By Steve Bolton
Within a matter of months, Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez and Karl Ratzinger, i.e. Pope Benedict VI, were swept from the world
stage, amid sure signs that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and famed South African
anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela are soon to follow. These men had poor
track records in defending the rights of the poor, but they were the last
leaders of real significance left on the planet espousing any brand of ideology
with eveb a whiff of egalitarianism. Despite their many mistakes they may be
sorely missed, for in their absence we may now be entering an unprecedented era
in world history, in which there will be no resistance left to the elites
hell-bent on enforcing inequality in every nook and cranny on the globe.
My words should not be construed as a dirge for
Chavez or Castro, who had many glaring faults that ought to blunt any praise
they might have otherwise deserved. It is a lament that even what little good
they did is certain to be swept away by the tide of commercial values and
capitalist economic policies, which the U.S. and its European allies have
succeeded in systematically implanting in every corner of the planet. There is
plenty of resistance brewing to their fading hegemony, but it is confined to
Islamic fundamentalists and the rising powers of East Asia, all of whom whole heartedly
support capitalism and the inequality it produces; the only difference is that
their visions of the New World Order are built on establishing inequality on
different lines, using money as a tool to gain power on the world stage, not
for the conspicuous consumption Western elites are fond of. We are unlikely to
see any kind of egalitarian ideology emerge from the rising powers of these two
regions of the Third World, for the roots of their civilizations they spring
from have never exhibited any kind of esteem for equality. To anyone who has
actually read the Koran and Hadiths, it is quite clear that Mohammed cared little
more for social justice than he did for women’s rights; he enjoined rich
Muslims to give alms to the poor, but never restricted the business practices
that have allowed them to get rich at the expense of the poor in the first
place. In fact, much of his writings are devoted to divvying up the spoils of
war, in which Muslim soldiers are clearly authorized to seize the goods and
rape the wives of their heathen enemies. Mencius, Confucius and Buddha had far
better track records in these regards, but even in epochs the philosophies they
spawned were at the peak of their influence, they had no effect on the
political economy of the Far East, which was always run by despots. What little
admiration there is for social justice in the Far East was introduced through
the minor inroads of Christianity, or by Marxism, a degenerate Western
imitation of Christian equality spawned when the West began to reject
Christianity itself. In the last two centuries, Buddhism has declined more than
any other major religion, thanks largely to a deluge of persecution by various
Communist regimes, and shows no signs of a genuine revival anytime soon.[i]
Hinduism has been suffering a non-stop decline ever since ancient times, when
it once stretched from present-day Afghanistan and Iran as far east as Indonesia,
to the point that it is now limited to a mere majority of the population of the
Indian subcontinent, alongside rapidly growing minorities of Muslims and
Christians. Furthermore, we would be least likely to see any new equalitarian
ideology arise out of Hinduism, given its disgusting, degenerate caste system,
which explicitly and quite wickedly confirms the supposed moral and spiritual
superiority of the rich Brahmin class.
Catholic Civilization and the Origins of
Social Justice
The whole
concept of social justice originated with Christianity, particularly in its
most orthodox, Catholic branches; it is a historical fact, for example, that
our modern ideas about human rights and democracy originated with Catholic
Poland in the 16th Century. Since that time, the people of the Western world
have gradually rejected the Catholic values that their civilization was founded
on, including the explicit system of business ethics and detailed economic
philosophy that made the Renaissance possible, in favor of Protestant, atheist,
agnostic or pagan ideas that are almost always inequitable in some manner.
Among these ideas was capitalism, which was born in the 16th Century as the
antithesis of every Catholic idea about economics and social justice. Marxism
was born in the mid-19th Century to counter the grotesque inequality brought
about by that philosophy, but was doomed to fail since it amounted to a
degenerate aping of the social justice that authentic Christianity demands.
Furthermore, the Communist system that Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and their ilk preached
as a replacement was the product of an Ivory Tower that proved unworkable in
practice. Yet Marxism did serve one constructive purpose before its final,
inevitable fall at the end of the last century: it forced the leaders of
capitalist countries to grudgingly grant limited reforms like minimum wages,
unions and safe workplace laws, in order to woo the working classes away from
the Marxist alternative. Now that Marxism is dead – even in China, which actually
practices a particularly rabid form of capitalism – the kid gloves are off. It
has been open season on the working classes and peasantry of the whole planet
throughout the whole post-Cold War period, but since Western civilization is
also considered “post-Christian,” we are unlikely to see any new movement for
real equality emerge in North America or Europe anytime soon. What little
remains of such noble concepts as “freedom” and “human rights” in my country
and its kin are tainted by the widespread rejection of the Christianity that
gave them birth, leading to their perversion for opposite purposes in Orwellian
fashion. “Economic freedom” now means the liberty for the rich to steal a man’s
house and livelihood, while “free love” also allows them to steal a man’s wife;
under the influence of such stupid ideas, the legal systems of the West are now
geared to preventing governments from exercising their main function, which is
to prevent one group of citizens from preying upon another in precisely these
ways. Human rights now means the right to do inhuman things, such as to commit
sodomy or deliberately tarnish the divine aspect of sex by breaking taboos
against other perversions – or even worse, the “right” to permanently take away
the rights of unborn children, through such “humane” methods as chopping them
up with a uterine curette
or crushing their skulls with cranioclasts.[ii]
Abortion has claimed about a billion lives worldwide in the last 40 years, in
the greatest Holocaust in human history against the most powerless set of
victims imaginable. Any civilization that doesn’t understand what is unjust
about this global crime wave against the unborn is never going to accept any
teachings about social justice in lesser matters, such as socioeconomic
equality. Yet the most common motivations for abortion by far are tied to some
commercial advantage on the part of the mother in some way, such a desire to
finish high school or college without the distraction of a child, or because it
might otherwise interfere with their career or financial plans; the same
commercialism and class prejudice that feeds socioeconomic inequality thus also
produces abortion as well. Yet even the handful of Westerners who still dare to
criticize abortion in public typically water its roots in this way, by
supporting right-wing political factions which promote that very same
commercialism and class prejudice.
