- "I will not tire of declaring that if we really
want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies
at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion
of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is
what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally."
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- ---Archbishop Oscar Romero (1917-1980)
-
- Contrary to the perpetual barrage of bovine fecal matter
spewed forth by our beloved corporate media whores, terrorism is not an
imminent threat to the continued existence of moral, peaceful human beings.
Certainly there are groups and individuals who kill innocents in pursuit
of demented agendas. However, by and large, those labeled "terrorists"
by the Bush administration and their unofficial mouth-pieces at Fox News
and similar outlets are people who are simply using "asymmetrical
warfare" to resist the ongoing oppression, exploitation and subjugation
of an imperialist aggressor.
-
- Increasingly, United States foreign and domestic policies
are determined by a relative handful of cynical bourgeois, some of whom
are not even US Americans. Their malevolence is exceeded only by their
avarice.
-
- True to their deceitful natures, the moneyed elite have
contrived the "War on Terror" as an attack on those bold enough
to violently oppose their enslavement. Yes, the latest campaign to enforce
Pax Americana is simply a new front in the "War on the Poor and Oppressed."
Humanity has been embroiled in an epic struggle between the pecunious and
impoverished since it developed agriculture, abandoned nomadism, and began
the acquisition of wealth. Industrialization, consumerism, materialism,
debt slavery, wage slavery, hyper-competitiveness, egocentrism, and the
myriad of ills spawned by American Capitalism have catapulted the plutocracy
into the stratosphere in terms of wealth and power. They are not about
to quietly relinquish their ill-gotten spoils.
-
- Despite the deepening misery and increasing numbers of
indigent human beings, our corporate masters and their loyal propagandists
assure us that the class wars are over. After all, the collapse of the
Soviet Union and China's rush to embrace "free markets" "prove"
that Socialism and Communism are utopian failures. The United States and
the countries it has conquered (sorry, that's liberated), are meritocracies.
For those of you in rags, riches are just around the corner. Simply get
off your lazy posteriors and apply a little elbow grease. Such tripe rolls
easily off the tongues of those pulling down six, seven or eight figure
incomes, people who nestle safely within the confines of their gated communities
and rest upon the comfortable support of their inherited or plundered fortunes.
-
- Yet far from having ended, thanks to the tireless efforts
of Goldwater, Buckley, Nixon, Reagan, Cheney, Bush, and a host of other
neo-fascists, the enduring socioeconomic struggle has reached a fever pitch.
Tragically, the ruling elite have utilized their formidable agitprop to
beguile the confused masses into believing that our depraved system's victims
(and their champions) are the enemy.
-
-
- Consider:
-
- In stark contrast to George Bush, a man responsible for
the deaths of a million or more Iraqis and Afghanistanis plus thousands
of US Americans in New Orleans and Iraq, Hugo Chavez has no blood on his
hands. And Chavez, a man who has mitigated the suffering of millions of
people, is the "threat".
-
- Resistance fighters battling to expel an imperialist
foreign occupier which has been waging genocide against the Iraqi people
since the Gulf War are "terrorists". The invading hordes are
hailed as "liberators".
-
- Ridiculously out-gunned and out-financed Palestinian
groups like Hamas, which resort to violence in a desperate attempt to counter
brutal Zionist ethnic cleansing, Apartheid, occupation, and colonization,
commit "acts of terror" when they kill Israeli civilians. Conversely,
Israeli IDF forces are "fully justified" when they commit murder
on a much wider scale because they are "defending Israel's right to
exist".
-
- One can find numerous other instances of the empowered
establishment vilifying and attacking the "wretched refuse",
but let's rewind a few years for a revealing look at a specific example
of the pernicious machinations of the opulent. Concurrently, we will also
explore a potential solution to the cancer of American Capitalism which
plagues the Earth and nearly every living being on it.
-
-
- Free at last?
-
- Liberation Theology, a movement widely embraced by Central
and South American priests and bishops in the 1960's, 70's and 80's, traces
its roots back to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who was hanged
in 1943 for his resistance to Hitler and the Nazis. Interpreting Christ's
teachings as a clarion call to devote their lives to the struggle for social
justice and human rights, people like Don Helder Camara, Leonardo Boff,
Dorothy Stang, and Oscar Romero faced harassment, punitive action from
the Vatican, persecution, and assassination in their quests to uplift the
exploited, violated, and destitute.
-
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- The Red Bishop
-
- Taking on both the Vatican and the military dictatorship
that ruled his home nation of Brazil from 1964 to 1985, the Red Bishop,
Don Helder Camara, was a fearless advocate for the down-trodden. World
renowned for relentlessly assailing the ruthless Brazilian government for
human rights violations, Camara attacked the Right Wing elements of the
Catholic Church with equal vigor. Before Pope John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger,
his reactionary confidant, effectively silenced most liberation theologians
(because of their Marxist tendencies), Camara managed to significantly
advance the cause of humanity in Brazil.
-
- Camara is noted for once having said, "When I give
food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no
food, they call me a Communist."
-
-
- The Architect
-
- Leonardo Boff in particular drew Ratzinger's wrath. Boff,
another Brazilian clergyman, was even more radical in the eyes of the Church
than Camara. His tireless intellectual efforts set the foundations for
Liberation Theology in Latin America. The Vatican was loath to associate
itself with this Leftist political movement, Christ's call for justice
be damned. As its chief architect, Boff was a marked man.
