Obsession and compulsion on a world scale
A large number of people all over the world, not just among the poor and the powerless but also among those who possess a great deal of money and power, are acting as if they were victims of massive substance abuse. Rational behaviour and the exercise of free will are constantly being set aside, even more so than in the past, in favour of obsessive and compulsive behaviour. The people behaving in these ways, doing things that are very harmful to themselves, and to everyone else around them, seem to be motivated by social and psychological forces beyond their control. As a result, hundreds of millions of “ordinary” people, being pushed around by those in power, as well as millions of others dominating practically every country in the world, are acting as if they were drunk or stoned. They seem to be completely unable to take charge of the situation in which they find themselves, and to act in their own best interests, by dealing with their problems in a rational way. Instead, all sorts of people are coming up with all kinds of weird interpretations of events that have nothing whatever to do with what is really going on in this world.
What people should be doing nowadays, in an urgent manner, is confronting all the world’s major crises head on, starting with the increasingly murderous pandemic, which has in fact killed several times more people, directly and indirectly, than the official tally of over three million victims. And continuing with the even more dangerous environmental disaster that is not only closely intertwined with the pandemic, but also continues to kill even greater numbers of people in dozens of other ways. Not to mention dealing in a similarly honest and definitive manner with the also closely related, and increasingly dangerous social and political divisions inside each country, as well as between often violently conflicting, geopolitical empires.
People all over the world should be facing up to reality in the way that the jurors in Minneapolis did in the recent US trial when they convicted a white policeman, for murdering a black man accused of a minor crime. Instead of supporting official institutions, as usually happens in such cases, they decided to listen to the prosecuting attorney’s plea to “believe what you see”. When people decide not to believe what they see, and avoid focusing on what is happening right in front of their eyes, this allows their vision to be impaired by long-standing addictions to reactionary ideologies like racism, sexism, imperialism and religious fundamentalism. By letting these ideologies cloud their judgement, they veer way off-track into huge errors of interpretation, based on wholly inaccurate predetermination.
A fascinating example of deliberate ignorance of what ought to be obvious to everyone who chooses to open his or her eyes, is the way in which many liberal-minded people in countries like Canada have chosen not to notice what is wrong with the hijab. This article of clothing, and other cover-up clothing worn exclusively by Islamist women, and not at all by Islamist men, really is an anti-feminist symbol promoting religious extremism. Even though it ought to be obvious to everyone what is really going on in this particular case, it is in fact not at all obvious to those Canadians, and to a minority group of like-minded people in Québec, currently accusing the provincial government of racism because of its laicity law prohibiting the wearing of religious symbols among civil servants in positions of authority.
Although no one is dying, or going to jail, because of that democratically adopted law, the highly-coordinated propaganda barrage of constantly repeated accusations of racism is nevertheless quite serious. Instead of simply taking off their religious symbols while at work, as thousands of true believers do in many other countries already possessing such legislation for decades, the religious extremists in Québec choose to make a big, emotional issue of their irrational, egotistical, ideological advertising. As a result, like several other religions also afflicted with similar diseases, the ultra-Islamic form of neofascism, firmly implanted in dozens of unfortunate countries all over the world, is receiving a great deal of indirect, misguided support from this liberal-minded prejudice.
Québec Superior Court justice Marc-André Blanchard, belonging to the anti-laicity minority group, recently compounded that same naive error by coming up with the ridiculous argument that religious advertising is far more important than commercial or political advertising, because it comes from “the soul” (a category that has never been accepted in rational discussion) rather than from the intellect. In reality, however, the hijab is every bit as much a political instrument as any electoral-campaign button that politically committed people often wear on their lapels, and it really does undermine the neutrality of the state when worn by those who represent its authority.
To be sure, the liberal-minded people I am referring to here are not making the genuinely racist misinterpretation of events that the most reactionary citizens in the USA do when they support the still ongoing killing of hundreds of black people by white policemen, during confrontations that did not happen to be recorded on dozens of live video feeds. When what is really going on in such disgusting incidents is not at all obvious to the naked eye, it is a great deal easier for convinced racists, whether in the police force or in the general population, to exercise their predetermined disdain for black victims. As well as for victims of Asian descent, who are also being attacked more often these days by ignorant numbskulls making a completely irrational connection between their victims and the so-called “Chinese virus”.
