Review of: Conspirituality by Julian Walker, Matthew Remski, and Derek Beres. Penguin Random House. June 2023.  

“Conspirituality” refers to a mix of spirituality, New Age thinking, yoga and wellness (I would add martial arts), and political conspiracy theorizing. The book has a focus on anti-vaccination campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it goes beyond health and explains something important about how politics have evolved in both Canada and the US in recent years. 

The book is a valuable resource to explain to people how their families and social groups have divided during COVID-19. Despite politics being a generally taboo topic in mainstream North American society, during long crises, like wars, big political changes, or the pandemic, political conversations are inevitable. People discover the politics of their friends and loved ones. Friendships break up, family ties are strained, and you begin a search for answers about how your friends went down these rabbit holes.  

As you try forensically to find out what happened, know that your friend’s rants are not really about them believing ever more esoteric beliefs. Other people’s beliefs always appear exotic, after all, especially when they’re unverified or unverifiable, as spiritual and religious beliefs are. Your friend’s rants are the rhetorical gestures of someone who is leaving one group, one social ecosystem (yours), for another. Conspirituality beliefs, like Kevin Simler wrote about advertising, are about social signaling more than they are about brainwashing. 

The politics of conspirituality run deep

I mentioned that in North America, political conversations are mostly taboo and that could be because people figure it’s better not to know, the better to get along. Avoidance usually is politely accomplished by saying something like, “I’m not really a political person.”  But conspiritualists are not merely beyond politics: they claim to be beyond earthly concerns altogether. 

Don’t believe it. Conspirituality is hyper-political and the politics of conspirituality, as the authors use the term, run far deeper than they appear. The movement against vaccine mandates didn’t stand down after the mandates were repealed – that movement is bigger now than it was when there were vaccine mandates. It is a movement that has a special hatred for public health measures, yes, but it also has: 

• its own philosophy of knowledge

• Its own media network

• A political economy including a durable source of revenue and livelihood for its leaders 

• Politicians and business leaders in high places

• Social groups and organizations meeting in person and on the web day in, day out, 365 days a year. 

It is a major social and political phenomenon, with deep roots: at least a movement, it is perhaps better understood as a religion whose many adherents are willing to make major sacrifices – to their social, financial, and health lives – in the name of what they believe. In the name of their own freedom, they are also willing to impose the consequences of their beliefs on others. 

It’s necessary to understand these core beliefs, beyond the wide array of details. Its leaders use a well-established right-wing trick of using language co-opted from the left, emptied of its original content, then redeployed. From the women’s movement for abortion rights, they call for “bodily autonomy” and “the right to choose”. But though they claim to despise liberals, they assert above all the liberal politics of individual property asserted against state control and of individual rights asserted against the collective. 

What makes their movement distinctive and gives it a religious character is that it goes beyond individual rights and assigns non-materialist, super-powers to the individual will – to heal, to acquire wealth, to change the course of history. In the same breath, the movement assigns non-materialist blame to the individual – for being poor, sick, or powerless. In their world, everybody gets what they deserve. It’s allocated by the universe. All that states, collectives, or public action can do is engage in immoral redistribution – from the undeserving to the deserving. 

Reading the description above, listeners of the Civilizations Series (e.g. our episode about Nietzsche) will start to discern patterns in today’s conspirituality movement that look a lot like the belief systems circulating in England, its colony, India, its former colony, the US, and its greatest admirer, Germany, at the end of the 19th century. The triumph of the will. Contempt for the collective. Fear and loathing of state action. The belief that the majority are sheep, natural slaves. The belief that there is a non-material power to the individual will. That the unfairness we see around us is actually fair, indeed optimal. You can call it many things. A hundred years ago it would have been Nietzschean or Theosophical. Today, as the book documents, it’s conspirituality and QAnon. Another word that sums it up? Anticommunist. 

Because what is communism? A system that values not individual will and intention for individual reward, but collective work for social benefit. A system that is willing to seize private wealth to allocate resources to public goods (yes, including health care and education). A system where there are no masters and slaves, natural or otherwise. A belief system that is materialist and scientific, that seeks to understand the relationship between human volition and the historical and physical realities in which we make our choices. 