It
is unlikely that the apostate nations of North America and Europe will ever
find their way out of this predicament anytime soon, so we will have to look
elsewhere in Christendom for a revival of genuine social justice. Given that
the Catholic Church and brands of Protestantism most akin to it are growing
like wildfire in sub-Saharan Africa, in the process of converting half a
continent in the unprecedented time span of just one century, we might hold out
some hope for a revival of authentic egalitarianism there in the long run. By
the standards of our ancestors, the brand of Christianity sweeping through the
Dark Continent is more orthodox than any other on the planet, without
succumbing either to the heresies common among the falsely labeled “liberals”
on the political Left or the so-called “conservatives” on the political Right.
The peasantry of Africa has direct experience with the horrific consequences of
unregulated capitalism, which is chiefly responsible for the spread of
starvation and other social plagues in the Third World in our day. Yet the
Church is still in its infancy in Africa, but not in Latin America, which has
been less susceptible to the Falling Away experienced by the post-Christian nations
of the West. The southern two-thirds of the Western Hemisphere have also been notorius
since the days of Columbus for their level of inequality. The gaps between the
rich and poor are so wide in some Latin American countries that they have
stunted the growth of their national power, particularly in the case of Brazil.
At independence in the early 19th Century, many of these countries had
competent manufacturing bases, but because the rich elites preferred to import
cheaper luxury goods from competitors like France and Britain, they opted for
low tariffs that quickly wiped out their nascent industrial sectors; the U.S.,
on the other hand, had a smaller gap between its rich and poor at independence,
as well as abundant farmland that had not been monopolized by oligarchs, so it
opted for high tariffs that slowly built it into a manufacturing powerhouse.
Furthermore, the elites of Latin America had little incentive to fund public
education in comparison to that of America, since their economies were tied to
the extraction of raw materials which took less skilled labor. As a result of
this inequality, the U.S. became a superpower while its Latin neighbors became
neocolonies that foreigners used as a milch cow. The great tragedy of Latin America is that it is has always had the means at hand to repair the gap in wealth that mired its people in misery and sapped the strength of its nations, yet has never availed itself of the great treasures of Catholic social teaching on economics. In fact, the oligarchical system was implanted back in the days of the conquistadores as a direct consequence of numerous rejections of Catholic teaching. For example, Pope Eugene IV excommunicated anyone involved in the slave trade as early as 1435, half a century before Columbus stumbled upon the Americas, bringing with him the first links to the slave trade networks that the Portuguese, Spanish and English had taken over from Muslims in North Africa. Prior to this, the Catholic Church had slowly stamped out slavery in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, by a gradual curtailment of the privileges of slave owners until it was commuted to ever-softer forms of serfdom. Eugene IV’s bull was the first of many condemnations of slavery issued by the Vatican over many centuries, long before the abolitionists of America and England got their acts together in the 1800s. Yet the conquistadores and their descendants simply ignored these toothless commands from the other side of the planet, including incessant directives from some Spanish monarchs and Catholic clergy against exploiting the Indian populations under their authority. During the Cold War, a wide section of the Latin clergy worked tirelessly for the rights of the poor descendants of the slaves and Indians and were persecuted for it, often by their own ecclesiastical superiors, but this pattern of division and persecution goes all the way back to the 16th Century. This division literally came over on the boat with the conquistadores and priests, who sometimes emigrated together from Europe and then were pitted against each other soon after their arrival. Among the most famous Native American rights activists was Bartolome de las Casas (1484-1566), but there were many others, such as the missionary Juan del Valle, and some who paid with their lives for evangelizing the Indians, like Antonio de Valdivieso, the bishop of Nicaragua and Cristobal de Pedraza, the bishop of Honduras.[iii] Some of Latin America’s new clergy sold out to the new oligarchs and stayed silent about the exploitation of the black slaves and Native Americans, just as many in Europe were turning a blind eye to the Church’s numerous mandatory teachings on economic ethics, which received less emphasis with each passing century as the Church progressively weakened in the West following the Reformation.[iv] Because so little emphasis has been placed for so long on these teachings or the good examples of men like Valdivieso and Pedraza, many reformers over the centuries who have had their hearts in the right places have gotten it into their heads that the Catholic Church is an obstacle to social justice. In truth, it and its Jewish precursors developed the concept in the first place, and to this day it possesses the only workable blueprint for putting it into practice.
