path toward religious salvation. Rather than the “good works” also being promoted (along with faith) by the Catholic Church.

Unfortunately, the very idea that any ideological construction, whether religious faith, traditional knowledge, or whatever other kind of belief, should never be challenged or questioned for any reason whatsoever, is one of the most obvious examples of fake news ever invented. In many ways, the search for absolute perfection is the root of all evil, since after all, “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”. The scientific attitude on this all-important topic, namely that nothing whatever ought to be accepted on faith alone, is the only rational approach. Particularly since it includes the capacity to reject even currently accepted, scientifically established facts, as capable of being replaced by new facts, just as soon as the old ones are proven (by further observation and experiment) to be inadequate. That takes place much of the time during scientific revolutions, which actually occur quite frequently in most of the currently active fields of study. To be sure, given the nature of human emotions, those revolutions often leave behind many (former) scientists who refuse to give up some recently-disgraced theory or another to which they have been clinging (religiously) during their entire professional lives.

Getting back to one of the other examples mentioned above, concerning the controversy around authority figures being allowed to wear religious garb while at work, related arguments about religious clothing worn by women in particular, such as the hijab or the niqab, are also being put forward by a large number of people whose ideas also fall into the category of fake news. I am referring here to all those women who consider themselves feminists, while still wearing the hijab themselves, or all those people of either sex who erroneously believe that women wearing such clothing can still qualify as being good feminists. Meanwhile, the same kind of people (like those from the federal government of Canada) also denounce everyone opposed to the hijab (or similar clothing), for feminist reasons, as being necessarily racist. In this case, it is often alleged that the principle of religious freedom always trumps any possible feminist opposition to cover-up religious clothing, and even that wearing revealing clothing in public, or condoning that practice, is a much greater offence against “true” feminism, than is religious cover-up clothing.

In fact, however, the rational truth of the matter is that both wearing cover-up clothing for religious reasons, and wearing revealing clothing in inappropriate situations, are equally at fault. Fake feminists are not only all those who refuse to condemn inappropriately revealing clothing, but also all those who refuse to acknowledge that cover-up religious clothing is necessarily anti-feminist, particularly when being used to advertise Islamic fundamentalism. More or less in the same way that wearing the ubiquitous, extremely strait-laced Mao costume, by both sexes, during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China, was done to promote a totalitarian ideology, deliberately curtailing individual rights for ideological reasons.

Just to complicate matters further, however, it is also true that millions of other (irrational) people often denounce such religious garb for racist reasons, rather than for genuinely feminist reasons. It is also true that many of the other goals of the feminist movement, such as the me-too campaign against rape and sexual harassment, are arguably more important to the cause than the (nevertheless) related problem of women’s cover-up clothing. Another good example of a more important cause being the fight against allowing well-off people to pay poverty-stricken women to become surrogate mothers. For which the Trudeau government in Canada seems to be gearing up at the moment, with the probable intention of removing the existing ban on that genuinely anti-feminist practice. This last practice being one of the better examples of what happens when neoliberalism crosses over the line separating it (at least theoretically) from neofascism.

In other words, even though all these hide-bound ideological stances, toward traditional knowledge, or the role of faith in religious salvation, or the wearing of cover-up religious clothing, or surrogate motherhood, seem at first glance to be about quite different subjects, they all have one thing in common. Which is that they are all examples of fake news, in the sense that they are all inside-out deformations of reality caused by mental rigidity, the incapacity of “true believers” in various different systems of belief to see their way clear toward a rational interpretation of controversial issues occurring in the real world.

The world we live in is, unfortunately, chock full of dozens of different kinds of fake news, which are constantly cropping up just about everywhere, and not just in the examples mentioned above. Another fascinating example, also from Quebec, comes from the 2013 Lac Mégantic tragedy, when an improperly braked train containing petroleum products rolled down a hill and exploded in a little town next to the American border, killing 47 people. The news in this case being that five years later, prosecutors have given up on pressing criminal charges against anyone, including the executives of the railway that owned the train, apparently because they felt that under the existing laws they could probably not get a conviction. Which means that not only the executives of the now-defunct MMA (Montreal, Maine and Atlantic) railway company, but also those from the Canadian Pacific railway company and the Irving Oil petroleum company, all of whom apparently contributed to the disaster in one way or another, through what certainly looks like criminal negligence in every case, all seem to be off the hook.

The fake part of the news obviously being that under a neoliberal regime, very important people who cut corners all the time, in the pursuit of maximum profits, never have to live up to their merely theoretical responsibilities concerning safety procedures. None of those hubristic company executives really seem to give a damn about a bunch of dead villagers. Any more than did the people responsible for the Union Carbide chemical explosion in Bhopal (India) in 1984, or the Chernobyl (Ukraine) nuclear explosion in 1986, or the Tepco nuclear disaster in Fukushima (Japan) in 2011, or the horrendous textile fire in Dhaka (Bangladesh) in 2012, and so on and so forth. Fake news every time, since the people responsible for each one of those “accidents” were never adequately punished for their crimes. No more than those responsible for historic disasters like the sinking of the Titanic way back in 1912, or any of the other similar disasters that keep on happening all over the place, all the time. Criminal negligence has also been mooted in the very recent (2018) Humboldt, Saskatchewan, highway bus collision with a trailer truck, although the usual follow-up, of letting company executives off the hook, has not yet happened this early in the game.

The concept of fake news also applies quite readily to those who have a hard time accepting the fact that Alexandre Bissonnette, the young Québécois who massacred six Muslim worshippers in a mosque in Quebec City last year, really should be called a terrorist, as well as an “Islamophobe”, which is to say someone who thinks that all Muslims are necessarily terrorists themselves. Another person who ought to be referred to as a terrorist is Richard Bain, a Quebec anglophone who tried to murder Quebec premier Pauline Marois back in 2012, and ended up killing or wounding several other people. As well as anyone else, anywhere else, who commits the same kind of political murder for the purposes of spreading terror among a targeted population. People who do not want to admit that individuals from “their” group are terrorists, just like all those coming from some other population, are just as guilty of deliberately misinterpreting the news for ideological reasons as anyone involved in any of the other examples mentioned above.

Which also includes those who refuse to belief that bombing civilians from the air, in any kind of military operation, also constitutes state terrorism. Every year many thousands more people die from state terrorism than they do from the somewhat smaller-scale terrorism committed by religious and political fanatics. Similar accusations can also be sustained against all those official spokespeople who refuse to use the word “genocide” to describe real examples of genocide, simply because doing so might legally require their government to actually attempt to do something about it.

Still another example of fake news is the inability of many political commentators to recognize that all politicians, and the politically active people who support them, should be called by their real names. The totalitarian “communists” who used to run countries like the now-defunct USSR, including those who still officially cling to the communist appellation for themselves, like the current leaders of the “People’s” Republic of China, were never (and are certainly not now) in favour of handing over the countries under their control to “the popular masses” (ordinary workers and peasants). The social-democrats, in many different countries in Europe and elsewhere, never actually set up any kind of democratic socialism when they were in power in their countries, and are certainly not intending to do so nowadays. The elitist “Democrats” in the USA are even less democratic than the social-democrats, while the even more elitist Republicans in the same country have never genuinely been in favour of carrying out the public will (republicanism).