After WWII, the US violently took up the leadership of the struggle against communism in all its forms (even modest social democratic reforms in remote parts of the world and pre-1917 forms of Indigenous, “primitive communism”). But before WWII, the great anticommunists were Nazis and Fascists, and before them, the great anticommunists were various kinds of Nietzscheans. 

Understanding conspirituality as a flavor of anticommunism makes possible some quick sorting. Suddenly the dense jumble of talking points changes from an incomprehensible muddle to simply one of a few possible variations on a few key themes. 

The actual book

The authors of Conspirituality, Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker, were  members (victims? survivors?) participants in yoga-based or other similar cult-like conspirituality organizations, have researched cults, and currently run a podcast talking to people who have been in and out of these kinds of organizations. The book includes both journalistic and historical investigation, and skillfully weaves the experiences of the authors and their guests through the narrative. Through their critique of the right-wing and their defense of science and of public health care specifically, the authors identify themselves as being on the left: to me they read like social democrats with interests in both electoral work and grassroots activism. 

I worried as I read the beginning of the book: when liberals write about conspirituality and related movements, they often end up defending the indefensible. In the liberal world view, deportations, assassinations, police worship and corporate giveaways are bad when Trump does them but fine when Obama/Biden does; liberals have an imperialist focus on the crimes of official enemies, etc. But there was very little of that in this book. 

There are real conspiracies

I was perhaps even a bit defensive in Chapter 2 when the authors outlined “three pillars of conspiratorial thinking, as laid out by the political scientist Michael Barkun.” These pillars are: “Nothing happens by accident. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is connected.” 

Reading this critique of conspiracism I remembered Michael Parenti’s lecture on “Conspiracy and Class Power”, Lance deHaven Smith’s book, Conspiracy Theory in America, or comedian Ron Funches, who asks: “You don’t believe in any conspiracy theories? I understand not all of them, not most of them, but you don’t believe in any conspiracy theories? You think the government’s just batting a thousand and telling us the whole truth? That’s a strong stance to take.” 

Because there are conspiracies, and dismissing all conspiracy theorizing is a gift to imperialists, who, after all, spend enormous amounts of money and resources on covert operations. But the authors of Conspirituality acknowledge that there are real conspiracies: “real conspiracies”, they write, “are discovered through evidence”. From Chapter 1 they note that there are real-world conspiracies – and that conspiritualists actually blur the lines between real conspiracies (like Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring) and spurious ones (which they discuss and refute in their book). 

Their analysis is brutally honest, going well beyond a simplistic defense of the liberal establishment. In Chapter 6, “Conspiritualists Are Not Wrong”, they discuss the vacuum created by privatized health care, into which the alternative health & wellness community seeps in. Conspiritualists, they write, “are attuned to systemic problems. They have felt their existential angst insulted by lifestyle marketing, and their humanity reduced to consumer data. They have felt the cold neglect of the state, the vacant stare of the medical gaze, and the brutal rise of rents…”

They continue: “Conspirituality does not create its followers’ nausea at the state, modernity, or the poisoned chalice of techno-capitalism. It does not create real-world disasters such as the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking network (a reality that makes QAnon reasonable on a symbolic, if not factual, level). It does not create histories of genocide, nor does it create histories of governmental cover-up.” 

No indeed, these are all real things that the conspiritualists take political advantage of. 

The political economy of wellness and conspiracy

In Canada, the public system is under attack and has been brought to the point of collapse, with privatization being incrementally brought in as a “solution” to the engineered crisis. In the US, which has no public system, getting sick means facing bankruptcy. Even Americans who thought they had good private insurance find themselves with surprise, ruinous bills after routine procedures or emergencies. At every stage people who need care are faced with actors who have incentives to stop them from getting that care. What is available through the privatized (or semi-privatized) health system is expensive, bureaucratized, frightening, and humiliating. For anyone who can promise an alternative path to good health that does not lead through this system, there are opportunities. 

