Category Archives: Decline of the west

Yugoslavia: No Stranger to Extremism

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Extremism, Hate, History, Serbia

 

Those who are still with me on this journey will be happy to know we are nearing the end. Only one country left to go and I have been talking too long about Yugoslavia. I am almost done. I have taken so long because I think Yugoslavia and the countries that emerged when it broke up are so important.  And all of the problems, I believe, relate to one very important issue. That is an issue that is get increasingly important in the modern world, including, of course, Canada and the United States. That is the rise in extremism.

 

By now it is obvious that extremism was rampant in Yugoslavia when it splintered in the early 1990s.  As a result, I think Yugoslavia is a country to which more of us in the west should pay attention.  Why is that? Because it can be a lesson to us all. Perhaps, we can learn enough to avoid their painful mistakes. The key lesson is, that it is incredibly dangerous to turn our country over to the extremists in our midst.

 

In Yugoslavia, people of various ethnicities lived together in relative peace for many decades. And peace is like health, if you take it for granted you are not appreciating it properly. It is too easy to forget how vital peace is to the good life. Canadians and Americans both take them for granted, at our peril.

 

In Yugoslavia after their charismatic leader, Tito, died, literally all hell broke loose. The dogs of war were running free and wild after he died. As soon as Tito died, the country became polarized all over again.  People moved to the extremes. The centre was hollowed out. People began to see other people who had different political or religious viewpoints from them, as enemies, rather than opponents. And this happened quite suddenly. From neighbours to enemies in 60 seconds. People could no longer live together with their foes. Some wanted to live separate and apart. Friendship turned to hatred. And the hate curdled and turned to violence.

 

In Canada, I shuddered when I first saw the Truckers’ Convoy that got international coverage carrying signs on their trucks that said, “F**ck Trudeau.”  I saw the same signs in Ottawa, and Steinbach. Trudeau was very popular, until he wasn’t and with amazing speed he  was hated when many Canadians considered him their enemy. It seemed like there was no room in the country for calm reasoning, or a middle ground. The extremist voices were the loudest. Some Albertans wanted to separate from Canada. Some still do. If these voices win the day, what makes us think that the violence that happened in Yugoslavia won’t happen here too. Albertans think they can no longer live with people in Quebec. Many in Quebec have felt that way for decades. What went wrong? Why do so many of us turn towards the loudest voices? Why are so many of us so quiet? Why do so many of us hate the other side? Even our leaders seem to turn to the extremes. Our Member of Parliament in Steinbach offered coffee and treats for the Truckers’ Convoy when it passed nearby. He found time for them, but never found time for the Pride Parade. He clearly admired the extremists. The LGBTQ* community not so much. This was during the time of Covid-19 when we were all on edge. Many hated Covid restrictions. Many of the truckers thought that freedom meant they could do whatever they wanted. They wanted a country without rules or regulations.

 

We in Canada, and even more in the US, are deeply polarized. Yugoslavia can show us what can happen in such circumstances. It is not pretty.

 

Eric Hobsbawn, another brilliant British historian, wrote about extremists in his series of history books on Europe. He pointed out how

 

“in the period from 1880 to 1914 nationalism took a dramatic leap forward, and its ideological and political content was transformed.  It’s very vocabulary indicates the significance of these years. For the word ‘nationalism’ itself first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century to describe groups of right-wing ideologists in France and Italy, keen to brandish the national flag against foreigners, liberals, and socialists, and in favor of aggressive expansions of their own state which was to become so characteristic of such movements. This was also the period when the song ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ (“Germany above all others) replaced rival compositions to become the actual national anthem of Germany. [Sort of like America First] Though it originally described only a right-wing version of the phenomenon, the word ‘nationalism’ proved to be more convenient than the clumsy ‘principle of nationality’ which had been part of the vocabulary of European politics since about 1830. And so it came to be used for all movements to which the ‘national cause’ was paramount in politics: that is to say for all demanding the right to self-determination, i.e. in the last analysis to form an independent state, for some nationally defined group.”