The Ancient Roots of Distributism
Just as anyone willing to stoop low enough to murder
their own unborn child to save a few bucks is never going to comprehend social
justice, anyone who can’t see why beating a fellow man half to death to force
him to work would never grasp the Catholic bans on more sophisticated forms of
exploitation. These teachings have been falling into desuetude since the Middle
Ages, when they helped Europe survive a thousand years of barbarian invasions
and plagues like the Black Death long enough to forge the Renaissance; many of
the same sneaky techniques employed by Catholics and their clergy in the 20th Century
to avoid unpopular commandments that protect the sanctity of the family, such
as the bans on contraception and divorce, were first pioneered by those seeking
to legitimate capitalism. What they all aim at, in practice, is to prevent the
rich from employing a series of dirty tricks to get richer at the expense of
everyone else. Social justice does not mean feeding the poor; it means making
sure they are not impoverished by others in the first place. Philanthropy is
also a poor substitute, especially when the rich simply give back a portion of
what they gained unjustly in the first place. As the famed American convert
Dorothy Day (1897-1980) once put it, “If you feed the poor, you're called a
saint, but if you ask why they're poor, you're called a Communist.” The reason
why the gap between the rich and poor is growing so quickly across the planet
today is because of the philosophy of capitalism, which is a distillation of
the opposite of the Catholic Church’s social teachings on these matters. For
the sake of convenience I’ll sum them up as the Seven Deadly Economic Sins;
this is a term of my own invention, but the condemnations of the individual
sins themselves were promulgated by saints and other authorities with real
competence, including popes and church councils who enjoyed the charism of
infallibility. You would think the simplest commands, against direct theft and
fraud, would be easy enough for capitalists to follow, given their obsession
with the inviolability of property rights. Yet since capitalism was born during
the Reformation, its history has been littered with numerous instances of mass
theft of public property, beginning with the confiscation of the Catholic
Church’s charities and other property, then the massive theft of public land
that began with the English enclosure movement of the 17th Century and has
since spread across the globe; one of the most recent examples was the looting
of public property by the new billionaires who took over Eastern Europe
following the fall of Communism. Fraud is not only routinely practiced in the
open toda but has been institutionalized, using deceptive advertising and clever
marketing techniques such as planned obsolescence.
The embracing of the other five deadly economic sins,
however, is what really sets capitalism apart from any other economic
philosophy. As far back as Old Testaments times, market cornering, paying unjust
wages, charging unjust prices, usury and speculation were condemned by the
Jewish prophets and in some cases directly forbidden by the Mosaic Law. Even
property rights were not considered sacrosanct to Moses, who authorized the
poor to glean food from the fields of the well-to-do. This centerpiece of this
unique economic system was the Jubilee, which necessitated that any land
purchased since the last Jubilee was to return to its original owners without
compensation; in this sense it amounted to the world’s first permanent system
of land reform, which prevented an oligarchy from forming. The rich were thus
not allowed to hoard the means of production, which in turn meant that they had
less leverage to extract unjust prices from their consumers and pay unjust
wages to their employees. It also meant that they had fewer spare assets to
lend at interest, which Moses also forbade in no uncertain terms. As the
generations passed and these laws fell into desuetude, complaints by the Old
Testament prophets about these particular forms of economic sin multiplied.
This column is too short of a space to give an exhaustive list of sources for
the numerous condemnations of them which fill both the Old and New Testaments,
both of which were extremely unfriendly to the rich and their chief means of
extracting wealth from the populace. Nor is there sufficient room to do justice
to all of the writings of the saints who preached exactly the same things after
New Testament times, by faithfully handing on precisely the same principles
well into the late Middle Ages. Prior to the Reformation, guilds were formed
that protected both the rights of workers to a much greater degree than our
modern unions, while preserving a healthy level of competition but forbidding
cut-throat Darwinian struggles between firms. As G.K. Chesterton, the renowned
20th Century Catholic journalist, pointed out accurately, in medieval times
most of the shady business practices that the Robber Barons and their
successors were lauded for would have landed them time in a stockade,
particularly the crime of market cornering. Instead of ending up on the cover
of Fortune 500, the Donald Trumps of saner ages were punished severely for
stealing from the people. Many of the principles which animated that age were
also enshrined by infallible Church councils in union with various popes, who
expended much energy stamping out usury in particular. In councils like Lateran
II (1139), Lateran III (1179), Lyons (1274) and Vienne (1311) they specifically
said that the crime consisted of charging any interest whatsoever and that anyone
who questioned that teaching must be denied Christian burial. Today this
commandment is almost universally ignored, even by the highest levels of the
Church hierarchy, which has dared to establish a Vatican Bank that flaunts
these teachings every day. As a result, the planet has been plagued with
progressively larger debt crises in every generation since the 1600s, while in
between countless millions of human beings have suffered unjustly under the
yoke of debt peonage. Had the Catholic Church enforced its own laws by
excommunicating bankers and telling debtors the Good News that they are only
obligated to repay the principals on their loans, all of this misery could have
been avoided.So could all of the suffering caused by capitalism as it spread across the world like a stain in the 19th Century. It took Communism, a twisted atheistic reaction to it, to galvanize the Catholic Church to delineate and distill its economic teachings into a more formal theory, beginning with the Pope Leo XIII’s classical encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. State policy should be to encourage “as many as possible of the people to become owners,” which illuminates the key difference between distributism and other philosophies like capitalism, socialism and Communism: instead of putting the means of production in the hands of Big Government or Big Business, it divides them up among the common people as thinly as possible. Under the related principle of subsidiarity, bigger enterprises should only be called upon for bigger tasks; to build an Empire State Building, for example, you would need a much larger construction company, yet there is no reason why such a larger entity should be able to use its mere size to squash all of the smaller construction businesses that perform lesser tasks, like siding individual houses. By doing so, even those workers who could not become owners would benefit, since they would have wider choices of employers to both work for and buy from. As Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and other prominent Catholic writers who elaborated on the theory in the early 20th Century said quite clearly, however, it would take government interference in the economy to referee such a delicate balance, for history had already demonstrated that the “Invisible Hand” that would automatically balance the marketplace was merely a mirage in the addled mind of Adam Smith. In subsequent encyclicals like Quadragesimo Anno (1931), Mater et Magistra (1961), Pacem in Terris (1963), Populorum Progressio (1967), various popes confirmed the consistent Catholic teaching that property rights and are not unlimited and proclaimed that many policies despised by capitalists, such as progressive taxation and nationalization of key industries within reason.