Even when reality is staring them right in the face, however, the liberal-minded people in Canada still make the equally irrational mistake of accusing the Québec government of racism, in this particular case, because they seem to have concluded beforehand that racism can only be committed by neofascist, white supremacists. In so doing, they have managed to convince themselves that other kinds of neofascism, such as the entirely political, Islamist variety of extremism, recently infecting the Muslim religion, simply do not exist anywhere in the world. It does no good, either, to argue with these liberal-minded people that all the other religions in the world are also infected by the same kinds of neofascist, ultra-right-wing, religious populism, such as evangelical Christianity, Hindu nationalism, and similar types of extremism imbedded within the Buddhist, the Confucianist and the Shintoist religions. As the saying goes, “there are none so blind as those who will not see.”
Evangelical Christianity is also just as infected by neofascist irrationality as is Islamic extremism, not only in the USA, where ultra-Christians still support the incredibly reactionary Trump movement imbedded in the Republican Party. 70% of Republican voters still believe in the insane theory that Trump was a victim of massive electoral fraud, even six months after the election. Many countries in Latin America also suffer greatly from the same kind of ultra-right-wing populism, fuelled by evangelical Christianity. This is particularly evident in Central America (Honduras, Guatemala, Salvador), and also exists in several other countries, with the most notorious example being Brazil’s ultra-reactionary president, Jair Bolsonaro. Many countries in Africa, particularly in West Africa, are also run by evangelical Christian leaders constantly fighting for political power with rival politicians from the Islamist movement. In the eastern part of Africa, the president of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, is also an evangelical Christian, who succeeded in winning the Nobel prize for making peace with the Eritrean extremists, before turning around and wiping out the autonomist insurrection in the Tigray region, with Eritrean help, in an extremely violent manner.
Back in Canada, another really good example of wilful blindness of religious origin is the case of the ultra-Christian black man in Alberta, Samuel Sey, who was interviewed in an article that appeared in “The Montreal Gazette”, and related newspapers, on April 27, 2021. He was invited to give a conference on systemic racism at a Christian institution, Ambrose University in Calgary, and came up with the truly fantastic idea that it is impossible for racism to be systemic anywhere in the world, at any time in history, because that is not the definition of racism that he found written down in the Bible! According to him, the Christian interpretation is that racism is caused by partiality, or bias based on the colour of a person’s skin, which in his totally blinkered point of view, somehow means that it cannot therefore also be systemic. He has managed to convince himself that racial disparities between white people and black people, such as the tendency for blacks to be poor more often than whites in many different countries, do not prove anything at all. Sey decided not to believe in any form of logical reasoning because of his total obsession with what he found in his favourite book, the Bible, an attitude that is irrational in the extreme.
In reality, this is just another example of how predetermination (unscientific prejudice) often works. To the detriment of people who convince themselves to think in this completely artificial fashion. In reality, systemic racism exists all over the world, including in Canada and in Québec. The laicity law in Québec is definitely anti-racist, but that in itself does not mean that Québec society in general is exempt from the ideology of systemic racism in many other ways. Unfortunately for people who do not want to believe in anything that goes against their own mind-set, the world that we live in cannot possibly be understood by anyone clinging to such an ultra-simplistic way of interpreting reality.
Another example of extreme, religious-minded thinking, reaching similar levels of absurdity, has to do with the second most popular political formation in Canada, the Conservative Party, whose current leader, Erin O’Toole, is trying to get into a good position to get elected soon. He has decided that the best way to do that is by copying the strategy of one of his predecessors, Stephen Harper, who ran the country as Prime Minister from 2006 to 2015. The idea being to downplay the considerable support that the Tories have always received from the large group known as “social conservatives”, who are firmly opposed for ultra-religious reasons to such modern practises as abortion, which the majority of Canadians just as firmly support.
Unfortunately for Mr. O’Toole, one Conservative Member of Parliament, Cathay Wagantall, has put forward a private member’s bill calling on the country to condemn selective abortions for female foetuses, as are currently being practised by millions of ultra-traditional families in countries like China and India, as well as among many Canadian citizens of Asian descent. With the result that those countries, and the corresponding communities belonging to their overseas diasporas, end up with huge imbalances between a much greater number of men, and a much smaller number of women, living in those places. Which, along with the related horror of female infanticide, lead to all sorts of long-lasting social problems.