 

Love of country can be a beautiful thing. Who after all does not love her country? But when it turns to hating the other country, the rival,  it can turn powerfully ugly. This is what all nationalists must guard against, whether they are Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump.  As Hobsbawn wrote,

 

“The basis of ‘nationalism’ of all kinds was the same: the readiness of people to identify themselves as emotionally with ‘their’ nation and to be politically mobilized as Czechs, Germans, Italians, or whatever, a readiness which could be politically exploited. The democratization of politics, and especially elections, provided ample opportunities for mobilizing them. When states did so they called it ‘patriotism’, and the essence of the original ‘right-wing’ nationalism, which emerged in already established nation-states, was to claim a monopoly of patriotism for the extreme political right, and thereby brand everyone else as some sort of traitor. This was a new phenomenon, for during most of the nineteenth century nationalism had been rather identified with liberal and radical movements and with traditions of the French Revolution.”

And extremism and nationalism go together like rum and coke, but they don’t taste as sweet.

Throughout the Balkans, after World War II this became a big problem. Whether in Romania, Bulgaria, Bulgaria, Serbia, or Croatia, this became a big problem. It is becoming a big problem in the United States today.  Canada seems to be following its big brother into troubled waters. Hitler exploited it. Now Trump is exploiting it. Poilievre would like to exploit it. That’s how the world turns.  But we must be careful.  Look at Yugoslavia to see what could easily happen.

 

Has the newest American Civil War started?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Death of Democracy, Decline of the west, Extremism, Hate, Pluralism, Polarization

 

 

Ignatieff pointed out when he first published Blood and Belonging in 1993 that federal states were all having trouble remaining unified.  He mentioned of course, Yugoslavia which was in the act of breaking up violently.  It actually had 5 Civil Wars in quick succession. All of them violent. But he also mentioned Canada which was facing strong chances of breaking up with the rise of Quebec nationalism. He also mentioned that most other federal states, such as India, Belgium and the former USSR were also facing challenges to thier  federal system.

 

Of course, since then things have got worse. Canada is now facing a threat to its union by Alberta in addition to Quebec. More importantly, the United States which is also a federal state but was not on his list of trouble federal states is now clearly in that camp as many of its so-called red states and blue-states seem to find living together increasingly difficult. Federalism is a political system designed to permit people to live together even though they have some pretty big differences without breaking up.  Such a system did not allow Yugoslavia to stay together. I would add another factor that is challenging federal states, and this is the rise of polarization. Polarization is clearly affecting federal states by driving its elements apart.

 

One of the regular political commentators I read, even though I often disagree with him, is Thomas Friedman, who has won 3 Pulitzer prizes.  That is pretty outstanding for a journalist. I read an article by him this week in the New York Times  in which he said this about his country, “in my view, we are in a new civil war over a place called home.” He thinks the United States is already in the midst of Civil War!   Last year I watched a film called Civil War, about an imagined Civil War in the United States. It was horrifying. Is that what the US is facing?  Even if it is not that kind of a break-up we have to ask, ‘What is happening to the United States?’

It’s horrifying about sums it up.

Why is Yugoslavia’s History so Important?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Hate, Serbia, The Sleep of Reason

 

This is a very unclear photograph I took  of a photograph through a dirty window which  I saw in Vukovar. It shows what Vukovar looked like after its war that lasted less than 4 months. Perhaps it is best that we can’t see it clearly?  What would Canada look like after a Civil War? Or the United States? Do you think that is impossible? History suggests otherwise.

A friend of mine told me recently, he found history boring. He did not want to learn anything about European countries fighting each other in “ancient” wars. I was surprised, but I suspect that is a common reaction. I did not challenge his point of view.  After all, we are all different. I suspect that most of my readers are bored by my comments about history. I hope not, but as I have said at the outset of this blog, I am writing for myself, because I enjoy it and because I write to organize my thoughts and as a result, I learn more. I hope some others enjoy what I write, but I write for myself.