The text of Matthew 13:52, “every Scribe trained for the Kingdom is like a householder who brings out of his storehouse new things and old,” is often applied to the theory of distributism, but there was little new in any of these encyclicals, which merely applied the same consistent, ancient set of principles to modern problems – all of which had arisen from failures to apply them previously. Although every pope since then has reaffirmed these teachings, albeit with less vigor, the theory of distributism has fallen into obscurity since writers like Chesterton and Belloc passed from the scene a half a century ago. In that time, capitalism has deepened in its bastions in the West and spread to every corner of the globe (often by force), now unchecked by the failed bogeyman of Communism. Without that threat, the mild reforms that capitalists were forced to put into practice in the West early in the last century, such as Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting efforts, unionization and the like, have been completely dismantled in the course of one generation. The labor unions of the 20th Century were merely crude analogues of the sophisticated guilds that maintained the rights of workers and competition simultaneously during the Middle Ages, but now even that fig leaf of protection for workers is gone, along with anti-trust legislation and any other check on capitalism. For the first time in human history, a single aggressive, inequitable economic philosophy reigns unchecked across the planet. It also happens to be a mirror image of Catholic social teaching in almost every respect, from its insistence on allowing businesses to devour each other, charge as much they want and pay as little as they can get away, to the routine gambling that goes on in financial markets, to the whole institution of usurious modern banking. Its spirit of commercialism and materialism is also manifestly contrary to the Gospel. Perhaps its worst aspect, however, is the class prejudice it promotes. The Bible is replete with warnings like Sirach 13:24 and 31:5-11 “that poverty is evil in the opinion of the ungodly” and that it is impossible to get rich without getting evil, or Proverbs 17:5 that “he who despises the poor slaps their Maker in the face.” Modern priests in the West are fond of explaining away the dire warning Jesus gave in Mark 10:25 “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” but all of the saints took it to mean exactly that: the rich are at special risk of eternal damnation. The last word on this subject is St. John Chrysostom’s classic Four Discourses, Chiefly on the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, in which he states clearly that the rich man in that parable went to a particularly hot place in Hell merely for ignoring Lazarus. Imagine how much hotter it would have been if he had enriched himself at the expense of Lazarus through illicit means.[v]
Chavez, Castro, Ortega and the Decline
of the Latin Left
Given that Latin America suffers from some of the
widest disparities of wealth on the planet and also has the world’s largest
concentration of both practicing and lapsed Catholics, it could be assumed that
this region would be the most likely place to find revolutionaries intent on
putting distributism into practice. The region indeed has a long tradition of
revolt against oppression, but it has born very little practical fruit in the
long run precisely because its reformers have looked elsewhere for their solutions
to rampant inequality and poverty. Because the specific commandments against
economic sin have gradually fallen into desuetude since the Middle Ages and
even the most orthodox Catholic leaders of recent times have failed to
emphasize distributism, it is highly likely that most of the rebels who have
sacrificed their lives for social justice in the last century have never known
that the Catholic Church offers a workable egalitarian alternative to Marxism.
That is probably also true of much of the region’s clergy, many of whom
succumbed to the allure of liberation theology, a heresy that flourished from
the 1960s through the 1980s among some of Latin America’s theologians, who
believed their only recourse was to adapt the faith to the worst elements of
Marxist philosophy. Most of the clerics who embraced the cause of social
justice in that era did not succumb to it, contrary to the outright lies of
many false “conservative” Catholics who interpret any kind of efforts to bring
about social and economic equality as “socialism.” This wing of the Church,
which is almost identical in behavior, beliefs and priorities to the Pharisees
in the New Testament, can be easily identified by its embrace of right-wing
economic policies which amount to heretical rejections of the Church’s
definitive and dogmatic commandments on economics. It is also prone to shrill
expressions of hatred towards Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was martyred in 1980
by right-wing death squads for championing the human rights of El Salvador’s poor
and oppressed. To anyone who has actually read his writings and listened to
what he actually said, his teachings on social justice not only had nothing in
common with liberation theology, but
were really quite tame compared to the writings of the saints who came before
him, let alone the practices and principles acted upon from Moses until the
late Middle Ages. During the Cold War the Latin clergy were split into three
groups, one which followed liberation theology, a second which looked the other
way at the numerous murders and outright genocide used by oligarchs to maintain
their system of exploitation, and a third which avidly pursued social justice
but which seemed at a loss to explain how to go about achieving it. The latter
group had some practical achievements using means like mild land reform,
increased government-supported social services for the poor, progressive
taxation and nationalization of key industries, all of which are explicitly
permitted by the Catholic Church. Yet in many cases they barely succeeded in
denting the great disparities in wealth, precisely because such means did not
directly address the economic sins that enable the rich to unjustly exploit the
poor and middle class in every capitalist country. The great tragedy is that
many of the leaders of the era who actually did care about their people had
little clue of what to do, except to flit between the first and third groups.
When they followed the heretics on the Left, they played into hands of the
heretics on the Right, and when they stayed to the middle course offered by the
orthodox Catholics in the third faction, they merely rehashed old Progressive
Era policies which have always proven insufficient to end exploitation.
