Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 8, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 WEDNESDAY JANUARY 8, 2025 Ideas, Issues, Insights Truth takes a sadly long holiday M Y coffee tastes extra bitter this morning. Like Donald Trump’s November victory in the United States, it’s leaving a bad taste in my mouth. It’s not so much the acrid aftermath of the Dem- ocrats’ election loss I’m feeling, but a far greater bereavement — larger in scope and significance even than the results of our southern neighbours’ presidential election. This is not about vote shares or individual can- didate upsets, swing states or senate seats. It’s about the death of the truth. Of course, the truth’s value as currency has been steadily dwindling since long before Trump first took office. But he’s played a strong role in its devaluation. And nowhere has this been as spectacularly evident as during this most recent American election cycle. Trump’s failings — both moral and legal — are quite well known, so there’s no point in regurgitat- ing them here. What he’s very good at is stating lies as facts and repeating them so often that they take hold in people’s brains. He’s a baron of bombast, speaking in superla- tives that are easy to remember. He will imple- ment what he has called “the largest deportation program in American history.” He threatens to jack up tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods, saying the United States subsidizes each of these countries by billions of dollars each year. “If we’re going to subsidize them, let them become a state (of the U.S.),” Trump told NBC in a post-election interview. He has boasted that he will end the war between Russia and Ukraine in one day. These are exaggerations some of us may find easy to dismiss but which nonetheless may well find fertile ground among U.S. citizens yearning for a reassertion of their country’s dominance and might on the world stage. But as I said, the problem here is so much bigger than Trump. The problem is that veracity has lost its value. Think about the world we live in. Social media is rife with deepfaked videos, artificial intelligence-gen- erated images and photoshopped pictures, all of which freely proliferate with little or no oversight. AI is being used in applications both benign and malevolent, from fun customized emojis, to ads for ketchup and Coca-Cola, to sexualized images of prepubescent children, to persuasive political propaganda to manipulate public sentiment. In Canada, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was momentarily mocked for releasing an ide- alized “Canadian dream” video which contained stock images of what were later identified as Russian fighter jets rather than the shiny new Ca- nadian defence assets the video suggested were being used to protect our home and native land. No big deal though, right? Last month in Alberta, the police were warning consumers to stay clear of scam ads featuring AI-generated images of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and billionaire Elon Musk after Edmon- tonians were bilked out of nearly $2 million. When members of the Royal Family see fit to doctor innocuous family photos, it’s a sad fact that the truth has become devalued and we can’t al- ways trust what we’re seeing or hearing. (Which is why trusted news sources are so important.) Remember when what was true had inherent value? If a person was honest, they were as good as their word. Honesty really was once thought to be the best policy, and truth was revered in all manner of well-known aphorisms. “The truth will set you free.” “The truth will out.” It used to be that a politician or public figure- head caught in a lie faced the ruination of their career — and that still happens on occasion — but more and more, half-truths, lies and out-and-out fabrications seem to be run-of-the-mill tools in the arsenal. All’s fair in politics and war. Of course I realize that propaganda has been around since ancient times, used to manipulate the enemy to gain an edge in battle. But in our current times, fakery and lies have sadly become all-too-common currency. No longer just used as means to an end in war, they are now routinely employed to sabotage and swindle one’s fellow citizens as well as political enemies. The author Aldous Huxley once observed that “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,” and that’s true. But in our increasingly inauthentic world, where images are cunningly curated and engineered to provoke complacency, fear, shock or rage, it’s getting harder and harder to ferret out the facts from beneath all the lies. Truth, like the Canadian dollar, has become weaker in value, and integrity is trading for pennies. Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s. Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com X: pam_frampton | Bluesky: @pamframpton.bsky.social Building on altruism, not aggression IF there were a subcategory of political economy in the National Book Awards, my vote for the 2024 Book of the Year would go to George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison’s Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. By “invisible” and “secret,” some might suspect another conspiracy theory, before being con- fronted by the extensive, detailed, documented evidence provided throughout. It certainly fits the category of nonfiction. Like its unmentioned precursor The Corpora- tion: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power published in 2003 by American-Canadian law professor Joel Bakan, Invisible Doctrine has also been converted into a documentary film by the same name. And just as The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel was re- leased in 2020, so too Monbiot and Hutchison may need to release an unfortunately necessary sequel of Invisible Doctrine sooner rather than later. The re-election of Donald Trump and his cadre of billionaires has made the creed now blatantly obvious. Neoliberalism is “an ideology whose central be- lief is that competition is the defining feature of humankind, and that greed and selfishness light the path to social improvement.” As 18th-century Scottish philosopher and founder of capitalism Adam Smith sermonized, any political state which handcuffs the “invisible hand” of the free market — self-interest engaged in competition — inter- feres with the “natural order.” As such, humans are primarily consumers, not citizens. The term neoliberalism — capitalism on ste- roids — was coined in 1938 and first championed by Austrian-British philosopher Friedrich Hayek in reaction to the welfare state policies of econ- omist John Maynard Keynes in Britain and the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt in America, both designed to survive the Great Depression of the 1930s. It later became the 1980s mantra of Thatcher- ism in Britain and Reaganism in America. Econ- omist Milton Friedman, Hayek’s most famous disciple, served as Reagan’s close adviser while the ultra-rich used their dark money to establish an entire network of “think tanks” to preach neoliberalism, duping average citizens into voting against their own interests. The essence of neoliberalism is more than the classic liberal removal of restrictions on the production and distribution of goods and services. It is the commodification and privatization of as much of life as possible, deeming all goods and services to be best delivered by for-profit eco- nomics, not