 

Well, I think Yugoslavian history is very important. Even though that country no longer exists. When Yugoslavia broke up the extremists took over. That is the worst thing that can happen. Extremism in Yugoslavia led directly to savagery and barbarism. That is where extremism often leads.

 

As a  recovering lawyer, I know one thing is very important. That is that divorce is never simple. Who gets the kids? Who gets the new computer? How much should one of the couple pay the other for support? Does it matter if one is at fault? Does it matter if one earned much more money than the other during the marriage?

 

And rarely, have the couple planned it out carefully before the divorce. After all they were in love forever.

 

We must multiply the difficulties in the case of a country breaking up.  That is even much more complicated. First, there are no clear rules. That means it is a minefield. It can quickly turn into a melee. Secondly, there are a lot more than 2 people and kids involved. Millions have their millions of opinions. So you get a great variety of opinions on both sides (or really, all sides) on every issue. Some of the questions are still the same. Who gets the good stuff? Like oil. Or nuclear reactors? Or the army? Who gets the debt?  How are the new boundaries to be determined? What about the people left behind in the “wrong country.”  How do we resolve these issues when there is no court to determine it.

 

We also have to remember that the loudest voices are often not most thoughtful voices? Extremists always seem to move to the podium in each country from where they speak the loudest. Level heads rarely count for much. The quiet ones seem out of the picture. The hot heads are screaming and we know where they stand.

 

Canada has a lot in common with Yugoslavia. And that’s the problem. Let’s consider a few issues. Consider Quebec. If it separates what happens to the national debt of Quebec or Canada? What if the Cree or Innu from northern Quebec want to stay in Canada? What if other first nations want to stay in Quebec? What are the new boundaries going to be? Some are pretty arbitrary. What if Labrador wants to be part of Quebec, rather than Newfoundland. What if St. Boniface wants to be part of Quebec?  What about those that don’t want to follow their leaders? Where do the Maritimes go if they are no longer connected to the rest of Canada.

 

Consider Alberta? Who gets the oil wells? What if indigenous people don’t want to stay in Alberta? What about the massive subsides that have been poured into the oil and gas industry over the decades? What if Alberta is landlocked? Is it too bad so sad for Canada? What about guarantees of religious freedom? What if LGBTQ don’t want to be part of Alberta? What if some people, from Saskatchewan want to be part of the new country of Alberta?  What if others, let’s say farmers, don’t want to join? What if Manitoba says, well then we will join the US as their 51st state (assuming the US would be stupid enough to agree to this)?

 

What if some first nations want to stay with Alberta and others want to stay with Canada? What if some want to join the US? What happens to the treaties between Canada and First Nations?

 

We have to remember what Ignatieff said:  “One essential problem with the language of self-determination and nationhood is its contagious. Quebec has discovered a people who also call themselves a nation.” The Cree in that province have been fighting back.

 

Separation will be incredibly complicated. And tempers will be running wild. Remember, hot heads will rise to the top. Cooler heads will likely not prevail. On both sides. Things can get out of hand quickly. Witness what happened in Yugoslavia. Neighbours there who had got along well for many years, all of sudden took up arms against each other?

What can we learn from Yugoslavia?  One thing, is that such questions are extremely divisive, and partisans can quickly appear who want to fight it out and will insist on belligerence from their leaders, not wisdom. History is important, and it must warn us and we must learn to be careful. Another lesson is that we must not turn our country over to the extremists. Finally, we learn from history that violence and anger don’t solve any problems. They just make things worse and they are unlikely to be in short supply.

We must learn humility. Hubris will be deadly.

And finally, such issues won’t be easier to resolve in this age of technological amplification of divisions and the rapid spread of disinformation, particularly disinformation that inflames matters. Things will be exponentially worse.

