Pastor John Wright with a great post
This week, however, I got involved in a discussion in another context that contested the moral superiority of the United States to the ‘fascist and totalitarian nation-states’ of the mid-20th century. While, to understate the obvious, I am not a big fan of Hitler, Mussolini, or Lenin, I tend to see the United States as the inverse of such totalitarian regimes, with its own version of totalitarianism, the totalitarianism of democratic free-market capitalism, that is at least every bit as pernicious because it is not as obvious in its totalitarian controls.
I was blogging about this some time ago. It was in response to something Bonhoeffer had written
Although the circumstances are not of such extremity of evil, neither was it perceived to be as such at the time. People refused to believe that such could be the case. While I do not see the present tendencies leading to murders of the scale of the Holocaust, I see a different type of pressure emerging, one which is economic, social. political, and like in Bonhoefer’s case, VERY much a SPIRITUAL issue. Even one in which the very soul of the American Church is at stake. While some lend their “theological support” and offer various “Biblical supports”, others avoid support but choose silence out of a desire to maintain “agreement” and focus on “common ground”.
The more “systemic” processes , those “inherent in our assumptions” and hidden by rhetoric about how “that’s just the way the world works” are more effective in that they remain in the dark. It’s not overt violence done to neighbors in close proximity (except of course, to those in Iraq, who are, by the way, also our “neighbors”, according to Jesus), but a violence of economic isolation; of exclusion; of “fighting back the hordes” who would rob the elite of their profits they have grown to “need” at an increasing pace. The only ethos free of this is that in which we are invited to participate in the power of the people of a resurrected Christ.
Pastor John quotes from an article: Slavoj Zizek | To Loot and Rape
In the much celebrated free circulation opened up by the global capitalism, it is “things” (commodities) which freely circulate, while the circulation of “persons” is more and more controlled. We are thus not dealing with “globalization as an unfinished project,” but with a true “dialectics of globalization.” The segregation of the people is the reality of economic globalization. This new racism of the developed world is in a way much more brutal than the previous one: Its implicit legitimization is neither naturalist (the “natural” superiority of the developed West) nor culturalist (we in the West also want to preserve our cultural identity). Rather, it’s an unabashed economic egotism – the fundamental divide is the one between those included into the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it.
