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=Text and Photos By=
Andre Vltchek
Journeys in the land of the eternal brainwash

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f raw, naked propaganda makes you sick, stay away from South Korea (ROK)!

While the Western brain-conditioning machine wants you to believe that it is actually the North that is successfully indoctrinating its citizens, those of us who have worked on both sides of the border (or on both sides of the “DMZ”) know much better. And if they don’t tell, they lie!

From the “art work” on both sides of the barbed wire fences, to the institutions designated to brainwash millions of common people, South Korea is leading; its regime’s propaganda (and the propaganda of its Western handlers) is much more experienced, determined, aggressive and therefore, effective.

BE SURE TO CLICK ON ALL IMAGES FOR BEST RESOLUTION

The curator of the “DMZ STORY, Berlin East Side Gallery & DMZ Story Exhibition” sounded more like an interrogator than an artist.

When I visited this huge German–South Korean anti-Communist propaganda “project” in Seoul, I mentioned at the entrance that I would be very happy to write about the exhibition. Then, I was not allowed to simply enter, I was forced to meet the curator.

And the curator sounded and behaved like an Asian apparatchik serving the West and its ideology (there are plenty of them in Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Cambodia and of course in South Korea). He began our encounter with the line of questioning so common in Seoul:

“Where do you come from? What are you doing here?”

Then things got a bit arrogant and patronizing:

“What do you know about Korea? Is this your first time here?”

“I know both sides fairly well”, I replied, still relatively politely.

“Both sides? How could you know both sides? You visited North Korea?”

“Yes”, I replied. “I was invited by the DPRK government. I traveled as a member of the Ramsey Clark Peace Delegation…”

Instead of showing well-mannered interest, his face turned red and he exploded:

“So you were told all those lies! You were shown nonsense, propaganda, fabrications”!

By then we were inside the multi-story exhibition venue. It was a truly monstrous place: lowest grade of propaganda kitsch! There were paintings of Brezhnev French-kissing Erich Honecker, as well as some sentimental outpourings about freedom, democracy, and peace… Anti-Communist barks were intertwining with pro-Western, pro-American ‘artwork’. There were images of both the Berlin Wall and Marilyn Monroe, on the same panel.

“Do you ever show mass-slaughter of Korean citizens by the US military?” I wondered.

“Americans never harmed anybody!” he began shouting. “They are very good people. Maybe there was some unfortunate collateral damage during the war, but they would never harm anyone on purpose.”

His eyes were shining. He hated me with all his essence. It was obvious. And it felt so wonderful to be hated by someone like him!

“I have a good friend, an Australian artist” I resumed our conversation. “His name is George Burchett… His father’s name was Wilfred Burchett… You know, perhaps the greatest English-language journalist of all times, a war correspondent… He worked in your country, during the war. He exposed countless crimes against humanity performed here, by the West. He proved that the Americans were burning numerous Korean civilians alive, in the tunnels, while conducting bacteriological warfare. And that many Western prisoners of war were forcefully disappeared by their own military, when they were, after being exchanged, insisting on telling the truth about how well and humanely they were treated by their North Korean and Chinese captors.”

I gave him my card. He ran to his office in order to Google me, and most likely, to report me. He was fuming. A few minutes later he ran back to the gallery, shouting: “You do not exist!”

He obviously kept misspelling my name. I helped him, I reestablished my existence, and then left the place.

*

The War Museum of Korea, also known as The War Memorial of Korea, is perhaps the single greatest propaganda institution anywhere on earth. It is so outrageous, so grotesque, so vile, and so huge, that only those who see it could believe that something like that could actually exist, scarring our Earth.

US strategic B-52 bombers are “decorating” its lawns, and so are tanks, helicopters and jet fighters, even some gunboats.

Statues all over the neighborhood are depicting insane looking soldiers, charging towards their invisible enemies – no doubt the fellow Koreans and Asians. The ROK, North America and the West are shamelessly glorified. Everything North Korean, Communist, and Asian seems to be spat on.

There are endless explanatory signs, describing events and equipment, like the one in front of a deadly US jet fighter: “F-5A ‘Freedom Fighter’ (U.S.A.).”

There are memorials to those countries that participated in the Korean War, on the South Korean side, including such places like South Africa (still apartheid), Ethiopia (still fascist), Colombia, Thailand and Philippines (fascist and staunchly pro-Western), Turkey, but also, of course the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

There is a Museum Wedding Hall, in case someone is interested to tie the knot while being surrounded by all those bellicose relics, equipment and ‘art work’. Many actually do get married here, I am told; true patriotic duty, I suppose.

*

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n South Korea, all Communist parties are banned, so the Communists have to operate clandestinely.

According to The Review of Korean Studies:

“The South Korean government enacted legislation against “anti-national” activities in 1948 and firmly establishing an anti-communist ideology with the National Security Act. The act outlawed any dissent or criticism of the ruling South Korean government, effectively making communism illegal. This included the media, art, literature and music…”

Truly democratic… But as long as voters are allowed to stick their papers to some box…

South Korea, one of the richest countries in Asia, grew on the foundations of open and uncompromising collaboration with the West in general and with the United States in particular. In the past it was resting on the fascist concepts designed by the West and by its own military and business oligarchs. ROK tortured, murdered and disappeared its dissidents. In many ways, it was not unlike Pinochet’s Chile or Suharto’s Indonesia.

Until now it remains one of the most fundamentalist hubs of capitalism, consumerism and pop culture. “K-pop” is actually spreading nihilism, idiocy, egotism and ignorance all over Asia, acting as an important tool of Western cultural imperialism.

The wealth does not always come with production (although some of it does). Seoul always got well rewarded for its efforts by its Western handlers.

While studying in New York City, I got to know several South Korean young women who were sent by their families to get diplomas at top US universities, while also acting on behalf of their corrupt military and corporate clans, purchasing prime multi-million dollar real estate; mainly condominiums in Manhattan.

*

Seoul is bad, but indoctrination gets even more intense, as one approaches the “border”.

At the very beginning of 2016, South Korean disinformation gurus resumed bombardment of DPRK with the vilest propaganda imaginable, using giant loudspeakers. Nonsense that was shouted through them again and again was supposed to humiliate the DPRK and its leadership, to discredit Communism, and to show the superiority of capitalist and Western dogmas.

The DPRK was ‘punished’ by those huge speakers for its missile program. ROK’s logic is simple: “it is fine to host the most aggressive army on Earth (the US army) on our territory. But if the DPRK decides to defend itself, it has to be castigated”.

Some time ago I wrote about one of my visits to that area – to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Here are a few updated excerpts. Until now nothing has really changed for the better:

Any trip to the border is revealing, as long as one is ready to keep his or her eyes open and to forget for a while about clichés and slogans which have been hammered into our brains for decades by Western propaganda: “South Korea: freedom and democracy. North Korea: evil state”…

If you are a connoisseur, the “Korean Veterans Association” arranges the ‘most enjoyable’ visits in conjunction with Chung-Ang Express Tour. Guides are nothing less than former South Korean soldiers and intelligence officers; just what those who are always willing to sample delicious nuances and tastes of pro-market and pro-western brainwashing process truly appreciate!

Everybody knows perfectly well what he or she is supposed to think about the land above the 38th parallel, but there is very little knowledge, at least in the West, about the brutality of former South Korean regimes: their fraudulent elections, aggressive anti-leftist propaganda, corruption, campaigns of terror and intimidation, torture and political killings. Not much is remembered about the brutality of the US forces during the Korean War, including several massacres of the civilian population. The Vietnam War and Western genocides triggered in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos overshadowed the equally terrible chapter of the Cold War, which took place on the Korean peninsula.

But back to the visits to the DMZ and the “Joint Security Area” at Panmunjeom, with the “Korean Veterans Association” vehicle and with Mr. Kim as my guide:

One day before my departure I received the usual memo and warning:

“PLEASE NOTE” the leaflet said: “Casual clothes such as blue jeans (kind of jean), and sandals (slippers) are not permitted in the area. Shaggy or unkempt hair is not allowed either. Any equipment, microphones or flags belonging to the communist side in the MAC conference room are NOT TO BE TOUCHED! Do not speak with, make any gestures towards or in any way, approach or respond to personnel from the other side.”