And if this happens too in the USA, which is flooded with firearms and other weapons and a history of violence that seems to be baked into their DNA, things are bound to be much worse than in Canada. As if all of that is not bad enough, the recent history of Americans choosing explosively ignorant leaders will also not be helpful. Times of tension require cool heads not hot heads. And they will be in short supply.

Learning history of places like Yugoslavia could help us to avoid the worst excesses of what happened there when that country broke up. Maybe it could even help us to avoid the break-up by reminding us of how precious our country is and we should not become complacent. It does not take much to slip into extremism. A little knowledge might help to avoid it.

All in all, things could get ugly. Quickly. The photograph above is what it means to look through a glass darkly.  That is also what the sleep of reason brings.

The Water Tower: A Symbol of Resistance

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Extremism, Hate, Modern History, Polarization, Political Violence

Our guide Marda led us on a fascinating walk through the town of Vukovar in Croatia. This town in 1991 was at the time the sight of the largest siege since the Second World War. Frankly, I expected to see more war-ravaged buildings, but most of them had been cleaned up. I don’t blame them for cleaning it up. Nobody wants to walk through devastation permanently (except me). And it has been more than 30 years since the war ended.

 

The first building we saw, from a distance, was the water tower which had become the symbol of the resistance of brave Croatians to the 3-month Serbian siege. The Croatians see it as symbol of their glorious resistance, defiance, and, they think, invincibility.  I consider such ideas hubris. After the war, it was one of the very few buildings (some say only one) left standing.  And that was truly remarkable since it had been subjected to barrage from the 1st day of the siege to the last, 87 days later.

There are images of the tower that can be purchased in gift shops for tourists. Souvenirs of the war. Go figure.

The Water Tower as a symbol of the defence of Vukovar was officially adopted on 30 October 2020, and is illuminated in the colours of the Croatian flag, with the lyrics of the Croatian anthem.

From day 1 of the siege , each and every day of the siege, the Serbians tried to demolish the tower with gunfire, and amazingly, if not miraculously as the locals think, it stood. It was hit with bullets but never collapsed. In fact, it was hit 640 times in 87 days. The people of the town took its durability as a message of their own durability and that of their town. They thought, that as long as the tower was there the Town would stand.

 

There is another amazing element to this story. Each day 2 young men, Ivica Ivanika and his friend Hrvoje Džalto took it upon themselves, to climb to the top of the tower,  at night in the dark without flashlights, to avoid getting shot. They climbed up the tower in order place  a new undamaged and sacred flag of Croatia to replace the one filled with Serbian bullet holes. The two men were scared every time they climbed up, thinking they might be shot. But every night they succeeded. It took about an hour and half to climb up and back down again, but they did it every day, religiously.

 

The stairs were not in perfect condition.  Entire rows of stairs were missing. No one had asked them to do this. They just did it. Sometimes they climbed in the middle of fierce fighting. They usually started around midnight. And every day the Serbs shot the flag down, and every night the two young men replaced the destroyed flag. Soldiers said that everyday their spirits were boosted as a result.

 

Unfortunately, Ivica Ivanika lost his life shortly before the town fell to the Serbs. After the fall of the city, Hrvoje Džalto was taken prisoner and much later exchanged, but he died before the opening of the renovated Tower. They are the heroes of the town.

 

Today, the tower has been converted into a museum with a restaurant. Traces of the war are still evident. And they are leaving those marks as a reminder. I appreciated that.

 

I think it is important to remember what happened there. It was a place where brothers turned murderous.

 

Sadly that can happen. It can happen anywhere. That is what we must remember.

Vukovar: When a Demon becomes God

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Extremism, Hate, History, Modern History, Political Violence

 

 

The Flower House

Almost all the buildings in the city of Vukovar in Croatia  were completely destroyed. A few were left riddled with bullet holes.