Even the vast majority of the “separatists” in the Quebec “independence” movement never really supported the idea of having Quebec become at least as independent from Canada as Canada itself is from the USA. Even Quebec’s most nationalist leader from days gone by, Jacques Parizeau, never wanted to set up an independent Québécois currency. All of these myriad political appellations, and hundreds more, are fake news because none of those politicians ever really wanted to set up societies based exclusively, or even mainly, on each group’s theoretical principles. The point here is not to require everyone to exactly support whatever they were initially set up to support, but just to argue that political observers should not be allowing all those people to get away with their diverse subterfuges. If we are ever to get rid of fake news, everyone should just call a spade, a spade, and come up with some more appropriate terms for existing political formations.

Throughout history, opportunist leaders of every possible religion and ideology have used their ordinary members honest adherence to any given system of belief in order to promote their own domination instead. All over the world, martyrs for whatever cause are constantly dying without realizing that their sacrifices were all for nothing. Popular movements of all kinds are constantly being manipulated by their leaders to promote exactly the opposite of whatever it was that they were initially supposed to be promoting. As a result, both of the world’s currently most important “realized” ideologies, private capitalism and state capitalism, have in almost every nation or region become two sides of the same coin, great wealth and great power both being used to promote sadism for the VIPs, and masochism for ordinary citizens or subjects.

The current world has become the best world ever for the domination of both private and state capitalism. On every continent, opposition to VIP domination is always completely localized, divided up along national lines, or racial lines, or gender lines. A situation that makes it incredibly easy for all the world’s leaders, not only heads of state and government, but also chieftains of all the other political, business, religious, social and cultural institutions that help run the world nowadays. If we compare 2018 with any historical watershed such as 1492 (Christopher Columbus), it immediately becomes obvious that the world is much bigger than it used to be, and a lot of people (but not all of them) are a lot more prosperous than they used to be. But also that inequality is much worse than it ever was before, having attained an all-time high, mostly caused by the fantastic sums recently accumulated by the world’s richest people, and the relative stagnation of everyone else’s recent income increases.

Most of us have never been more powerless, in comparison with the enormous capacities of those currently in power. Using Amartya Sen’s extremely valuable concept of (comparative) capabilities, any decent analysis of the measure of good government (or good leadership) nowadays would necessarily have to focus on the fact that most people do not possess anywhere near the kind of material and social capacities to enable them to realize their merely theoretical democratic rights. Access to genuine human rights, real democracy, real separation of church and state, and so on, is extremely limited for the vast majority of human beings. At the same time, an extremely small minority of putative leaders possess much greater power in every domain than such people ever possessed before. Oligarchs like Chinese leader Xi Jinping, or multinational executives like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, have attained almost total control of the world’s most powerful countries, the differences between their methods used to gain that unprecedented power being much less important than the similarity between their results. This is what fake news is really all about: massive dictatorships disguised as good “governance”.

Of course, the main reason why the expression “fake news” is constantly being repeated these days is because it was coined by one of Donald Trump’s favourite sycophants (Kelly-Anne Conway), to help the current US president get over all his self-inflicted wounds. Namely by systematically blaming his political adversaries for having somehow “invented” every stupid thing that he himself ever did or said. The real fake news in this case being Trump’s own astonishingly successful campaign of getting elected as a champion of the industrial working-class, he being the number one person in the USA most lacking in credibility in order to play such a role. As a billionaire tycoon from the extremely corrupt real estate and casino “industries”, as well as having been a so-called “reality” show personality. Anyone in the world who cannot figure out why Trump has so far “succeeded” in doing absolutely nothing for US workers needs to consult a psychiatrist.

Speaking of the industrial working-class, that sociological entity has become another prime example of fake news, not just in the USA but everywhere else as well. Journalists writing articles these days about how what is left of the union movement in the West should be adjusting to massive changes in the current work environment, are missing the point when they focus on the “fact” that the days of the industrial working-class are over. In the first place, the industrial working-class still very much exists in countries like the USA, even though it is not nearly as big or as important as it used to be. In spite of that, many observers, even including a few professional sociologists, have come to a point where they are denying the very existence of industrial workers as a social class, or even denying the existence of social classes altogether. Which simply means that they have fallen under the dumbing-down influence of the neoliberal ideology that views society itself, in the jaundiced view of true believers like Margaret Thatcher, as being divided up exclusively into individuals and families, without any collective characteristics whatsoever.

In fact, however, in today’s world, the industrial working-class has never been bigger, nor more important, than it is now. What has changed is that this social class has massively moved into dozens of formerly Third-World countries, where it did not have much of a presence in days gone by, while still maintaining even nowadays an active presence in all the countries where it existed initially. Instead of forgetting about the industrial working-class, what the union movement in the West should be doing is linking up, in a much bigger way than they already have, with the trade unions in countries like China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico and so on. Unions that still exist in spite of being very much under government control in at least some of those countries, such as China. The very low wages and rotten working conditions that led to the rise of the union movement in Europe (including Russia), North America and Australasia during the nineteenth century, are quite prevalent these days in all the recently industrialized countries and regions of the world. Which means that if only from an objective point of view, there is a lot of potential for a great deal more of so far unrealized union activity, and for the rebirth of genuine (not fake) social-democratic parties in all those places.

The fake news involved in the case of the industrial working-class is the fact that, under the combined (demoralizing) influence of neoliberalism and neofascism, left-wing people all over the world seem content nowadays to leave industrial workers under the control of ultra-right-wing populist governments and movements, in the older industrial countries as well as in the newer ones. In the older industrial countries, this social class has been completely abandoned to its own devices, as if it never existed, by people still intent on describing themselves as leftists, or democratic socialists, or communists, or anarchists, or whatever.

As a result, the millions of people who still belong to this social class have ended up supporting ultra-right-wing populist movements against the “liberal establishments”, as in the case of the Trump regime in the USA and the other neofascist governments in places like Poland and Hungary, as well as similar parties that are hugely popular, but not yet in power, in countries like France, Austria and the Netherlands. In the newer industrial countries, large portions of this same industrial working-class sometimes even tacitly support state-capitalist governments like the ones in China, India and Brazil, that run their countries in ways that closely resemble ultra-right-wing populism and neofascism, while also being heavily influenced by large doses of neoliberalism.

Unfortunately, however, living in a world exclusively dominated by reactionary ideologies like these ones is not a very good way to prepare for the future. The total incapacity of any of today’s world leaders to deal with any of the current crises, such as massive environmental degradation, the imminent threat of a new world-wide financial collapse, multifaceted geopolitical confrontations between the world’s major powers (all trying to become “great again” at one and the same time), enormous divisions between competing cultures (indigenous cultures, European-origin cultures, Muslim-majority cultures and dozens of other cultures), and the equally dangerous division of humanity between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor, simply means that the human race may not have much of a future. This is not a time for everyone to sit back and confine themselves to mental rigidity and “obsessive-compulsive disorders” brought on by concepts like fake news and faith alone.

