Jesus and World Plutocratic Government

Alan Storkey

BIG AND SMALL

Big-picture arguments can strike us as sweeping, simplistic and elementary when our thinking should be complex, respond to different data sets and see all aspects of an issue. But this is not always the case. There are elephants in the room – things so big and so near us that we fail to see them. Our insistence on complexity may in fact be a grubbing of trivia to avoid the big problem. As Jesus said, “You strain at gnats and swallow camels” (Matt 23:24). When you stand back, that is what we do, every day. We intensely discuss Gaza as though it is the only war when there have been 200 big wars since 1900 all resulting from the same process, costing 200 million human lives and $1,000,000,000,000,000. Yet we do not discuss the big picture. In the UK, we discuss Angela Raynor perhaps not paying £1,500 on a house transfer when Tories have pocketed billions on dodgy public sector deals.

Often, as scientists know, a local scientific theory forms part of a bigger picture, and most scientists more or less believe in one big picture. Jesus – when he taught people who, like us, were slow to understand – focused on the big pictures, often using small images. The prodigal son is the human race. The one pearl is the government of God. The seed in the weeds is the kingdom of God choked by worry and deceit. One of Jesus’ big pictures is wealth. He spoke of it in every which way. In Matthew 23 Jesus unmasks the greed and self-indulgence of the political establishment. When the Temple was destroyed in 70AD there was so much gold in it that the price of gold halved throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The love of wealth is perhaps the biggest problem in world history, but perhaps it is small. “Show me the coin,” Jesus said before denying its status as a token of ultimate authority.

WEALTH AND FASCIST POWER

We call ourselves democratic, but really at all the key times since 1900 wealth has ruled. Wealth and military power had created empires for Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and the Japanese. WW1 disrupted the imperial dispensation. Marx was right: capitalists were exploiting workers everywhere. The Russia of Fabergé eggs failed, was devastated by WW1 and rebelled into the USSR. Our ally became our enemy because of the Revolution and the danger to capitalism.

The West hid, successfully, many of the failures of the rich, of plutocratic rule. They were enormous. We can look at the British: the Boer Wars and concentration camps, the long looting of India or the hundred-year humiliation of China through the sale of addictive opium. We can look at the violent treatment of Native Americans or the cruel subjugation of Africa and South America. The long history of the rich corrupting the world – the march into modernity – was called civilisation, but it was part fiction.

The rich had a problem. The workers were being exploited, but were wising up through education, success in emerging industries, travel, political activism, the teachings of Christianity and having to fight the quarrels of the rich. Gradually, the lazy rich were getting exposed and did not want to share the fate of Russian aristocrats. And so, mainly out of fear, they linked up with militarism in world-wide fascism. The deal was clear. The rich fund militarism to control the system and the militarists defend the rich against the workers and socialism. Fascism was spreading around the globe.

HITLER AND WWII WAS THE RESULT, NOT THE PROBLEM

Fascism was everywhere holding the workers at bay. It ran the show in Italy, was strong in France, Portugal, Spain (after the Civil War), in Japan, the UK and in the States. Few have heard of the business-fascist plot to oust Roosevelt in 1934. But, of course, it all came together in Hitler. He was war-traumatized, beat up socialists, and was bizarrely funded by Henry Ford at first and then by Fritz Thyssen, one of the richest Germans. After the Wall Street Crash the need for Hitler was acute and he was popular among the rich in Britain and the States. We blank out the fact that US firms gave Hitler a full range of weapons factories. The US Ambassador, William Dodd, reported to Roosevelt in October 1936 that more than a hundred US companies were arming Hitler and were not allowed to take earnings out except in goods. Then the Tory fascist sympathizers at Munich gave Hitler a further massive arms cache with Czech weapons and the great Skoda arms factory. And so WWII came because the West armed Hitler and spurned a coalition with the USSR. Aside from Churchill, most of the Tories in the late 1930s backed Hitler. Even in May 1941 Rudolf Hess flew over still hoping to hold together a UK/Nazi coalition. But war has its own dynamic.