-
- Statements like, "Jesus was a political prisoner,
who died on the Cross, not an old man who died in bed," did little
to endear him to an institution far more interested in expanding its wealth
and influence than in taking a stand against established powers on behalf
of the indigent. The Church stripped Boff of a number of his priestly duties.
He eventually left the Church and went on to pursue a better world through
independent political activism.
-
- Affirming his fervent opposition to our criminal potentates,
in November of 2001 Boff commented, "For me, the terrorist attack
of September 11 signs the turning for a new humanitarian and world model.
The targeted buildings send a message: a new world civilization couldn't
be built with the kind of dominating economy (symbolized by the World Trade
Center), with the kind of death machine set up (the Pentagon) and with
the kind of arrogant politics and producer of many exclusions (White House
spared, because the plane fell before). For me the system and culture of
the capital started to fell. They are too destructive."
-
-
- Dot
-
- A US American nun who eventually became a naturalized
citizen of Brazil, Dorothy Stang was an indefatigable and valorous defender
of both the rainforests and the rights of peasant farmers. Despite death
threats from wealthy land-owners and logging interests, she continued helping
poor Brazilian families work small land parcels without engaging in deforestation.
On 2/12/05, assassins gunned her down at close range.
-
- Dot, as her family called her, summarized her noble agenda
succinctly with these words:
-
- "I don't want to flee, nor do I want to abandon
the battle of these farmers who live without any protection in the forest.
They have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where
they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment."
-
-
- San Romero
-
- Perhaps the most influential member of the deeply inspiring
Liberation Theology crusade was "San Romero." The Vatican gave
Oscar Romero his position as Archbishop of San Salvador because he ostensibly
supported the "Washington Consensus". However, witnessing thousands
of horrific crimes against humanity catalyzed Romero's profound conversion.
Jimmy Carter (and later Ronald Reagan) helped finance the military of a
government in El Salvador dominated by a few wealthy oligarchs who were
closely aligned with US corporations. In their efforts to defend their
wealth from the threat of the "Communist scourge", Washington's
friends in El Salvador were murdering 3,000 unarmed "oppositionists"
each month by 1980.
-
- Romero advocated a path of non-violence. In 1978 he wrote:
-
- "The counsel of the Gospel to turn the other cheek
to an unjust aggressor, far from being passive or cowardly, shows great
moral force that leaves the aggressor morally overcome and humiliated.
The Christian always prefers peace to war."
-
- Utilizing his position and voice within the Church, Romero
delivered powerful sermons calling for an end to the torture and slaughter.
As an active means of protest, he closed schools, cancelled masses, opened
the seminary to the homeless and wounded, and halted construction of the
new cathedral. He leveled powerful accusations against the ruthless tyrants
ruling El Salvador. Romero called upon the US to stop funding the butchers
in San Salvador (Washington continued sending $1.5 million per day for
12 years), the penurious to take up "their own struggle for liberation",
and the peasant soldiers of El Salvador to defy their government masters:
-
- "Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill
your fellow peasant . . . No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is
contrary to the will of God. No one has to fulfill an immoral law. It is
time to recover your consciences and to obey your consciences rather than
the orders of sin. . . . In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering
people I ask you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the
repression."
-
- As a result of his appeal to El Salvador's troops to
defy their orders, on March 24, 1980, Monsignor Romero unknowingly presided
over his final mass. In the midst of the service, an assassin's bullet
ripped through Romero's heart. Within moments, he had passed to the other
side. Reactionary forces had slain yet another intrepid defender of the
tyrannized and poverty-stricken.
-
-
- Hit Me With Another Round of Inculcation
-
- Yet as Western media pundits, think tanks, and our "public
servants" have so astutely observed, there is no class war. Socioeconomic
classes are amorphous in a US-dominated world economy offering limitless
upward mobility. Marx and his philosophies are dead. It is simply the natural
order that "moral beacons" like Carlos Slim Helu, the Walton's,
Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch and a few hundred others possess more wealth
than the world's poorest 2.5 billion people. While it is a pity, the 11
million children who die as a result of poverty each year are necessary
sacrifices upon the altar of Mammon.
-
- In the terrifying and unlikely event that your indoctrination
fails and you find yourself suddenly afflicted with the profound feeling
of existential emptiness that accompanies the realization that our hedonistic,
acquisitive, narcissistic, shallow, mean-spirited, and bellicose American
Way is spiritually bankrupt, remember that the Liberation Theologians showed
us that there are other ways of being.
-
-
- Oh, to Hell with it!
-
- Just turn on the TV. Luxuriate in the fantasy that you
could become as affluent and privileged as "The Donald." That's
much more gratifying than attempting to emulate those hopelessly idealistic
wannabe saints!
-
- [Note of Disclosure: In his relatively nascent but profound
divorce from the rabid centrism posing as "liberalism" infecting
many US Americans, this author unwittingly advocated and embraced notions
akin to Liberation Theology prior to discovering the existence of this
incredible movement. Despite abandoning his Christian faith in favor of
a personal spirituality forged in the crucible of personal struggle, the
two pieces linked below reveal the striking similarities between his personal
principles and those of Liberation Theology:
-
- http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/4369/1/50/
-
- http://www.axisoflogic.com/cgi-bin/exec/view.pl?archive=145&num=22526
-
- In short, the author is heavily biased in favor of many
aspects of Liberation Theology.]
-
-
- Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who
has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. His essays have been
widely published, he is an associate editor for Cyrano's Journal Online,
and he volunteers at homeless shelters. He welcomes constructive correspondence
at <mailto:willpowerful@hotmail.com>willpowerful@hotmail.com or
via his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at <http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/>http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/
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