[Peace-discuss] Blum's lighthearted forecast for 2112

[Carl G. Estabrook]

The rest is indeed "less lighthearted," including the best short  
summary I've seen of Obama's typically mendacious "withdrawal" from  
Iraq. I read it on "AWARE On the Air" today.

But even Homer nods, and at one point Blum simply repeats the typical  
liberal/village-atheist bromide about Christianity in Latin America:

"Throughout most of the 20th century, the Catholic Church in Latin  
America taught its flocks of the poor that there was no need to do  
battle with the ruling elite because the poor would get their just  
rewards in the afterlife."

The reality was quite different. Here's a better account:

"Apart from Cuba, the plague of state terror in the Western hemisphere  
was initiated [by the US} with the Brazilian coup in 1964, installing  
the first of a series of neo-Nazi National Security States and  
initiating a plague of repression without precedent in the hemisphere,  
always strongly backed by Washington, hence a particularly violent  
form of state-directed international terrorism. The campaign was in  
substantial measure a war against the Church. It was more than  
symbolic that it culminated in the assassination of six leading Latin  
American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, in November 1989, a few days  
after the fall of the Berlin wall. They were murdered by an elite  
Salvadoran battalion, fresh from renewed training at the John F.  
Kennedy Special Forces School in North Carolina. As was learned last  
November [2009], but apparently aroused no interest, the order for the  
assassination was signed by the chief of staff and his associates, all  
of them so closely connected to the Pentagon and the US Embassy that  
it becomes even harder to imagine that Washington was unaware of the  
plans of its model battalion. This elite force had already left a  
trail of blood of the usual victims through the hideous decade of the  
1980s in El Salvador, which opened with the assassination of  
Archbishop Romero, 'the voice of the voiceless,' by much the same hands.
"The murder of the Jesuit priests was a crushing blow to liberation  
theology, the remarkable revival of Christianity initiated by Pope  
John XXIII at Vatican II, which he opened in 1962, an event that  
'ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church,' in the  
words of the distinguished theologian and historian of Christianity  
Hans Kueng. Inspired by Vatican II, Latin American Bishops adopted  
'the preferential option for the poor,' renewing the radical pacifism  
of the Gospels ... In the post-Vatican II attempt to revive the  
Christianity of the pre-Constantine period, priests, nuns, and  
laypersons took the message of the Gospels to the poor and the  
persecuted, brought them together in 'base communities,' and  
encouraged them to take their fate into their own hands and to work  
together to overcome the misery of survival in brutal realms of US  
power.

"The reaction to this grave heresy was not long in coming. The first  
salvo was Kennedy's military coup in Brazil in 1964, overthrowing a  
mildly social democratic government and instituting a reign of torture  
and violence. The campaign ended with the murder of the Jesuit  
intellectuals 20 years ago. There has been much debate about who  
deserves credit for the fall of the Berlin wall, but there is none  
about the responsibility for the brutal demolition of the attempt to  
revive the church of the Gospels. Washington's School of the Americas,  
famous for its training of Latin American killers, proudly announced  
as one of its 'talking points' that liberation theology was 'defeated  
with the assistance of the US army' -- given a helping hand, to be  
sure by the Vatican, using the gentler means of expulsion and  
suppression.

"As you recall, last November [2009] was dedicated to celebration of  
the 20th anniversary of the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian  
tyranny, a victory of the forces of 'love, tolerance, nonviolence, the  
human spirit and forgiveness,' as Vaclav Havel declared. Less  
attention -- in fact, virtually zero -- was devoted to the brutal  
assassination of his Salvadoran counterparts a few days after the  
Berlin wall fell. And I doubt that one could even find an allusion to  
what that brutal assassination signified: the end of a decade of  
vicious terror in Central America, and the final triumph of the  
'return to barbarism in our time' that opened with the 1964 Brazilian  
coup, leaving many religious martyrs in its wake and ending the heresy  
initiated in Vatican II -- not exactly an era of 'love, tolerance,  
nonviolence, the human spirit and forgiveness.' We can wait until  
tomorrow to see how much attention will be given to the 30th  
anniversary of the assassination of the Voice of the Voiceless while  
he was reading mass, a few days after he wrote a letter to President  
Carter pleading with him -- in vain -- not send aid to the military  
junta, who 'know only how to repress the people and defend the  
interests of the Salvadorean oligarchy' and will use the aid 'to  
destroy the people's organizations fighting to defend their  
fundamental human rights.' As happened. And we can learn a good bit  
from what we are unlikely to see tomorrow...


On Jan 3, 2012, at 6:37 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:

> From Bill Blum's report: http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer101.html.
>
> The rest is less lighthearted.
>
> --mkb
>
> Happy New Year. Here's what to look forward to...

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