The
latest generation of rebels is still flitting back and forth, muddling its way
through by rehashing the same mild reformist policies. Their poster boy was
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died on March 5. My assessment of him was
tepid from the time I first heard of him in 1992, when he led a failed coup
shortly after I completed my Master’s in history with a concentration in
U.S.-Latin American relations. The democratic institutions he tried to
overthrow were clearly riddled with corruption that made them subservient to
the local oligarchy, but instead of repairing the holes in its fabric, Chavez’
attempt to usurp power merely widened them. Left-wing coup leaders like Chavez
have been rare throughout the region’s history, with the vast majority being
tools of the elite, so any degradation of civilian institutions that paves the
way for further military meddling only serves to undermine the cause of
reformers in the long run. His idol, Fidel Castro, did even more damage by
assuming dictatorial powers at the advent of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. To be
fair, it is hard to see in retrospect how Castro could have retained power in a
democratic system even with the support of a large majority of the populace,
given how frequently and easily Washington resorted to shady tactics to thwart,
coopt, overthrow or even exterminate democratic leftists across the Third World
during his era.After taking office through the ballot box in 1998, Chavez acted in a more responsible manner than most of Venezuela’s past right-wing presidents, without damaging the cause of democracy half as much as his rabid opponents are fond of accusing him of, but his commitment to it certainly wobbled from time to time. His critics are also fond of calling him divisive, as if that were a bad thing; as I have pointed out many times before in this blog, Jesus himself said in Luke 12:49-53 and Matthew 10:34-37,“I have come to bring division. Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn 'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law - a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.' Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” The primary problem with most of the Latin American clergy in the last half millennium, including such future saints as Romero, is that they haven’t been nearly divisive enough. Chavez has also been falsely accused of being pro-abortion but this is only true of Castro, who committed the greatest blunder of the Cuban Revolution by giving his sanction (as America, the Soviet Union and all the other great powers did) to the greatest Holocaust in history merely because it was labeled “progressive.” Chavez has also been accused of being pro-gay marriage. These are merely smears on the reputation of Chavez by those who want to turn Venezuela’s Catholics against him; if anything, Chavez was an asset in helping prevent changes to the nation’s relatively restrictive abortion laws. The same is also true of Bolivian President Evo Morales, who was among the many like-minded Latin leaders who took power through elections around the beginning of this century – which was only possible today, now that the power of the U.S. has faded sufficiently that it can no longer rig elections and arrange right-wing military coups as routinely as it did throughout the 20th Century.
Other examples include Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista rebel who returned to power in Nicaragua in 2007, Mauricio Funes of El Salvador’s Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist president of Brazil from 2002 to 2010. All of these movements were falsely accused of being Communist dupes during the Cold War. It was true of Castro, but not of many of the movements he was sympathetic to. They all mixed in some elements of Marxism (which is also true of even the most right-wing capitalist economists, because Marx and his ilk weren’t wrong all the time) but the charges of being league with Communists was simply a smear campaign in many cases, such as Nicaragua, where the Sandinista government of the 1980s simply jailed members of the Communist Party. This gave the U.S. and its allies sufficient casus belli to deprive these and many other leftist movements of certain victory at the ballot box numerous times throughout the Cold War, ranging from threats of coups in the cause of Lula to backing of genocidal right-wing death squads with American taxpayer dollars in the cases of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and a half-dozen other Latin countries. It simply wasn’t possible to have a genuine leftist movement succeed in taking power through democratic means in the last century, because time and again, Washington and its Latin allies barred the way by tainting the democratic process – the largest portion of the CIA’s budget in the 1980s, for example, was devoted to manipulating foreign elections – or simply overthrowing anyone who threatened Corporate America’s financial interests if they managed to take power at the polls, after hurdling such obstacles as murderous death squads and electoral fraud. It is not surprising then that the genuine reformers who are now in power typically go to the opposite extreme of criticizing the U.S. in knee-jerk fashion, or worse yet, befriending its enemies out of spite. Chavez, Ortega and other like-minded Latin leaders have recently been guilty of giving diplomatic support and rhetorical encouragement to besieged dictators like Syria’s Bashar Assad and Libya’s Muammar Khadafy, despite the fact that these are precisely the kind of homicidal dictators they have fought against their whole lives. They are also guilty of treating Iran warmly, despite having nothing in common with the cause of Islamic fundamentalists, save for their anti-Americanism. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend, at least for anyone who stands true to a particular set of moral standards; Chavez and his fellow Latin leftists are entirely guilty of selling out their own principles by blindly lashing out at the U.S. and befriending its worst enemies, without examining each case on its merits. Not everyone who affixes the word “revolutionary” to their cause is to be praised. Some “reformers” are actually deformers.
