Hot and cold about Christmas

By David Simmons

Pak Chong, Thailand

And now for something completely different – a Gringweilo piece penned on Christmas Day. Think of it as an apology for the rather gloomy year-ender I posted on December 19 that no one read (click here to remedy that oversight).

Like most converts from Christianity to the Religion of Reason, I have mixed feelings about Christmas. Actually its joy started to wane in 1973, as my mother had died late that year. No one has ever been closer to me than her, and I was grateful, then, for the faith that I would see her again in the Sweet Bye and Bye. Later I learned that “she lives on in our hearts” is more than a truism – more than four decades later, an occasional random memory of her wit, sometimes gentle, often scathing, can still make me smile.

Here in Thailand, of course, Christmas is not officially celebrated, except by the retailers in the mega-malls. For them, it’s a glitzy tinsellized précis to New Year’s, which is celebrated, with typical Thai gusto. Thais love New Year’s so much they celebrate three – January 1, the Chinese one, and their own three-day Songkran (Water Festival) blow-out in mid-April.

Here in Pak Chong, there was no white Christmas. That’s only a half-joke; frost isn’t unheard of this time of year in some of the higher-elevation provinces nearby. But “winter” this year is unseasonably warm. The high today was 33 degrees, and my computer says it’s 26 as I write this at around 8pm.

Things were quiet here at Chez Dave. The family went down to Bangkok early in the morning for a wedding, so I only had the dogs for company. The cat was here as well briefly, but after turning up his nose at his breakfast, he went out to see if the neighbours had anything more interesting to eat, and/or to boink one or two of his girlfriends. So I took a leisurely stroll through Facebookland to check out the Christmas greetings.

It’s fashionable for us Rationalists to sneer at Christmas greetings as obligatory Hallmark pap, but I think most are sincere. There’s something about this season that is comforting, like a crackling fire in a stocking-bedecked hearth.

A few of the comments were fairly close to my own feelings, both negative and positive. Two Scrooges, both coincidentally named Shane (one a retired journalist in British Columbia and the other an NGO worker based in Yangon), posted the following:

Er ... ah ... *cough* ... yes. Merry Christmas, I suppose.

and

According to BBC World News, North American Air Defence Command is yet again tracking the progress of Santa Claus. I guess he won’t be delivering gifts to Yemen, Syria, Iran, Russia or China then.

Possibly more likely to get an approving nod from a certain Nazarene carpenter was this post from my Muslim friend Salim:

My most beloved friends. No matter what your religion, whether you believe or not: I wish you and your families a very Merry Christmas. Don’t let turbulent times disturb you, nor diminish your faith in humanity. Peace to you and good health! Salaam Alaikum. It’s the birthday of the Messiah – so celebrate, religiously or socially!

But best of all was this, not on Facebook but sent by e-mail from Lorne, the only high-school chum I’m still in regular contact with, who is currently vacationing in Florence with his partner Alain:

I have lit a little candle in Santa Croce, the great Franciscan church here in Florence, in front of Donatello’s great sculpture of the Annunciation, for you and your wife and child. It is a superstitious thing to do, but ... it isn’t wrong to remember someone and his family, on the other side of the world in “the deep midwinter”, at least where he and I grew up more than fifty years ago.

Not wrong indeed, old friend.

Shock! The year-ender that polls didn’t foresee

By David Simmons

It has been another fairly uneventful year or, more accurately, more of the same. Work five days a week striving, with varying success, to convert what Thais think is English into something that can be considered nominally publishable. Striving, with varying success, to get my family to live within our means. Hoping, with fingers crossed, that our ancient Honda CR-V will live another year past its natural life expectancy.

My health has had its ups and downs, mostly the former. A digestive-system disorder that reared its ugly head about a year and a half ago is still there, though at my most recent visit to a specialist in Bangkok he opined that the symptoms now were so mild that he didn’t believe any invasive treatment was advisable, and pencilled me in for an appointment six months thence. It’s got even better since then, and I can eat (and drink, praise the Lord) nearly anything I want whenever I want now without any adverse reaction. Unless there’s a relapse, I might disappoint the doc and not show up for the appointment.

We’ve made the final payment on our mortgage, though the bank hasn’t officially transferred the deed to my wife yet (as a foreigner, I can’t legally own a house in Thailand – a policy I support, as it has kept homes relatively affordable to middle-income Thais). I haven’t yet found a third income source (the secondary one being paltry Canada Pension Plan payments). There is a possibility on the horizon, though, so my wife’s dream of replacing the ancient CR-V and/or fixing the leak in the kitchen ceiling may yet come true.

Our daughter Lukyi turned fourteen in early December, and has not yet developed the most seriously dreaded symptoms of teenageritis – she’s still fairly delightful, and consistently top in her class at school in some subjects, especially English. Her spoken English isn’t as good as I’d prefer, as she doesn’t get any practice with it outside of school except with me, but I believe she would already out-qualify at least half of the reporters I work with every day. Not that I intend to encourage her to pursue a career in journalism, should such a thing even exist once she is old enough to go out on her own.