No alcohol consumption was allowed before or during the trip.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the morning I put on sharp looking black pants, trimmed my beard, and charged my cameras. After examining my reflection in the mirror I came to the conclusion that despite some shortcomings in my appearance beyond my control, I looked fit to represent the affluent world of ‘democracy, freedom and economic opportunities’. My inner thoughts remained well hidden and unless someone were to force me to undergo a lie-detector test, there was hardly any danger that my presence at the most militarized frontier in the world would cost disturbances or embarrassment to my South Korean hosts. Armed with my notebooks, cameras and US passport, I left the hotel, in anticipation of yet another surreal undertaking.

The big bus slowly and majestically departed the center of Seoul. Mr. Kim, our guide, exceeded all my expectations. He summarized the evilness of the North Korean regime, underlined the great economic, moral and democratic might of the the Republic of Korea, and then warned us to be careful, “very careful” when we encounter “those North Koreans” at the border:

“…And don’t make any unexpected and sharp moves. Don’t step away from the trails: the border is a minefield. Take photographs only when I advise you. Do not talk to North Korean guards! Enjoy your trip!”

At the back of my seat, I found a brochure printed by the Korean Veterans Association. On the front page, a middle-aged western couple was grinning (showing perfect and clearly fake teeth) in the direction of North Korea. Sure enough, these people were not pointing fingers at anything. The woman was pointing her designer sun glasses held in well manicured fingers, a man – looking like he had just won a brand new Jaguar in sweepstakes – was pointing his small camera towards the territory of the proud member of the “Axis of Evil”.

“…And our close and reliable ally – the United States of America – is always ready to defend our freedom and democracy,” came from the loudspeakers attached to the ceiling of the bus. Mr. Kim was obviously doing his best to educate us.

“Among other things, you will see Reunification Village – no taxes paid by its inhabitants. They are growing one of the best ginsengs in the world there. Reunification Bridge… You will see some of 700 thousand South Korean and American soldiers stationed at the border: 90% are Koreans, 10% Americans… You are all very privileged: Korean citizens have to apply for this visit 6 months to one year in advance, and most of them are not granted a permit… You will also see Ballinger Camp…”

A perfect multi-lane highway was following the coast of the Han-gang River. There were no milestones on either side of it. Soon after we left Seoul, we spotted a small area between the motorway and the river being converted into a tremendous barbed-wire fortification “decorated” only with watchtowers and other military installations. All that probably just in case some North Korean military divers decided to invade this ‘capitalist paradise’.

Enormous concrete apartment blocks were visible from the window on the right side of the bus. Entire towns, entire cities made of the same multi-story housing projects. I could hardly keep up with the numbers: Block 23, Block 78, and on it went. Majestic Han-gang River, soldiers and endless wire on one side; concrete and identical looking housing ghettos on the other.

The bus entered “Freedom Road” and after a few miles, stopped at the parking lot near “Freedom Bridge”. There stood the last South Korean train station, after which the tracks went towards the North and the bridge itself, decorated with the heart-breaking paper messages written by ordinary Korean people attached to the metal grid: mostly wishes to see their families across the border at least one more time.

The bus moves again, this time towards the Tongil Bridge and the checkpoint. We were entering the “no-go-area”, the most militarized place on earth, the “Demilitarized Zone”.

Mr. Kim’s outbursts were intensifying. He was jumping at the front of the bus, excited, clearly ‘on the mission’. He began mixing attacks against North Korean state with his cheap military humor:

“So why do we still have so many American soldiers here? What do you think? Hey? Because they are protecting us! And because we don’t want to spend more money on our own defense!” He was laughing at his own puns, but nobody else was. Foreign visitors on the bus were silent. The view behind the window obviously overwhelmed them – especially those who came there for the first time.

Barbed wires were everywhere and so were the military trucks driving up and down the road. Everything looked unreal and disturbing, including the ginseng-growing Freedom Village, a small hamlet separated from the rest of the world, surviving in the middle of the minefields and well-hidden high-tech weaponry.

The area looked peaceful, almost serene. No heavy weapons visible: everything hidden under the ground. There must have been tens of thousands of tanks, camouflaged bunkers, artillery and missile silos as well as nerve-gas and biological-weapons concentrated around here, but from our angle of vision, there were only some majestic migrant birds flying over the gently rolling hills, shitting on all this baloney from tremendous heights.

The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is just a strip of land – approximately 248km/155 miles long and 4 km/2.5 miles wide, cutting across the Korean Peninsula that serves as a buffer zone between the North and South.

The bus drove through the military Camp Bonifas and terminated its journey at the parking lot at Ballinger Camp. Our passports were checked again and then we had to attend a briefing. Another list of rules, another endless outburst of propaganda pushed down our throats. American and Korean soldiers were patrolling side by side, inside the briefing room and on the road.

“The American army has a golf-course here”, explained Mr. Kim after we had boarded another, this time military bus with two soldiers inside. “The funny thing is that it has only one hole and it is surrounded by the mine-field”. He laughed loudly, but again nobody responded.

And then it appeared in front of us: the ‘truce village’ – Panmunjom – the only place where the North and South connect. It is called JSA (Joint Security Area), with several buildings on both sides and some constructed right on top of the MDL (The Military Demarcation Line). This is where negotiations between the two sides have been held since 1953.

We were obliged to visit “Freedom House”, a monstrous propaganda establishment made of glass and steel. From here, the North Korean information center (Panmun-gak Pavilion) is less than 100 meters away. Theoretically I should have been free to cross all the way to the DPRK side and visit their center. I should have been free to move around, as long as I did not leave the JSA.

I was not prevented to enter by the North Koreans: I was prevented to leave by the brisk military voice of Mr. Kim, my guide or whatever hell he really might have been. And of course, by Mr. Kim’s handlers…

Instead of going north I was again bombarded by stories about the bizarre “Stump of the Tree Chopping Incident” from 1976, about the shootout which followed the defection of a Soviet diplomat to the South during the Cold War, about long tunnels which were dug by the North Korean military (no outright lies, just manipulated half-truths).

At some point I felt that I could not stomach Mr. Kim any longer. I approached him on the viewing terrace, just a few feet from DPRK, and asked him publicly, in front of the soldiers and visitors:

“Mr. Kim, could you please tell us about the accident involving the US soldier defecting from here to the North in 1983?”

Mr. Kim stared at me in disbelief and I could only guess what would have happened to me if I had dared to challenge him in the days of the ROK’s full-blown military dictatorship.

“You must be out of your mind, young man”, he replied in a patronizing tone of voice. “Why would an American defect to the Communist North? Nothing like that ever happened.”

But it did happen, and it was not the only “incident” of its kind.

Finally I was allowed to enter the barrack where the negotiations between the North and the South take place. The Demarcation line – the border – runs in the middle of the table. I went around the table, technically entering the DPRK. It felt good…

South Korean soldiers kept their watch inside and outside the barracks. The ones selected to serve in this area were enormous – probably two meters tall.

Their ‘adversaries’ from the north were of average height.

South Korean soldiers, although most likely made of flesh and blood, were trained to stand still without the slightest movement, creating the impression that they were made of wax. Not one muscle moved. Their expressionless faces were decorated by large-frame sunglasses, making them look like mafia or like bouncers in some exclusive bordello. Outside the barracks, soldiers were standing with their legs unnaturally spread, only half of their faces facing the enemy, the other side facing the corner of the wall.

Grotesque, Kafkaesque, all this… Then I thought: “This is the true image of fascism, militarism and imperialism.”

At the other side, lonely looking North Korean soldiers appeared modest and very human in comparison, their Soviet-style uniforms far from fancy. They were facing their adversaries directly, not the wall of the barrack: directly, like true and proud human beings!