Because scientific and evidence-based medicine is only accessible through financialized insurers and plans, the alternative paths work on everything else. Many of these are good practices: exercise, breathing, going outside, eating healthy, and of course, nutritional supplements. Some, like yoga, include exercise and breathing but also get people together for social activity, another healthful practice in itself. Some are big business, multi-level-marketing schemes and corporate behemoths in their own right. 

The capture of US health care by private insurers is one side of the political economy of conspirituality; the business of selling online and in-person yoga, lifestyle, spirituality and train-the-trainer courses and nutritional supplements is the other side. 

The number of actors in the conspirituality space that sell supplements came as a shock to me. Alex Jones sells supplements. Jordan Peterson’s daughter sells supplements. The book exposes many other figures – people who have sexually abused their yoga students, ran cults, defrauded clients, and enriched themselves while making unscientific claims. And all of them sell supplements! I remember reading some Big Tech executive lamenting that “we’ve made the world a dystopia so that we could get people to click ads.” If you read Conspirituality, you’ll be horrified at what’s been done to sell nutritional supplements. 

Combine the drive to sell supplements and online courses with the marketing of these products in an attention economy where more extreme claims outcompete less extreme ones and you get an incentive structure for ever-more outrageous theories. These are outlined in gory detail in the book.

By diving into the history of yoga, the authors also pull out links to eugenics. Yoga is less an ancient practice of wisdom and more an amalgam of 19th-century physical culture. Europeans certainly got much of their culture, including physical culture, from Asia (I am convinced that catch wrestling, for example, developed in Lancashire around the same time as British colonialism in India’s most rapid advance, and from which other wrestling traditions followed, was a cross-pollination of local wrestling tradition with Indo-Persian pehlwani / kusti) but the borrowing went the other way too. Yoga was an outgrowth of a Swedish gymnastics movement and heavily influenced by a genocidal German eugenicist bodybuilder who changed his first name to Eugen to reflect his interest in human perfection.

Purity of breath, purity of movement, purity of exercise, and purity of diet: these were all eugenicist beliefs that are also woven inevitably into the fabric of today’s multi-billion dollar wellness industry / movement. In the gospel of prosperity, in the law of attraction, everyone gets what they deserve. In the eugenics movement, that includes genocide for the racially inferior or impure. As India goes fascist, yoga is its standard bearer in North America. 

The authors map every major star in the conspiritual constellation: Joe Rogan, while he doesn’t get his own chapter, is described as

“the Walmart Supercenter that opens up on the access road to a midsized town. It’s enormous. It’s open late. It dries up the mom-and-pop shops in town. Parking is easy. You can buy anything there in a low-cost, frictionless consumer experience. But usually, you can’t tell where the product comes from, and you won’t know its quality until you get it home and use it.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s anti-vax campaigns get their own chapter, as they describe how RFK pivoted from a “big-picture environmentalist fluent in geopolitical intrigue and corporate malfeasance” whose anti-vax moves collapse the big picture into

“a single medical-sized issue. His expertise on the imperiled global environment shoehorns down to an obsession with the individual body—especially the child’s body—as its symbolic victim.” 

For a leftist, such figures really are always the same. They are pushed onto our screens by the algorithm with some kind of reputation for speaking hard truths and being uncontrollable mavericks. We investigate. Before long, every single one of these mavericks kiss the ring of the pro-Israel lobby and reveal that their loyalty is first to colonialism and only secondarily to any other maverick cause they might have or hard truth they might want to speak. 

[And before you tell me, yes I know that Rogan’s had Abby Martin on to talk Palestine. I also find him likeable, ok? As the authors write, Rogan’s “sheer volume of content resists any final word on Rogan’s personal political values or worldview on reality”. But over time, the authors continue, “his guest list has trended… into parroting right-wing talking points about quarantine, Biden, guns, and culture war moral panics. He emphasized his values shift in an interview about moving his business from California to Austin. “I moved to Texas because I want fucking freedom.”]