What is to be done is not obvious

I just finished reading an essay published in 2017 by a French journalist called Hervé Kempf, Tout est prêt pour que tout empire : 12 leçons pour éviter la catastrophe, which can be loosely translated as “Everything is in place so that everything will get worse : 12 ways of avoiding catastrophe”. It turns out that Kempf is quite a prolific author, who also edits an on-line daily bulletin (Reporterre) about environmental issues.

Kempf’s basic message in that book was that all three of what he considers to be the most important ongoing sources of major strain in today’s world, the ecology crisis, terrorism and the domination of neoliberal capitalism, are not at all separate issues but are instead interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Which is precisely the kind of message I have been trying to relay myself in most of my recent blogposts, although I see terrorism (and state terrorism) as being part and parcel of the rise of neofascism, not just in the Muslim world but in many other places as well.

I only found out about Kempf’s contributions a couple of weeks ago, after having read an article by Jacques B. Gélinas in the most recent issue (March 2018) of the left-wing Québec periodical, L’autre journal. The article was entitled “La vraie nature du néo-libre-échange d’aujourd’hui” (“The true nature of neo-free-trade today”), “neo-free-trade” being Gélinas’s synonym for neoliberalism, in which the tariff-reducing free trade of days gone by has been replaced by “governance”, the laissez-faire idea according to which government only exists nowadays to help business and nobody else.

Kempf began his demonstration by going back to the 1980s, with the decline and fall of the USSR and the large bloc of other communist countries, supported by influential communist parties in dozens of other places. A huge event that completely changed the ideological structure of the world, in spite of the fact that those countries and parties never really represented what they were supposed to have represented. They nevertheless forced the governments of the private capitalist countries to make concessions toward their own less fortunate citizens to prevent them from being attracted to Marxism.

The fall of communism also left an enormous ideological void in the world, that contributed greatly to the rise of neoliberalism and hyper-individualism. Not to mention the tremendous boost it gave to the rise of religious fundamentalism, particularly Islamic salafism, and all the terrorist movements associated with that ideology. Particularly after the Western empires, especially the American empire, constantly promoted such Islamic terrorist groups as military allies in their fight against the declining Soviet empire, in such places as Afghanistan.

Kempf also describes the large-scale dismantling of government intervention into the economy, in most of the countries belonging to the Western world as well as in many other non-Western countries suffering from neocolonialism, and how that process was bolstered to a very important extent by the entry of the formerly communist China into the world economy. By providing the rest of the world with huge quantities of cheap manufactured goods, low-wage China made it possible to lower the prices of consumer products in many different countries, and to break trade-union resistance to stagnant wages wherever it was necessary. (Quite an interesting role for a place still called the “People’s Republic”, ruled by a party still officially “communist”, at least in name.) Kempf also went on to show how the combination of all those converging events eventually resulted in an ever-increasing gap between a very small number of ultra-rich people and the vast majority of much poorer people, all over the world.

Kempf further outlines how many different social-democratic policies (“the welfare state”) were abandoned in country after country, as well as how political democracy itself was undermined in the USA, particularly during the Bush-Cheney period (2001-2009). As well as in the European Union, that met every challenge against its neoliberal rule by simply ignoring popular protests and democratic referendums all over the continent (as in France, the Netherlands, Ireland and Greece). Instead, the neoliberal rulers managed to concentrate all available government resources on treating the self-inflicted wounds of the world’s most important private capitalist investors, spending trillions of dollars in public funds on bailing out dozens of private banks and other private financial institutions, not only immediately after the 2008 “subprime” crisis broke out, but also (through “quantitative easing”) right up to the present day.

Kempf is also quite good at showing how the political and economic rulers of the world pretended to listen to the growing ecology movement, while simultaneously refusing to do anything serious about the ever-increasing use of fossil fuels all over the world. He devotes several pages to describing many other aspects of the ecology crisis, such as the poisoning of the Earth’s atmosphere, the cutting down of major forests in many different countries, the completely unregulated dumping of garbage into the world’s oceans, the onset of climate change and the proliferation of such “localized” environmental disasters as the explosion of a huge British Petroleum platform in the Gulf of Mexico and the horrendous nuclear accident at the Tepco company reactor in Fukushima, Japan.

Kempf’s analysis is also quite good on the rise of Islamic terrorism, that he traces back to events like the 1979 takeover of Iran by Shiite clerics, as well as the subsequent radicalization of Saudi Arabia itself. In 1980, a brief military occupation of the Muslim world’s main mosque in Mecca by a group of Islamic fundamentalists led to a full-scale revival of ultra-conservative Wahhabism throughout Saudi Arabia. That absolute monarchy then used its new-found wealth stemming from the tremendous increases in petroleum prices during the 1970s to send Islamic “missionaries” all over the Sunni-majority part of the Muslim world, to help convert millions of moderate believers into religious fanatics. Iran, of course, served a similar role in radicalizing several other countries with a significant Shiite population, such as in Iraq following the completely ridiculous military invasion by the USA in 2003.

In his book, Kempf also shows how those earlier events in Iran and Saudi Arabia led to further Muslim radicalization during such more recent events as the civil war in Algeria during the 1990s and the failure of the 2011 “Arab spring” uprisings in several other countries. The outcome of which included military dictatorships preventing reactionary, but nevertheless elected, Islamic movements from holding power in Egypt as well as in Algeria. Not to mention the extremely violent, still ongoing civil war in Syria, involving military interventions from many different powers, including the Saudi-funded Islamic State movement. (Whose potential revival seems to be one of Turkey’s objectives in its current invasion of Syria.)

But Kempf’s book does not refer to any other kind of religious radicalization and its terrorist offshoots than the Muslim kind, although he does refer in several places to the rise of extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant nationalism in the USA and Europe. Personally, I think it is impossible to understand the ultra-right-wing populist movements in those countries, as well as in dozens of other places, without also investigating their own religious origins. In my view, both North American and European ultra-right-wing populism are constantly being bolstered by  fundamentalist “revivals” within Christianity, whether it be in countries with Catholic majorities (Poland, Hungary, etc.), Orthodox majorities (Russia, Serbia, etc.), or Protestant majorities (Britain, Germany).

Not to mention the much greater popularity recently gained by the evangelical churches, particularly the pentecostal movement, further radicalizing Christianity by converting “moderate” believers from all the other branches of that religion into “true believers”. In the USA, for example, the disastrous Trump movement has relied from the beginning on various different strains of Christian fundamentalism, particularly active in the Southern states, contributing greatly to the rise of neofascism in that country.

The fundamentalist radicalization of Christianity also applies within even greater force in Latin America and the Christian regions inside Africa, once again within the Catholic Church as well as within the various evangelical churches, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists. Third-world Christian fundamentalism also profits from billions of dollars being spent on proselytism by evangelicals living mainly in the USA, a country that plays a similar role in Christian radicalization to the radicalization of Sunni and Shiite Islamists financed largely by Saudi Arabia and Iran.

As for terrorism, although there is no large, world-wide, terrorist movement spawned by Christianity these days, equivalent to the Al-Qaeda and Islamic State movements inside Islam, abortion clinics in various countries have suffered from sporadic Christian terrorism, while in many other countries like the Central African Republic, unofficial Christian armies have been fighting it out for power with corresponding Islamic organizations. In the USA, the vast majority of the very numerous, well-armed, neofascist, survivor organizations also have close ties to antediluvian forms of Christian fundamentalism.