Standing for a while on the North Korean turf, I thought how little people are allowed to know about this land! Only what is tailored by countless vicious reports carried by the mainstream Western media.

But after the war, the North was successfully competing with the South. For quite some time it was richer, more prosperous, socially balanced, and optimistic. Then the ‘eastern block’ was destroyed by Western imperialism, and the North cynically abandoned, supported only by its great neighbor: China. Isolated and petrified (not unreasonably, as is evident from the history), it became a target, a punch bag of victorious western propaganda: “Communism? You want Communism? Just look at North Korea; that’s an alternative to our free society.”

The DPRK has been facing countless provocations from the south, but mainly from the West. US military bases on the territory of the ROK… Deadly US air force bases in Okinawa… Naval exercises near its shores… Sanctions and demonization… Terrible insults… All this, only because the DPRK wants to go its own way! Only because it has been refusing to become a serf, a slave!

And the past… Even according to BBC Timewatch:

“More than one million civilians died during the Korean War in 1950 but no one knows how many of these were killed by American forces. Few doubt that US forces committed atrocities in Korea, although the Pentagon denies official responsibility for one of the worst incidents of the war: the frenzied slaughter of civilians at the No Gun Ri railway tunnels”.

I asked Mr. Kim about the No Gun Ri tunnel, but by then I was firmly on his shit list, and he stopped replying to my questions.

Our bus briefly stopped at the “Bridge of No Return”, an abandoned border crossing. Again, the DPRK was just a few feet away.

“Look at the “Propaganda Village on the other side”, shouted Mr. Kim, salivating. “You can see the houses there, but nobody lives there. It is just propaganda. Pro-pa-gan-da! And that flagpole with the North Korean flag: it is the highest flagpole in the world, 157.5 meters high. We built our flagpole at 98.4 meters in 1980’s and they felt they have to have the highest one in the world.” He produced a dry, ugly and sarcastic laugh.

Again, the no man’s land between two Koreas seemed serene and quiet. Green fields and light mist were pleasing to the eyes. Birds were flying and shitting, while creeks were singing.

“To hell with the flagpole”, I thought. “What were you doing in the 1970’s, during Park’s dictatorship, Mr. Kim? Were you breaking balls, raping, torturing students?”

“And now”, said Mr. Kim, grinning happily, “Let’s give a big applause to our heroic soldiers, both Koreans and Americans!” We were approaching Camp Ballinger. “Here you can’t take photographs, but you can buy souvenirs and finally? Finally you can have a drink!”

After several checkpoints and a few miles of military roads, it was traffic jam all the way to Seoul. Traffic and barbed wires, only this time to my right. And the endless ocean of concrete apartment blocks on the left…

“Come and join us again”, said Mr. Kim, parting. Across the street, protesters were blasting “The International” in Korean, from enormous black speakers placed right on the sidewalk in front of some office building.

*

In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), things were more enjoyable. I went there in 2013. Pyongyang, celebrating the 60^th anniversary of the Victory; it was festive, full of cultural venues, grand music performances and concerts.

I then wrote:

“60 years ago North Korea won the war. But some 4 million people died, many of them civilians. Maybe it was more than 4 million, nobody knows exactly. The capital city Pyongyang was totally leveled to the ground. I did not want to hear loud music and long speeches. I wanted to pay tribute to those who lost their lives, by sitting quietly by the river covered by mist, listening to the tall grass. But during my 8 days in North Korea, I had very few moments of silence, almost no opportunity to reflect.

What have I seen in those 8 days in DPRK – in North Korea? I saw an enormous futuristic city, Pyongyang, the capital, built from the ashes. I saw enormous theatres and stadiums, a metro system deep below the ground (public transportation doubling as nuclear shelter, in case the city came under attack). I saw trolley buses and double-decker buses, wide avenues, unimaginably ample sidewalks, roller-skating rinks and playgrounds for children.

Statues and monuments were everywhere. The size of some boulevards and buildings were simply overwhelming. For more than a decade I lived in Manhattan, but this was very different grandeur. New York was growing towards the sky, while Pyongyang consisted of tremendous open spaces and massive eclectic buildings.

Outside the capital I saw green fields, and farmers walking home deep in the countryside. Clearly, there was no malnutrition among children, and despite the embargo, everyone was decently dressed.”

Young people that were working with me – my interpreter, drivers, and guides – had a fantastic sense of humor. They were also very kind.

My interpreter was obsessed with potato chips. She was also picking my brains about how to deal with her ‘evil’ boyfriend who was not ready to make his move and to propose marriage. As we were driving all over the country, they were showing me their motherland, while I was sharing my photos from all corners of the globe, stored on my iPhones.

At one point we came to the same spot, which I knew from the other side, to the same Panmunjom, and to the same DPRK information center (Panmun-gak Pavilion), which a few years earlier I had not been allowed to visit from the side of Republic of Korea.

There were detailed photo exhibitions and paintings on this side of the border. There were terrible events illustrated, and bitter memories revisited. But it was all so serene, human, and endlessly sad.

Ramsey Clark spoke about the horrors of the past, and about the brutality of US actions. An old man, one of the survivors of the mass killings of civilians in the tunnels, spoke about the brutality he witnessed as a child. The artwork in the local museum depicted the savage torture and rape of Korean women by US troops, their bodies mutilated; with nipples penetrated by metal hooks.

On July 26 2013, I met, together with Ramsey Clark and a few other delegates, Mr.Yang Hyong Sob, the Vice President of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Committee.

“Seeing is believing”, he declared. “Please tell the world what you witnessed here.”

I replied:

“It is their common tactic. The West portrays people of the DPRK, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Serbia, as heartless, as if they were some plastic androids. Then, subconsciously, compassion towards the people of those nations vanishes from the hearts of the Western public. Suddenly it is fine to starve, to bomb, to murder thousands, even millions of those androids. But once the faces are shown, the Western public gets confused; many refuse to support mass murder. Therefore, the faces are hardly shown.“

No one knows how many Korean people died during the war. Millions, for sure… Some say 4 million… or more. Further millions of human lives were ruined by the sanctions, Western-provoked intimidations of the DPRK, and by the arms race.

Still, the hate, insults and professional propaganda are flying mostly from the South!

*

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]eoul 2016… The first ice is gently covering the surface of Han-gang River.

My hotel “W” on top of Walker Hill is overly “cool”, impersonal, overpriced and metallically cold. Techno beats are following me everywhere, from elevators to the vast lobby.

“Where are you from?” The driver on the way from the Incheon Airport interrogates me. His English is perfect. He served with the US military. Almost all drivers of those orange taxis that the foreigners are urged to use, are government agents. They only ask questions, and hardly ever answer.

“What do you think about North Korea? Oh, you went there? You know?”

After I reply, when I say what I witnessed, deep silence follows. Then a barrage of pointed questions. I ignore that old snitch.

I go around Seoul, searching for dissent. No new great films are made about the horrors of the ROK dictatorship. They still sell “Peppermint Candy” in some DVD stores, the greatest film so far, but it was made so many years ago…

There are some books, describing South Korean racism, xenophobia, and police, military and capitalist brutality. There are stories about the immigrants from DPRK, doctors and professors, forced to work as cleaners in the toughest bordellos of Seoul. It is not only foreigners who became targets of chauvinism, but also the immigrants from the north.

I don’t like what I see and feel in Seoul. It is cold, brutal, confused. I feel totally alone here. I talk to several foreigners: they all feel the same: from diplomats to English teachers. It does not feel like Asia. I am not exactly sure what it feels like. Like an enormous military base of some relatively rich country, perhaps?

Everyone who means something here was educated in the US. I see tremendous, horrifying Pentecostal churches all over the city. I see open and concealed pro-Western propaganda, everywhere. I see militarization. And Christmas trees…

Nobody wants to talk, if you are ‘different’. Unlike in Japan, here, many speak English: for obvious reasons. But nobody talks, beyond clichés. You have to fit. You have to be a Christian, right winger, anti-Communist, damn it!

