THE POWERFUL NEVER MAKE MISTAKES

By Marc Batko

The powerful never make mistakes; every disaster is only a learning experience, an unfortunate product of botched intelligence.

Called to humility and interdependence, modern man in the Donald Duck culture is unable to see the deeper issues. Driven by shadow issues and wedge issues, we are tempted to trivialize quality of life issues.

Criticism multiplies as the contradictions and lies of the unprovoked unilateral US war on Iraq plunge the country into a quagmire. The specter of unending war darkens and blurs the future.

Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees. The Hitler mindset saw only the soldier as a model of courage. The huckster culture that imagines the market as a self-healing panacea falls for Maudeville’s fable of the bees. Everyone pursuing self-interest is said to create the common good.

In truth, the state has a social function and cannot be reduced to the power- and security state. The state is obliged to protect freedom of conscience and help those fallen under the wheel (cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison).

The social market economy sees the limits of the market economy and the necessity of state intervention and regulation. The state should prosecute market distortions and cushion and support those injured or excluded by the market.

In “1984”, George Orwell warned that war would become a domestic necessity to divert the people from domestic economic collapse. Criticism and dissent would be expunged so people wouldn’t even understand these words any more. Stripped of their individuality, people would be enveloped in newspeak (war is peace, freedom is slavery and truth is lies) and give birth for Big Brother.

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, people would accept the image rather than reality. The enlightened striving to unmask the fraud are chased out of the city.

In “The Brothers Karamoazov”, Dostoevsky prophesied that people would surrender their freedom for the Grand Inquisitor’s promise of happiness. Today’s Grand Inquisitor only promises unending preventive war and the Senate replied with a 515-page denunciation. Today’s Grand Inquisitor promises distraction through a shadow or wedge issue and constitutional obfuscation, an amendment to take away equal protection and stylize marriage as a constitutional article rather than a civil religious affair of love. By a 50-48 vote, the Senate voided this constitutional amendment and obfuscation.

Early Christianity protested against wealth and militarism. As dogs return to their vomit, might is right and the warrior mentality are modern forms of vomit dressed as self-defense. War is a racket and a false unity, a false religion, false consciousness and false security.

Resistance is part of our nature as antibodies are part of our bodies. May we open ourselves to the rich tradition of resistance, to the resistance of historical victims of totalitarianism, to the resistance of nature and to the resistance of the Global South. Threatened with plutocracy, our state can choose the narrow way of democracy that includes economic democracy. Bewitched with the temptation of empire, we can plead for the republic with checks, balances and equal rights. Beguiled by myths of corporate beneficence and corporate personhood, freedom threatens to be reduced to property and contract.

The simple things are complicated in a culture of war-tainment and infotainment. Increasing purchasing power creates full employment. Subsidies to corporations produce deficits. Under-consumption and the collapse of the domestic economy and domestic demand are consequences of the unbridled market luring corporations with deregulation, privatization and liberalized capital markets..

Rejoice, you internationalistas, states are ennobled by justice, not by cowardice and fear.

Rejoice, you critics, social criticism and prophetic criticism are correctives to one-dimensional delusions, leaven in a culture of resignation and helplessness.