29/05/2008

Solution for Latin America and beyond

American business and government are bound up with the ruling minorities in Latin America - with the rural and industrial property holders. Our interests are their interests - stability, return on investment - are the same. Meanwhile the masses of the people keep on suffering because they lack even minimal educational facilities, healthcare, housing, and diet. They could have these benefits if national income were not so unevenly distributed.

The only real alternative to injustice in Latin America is socialism [...]

American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force - without a secret police force. The argument is with capitalism and it is capitalism that must be opposed, with its CIA, FBI and other security agencies understood as logical, necessary manifestations of a ruling class’s determination to retain power and privilege.

Now, more than ever, indifference to injustice at home and abroad is impossible. Now, more clearly than ever, the extremes of poverty and wealth demonstrate the irreconcilable class conflicts, that only socialist revolution can resolve. Now, more than ever, each of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the international order.

Philip Agee in CIA DIARY, Inside the Company

I had a conversation with my grandmother who grew up in pre-communist Poland in a privileged class family. She talked about appalling poverty, only step above middle ages feudalism, that gripped majority of the population. After WWII, after loosing family properties due to nationalization of industries and land, hating communism all her life, she still found enough objectivity to observe that socialism, or more specifically - communism, as oppressive as it was, eliminated poverty of the masses, equalized the society and, from the perspective of time, "was inevitable, and probably the only solution" to injustice.

24/05/2008

The soul that Lucifer ate

The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department
Inspector General’s report released this week was that agents
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a “War
Crimes” file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the
Guantánamo Bay US prison camp, before being ordered by
the administration to stop writing their reports.

The report makes it absolutely clear that torture was ordered
and planned in detail at the highest levels of the government—including
the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and
the Justice Department. Attempts to stop it on legal or pragmatic
grounds by individuals within the government were systematically
suppressed, and evidence of this criminal activity covered up. SOURCE

As terrible as the actions of this junta are what interests me is what hides in the heads of persons responsible for these atrocities. Do they realize they are committing immoral acts or do they consider them intricately human? Were they Good people who at some point turned Evil? Or were they always Evil (is there even such thing as Evil if the acts they are committing are part of what we the humans are, as history would suggest)?

Philip Zimbardo in The Lucifer Effect: In this book, I summarize more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a "perfect storm" which leads good people to engage in evil actions. This transformation of human character is what I call the "Lucifer Effect," named after God's favorite angel, Lucifer, who fell from grace and ultimately became Satan.

How does a normal kid who grows up in a well to do Western society turn Evil? Is there any difference between growing up in a permanent war zone such as Afghanistan were there exists no living memory of peace, and that of a small town USA? Apparently not. Is Philip Zimbardo right? Good people transform into Lucifers regardless of where they come from or whatever their growing up conditions? I'd like to see how this transformation took place in the case of someone like C Rice, D Rumsfeld, J Bolton etc, step by step. Perhaps some day a new Truman Capote will visit them in jail and take their brains apart for the rest of us to see what's inside, but I wonder if such a vivisection would be complete without a priest or a specialist of the soul? Maybe it's the soul that is the answer - some people simply do not have it.

19/05/2008

Why against the war

Dorothy Day:

We are against war because it is contrary to the spirit of Jesus
Christ, and the only important thing is that we abide in His spirit. It
is more important than being American, more important than being
respectable, more important than obedience to the State. [...]

What would we advocate? Wholesale disloyalty to Americanism. Wholesale
refusal to fight. Wholesale withdrawal of labor (a general strike) from
all industries that further the war effort. We would urge a mighty band
of Catholic Conscientious Objectors who will refuse induction, who will
follow Jesus of Nazareth, Prince of Peace, in the way of non-violence,
in love for all mankind!

Soon to become Saint Dorothy?

17/05/2008

Free ebook for download

The Spiral of Violence is a classic for liberation theology aficionados. Author, Archbishop Dom Helder Camara, nicknamed "Red Bishop" said:

“When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist.”

“The greatest problem of the Church is not a lack of priests, rather the hunger faced by the people.”