Most of the terrorism within Christian parts of the world, however, is state terrorism, often used by ultra-right-wing governments in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe against their own populations. As well as also being used by the supposedly liberal Western empires, and the Russian Federation, either as counter-insurgency forces attempting to eliminate Islamic extremists, or in the military “pacification” of such simultaneously anti-Islamist but also anti-Western dictators as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gaddafi in Libya. Although Kempf did not use the expression “state terrorism” in his book, he did refer quite often to attempted Western “pacification” of many different Muslim countries.

I am convinced that we should be referring to all the fundamentalist Muslim and fundamentalist Christian movements in this world as forms of neofascism. Left-wing groups inside the Western world, who choose to see Islamism as somehow “anti-imperialist” because that reactionary ideology is theoretically opposed to Western imperialism, are missing the point. As the very name, “Islamic State” implies, those Muslim reactionaries are trying to revive the imperialist caliphates of the so-called “golden age” of Islam, from the same period referred to in the West as the “Middle Ages”. They are in fact just as imperialist as any other kind of imperialism. We should also be referring to Hindu nationalism in India as another form of neofascism, and to Buddhist nationalism in such places as Myanmar and Sri Lanka as still another kind of ultra-right-wing populism, aka neofascism. Not to forget the state terrorism, and the increasingly obvious neofascism, of the “democratic” Jewish state of Israel.

Another kind of religious terrorism is also active inside the Khalistan “separatist” movement in the Punjab section of India, militant Sikhs there having also recently used the terrorist weapon in their fight for Sikh independence from India. Personally, I have nothing against independence movements as such, in various parts of the world, following the principle of the right of all peoples to self-determination. Although I do not see religion as being the world’s best reason for attaining national independence, given the “racialization” of minority religions in places like Israel, Pakistan and Myanmar. Not to mention the long-standing religious division of several peoples sharing common ethnic and linguistic origins, such as the recently warring states of Serbia (Orthodox Christianity), Croatia (Catholicism) and Bosnia (Muslim majority).

Of course, much of the Sikh terrorism of the 1980s was directed against the even more violent  state terrorism of the Indian government, as both mutually reinforcing cause and effect, during the same period. Canada, however, also suffered from Sikh terrorism back then as well, notably in the 1985 killing of several hundred Canadian citizens on an Air India flight between Montreal and London (UK). Which helps to explain much of the recent controversy concerning prime minister Justin Trudeau’s unsuccessful trip to India. In my view, terrorism has never helped any of the world’s independence movements achieve their goals, whether or not that terrorism had a religious origin or a more political origin, as in Québec and Ireland.

My objection about using terrorism as a weapon also applies, albeit somewhat less directly, to some of the “popular uprisings” against neoliberalism that Kempf also talks about in his book. Such as the 2005 “suburban rebellion” in France, during which participants took to the streets to destroy things, including thousands of cars, without checking to see whether or not all, or even the majority, of the individuals whose cars were demolished truly belonged to the category of ultra-rich “enemies of the people”. Nothing is more unpopular among ordinary people than “popular movements” that target ordinary people like themselves.

In his book, Kempf also referred very briefly to Confucianism when commenting on Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory. It seems to me, however, that Confucianism has also been revived, quite openly, as a cultural weapon of “communist” Chinese imperialism in today’s world. There is also apparently an important Shintoist faction inside some of the leading political parties in Japan, as well as an equally reactionary Buddhist element. Both of those examples of religious nationalism can also be seen within the framework of a world-wide tendency toward neofascism, fundamentalist religions in every case providing much of the popular support for ultra-reactionary official policies all over the world. Apparently, there are even neofascist tendencies arising within many of the indigenous populations in this world, also linked to similar kinds of religious fundamentalism within several of the animist (shamanist, totemist) religions.

As a result, I also take issue with Kempf’s message in the final paragraphs of his book, when, following Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas, he refers to an alleged “need” to replace the material hedonism of private accumulation with some sort of spiritual guidance. Of which the only example Kempf gave was to cite Pope Francis about following in the footsteps of Francis of Assisi’s call for some sort of voluntary austerity. The Catholic Church, however, has a long history of fake claims when it comes to expressing genuine sympathy for the downtrodden, as Francis himself proved once again with his refusal to sanction bishops who openly tolerate the sexual predations of wayward priests. Since the world’s oldest religious institution first introduced “pastoral celibacy” a thousand years ago, millions of pedophile rape victims, of both sexes, have suffered tremendously all over the world from those priests refusal to practise “sexual austerity”. An uninterrupted trend that shows no signs whatsoever of ever slowing down.

In my view, this kind of “transcending asceticism” is worse than useless since it deflects away from the real issue, which is how to set up a kind of environmentally sustainable, genuinely social-democratic world that consciously rejects all the different varieties of elitism, sexism and racism, all over the world. Each one of the 200 or so countries on this planet cannot be considered to be any kind of functioning democracy unless most of the important decisions made in that country are made in the interests of most of its people. In places like Canada and the USA, for example, where the vast majority of the population is made up of service workers, most of the decisions made in such countries would have to be taken in the interests of service workers, in order to justify official claims about being genuine democracies.

Which is, quite obviously, light-years away from the current situation, as Kempf himself points out. The domination of neoliberalism in places like Canada and the USA means that the combined efforts of all the multinational private corporations, as well as governments at all levels being run as if they were private companies imitating profit maximization, are focused on making sure that most of the newly-created wealth is channelled into making already rich people that much richer. Since the 1980s, everyone else in such countries has been either treading water or falling even further behind. A situation that has been made that much worse by the recent revelations concerning thought control being channelled through social media like Facebook.

Since Kempf’s book was published, the Trump regime in the USA has put on a big show of renewed patriotism, such as with the recent tariffs being placed on imported steel and aluminum, without fundamentally changing the neoliberal profile of that country at all. Cutting corporate taxes, and rich individuals taxes, way down to historically low levels guarantees that none of that fake patriotism can possibly benefit anyone who does not resemble Donald Trump himself, financially speaking. A worse champion of populist anti-establishmentarianism would be hard to find anywhere on this besotted planet.

Which brings my critique of Kempf’s approach to a couple of more general observations, focusing not so much on what he wrote as on what he chose not to write. The first one of these more general critiques has to do with Kempf’s attitude toward science. In his book, the only positive reference to science lies in the fact that the vast majority of the world’s environmental scientists, such as those in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agree completely with Kempf that no kind of future human society is possible unless human beings as a species succeed in overcoming the ecological crisis by putting a stop to their endless, uncontrolled pollution of the natural environment in dozens of different ways.

Aside from that, however, Kempf seems to imply that science and technology cannot be relied upon to contribute in any other significant way to that process because all the non-environmental scientists in the world seem to be caught up in a materialist ideology of technocratic “solutions” to everything. He seems to believe that those scientific technocrats deliberately ignore every human being’s individual responsibility to solve the crisis by renouncing economic growth altogether, all over the world, in a local-community, utopian-socialist, spontaneous coming-together of each person’s individual decision to focus on voluntary austerity. Which seems to me to be even more pie-in-the-sky than any kind of technocratic fix.