The chief complaint to be made against the current generation of leftist Latin leaders is that they have generated a lot of heat but little light. This especially true of Chavez, whose bombastic rhetoric and haphazard reforms led to unnecessary friction instead of productive division in many cases, including some instances where squatters hyped up by his speeches committed inexcusable acts of violence against landowners. If this really bothered his critics they would speak up against the far more numerous human rights abuses committed by those who have opposed his reforms – but their real beef is that he embraced social justice, for genuine equality is anathema to capitalists motivated by class prejudice. Still, Chavez could have done a much better job of enacting his reforms, which could have been applied with surgical precision if he had the requisite clarity of vision. He and his followers had a genuine commitment to social justice, but have only a vague idea of how to go about achieving it. As I wrote in The Deaf Protesting the Blind: The Failure of the Occupy Movement and Other Organized Dissent Since Reagan, this is the same flaw which has hampered all of the genuine causes for reform in the West for the past generation, ranging from the anti-abortion lobby to the Occupy Movement (which fizzled even faster than I predicted). Across the entire planet, the cause of social justice is in a state of paralysis because the reformers themselves have a nebulous sense of what it really means, what it originates from and how to go about ensuring it. As a result, they keep falling back upon the same time-worn policies, which have proved insufficient time and again. Keep in mind that I did not say “failed,” for such tactics as progressive taxation, selective nationalization and social programs do have genuine benefits; they at least aid the poor and middle class by blunting the rapacity of the rich, which is precisely why “conservatives” foam at the mouth in indignation over them. Likewise, Chavez was better than all of the Venezuelan leaders who came before him. He had some genuine accomplishments, including some solid improvements in many indices of equality, poverty and health. For example, Venezuela’s poverty rate declined from 48.6 percent when he took office to 29.5 percent in 2011, according to the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America.[vi] Ortega has achieved smaller gains during his two stints in office. Castro achieved spectacular, lasting improvements in Cuba, which became a leading center of medicine in the region and boasted of a higher life expectancy than the U.S., all on the limited means provided by a nation which still depends on sugar cane for its wealth. It will be harder to eradicate Cuba’s achievements, but Castro’s enemies can rest assured that they will fail in the long run, with disastrous consequences for his people. Throughout the last century, Communism has proven to be a generational thing, which is quickly swept away once the leaders who implanted it die off; despite the fact that Cuba had the most tolerable Communist regime of the Cold War era, one that definitely provided a safer and more just social order than the right-wing military dictatorships that otherwise dominated the region, it will be no different. This is bad news for the people of Cuba, given that the émigrés seething in Florida for a chance at revenge and are certain to perpetrate a bloodbath once Castro dies. He already stepped down from the presidency in 2008 and in February of this year, his successor and brother Raul announced his own upcoming retirement within five years. Unless the Cuban Revolution can be rooted in a more lasting and accurate philosophy of social justice than the anachronism of Communism, it is doomed in the long run. The meager accomplishments of Chavez may not even survive a few years beyond his death, given that they were rooted more in a mood than a complex and detailed ideology.
Neither Castro nor Chavez realized that what they were fighting against is a spiritual disease, avarice, which can only be cured through spiritual means. Exploitation and the poverty it produces are outward consequences which can and must be addressed, which is where both charity and distributist reforms have their roles to play, but they’re all like temporary fillings doomed to fall out if the tooth they’re rooted in remains infected. In essence, the revolutions they supported were far too shallow in comparison to the deeper spiritual revolution Jesus called for, in a revolt against the Prince of This World. In fact, both men and their followers have probably never questioned where their own commitment to social justice comes from, but we can answer that question unequivocally: the Catholic Church, which invented the concept of human rights. India has been plagued since ancient times by even worse inequality, yet it has little tradition of grass roots revolt against oppression. Only in Catholic Latin America could such a monstrosity as Communism be softened and tamed and put to constructive use, as Castro has done half-consciously. We can measure how dramatically Catholicism affects Latin America’s behavior for the better by comparing how vengeful its people are against the U.S. with the indiscriminate violence and unreasoning hatred much of the Muslim world has for us. America committed a few sins against democracy and human rights in the Middle East in the 20th Century, including paving the way for the Iranian Revolution of 1979 by overthrowing the duly elected reformist government of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1952 and paying the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, to torture Iranian mullahs in the ‘70s. Far worse crimes were committed against the people of Latin America, however, such as the violent overthrow of several democratic reformist regimes in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973) and funding for genocidal military governments and death squads which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Central America in the 1980s alone. In fact, the U.S. aided the causes of democracy and independence in the Islamic world during the Cold War to a much greater extent than it did in its own backyard. Yet you don’t see the Sandinistas or the FMLN killing American civilians at every opportunity with car bombs and hijacked airplanes; the most second most popular name for newborn male children in the Middle East is now Osama, but you don’t see the people of Latin America naming their kids after some killer of Americans, despite having far more excuse for doing so. Catholicism quietly pervades the region in many subtle yet powerful ways that are only apparent at a distance. Even its heretics are of a different breed; every heresy developed in the Western world since the Reformation has struggled to gain traction here, while the region has produced only one of its own, liberation theology, which is far less damaging than many current betrayals of the faith which the current generation in the Vatican is too obsequious to rebuke any longer.
One of my favorite priests, the late exorcist Fr. Malachi Martin, appeared quite puzzled at the end of the Cold War over why Communists like Castro and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev appeared so receptive to Pope John Paul II in comparison to other world leaders. The answer is that Communism was a corruption of social justice that filled the void left by the abandonment of distributist ideals by the Catholic Church, which left rebels like Castro and Gorbachev honestly concerned with the well-being of their people with nowhere else to turn for guidance. Unlike the modern-day Pharisees who are so common today in the traditionalist Latin Mass churches and modern movements against abortion and the destruction of marriage – all of which are causes I have sympathy for or staunchly support – Martin did not explicitly reject the Church’s system of economic morality. He was adamantly orthodox in all other matters and had a treasure trove of knowledge of Catholicism that is sorely lacking anywhere on the planet today, but seemed to understand next to nothing about this aspect of the Magisterium. Everything I have said here about Church dogmas comes from sources that Martin recommended enthusiastically, like the Catechism of the Council of Trent, but he seemed ignorant of it all, which is understandable given that Catholicism is a vast ideology that encompasses every aspect of life. After sifting through his writings and radio addresses I have yet to hear him once speak about Archbishop Romero’s cause for sainthood, yet I suspect Martin would consider him a martyr to the heresy of liberation theology out of simple knee-jerk sympathy with conservatives. Likewise, Castro, Chavez and Ortega would side with the real liberation theologians, out of the same ignorance of distributism.