 

I had read about Vukovar years ago in the two books by Michael Ignatieff and Tony Judt that I have referred to in these posts.  I have often thought about that war between brother states. I wanted to see the city. I thought it was important to understand it. It could happen here in Canada or in the United States.

 

Croatia had not been independent in 1,000 years until it declared its independence from Yugoslavia in1991 and then got tangled up in war with Serbia, also a former Republic of Yugoslavia as was Croatia, really a brother state.

 

An early skirmish in the 5 wars of the former Yugoslavia in what became briefly, Serbia, was the fight for Vukovar that was part of Croatia. Serbia, at great cost, temporarily “won” the war and gained control of Croatia, but that did not last long. It is now again part of Croatia. Why all the killing then? What were all those deaths for? Who knows? Maybe God. Not I.

 

Vukovar was once the Hapsburg episcopal seat. It was located directly on the Danube River and we were fortunate to visit it on this trip through the Balkans. As Michael Ignatieff said in his book Blood and Belonging,

 

“In 1991 it became the Croatian Stalingrad. Throughout the autumn, the Croatian national guard defended it to the last street against the heaviest artillery bombardment seen in Europe since 1945.”

 

They fought valiantly but eventually succumbed to the barrage until November 1991 the Yugoslav National Army (‘JNA’) which was dominated by Serbs, together with Serbian paramilitaries “liberated” the town. The “liberation” was much like the liberation of Fallujah in Iraq by coalition forces led by Americans where crumbled and flattened buildings stood behind the fighters as they drove around the city. Liberation, like beauty, is definitely in the eyes of the beholder. When the City of Vukovar was “liberated” by the Serbs there was, as Ignatieff said, “nothing left to liberate but a devastated ruin.”

 

 

C.S. Lewis, who was a wise man, said this about love of country: “We all know now that this love [nationalism] becomes a demon when it becomes a god.” He was referring to Nazism, but really it has much broader application. It can apply to any form of extreme nationalism, no matter where it is found. It can apply to Serbia, or Croatia, or Nazi Germany, or the United States, or Canada. No one is immune.

 

Lewis made another important point about love of country. And this attitude is becoming more and more common in places like the United States and Canada. This is the attitude that our ancestors were uniquely great. Many of us want to take photoshop to history to eliminate the flaws. Lewis realized that “the actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings.” No country is purely good. We must never forget that. If we do forget it, we don’t really love our country; we love a mirage. We love fake news. As well, if we forget this obvious fact, we begin to nurture a debilitating sense of superiority that can shred our own decency. We can become what we hate. Lewis also said, with such an attitude, “If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. This is what happens when a false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.” In particular, we must guard against using this false sense of superiority as an unjustified basis for cruelty or exclusion.

As Bob Dylan, another very wise once said: “You don’t count the dead with god on your side.” That is what we must guard against.

 

In one house, [shown above] which locals referred to as “the flower house,” the holes from bullets and artillery were resplendent. Apparently, the owner had tried to rebuild it but despite repeated efforts to get a building permit and constantly being rebuffed by the local council, he decided to let it be.  All he did was place a large number of flower pots around it, hanging from every window. I guess he was trying to say, ‘Take your permits and shove them.’

Nothing can grow in the Valley of Bones other than hate. And maybe a few potted flowers.

 

Vukovar: The Valley of Bones 

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Hate, History, Mass killings, Modern History, violence, Waterfalls

 

I had been eagerly waiting to see the Croatian city of Vukovar since I signed up for this trip cruising up the Danube. I am sure I was the only one of our 147 passengers who thought that. Others wanted to see Bran Castle, because it was Dracula’s castle. So at least they thought.

The first thing we saw in this town was a museum. Vukovar has several museums, including the Vukovar Municipal Museum, housed in the Baroque Eltz Palace, which covers the city’s long history. This museum is dedicated to preserving the history of this region, even if that history is not always pleasant.