Kempf does not even refer in his book to any of the numerous groups of scientists and engineers in various different countries currently trying to do basic research on finding hitherto undiscovered substitutes for fossil fuels, such as those attempting to peacefully control fusion power (potentially much less polluting than either nuclear fission or hydrocarbons). The only types of fuels that meet with his approval are wind and solar power which, in their current state of development, could never become a viable substitute for fossil fuels in a world of 7.5 billion people, and counting. Fusion power, however, if it is ever discovered, would presumably suffer from at least one of the disadvantages of another major source of energy, hydroelectricity, namely its reliance on enormous investments in infrastructure. But fusion power would also completely avoid hydro’s other major drawback, the limited world-wide proximity of power-generating natural sites. Fusion’s “natural resources” being readily available, but currently unexploited, deuterium and tritium isotopes of hydrogen, found in water.

From the point of view of a utopian-socialist like Kempf, however, technocratic solutions like fusion power are automatically “persona non grata”, because the research establishments (and the eventual power plants that would have to be built all over the place) require the kinds of financial investment that are normally only available with huge quantities of public funds being spent by very well-established government bureaucracies. To be sure, the recent, neoliberal-induced, decline in the powers of the nation-state, in all the richest countries (including those of the European Union), is making it difficult for any of the currently existing research programs in fusion power to make any headway, given the fact that they are all chronically under-funded, at least in comparison to the task at hand. Even if one of those teams did happen to achieve some kind of significant breakthrough, in spite of everything, it is not at all certain that the kind of large-scale, international cooperation necessary to bring functioning power plants into existence, in anywhere near the numbers necessary to play a major role on the world scene, is still possible.

Which brings me to the other major drawback in Kempf’s way of looking at things, namely his attitude toward not just the nation-state as an institution, but also toward state capitalism (aka, economic nationalism). By coincidence, I also just finished reading a completely different kind of book, Joshua Kurlantzick’s State capitalism: How the return of statism is transforming the world (published in 2016). Kurlantzick, a scholar associated with the very upper-crust and well-funded Council on Foreign Relations in the USA, started off his book by reiterating the official neoliberal viewpoint according to which “the free market” of private capitalism is usually much more conducive to political democracy than is state “intervention” into the economy.

He quickly points out, however, that state capitalism has existed at least as long as private capitalism and has sometimes coincided with democracy, even during the “thirty glorious years” of 1945-1975, at the height of the Cold War, in such non-communist countries as France, Japan and India. And he adds that the Western democracies in particular “oversold” the link between democracy and private capitalism in the Third World, leading many poorer countries to prefer authoritarianism after several decades of “democratic economic development” (largely based on neocolonial investment) that did not result in any significant increase in overall national wealth.

Kurlantzick’s main point is that most scholars, as well as many other observers (now including Hervé Kempf), have not even noticed the recent trend, since the 1990s, toward the return of state capitalism in dozens of different countries, most of which pursue authoritarian policies (China, Russia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Venezuela, Argentina, etc.), but some of which he characterizes as democratic (Brazil, Indonesia, Norway and Singapore). He also describes many of those state capitalist countries, whether authoritarian or democratic, as being often economically efficient, much more sophisticated than the state capitalists in dozens of other countries that did not succeed nearly so well (according to him) in earlier times (before 1945). Kurlantzick also refers to the existence of many lesser forms of state capitalism even in countries currently under the almost hegemonic control of neoliberalism, such as Canada, that includes within its borders such state-controlled companies as Hydro-Québec.

Although I do not agree at all with Kurlantzick’s often-reiterated prejudice in favour of private capitalism, I must admit that I was quite impressed with his capacity to realize that state capitalism does not necessarily have to be anti-democratic or inefficient. When I was doing research myself during the 1980s for both my master’s thesis (1984) and my doctoral thesis (1991), at the Université du Québec à Montréal, on the influence of economic nationalism in central Canada (Ontario and Québec) during the nineteenth century (1846-1885), very few of the secondary sources that I read back then had anything positive to say about my subject. Practically every history book and economic treatise published in the Western world during the Cold War was very heavily prejudiced against state capitalism, for ideological reasons, even in France during the Gaullist period (1958-1969). A prejudice that has finally come to be challenged in more recent historical work, such as William Ashworth’s 2017 book on the industrial revolution in Great Britain, that focuses (according to a review written by Pat Hudson in the January 2018 edition of History Today), on the crucial role that the British government played in fostering that all-important economic upheaval.

The final chapters in Kurlantzick’s book focus on some of the reasons why he perceives state capitalism as being a threat to the future of political democracy in many different Third World countries, as well as a threat to the future economic development of state capitalist countries as such, the future of state capitalism as a model, and even the future of the world economy itself. So far as he is concerned, however, the most important threat of all to be dealt with is the threat to democracy in general, all over the world, from the use of state firms as weapons against private capital in the two most important authoritarian countries, China and Russia.

What Kurlantzick obviously did not anticipate, when he wrote his book, was the election of a president of the USA who sometimes has positive things to say about government “intervention” into the economy, as well as about authoritarianism in Russia. Although as I pointed out earlier in this article, Donald Trump has not really abandoned neoliberalism at all, Kurlantzick himself must be having second thoughts these days on the positive relationship he seems to cherish between private capitalism and political democracy.

Personally, I do not think that the future of humanity is any better served by the domination of private, neoliberal capitalism than it is by the domination of state capitalism. In today’s world, all the countries practising neoliberalism since the 1980s have been going all-out so as to increase, as much as possible and as fast as possible, the already gigantic income gap between ultra-rich private investors and everyone else on this increasingly unstable planet. Their governments have been competing among themselves to offer generous tax breaks to extremely well-off individuals and their multinational corporations, who are also using every possible kind of legal and illegal tax evasion to even further concentrate capital accumulation into the smallest number of pudgy little hands possible.

Thereby forcing governments to impose increasingly stringent austerity programs on the rest of the population, making it impossible to provide any of the health, education and popular welfare services without which no societies can survive. Not to mention grossly underfunding the fight against pollution, the fight against gargantuan (advertising-induced) waste of raw materials, basic scientific research, and the environmentally friendly economic and social development of urban slums, as well as all the other neglected regions left behind in every possible country.

It is hard to see how any intelligent person could possibly describe upper-class and over-class dominated countries as somehow being democratic. Which does not mean, however, that most of the state capitalist countries are doing an any better job at being democratic themselves. China, easily the world’s most successful and arguably the world’s most authoritarian state capitalist country, having just recently given its leader the title of “emperor for life”, is obviously not at all interested in political democracy, nor in any kind of social democracy.

It is also not entirely state capitalist either, having adopted many of the different trappings of neoliberalism as well, such as becoming the new champion of “neo-free-trade”. Thereby imitating Great Britain’s nineteenth-century feat of proclaiming itself the anti-protectionist “workshop of the world” only after having gotten rich on government “intervention” in prior decades. Most of the other state capitalist countries mentioned in Kurlantzick’s book, such as India, also firmly support neoliberalism whenever it suits them. From the point of view of an outsider looking in, it all looks like some king of gargantuan conspiracy between Big Government and Big Capital, united against everything, and everyone, not big enough to count for much.

