Inside-out, upside-down and backwards

When I was recently visiting the British Museum, chock full of millions of artistic objects gleaned, or pillaged, from most of the world’s existing cultural traditions, I was once again struck, more strongly than at any other time in the past, by the frightening convergence of practically every one of those competing cultures. Whether the objects came from some part of Western civilization, or from one of the thousands of urban-based empires to be found in various different parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, or from one of the world’s myriad indigenous cultures spread out all over the inhabited regions of the globe, did not seem to make any difference in one fundamental respect. Nor did it often make any difference whether those objects came from societies or civilizations that disappeared thousands of years ago, or from any of the more recently established cultures that are still well represented on this planet nowadays.

In almost every case, and in spite of enormous cultural differences between each competing system, just about all the various different social structures had one fundamental characteristic in common. That was the outstanding anomaly of having each group of human beings, comprising tens of thousands, or hundreds of millions, of ordinary people, to be found under the tight-fisted control of tiny bands of privileged alpha males lording it over the “toiling masses” in a typically inside-out, upside-down and backwards parody of the modern democratic ideal. It is extremely difficult to find, anywhere inside those societies, including the few and far-between examples of (pseudo) democracy occasionally encountered within ancient Greece, as well as the somewhat more numerous democratic pretenders from the modern world, many cases in which the majority of the population genuinely enjoyed any significant degree of control over their own political, economic, social and cultural standards of life.

This situation leaves me with the impression that some kind of degenerate biological evolution seems to have been very often completed by an equally degenerate form of cultural evolution, placing almost every group of people in a stranglehold of wealth, power and privilege. With the result that every human society seems to be almost as anti-democratic as every other society, forever ruled by slaveholding social classes, practising relatively interchangeable degrees of elitism, sexism (misogyny) and us-versus-them racism. All of which are constantly being bounced back and forth between every conceivable, competing culture, religion, ideology and/or philosophical tradition. From the beginning of neolithic times to the present, the perceived needs of the world’s leading elites have practically always been placed first on every society’s agenda, far ahead of the welfare of the general population, rather than the other way around.

If any particular society had actually been organized in anything like a democratic way, the needs of the worst off and the most vulnerable elements in the total population would have been taken care of first, followed by the needs of “in-between” (middle-class) people. Once those two operations had been carried out, any surplus left over in that society would then have been distributed among those few people already prosperous enough to have been free from any immanent, material threats to their overall welfare. Instead of proceeding in a truly democratic manner, however, as if the majority of any given population were as important as any of its privileged minorities, almost all the neolithic and post-neolithic societies known to exist have just about always proceeded in an elitist way, letting any tiny surplus left over, after the ruling elites seized their lion’s share, “trickle down” (if at all) to the toiling multitudes.

In other words, the system seems to have always worked “properly”, but only for those un-democratic people who set it up in the first place. Nevertheless, in any popular cultural rendering nowadays intended to reflect the way things really work, such as the recent Spielberg film about the “Pentagon Papers”, people in high places are seen to be feigning incredulity upon hearing leading executives’ bald-faced lies about their deliberate ignorance of (theoretically projected) democratic norms. This is, however, ridiculous pretension, “artistically” invented in order to uphold the modern democratic illusion, since no such incredulity ever seems to have truly existed among the ruling elites, whose realistic pronouncements in our own time still read very much like the hyper-inflated boasting (à la Donald Trump) of any one of a hundred thousand ancient Middle Eastern imperial braggarts.

In recent times, “her majesty’s loyal opposition” has occasionally been allowed to severely criticize official governing policy, so long as none of that opposition ever ends up reversing the prevailing social order altogether. Every now and then, in various different parts of the world, popular rebellions have sometimes prevailed for a short time, that attempted to put ordinary people first, over previously established, elitist minorities. Especially when the rebels dared to literally interpret official propaganda according to which all believers were equal in the sight of some (unfortunately non-existent) religious divinity. After which, the prevailing order was restored, those rebels not having seen the error of their ways on time perishing in a frenzy of military slaughter. Even when official communist parties managed to take over temporary control of entire countries, or entire empires, the same official communists who made the revolution in the first place simply took the former rulers’ places in the throne rooms and ran those countries pretty much the same way that they were being formerly run. “Bourgeois” revolutions have also been just as thoroughly, and violently, betrayed as were “proletarian” revolutions, not just in the Western world but also in practically every single country or region belonging to what used to be called the “third world”.