Vukovar Municipal Museum

We had been warned by our cruise director that the history of Vukovar was rough.

On our short stroll through Vukovar, a crucial city in the wars of Yugoslavia, our local guide, Marda, almost apologized for bringing to our attention the history of the massacre that happened here. At the time it occurred in 1991, it was the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War. I thought that history was important, and I was glad she explained, to us, even though very briefly, what had happened. I wanted to understand it, partly because I realized it could happen back home in North America.

Tito the leader of Coca Cola communism, had a dream of brotherhood and unity.  It was brutally shattered after his death as various ethnic groups attacked each other with stunning ferocity. Brotherhood could not hold back the hatred.

Journalists have used the expression “The Valley of Bones” to refer to areas that are strewn with human remains.  They don’t necessarily refer to a specific area. They really mean an area that is desolate or war-torn after a long battle. I am sure some use it to describe the land that was once Yugoslavia.

In 1989, Frank Viviano, a journalist for the New York times referred to a place in Yugoslavia, Croatia to be specific, this way: “…as if all Yugoslavia had once been paved in concrete and were now breaking up. The biblical valley of dry bones, you might imagine, lay somewhere between Knin and Obrovac.” These are 2 towns in Croatia that were important medieval capitals and became important during the Croatian War of Independence.

The New York Times writer was talking about one of the most beautiful places in the world, called Plitvice Lakes where 16 lakes are connected by turquoise blue waterfalls . He said was second only to the Grand Canyon. I am not sure if the Grand Canyon is more beautiful. That place is called Plitvice Lakes and I saw it in 2008. [I must post about that trip.] In any event the expression refers to land that has far too many human bones.  Like the land that used to be called Yugoslavia. The beauty really can’t hide the bones. Or the hate.

 

The wars of Yugoslavia showed the power of hate.  These powers include powers opposed to fellow feeling.  Forces that seek to divide rather than to join, seemed much more powerful than the forces that kept people together, or at least in line.

 

There was a room with a body bag filled hundreds of bones.  At least 21 people.  And there were many body bags. There are many sites with bones.  Many are found in mass graves that were discovered after the war when bones were found in the earth.  When I was in Vukovar I was told by a young Croatian guide Marda, who held no animosity towards Serbians, that a mass grave of about 900 bodies had been found the day after the war with Serbian ended with the defeat of Croatia. And there are many mass graves around the country.  Many of the bodies are badly damaged. Often the skulls were so smashed you could hardly recognize them as humans. Some contained bones of women and children. Those are all valleys of bones.

 

Political extremism is born from a feeling other than fellow feeling. Its parent is that feeling that finds the other repugnant solely for being other. The feeling that we are superior to them. That the others are not even human.

 

Many people were let down when the UN who declared safe zones in the former Yugoslavia failed to make those zones safe.  People under siege gathered to be protected by the UN troops and  laid down their weapons, but  when the Serbs arrived they proceeded to slaughter those people. Or rape them.

 

We must remember that when we leave our affairs to the hard men in our group—there are always men—we will pay a hard price. As someone said, “as long as there are hard men there will be wars.” I wish I knew who to give her credit for those wise words. Einstein was more cynical than that. He said, “As long as there are men, there will be wars.”

 

We must all remember that there will always be men (again usually men, but sometimes women) who will urge us to join groups where we are obligated, to despise the other side. That is a dangerous path which never leads to glory no matter how much some try to persuade us.

That is the attitude that leads to a valley of bones.

 

Why are Governments not Trusted?

Death of Truth, Decline of the west, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Neo-liberalism, Oligarchy, Social democracy, Social Democracy and Trust, Trust and Distrust

 

As I mentioned in my last post, a lot of hesitance to trust vaccines is a result of distrust of government. This is a shame, because particularly in troubling times such as pandemics, it is essential that people trust their government about the information they give about vaccines or other health measures.  Distrust in government is not a laughing matter.  Distrust in government is a very costly matter.

