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Pablo Muñoz Iturrieta (Argentina, 1982), Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Carleton University, is a writer and lecturer specializing in issues of gender ideology and religious freedom. His field of research is centered on the human person. He is the author of several books, including Atrapado en el cuerpo equivocado: la ideología de género frente a la ciencia y la filosofía (2019), The Meaning of Religious Freedom in the Secular Public Square (2020), Las mentiras que te cuentan, las verdades que te ocultan (2020) and soon to be published Política, Secularismo y libertad religiosa (2022).
An apparently paradoxical situation has arisen, where democracies that are considered to be exemplary (as in the case of New Zealand or Canada, which you know first-hand) have imposed some of the most severe and Draconian measures to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Ryszard Legutko, MEP in Poland, explains in The Demon in Democracy that the contemporary liberal state has an unprecedented power not even dreamed of by the authoritarianism of the 20th century. Are his theses being validated by the events of the last two years?
I certainly agree with the Polish author’s analysis of how, ultimately, contemporary liberal democracies are turning into a kind of political activism and vigilantism. Indeed, there is much talk of ‘social justice warriors.
There is a paternalism that is being manifested by characters such as Trudeau or the Prime Minister of New Zealand, who want to dictate how to think, how to speak, how to protest, how to move around. Something very similar to what Legutko says was experienced in the communist bloc. However, I also have a theory that I develop in my latest book The lies they tell you, the truths they hide from you.
One of the things I explain in that book is that the West is based on what in the Roman Empire was considered the institution of the oath. What is the institution of the oath? The fact that we live in a society that presupposes that, in order to conform as such – and this also includes families – people must be faithful to their words, they must fulfill what they promise. Without this fidelity to the word given, it is impossible to build a political society as we have known it.
The cultural change we are experiencing with progressivism leaves aside the profession of truth. A fact that is especially manifested by laws such as the gender law, which forces citizens to lie. If we leave aside this obligation to the truth – which founded our Western civilization – it means that the civilization in which we live is not only finished, but it is a pseudo-culture that will lead us to nothingness. This is why we have witnessed the transformation of Marxism itself: from a materialist dialectic on the economic matter, to what today is the deconstructivist nihilism characteristic of postmodernism.
Today’s liberal democracies have embraced this postmodernism as a founding ideology, and that is why the present cultural dictatorship is a progressivism that is heading towards nothingness itself. A true dictatorship of nothingness seeks to destroy freedom, establish uniformity of thought, impoverish the language (destroying the classics), prohibit reading, purge books… Regarding the latter, the Trudeau government recently announced that it is going to carry out a gigantic purge within the Library of Canada (which would be the equivalent of the Library of Congress in the United States) of all books that do not have an indigenous perspective. The same goes for the imposition of inclusive language. Here in Canada, there has been a very strong pronoun obsession, which has led to every fool putting a pronoun in the profile because they don’t want to be left out of thought control.
Another sign of the abolition of truth is the ideologization of education, which has made schools centers of indoctrination. I also talk in the book about suppressing history. Because once history is suppressed, it can be rewritten at will. And from there, to propose a whole political agenda based on non-existent past oppressions (which illustrates the importance of incorporating critical race theory into this whole political debate).
Then there is another element in the denial of nature, which is contrasted with culture. Biological sex versus gender identity is contrasted. In this way, hatred is propagated by what is called the ‘psychologization of critical thinking’, namely: phobias are invented to try to cancel thinking. Today we have legislation regarding homophobia, transphobia, lesbophobia, fatphobia… and whatever cover you want to invent is there. Behind all these elements, obviously, there is an underlying aspiration of elitist-globalist control. It happens in all liberal democracies, but it is clear that the Canadian model is in the vanguard.
On Liberticidal Measures
Could the Western political elites, who as we mentioned are strongly questioned for their liberticidal mechanisms applied under the guise of protecting public health, be using the war in Ukraine as a tool of distraction and social appeasement?
In January of this year – and you can verify this on my Twitter account – I announced that European governments and the Canadian government, among others, could no longer count on the fear of the pandemic to continue exercising authoritarian measures over the population. A series of very deep manifestations of discontent were taking place, undermining and shaking the political credibility of their leaders. Therefore, the plan, so to speak, of “social control” which we have witnessed in the last two years, was at risk—in a very great risk indeed. I was saying there that they needed a war and that this explained the reason for the constant provocations to Russia. They were desperate for this scenario to cover up not only their rejection, but also the great financial problem that is taking place worldwide.
A few days after I said all this, the initiative of the Ottawa truck drivers’ convoy came up. It was clearly a huge blow to the government, which almost caused the resignation of the Prime Minister, who was forced to withdraw the martial law, since if the Senate rejected it, it would mean a vote of no confidence (i.e., his removal from office).
Undoubtedly, the current governments, with all their media apparatus, are taking advantage of the war in Ukraine to impose not only a single vision of the conflict -distorted and manipulated, as always- but also to try to wash their image and cover up other serious problems that are looming. When you cover up one problem with another, sooner or later everything explodes. That is what I really fear. Both because of the energy crisis that may follow this event, and because of all the financial and economic setbacks (the collapse in the value of the currency, for example). It will be a before and after period, a transition to a new economic model and a new international political one. It will not come to nothing. Here we must be very attentive to how China will take advantage of the situation to establish itself as a major power.
