http://www.progresoweekly.com/index.php?progreso=Max_Castro&otherweek=1113541200
Culture of life, culture of death: The right spins the Pope for political profit By Max J. Castro It took several decades before the powers that be and a mindless media managed to denature the dissident vision of Martin Luther to the point that it could be construed as a validation of the status quo. But history now moves considerably faster. The process of distilling, distorting and domesticating the thought of Pope John Paul II began even before Karol Wojtyla was buried. For more than a decade, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, John Paul II articulated a critique of unfettered capitalism as powerful and pointed as his earlier denunciation of communism. It is clear, reading the Pope's statements and speeches since the 1990s, that he considered communism history and capitalism, in its current unvarnished, undiluted and globalized version, the problem of our era. Yet those who worship most fervently at the altar of a hard-edged capitalism, from President George W. Bush to Rush Limbaugh, have embraced and celebrated the legacy of John Paul II as if the Pope's words about social justice were irrelevant. In fact, they are anything but; they are moral missiles aimed straight at the heart of our ruling ideology and the global society and economy it seeks to justify. Communism is history and capitalism is now. But, when it came to summing up John Paul's legacy, the media, usually narrowly focused on the latest event, overwhelmingly emphasized the Pope's historic role in the downfall of the communist bloc fifteen years ago over his recent challenge to the injustices of the global system. A Google search provides an admittedly crude measure of this bias. A search using the terms "Pope" and "communism" yielded 10,400 entries. "Pope" and "capitalism" resulted in 1,280 hits. That's a rate of 8 to 1, and most of the latter entries originated in media located in developing countries. It is not surprising that the corporate media drastically downplayed the Pope's late moral teaching against rapacious capitalism. In the context of the deification of the market, the legitimization of greed, and the dismantling of structures of solidarity during the last twenty years, the Pope's message was virtually revolutionary. Pope John Paul II repeatedly stressed that economic policies that ignore social consequences - in other words the very policies foisted on poor countries by the U.S.-led international financial institutions for two decades - are immoral. In one address, John Paul said that it was wrong for the rich countries to maintain their standard of living by taking the lion's share of the energy and resources needed for the whole world. He called on developed countries to forgive the debt of developing countries and denounced the trend toward a world society in which "the powerful predominate, setting aside and even eliminating the powerless." His words on the moral status of such a system could not have been clearer or more indicting: "This model of society bears the stamp of the culture of death, and is therefore in opposition to the gospel message." If the right managed to ignore the Pope's prophetic critique of capitalism run amok, when it comes to this question of the culture of life versus the culture of death, conservatives distorted the message through selective adoption. What the right disregarded was not just the fact that the Pope considered that a global order based on breathtaking inequalities was part and parcel of the culture of death. Cultural conservatives assumed the mantle of the Pope's authority to advance their fight against abortion and gay rights while acting as if his fierce opposition to the death penalty and the Iraq war did not exist. On this point, it was comedian Bill Maher who said it best when he remarked that he respected the Pope because, unlike right-wingers in this country, John Paul II was consistent. There is, therefore, something indecent beyond hypocrisy in the spectacle of George W. Bush basking in and spinning the legacy of Pope John Paul II. The same George W. Bush who, as Texas governor, practiced capital punishment with enthusiasm. The same George W. Bush who tightened and made more inhumane the U.S. embargo against Cuba that the Pope denounced as deplorable and unethical. The same George W. Bush who, as president, has waged an illegal war in Iraq and an indecent class war against the middle class, the workers and the poor at home. The same George W. 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