THE IDEOLOGIES OF THE VARIOUS components of the current resurgence of neo-fascism-neo-Nazism aren't the center of that thing, it is the billionaires and millionaires, in the United States, Britain, Russia and elsewhere who are financing it and their psychotic mania for concentrating wealth and, so, power for themselves which are behind it. The racism, the bigotry, the misogyny, the LGBTQ hatred, etc. are the levers they use to mobilize other species of psychotics (and lots of the billionaires and millionaires share their psychoses) to serve their real ends, to destroy egalitarian democracy and the commonwealth that is one of the oldest and deepest strains of the Jewish monotheistic tradition.
That is how the former KGB communist Putin and his lackeys, most of whom were part of the Soviet elite or their brats, are so easily amassing some of the greatest fortunes through theft and are in thick with their fellow thieves, the billionaires and millionaires of the capitalist West. They were never really different except that they had to pretend to having some kind of intention of egalitarianism even as the Communists inevitably rose up an elite of their own as The People were given a few crumbs to starve on as they were terrorized into slavery. That is hardly an advance on the goals of western capitalists, especially as they gave up the pretense of any kind of devotion to Christian egalitarianism and, eventually, even pretending they believed it. The slave-power here never intended to follow it, even as they professed it.
Yesterday's Catholic liturgy held one of the central pillars of that egalitarianism which is, in my experience, found nowhere except in religion, from the much misunderstood, misused book of Leviticus:
Then, on the tenth day of the seventh month, let the trumpet resound;
on this, the Day of Atonement, the trumpet blast shall re-echo
throughout your land.
This fiftieth year you shall make sacred
by proclaiming liberty in the land for all its inhabitants.
It shall be a jubilee for you,
when every one of you shall return to his own property,
every one to his own family estate.
In this fiftieth year, your year of jubilee,
you shall not sow, nor shall you reap the aftergrowth
or pick the grapes from the untrimmed vines.
Since this is the jubilee, which shall be sacred for you,
you may not eat of its produce,
except as taken directly from the field.
“In this year of jubilee, then,
every one of you shall return to his own property.
Therefore, when you sell any land to your neighbor
or buy any from him, do not deal unfairly.
On the basis of the number of years since the last jubilee
shall you purchase the land from your neighbor;
and so also, on the basis of the number of years for crops,
shall he sell it to you.
When the years are many, the price shall be so much the more;
when the years are few, the price shall be so much the less.
For it is really the number of crops that he sells you.
Do not deal unfairly, then; but stand in fear of your God.
I, the LORD, am your God.”
It's no wonder that the Black People enslaved in the United States talked about "the year of Jubilee" so often, the time of "liberty for all the inhabitants of the land," a time of restoration of rights, a time when all sold property would be returned to the families which had sold it - clearly this law intends that to be understood, always as leasing not what the Anglo-American legal system with its endless amassing and concentration of wealth and, so, inequality defines it to be.
I will point out that elsewhere in The Law it defines the food left in the field, the source of wealth, as being the rightful property of the destitute, the orphan, the widow and the alien dwelling there. As a recent convert from vegetarianism to veganism, if you may not eat of its produce,except as taken directly from the field, that could mean that the text implies that they weren't supposed to eat animal products, though I'm sure that would be seen as too radical by a lot of people. Though it defines the sacred year of Jubilee through what it said.
The Law of Moses is nothing less than a legal system to ensure a far more radical equality as being the will of God, meaning to establish that equality more strongly than any secular, materialistic legal system ever has. It does not outlaw the ownership of property but defines it in such a way as a right of all that any financial scheme cannot override, I would go so far as to say that under that Law the concept of ownership of shares in a corporation past the point of a just return on an investment is unjust and illegal. Capitalism is absolutely a contradiction of that law, though any socialism which would abolish ownership in favor of the state owning everything is, as well, wrong. Again, in the former Soviet Union, we can see how state ownership easily became private plunder by those conveniently former "communists" as they gave up a pretense of their formerly professed faith. There have been socialists who advocated something like that though they were swamped by the Marxist-materialist and anti-democratic ideology which, in real life, is just a different flavor of violent, oppressive gangsterism.
One of the greatest things that was done in Vatican II, building on, of all Popes, Pius XII's reform of having the scripture readings in the vernacular (as the priest quiet mumbled them in Latin), greatly expanded the readings from the Hebrew scriptures, perhaps the reason that around the world Catholics got to hear that mightily subversive text announced as the Word of God. I doubt that many of the trad-catholics would really have liked people to take it to heart as such. I doubt that any defined group of scientistic materialists heard any such radicalism expounded as that any time in the past year. I'm sure the many libertarians in organized atheism would despise that notion as would any strict Darwinsts who are, after all, the descendants of Thomas Malthus, the depraved Anglican pastor who wanted a large part of his "flock" to be thrown out and starved to death.
The modern Biblical scholars who attribute the texts we have of the First Testament to the Jerusalem elite make you wonder at how much they would have liked what they, nevertheless, felt was the Word of God strongly enough to preserve it, if in their falling away from egalitarianism to the injustice of the Solomon and post Solomon period, they felt compelled to retain the Sinai tradition even when it condemned their privilege, for which you can read "injustice" injustice being a component of all privilege. I don't know the answer to that but it's one of the things I thought about when I heard it read while listening to the mass. I find that hearing the Scripture often leaves me just a little more radical than I had been before I heard it.
No comments:
Post a Comment