None of the ignorant illusions that various different groupings of ordinary people have adopted over the centuries ever seem to have helped them avoid their fate as domesticated servants obliged to kowtow to their officially superior masters. Religious communities of theoretically equal believers, patriotic communities of common-wealth or shared empire, imagined communities of democratic electors (one person, one vote), as well as those said to be based upon celestial harmony and virtuous order, whatever absurd kind of high-flying ideals that people have invented over the centuries, have all been shown to be totally bogus in practice, at least in the vast majority of cases. Even those few countries pretending to practice cradle-to-grave democratic socialism have never attempted to complete that transition, always letting their own wealthy elites control quite a large proportion of national resources, far beyond their tiny percentage of the overall population.

In the real world, most human lives resemble the portrait assembled by South African philosopher David Benatar and his collaborators, in the books he published with Oxford University Press in 2006, 2015 and 2017. So far, I have only read a couple of pages of presentation of his ideas in the French magazine, Sciences humaines (Thomas Peltier, “De l’inconvénient d’être en vie”, April 2018), as well as several articles about his work published on the Internet (most of them fiercely critical). But I definitely have to agree with his reported assessment according to which most people’s lives are fundamentally compromised by all sorts of physical and psychological suffering, bullying, horrible living and working conditions, not to mention having to deal with the fact that certain, eternal death is always the only possible, guaranteed outcome of everyone’s life. Even when most people are supposed to be enjoying themselves, various negative incidents always take place to remind them that they can never have any fun without simultaneously having to put up with the darker side of reality.

It is also true that the desire for self-preservation convinces most people to nevertheless believe in some kind of avatar or another, voluntarily plunging themselves into an ocean of self-deceit, refusing to admit most of the time that their lives have no particular meaning after all is said and done, and that their minuscule existence is just a really tiny section of totally brainless, natural evolution, from the big bang to the present day. My take on all of this, however, is that I do not agree with Benatar at all about how his portrait of reality in fact applies to everyone equally, regardless of their respective place on the social ladder. In my right-honourable opinion (as anyone living within the British parliamentary system might want to put it), having a great deal of wealth and power makes it considerably easier to put up with all this crap than does (for billions of people) having to slave away during a very short overall lifetime, deep inside a dark and dismal pit of mud, blood and excrement, all “artistically” blended into a filthy, putrid mess, down at the bottom of someone else’s private gold mine.

As a result of all this stagnant inequality, all over the world, progress as a concept has finally been abandoned by almost everyone and replaced by neoliberal and/or neofascist atavism, because it (progress) never had a chance to develop for real, given the inherently reactionary nature of almost all human “governance”. People are condemned to repeat history all the time, as in the case of the 1929 financial crisis being reproduced by the one in 2008, because they never succeed in becoming genuinely better people than they were before. The old saw about how “it’s just human nature” seems to have been borne out again within the past fifty years of my own adult life (1968 compared to 2018). As also exemplified in such other cute proverbs as “nice guys finish last” (baseball coach Leo Durocher) and “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God” (the Bible). All of which is mainly due to the jaundiced presence in our midst of a longstanding epidemic of egotistical monstrosity that recently went viral, brought on by those who we are now calling “narcissistic perverts”. Namely the very same privileged alpha males to which I was referring earlier in this article, just a lot more of them than ever existed before, in keeping with the world’s much larger present population.

Which means that whenever there is a problem anywhere in the world, whether it be sexual harassment, environmental degradation, religious terrorism, violent anti-immigrant sentiment, or whatever, the people in charge always end up blaming the victim. Problems caused by neoliberal or neofascist rulers always have to be solved by “everyone” (the lower classes), because preserving the prevailing system is considered much more important than anything else could ever be. For the world’s most important state-capitalist or private-capitalist rulers, guaranteeing a decent rate of profit for the people on top of the world is always a higher priority than keeping billions of ordinary people alive and kicking. Even though the world’s most horrendous refugee situations are predominantly caused by the deliberate geopolitical creation of “failed states” (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Haiti, Myanmar, etc.) all over the world, doing anything about any of these things is constantly being shuffled off onto the backs of the “little people”, that is to say those lacking the means (wealth and power) to successfully resist obedience to officially-sponsored evil.