On the day that the heirs of Romero and Martin shake hands, then Catholicism will be a force to be reckoned with on the world stage again, but not a day before. Both Catholicism and social justice will continue fail until both causes realize that they are part of the same whole; Catholicism is the body, while social justice can be likened to its left leg, which the Church is lame without. By failing to adequately teach, advertise and put into practice distributism and all of its related economic commandments, the Church not only paved the way for evil men to invent Communism, but left good men like Castro and Gorbachev little choice but to embrace it. Who can blame men like Castro and Chavez for being critical of the Church, when what little they’ve seen of it is the hypocritical wing which has long been silent about exploitation and human rights? Throughout the Cold War, both the Church and the champions of genuine social justice blew golden opportunities to support each other, despite the fact that they are inextricably entwined.
The greatest failure of men like Castro and Chavez is that they did not return to their Catholic roots for solutions to the social problems that their own unrecognized Catholicism made them so acutely aware of. As a result, they put programs into action which sometimes produced good fruit, but none that is destined to last. Chavez, for example, merely recycled the same old high-handed top-down methods of ensuring inequality, which always last only as long as the governments and political moods which gave birth to them. As distributist writers like Chesterton, Belloc and Fr. Vincent McNabb said, it is much harder to uproot a well-established peasantry, which is what Chavez and Castro should have aimed at creating. Most of Latin America’s problems began in the time of the conquistadores, who established a highly unequal distribution of land tenure which has persisted because of continual theft, fraud and violence by the oligarchies of the region. Instead of using the land to feed their people, however, most of the oligarchs leave it fallow in order to drive up prices, or devote it to luxury crops like coffee for export to the West. Much of the region has been turned into a vast cattle ranch for the rest of the world, worked by landless laborers who cannot afford to eat the meat they produce for export. Just 10 percent of the region’s arable land is adequately farmed, despite the fact that millions of Latin Americans live on the edge of starvation – which suits the oligarchs just fine, because this forces the poor to labor on their farms and in their factories at unjustly low wages.[vii] This is also true of Venezuela, where some 60 percent of the land is still held by the top 2 percent of the population, who likewise leave the vast majority of it fallow to deliberately drive up prices.[viii] Instead of breaking up the big landholdings using Teddy Roosevelt-style trust-busting laws, or land reform legislation which has roots as far back as the legal traditions of medieval Spain and Portugal, Chavez instead allowed peasants to manage and farm land bought and held by the central government. The centerpiece of his haphazard version of land reform was to resettle would-be farmers in villages established by the government. While central governments can and must play roles in maintaining a level field of competition among small businesses and small farms, and can certainly provide such services as training in how to run them, what Chavez put into practice was not a grass roots effort. The closest he came to grass roots organization was to turn a blind eye to chaotic land seizures by squatters, which unnecessarily inflamed tensions. Like many of his other policies, these reforms were piecemeal, ham-fisted and hesitant, not sweeping, forceful, precise and lasting. With greater clarity of vision, he could have engineered a more just social order in the vast, depopulated rural expanses of Venezuela, based on widely dispersed, privately held small landholdings producing food for Veneuzuela’s cities, which would be far less crowded if its rural land weren’t so badly divided. The next time a right-wing government came to power, it would have a far more difficult task of stealing all of this land on behalf of the oligarchs, whereas now it can simply terminate the centrally-run government farms on a whim. Smallholders sometimes even suffered because of the indiscriminate and muddled nature of Venezuela’s recent land reforms. The primary attention of future reformers in the mold of Chavez and Castro must be focused on defending small proprietors and guilds, with particular focus on using governments to break up Big Business rather than establishing top-down social experiments like cooperatives or social programs. The primary purpose of government is to safeguard its citizens from injuring other citizens, which is precisely the whole aim of Big Business in the first place. The Catholic Church and its Jewish antecedents have always maintained that the rich have no innate right to monopolize the means of production in this way, for as it was said millennia ago in Isaiah 5:8, “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” The violation of this commandment is the linchpin of capitalism; no solution that fails to address it head-on is likely to last. Socialism has failed; Progressive Era-style reforms are only temporary half-measures. Nor is technological development enough, for we already have plenty of that alongside growing inequality and poverty; beware of capitalists who claim that humanity merely needs to bake a bigger economic pie, for historically they have always helped themselves to any new slices in addition to the ones they are already accustomed to stealing.