On Russia’s Role
Is the “single, distorted view” of the conflict partly due to Russia’s fractious role in globalism?
We have to distinguish a double type of competing orders in this current situation. There may be more, but I would simply like to mention two fundamental orders: one is ideological and the other is a geopolitical one. On the ideological level, Russia obviously represents, in some way, a vision of the world and of reality that is totally opposed to that which the globalist elites want to impose. Perhaps that is why many people find hope in it and in Putin’s speeches.
From the ideological point of view, there is a very big contrast between Russia and its model -at least behind closed doors- and the one pursued by the UN and the different institutions of the European Union. But then, and with a much more directly point of view on this conflict, there is an underlying geopolitical issue that has to do with energy: the fact that in the south of Ukraine, in the Crimea area, gas was found around the year 2011. That is a determining factor to consider, which explains why, although Russia proposes an anti-globalist model within its own territory, it supports a lot of dictatorships in the region with a model more aligned to supranational organizations.
From the ideological point of view, Russia, as a nation, is in sharp contrast to the progressive globalism promoted by the great international financial centers; however, from the geopolitical point of view, everyone has its own interests. According to these interests, Russia even supports dictatorships such as those of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. Having a passage through the Nicaraguan canal, for example, would be of a strategic issue.
The battle for Ukraine, in my opinion, has a lot to do with Europe’s energy dependence on Russia. If gas is taken out of Ukraine, the Europeans could do without the Russians. That is what is at the heart of the matter. It should be noted that on February 20 of this year, when Kamala Harris went to Germany, she talked about bringing Ukraine into NATO. That announcement provoked the Russian to invade, which took place on February, 24. Take into account that there are four days difference (or three days if we count the days in between) that really explain why Russia was forcibly pushed into a situation that we are now in. The European Union and NATO cared absolutely nothing about any question of diplomacy to try to avoid this current outcome.
Conservatism and Foreign Policy
From a conservative and patriotic point of view, is it better to have a unipolar, bipolar or multipolar world?
I do not know if it makes sense in geopolitics and international relations to try to find a comparative answer; what is at stake are the interests of each actor. Nowadays we no longer have nation-states fighting each other, but new players have been added to the chessboard since the 20th century. I call these players, who have more power than many of the states, “political units without a territorial seat”. They have enormous financial and technological capacity. I am referring to investment funds (BlackRock, e.g.) and large technology companies (Google, Facebook, e.g.), which could perfectly well, if they wished, divert a presidential election in one direction or another. The same goes for foundations (Open Society, e.g.), which work to destabilize the social order.
In the world reality, sometimes we are only spectators, we remain expectant and try to understand what is happening. The comparison does not correspond to the simple fact that the current worldview is beyond the categories we have at our disposal
What can we do to overcome nihilism and change the prevailing order? From our ranks several alternatives are suggested: civil disobedience, a medium or long-term strategy based on metapolitics and cultural battle, or something more immediate like organizing ourselves around parties and think tanks.
In my personal opinion, and as I have already stated in The lies they tell you, the truths they hide from you, it seems to me that we cannot face this progressive onslaught alone. It is key to form communities -even if they are small-groups with which we can relate to. Whether it is an affinity-based on religion, work, where we live, ideals… Having certain objectives in common is the only way to really get ahead.
Families and different people can come together and, in this way, build a grassroots community in order to survive progressivism. We are talking about something essential, since the human being is not only a political being, but also a profoundly social being. He needs social contact in order to grow in character, in virtue, and to mature.
On the other hand, I also think it is very important to be well educated, since in the end these ideologies have an impact when a certain person is ignorant. This is now more important than ever for one simple reason: that in the past there was a whole culture based on values -especially a transcendent purpose in life- and that, in one way or another, made up for any deficiency in the person’s education; today, however, this culture does not exist anymore. If parents are not well-trained and well-prepared, they are unable to fill the void created by progressivism.
If we want to generate a countercultural revolution, we must be educated before anything else. The change that is required is eminently cultural, and neither politics nor economics will be able to bring it about. A clear example of this is Canada: a country that is not doing very well economically now, but when it has been doing very well, it still has a deep cultural problem.
I make an emphasis to what I always say: it is imperative to create institutions that are subsidiary to family work. We must work from that small base, form new schools that serve the families and enhance what the child learns in them. If we denounce that today, unfortunately, education centers are centers of indoctrination, what we have to do is to create new education centers. We have to take education away from the state, and we have to devise together a new type of primary and secondary school.
Then we have to start thinking big, having in mind a university. We have the intellectuals, what we need is to set up an education system that is at the service of the family, of the youth, of the children; to promote their ideals and all their capabilities. In short, to wage a serious cultural battle.
Finally, we have to form a political movement that will take our demands to the political and social level. Otherwise, our efforts will be in vain. We saw this with the case of the truckers and the Canadian counterrevolution, where there was no representation in Parliament and in the political arena. They appealed to civil disobedience; but even if they had succeeded in overthrowing Trudeau, they would not have had the means to replace him.
Silvio Salas, Venezuelan, is a writer and Social Communicator, with an interest in geopolitics, culture war and civil liberties // Silvio Salas, venezolano, es un comunicador social interesado en temas de geopolítica, libertades civiles y la guerra cultural.
Sigue a Silvio Salas en Twitter: @SilvioSalasR