So in other words, life continues to be relatively free of drama, comfortably dull. Not worth writing about, when considered in the context of the global events of 2016.

I recently watched on YouTube a conversation hosted by Democracy Now, one of the few remaining sources of accurate information based in the US, between Noam Chomsky and Harry Belafonte. Apart from the fact that these two old warriors are still so brilliant, so energetic, so insightful, what is so impressive about them is that despite all they have seen and experienced, all the disappointments they have endured, all the hopes they have seen dashed, they remain so optimistic that human civilization is not only salvageable, it’s still worthwhile trying to save it.

While I hold both of them in very high regard, I’m not sure I agree with them, on either count.

For me this year, the saddest decline has been in my own trade. Yes, of course, journalism has been in trouble for a very long time, maybe always, to varying degrees. And it’s easy to exaggerate the importance of this failure or that one, this round of copy-editor firings or that misleading headline, this irresponsible commentary or that drumbeat for the next war. But the coverage, or lack of it, of some of the most important stories of the year seemed especially embarrassing this time around to someone who has spent (wasted?) most of his working life in journalism.

As I write this, the latest obsession is “fake news” allegedly instigated by the villain du jour, Vladimir Putin. It’s pretty obvious even to the fairly obtuse that this is just another excuse to try to censor unthinkable thought, to stifle all who would dare to stray from the established view of the world. 

I’m not a strong believer in conspiracies. The apparently insoluble situation humankind finds itself in is not the deliberate result of a cunning plan drafted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, or by the oil industry, or by Wall Street or the Chinese or the Russians or radical Islam. It’s negative serendipity, a series of events, many of them random, that have unfolded as they shouldn’t have.

One of these phenomena is the creation of monsters. The most obvious recent example of this is Donald Trump. We may never know why he decided to run for president of the United States; I believe it was initially just to make his brand more valuable, or sheer, simple narcissism. I believe he was as surprised as anyone that his campaign, meant to be just another fraudulent business ploy, exploded into life. And he just kept pushing the envelope to see how many stuffed shirts he could tear down, how many disaffected and betrayed voters he could win the hearts of, how outrageous he could be before the limit was finally reached. But it never was.

The corporate media, of course, loved this. They abetted his campaign, reporting his every outrage, every salacious horror story from his past, scouring their Rolodexes for has-been beauty queens with long-ago-groped pussies, broadcasting dead air of empty podiums at Trump rallies while ignoring packed stadiums at Sanders rallies.

By the time they realized they had created a monster, it was too late. A wholesale shift of tactics to gush endless praise of Hillary Clinton, glossing over her many flaws while attacking Trump at every opportunity, failed dismally. In the end, they had no choice but to roll out the heavy artillery: Invoke Putin! And those guns are still firing, though the ship of state’s decks are awash.

It may well be that the Internet is another monster that has got out of control. It did its job for a while, flooding the Web with information both true and false, equipping the ignorant, ill-informed and just plain malevolent with the same megaphone as established news media and academia. Anyone could say anything they wanted, and it became impossible for most to tell the difference between accurate, responsible reportage and nonsense. This, it was thought for a while, was good, as people would trust their rulers, both in government and in the corporations that controlled it, because the only alternative was chaos and cacophony.

And then this year, we saw this strategy fall apart with rapidity that took even people like Chomsky, who had been predicting something like it for a long time, by surprise. Brexit and Trump were the starkest manifestations in the English-speaking West, but there were many other examples. Decades of lies that neoliberal economics and corporate-biased globalism were, if not necessarily beneficial to the great majority of people, were as inevitable and unalterable as the force of gravity were no longer acceptable. Now, in a 180-degree reversal of the way things were meant to be, millions assumed that if the establishment said this was the way to go, this was what must be, it must be bullshit.

Many, perhaps nearly all of us, on the left have recognized that our leaders have badly failed us, and that the great majority of people privileged enough to live in democracies have either stopped voting altogether or have moved in desperation toward the far right or charlatans like Trump, reasoning (if that word even means anything any more) that maybe the fire is better than the frying pan after all.

In October, while investigative journalists were busy digging up the newest grope report or trying to keep up to date on the latest FBI revelation about Mrs Clinton’s e-mail server or figuring out how to blame Putin for flooding in Iowa or the demise of the Gulf of California porpoise, one of the stories they missed was a report published by Barclays Bank called “The Politics of Rage”. The bank analysed in detail the rapid decline in faith in the establishment and anger against, in particular, corporate-defined globalism. Its main concern was the potential for this anger to hurt the bottom lines of their corporate clients, but for the rest of us, these excerpts also ring true:

The biggest source of voter rage appears to be a sense of economic and political disenfranchisement due to imperfect representation in national governments and delegation of sovereignty to supranational and intergovernmental organizations.