Getting back to my critique of Hervé Kempf’s book as such, aside from the fact that he did not seem to notice the recent revival of state capitalism, Kempf also had nothing to say about the threat of nuclear war, which ought to be seen as another major source of hypertension in this world. The number one source in fact, which, if ignored, could not just rid the Earth of all the people on it, but also of all the other multicellular creatures as well. With every one of the world’s nuclear powers rattling their sabres these days about ever-increasing “defence” spending, new radar-piercing missiles, “tactical” nuclear weapons and the need for everyone to listen to each leader’s strident rhetoric more than to any other leader’s strident rhetoric, I do not see how we can keep nuclear confrontation out of the list of the world’s most urgent, potential catastrophes.

So, what is to be done about all of these life-threatening sources of tension? We need to save the world, quickly and simultaneously, from nuclear annihilation, catastrophic climate change, economic collapse, neoliberalism, neofascism, religious terrorism and state terrorism. All of those things to be done are obvious. What is not so obvious is who are “we”? Who are the people with the power and the will to solve all of those Earth-shaking problems right now? Let’s be honest about this: the answer to that question does not seem the least bit obvious.

Puritanism and Perversion

Many of my more recent observations have focused on the theme of puritanism versus perversion. In dozens of different examples from all over the world, I have noticed that human beings and their institutions very often combine numerous instances of puritanical interpretations of reality with equally numerous instances of different kinds of perversion. Even though those two ways of looking at things seem to be totally contradictory, at least on the surface of things, people are constantly combining them together anyway.

One of the more obvious examples of the emergence of this theme was when I was trying to figure out how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s mind works. Netanyahu has gone on record several times over the past few weeks, denouncing the Polish government’s recently adopted legislation making it illegal for anyone in that country to refer to the concentration camps established by Nazi Germany in Poland during the Second World War as being “Polish” camps. Even though the Poles claim that their new law merely recognizes historical reality, the very idea that the extremely conservative Polish government felt the need to translate that fact into such a peculiar kind of legal existence raises legitimate concerns. The Israeli government, among many others, is worried that the Poles are simply trying to ignore the very real collaboration with murderous German antisemitism that affected a very large number of Polish people at the time, including many prominent members of the Polish establishment. The law looks like it was drafted for contemporary political reasons, in an attempt to somehow cover up for the increasingly ultra-right-wing policies currently being adopted by the Polish government.

Netanyahu, however, has gone overboard on this issue (as on so many other issues) by accusing Poland of trying to re-write history. While there is no doubt that that is indeed what the people in the Polish government are doing, it is really incredible that a guy like Netanyahu could make such a claim against anyone else, given the number of times that he himself has engaged in this kind of behaviour. The deliberately organized Israeli ignorance of Palestinian reality, for example, has become much more elaborate under Netanyahu’s rule than it ever was before, making his criticism of Poland seem exceptionally hypocritical.

The very idea of referring to the occupied West Bank using the Biblically inspired fiction of “Judea and Samaria” is just one example among dozens of others of how today’s Israel attempts to re-write history as much as it possibly can. Netanyahu wants everyone in the world, not just the Christian Zionists in the USA, to exclusively accept his own stultified version of history. And to accuse everyone who does not kowtow to that one-sided interpretation of events as being antisemitic, just like those horrible Poles. Israel has also taken on an increasingly right-wing populist profile over the past few years, not only in relation to its neighbours, but also in domestic policy, treating its own (Jewish-majority) population a lot worse than it did in the past.

Like many of the leading people in the Polish government, several leaders of the Israeli government, of which Netanyahu is the most important example, are in fact combining puritanism and perversion in several disgusting ways. Their puritanism is exemplified in the mental rigidity of re-defining both history and current events in ways that are consistent with the extremely orthodox vision both governments have of the official Polish and Israeli projections of reality. No one else is to be allowed to adopt any other version of each country’s imagined history, which according to them must always parrot each official, falsely perfect, interpretation of each nation’s “internal essence”. At the same time, however, most of the leading lights in both countries are also extremely corrupt individuals in their own personal and political lives, Netanyahu himself currently being denounced inside Israel for many different instances of corruption, particularly (but not exclusively) the financial kind.

Shortly after I made this initial observation, it occurred to me that Poland and Israel are far from being the only places in which today’s leading figures are committing both puritanism and perversion together. The USA’s Donald Trump also can always be counted upon to rise to the occasion whenever it comes to any possible kind of wrongdoing. The fact that he apparently paid 130 000 dollars to a porn starlet named Stormy Daniels to (unsuccessfully) keep her quiet about a dalliance he had with her several years ago is just one of the more recent examples on the corruption side of the equation in his case. The puritanism in the equation being provided by his totally ridiculous projection of the US empire’s recent political, economic, social and cultural decline as having been caused by a swampy liberal establishment’s politically correct flirtations with affirmative action, women’s liberation and uninhibited, illegal immigration.

Trump also referred to the MS-13 street gang, most of whose members come from El Salvador, in his State of the Union address, alleging that their frequent killings and other violent criminal acts committed in the USA supposedly make the very existence of that gang a good reason for Americans to support his immigration policy, aimed at keeping such people out of his country in the future. Trump’s attack on MS-13, however, is just further evidence of his curious double commitment to both puritanism and perversion, since the Salvadorian civil war of 1980-1992, between the triumphant, US-backed military and the severely outgunned, Cuban-backed guerrilla army, was the main vehicle by which that Central American country became so extremely violent in the first place. Like many other such countries, the Salvadorian banana republic, dominated for many decades by US corporations, has never fully recovered from that horrendous event, political, economic and social conditions there ensuring a constant flow of legal and illegal immigration to the USA (and Canada).

US foreign policy, from both sections of the joint Democratic-Republican swamp in Washington, has adversely affected dozens of third world countries over the past few decades, from all over Asia, Africa and Latin America. Both sides in the Salvadorian civil war tried to maintain totally fictitious, puritanical stances, “democratic anti-communism” on the pro-US side and “popular anti-imperialism” on the pro-Cuban side, as well as committing very real atrocities (perversion) on a large scale. As in many other Cold-War conflicts, however, the overall contrast between the puritanical nature of each propaganda message, and the horrific nature of the violence each side committed in the real world, was much more pronounced on the pro-US side. Making Donald Trump’s current bleating on that subject particularly inappropriate.

In fact, the real cause for the very real decline of the American empire becomes abundantly clear as soon as its recent history is compared to that of the up-and-coming Chinese empire. What is making China great again, at least compared to much more intensely neoliberal countries like the USA and the European Union, is the fact that the Chinese government still has a great deal of control over the development of its national economy. To be sure, China is most definitely not a People’s Republic, since the “red-diaper billionaires” who run the place nowadays are not any more interested in the ordinary people’s welfare than their parents were  when Chairman Mao was using large-scale famine to force all the peasants into abandoning the small family land ownership that they had initially acquired right after the 1949 revolution.

