[Peace-discuss] A different world is possible

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
	--Samuel Beckett

Your objection seems to be a peculiar position for a Christian to take:

"Jesus failed to affect human history from within, he failed to bring it to a 
head, he was crucified instead.  If it were not that christianity kept his 
memory alive, the life and death of Jesus would have passed almost unnoticed and 
soon have been forgotten.  It did not have the historical importance of, say, 
the murder of Julius Caesar or Patrice Lumumba.  Neither the world as a whole 
nor even the Roman Empire in the Middle East seemed to be in any way affected. 
We might say that if Jesus had not been rejected this would not have been the 
case; the new kind of human community - the kingdom of god - would have been 
established, history would have come to a head or, if you like, pre-history 
would have come to an end.  We know, however, at least by hindsight, that Jesus 
was bound to be rejected.  Human history was such, was so determined by sin, 
that it could not accommodate the kind of human relationships that Jesus proposed.

"Because Jesus failed he did not (like, say, Thomas Jefferson) lay the 
foundations of a new kind of society.  He did not represent something to which 
people could look back and from which they could go forward.  Because of his 
resurrection, because he was able to achieve his mission through failure, he is 
relevant to people not a s past but as future ... the business of the church is 
to 'remember' the future..." [--Herbert McCabe, OP, "Law, Love and Language"]


On 4/21/10 12:25 AM, John W. wrote:
> So it took decades to bring into being one impoverished "anarchist" village
> in Spain, which was then brutally crushed by the fascists et al.?  What then
> would you say is the probabability of the possibility of a "different
> world"?
>
> On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 10:43 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu
> <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>
> From <http://www.truthout.org/remembering-fascism-learning-from-past58724>:
>
>
> ...a collection of primary documents about collectivization [was] published
> in 1937 by the CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist union that is celebrating its
> centenary this year. One contribution has resonated in my mind ever since, by
> peasants of the village of Membrilla. I would like to quote parts of it:
>
> "In [the] miserable huts [of Membrilla] live the poor inhabitants of a poor
> province; eight thousand people, but the streets are not paved, the town has
> no newspaper, no cinema, neither a café nor a library.... Food, clothing and
> tools were distributed equitably to the whole population. Money was
> abolished, work collectivized, all goods passed to the community, consumption
> was socialized. It was, however, not a socialization of wealth but of
> poverty.... The whole population lived as in a large family; functionaries,
> delegates, the secretary of the syndicates, the members of the municipal
> council, all elected, acted as heads of a family. But they were controlled,
> because special privilege or corruption would not be tolerated. Membrilla is
> perhaps the poorest village of Spain, but it is the most just."
>
> These words, by some of the most impoverished peasants in the country,
> capture with rare eloquence the achievements and promise of the anarchist
> revolution. The achievements did not, of course, spring up from nothing. They
> were the outcome of many decades of struggle, experiment, brutal repression -
> and learning. The concept of how a just society should be organized was in
> the minds of the population when the opportunity arose. The experiment in
> creating a world of freedom and justice was crushed all too soon by the
> combined forces of fascism, Stalinism and liberal democracy. Global power
> centers understood very well that they must unite to destroy this dangerous
> threat to subordination and discipline before turning to the secondary task
> of dividing up the spoils.

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.