Wagantall’s bill is causing a huge head-ache for Erin O’Toole because he only recently became the leader of that party by cynically manoeuvring around to get temporary, social-conservative support during the leadership campaign. Before turning around again, once he became leader, and opposing those same people in order to now have a decent chance at getting elected into the much more satisfying post of Prime Minister. In the meantime, none of the other political parties at the federal level want to support the Wagantall bill, because that would most likely revive the divisive abortion debate. As a result, most people end up in the absurd position of wishing that there were some way for them to condemn selective abortions, which most of them quite rightly abhor as being ultra-misogynous, without falling into Wagantall’s carefully set trap. She only proposed that bill in the first place because what she really wants to do is to manoeuvre everyone in the country into opposing all abortions, of every kind, for her own ultra-religious and also weirdly misogynous reasons.
But it is not just religious extremists not officially in power who deliberately misinterpret whatever is going on around them, by trying to impose their own particular prejudices on everything that moves. Many governments not completely run by religious extremists are also quite adept at doing exactly the same thing, in their own indomitable ways. In yet another fascinating example, the same Canadian government that is backing the liberal-minded people that I mentioned earlier, accusing the Québec government of racism because of its totally anti-racist laicity law, has also come up with an equally peculiar interpretation of how racism functions in every region of the country, and throughout Canadian history. According to official training documents for Canadian civil servants, obtained by the “Toronto Sun” newspaper several weeks ago, the federal government itself supports the absurd idea that white racism is the only kind that really exists.
I first learned about the existence of those training documents by reading Jean-François Lisée’s column (“Le Devoir”, April 17-18, 2021), in which he denounced the Canadian government’s point of view in no uncertain terms, pointing out quite a few errors of judgement contained therein, including several important errors of omission. For example, Lisée referred to one of the documents’ historically accurate assertion that indigenous people in Canada have been mistreated by white people in power ever since the French and the British empires first showed up in this part of the world, during the colonial period of history, notably by forcing many of those people into abject slavery.
But as Lisée quite rightly points out, that same government document fails to report that many indigenous peoples themselves also practised slavery between rival tribes before that period, thereby leaving the deliberate impression that only white people could possibly be so cruel. The fact is that both racism and slavery have been practised in the past, and are still being practised, in various different ways, in all the world’s major cultures. The European imperial slave trade of the colonial period, mostly based on the massive mistreatment of African slaves, was preceded, as well as accompanied and succeeded, by an equally large intra-African slave trade, and by a third, also equally large, Muslim slave trade run by empires based in the Middle East. It is completely ridiculous, as well as constituting a peculiar form of “reverse” racism in itself, to try to confine such practises to only one large group of people, defined exclusively by the thoroughly unscientific criterion of skin colour.
In addition to the numerous varieties of disinformation already mentioned, there are also hundreds of other ways by which prejudiced people exercise their anti-social prejudices, over and over again, in every part of the world. The same type of zonked-out, misguided thinking also characterizes those millions of reactionary people who get together in huge, un-masked, closely-packed numbers for all sorts of ignorant reasons. The most popular of which being, not only in extremely hard-hit India but also in dozens of other countries, in order to publicly celebrate their ultra-orthodox religious adhesions. Which they are always doing for their own irrational reasons, in spite of how many more people around them are dying from the pandemic because of their collective stupidity. The most conservative factions of every single religion in the world are constantly participating in this kind of neofascist nonsense all the time. Recently, even in a comparatively well-vaccinated country like Israel, a large number of ultra-orthodox Jews, illegally congregating in an overcrowded venue during the pandemic, panicked when they all tried to leave the building at once, with disastrous consequences for many of the unfortunate people involved.
Other millions of people also help propagate the SARS-CoV-2 virus by refusing to get vaccinated for similarly irrational reasons, once again very often including the selfsame, religious-extremist populations. In the ultra-rich USA, possessing the world’s largest supply of vaccines, herd immunity, especially against the up-and-coming variants, may still not be achieved after all, even within that country, if too many reactionary people refuse to get inoculated, for much longer. Especially given the fact that the world’s richest countries are hoarding most of the available vaccines for themselves and refusing to share with any of the much more numerous poor countries, thereby making the fight against those variants much more difficult for everyone, everywhere.
However, the world’s most influential people, and also the most dangerous, constantly engaging in ultra-narcissistic, psychopathic behaviour, are those who are drunk, or stoned, on wealth and on power. These are the extremely privileged private capitalists, and the state capitalists who imitate them, both groups of which continue to practice jointly neoliberal and neofascist, “business as usual” by investing massively in whatever brings them ever more wealth and power. Even when it comes to such harmful behaviour as continuing to promote fossil fuels, and even when other alternatives are waiting to be encouraged instead, thereby deliberately ignoring all the well-known, destructive characteristics of such investments on every ecological system that exists, in every country in the world.