The “capitalist-roaders” in power in China since 1979, however, have not yet permitted their billionaires to sell their country down the river to the same extent that the USA, the EU and many other such countries have done, letting their own billionaires pursue extremely unpatriotic, short-term profit margins, in the process freely trading off most of their companies industrial output to former third-world countries like China. Cheap labour has allowed China, much more than India, Mexico or any other such nation, to kick-start a post-1979 “Long March” toward world domination. Which includes attempting to impose its own puritanical, and highly inaccurate, interpretation of China’s history, that is officially based on the “restoration” of China’s “age-old domination” of the world economy, that suddenly (and inexplicably) disappeared during the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution.

As a result, the formerly dominant USA has been left in the lurch, still spending enormous quantities of money on its fantastically expensive military operations, but increasingly hamstrung by successive waves of tax reductions on rich peoples fortunes, recently intensified once again by the excessively backward, “soak-the-poor” policies of the highly corrupt Trump administration. China’s puritanical interpretation of Chinese history also includes its oh-so-natural domination of all the non-Han minority regions within its current, official borders. Not to mention its own expansionist military strategy. But so far the well-entrenched financial corruption and like-minded perversions of China’s own billionaire class have not yet been allowed to seriously undermine Chinese patriotism, at least not to the same incredible extent as in its more thoroughly neoliberal rivals, not only the USA and the EU, but also Britain, Russia, India and Japan. In other words, China’s ongoing march toward total domination of the world economy and, eventually, geopolitics, has not been the least bit accidental.

To be sure, all the different varieties of neoliberalism, and neofascism, that have dominated politics in almost every country in the world over the past forty years, also display equal doses of puritanism and perversion, just like in the above-mentioned examples. For its part, wherever it occurs, neoliberalism is based on a completely unrealistic interpretation of world economic history over the past several centuries, during which the supposedly pristine spirit of “free enterprise” has been gradually emerging into the open air, liberating itself in the process from the stultifying stranglehold of its own alter ego. Which is the diametrically opposed ideal-type known to theoreticians of laissez-faire (economic liberalism) as government “intervention” into economic affairs (economic nationalism).

Neoliberal puritans firmly believe that nothing good can ever happen in this world until everything that moves is completely “free” from any collectivist impulse whatsoever. For them, the only barrier holding back unbridled economic development has always been the “red tape” of public bureaucracy. From the ultra-idealistic point of view of extreme individualism, “red tape” has always been defined as anything whatever that prevents the world’s leading private investors from making a lot more money than they ever did before and dominating all ordinary, proletarian non-VIPs much more than what they have previously been allowed to get away with doing.

This kind of extreme individualism, open to only a relatively small handful of the world’s leading manipulators of capital, also has the added advantage of dovetailing quite nicely with unmitigated perversion, in which dominant alpha males like Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein (along with a small coterie of female imitators) simultaneously free themselves from the sexual limitations of ordinary social intercourse. The result being a veritable orgy combining entirely “free” enterprise, totally uninhibited exploitation of labour, as well as free “love” between dominant philanderers and their unfortunately more introverted victims. Whose theoretical “consent” to whatever they are being forced to do is always guaranteed, not by them, but by an ever-accommodating, old-boy legal system constantly intervening on the side of elitist tradition.

Superficial appearances to the contrary, the other leading ideology these days, neofascism, does not have any problem whatever with world-wide neoliberalism, just as long as each participating, elitist, racist and sexist empire, religion and competing cultural tradition is allowed to introduce its own peculiar sort of falsely puritanical perversion into the overall swamp. Another example of this kind of puritanical history lesson being the recent scandal in Thailand, where the ruling elite has been trying to jail for life an old professor who had the temerity to claim that the king of Thailand might not in fact have won a battle with the Burmese empire that took place over 500 years ago! Presumably, this tyrannical attempt to constantly support everything that any Thai king is doing nowadays, or that any other Thai king has ever done in the past, is part of that country’s long-standing tradition of artificially preserving the monarchy (at least) from any of the incredibly ingrained kinds of financial corruption and polymorphous perversion, that has characterized most of Thailand’s recent governments.

Still another recent example of this sort of thing comes from the Hindu-nationalist, but also neoliberal, government of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, whose tourist department has taken the country’s most well-known architectural symbol, the Taj Mahal, out of all official tourist brochures because that enormous mausoleum was built by a Muslim ruler, and therefore cannot really be Indian after all. Needless to say, the same government is also enmeshed in a long series of financial scandals, making it another perfect example of the current world tendency toward combining puritanism and perversion.

In other words, as long as the international, neoliberal elite allows each long-established tradition to get away with imposing its own (fake) puritanical version of history on its own people and to include its own vision of the supposedly eternal domination of each distinct society by traditional elites (political elites from dominant ethnic groups, and allied elites from the business world, established religions, established genders and so on), the two dominant ideologies in today’s world can get along famously.

The international liberal elites, who are in theory ideologically opposed to the kinds of ethnic, religious and gender-based traditions that favour neofascist behaviour, can go on bleating as loudly as they want about how wrong all of those traditions really are, so long as they refrain from imposing any real changes. Lip-service is perfectly acceptable, as long as every wealthy and powerful person in the world, neoliberal and/or neofascist, agrees not to rock the boat too violently about all those (evanescent) non-traditional approaches to society.

Leaders like Canada’s Justin Trudeau can therefore propose including labour rights, gender rights and minority rights into international trade deals as often as they want, so long as they recognize that those demands are only being introduced as bargaining chips for domestic political consumption, to be thrown away as soon as something really important comes up. “Something really important” being any concessions from the other side that could potentially help Canadian corporations improve their bottom lines, which is what trade deals are really supposed to be all about.

But it also occurred to me recently that this kind of combined puritanism and perversion on the part of most of the world’s very important people is not just a fascinating characteristic of today’s society, but has in fact existed for a very long time. Not so long ago, I went to an official reception in a nearby Montreal suburb, set up to honour a number of distinguished personalities from that suburb’s recent past. One of the speakers at that event, the current scion of a very well-known, and very rich, commercial family from that community talked for several hours about the history of the founders of the family, as well as about many more recent leading lights in the family firm. He started off by referring to the Viking origins of his family, and how they participated in all the raiding, pillaging and raping that their ancestors had carried out hundreds of years ago in the British Isles. Before they intermarried with their former victims and became good British citizens themselves.

Then he went on to describe in grandiloquent detail about how his family later switched to commercial activity, trafficking many of the same products that they had originally stolen, selling those goods over the centuries to millions of more recent customers, through what he himself described as “legalized pillage”. He also joked about how the men in the family simultaneously replaced rape with somewhat more civilized methods of sexual conquest. Then he went on to describe how some of the more recent heads of the family had done their utmost  to help ensure the victory of the British Empire in many of its nineteenth and twentieth century wars, as well as contributing greatly to the development of such exemplary religious and charitable institutions as the YMCA, that also made an important civilian contribution to the empire during many of those same wars.

The whole speech reminded me very much of Quebec “separatist” leader René Lévesque’s denunciation of the “white Rhodesians” in Quebec society who had dominated commercial affairs in that province up until the 1960s. According to him, they were also the most fanatical supporters of Canadian federalism, that Lévesque once described as being a recent extension of the British imperial tradition. Lévesque, of course, has been denounced hundreds of times over the years for that kind of nationalist rhetoric. Too bad he did not live long enough to have listened to the same speech as I listened to several decades after his death.