The simple “triumph of the will” pattern beneath the bewildering details

The authors lampoon conspiracy theorists for believing everything is connected. But their very book provides a framework for simplifying the bewildering details that present as an incredible diversity of beliefs and systems: life coaching, yoga, the law of attraction, aliens, lizards, crystals, vegan diets, buddhism, theosophy, QAnon, antivax. The authors very effectively point out the connections between these. 

And I can add that these are all just different flavors of Nietzscheanism, of anticommunism. They are belief systems that can find ample financial and political support on a continent where health care and science have been almost fully subordinated to profit and corporate power. They are ideologies and organizations appropriate to struggle against the main demands of socialists: health and education for all. Didn’t the Nazis, the most extreme anti-communists, build out a science of racial hygeine to “cleanse” science of socialist baggage? Didn’t they build out their own Nazi version of environmentalism, to keep the earth unpolluted of inferior chemicals and inferior races, even as they poisoned and destroyed everything in their path?

Liberal and right-wing politics are complementary anti-socialist strategies. Liberal anti-socialists show up with professional charts and hyper-educated agents of austerity to explain why such demands are infeasible. When socialism is shown to be feasible, there are movements of the right who are willing to fight, kill and even die, out of the belief that science-based measures are the real killers. 

As I mentioned in my last post, before I learned (from Losurdo, Horne, and some others) what liberalism really was, I used to believe that there was some kind of possibility of reconciliation between liberalism and leftism. I’ve come to the conclusion that the core beliefs of liberalism in private property, constraints on state powers of redistribution and public action, and in-group democracy were designed as ideologies of colonialism and imperialism. They’re not compatible with anti-imperialism. 

Conspirituality and me

What about spiritual beliefs? Can they be reconciled with leftist aspirations? As a teenager, I actually had my own fascination with spirituality. On a page of Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do, I found the name “J Krishnamurti” on a list under the heading “Mental Training”. I became an avid reader of Krishnamurti’s books, dialogues, and lectures. His dialogues with (rogue) physicist David Bohm influenced my decision to make one of my majors physics (the other was history, as listeners know). 

Krishnamurti counsels detachment of the ego, of not projecting one’s own ideas on to other people or situations, of experiencing the moment fully, of not carrying baggage from the past or expectations for the future into the moment. As I started to read more political writing (starting with Gandhi, who met Krishnamurti and they didn’t get along), I wondered if this kind of “mental training” could help in political work. I don’t think it can. Indeed, Krishnamurti’s notebook of dialogues with visitors to one of his retreats contains a dialogue with a communist that goes nowhere – there is an unbridgeable gulf between them as they talk past one another. 

Many years later, I read a book about Krishnamurti by the daughter of his business partner (also the daughter of the woman with whom Krishnamurti had a lifelong affair, known to her husband the business partner – and yes I read the Krishnamurti foundation’s reply to the book too). Learning a bit about how Krishnamurti actually lived, I realized how poorly these lessons translate for anyone who has to actually live in the world, even someone who’s life was deliberately sheltered the way Krishnamurti’s was. Krishnamurti, who was waited on by people who believed in his saintly status, could not live the life he preached. How could his preaching help someone who has to figure out a livelihood, relationships, how to work ethically and try to contribute to making the world a better place? 

As tools for specific situations, focusing on the present and letting go of the ego are useful. As an approach to living? Much less so. Detachment from daily life and from the material world isn’t desirable or possible. Disconnection from the future and past ends up meaning you can’t understand what happened or plan what to do next. With apologies to Bruce Lee, this is the opposite of “mental training”.  

And this is true when you look at the sayings of Krishnamurti, who is among the most benign of these figures. As with liberalism, so with conspirituality: there’s no reconciling it with a leftist world view. 

Indeed, while I think I understand North America a bit better after reading it, the book has given me new worries. It seems there is a grassroots insurgent movement with deep roots, plenty of resources, friends in high places and in the police, that is opposed to public health and to science. In the unlikely scenario that a government comes to power in North America that wants to improve those things, it will have to contend with that movement. 

I’m still going to exercise, pay attention to nutrition, go outside, breathe, and be an environmentalist, and so should you. If Lenin could learn weightlifting, so can I, dammit.