For VIPs like British prime minister Theresa May, industrial pollution can only have been caused by regular joes (and jills), constantly throwing their one-time-only drinking straws into the ocean. For the “obvious” reason that no one like May has ever seen any “ever-responsible” industrial concern throwing anything at all away, or contaminating the soil, or anything like that. Similarly, for established newspaper columnists like Allison Hanes or Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed (of the Montreal Gazette), it seems that only ordinary European-origin Westerners ever adopt racist attitudes toward recent immigrants from non-European countries. For the obvious (fake) reason that no one at all among the “racialized” visible minorities living anywhere in the world, nor within any of its indigenous communities, has every been known to be racist, or anti-semitic, or anything like that. It is after all a well-known “fact” among such propaganda mongers that the only majority populations anywhere in the world to have adopted racist attitudes toward “outsiders”, are those coming from Christian-European origins. None of the world’s leading sycophants, or apologists for the prevailing system, will ever admit the truth, namely that every population of every possible cultural origin has always proved to be as racist as any other such population.

Unfortunately, human societies as a whole do not seem to be able to achieve moral rearmament anywhere in the real world, because none of the world’s societies or civilizations were ever morally armed in the first place. Still, it is not going to do anyone any good to just support reactionary regimes, because they are so popular these days, like a lot of my former colleagues have done. It is still better to take the high road (that I did not always do in the past) and to continue believing in some kind of turnaround, right up to the bitter end. Even though it often seems as if “everything that is possible is not worth doing, and everything that is worth doing is impossible”. There is in fact no excuse for ordinary people (those not making billion-dollar decisions every day) to behave like morons, just because almost all the VIPs in this world are doing it all the time.

One way of getting people to back away from the precipice, even when it seems a bit late to be still trying to do that these days, is to point out that the recent worsening of humanity’s long-established sorry state has, after all, been accomplished through conspiracy. As the dozens of very intelligent authors have pointed out, who were cited in Le Monde diplomatique (Manière de Voir)’s recent special on conspiracy theories (“Complots: théories…et pratiques”, April-May 2018), although a very large number of the conspiracy theories being bandied about all over the world nowadays are complete fakes, quite a few other conspiracies have turned out to quite genuine, with devastating results.

For example, it is certainly true that the USA did after all land several astronauts on the Moon several decades ago, and that the terrorist assault on the World Trade Centre in New York (and several other targets) did take place back on 9-11 (2001), pretty much as was reported at the time. But it is also equally true that several of the world’s most important states have been closely colluding with various multinational corporations, and the world’s most important criminal organizations, to jointly exploit the opportunities opened up by recent financial liberalization, in order to enormously increase the worldwide scope of both legal and illegal tax evasion. Worldwide government austerity, directed primarily at poor and middle-class people, has been the inevitable result. In other words, some conspiracies really took place as alleged, while others most definitely did not.

Unfortunately again, the counter-revolution against many different regimes’ democratic pretensions has been successful in dozens of places, fascism with a human face has been elected in some of the world’s most powerful countries, the book of neofascist faces is currently in power in many different regions, and voluntary slavery is therefore feeling real good about itself these days. After all, 63 million people in the USA did indeed elect a fake anti-establishment member of the establishment, with help from Russia, Wikileaks, private British algorithms and assorted minions of artificial intelligence. Neofascism has become as important as neoliberalism all over the world, because state capitalism is now collaborating openly with private capitalism. Many of the traditional allies of the USA (the European Union, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc.) as well as many of its traditional enemies (Russia, China, Iran, etc.) are all playing their designated roles in what amounts to a worldwide reinterpretation of the absurd 1960s musical, “Stop the world, I want to get off”. Or, to borrow a line from another such play, “My fair lady”, “It has been done!”

Francis Fukuyama was right after all, history is over, “the market” (i. e., the world’s most important investors) rules the world, state capitalism, private capitalism and organized crime have all merged (or converged) into one gigantic, elitist amalgam of vested interest. The future of humanity is upon us, we are now entering the final, mopping-up stage of the aforementioned counter-revolution. It appears that human beings have resolved to make this brave new world of neofascist trans-humanism work, or die trying. There is therefore nothing left to be done, because it already has been done. We are already inside the matrix. If we are all killed off in the next few years by our own nuclear insanity, or our own environmental implosion, or financial collapse, or unbridgeable social division, or sexual warfare, then we will pass the torch on to our robot successors and let them fight to the death among themselves over whether or not they ever had a biological origin. The only future that we seem to have chosen never to embrace will be the old-fashioned kind, that includes out-of-date concepts like progress and real, rather than fake, democracy.

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.