We find that a [deep] cause is a perception among “ordinary citizens” that political and institutional “elites” do not accurately represent their preferences amid a growing cultural and economic divide.

But this goes beyond financial profit and loss. Angry people are ungovernable people, and that makes those who live for power desperate. And desperate power is a dangerous combination.

Chomsky argues over and over again whenever someone hands him a microphone that the many problems threatening civilization are overshadowed by two potential perils that go far beyond making it tougher to put food on the table. They could destroy civilization itself, if not the human (and other higher) species: global warming and nuclear war.

On the first point, it seems pretty obvious that we are long past the point where we could have prevented radical climate change, and that the whole world should now be focusing on how to mitigate the damage. It should be preparing now for the inevitable wars and mass migration caused by famine, water shortages, and intensifying natural disasters. But that’s a long-term issue and plenty of people way smarter than me have written about it. Will governments and their corporate masters pay any attention? Probably not, but the information is there if they want it.

More preventable is Chomsky’s second fear, nuclear holocaust. He has rightly pointed out many times that it is a near-miracle, given the sheer number of these horrible weapons, many in the hands of dodgy if not completely unstable countries like Pakistan, Israel and now North Korea, that we haven’t blown ourselves to bits already. But the point remains that if and when that holocaust does come, it will probably be either by accident or by a combination of errors, miscalculations and paranoia.

That’s why the current domination of US, UK and some other smaller powers’ foreign policy by the deliberate antagonization of two of the biggest nuclear-armed states, China and Russia, is so irresponsible. Pushing a bear into corner is dangerous enough, as is pulling the tail of a dragon, but doing both at the same time is inviting suicide. It’s the politics of desperation, taken to a potentially apocalyptic extreme.

In any case, the whole thing is pointless. China has quietly taken over nearly all of Southeast and Central Asia, and most of sub-Saharan Africa, without a shot fired, by investing in all three regions’ infrastructure and industry, exploiting their resources on mutually acceptable terms, and staying out of their politics.

While the US and the European Union face a backlash from corporate-penned “free trade” deals that funnel wealth to the very top of the food chain, China has established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that rivals the International Monetary Fund without any crushing “Washington Consensus” or “austerity” nonsense, and is backing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a mega trade deal designed, unlike the failed Trans Pacific Partnership, for the aims of Asian countries.

At the same time, it has made Russia a de facto client state via mutually lucrative energy deals, strategic and security collaboration via the Shanghai Co-operative Organization, and revitalization of Siberia and its vast natural resources. And it is knitting it all together with its New Silk Road policy, a huge land- and sea-based trade network stretching from Shanghai to Istanbul.

The upshot is that two-thirds of the world’s population is now in the hands of two powerful authoritarian regimes, as timid attempts at democracy like Thailand’s fall by the wayside. Even where democracy still functions in Southeast Asia, such as the Philippines, voters opt for anti-establishment hardliners like Rodrigo Duterte who middle-finger Washington and cosy up to Beijing.

So it’s unlikely there will be a nuclear World War III; there’s just no profit in it. As well, China and Russia are still restrained by the MAD principle. Those that are not – Pakistan, Israel and North Korea – still don’t possess arsenals big enough to destroy much more than their own back yards.

But I digress. Back to my main point: the sinking of my profession, journalism, into a swamp of irrelevance. None of the presidential or vice-presidential debates during the US election mentioned climate change or nuclear-weapons proliferation, not even once. Both candidates diverted attention from important issues by blaming Russia for this, or China for that. Trump may have been slightly less jingoistic than Clinton on specific potential victims, but he stated the need to “build up” the US military machine, already the most dangerous the world has ever endured.

And the media, other than independent outlets such as Democracy Now and The Young Turks, said nothing.

So with all of that going on, who could possibly care about the nasty noise the starter in the CR-V has been making, or the rising cost of feeding two dogs and a cat, or the fact that it could be months before I can trust my digestive system enough to dare a visit to Tony Roma’s?

No, can’t be bothered with a year-ender. Instead, I’ll just wish all my friends and family a very happy holiday season, and a great 2017.

Genius Out of the Bottle

By David Simmons

The demon is a character of every major religion and superstition that has existed throughout history. But like humans, it has evolved over the centuries.

The English word “demon” derives from the ancient Greeks’ δαιμόνιον, and to them, such beings were not necessarily malevolent. They had another word, εὐδαιμονία, derived from δαιμόνιον, that meant “happiness”. The theory was that the happy Greek was possessed by a happy demon.

The problem with demons, in practically every religion, is that they are will-o’-the-wisps. And their ability to possess the bodies of humans makes them untrustworthy allies at best and thoroughly nasty at worst, necessitating exorcism.

In the East, people remain somewhat tolerant of these disembodied beings, especially as there is a good possibility (they believe) that they are the spirits of the dead, including their own loved ones. But while they’re treated with respect, it’s believed that it’s better all around if they stay in their own world, and not try to re-enter the land of the living. For this reason, all over Buddhist Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar), you see spirit houses, little dwellings supplied with foods and drinks to entice them to stay there, and not to enter the homes of their still-living loved ones.