PUTTING TOGETHER HIDDEN FASCISM AFTER 1945

Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor meant the US had to fight Hitler. Roosevelt had faced strong business opposition to fighting the Nazis. Hitler attacked the USSR, the Communist enemy, in June 1941. Despite Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the US into the war in December 1941, the USSR was used to bear the brunt of the fighting and for defeating the Nazis – three full years of fighting. They suffered the loss of 25 million lives in the worst of the fighting, while the US and UK lost half a million each. The creation of the Second Front was delayed until it was easy for the Western allies; Churchill made sure of that. Then suddenly the US/UK had “won the War,” dumped their ally and backed a new fascist militarism against the USSR and then China to retain Western capitalist/plutocratic world control. Within weeks of the USSR effectively winning the war for us, she became the new enemy and the reason for “necessary” military dominance. There was no effort at peace. There was no Marshall aid for the USSR, and the McCarthyite era and another Red Scare kept the communists bad and capitalists good.

THE LONG FALSE NARRATIVE

The long post-WWII story, under the guise of democracy and freedom, has really been a continuation of the same story. Since the end of the war in the US, and since 1951 in the UK, capitalism has been in charge. From empire we moved to multinational companies controlling resources through military alliances, whether in the Congo or the oil states. We got rid of democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran because oil profits were more important than democracy. War profits were more important than people in Vietnam. The bullying dictator Saddam Hussein was our friend, then a useful enemy. When Jimmy Carter attacked militarism, he had to go. While Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan loosened controls over international capitalism, money went off-shore – we do not know where, whose or how much – and secretly money ruled the world, with weapons to guarantee control.

Of course, there is a myth for the masses. Always an enemy is needed. The old appeals to nationalism, patriotism, fear, “greatness” and “democracy” are there to carry the masses into support. The Daily Mail, later Murdoch and the Sun, made sure that the working classes were entertained out of principled thought and solid political debate. The pattern that began with the fake Zinoviev telegram in the October 1924 election carried on. Elections that run on rubbishing, personality, blame, lies and selective statistics became the norm. Media propaganda dominated much news and real debate deteriorated. Political leaders like Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Trump; or Thatcher, Blair, Cameron, Johnson and Truss grow on a money tree. They will keep the big money show on the road, even while democracy is being destroyed and consumer capitalism is ruining the planet. The rich have told us to spend, preferably on credit, to be ourselves, and this message dominates all others.

We face, or ignore, the fact that most of our politics has been smoke and mirrors. The capitalist West, now including Russia and China, exploits the planet’s resources and generates mass poverty while the rich rule. 2% of the world’s population own half the world’s wealth while half own only 2% of it. We arm states into military dictatorships, wage wars when we want, undermine the UN and seem bent on capitalist death-by-war-and-climate. But the reckoning is coming.

JESUS AND THE RECKONING

Jesus is rock firm: You cannot serve God and Mammon. He overturns the money-changers’ tables. Why? Is it a slightly embarrassing excess or is he insisting that this is the biggest problem in world history? He understands it all. This is where evil grows. Money holds hands with corrupt power. This has not changed since Jesus’ time, except in scale. We need the politics of truth, the parties of faith, the end of nationalism, the contented economy, the support for the poor and sick, the end of weapons and conflict, nation speaking peace unto nation, fair wages, reduced consumption and the end of accumulated wealth. We need a principled revolution deeper than any envisaged by Marxism.

We need to hear Jesus. Do you see this camel? Well, every day you ignore it. It is called wealth. Look at the shape of the camel: it flies aircraft, wages war, burns energy, pursues luxury. It is extravagant. It buys us into debt, eats up resources, exploits anything. And it is driving global warming at a blinding speed. The reckoning is here – in the next ten years: global warming, denied for decades because it harmed profits, now causes destruction, drought and famine around the world. The mighty on their thrones are fighting one another and have committed to arms and devastation. There will be, unless we stop it, a cold war against China because she is an economic rival to the rich West. Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Boris and their ilk sing the tune while secretly the oligarchs write the score. We are taught that wealth will be our salvation, while Jesus insists that the wealthy wait at the border for an entry permit to the kingdom of God. He urges us, see the camel, not the gnat. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for the rich man to enter the kingdom of God. The gentle, meek Christ must and will rule. Yes, we hear you, Lord, and we will act.

Alan Storkey is an economist. He has written Jesus and Politics, War or Peace and Militarism has Failed: We Disarm the World around parts of this topic.