...the Roman Catholic Church acted like a world corporatocracy, with such pervasive control over thought itself, that people could not even perceive that they were being controlled. This monolithic, international organization, which purported to have the power to consign you to Hell, controlled kings and other landowners and acquired vast lands and wealth. They controlled armies. They controlled literacy and all the clerks (the bureaucrats, legal document writers, propagandists) in virtually every country in Europe. Nothing got declared or legally sealed without their eyes perusing it and their scribes penning the document. They even controlled and greatly limited copies of the Bible. It was the trans-national nature of this organization that made them so powerful. They had priests, bishops, monasteries and clerics everywhere. They required donations of land and wealth from the rich "to save their souls." They spoke and wrote in their own language amongst themselves--Latin--which almost no one else could understand. Almost everyone else was illiterate, and most people spoke local dialects (which became French, Spanish, English, etc.) It was thought control that was the most important--compelling people to believe utter absurdities about themselves and their own lives, about the world and physical reality, and about Church power--that to challenge Church power was to challenge God.
Fast-forward to today: Who has such power today? Power so pervasive that most people can't even see it. The transnational power to control governments and whole countries. The power to acquire vast, unearned properties and wealth, everywhere, and forever. The power to control thought--to convince people of utter absurdities (that banks should be deregulated, that "trickle down" will "trickle down" to
you, that Iraq had WMDs, that Republicans want to "balance the budget," that Social Security is bad for you, etc.). The power to consign whole countries and populations to the Hell of unemployment and poverty, and IMF/World Bank debt, and privatized public services, and ravaged resources. The power of multinational corporations and war profiteers is not so visibly monolithic as that of the Church in the Middle Ages. The powermongers have become a bit cleverer in their secret 'Bilderberg' alliances but they are no less lethal in their impacts on the freedom, well-being, progress and self-rule of most of humanity. And their venue is much bigger.
They are even attacking education, through their "tea party"-ish (McCarthyite) tool groups and politicians. In Latin America, they HATE the new leftist leaders who are pouring oil profits into education. They fear an educated population (except for a small elite which serves them). They want people to again believe that the earth is flat. Uneducated people have no recourse but to be their slave labor--or the cannon fodder for their resource wars.
It's quite interesting that one of the regions in outright rebellion against the corporate rulers is the region that has been most influenced by the Catholic Church--Latin America. But, as the new leftist president of Paraguay, Fernando Lugo (a former bishop), said, in Oliver Stone's documentary, "South of the Border," liberation theology--the philosophy of the
grass roots of the Catholic Church (not the prelates in Rome, who oppose it, but rather the ordinary priests, nuns and laypeople, who identify with the vast poor majority in Latin America)--has been a major factor in the leftist democracy revolution that is occurring there. The Vatican and most of the bishops are on the other side--the side of the fascist rich and their corporate colluders.
This may be why the Catholic Church suppressed a reading knowledge of the Bible for about a thousand years. It contains a revolutionary message AGAINST the acquisition of material wealth and power. "Love they neighbor" was not exactly the banner under which the Church warred against the freedom of the human mind for all that time. It was not the banner of the 'Holy' Crusades or the Inquisition. It is rather impossible to deny that that was Jesus' entire philosophy--"Love they neighbor" if you can actually read the New Testament. And the liberation theologians have obviously read it and taken it seriously. They have suffered death, torture and repression (including repression by the Vatican) as a result. But their thought is now ascendant and spread over a whole continent. Leftist democracy is the future of Latin America--fueled by this OTHER strain of thought that ran through Christianity under ground, often viciously suppressed, from the beginning: taking "Love they neighbor" seriously.
And perhaps this is why the corporatocracy is so avid to slander Christians by funding rightwing 'christian' nutballs and even installing them in the White house, and giving them a Big Trumpet in the corporate media to promulgate their nutball rightwing views, way, way out of proportion to their numbers.
You have to love a continent that has resisted and rejected corpo-fascist media lies, disinformation and thought control. The corporate media in Latin America is as bad, and often worse, than our own. You think
we suffer "Alice in Wonderland" nutball media. There, the corporate media actively calls for coups and actively participates in coup attempts, along with non-stop, 24/7, vicious slander and lies against leftist leaders. The people ignore it and just keep electing and re-electing leftists--in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador and other countries. What they have that we don't have any more is TRANSPARENT vote counting. But that's another story. They also have leaders who take Christianity seriously--unlike, say, George Bush, who paraded as a 'christian' and slaughtered a hundred thousand innocent people to steal their oil; or any number of pontificators in the Senate, the House and around our land, who arrange photo ops of their church attendance, and then collude on war, on torture and on massive theft against the poor, here and abroad, for the profit of the rich. These new Latin American leftist leaders believe in bootstrapping the poor, sharing the wealth and caring for the weak--the sick, the elderly, the poorest of the poor, the children. Taking this, the singular message of the New Testament, seriously, is their greatest "crime." They have overcome both the powermongers of the Medieval Catholic Church and the powermongering Corporatorcacy that plagues us all today. That is pretty amazing. And it is no wonder that the Corporatocracy is scared pissless by this development, and sicks its media dogs on these leaders and their people, to relentlessly slander them, on the one hand, and completely fail to provide any real news about them, on the other.
Think 1209 A.D., the Albigensian Crusade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