That’s not how Western Christians see the situation. For them, demons have completely lost their credibility. They are not to be tolerated. This remains the attitude even as the West becomes more and more secular. The ancient concepts of Good and Evil persist, even as more people doubt (or claim to doubt) those concepts’ supernatural origins.

All this has given rise to the relatively modern phenomenon of demonization – the assignation of demonic qualities to humans, or human innovations or symbols, that are seen to be so evil or dangerous that they transcend normal humanity. In Europe, the most famous human demon is Adolf Hitler. I use the present-tense “is” because the Hitler myth remains almost as powerful, and even more ethereal, than when he was alive.

It’s probably important to say at this point that demonization is not the same as slander. There is plenty of evidence that Hitler was a very bad man, so he’s not getting a bum rap. In nearly all cases, the object of demonization is pretty bad to start with. What happens is that his wickedness gets exaggerated or over-reported to proportions that either cloud the truth or assign to him traits or qualities that he did not actually possess.

To stay with the Hitler example, it’s not permissible to question the claim, for instance, that he was personally responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews. Maybe it was only 5 million, or 7 million. And maybe he personally did not know or – more likely – did not care what was going on in the concentration camps set up by his underlings. But the 6-million figure has become such an article of faith that it is actually illegal in modern Germany, a country that claims to value freedom of speech and the unfettered examination of history, to suggest it is inaccurate.

Meanwhile, anyone who points to the fact that the German economy was a complete basket case until Hitler came to power, and that he put into motion a culture of science and innovation that led to the modern freeway, the Volkswagen, and the rockets that eventually flew to the moon – sometimes by personal encouragement and funding for people like Ferdinand Porsche and Wehrner von Braun – is taking the risk of being demonized himself.

I mentioned above that demonization can be applied not just to individual humans but also to their innovations. An example of this, again from the Nazi era, is the swastika. This is an ancient symbol that was used by many cultures, mostly in the East, before Hitler decided to adopt it for his National Socialist Party. Now it is a symbol of all of the evils of the Third Reich.

But only in the West. Most Westerners do not understand that the demonization of Hitler, the Nazis and the swastika was never enthusiastically subscribed to in Asia.

Nazi action figures in a Thai shopping mall.

In Thailand, Hitler is seen as a clown, possibly a symbol of how Europeans, who think they are superior to everyone else on the planet, and who have never understood how their colonization of most of Asia was deeply resented and remains a source of shame to this day, are in fact self-deluding arrogant fools, crooks and murderers. Every once in a while, someone in Thailand uses a Hitler image in an advertisement or a publicity stunt, and local expats freak out in rage at their “insensitivity”. And the Thais get another laugh out of it, knowing that few of the offended have even heard of Shiro Ishii, the Mengele of the Japanese Empire, or even Hideki Tojo. 

Don’t get me wrong, though – I’m not claiming that Asians are less susceptible to the use of, or manipulation by, demonization. As in the West, it is most commonly used in the political sphere. In Thailand, the guy with the horns and pointy tail is Thaksin Shinawatra, who outflanked his many enemies within the traditional Bangkok-based elite (he hailed from the country’s “backward” North) and “tricked” the rural majority into electing him as prime minister for his “populist” programs.

Of course he was just as corrupt as his predecessors, and used his power to enrich himself and his family and friends like they did. But unlike them, he also kept a lot of his promises, and put in place policies that shifted much of the country’s wealth and industrial base into the formerly solely agricultural (and poverty-stricken) North and Northeast, which remain important drivers of the Thai economy. And that in a nutshell is why Thailand now is a bitterly divided country, between the royalist Central region to which Thaksin is the devil incarnate and the populous North and Northeast, which have stubbornly failed to buy into the anti-Thaksin mythology.

And this is another important aspect of demonization. Like any mythology, it has its adherents and its opponents, and doubters sitting on the fence. In Asia, the most obvious example of this is Kim Jong-un. To most people outside North Korea itself, he is the personification of evil, who keeps an entire nation in slavery. But to North Koreans, he can do no wrong. Do they believe this because if they don’t they’ll be sent to a labour camp? For some that may be the reason, but it’s more likely to be because they have been brainwashed from birth that the Kims are quasi-deities. And that’s how belief systems work everywhere.

Whether in the East or the West, demonization is a form of delusion, an altering of facts to manipulate the believers into a certain set of behaviours. It is often a form of deliberate propaganda, but in many cases it is a spontaneous phenomenon arising from a need for self-delusion. I believe that is what is happening right now, as I write this, in the United States.

The phenomenon in question is Donald J Trump. Again, there is no need to pretend he’s a great man to make this point; obviously he is not. He is a chronic liar and cheater. But lying and cheating are the hallmarks of most politicians, especially on the right wing that Trump represents. Everyone knows this, and yet it is an inconvenient truth that must yield to the mythology that a Trump presidency would turn the US, if not the planet, into Dante’s inferno.