Leftists can’t afford to concede wellness to the right. We can’t concede conspiracy theorizing to the right either. 

We need our own versions of both!  

I know not all of you who read the newsletter listen to the podcast, but we just did a 3-hour epic on the Balkan Wars 1912-1913 that led directly to WWI. Researching it, I came across the dispatches of a war correspondent named Leon Trotsky, who wrote long profiles of all the players, talked to wounded soldiers, traveled all over the region while the wars raged and in their aftermath. Trotsky was no impassive observer, but an advocate for a specific solution to the raging Balkan conflicts of the time: a socialist Balkan Federation dedicated to the economic development of the whole region for the benefit of all its peoples, free from imperial intervention. Trotsky would live to see something like this implemented in the form of Yugoslavia, but Yugoslavia was dismembered decades later by nationalist wars and imperial intervention.

In the podcast I also quoted from Richard C. Hall, an academic who wrote about the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars and came to a similar conclusion as Trotsky:

“The large nationalist state as exemplified by Italy and Germany proved a poor model for the Balkan peoples. No such states were possible, because the nationalist claims of each Balkan state overlapped with those of its neighbors. Every attempt in the twentieth century to realize this goal has led to war and foreign intervention. Only the adoption of a post-nationalist perspective by the Balkan peoples can break the pattern of war and intervention.”

Writing just after the breakup of Yugoslavia, Hall found himself arguing for the necessity of something like it!

I was a teenager during Iraq War 1990/1. I was critical but not in any position to be aware of any anti-war sentiment in my city much less to, e.g., go to an antiwar protest. The first such protests I did attend were during the NATO war for the final dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1999. A lot of people I knew, including fellow students from the Croatian diaspora in Toronto, actually celebrated when the NATO bombing began. Eastern Europe is not a context where I have a lot of background references in long-term memory and everything I have come to understand about it has been done analytically. Unlike some other parts of the world where I find I have some intuition that I can work from, in this context all I have is reading. As far as my feelings went, I simply felt a lot of horror and tragedy, and could not believe any of the arguments coming from NATO about the necessity of bombing.

I wrote one of my first letters to the editor when a Globe and Mail columnist took the occasion of the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade to talk about Chinese xenophobia.

I would have written it a bit differently today but you probably recognize the tone.

At the time I thought of the destruction of Yugoslavia as a tragedy of self-destruction. The narrative structure, which I was reading in liberal authors like Michael Ignatieff (who wrote a travelogue of the Balkans as a theory of nationalism in his pre-Empire-Lite and pre-Canadian prime ministerial candidate years), was that these communist states suppressed nationalism which exploded all the worse for having been suppressed, and as the biggest nation in Yugoslavia, Serbia (or, the preferred term, “the Serbs”), had entrapped the others who naturally wanted to break away at the first opportunity. They broke away, “the Serbs” fought back to keep them in, committing so much war and genocide that NATO was forced to bomb them.

It was a compelling enough framework, since it’s impossible to understand any of the belligerents without an analysis of nationalism. What the framework could never explain was what the US was doing in there. The idea that Balkan nationalisms had become so disruptive to the world order that the US was forced to intervene – that was the best available explanation and it was simply preposterous. But it was not until much later that I got a sense of the full role of the US in the breakup of Yugoslavia, and why the US wanted Yugoslavia broken up. To understand all that, I had to go beyond the liberal analysis of rival nationalisms and get into economic analysis.

In search of an alternate, anti-war view of the Yugoslavia wars, I read Diana Johnstone’s Fool’s Crusade and Michael Parenti’s To Kill a Nation. But I found the economic arguments put together most effectively (including by these two authors) in a 2010 documentary by Boris Malagurski called The Weight of Chains.

Malagurski grew up in Yugoslavia and links his economic analysis with the experiences his father had working in an industry that was ultimately dismantled along with Yugoslavia – which gives a clue to what was going on.

