[Peace-discuss] The Legacy of 1989…

C. G. Estabrook galliher at illinois.edu
Sat Dec 19 19:48:12 CST 2009


A typically insightful but in some ways surprising piece, it's in fact nothing 
that Chomsky hasn't said before.

Its stress on the political importance of Christian and particularly Catholic 
theology seems to me right -- notably the murderous US efforts to suppress 
Liberation Theology -- but I don't think the story is over. The impulses that 
led to its worldwide vogue have been suppressed but not eliminated by U.S. 
neoliberalism. (As an indication of that situation, the present bishop of Rome 
is not the reactionary of American journalistic cliche.)

In the 20th century the majority of Catholics were First Worlders, now it's 
Third Worlders -- and the disparity grows daily as Catholicism rapidly expands. 
  With the disappearance of official Marxism-Leninism, the most extensive 
anti-capitalist discourse in the world today is Catholicism. See, e.g., the 2009 
papal encyclical "Caritas in veritate," which has desperately upset the Right 
around the world -- except in the U.S., where it's been largely ignored because 
it doesn't fit it to the Evangelical-inspired assumption that Christianity is on 
the political Right.

One US paper did editorialize at the time, "Pope Benedict XVI will not be 
attending the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh in September. It's just as well. The 
Pope might strike a dissonant chord among the leaders and finance ministers of 
the world's most developed economies ... He is an advocate of redistributing 
much of the world's wealth."

I'm doing a course -- a discussion group, really -- on the pope's (extensive) 
statement at St. Mary's church in Champaign, beginning in January.  Anyone 
interested is welcome to participate.  Send me a note. --CGE


Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> 
> The Legacy of 1989, in Two Hemispheres
> December 19, 2009 
> By *Noam Chomsky* 
> Source: ITT 
> Noam Chomsky's ZSpace Page 
> <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/noamchomsky> 
> 
> 
> November marked the anniversary of major events in 1989: "the biggest 
> year in world history since 1945," as British historian Timothy Garton 
> Ash describes it.
>  
> That year "changed everything," Garton Ash writes. Mikhail Gorbachev's 
> reforms within Russia and his "breathtaking renunciation of the use of 
> force" led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9—and to the 
> liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian tyranny.
>  
> The accolades are deserved; the events, memorable. But alternative 
> perspectives may be revealing.
>  
> German chancellor Angela Merkel provided such a 
> perspective—unintentionally—when she called on all of us to "use this 
> invaluable gift of freedom to overcome the walls of our time."
>  
> One way to follow her good advice would be to dismantle the massive 
> wall, dwarfing the Berlin wall in scale and length, now snaking through 
> Palestinian territory in violation of international law.
>  
> The "annexation wall," as it should be called, is justified in terms of 
> "security"—the default rationalization for so many state actions. If 
> security were the concern, the wall would be built along the border and 
> made impregnable.
>  
> The purpose of this monstrosity, constructed with U.S. support and 
> European complicity, is to allow Israel to take over valuable 
> Palestinian land and the main water resources of the region, thus 
> denying any viable national existence for the indigenous population of 
> the former Palestine.
>  
> Another perspective on 1989 comes from Thomas Carothers, a scholar who 
> served in "democracy enhancement" programs in the administration of 
> former President Ronald Reagan.
>  
> After reviewing the record, Carothers concludes that all U.S. leaders 
> have been "schizophrenic"—supporting democracy if it conforms to U.S. 
> strategic and economic objectives, as in Soviet satellites but not in 
> U.S. client states.
>  
> This perspective is dramatically confirmed by the recent commemoration 
> of the events of November 1989. The fall of the Berlin wall was rightly 
> celebrated, but there was little notice of what happened one week later: 
> on Nov. 16, in El Salvador, the assassination of six leading Latin 
> American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, along with their cook and her 
> daughter, by the elite, U.S.-armed Atlacatl battalion, fresh from 
> renewed training at the JFK Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, N.C.
>  
> The battalion and its cohorts had already compiled a bloody record 
> through the grisly decade in El Salvador that began in 1980 with the 
> assassination, by much the same hands, of Archbishop Oscar Romero, known 
> as "the voice of the voiceless."
>  
> During the decade of the "war on terror" declared by the Reagan 
> administration, the horror was similar throughout Central America. The 
> reign of torture, murder and destruction in the region left hundreds of 
> thousands dead.
>  
> The contrast between the liberation of Soviet satellites and the 
> crushing of hope in U.S. client states is striking and instructive—even 
> more so when we broaden the perspective.
>  
> The assassination of the Jesuit intellectuals brought a virtual end to 
> "liberation theology," the revival of Christianity that had its modern 
> roots in the initiatives of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II, which he 
> opened in 1962.
>  
> Vatican II "ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church," 
> theologian Hans Kung wrote. Latin American bishops adopted "the 
> preferential option for the poor."
>  
> Thus the bishops renewed the radical pacifism of the Gospels that had 
> been put to rest when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity 
> as the religion of the Roman Empire—"a revolution" that in less than a 
> century converted "the persecuted church" to a "persecuting church," 
> according to Kung.
>  
> In the post-Vatican II revival, Latin American priests, nuns and 
> laypersons took the message of the Gospels to the poor and the 
> persecuted, brought them together in communities, and encouraged them to 
> take their fate into their own hands.
>  
> Reaction to this heresy was violent repression. In the course of the 
> terror and slaughter, the practitioners of liberation theology were a 
> prime target.
>  
> Among them are the six martyrs of the church whose execution 20 years 
> ago is now commemorated with a resounding silence, barely broken.
>  
> Last month in Berlin, the three presidents most involved in the fall of 
> the Wall—George H. W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl—discussed 
> who deserves credit.
>  
> "I know now how heaven helped us," Kohl said. George H.W. Bush praised 
> the East German people, who "for too long had been deprived of their 
> God-given rights." Gorbachev suggested that the United States needs its 
> own perestroika.
>  
> No doubts exist about responsibility for demolishing the attempt to 
> revive the church of the Gospels in Latin America during the 1980s.
>  
> The School of the Americas (since renamed the Western Hemisphere 
> Institute for Security Cooperation) in Fort Benning, Ga., which trains 
> Latin American officers, proudly announces that the U.S. Army helped to 
> "defeat liberation theology"—assisted, to be sure, by the Vatican, using 
> the gentler hand of expulsion and suppression.
>  
> The grim campaign to reverse the heresy set in motion by Vatican II 
> received an incomparable literary expression in Dostoyevsky's parable of 
> the Grand Inquisitor in "The Brothers Karamazov."
>  
> In this tale, set in Seville at "the most terrible time of the 
> Inquisition," Jesus Christ suddenly appears on the streets, "softly, 
> unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognized him" and was 
> "irresistibly drawn to him."
>  
> The Grand Inquisitor "bids the guards take Him and lead Him away" to 
> prison. There he accuses Christ of coming to "hinder us" in the great 
> work of destroying the subversive ideas of freedom and community. We 
> follow not Thee, the Inquisitor admonishes Jesus, but rather Rome and 
> "the sword of Caesar." We seek to be sole rulers of the earth so that we 
> can teach the "weak and vile" multitude that "they will only become free 
> when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us." Then they will 
> be timid and frightened and happy. So tomorrow, the Inquisitor says, "I 
> must burn Thee."
>  
> Finally, however, the Inquisitor relents and releases "Him into the dark 
> alleys of the town."
>  
> The pupils of the U.S.-run School of the Americas practiced no such mercy.
> 



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