Consider just one recent Trump comment. During his debate with Hillary Clinton on September 26, when she pointed out that he was an incorrigible tax evader, he said, “That makes me smart.” That got the Trump Is the Antichrist brigade up in arms. But the entire American business class pats itself on the back not only for evading taxes, but for lobbying and bribing politicians into making it even easier for them to do so. Everyone knows this. But the inconvenient truth must be set aside.

Some genies are cool.

Meanwhile, Trump himself – possibly inadvertently – has bought into his own demon myth by claiming to be a genius. That’s a Latin word that originally meant a demon who oversaw childbirth and, if the kid was lucky, was his guardian angel – a benevolent genie. This genie imbued the child with the characteristics that would guide him into adulthood, and special abilities – like the knack of choosing a clever accountant to help him avoid paying taxes.

So Donald J Trump is a demon not because he evades taxes, or because he thinks fat women are “pigs”, or because he thinks there are too many Muslims, but because he says so, in so many words. To watch all the crocodile tears, you would think he concocted these antisocial ideas in the Trump Tower. That’s what you would think – unless you knew, as we all do, that it’s nonsense. These ideas are in fact embraced by millions of Americans who have been too afraid, or too hypocritical, to voice them.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud
hatch out

The 2016 US election has been criticized as post-factual. In fact, the facts were too unpalatable to contemplate, let alone deal with, long before 2016.

The United States is an intolerant, violent society where the chance of getting shot to death is astronomically higher than in any other developed culture, where for-profit prisons are packed to the rafters, where citizens are still executed. Desperate immigrants, mostly Latinos, pour into it to try to improve their lives, only to be exploited by employers so as to drive down wages, and blamed for it by white folk forced on to Food Stamps, while people like John Stumpf and Martin Shkreli and Jamie Dimon become billionaires.

But it’s not nice to talk about such things. Vote for Hillary, and more of the same – if you don’t, you’re an uneducated boor and a racist.

The subheading is a quote from Robert Graves’ I, Claudius

A Tale of Two Chelseas

By David Simmons

There has been a lot of hype about the “historic” nomination of a woman for president by a major US political party, but it’s only one of many historic occurrences during a very unusual election period, still ongoing as I write this. I don’t place a lot of importance on the gender of politicians – as in so many other ways, the US is far behind other countries in putting a woman in charge, and most of those females who have become a president or prime minister elsewhere haven’t been a marked improvement over their male rivals.

To me, the “historic” influence of a social democrat, or “democratic socialist” as he prefers to call himself, is much more important. Bernie Sanders changed the conversation of the primary campaign, not just on the Democratic side but among Republicans, with Donald Trump winning his nomination largely on the back of Sanders’ economic talking points.

But there’s another interesting historic event, one that doesn’t get much mention. There is a strong possibility of Chelsea Clinton becoming the first two-administration First Daughter in history.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to spend one’s formative years in the White House, as Chelsea and the Obama girls have done. The system seems to be set up to protect presidents’ children from their unique situation as much as possible, including the media spotlight, and it seems to work pretty well – Chelsea is evidently none the worse for wear, Malia Obama is heading to Harvard next year, and even the Bush twins didn’t turn out badly.

At a mostly unimpressive Democratic National Convention in July, Chelsea did a commendable job introducing her mother ahead of Hillary Clinton formally accepting the nomination. Her presentation was poised and apparently sincere, without inordinate tear-jerkery. During her speech, she noted that she was aware she had been born into extraordinary privilege, and that with such privilege comes responsibility. I have no reason to doubt that in this, too, she was sincere.

Much of the US presidential campaign, like political campaigns in democracies around the world, has been focused on the grotesque inequality in economic status, and hope for betterment, that has increasingly plagued the Western world since the shift against the working class under Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and others in the early 1980s. This inequity extends far beyond people’s ability to put food on the table, or get a decent education for their kids. Many people are now unable to enjoy basic justice.

A symbol of this is another Chelsea, who when her name was Bradley Manning leaked embarrassing and politically damaging information about the misbehaviour of US troops in Iraq. Since then, she has languished in a prison, one of several whistleblowers who have felt the wrath of offended power. A higher-profile victim is of course Edward Snowden, who has had to flee his homeland to avoid the fate now suffered by Chelsea Manning, while Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks distributed Manning’s information, is under virtual house arrest in London.

The huge price paid by the likes of Manning and Snowden for daring to challenge the power of empire is far from unprecedented. To the empire, the maintenance of its power supersedes all other considerations, even the values it claims to uphold such as justice. And peace.

To non-Americans, one of the aspects of the current presidential campaign that is most alarming is its jingoism. The low point was probably the rant at the DNC by retired General John Allen, who said among other things: “With Hillary Clinton as our commander-in-chief, the United States will continue to be that indispensable, transformational power in the world.... Our armed forces will be stronger. They will have the finest weapons, the greatest equipment.”