In spite of a well-publicized campaign of “ESG” advertising about how today’s most important investors “care deeply” about the natural environment, about social considerations and about “good governance”, in reality most current investment in the real world is still very much deprived of any such ethical considerations. Some people also naively believe that China is doing the right thing, because of its massive investments in solar and wind power, while choosing to ignore the fact that the same country also continues to invest, many times more heavily, in the most polluting kinds of fuels available. China’s main goal being to achieve the highest possible quantities of overall industrial and agricultural production, as an essential part of its irrational, national-identity focus on replacing the USA, and every other possible contender, as the number one empire in the world, forever.
The world’s most important money-makers, dominating the social group known as big business, are still profiting from the neoliberal counter-revolution that they imposed on everyone during the 1980s, when the central banks’ monetarist “war on inflation” was won by jacking up interest rates to over 20% (1979-1981), and keeping them extremely high until the end of the decade. Numerous other varieties of neoliberalism were also introduced back then, and are still being enforced nowadays. In spite of naive criticisms of those fighting against neoliberalism, such as journalist Louis Cornellier’s article on what he calls “left-wing pessimism”, published in “Le Devoir” on March 28, 2021. Cornellier focused on the fact that even though neoliberalism has been around for a long time, it has not yet succeeded in completely getting rid of several progressive social programs in many different countries, not even in the ultra-neoliberal USA. But the fact that there are still poor and middle-class people benefiting from such programs, that were originally established before the neoliberal counter-revolution began, does not mean that anti-social, neoliberal attitudes have not nevertheless triumphed almost everywhere.
With the result that in countries like the USA, between 1979 and 2017, overall national income per person may have increased by 85%, but the purchasing power of ordinary, salaried employees simultaneously declined by 13%. The only way to explain such an extraordinary conundrum is to realize that the richest people in such countries made off with considerably more than just “the lion’s share” of all that new wealth, generated largely by the development of many newer technologies. They even took away a larger proportion than usual of all the “old” wealth, generated by technologies that have existed for decades, from the majority of the working population.
As a result, in today’s world, a very small number of ultra-rich people have ended up making about 100 million US dollars per day, while a very large number of ultra-poor people (especially in places like India and Bangladesh) are still only making about one dollar per day. That incredible ratio of 100 million to one has replaced the old-fashioned ratio set back in the “gilded age” (1885-1914), when the corresponding ratio between the world’s richest, and the world’s poorest people, was several degrees of magnitude less severe than it is now. The Chinese government claims that no one in that country is currently making less than $1.70 (US) per day, but that is not much of an achievement, when looked at on a world scale.
Nevertheless, in spite of the pandemic, and in spite of the ESG advertising, unbridled neoliberalism, backed up by all the different varieties of ultra-right-wing populism (also known as neofascism), is still being practised in practically every country. An interesting example of which is the constantly increasing price of housing all over the world. This is especially true in poor countries such as most of those in Africa, where few people are fortunate enough to buy a house. But it is also true in much richer countries like Canada and the USA, in spite of the extremely recent increases in overall government spending inside North America, and the much larger, corresponding magnitude of the national debt. A debt that succeeding generations are presumably going to have to pay off, in an increasingly uncertain future, just like the debt that the British people just recently succeeded in paying off to rich European investors, stemming from government borrowing dating back to the Napoleonic Wars! Ironically, the investors involved in that deal back then do not seem to have had to worry about taking on a great deal of risk, at least not since those wars ended, over two centuries ago.
In today’s world, by cutting off a large percentage of international travel, the pandemic has accelerated the already well-established trend of constantly accumulating increases in the prices of every kind of housing, putting the purchase of single-family dwellings, even in the rich countries, out of the reach of an ever-increasing proportion of not just poor people, but also most middle-class people, and jacking up the cost of rent for the vast majority of the ordinary population. Given the still-ongoing straitjacket of neoliberal laissez-faire, very few countries have made any significant headway in controlling rents or prices, with most countries, including the USA and Canada, letting “the free market” make its own highly significant contribution to the ever-increasing income gap between the social classes.
It is also highly doubtful that US president Joe Biden’s recent, official support for trade unionism will have any positive effect on workers, given the very low level of unionization in that country over the past forty years. An observation that is also reinforced by the fact that even in the European Union, and countries like Canada and Québec, where unions are still reasonably popular, especially among public employees in the health and education sectors, those labour organizations have seldom succeeded in protecting their members against the ravages of neoliberalism, and the imposition of such neofascist policies as compulsory overtime and cancelled vacations, particularly since the pandemic began.