Two of my books are translated to Korean and published in Seoul. I try to meet my publishers, but they reply in an extremely rude way, turning me down. They are not interested. My work is just some commodity. They don’t give a shit about me as a person.

I work for several days here. Eventually, emotionally exhausted, I run away.

On my TG flight from Seoul to Bangkok I watch the last bit of the insane propaganda – a South Korean film about the DPRK invasion, called “Northern Limit Line”. Again, North Koreans are robots, beasts, murderers, while South Koreans are good sons, good citizens, and true heroes. Like in K-pop, even the propaganda is now utilizing self-righteous, egotistic forms.

I came to write about South Korean propaganda and I got what I was asking for. I cannot complain. But I actually overate. The free “buffet” of it was just too vast. It will take some time to digest before I come back for more! 

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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

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=By= Henry A. Giroux

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]merican society is morally bankrupt and politically broken, and its vision of the future appears utterly dystopian. As the United States descends into the dark abyss of an updated form of totalitarianism, the unimaginable has become imaginable in that it has become possible not only to foresee the death of the essential principles of constitutional democracy, but also the birth of what Hannah Arendt once called the horror of dark times. The politics of terror, a culture of fear, and the spectacle of violence dominate America’s cultural apparatuses and legitimate the ongoing militarization of public life and American society.

Unchecked corporate power and a massive commodification, infantilization, and depoliticization of the polity have become the totalitarian benchmarks defining American society. In part, this is due to the emergence of a brutal modern-day capitalism, or what some might call neoliberalism. This form of neoliberal capitalism is a particularly savage, cruel, and exploitative regime of oppression in which not only are the social contract, civil liberties and the commons under siege, but also the very notion of the political, if not the planet itself. The dystopian moment facing the United States, if not most of the globe, can be summed up in Fred Jameson’s contention “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” He goes on to say that “We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”¹

One way of understanding Jameson’s comment is through the ideological and affective spaces in which the neoliberal subject is produced and market-driven ideologies are normalized. Capitalism has made a virtue out of self-interest and the pursuit of material wealth and in doing so has created a culture of shattered dreams and a landscape filled with “Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured: all suggest a collective failure of will. These shortcomings are so endemic that we no longer know how to talk about what is wrong, much less set about repairing it.”[i]

Yet, there is a growing recognition that casino capitalism is driven by a kind of mad violence and form of self-sabotage and that if it does not come to an end what we will experience in all probability is the destruction of human life and the planet itself. Certainly, more recent scientific reports on the threat of ecological disaster from researchers at the University of Washington, NASA, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reinforce this dystopian possibility.² The undermining of public trust and public values has now given way to a market-driven discourse that produces a society that has lost any sense of democratic vision and social purpose and in doing so resorts to state terrorism, the criminalization of social problems, and culture of cruelty. Institutions that were once defined to protect and enhance human life now function largely to punish and maim.

As Michael Yates points out throughout this book, capitalism is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either exploit or consider disposable.

Security and crisis have become the new passwords for imposing a culture of fear and for imposing what Giorgio Agamben has called a permanent state of exception and a technology of government repression.[ii] A constant appeal to a state of crisis becomes the new normal for arming the police, curtailing civil liberties, expanding the punishing state, criminalizing everyday behavior, and supressing dissent. Fear now drives the major narratives that define the United States and give rise to dominant forms of power free from any sense of moral and political conviction, if not accountability.

In the midst of this dystopian nightmare, there is the deepening abyss of inequality, one that not only separates the rich from the poor, but also increasingly relegates the middle and working classes to the ranks of the precariat. Concentrations of wealth and income generate power for the financial elite and unchecked misery for most people, a fear/insecurity industry, and a growing number of social pathologies.

Michael Yates in The Great Inequality provides a road map for both understanding the registers that produce inequality as well as the magnitude of the problems it poses across a range of commanding spheres extending from health care and the political realm to the environment and education. At the same time, he exposes the myths that buttress the ideology of inequality. These include an unchecked belief in boundless economic growth, the notion that inequality is chosen freely by individuals in the market place, and the assumption that consumption is the road to happiness. Unlike a range of recent books on inequality, Yates goes beyond exposing the mechanisms that drive inequality and the panoply of commanding institutions that support it. He also provides a number of strategies that challenge the deep concentrations of wealth and power while delivering a number of formative proposals that are crucial for nurturing a radical imagination and the social movements necessary to struggle for a society that no longer equates capitalism with democracy.

As Yates makes clear throughout this book, money now engulfs everything in this new age of disposability. Moreover, when coupled with a weakening of movements to counter the generated power of capitalists, the result has been a startling increase in the influence of predatory capitalism, along with inequities in wealth, income, power, and opportunity. Such power breeds more than anti-democratic tendencies, it also imposes constraints, rules, and prohibitions on the 99 percent whose choices are increasingly limited to merely trying to survive. Capitalists are no longer willing to compromise and have expanded their use of power to dominate economic, political, and social life. For Yates, it is all the more crucial to understand how power works under the reign of global capitalism in order to grasp the magnitude of inequality, the myriad of factors that produce it, and what might be done to change it.

Accompanying the rise of a savage form of capitalism and the ever-expanding security state is the emergence of new technologies and spaces of control. One consequence is that labor power is increasing produced by machines and robotic technologies which serve to create “a large pool of more or less unemployed people.” Moreover, as new technologies produce massive pools of unused labor, it also is being used as a repressive tool for collecting “unlimited biometric and genetic information of all of its citizens.”[iii]

The ongoing attack on the working class is matched by new measures of repression and surveillance. This new weaponized face of capitalism is particularly ominous given the rise of the punishing state and the transformation of the United States from a democracy in progress to a fully developed authoritarian society.   Every act of protest is now tainted, labeled by the government and mainstream media as either treasonous or viewed as a potential act of terrorism. For example, animal rights activists are put on the terrorist list. Whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden are painted as traitors. Members of the Black Lives Matter movement are put under surveillance,[iv] all electronic communication is now subject to government spying, and academics who criticize government policy are denied tenure or worse.

Under neoliberalism, public space is increasingly converted into private space undermining those sphere necessary for developing a viable sense of social responsibility, while also serving to transform citizenship into mostly an act of consumption. Under such circumstances, the notion of crisis is used both to legitimate a system of economic terrorism as well as to accentuate an increasing process of depoliticization. Within this fog of market induced paralysis, language is subject to the laws of capitalism, reduced to a commodity, and subject to the “tyranny of the moment….emaciated, impoverished, vulgarized and squeezed out of the meanings it was resumed to carry.”[v]

As the latest stage of predatory capitalism, neoliberalism is part of a broader economic and political project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital, particularly financial capital.[vi] As a political project it includes “the deregulation of finance, privatization of public services, elimination and curtailment of social welfare programs, open attacks on unions, and routine violations of labor laws.”[vii] As an ideology, it casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit making as the arbiter and essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. As a mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life driven by a survival-of-the fittest-ethic, grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, and committed to the right of ruling groups and institutions to exercise power removed from matters of ethics and social costs. As a policy and political project, it is wedded to the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection of private issues and public problems, the selling off of state functions, liberalization of trade in goods and capital investment, the eradication of government regulation of financial institutions and corporations, the destruction of the welfare state and unions, and the endless marketization and commodification of society.

Nothing engenders the wrath of conservatives more than the existence of the government providing a universal safety net, especially one that works, such as either Medicare or Social Security. As Yates points out, government is viewed by capitalists as an institution that gets in the way of capital. One result is a weakening of social programs and provisions. As Paul Krugman observes regarding the ongoing conservative attacks on Medicare, “The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful.”[viii] In opposition to Krugman and other liberal economists, Michael Yates argues rightly in this book that the issue is not simply preserving Medicare but eliminating the predatory system that disavows equality of wealth, power, opportunity, and health care for everyone.