Apart from some muted cries of “No more war!” from the floor of the convention, there was very little negative reaction within the US to this call for even more aggression. One counterpunch (in CounterPunch) came from actress Margot Kidder. She wrote:

You people have no idea what it is like for people from other countries to hear you boast and cheer for your guns and your bombs and your soldiers and your murderous military leaders and your war criminals and your murdering and conscienceless Commander in Chief. All those soaring words are received by the rest of us, by us non-Americans, by all the cells in our body, as absolutely repugnant and obscene.

But that’s the whole point. We non-Americans – Kidder, like me, was raised in Canada – find it very difficult to understand how Americans think. You might as well ask why the peasants of ancient Gaul failed to appreciate the superiority of the Roman conquerors, with their advanced political system, high technology like roads and aqueducts, and the overwhelming efficiency and brutality of their military. We are mere serfs who, if we matter at all, provide some contribution to some aspect of the imperial system, such as labour or raw materials.

We criticize America’s foreign policy, its wars, its campaign of destabilization in the Middle East, its provocation of dangerous, nuclear-armed powers like Russia and China. We criticize its internal structure, its rejection of the concept of universally accessible health care, its use of capital punishment, its mass incarceration, its obsession with guns, none of which find any currency in other developed nations. But our criticisms don’t merit being argued against, or even sneered at. We are simply ignored.

That is the privilege of empire. And it is a privilege that must be defended at all costs.

There’s a famous bit from the Monty Python film Life of Brian titled “What Have the Romans EverDone for Us?” After a long argument about why Palestine must overthrow its Roman oppressors, the activists conclude:

Reg: All right ... all right ... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order ... what have the Romans done for us? 

Xerxes: Brought peace!

Reg: What!? Oh ... peace, yes ... shut up!

Apart from actual shooting wars like Vietnam and Iraq, arguably the worst crimes committed by the American Empire was its decades-long suppression of democratic progress in Latin America, with its backing of military coups and support of right-wing dictatorships and death squads. But the people who suffered the most during that period were those who resisted it. For the sullen but mostly quiet majority, life was mere drudgery, hardly distinguishable from what they now “enjoy” under democratically elected government.

Elsewhere, the developed democracies of Europe, Canada and Australasia, while they cannot avoid the effects of US dollar hegemony, crony capitalism, Wall Street’s excesses, and the political instability in the Middle East, Africa and Asia caused (deliberately or otherwise) by US foreign policy, manage reasonably well. There is far more to be gained – or less to be lost – by keeping their heads down than by opposing the empire. Even helping out in US military adventurism through such outfits as NATO makes more political sense than the alternative.

If we had a choice of which empire we belonged to, it would be a choice much like the one that will be faced by American voters in November: a known warmonger and supporter of the neoliberal economics that caused and has perpetuated the decimation of the middle class and worsened inequality, or a possibly unhinged loose cannon who has built his popularity on a campaign of intolerance, racism, misogyny and outright lies. If we could replace our imperial overlord with someone else, who would it be? Russia? China?

Best not even to ask the question. Better just to get on with our tiny little lives, in the relatively open world of a privileged Chelsea Clinton than in the dank cell of a Chelsea Manning.  

Radical nostalgia

By David Simmons

The French language has a lot of very cool expressions. Most of them have direct equivalents in English, but we use them anyway because they sound cooler. The first Fawlty Towers episode, “A Touch of Class”, points to this phenomenon in one scene where Basil says about the charlatan Lord Melbury after he accepts a complimentary dry sherry, “Such ... such ... I don’t know what,” and the Major says helpfully, “Je ne sais quoi!”

But some we use because there is no way to express their meaning so accurately, or so succinctly, in English. Examples are déjà vu, passé and cliché.

I stumbled across another of these recently: dépaysement, defined as “the feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country – of being a foreigner, or an immigrant, of being somewhat displaced from your origin”. It’s a useful description of how I feel sometimes, having been away from my homeland for sixteen years. It’s not powerful; I have a good life in Thailand, and no yearning to return to Canada. But once in a while, in a circumstance that would never occur “back home” – strolling in shorts and a T-shirt among palm trees in January, beinghonoured in a religious ceremony by people who know I’m not a believer but don’t care, being flirted with by a beautiful working girl a third my age in a bar – there is a touch of dépaysement.

It’s a useful word because it allows for the feeling’s lack of intensity, and its brevity. Other forms of nostalgia are more intense. This is often true in the political realm, where we strongly yearn for the “good old days”, whether or not they actually ever existed, at least in the form our minds have evolved them into.

Leftists like to think we are immune from this, that it’s only conservatives who want to turn back the clock. In fact, we don’t even call ourselves leftists any more – we are “progressives”. And some among us, such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, are “radical progressives”.