The world’s richest people, however, are not at all satisfied even with the incredibly high, hundred million to one ratio of domination over the world’s poorest people, that I mentioned earlier. None of those at the very top of society are giving any indication whatsoever of reining in any of their drunken fixation on ever higher profit accumulation. Instead, they are relying on recently invented instruments like artificial intelligence to provide them with whole new ways in which to make even more money, by automating absolutely everything, and plunging even more millions of ordinary people into unemployed misery and street-corner begging.
Huge tech companies like Facebook and Twitter are also using secret algorithms to further encourage ideological polarization among their compulsive users, thereby contributing not only to extreme divisions among the social classes, but also to even more extreme divisions between true believers. Most of that “polarization”, however, has to do with the rise of rival varieties of ultra-right-wing populism (neofascism) all over the world, the left-wing and the ultra-left having severely contracted instead. The sky is the limit for those already ultra-rich people, who seem to prefer having the ratio of richest to poorest in the world to climb even higher than it is now. These ultra-narcissistic, ultra-egotistical individuals, stoned on wealth and power, are quite willing to condemn hundreds of millions of poor people to misery and death, because they have never really believed, in spite of their official propaganda, in “sissy” concepts like empathy and ethics.
Not even Joe Biden’s recent turn-around, from actively supporting neoliberalism to officially claiming to be opposed to it instead, seems to have had much of an effect on reality. Based on what has been going on during the past forty years of the constantly accelerating, laissez-faire attitude, we can expect the richest people in the USA, and everywhere else as well, to strenuously resist every step of the way, Biden’s related intention, and similar moves in many other countries, to return to higher rates of taxation on major fortunes. The Trump movement, and the ultra-conservative Republican Party, are still very popular in the US population, in spite of the fact that everything they stand for is totally opposed to the best interests of the working people in that country. Biden may be cynically counting on Republican, and private sector, opposition to his program to bury most of his proposals in the sand, while still reaping political benefits from them anyway.
The US president’s new-found emphasis on government’s role in economic growth has apparently been cynically upheld even by the British-based magazine, “The Economist”, which has been the Bible of anti-governmental, economic liberalism, since way back in the nineteenth century. But the fact that Biden does not seem to want to do anything credible about the housing crisis, refused to support the nationalization of health care in the USA, refused to support raising the minimum wage to at least 15 dollars per hour, and did not include any kind of real emphasis on overcoming climate change in his proposed legislation, makes it extremely unlikely that his plan really indicates much more than an attempt to get at least part of the working-class to support the Democratic Party again, like many of them used to do several decades ago, before neoliberalism took over.
Joe Biden should be recognized for having at least started to move away from all-out neoliberalism, even though his wishy-washy approach is far from being sufficient. He also made a mild contribution to US foreign policy when he finally recognized the pro-Muslim Ottoman Empire’s genocide directed against the Christian minority in Armenia, during the First World War. Even though his gesture was only symbolic, it was still denounced in no uncertain terms by Turkey’s current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, another ultra-Islamist autocrat who seems to want to revive the Ottoman Empire in his part of the world. Biden’s gesture, however, could also be related to the fact that Erdogan’s Turkey recently bought missiles from Russia, even though it is still supposed to be part of the ultra-militarist, US-dominated NATO alliance.
These recent events bring to mind the longstanding debate between millennialism and the world as it really is. During the past several decades, liberal-minded critics of socialism and communism have dismissed the positive intent of those left-wing ideologies, on the grounds that they are nothing but secular versions of old-time religion. Millennialism being the belief in the existence of a mythical “golden age” sometime in the distant past, which was destined to return at some point in the future, thereby realizing the ideological pretensions of all the world’s most popular religions, as well as of their secular copycats. The Christian version of that idea being “the second coming of Jesus Christ”, the Muslim version being a return to the “world-wide” domination of the early Islamic empires, and the communist version being a return to the postulated era of “primitive communism” that supposedly existed prior to the founding of urban-based civilizations based on social-class domination. Several fascist (“national-socialist”) versions of millennialism were also concocted in days gone by, the most important of which being Adolf Hitler’s “thousand-year reich”, which in reality only lasted from 1933 to 1945.