Neoliberalism has put an enormous effort into creating a commanding cultural apparatus and public pedagogy in which individuals can only view themselves as consumers, embrace freedom as the right to participate in the market, and supplant issues of social responsibility for an unchecked embrace of individualism and the belief that all social relation be judged according to how they further one’s individual needs and self-interests. Matters of mutual caring, respect, and compassion for the other have given way to the limiting orbits of privatization and unrestrained self-interest, just as it is has become increasingly difficult to translate private troubles into larger social, economic, and political considerations. One consequence is that it has become more difficult for people to debate and question neoliberal hegemony and the widespread misery it produces for young people, the poor, middle class, workers, and other segments of society– now considered disposable under neoliberal regimes which are governed by a survival-of-the fittest ethos, largely imposed by the ruling economic and political elite. Unable to make their voices heard and lacking any viable representation in the process makes clear the degree to which the American public, in particular, are suffering under a democratic deficit producing a profound dissatisfaction that does not always translate into an understanding of how neoliberal capitalism has destroyed democracy or what it might mean to understand and challenge its diverse apparatuses of persuasion and power. Clearly, the surge of popularity behind the presidential candidacy of a buffoon such as Donald Trump testifies to both a deep seated desire for change and the forms it can take when emotion replaces reason and any viable analysis of capitalism and its effects seem to be absent from a popular sensibility.

What Michael Yates makes clear in this incisive book on inequality is that democratic values, commitments, integrity, and struggles are under assault from a wide range of sites in an age of intensified violence and disposability. Throughout the book he weaves a set of narratives and critiques in which he lays bare the anti-democratic tendencies that are on display in a growing age of lawlessness and disposability. He not only makes clear that inequality is not good for the economy, social bonds, the environment, politics, and democracy, Yates also argues that capitalism in the current historical moment is marked by an age that thrives on racism, xenophobia, the purported existence of an alleged culture of criminality, and a massive system of inequality that affects all aspects of society. Worth repeating is that at the center of this book, unlike so many others tackling inequality, is an attempt to map a number of modalities that give shape and purpose to widespread disparities in wealth and income, including the underlying forces behind inequality, how it works to secure class power, how it undermines almost every viable foundation needed for a sustainable democracy, and what it might mean to develop a plan of action to produce the radical imagination and corresponding modes of agency and practice that can think and act outside of the reformist politics of capitalism.

Unlike so many other economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz who address the issue of inequality, Yates refuses the argument that the system is simply out of whack and can be fixed. Nor does he believe that capitalism can be described only in terms of economic structures. Capitalism is both a symbolic pathological economy that produces particular dispositions, values, and identities as well as oppressive institutional apparatuses and economic structures. Yates goes even further arguing that capitalism is not only about authoritarian ideologies and structures, it is also about the crisis of ideas, agency, and the failure of people to react to the suffering of others and to the conditions of their own oppression. Neoliberal capitalism has no language for human suffering, moral evaluation, and social responsibility. Instead, it creates a survival-of-the fittest ethos buttressed by a discourse that is morally insensitive, sadistic, cannibalistic, and displays a hatred of those whose labor cannot be exploited, do not buy into the consumerist ethic, or are considered other by virtue of their race, class, and ethnicity. Neoliberalism is the discourse of shadow games, committed to highlighting corporate power and making invisible the suffering of others, all the while leaving those considered disposable in the dark to fend for themselves.

Yates makes visible not only the economic constraints that bear down on the poor and disposable in the neoliberal age of precarity, he also narrates the voices, conditions, hardships and suffering workers have to endure in a variety of occupations ranging from automobile workers and cruise ship workers to those who work in restaurants and as harvester on farms. He provides a number of invaluable statistics that chart the injuries of class and race under capitalism but rather than tell a story with only statistics and mind boggling data, he also provides stories that give flesh to the statistics that mark a new historical conjuncture and a wide range of hardships that render work for most people hell and produce what has been called the hidden injuries of class. Much of what he writes is informed by a decade long research trip across the United States in which he attempted to see first-hand what the effects of capitalism have been on peoples’ lives, the environment, work, unions, and other crucial spheres that inform everyday life. His keen eye is particularly riveting as he describes his teaming up with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the 1970s and his growing disappointment with a union that increasingly betrayed its own principles.

For Yates, the capitalist system is corrupt, malicious, and needs to be replaced. Capitalism leaves no room for the language of justice, the social, or, for that matter, democracy itself. In fact, one of its major attributes is to hide its effects of power, racial injustice, militarized state violence, domestic terrorism, and new forms of disposability, especially regarding those marginalized by class and race. The grotesque inequalities produced by capitalism are too powerful, deeply rooted in the social and economic fabric, and unamenable to liberal reforms.  Class disparities constitute a machinery of social death, a kind of zombie-like machine that drains life out of most of the population poisoning both existing and future generations.

The politics of disposability has gone mainstream as more and more individuals and groups are now considered surplus and vulnerable, consigned to zones of abandonment, surveillance, and incarceration. At one level, the expansive politics of disposability can be seen in the rising numbers of homeless, the growing army of debt-ridden students, the increasingly harsh treatment of immigrants, the racism that fuels the school-to-prison pipeline, and the growing attack on public servants. On another level, the politics of disposability has produced a culture of lawlessness and cruelty evident by the increasing rollback of voting rights, the war waged against women’s reproductive rights, laws that discriminate against gays, the rise of the surveillance state, and the growing militarization of local police forces. Yates argues convincingly that there is a desperate need for a new language for politics, solidarity, shared responsibilities, and democracy itself. Yates sees in the now largely departed Occupy Movement an example of a movement that used a new discourse and set of slogans to highlight inequality, make class inequities visible, and to showcase the workings of power in the hands of the financial elite. For Yates, Occupy provided a strategy that can be and is being emulated by a number of groups, especially those emerging in the black community in opposition to police violence. Such a strategy begins by asking what a real democracy looks like and how does it compare to the current society in which we live. One precondition for individual and social agency is that the horizons for change must transcend the parameters of the existing society, and the future must be configured in such a way as to not mimic the present.

What is remarkable about The Great Inequality is that Yates does not simply provide a critique of capitalism in its old and new forms, he also provides a discourse of possibility developed around a number of suggested policies and practices designed to not reform capitalism but to abolish it. This is a book that follows in the manner of Dr. Martin Luther King’s call to break the silence. In it Yates functions as a moral witness in reporting on the hardships and suffering produced by grotesque forms of inequality. As such, he reveals the dark threats that capitalism in its ruthlessly updated versions poses to the planet. Yet, his narrative is never far from either hope or a sense that there is a larger public for whom his testimony matters and that such a public is capable of collective resistance. The Great Inequality also serves to enliven the ethical imagination, and speak out for those populations now considered outcast and voiceless. Yates provides a furious reading of inequality and the larger structure of capitalism. In doing so he exhibits a keen and incisive intellect along with a welcomed sense of righteous fury.

Notes.

[i] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, (New York, N.Y.: The Penguin Press, 2010), p. 12.

[ii] Giorgio Agamben, “The Security State and a theory of destituent power,” Philosophers for Change, (February 25, 2014). Online:

The security state and a theory of destituent power

[iii] Ibid., Agamben, “The Security State and a theory of destituent power,”

[iv] George Joseph, “Exclusive: feds regularly monitored black lives matter since ferguson,” Intercept (July 24, 2015). Online: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/24/documents-show-department-homeland-security-monitoring-black-lives-matter-since-ferguson/; Deirdre Fulton, “Exposed: Big Brother Targets Black Lives:Government spying can be an ‘effective way to chill protest movements,’ warns Center for Constitutional Rights,” CommonDreams (July 24, 2015). Online: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/07/24/exposed-big-brother-targets-black-lives

[v] Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), p. 46.

[vi] I have taken up the issue of neoliberalism extensively in Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008) . See also, David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Gerad Dumenil and Dominique Levy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Henry A. Giroux, Twilight of the Social (Boulder: Paradigm, 2013); Henry A. Giroux, and in Against the Violence of Organized Forgetting: Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014);

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: Zone Books 2015).