What escapes our notice is that the term “radical progressive” is an oxymoron. The word “radical” is derived from the Latin radix, “root”. What Corbyn and Sanders argue for – and they say so, in so many words – is a return to the root values of pro-worker philosophy, which they lament the Labour and Democratic parties respectively have strayed from.

There is historical evidence for their arguments. Not only were the values they yearn for once practised – and legislated – by such leaders as Franklin Roosevelt, but the deliberate attacks on those values, especially (and increasingly after the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the early 1980s) by corporate power, are well documented. So too is the core deterioration of former pro-worker political parties such as the Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK, and the New Democrats in Canada under such people as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Tom Mulcair in the quest for power and funding.

Similar forces are at work among conservatives. Many of them are just as angry as leftists at what they perceive as theft of what they once had, or thought they had, and in fact no longer want to “conserve” anything. They want to go back home, to a world where women and people with dark skin knew their place, where a good day’s work earned a good day’s pay, where children respected their elders, homosexuals had no rights to exist, and environmentalists weren’t destroying jobs. They mythologize people like Ronald Reagan, forgetting that he recognized the US needed immigrants to sustain and bolster the economy. They forget that Dwight Eisenhower campaigned for re-election on his record of increasing union membership in his first term in office. And they rally instead to the call of frauds like Donald Trump.

Perhaps even more ominous than the spectre of a man like Trump with a potentially planet-destroying nuclear arsenal at his stubby fingertips is the “radicalization” of religious people, but it’s the same force at work. Reactionary Christians and Muslims cherry-pick the Bible and Koran, often to the point of disrespecting the founders of their religions, to justify sometimes violent efforts to go back to a “purer” age of intolerance and extremism.

Yearning for our roots is natural, and can even be a positive force. But sometimes we find that the roots have gone rotten.  

True believers

By David Simmons

One tends to select Facebook friends who are like-minded, so it’s not very efficient as a forum for debating opposing views. And when we do, points tend to be intelligently argued, sometimes posing a needed challenge to a viewpoint that, we find, had not been sufficiently thought through, or had been affected by changing circumstances that had escaped our notice.

But once in a while we run across a “friend of a friend” by whom we inadvertently get barraged with a load of nonsense. The best way to deal with such encounters is to move on and leave such people to wallow in their ignorance or superstition, but sometimes we foolishly allow ourselves to get mired in a debate that cannot possibly go anywhere.

This happened to me recently when I ran across a True Believer in the Rothschild Conspiracy. As I knew little about the subject, I did a bit of research, and found that this mysterious Jewish family is allegedly responsible for controlling and manipulating every central bank on the planet except two (Cuba’s and North Korea’s, and they are next), funding the Holocaust, founding the State of Israel, and putting Barack Obama into the White House.

Busy bunch.

I was tempted to dismiss this as yet another anti-Semitic fantasy, but apparently it is cherished by some who are only dimly aware that the Rothschilds are Jewish, or if they are aware of it, don’t particularly care. They would be just as opposed to a single family controlling the bulk of the world’s wealth if those rascals were, say, Norwegian or Lower Slobovian.

Conspiracy theories abound, of course; Mel Gibson even starred in a movie about them called, not surprisingly, Conspiracy Theory. They thrive on a widely held trait: gullibility, the willing embrace of nonsense.

We see this all the time in politics. The most obvious example at the time of writing is Donald Trump, but his entire party has thrived for decades on voter gullibility. How many times do working people have to be shafted by the trickle-down principle before they stop electing its perpetrators? How could Americans put George W Bush in the White House not just once, but twice? And it’s not just Americans – David Cameron, Stephen Harper, and many more stand as other examples.

So, in the face of this, are small-d democrats not also True Believers, gulled by a nonsense drilled into us all our lives, that people have the right to choose their own rulers, even when said rulers are felonious, incompetent, thoughtless, corrupt, or a combination of these?

In most democracies, the dream of perfecting the human condition is routinely sabotaged by political graft and stupidity. And in almost every such country, there exists a powerful minority bent on abolishing democracy, seeing it as a system every bit as failed as the trickle-down principle. Like the hula hoop, it was fun while it lasted, but it’s time to move on – or, in the view of most anti-democrats, move back to feudalism, when timeless values such as the Divine Right of Oligarchs were firmly in place.

Most wouldn’t put it like that, of course. Many reactionaries and fascists are probably not even aware that they are fundamentally anti-democratic; no no, they would argue, we only wish the Great Unwashed would elect politicians who are not felonious, or incompetent, or thoughtless or corrupt. And until they do, we’ll use our resources to manipulate the electoral system so the Right People are put into power. (And, perhaps they add, we’re not even Rothschilds.)