Nowadays, various reactionary movements, some of them dominating entire nations and empires, are deliberately and gloriously using disinformation about current reality in order to advance the ridiculous idea that the return to “traditional values” in countries as diverse as the USA (the Trump movement), Brazil, Poland and Hungary (ultra-right-wing versions of Christianity), Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Algeria and many other Muslim-majority countries (ultra-right-wing versions of Islam), India (Hindu nationalism), Myanmar and Sri Lanka (Buddhist nationalism) and China (Confucianist “communism”), are all signs of popular rebellion against international, liberal capitalism. Curiously enough, however, all those extremely different forms of neofascism do not just have each culture’s particular “traditional values” in common. All of them also continue to support neoliberalism (laissez-faire) as well, in the economic and social aspects of their political platforms.
China is not the only formally communist country to be extensively using neoliberalism nowadays, since it has also been adopted by Vietnam and several other such countries. Neoliberalism has also taken up a large amount of space in the official programs of social-democratic countries like those in the Scandinavian region, as well as in the British Labour Party (introduced by the former Prime Minister,Tony Blair). In the past, such countries succeeded in adopting different kinds of pro-labour legislation known collectively as “the welfare state”, while still accepting the continued existence of top-down capitalism, including neoliberal capitalism. In those countries, liberal and conservative political parties share power with mildly socialist parties, jockeying back and forth in an eternal see-saw of progress and reaction. Several of those countries also tolerated the continued existence of feudal (“constitutional”) monarchies, an atavistic condition that also applies to such neocolonial countries as Canada and Australia, which also succeeded in adopting a little bit of pro-labour legislation from time to time.
The truth of the matter is that the acceptance of reactionary neoliberalism by practically all the countries in the world, no matter what their official ideology might be, is proof that they are all involved in the more or less complete rejection of social progress in one way or another. Millennial arguments against greater social equality by liberal ideologues, as well as the ultraconservative return to “traditional values”, not to mention the hypocritical acceptance of reactionary neoliberalism by the fake-communist and the mildly social-democratic countries, have combined together to render all the world’s progressive movements much weaker, and much less prepared to deal with enormous new problems like the pandemic, than they were before neoliberalism started taking over most of the planet back in the 1980s.
It is also highly doubtful that a large number of the world’s countries, and existing political movements, will want to adopt even a mildly pro-labour strategy of government, like the “democratic capitalism” that used to exist in several anti-communist countries during the “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975). Joe Biden may pretend to have turned over a new leaf recently, after fifty years as a politician constantly practising “middle-of-the-road compromises” with political reactionaries, but his new pretensions do not seem very convincing. One of the people who Biden himself must have talked with on several occasions in the past, Ramsay Clark, just died recently. He was the former attorney general of the USA under Lyndon Johnson during the 1960s, who apparently supervised the writing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Civil Rights Act back then.
Clark later went on to spend most of the rest of his life getting very upset at practically every military and CIA intervention that the USA carried out during the entire Cold War, from 1947 to 1991, when that imperial nation helped kill off millions of left-wing nationalist and pro-communist militants in dozens of different countries, while simultaneously allying itself with every ultra-reactionary regime it could find that hated the not-really-very-communist countries as much as they did. Unfortunately, Clark also spoke on behalf of, and even represented as a lawyer, some of the world’s most reprehensible politicians, his only criterion for so doing apparently being that they had to be firmly opposed to whatever the USA was doing, or planning to do, at the time.
Reviewing his entire career, therefore, is a truly excellent way for anyone nowadays to figure out what has been going wrong in this world since the end of the Second World War. We have to face up to the fact that, over the past 76 years, practically every official point of view on this planet, whether pro-USA or anti-USA, has been completely and entirely inadequate, from a moral standpoint. With almost every source of wealth and power during that entire time almost totally fixated on dominating the world, in every sphere of human activity, it is no wonder that we are still facing a situation in which dozens of opposing kinds of jointly-functioning neoliberalism and neofascism are squared off against each other, with very little room left over for anything genuinely progressive.
All the world’s most important, reactionary, interconnected ideologies, social-class elitism, racism, sexism, age-ism, imperialism, militarism, religious fundamentalism, ethnic exclusivism and anti-environmental extractivism, are still being supported and expanded upon by the neoliberal-neofascist tandem. Each one of those backward ideologies has also been imposed in truly systemic fashion, every time. What we should be doing instead is building up a much more progressive, international movement that is genuinely opposed to every kind of oppression and exploitation that currently exists, for real and not just in a fake way. Unfortunately, totally irrational obsession and compulsion still seem to be dominating most of the world, with the overall situation getting worse, instead of getting better.