[vii] Michael D. Yates, “Occupy Wall Street and the Significance of Political Slogans,” Counterpunch, (February 27, 2013). Online:http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/27/occupy-wall-street-and-the-significance-of-political-slogans/

[viii] Paul Krugman, “Zombies Against Medicare,” New York Times (July 27, 2015). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/opinion/zombies-against-medicare.html?_r=0

This essay is excerpted from the introduction to The Great Inequality by Michael D. Yates.

 

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Contributing Editor Henry A. Giroux  currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

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=By= Gaither Stewart (Rome)

 

The worldwide influence of the Roman Catholic Church emanates from the Holy See,which is the Church’s central government headed by the Pope and physically located within the territory of the Vatican State inside the city of Rome with a population of 821. The Holy See has diplomatic relations with world nations which maintain two separate embassies in Rome: one to Italy and one to the Holy See. Now why the hell, one wonders, should Argentina or the USA, China or Gabon maintain diplomatic relations with a church? Likewise the Holy See has its embassies around the world, the nunciatures, while from day to day the Roman Church insists on meddling in Italy’s and world affairs. Today the Roman Catholic is effectively blocking new legislationon on same sex marriages and concommitant rights in Italy and other countries. One of the first demonstrative acts of each new pope is a triumphant cortege through the streets of “Italy”, just across the Tiber River from the Vatican.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne Sunday morning in the residential wasteland of Queens, New York, a friend I only thought I knew cited a famous quote of T.S. Eliot, words, my friend said, that had changed his life. As we lumbered through the barren streets of a non-descript neighborhood of non-descript houses and miniscule front yards of dry yellow grass, he suddenly took my arm and apropos of nothing pronounced:

“The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

To the two young men walking through dismal Queens, both inebriated with the hubris of youth and morning vodka, two doubters unmindful of even the possibility of God and the debate raging about it, those words spoken in the suburban desert rang humbling, menacing and earth-shaking. Silence followed. Neither of us commented.

In the many years since that day in Queens I have never seen the Eliot play performed, and of the film of the same name I recall chiefly the scenes of debauchery of two young friends of 12^th century England, one a King, the other his Chancellor and future Archbishop of Canterbury.. Still, the text of Murder in the Cathedral is enduring and lives apart from the performance of play or film as befits the artistic work of a Nobel writer (1948).

At home in Rome I occasionally I pull down from the shelf the azure and deep red Faber & Faber edition of the book, anxiously awaiting the lines I first heard on that hot Queens street. Now, in these spring-like winter days I by chance saw a documentary film on the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket and as a Rome resident I follow Pope Francis’ bid for more temporal power, often with the 12^th century Archbishop, Thomas Becket, in mind.

Living in Catholic Rome and in the proximity of the Islamic world makes you constantly aware of the age-old persisting power struggle between state and church. The Roman Catholic Church seems to see temporal power as the chief aim of its ministry on earth while an analogous dichotomy between state and religion exists on the Islamic side of the Mediterranean Sea.

In any case, I find that Eliot’s play is an auspicious start for a look at the classical power struggle. The individual’s opposition to authority as was that of Thomas Becket, is even more pertinent in today’s globalization than it was in Eliot’s time in the 1930s when fascism was rising in Europe. Although Thomas Becket’s internal struggles are the essence of the play, the of secular vs. religious power continues to plague mankind. Those two struggles are the subject of this essay.

 

                                PART ONE

The Events

In 1163, the two friends, Thomas Becket (1118-1170), Archbishop of Canterbury and the English King, Henry II (1133-1189), quarreled over the respective power roles of the English Church and Henry’s state in change. So stormy did the dispute become that Becket escaped to France to rally support for the Church against the pressures of the State of Henry II. Seven years later, after an apparent reconciliation with his old friend, Becket returned to England only to be murdered in his Canterbury cathedral by four of Henry’s knights.

 

His assassination nearly a millennium ago reminds us of the political murder in modern times of the Archbishop Oscar Romero at the altar of a chapel in El Salvador in 1980. Like Becket’s early relationship with the King Henry, Oscar Romero was at first considered an ally of the ruling oligarchy of El Salvador in the grip of US imperialism. However, after he was named Archbishop in 1977, mounting repression, attacks on the clergy, murders of priests and the misery of the poor changed his views. Romero became a spokesman for the poor and the Liberation Theology so despised by reactionary governments on the one hand and by the popes of Rome on the other. Oscar Romero boycotted the new President’s inauguration on July 1, 1977, denying him the blessing of the Catholic Church, declared the election invalid and outlined in a sermon a moral justification for mutiny against state power.

As Thomas had intimated 800 years earlier, Romero said: “If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. If the threats come to be fulfilled, from this moment I offer my blood to God for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador. Let my blood be a seed of freedom.”. Though he is already called San Romero in El Salvador, a saint-martyr for the faith, the Roman Church still rejects his sanctification because it would be the same as approving the radical pro-poor movement, Liberation Theology, which during the Cold War (and still today) was seen by political power as a Marxist Trojan horse that would allow communism into South America. The complex procedure for Romero’s canonization only began in 1997, twenty years after his murder. Still not a Church saint, Romero was merely beatified as a sop to the “people” by Pope Francis on May 23, 2015.
In the England of Henry II, the Crown and the Church were at war for supremacy. Thomas Becket was weaker and had to die. His was a martyr’s death. Three years later he was canonized and pilgrims flocked to his tomb, including a repentant Henry II himself, in search of epiphany.

The reality was less a story of martyrdom of Becket than it was a story of a political assassination, relevant in all times. While Romero’s assassination was in the name of capitalist imperialism, Thomas was murdered by the State of King Henry II in order to supplant Church law with the King’s State courts, to introduce trial by jury and constitutional and legal reforms. His assassination was a case of the wrong thing though for the right reason.

Eliot’s play is thus not just about the murder of Thomas Becket. It is also about standing up for what is right in the face of the temptations of power on the one hand and glory on the other. Henry expected Thomas to allow him to exploit his friendship and his church title in order to abuse the power of the Church for the benefit of the State. Thomas refused—a courageous display of not giving into state power’s pressures. Here, Thomas did the right thing for the wrong personal reasons. Somewhere within this narrow interpretation of Eliot’s intention, apparently lay my drunken friend’s epiphany which he claimed changed his life. And who can smirk and presume that he exaggerated that hot morning in Queens?

As a matter of political approach—and unlike T.S. Eliot in his play—I am more interested here in the social aims of King Henry II than in the qualms of conscience of Archbishop Thomas Becket.

In our daily lives many of us do not yet have someone as powerful as Henry II breathing down our necks. But we do face moral challenges. How to say No! at the risk of being different?  Join the majority or dare to remain independent?  Display your intelligence or be “cool” all-American and act dumb?

As Oscar Romero showed, power struggles are not all the same. But the issues in this play are disturbingly real and perilously relevant to today’s world: man’s nearly meaningless place in the conflicts of this era of authoritarian military-industrial power combined confusedly with the churches of philistine fundamentalism, God-is-on-our-side hypocrisy dominating human affairs.

On the first level, Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral is a play in verse about the dangers of temptations on the way to sainthood or to political power. Thomas Becket resisted several temptations coupled with cajolery and threat. He is offered a return to political power alongside King Henry while at the same time he is accused of disloyalty to the nation and his ecclesiastical office and threatened physically. He is tempted with a return to his halcyon youth with his friend Henry, and the concomitant danger of being forgotten by history.

While Thomas if lured by a return to political power, he also tempted by the glory of sainthood for all eternity. He is offered both the glory of martyrdom and earthly pleasure, both of which he sees as human weaknesses. Not wanting to be “compromised”, he declines the temptation of earthly power. But like Islamic shahids today he allows himself to become God’s instrument and succumbs to the temptation of eternal glory—his fatal weakness: he allows his pride to lead him to a martyr’s death at the hands of power’s executioners: “the right deed for the wrong reason.”

Maybe he did not really seek death but his fate did not permit him to act otherwise. To the tempters he responds with these famous words:

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain;

       Temptation shall not come in this kind again.