While it existed, Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country (indeed a founding member of the movement), with an economic model characterized as “market socialist”, trying to combine various elements of economic planning and welfare state protections with market competition. In various ways, it was very successful! Malagurski’s parents, like all Yugoslavs well into the 1980s, had free medical care and education, one month paid vacation, and the country had a 91% literacy rate. With state support and investment, Yugoslavia developed a considerable industrial base, including heavy industries (Malagurski’s film includes considerable detail about a motor plant – which I’ll return to below).

Because Yugoslavia was part of the nonaligned bloc, its leaders sought to maintain good relations with both the Soviet bloc and the West. For the West’s part, the idea of collapsing a socialist state and carving it up never lost its appeal. The collapse of the USSR (which will occupy future newsletters) made it possible. Yugoslavia, like the USSR, tried to reform to taking Western finance. Once indebted to Western banks, Yugoslavia was ready to be carved up.

Malagurski cites a National Security Council memorandum (#133, if you want to look it up), which, under president Reagan, stated a US policy of supporting a “market-oriented” Yugoslavia. In 1988, the National Endowment for Democracy sent advisors to the country, funding another group called the Center for Private Enterprise, which in turn funded the G17 – a group of 17 Yugoslavian free market economists including IMF and World Bank staffers. This Group of 17 ran the government bankruptcy program of 1989-90, forcing cuts to the social sector and forcing public and private enterprises into bankruptcy. About 1,100 enterprises were wiped out between January 1989 and September 1990; the standard of living declined by 18% and unemployment went up to 20% by the end of the decade.

Yugoslavia’s financial crisis was America’s opportunity. When Yugoslavia went to president Bush I in 1989, the US response was to declare that any republic in Yugoslavia could get aid — only if they broke away from the federal republic. Elections would be held only in the constituent republics and aid would only go through them. The US, in other words, used financial aid to begin the breakup of Yugoslavia already in 1990.

The aid worked as intended, and made the financial crisis worse: with inflation at 200%, Yugoslavia couldn’t pay interest on the debt or pay for the raw materials to run its heavy industries. Economic cooperation between republics failed, the communist parties lost elections to the nationalists, and unilateral declarations of independence followed – all of which were quickly recognized by the US. So quickly it was as if the US was waiting for them. The Balkan Wars of the 1990s followed, and the US sanctioned the federal state.

I’ll leave the military questions, which Malagurski covers from his point of view, for another time. Let’s keep following the economic story and US policy.

By 1993, 90% of domestic pharmaceutical production had stopped. Average caloric income was down 28% from 1990 levels, with 1.5 million considered undernourished. Unemployment was up to 60%. Monthly income dropped from $500 to $15. The inflation rate went to its highest in history.

The international financial institutions collected the external debts for each of the constituent republics – they were each saddled with debts, carefully partitioned from the central debt held by the federal republic of Yugoslavia. In 1995, Bosnia unveiled that it would be occupied by NATO and administered directly by the West (which was also Kosovo’s fate). Before the 1999 NATO campaign, the World Bank analyzed the likely effects of a Kosovo war, including plans for occupation.

NATO’s bombing campaign targeted Yugoslavia’s industrial base. A cigarette factory was bombed, later acquired by Philip Morris. The Yugo car factory was bombed, getting rid of competition for Western auto firms. Cement, oil industry, telecom facilities were all bombed.

There is, perhaps, one military note from this period worth making. That is, that while the US successfully bombed various industrial, civilian, and diplomatic targets (including the Chinese Embassy, as mentioned above), militarily the campaign was stalemated in 1999. NATO’s ultimate victory came from the imposition of a diplomatic settlement on Yugoslavia’s president Milosevic, who they later arrested and who conveniently died in in a NATO prison. The settlement was imposed not through victory on the battlefield, but through the threat of a genocidal bombing of civilians. The most detailed account of this is quoted by author Gregory Elich, who cites another source about a meeting between Finnish diplomat and Nobel Prize Winner Martti Ahtisaari and Milosevic:

Milošević took the papers and asked, “What will happen if I do not sign?” In answer, “Ahtisaari made a gesture on the table,” and then moved aside the flower centerpiece. Ahtisaari said, “Belgrade will be like this table. We will immediately begin carpet-bombing Belgrade.” Repeating the gesture of sweeping the table, Ahtisaari threatened, “This is what we will do to Belgrade.” A moment of silence passed, and then he added, “There will be half a million dead within a week.” Chernomyrdin’s silence confirmed that the Russian government would do nothing to discourage carpet-bombing. [6] – June 7, 1999, Il Giornale Milan, Ristic interviewed by Renato Farina. 