 

Figuring out why governments are not trusted is a tricky thing.  Nesrine Malik said this about citizens of her country of Sudan who believed the government could not be trusted in giving them good vaccines for free:

 

This sounds like completely irrational behaviour, but in fact it is the opposite. In countries such as Sudan, nothing good, and certainly nothing free, comes from the state. The government is an extractive body that exists not to serve citizens, but to rifle through their pockets and charge them for going about their daily business. Corruption is endemic – from bribing one’s way through traffic violations, to being forced to use private hospitals because government cronies have hoarded medical technology. The state is something that you thrive in spite of. The government’s communication reflects this uneasy relationship. Officials speak to the public either to scold them or spread propaganda, and dissent is banned; in Egypt, doctors who contradicted the government’s account of the pandemic were arrested, while oxygen tanks ran out in intensive care units in Cairo.

 

We tend to learn from experience. Our own experience. In Sudan the consistent experience of people with the government is that it will try to screw the citizens in favor of their cronies. They are naturally reluctant to believe that free vaccines are given to them for the welfare of the people. After all, their government has rarely considered the welfare of the people. This is called crony capitalism, or in extreme cases, oligarchy. Oligarchs won’t hesitate to use their power to screw us. That is what they do all around the world. And in Canada and the US the trajectory is in the direction of oligarchy.

 

In the US they are increasingly nearing oligarchy, if they are not there already. The rich in the US who have the ear of the government use that power to ensure that money is not “wasted” on public health. Many of the health insurance companies do all they can to maximize their profits even at the expense of their customers. Christiane and I have recently experienced a most bizarre version of this that I must blog about some day.

 

As Nesrine Malik said in her Guardian article: “Suspicion is easily sown, because political systems don’t need to be fully authoritarian to sustain exploitative and dishonest regimes that breed mistrust.” Americans know that pharmaceutical companies earn enormous profits. You might even say, as Malik did, “outrageous profits.”  In the UK during the Covid-19  pandemic people were reluctant to trust the government because journalists revealed how their government kept changing the rules while leaders refused to obey the rules themselves. We had that in Canada too. We have no vaccine against corruption. Or ignorance for that matter.  As Malik said, “State failure breeds paranoia. And when trust in government breaks down, people turn to personal vigilance.”

 

This is what Nesrine Malik said,

 “Vaccine rejection doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s easier to dismiss hesitancy and conspiracies as unhinged behaviour; it makes us feel less unnerved by displays of unreason from those who we think are, or should be, rational people. Sure, among vaccine-hesitant people are those who are simply stubborn, misanthropic or selfish. But, just as the pandemic exploited the weaknesses of our economic and public health systems, vaccine hesitancy has exposed the weaknesses of states’ bond with their citizens. There are no easy answers for how to deal with those who repeat conspiracy theories and falsehoods, but scrutinising the systems that lost their trust is perhaps a good place to start.”

 

I think Malik makes a lot of sense. It is not a simple answer to a complex problem. It is a complex answer, as it should be. 

In the west, since the time of extreme neo-liberalism of Saint Ronny Reagan, the Iron Lady, Maggie Thatcher, and to a lesser extent their dedicated follower Brian Mulroney anti-government propaganda has flourished since the 1980s as Americans and Canadians have been fed a steady diet of dubious claims that the state is unreliable and predatory.  As Saint Ronald Reagan said, “the most scary 11 words in the English language are, ‘I am from the government and I have come to help.’ For decades, conservative political leaders have repeated over and over and over again that the government cannot be trusted.

As a result many of us believe this. And that is a costly mistake. This is all part of neo-liberal dogma/propaganda that the government can’t be trusted only the private sector is worth our trust.