The Alpha and Omega of Social Justice
Only one other major figure on the planet understood
social justice better than these misguided heroes: Karl Ratzinger, i.e. Pope
Benedict XVI, who authored the Vatican’s official condemnations of liberation
theology under John Paul II. Anyone who has ever actually read those documents
can see that it was a very narrow idea that applied to just a handful of
wayward clergy in Latin America; in fact, he wrote right on the very same pages
that it is mandatory for Catholics to pursue social equality. He was the first
major public figure of the last century to lament the “plague of usury” that
the whole planet now labors under. Like John Paul II before him, every
encyclical he wrote and every public comment he made concerning economics was
much too contrary to capitalism for even the most left-wing member of the
modern Democratic Party to be comfortable with – despite the fact that they
were both relatively weak and short on specifics in this area than their
predecessors. John Paul II considered Romero a saint, while Benedict recently
said “Romero as a person merits beatification” – thereby prompting own staff to
excise the comment from the official transcript of that conversation.[ix]
This
is the type of subterfuge I warned the next pope would have to face in Pontification on the Next Pontificate: The Restoration
of Papal Authority and the Greatest Schism. Benedict has now been swept from the world stage, just like Castro
and Chavez, leaving no prominent followers of any egalitarian ideology
whatsoever, no matter how misguided or sane, left anywhere on the planet for
the first time since antiquity. The pope understood social justice better than
these men, who in turn understood it better than any capitalist, including much
of the Catholic clergy in the West. Meanwhile, America was turning a blind eye
as Corporate America continued to loot the nation, while it was issuing stamps
commemorating an “Equality” it hasn’t had for generations; worse still, all of
this occurred while it was distracted by the homosexual marriage issue, which
warps the Catholic vision of human rights to enshrine dehumanizing sexual acts,
using the Orwellian term “equality movement” to mask itself. As Proverbs 28:5
puts it, “Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord
understand it completely.” There is hope that Jose Mario Bergoglio, the newly
elected Pope Francis I, will demonstrate an even greater understanding of
social justice than his recent predecessors. If not, the human race is serious
trouble, for Benedict was the last line of defense for the poor and the middle
class; there is no other authentic defender of social justice left, nor is
there any other ideology save for distributism which is capable of taking on
global capitalism. Nothing short of an ideology that is actually true in every respect is capable of
combatting such a monstrous menace. It remains to be seen if the new pope
understands explicitly just how deep a threat capitalism is to justice, human
dignity and the Catholic faith, for it took John Paul II and Benedict XVI much
of their pontificates to grasp the nature of the challenge it poses. The
initial concerns about Bergoglio’s role in Argentine’s “Dirty War” have little
foundation, for he risked life and limb to help some of its victims escape.
This is a sad chapter in Latin American history that I know in great detail,
since I did the equivalent of a Master’s thesis on the region’s Cold War
insurgencies. Suffice it to say that the inside story is that Argentina’s
military dictatorship waited until it had succeeded in wiping out the
Montoneros, a small and ineffective leftist guerrilla group, then killed tens
of thousands of ordinary citizens; many of the “snuff films” of the ‘70s and
‘80s were made in Argentina, supported by American tax dollars in a roundabout
way. Francis I has already apologized for not speaking out against this wave of
persecution, so we can probably count on him to stand up like Romero did
against similar oppression in the future. That also means standing up against
other heinous crimes that have also gone unpunished, such as abortion. In these
matters he is entirely orthodox. It remains to be seen if he is orthodox enough
to get down to the difficult business of enforcing Catholic doctrines on
economic sin, which will be quite a shock to the world’s one billion Catholics
after they’ve had almost two centuries to grow accustomed to speculating in the
stock markets, underpaying, overcharging, cornering the means of production and
committing usury just like everyone else. Nothing short of meeting these sins
head on will ensure social justice. Hopefully he is up to the difficult task of
shutting down the Vatican Bank, forbidding Communion to capitalists for
embracing the Seven Deadly Economic Sins and firing bishops for failing to warn
their parishioners that such practices are mortal sins, just like
contraception, divorce and others that conservatives are fond of pointing out. A
simple, vague defense of the poor is not good enough to secure their rights;
there is no other workable solution except enforcing the preexisting
commandments that have simply been ignored for so long, thereby bringing about
the global disparity in wealth we see today. Just as the whole concept of
social justice originated with the Catholic Church, so too has the concept been
eclipsed and warped in tandem with the global apostasy from Catholicism. Now
there is just a single defender of justice left, so anyone who believes in it
must listen to him carefully. Hopefully he will listen to the Magisterium in
the same spirit as Pope Alexander III, who replied to the merchants who harangued
him that he was powerless to change the permanent prohibition on usury, for the
matter had already been decided by Christ. If not, the final defender of
egalitarianism on the world stage today will speak with a muffled voice and
accomplish little.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
[i]
See Jenkins,
Philip, 2002, The Next Christendom: the Coming of Global Christianity.
Oxford University Press: New York.
[ii]
For a closer look at the various instruments used in this Holocaust, see The
Grantham Collection – Abortion Instruments and Photographic Archive at http://www.abortioninstruments.com/new_index.html#instruments.
[iii] p. 47,
Dussel,
Enrique, 1981, A History of the Church in Latin America: Colonialism to
Liberation (1492-1979). William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand
Rapids, Michigan. Alan Neely, trans.
[iv] i.e.,
an Orwellian term for what was actually a Deformation.
[v]
Chrysostom, St. John, 1869, Four Discourses, Chiefly on the Parable of the
Rich Man and Lazarus. Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer: London.
[vi]
See Devereux, Charlie and Raymond Colitt, 2013, “Venezuelans’ Quality of Life
Improved in UN Index Under Chavez,” published March 7, 2013 by Bloomberg.com.
[vii] p. 77, Burns, E. Bradford, 1984, “The
Continuity of the National Period”, pp. 61-80 in Latin America: Its Problems
and Its Promise, Jan Knippers Black ed. Westview Press: Boulder, Colorado.
[viii]
Hoag, Christina, 2001, “Chávez May Set Off a Land Reform Earthquake,” in the BusinessWeek
online edition, April 16, 2001. Available at www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_16/b3728150.htm.
[ix] See
Warren, Michael, 2013, Bergoglio OK'd Slain Priest Sainthood Cases,"
published by The Associated Press on March 19, 2013. Available online at
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/03/19/3925173/bergoglio-okd-sainthood-cases.html
and Greaves, Mark, 2013, "Romero Should Be Beatified, Says Benedict XVI
During Brazil Visit," published March 29, 2013 in the online edition of
the Catholic Herald. Available online at
http://archive.catholicherald.co.uk/article/18th-may-2007/1/romero-should-be-beatified-says-benedict-xvi-durin
No comments:
Post a Comment