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

One may justly reject the idea that the martyrdom as a religious heretic of Giordano Bruno in Rome or that of Sophie Scholl as a political dissident in Nazi Munich really contributes much to some greater good because man can live a moral life, full of good deeds, without God, and without ultimate sacrifices to a greater good. As Dostoevsky writes: …harmony …is not worth the tears of that one tortured child.

                                PART TWO

Temporal Power

The temporal power of the Roman Catholic Church refers to the political and governmental activities of the Church as distinguished from its spiritual mission. power.

The Popes of Rome named themselves God’s vicars on earth. The former Papal States in Italy achieved the status of a country with relations with other countries. When on Christmas day in the year 800 the Pope crowned Charlemagne Emperor, the Roman Church gained power over the entire Holy Roman Empire. Church and State were one.

In our times, though officialy separated, Church and State are again often one. Distant from its religious doctrine and its pastoral mission, the Church’s temporal bent is one of its worst aspects which the Church explains is an unavoidable bridge that must be crossed in order to disseminate the Christian faith: earthly power is considered necessary to spread the doctrine of Jesus Christ. In any case, over and over again religions have shown that they have no capacity for temporal power.

We see the proof in practice today in the exercise of power in the USA under the sway of a mystical sort of Americanistic religious persuasion bordering on voodooism infected with the disease of false religion.

As Henry II had done before him, Napoleon abolished the Church’s temporal power and in his conquests dissolved the Papal States as natural rivals for power. Temporal power was then restored to the Church by the Congress of Vienna of 1815 when Napoleonic laws were abolished.

Back in power, the reactionary Church returned to the destruction of modern improvements and reforms, forcing society back to medieval days, for example in Italy banning vaccination against smallpox which then devasted peoples in Papal lands. The Jews were again locked in the Rome ghetto, while the Church’s historic neglect of the environment made of Latium—except for rich Papal estates—the most godforsaken part of Italy.

Finally, in the nineteenth century the new Italian Republic which united the diverse states of the peninsula declared an end to the Papal States. Formally, the Church’s temporal power ended in 1929 with a treaty, the Concordat, between the Vatican State and Italy, according to which the papacy was to have no more political interests in Italy and the rest of the world.

But the meddling of the Roman Catholic Church in temporal affairs has never ended. Its continues to be worldwide. The popes and their bishops pressure temporal society on a wide spectrum of civil issues such as marriage and the role of the family, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, same sex marriage and all progressive legislation. Internationally, the Pope makes statements in favor of peace but carefully refrains from serious criticism of the United States from where come substantial funds to pay for the huge Church bureaucracy. In ethics, the Church line is the “defense of life” in all its aspects, except for capital punishment.

Faith and Politics

Before shifting my point of view to Henry, a few words about Eliot’s faith and a guess at his reasons for writing this powerful text, the second and underlying level of his play. The question is germane. Though Eliot embraced Christianity, the more I get to know him the more I wonder if he really believed. Did he believe in what he wrote here and in his Notes Toward A Definition of Culture? In his play, King Henry only hovers in the background as the representation of Thomas’ past of pleasure, his present of contrast and threat, and the mysterious future. Thomas Becket stands on center stage as if the writer. T.S. Eliot were searching in the Archbishop’s psyche for answers about his own faith—the temptations, doubts and hesitations Eliot the super but uncertain intellectual felt about his faith and his choices.

Among spiritual thinkers and seekers, Eliot returns often to Dante and Shakespeare. Dante, whose universe is dominated by Satan and whose Hell has much more to do with Church and secular politics than religion. Eliot must have known what Thomas-Eliot would say if only he had faith. If only he lived in a world of faith. In the voice of Thomas Becket in the end seeking to purify his motives for accepting martyrdom, Eliot says it: “I have had a tremor of bliss, a wink of heaven, a whisper, And I would no longer be denied.”

Yes, most certainly the writer had his doubts. Not as Dostoevsky, yet, a tremor. A clairvoyant glimpse toward the future. I believe Eliot wanted to believe but I do not believe he even believed he believed. Born to an age of avant-garde thought defined by its rejection of faith in God, Eliot did made faith respectable. Yet his faith seems to have been based on hope. And it was largely aesthetic, prompting Harold Bloom’s remark that T.S. Eliot aspired to the triple identity he claimed of royalist, Christian, and classicist “with considerable bad faith.” In Notes Toward the Definition of Culture written after World War II, Eliot wrote of religion in the USSR some lines pertinent today, especially the last phrase:

“From the official Russian point of view there are two objections to religion: first, religion is apt to provide another loyalty than that claimed by the State; and second, there are several religions in the world still firmly maintained by many believers.”

Or, he might have added, the concomitant danger of conformity of the State to religion as is the case in puritan America.

You can encounter super believers anywhere, those supercilious religious people-bigots who feel superior, convinced that God sustains their actions. The result is their assurance that the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan are holy and that war crimes are just. In their view the just war is a religious war. And in fact, religion is at the heart of many of history’s wars. As a rule, the fundamentalist Fascist State uses religion as a tool to manipulate people. The organized religions through which Power works become malleable tools for perpetrating the crime of wars of conquest. This is not necessarily the fault of the religious impulse in human beings. It is the fault of organized religion itself which today justifies the odious slogans in the USA of “our way of life” and “they (the others) hate our freedoms.” It is the way the self-proclaimed vicars of Christ exploit organized religion.

If not for Eliot’s own religious hang-up, his play Murder In the Cathedral could have centered on politics, not morality and the spiritual instinct. Instead, for a great part the play is seen from an individual religious point of view.

In that sense the murder of Thomas Becket at Canterbury was of less importance for us than the assassination of Archbishop Romero in El Salvador. Thomas’ was in fact more a rogue killing by soldiers who thought they were carrying out what their King wanted done. Maybe Becket died from an act of stupidity—which was most certainly not the case of the murder of Oscar Romero. State power knew exactly what it was doing.

Still, because of the temporal power of the Catholic Church in the England of Henry II, murdering an archbishop was a dangerous act. Not so for the perpetrators in the El Salvador of our times where the hierarchy of the Roman Church stood on the side of brutal imperialist-capitalist power. To Eliot and the modern reader, Thomas’ murder was of much less importance than the democratic belief that not even the king is above the law. For that reason, I believe, Eliot centered the play on Becket’s motives for sainthood, not on his resistance nor on Henry’s potential quest for redemption, and who knows? perhaps the King really hoped for an epiphany. Though the play was written at the time of the rising of Fascism and Nazism in Europe and can be understood also as an individual’s opposition to authority as in the Sophocles play Antigone, Becket’s internal struggle over his opposition to Henry II is in my reading secondary.

Having come into conflict with secular authority, the Archbishop is visited by a succession of tempters urging him alternately to avoid conflict and give in to the King, or, to seek martyrdom. While three priests consider the rise of temporal power, Becket instead reflects on the inevitability of martyrdom, which, though he embraces it, he also interprets it as a sign of his own fatal weakness. Eliot’s Becket thus becomes a Christ figure whose role is the martyr, reflecting the writer’s own quest for faith—aesthetic or genuine, who knows? In any case, Eliot’s Becket is led step by step to provoke violence against himself and to submit to it. Self-murder or suicide? Or martyrdom of both suffering and the resulting glory?

 

Henry II, Great Grandson of the Norman Conqueror

Though the King never appears in Eliot’s play, his shadow is a powerful presence, his power fills Thomas’s past and present. “O Henry, O my King” he laments, while the chorus chants: “The King rules.” Yet though a shadow, the King is human. And state power is real. The priests declaim: “But as for our King, that is another matter.” Or: “Had the King been greater, or had he been weaker Things had perhaps been different for Thomas.”

Though the author T.S. Eliot leaves little room for partisanship, I began to side with the shadow which is King Henry. In real life the King’s struggles against a strong-willed wife and unruly sons and his relationship with his friend Thomas Becket detract from his accomplishments and lasting influence on Anglo-Saxon judicial systems. Eliot however did not favor the King role at all which the Tempter notes when he offers Thomas eternal glory after a martyr’s death:

“When King is dead, there’s another king,

And one more king is another reign.