Of course, this ideology has for decades served the interests of the wealthy who care most about minimizing their personal or corporate taxes. This ideology is now so prevalent that even people whose best interests would be served by government are reluctant to accept its help. Governments provide many things of enormous value including hospitals, roads, libraries, universities, parks, environmental regulations, health and safety standards to name only a few. Governments are important!  And vaccines are a very important part of this. For decades we have been taught, and many of us believed, that governments are bad and private enterprise is good. Now we are paying a heavy price for blindly following that ideology.

The Language of Pestilence

American Fascism, Decline of the west, Extremism, Immigration and Refugees, Political Violence, Populism, Tyranny and Fascism

 

By now people around the world have realized the dangers of dehumanization.  The Republicans in the American election led by Donald Trump are using dehumanizing language to rile up their own supporters against immigrants, woke adults and children, and the political opposition.

I remember when I first heard about dehumanizing language during the genocide in in Rwanda in 1994.  At the time Hutus were a majority in Rwanda even though the Tutsi minority dominated the country for many years thanks to former European colonizers who preferred the Tutsi as their allies when Europeans imposed their will on the country. Naturally, this was resented by the majority Hutus for many years, but they did little about it until the 1990s.

In 1959, the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries such as Uganda. The Tutsi in exile always yearned to come back to power in Rwanda which they thought of as “their country”.  You might say they wanted to make Rwanda great again. A group of Tutsi exiles formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and their purpose was to restore the Tutsi minority to power. This group invaded Rwanda in 1990.

Then on April 6, 1994 an aircraft carrying the President of Rwanda and the president of the neighbouring country of Burundi was shot down. Both presidents were Hutus. This was the spark that turned dehumanzing language into action. Violent action.

As a result, the Hutus of Rwanda used this as an excuse to slaughter the Tutsi and it turned genocidal later that year, in a 100 day reign of terror in which about 800,000 Tutsi were murdered.  As the BBC reported,

“Neighbours killed neighbours and some husbands even killed their Tutsi wives, saying they would be killed if they refused. At the time, ID cards had people’s ethnic group on them, so militias set up roadblocks where Tutsis were slaughtered, often with machetes which most Rwandans kept around the house. Thousands of Tutsi women were taken away and kept as sex slaves.”

 

Even though Tutsi and Hutus had lived together in Rwanda  as neighbours for decades, the slaughter was incredibly vicious. Why was that? The  BBC tried to answer the question, ‘Why was it so vicious’? This is what they said,

“Rwanda has always been a tightly controlled society, organised like a pyramid from each district up to the top of government. The then-governing party, MRND, had a youth wing called the Interahamwe, which was turned into a militia to carry out the slaughter.

Weapons and hit-lists were handed out to local groups, who knew exactly where to find their targets.

The Hutu extremists set up a radio station, RTLM, and newspapers which circulated hate propaganda, urging people to “weed out the cockroaches” meaning kill the Tutsis. The names of prominent people to be killed were read out on radio.

Even priests and nuns have been convicted of killing people, including some who sought shelter in churches.”

 

Such language has been used by Donald Trump during the current presidential election campaign. He has referred to immigration and his political foes as “vermin.” This is the language of dehumanization. And it is incredibly dangerous, as Rwanda demonstrated. No one should assume it is not significant.

 

Hutus were convinced by their own propaganda that the Tutsi were not human. They were cockroaches! And everyone knows cockroaches can be killed at any time with absolute impunity.

The lesson here is that words are important. With language that dehumanizes people into vermin or insects, ordinary people can turn into savage murderers. Dehumanization is the key. If you think your foes are people like you, it is difficult to slaughter them, but not if they are insects or vermin.

This is precisely what Trump has been doing with his rhetoric. He has called them vermin or enemies of the people. He has said he will use the American military to do the job. Hitler did the same thing and we know the result.

This is ugly stuff, but I would submit can lead to worse—namely hate crimes or even worse. This happened in Germany, Rwanda, and other places. Such language can create a slippery slope to atrocities. No country is immune to the problems. Not even the United States.