by public property or responsibility. Neoliberalism also demands wealth tax cuts, if not exemptions, along with deregulation of labour practices, environmental controls, and trade barriers. As Monbiot and Hutchison explain, contrary to its reputed socially beneficial trickle-down effect, “capitalism is not, as its defenders insist, a system designed to distribute wealth, but one designed to capture and concentrate it.” Indeed, unlimited freedom is always to the advantage of the self-in- terested, empathy-lacking bully. The authors devote separate chapters to de- tailing selected effects of neoliberalism, from personal loneliness to environmental degradation (“let them eat carbon”) to the crisis of democracy. By reducing and restructuring public services to ensure they fail, neoliberalism is the disenchant- ment and scapegoating of politics by economics, thus necessitating authoritarian neofascism — Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” (TINA). Yet in a brilliant public relations coup, neoliber- alism has shifted responsibility for our multiple social crises onto individuals, “blaming ordinary people for the very crises that have been imposed on them.” For example, the micro-solution of avoiding single-use plastics is helpful, but ulti- mately insufficient. Nevertheless, Monbiot and Hutchison provide an inspiring macro case study of how America immediately and completely rebuilt its economy during the Second World War when confronted by a military threat. That was still less than the existential threat humanity faces today, but clearly, provided collective political will, systemic transformation is possible. We need to rebuild society on empathic altru- ism, not greedy aggression. We need the bridging of communitarianism, not the bonding of neofas- cism. We need long-term, co-operative collective interest, not short-term, competitive self-interest. We need to activate Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature.” In response to Canadian-American economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s lament in The Affluent Society of the “private opulence and public squa- lor” of neoliberalism, Monbiot and Hutchison en- vision the “private sufficiency and public luxury” of deliberative, participatory, social democracy. But disastrously, according to British political economist Susan Strange, author of Mad Mon- ey, “neoliberalism has become the major world religion, with its dogmatic doctrine, its priest- hood, its law-giving institutions, and perhaps most important of all, its hell for heathen and sinners who dare to contest the revealed truth.” Dennis Hiebert teaches in the department of sociology and criminol- ogy at the University of Manitoba. Trudeau bites the dust DONALD Trump excels in every field, includ- ing surrealism. Leonard Cohen sang “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin!” but it’s completely outclassed by Trump’s “First we take Greenland, then we take Canada!” And he’s going to take the Panama Canal, too! It’s probably just bluster and nonsense, but it has already taken down Justin Trudeau, Can- ada’s prime minister for the past nine years. His resignation on Monday was the delayed consequence of a row with his deputy Chrystia Freeland last month over his ‘weak’ response to Trump’s threat to slap a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian exports to the U.S. The actual annexation threats came a bit later, and most Canadian journalists assumed that they were just a way of scaring Canadi- ans into accepting the new tariffs or making other concessions. They’re probably right, too – but what if they are wrong? This is Donald Trump we’re talking about here. The Panamanians, by contrast, just shrugged. They have been invaded by the United States before, most recently in 1989, but only around 500 Panamanians were killed that time and after a while the Americans went home again, as they usually do in the Caribbean (Grenada, Haiti, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua). And the Greenlanders were simply bemused by Trump’s offer to buy their country, as was the Danish government, which looks after the island’s defence and foreign affairs. It has been a long time since countries bought territory from other countries, and seizing it by force is illegal. Nevertheless, Copenhagen increased its defence spending on Greenland by US$1.5 billion. The threats may all be empty, and they certainly reveal an ignorance so profound that it may qualify for “protected cultural status” with UNESCO. However, what seems faintly comical viewed from abroad is taken seriously by some people in the United States, and they are thicker on the ground in the circles around Trump than anywhere else. For example, official presidential sidekick Elon Musk has just tweeted that “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” He posted it as a yes/ no poll, and so far 73 per cent of his fans back his idea of invading the United Kingdom to free the British from the tyrant Keir Starmer. It’s not enough to say that they’re just yanking our chain. That’s probably the right answer, but you’d feel really stupid if they really did mean some of it and you woke up one morning to find American troops in your street. On the other hand, what could you do to lessen that possibility that wouldn’t look equally stupid? It’s the same dilemma you always have when dealing with the threats of madmen, real or fake. Let’s just look at the bright side, which is that Trump’s threats have finally forced Trudeau to resign. That is good news because it opens up a faint possibility that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre will not be the next prime minister of Canada. An election is due no later than October 20, and so long as Trudeau was in the race Poilievre was the sure winner. Poilievre (not a francophone despite the name) is not really a Canadian Trump, though he shares most of the same ideas. He’s smarter and more presentable, more like U.S. vice-president-elect JD Vance but just as much a part of the extreme right. Here’s his take on Canada’s governing Liberal Party, as middle-of-the-road as it could be. “First they were communists, and then they became socialist, and then they became social democrats, and then they stole the word liberal, and then they ruined that word. They changed their name to progressives, and then they changed their name to woke.” As long as “crypto-communist” Justin Trudeau was in office, Poilievre seemed bound to win, not so much because ideological rants are the Canadian style but because Canadians had really come to loathe Trudeau. The inten - sity of the hostility to him in otherwise calm and reasonable people was astonishing. People found other, more sensible-sounding reasons to dislike Trudeau, whose government did as poorly as most other elected Western governments in coping with COVID-19 and the subsequent runaway inflation. However, I have long been convinced that they really hated Trudeau because he was irredeemably smarmy. Now that he’s gone and the Liberals will have a new leader, there’s at least a small chance that Poilievre will not be the next prime minister of Canada. Otherwise, by the end of this year all of mainland North Amer- ica will be ruled by the hard right — except Mexico, of course. Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. DENNIS HIEBERT UNSPLASH PHOTO Too often the truth is obscured by webs of deceit. GWYNNE DYER PAM FRAMPTON ;