The meaning was clear. To refuse the ultimatum would lead to the widespread death and destruction. President Milošević summoned the leaders of the parties in the governing coalition and explained the situation to them. “A few things are not logical, but the main thing is, we have no choice. I personally think we should accept… To reject the document means the destruction of our state and nation.” [7]

Once Milosevic signed, Kosovo was put under direct “internationalized” control and the next round of dismemberment of Yugoslavia followed. A German bank took over the banking sector the province. Telecom was sold to German Telecom. A Western consortium took control of the immense Trepca Mining Complex. A local company made butter for 200; Germany subsidized its 300 butter to sell at 150, making Serbia an importer of goods. A steel factory set up with a $600M loan was sold to a US company for $23M. In Croatia, the hotels are owned by German and Austrian companies, the fishing zone was given to the EU/Italy, and the entire island of Brijuni was sold. Bosnia’s new constitution included the Governing Board of the Central Bank being an IMF appointee, and stipulated not to be a citizen of of Bosnia or any neighbouring country. Central Bank independence taken to the extreme: these central banks are so independent that they are totally dependent – on the West.

As for the debt that got Yugoslavia into trouble in the first place: when united Yugoslavia went with its hat in hand to the West in 1988, the country was in serious trouble with $13.5B in debt. By 2010, the West had completely destroyed the country and split it into many republics, whose total debt was… $184B.

Health insurance was privatized, the education system was crashed, health insurance lost, pensions were cut. By the 2010s, close to 40% couldn’t pay their bills and 56% were hungry.

So, returning to the question in the title: before Yugoslavia was dismembered, it had: an industrial base, health care, education (including some of the highest standards in the world), subsidized transportation, and vacations.

Plagiarism is when you take credit for someone else’s work. Powerful individuals do it all the time. The powerless, when caught, are usually punished for it. Like bullying, there is a social norm against it and a stigma attached. But also like bullying, it is hard to teach that it is bad when it is one of the structures that underlie the international order. Around here, imperialism is fundamentally about the drain of wealth from poor countries to rich countries and from Indigenous peoples to colonizers. But imperialism is about more than just wealth: knowledge is stolen too. When imperialists steal knowledge without attribution, it’s not just plagiarism: it’s imperialist plagiarism.

And like I said, it is so pervasive as to be almost invisible. So much so that it appears in books about completely unrelated topics. Imagine my surprise when I was just trying to relax and read a nice book about how to survive the apocalypse, namely Lewis Dartnell’s 2014 book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm, when I came across this passage (on pg. 11 if you’re looking):

“One of the major catalysts for the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries was the trickle of ancient learning back into Western Europe. Much of this knowledge, lost with the fall of the Roman Empire, was preserved and propagated by Arab scholars carefully translating and copying texts; other manuscripts were rediscovered by European scholars.”

What’s wrong with this, you ask?

There seems to be a model of global knowledge distribution that looks something like this:

A few questions arise.

1. Did the West’s ancient learning come from Greece & Rome?

2. Was the role of Islamic civilizations to copy & translate texts?

3. Did Asia have any learning worth talking about?

4. Did Indigenous civilizations?

Let’s take each one in turn.

1. When it comes to Ancient Greece and Rome and where they got their knowledge, there are a number of readings that are of interest, and some striking points that are made by, for example, George G.M. James in his 1954 book Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy was the Offspring of the Egyptian Mystery System.