In Thailand where I live, the anti-democratic movement in recent years has become more and more efficient. Barely fazed by the establishment Democrat Party’s chronic failure to win elections, the big-business-backed royalist elite has stacked the courts, the National Anti-Corruption Commission, the Election Commission and myriad other “independent organizations” with co-conspirators to drum up novel ways to sabotage and overthrow nearly every popularly elected government since the early 2000s. And when these ploys fail, as they did in late 2013 and the Democrats’ ultra-reactionary wing launched street protests that threatened to wreck the economy irreparably, they send in the tanks.

Thailand has had plenty of military regimes before, but the current one seems more sure of itself than its predecessors. Like all dictatorships, it relies heavily on draconian repression of dissent, but also tosses goodies to the feared rural majority to keep them quiet. Meanwhile it has spent the past two years drafting a constitution designed to ensure that genuine democracy will never again rear its ugly head, and that the Right People run the country and re-entrench timeless values, Divine Rights and so on.

Heavily influenced by the most successful dictatorship in Asia, if not the world, namely China, the Thai junta does little to hide its contempt for democracy. Yes we’re draconian; yes we do things our way and brook no opposition. Why should we? We tried it your way and peace and order (the two gods of the military cult) broke down. And with some justification, much of the generals’ venom is directed not at the populist rural-based Red Shirt movement despised by the Bangkok-based elite, but against the establishment Democrat Party, rightly mocked as weak and incompetent.

Are the Thai generals right? Does democracy deserve to be beaten down once and for all? If we grit our teeth and look at the state of the world objectively, it’s hard not to see that they have a point.

Here in Southeast Asia, there are only two democracies worthy of the term, and both are relatively young. They are Indonesia and the Philippines. In the former, political Islam is the major force of reaction threatening to destroy the progress the country has made since the end of the Suharto dictatorship, while in the latter, rampant corruption has been the most irascible foe of progress.

But one does not have to look to Asia to see the failure of democracy to take root in a meaningful, progressive way. While democratic systems did flourish for a time in Western Europe and North America, corporatism has successfully taken them over to the extent that economic and political inequality, along with species-threatening environmental degradation, have taken over. European and American democracies were, briefly, beacons on the hill of despair, promising a way out of global poverty, ecological disaster and war. No more.

In Thailand, the people were robbed in 2014 of their chosen government by men with guns. They were powerless to prevent it. Yet in the United States in 2004, there were no tanks or men in uniform calling the shots; the people had the freedom to oust George W Bush from the White House, but failed to do so. Much more recently, the people of the United Kingdom had the freedom to turf Prime Minister David Cameron, but chose instead to give him even more power to wreck what little is left of the hard-fought social reform instituted since the end of World War II.

So, in the face of such damning evidence, by what logic do we continue to support the right of people to choose their own rulers? Is there logic at all, or only True Belief?

Fine print and bootstraps

By David Simmons

My late father said if somebody promises you something for free, read the fine print.

– Hillary Clinton

On the same day that the front-running US Democratic presidential hopeful cited conservative Republican Hugh Rodham to put down her rival Bernie Sanders’ campaign plank of free college tuition, about a dozen members of my wife’s family showed up at our house to perform a traditional Thai New Year water-bathing ritual for me, and for me alone. This consisted of me sitting in a chair on our front patio, while they all took turns pouring flower-scented water on to my hands and feet, amid prayers for my good health.

They did this for free.

A lot of Westerners who have married into Thai families have found themselves treated like an ATM. I’ve helped my wife’s family from time to time; why wouldn’t I? Their needs have always been modest, and I can afford it. They have also been there for me when I’ve been sick, or we needed help with a move, or whatever. But even if they didn’t, I’d back them up if they needed it. I don’t believe in fine print.

It has been like that for me from my earliest memories. I have plenty of flaws, and I’ve changed belief systems several times over the decades, but I’ve always been clear-eyed that “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” is logical nonsense, a defiance of the law of social gravity. Okay, I’ve worked for a living since I was seventeen. Okay, I’ve never been on government welfare. I paid my own way through university.

But I had the opportunity to do all those things. I had the good fortune of being born to parents who, though not well off, sacrificed to ensure I got the best health care during my frequent childhood illnesses, who supported me in my interests even though they changed every other week, who took me seriously when I was older and shifted from their belief systems, and encouraged my inquiring mind even when it led me to debate with them.

I had the opportunity to spend a decade and a half floundering through the postsecondary education system, shifting from sciences to arts, dropping out for years to travel aimlessly, until I finally found a career I could live with, and that could live with me. I had the opportunity to do that because my young adult years were the 1970s, that brief period when tuition was affordable and good-paying unionized summer jobs were plentiful.

Sure, I’ve been inordinately fortunate all my life. But I don’t believe there is anyone on Earth who can’t point to similar examples of good fortune, even if they are far fewer in number.

The only fine print I see is that the bootstrap brigade are wilfully dismissive of their own luck, of the many people who helped them when they needed it, picked them up when they were down, without expecting anything in return. They use their own ignorance as an excuse to tread on the already downtrodden.

If my heart were as big as it should be, I would feel sorry for them.

Sawatdee Songkran.