King is forgotten, when another shall come:

Saint and martyr rule from the tomb.”

Henry II improved the affairs of his kingdom, reaching from Scotland to the Pyrenées. Though he failed to subject the Church to his courts, his judicial reforms endured. His centralized system of justice and modern court procedures replaced the old trial by ordeal. He initiated the concept of “common law” administered by royal courts, thus encroaching on feudal courts and on the jurisdiction of Church courts. He decreed that priests should be tried in royal courts, not in Becket’s ecclesiastical courts.

Henry’s aim was the overthrow of the feudal system, unknowingly to him paving the way for the role of the bourgeoisie and capitalism and making him an active link in Marx’s historical dialectic. To achieve that he had to control the Church by combining under the crown of England both State and Church. Neither Becket nor the faith could stand in his way. He did not eliminate the Church; he absorbed it and used it. For the same reasons modern political leaders of West and East use religion, wrapping themselves in religious language and religious issues—our Christian values, our Christian heritage and God is on our side.

Now, a leap ahead of five centuries to the English Revolution and the three civil wars beginning in 1642. Henry II could not know what he was setting in motion and would have been horrified at the results. For the most radical achievements of the English bourgeois revolution were the temporary abolition and permanent weakening of the monarchy, confiscation of both Church and aristocratic estates. Though not a working-class movement with a revolutionary theory, the English Revolution declared the monarchy “unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people.” Henry’s impulse resulted centuries later in the execution of the King, a redefinition of the English monarchy and the “dangerous and useless” House of Lords, and the proclamation of a republic.

That is not to say that those 17^th century men were particularly foresighted. Still, until recent times western men could see our problems in secular terms because our ancestors had put an end to the use of the Church as a persecuting instrument of political masters.

As long as the power of his state was weak, as Henry II understood, the Church could tell people what to believe and how to behave, as do Roman popes today. For behind the threats and censures of the Church, all the terrors of hell fire are real for its unfree believers-subjects. Under Church control as in El Salvador social and political conflicts become also religious conflicts.

In 17^th century England the haute bourgeoisie was terrified of the revolutionary torrent it had let loose. It needed a reformed monarchy responsive to its interests, to check the flow of popular feeling. It also needed the Church of England. The fear then was today’s fear: that the people will rise in revolt in mighty numbers against the rotten capitalist order, which as Marx predicted is indeed rapidly hanging itself with its own rope. As according to Marx religion is the “opium of the people” and is the close and inalienable ally of political power.

A second lesson of the historically under-rated English Revolution was the Revolution’s need for organization. People must choose sides. To decide, they must know what they are fighting for. They learned that freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are the first freedoms to fight for. The ruling bourgeoisie needed the people … yet it feared them. Therefore it kept also the monarchy as a check against too much democracy. The condition of the petty bourgeoisie of 17^th century England was similar to that of the former middle class in the USA today, where what was once the middle class, filled with all its false consciousness, is dependent on the corrupt system, dominated and rocked to sleep by the blandishments and rewards given them by the minute upper class.

Therefore, in order to change things, the urgent need for a movement of the lower classes—and an informed and educated class to lead the way—both liberated from the binds of religious fundamentalists in the pay of the system.

Civilizations and cultures have meanwhile gone their own ways, some helped along the way, some hindered. Revolution to revolution, social progress and social setbacks. Who knows if civilization has really peaked and its time is up? While we battle for survival, the question of social evolution remains open. The State-Church equation is different today. The issue is raw power itself, Power in which religion is so enmeshed as to be one and the same with the disastrous results before us.

As Thomas Becket says to the tempter suggesting a return to his past of power and glory, “singing at nightfall, whispering in chambers”:

“We do not know very much of the future

Except that from generation to generation

The same things happen again and again.

Men learn little from others’ experience.

The same time returns. Sever

The cord, shed the scale. Only

The fool, fixed in his folly, may think

He can turn the wheel on which he turns.”

 

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Senior Editor Gaither Stewart, based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was just published by Punto Press.

 

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[box type=”download”] The Oath Keepers—allowing for a different age and a different national culture—are the US version of the German Freikorps, an ultra-right wing armed militia composed mostly of unemployed former WWI soldiers and virtually organized with the support or direct guidance of the Reichswehr to combat workerist and communist mobilizations and uprisings during the turmoil engulfing Germany between the wars. Many in the Freikorps would later join the growing Nazi party. The fact they are allowed to strut around, intimidate, take up sniper positions and other acts not remotely allowed regular citizens, let alone Ferguson residents, is proof conclusive where the state sides in this social and race conflict.

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This is the Wiki’s passage on them:
In the early 20th century, Freikorps were raised to fight against the newly formed Weimar Republic, as well as their left-wing counterparts, through the early 1920s. These paramilitary organizations “roamed the countryside, killing with impunity.”^[1] “They engaged in bloody confrontations with republican loyalists and engineered some of the more notorious assassinations” of the Weimar period, and are widely seen as a “precursor to Nazism”.^[2] An entire series of Freikorps awards also existed, mostly replaced in 1933 by the Honor Cross for World War I veterans.

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ABC US News | World News

READ BELOW HOW AP REPORTED THE SITUATION

[learn_more] The return of an armed militia group patrolling the streets of Ferguson drew criticism Tuesday from both protesters and the county police chief overseeing security amid ongoing demonstrations marking the anniversary of 18-year-old Michael Brown’s shooting death. St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said the overnight presence of the Oath Keepers, wearing camouflage bulletproof vests and openly carrying rifles and pistols on West Florissant Avenue, the hub of marches and protests for the past several days, was “both unnecessary and inflammatory.”

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Belmar plans to ask county prosecutor Bob McCulloch about the legality of armed patrols by the far-right anti-government activist group, which largely comprises past and present members of the military, first responders and police officers. But Missouri law allows anyone with a concealed carry permit to openly display a firearm anywhere in the state. John Karriman, a representative of the group who teaches at the Missouri Southern State University police academy, said there were five armed Oath Keepers at the Monday night protests and that another 45 or so unarmed group members were stationed nearby to try to help keep the peace. He said members plan to remain in Ferguson “at least through the end of the week.” “A handful of us were visible,” Karriman, a former police officer in Joplin, Missouri who ran unsuccessfully as a Libertarian Party candidate for county sheriff in southwest Missouri. “The rest of us are behind the scenes.”

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Oath Keepers previously showed up in Ferguson in November after a grand jury declined to indict former Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in Brown’s death, saying they stationed themselves along several downtown rooftops to protect businesses from rioting and looters. Karriman said the group stepped in only after Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon declined to summon the National Guard in the aftermath of the grand jury decision. County police ordered them to leave then, but group members intermittently returned. The five armed Oath Keepers, all of whom appeared to be white, interacted freely with police late Monday and early Tuesday but endured catcalls and jeers from demonstrators. Protest organizer Nabeehah Azeez called the presence of the armed men “a contradiction in how things work.” “The rules don’t apply to everyone,” she said. “If those were black men walking around with rifles, they probably wouldn’t be living today.”[/learn_more]

A RIGHTWING V FOR VENDETTA

FACT TO REMEMBER:
IF THE WESTERN MEDIA HAD ITS PRIORITIES IN ORDER AND ACTUALLY INFORMED, EDUCATED AND UPLIFTED THE MASSES INSTEAD OF SHILLING FOR A GLOBAL EMPIRE OF ENDLESS WARS, OUTRAGEOUS ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND DEEPENING DEVASTATION OF NATURE AND THE ANIMAL WORLD,  HORRORS LIKE THESE WOULD HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED MANY YEARS, PERHAPS DECADES AGO.  EVERY SINGLE DAY SOCIAL BACKWARDNESS COLLECTS ITS OWN INNUMERABLE VICTIMS. 

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Mayor Should Fire All Protesting Cops and Apply Savings to Better Things

BY DAVE LINDORFF
(PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGES TO EXPAND)

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