When it comes to Ancient Greece, the fount of knowledge is Aristotle, who wrote 400-1000 books on every topic from physics to medicine to poetics and biology. These books were written in a remarkable period of productivity that Aristotle experienced very shortly after Alexander the Great conquered and looted the great library at the city he then named Alexandria. Did Aristotle really write FOUR HUNDRED books on EVERY TOPIC then known to humanity? George James: “Throughout the intellectual advancement of man, the world has witnessed many a genius; but those have always been specialists in particular fields, not specialists in every branch of science.”

Maybe Aristotle just copied the Egyptian library? In which case Ancient Greek knowledge, which was the fountain of Ancient Roman knowledge, came from Africa (and we haven’t even talked about all the knowledge Greece acquired from its long interactions with Persia and points east of there…). Others who have made this case include Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization, Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, and of course Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.

2. Next, we have the idea that the Islamic scholars’ role was to copy and translate texts! Is that what they did?

In his 2015 book, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane, Frederick Starr talks about the original and extraordinary contributions to knowledge from medieval Islamic scholars like Al Biruni (973-1050) who separated astronomy from astrology; discovered elliptical orbits and earth’s rotation; calculated the radius of the earth and hypothesized that the American continent existed. Al Khwarazmi (780-850) solved the quadratic equation, treated algebra as an independent discipline, added sine and cosine tables and the first table of tangents. It goes a little bit beyond the copying and translating of texts!

3. Let’s go a bit farther east, shall we? Because luckily for the advancement of science, these Muslim scientists were not merely reading Greek and Roman texts. They were reading Hindu mathematicians like Aryabhata (476-550) from Nalanda University, who got us the zero, approximated pi, solved the summation of series of squares and cubes, and Varahamihira (505-587) whose astronomical work was used by al-Biruni. Among other discoveries, Varahamihira found that reflection is caused by the back-scattering of particles.

I haven’t even mentioned China, which would require, rather than a newsletter, an immense multivolume over years — how do I know it would require this? Because that is what Joseph Needham produced…

Some of the advancements made in China that are now adopted everywhere are outlined in John M. Hobson’s 2004 book, the Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Here’s a partial list.

Education – exams – economic analysis – paper money – markets – urbanization – publishing industry – block printing

Manufacturing of: metals, tea, paper, silk, porcelain, dyes, glass, steel (cast iron, coke, steam power), petrol and natural gas for fuel

Agriculture: mouldboard plough, rotary winnowing machine, seed drill, crop rotation

Sailing: compass, square hull, sternpost rudder, fore and aft sails, watertight compartments, gunpowder, cannons, muskets

4. Our survey is now nearly complete, in that we have shown the origins of human knowledge in both Africa and Asia. But as vast as those knowledges are, humanity in 2023 would be suffering incredible ignorance without the contributions of the Indigenous civilizations of the Americas (and of Oceania).

Some surveys of the contributions of Indigenous civilizations include Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

Some concepts that come from Indigenous civilizations: Democracy, deliberation, political debate, freedom, diplomacy, and ecological sustainability. Graeber and Wengrow write the following summary:

“Let’s pause for a moment to take stock. In the years between 1703 and 1751, as we’ve seen, the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought. What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom. As it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values – organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves – they reacted in a variety of different ways.

“Some, like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright. Others – settlers, intellectuals and members of the reading public back home – came to see it as a provocative and appealing social proposition.”

There are books – libraries – filled with knowledge that was built on these plagiarized foundations. In many cases, the knowledge was taken out of its context and alienated from its source. Not just plagiarized, but corrupted as well. There is a lot more material out there about this (JM Blaut, Gunder Frank, Bagchi…) and in fact I would love to hear if you know of other sources along these lines.

My point in this little survey has been to refute the pillar of racist ideology that knowledge comes from the West and is diffused to the world through semi benign colonial processes. In fact, the West has no special claim to have developed knowledge. Some things came from the West: most things did not. Much that is claimed as Western knowledge comes from elsewhere.

Now here we are, and humanity has the stock of knowledge that it has. We have to make the most of it and maybe it doesn’t matter all that much where it came from, but that everybody gets it and what we can do with it.

But I still don’t think Aristotle wrote all those books…

[I first presented these readings at a conference at York U on May 16, 2023]