I found yet another example of this kind of combination of puritanism and perversion when I was reading the doctoral thesis of Christopher William Powell, “‘Vietnam: It’s Our War Too’: The Antiwar Movement in Canada, 1963-1975” (University of New Brunswick, 2010), which is available online. Powell’s goal was to basically describe the Canadian participation in the anti-Vietnam war movement, including the demonstrations and public meetings all over Canada, the political organizations that ran the movement at the time, their close ties to similar groups in the USA and the role of specific groups within that movement, such as the US draft dodgers in Canada, the pacifist Voice of Women, and the ongoing involvement of various rival Canadian communist parties, affiliated to either the USSR, to China or to the Trotskyist “Fourth International”. For me, it was a real “blast from the past”, since the antiwar movement was also a big part of my life during those years. Powell also refers in his 500-page text to many of the people I met myself back then.

Unfortunately, there are several interesting gaps in Powell’s presentation. For example, he refers only briefly and indirectly (pages 193-194) to a “flag-burning incident” at the US Consulate in Toronto during the International Day of Protest in April, 1967, which was falsely attributed to the Trotskyist movement, who vehemently denied having participated in that event. If he had done any checking, he would have found out that the US flag was effectively burned during a protest organized by the Toronto branch of the Maoist “Progressive Workers Movement”, based in Vancouver, that he mentioned on several other occasions in his thesis. His thesis director, Gregory Kealey, who was interviewed by Powell as one of his original sources, was apparently quite active in the antiwar movement, and also a well-known Trotskyist at the time, and presumably could have filled him in about this.

I was one of the people arrested at the April, 1967 demonstration in Toronto, and the only Canadian (to my knowledge) later sentenced to three months in jail (as well as a substantial fine) for antiwar activity during those years (of which I only served three weeks, the prosecutor having changed his mind along the way about the unusual severity of the initial sentence). Powell could have found out about all this quite easily, which could have become an interesting footnote in his thesis, as well as contributing to the thoroughness of his coverage. Not least by reading the account of that event (accompanied by a front-page picture of me being arrested) in the Toronto Star in August of 1968, when my trial took place. Including this material, as well as several other details related to the Toronto PWM (that later became the nucleus of the “Canadian Party of Labour”, also mentioned by Powell a few times later on in his text), could have helped avoid the rather severe bias in his thesis toward the organizational prowess of the Trotskyist movement.

As for the role of both puritanism and perversion in the history of the anti-Vietnam war movement at the time, and in the Vietnam War itself, they were all over the place. So far as the USA and its allies are concerned, their puritanism was obvious in their vainglorious effort to pass off their own overwhelming participation in the Vietnamese civil war as part of their goal of freeing the “democratic” world, including the dominoes in Southeast Asia, from the totalitarian communist attempt at world domination. In reality, the USA and its allies were much more interested, as in the more recent Salvadorian example cited above, in keeping all the world’s regions open for economic exploitation by neocolonial investors, the US leaders of that movement merely fulfilling former president Calvin Coolidge’s old American “mission statement” according to which “the business of America (sic) is business”.

Killing a couple of million anti-American Vietnamese, especially those dying in the massive carpet bombing of civilian targets, became an important addition to the several million other victims they also eliminated in dozens of other pro-communist targets all over Asia, Africa and Latin America. Not to mention several million additional victims, belonging to non-communist but still anti-imperialist adversaries, people opposed to the USA and its allies for reasons of national independence, those theoretically non-aligned countries who feared domination from both sides during the extremely violent “Cold” War (1945-1991).

Which is not to say that both the communist and the nationalist adversaries of private-capitalist imperialism were not also guilty of both puritanism and perversion, during the Vietnam War as well as in every other case. For their part, the Marxist-Leninists from the USSR and all the other pro-Moscow communist parties, but also the ones who supported the Maoists in China as well as the different factions inside the Trotskyist movement, were not really communists at all, but totalitarian state-capitalists. In fact, the communist (ultra-egalitarian) ideology as such was never really practised by any of those different kinds of Leninists, but only used as a rallying cry to trick people into supporting their policies, on behalf of a new oligarchy whose role was to replace a small number of private-capitalist investors and their government representatives with an equally small number of totalitarian, state bureaucrats running such countries for the exclusive benefit of an obedient coterie of party militants. (Including Leon Trotsky himself, before he was booted out of the USSR by Joseph Stalin.) Not to forget the millions of lives lost in such ultra-communist abominations as Stalin’s forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, as well as Maoist China’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”.

The same kind of analysis also applies to most of the nationalist adversaries of the imperial countries supporting private capitalism, such as the African National Congress in South Africa. In that country, the ANC’s (theoretically anti-imperialist) nationalist elite came to power in 1994 and promptly replaced the old, pro-apartheid elite (a product of Western imperialism) with its own militants, oppressing the majority of the population almost as much as they were oppressed by the previous regime. Needless to say, those nationalist elites also invented their own puritanical mythologies of “Black liberation” in Africa (also adopting similar slogans in Asia and Latin America) in an attempt to hide their real-world betrayal of their own, highly theoretical, principles.

Putting the Cold War examples of puritanism and perversion together with the more recent examples mentioned above, means that I am forced to come to a very disappointing conclusion. Since I first got involved in political activism, more than 50 years ago, not much progress seems to have been made in human behaviour. Revolutions are constantly being betrayed, progressive reforms are constantly being reversed, and the status quo nowadays stinks as much as it ever did. So I was initially tempted to conclude this blogpost by using the well-known Québécois expression, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”.

Unfortunately, the lack of progress does not mean that things cannot end up getting a whole lot worse. If some major new crisis, like some sort of repetition of the world-wide financial crisis of 2008, breaks out shortly, as seems more than likely, the world’s governments and central banks may no longer have the financial wherewithal to do anything about it. In which case, mildly reactionary leaders like French president Emmanuel Macron may want to imitate the Trump regime in the USA, doing whatever they want without worrying about the consequences. Leaders like Trump may want to go even further, and grind their opponents down the way a lot more than before, like Vladimir Putin does in Russia. Leaders like Putin may also want to go even farther than what they have already done, and adopt instead the almost total control over society enjoyed by leaders like China’s Xi Jinping. Or, even more completely totalitarian, like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. In other words, authoritarianism seems to be getting more and more popular with world leaders every day.

Since 2013, when I started writing this blog, I have often denounced the fact that even the world’s more democratic countries, like the one in which I have always lived, have not really always been as democratic as all that, even at the best of times. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, may have embedded fundamental human rights in his remake of the Canadian constitution (with mixed results), but he is also well-known for having successfully used the draconian “War Measures Act” against a tiny terrorist organization (the FLQ) that never had more than 30 members in it at any one time. Half of which may very well have been police agents of some kind.

Writing a blog like this one, even if it has never become terribly popular, may not be possible at some point in the future. At least half of the world’s current political regimes do not tolerate public criticism of any kind, no matter how few people in such countries even know that such criticism actually exists. The fact that there does not seem to have been much progress in the world over the past half-century makes reaction, the opposite of progress, that much more possible in the foreseeable future.