Meet The New Pope, Same As The Old Pope

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the newly self-christened “Pope Francis,” is in the tradition of most of his predecessors of the past century- a man who carried on his church's alliance with fascism. (1)

During the days of the Argentine fascist military junta (1976-83) which tortured and murdered 30,000 Argentines, then “Father” Bergoglio headed the Jesuits in that country. He never publicly opposed the junta. Two Jesuit priests were expelled by Bergoglio for ministering to the poor in the slums, according to the priests' later accounts. Within a week, they were kidnapped and tortured by the fascist military. (But they were among the lucky few who survived. They turned up months later, drugged and dumped in a field.) By expelling them from the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), Bergoglio of course gave a green light to the junta to kidnap and torture them. Years later, Bergoglio parried the priests' allegations against him by claiming to have lobbied General Videla for their release. (2)

When I searched for details of the story, what I got was a link to non-U.S. media. Here's what the Canadian Globe and Mail says: 
 
“The Spanish newspaper El Pais [themajor newspaper of Spain] quotes from a 1995 memoir by Father Jalics, who now lives in Germany [where he could be interviewed, if the crappy media was interested in getting an accurate story], in which he accuses Father Bergoglio of betraying them.

“'Many people who held far-right political beliefs frowned on our presence in the slums,' the priest writes. 'They thought we were living there in support of the guerrillas, and set out to denounce us as terrorists. We knew which way the wind was blowing, and who was responsible for these slanders. So I went to [Father Bergoglio] and explained that they were playing with our lives. He promised that the military would be told that we were not terrorists. But from subsequent statements by an officer and 30 documents that we were able to access later, we saw without doubt that [Father Bergoglio] had not kept his promise but, on the contrary, had filed a false complaint with the military.'”

The Globe continues: “Reuters reports that the other kidnapped priest, Orlando Yorio, testified in a book, The Silence, by journalist Horacio Verbitsky, that Father Bergoglio had deliberately caused the kidnapping of the priests by withdrawing the Jesuit order’s protection of the two, and thus signalling to the regime that they were enemies.

“'History condemns him,' Reuters quotes Fortunto Mallimacci, the former dean of social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, saying about Cardinal Bergoglio. 'It shows him to be opposed to all innovation in the Church and above all, during the dictatorship, it shows he was very cozy with the military.'”

The Globe then reports Bergoglio's denials and explanations; in other words, does balanced reporting. Unlike the New York Times, which not only is totally one-sided and dishonest, but in some particulars false and grossly misleading, and unlike most of the global media, which ignores the story entirely.(3)

 [“PopeFrancis and Argentina’s military junta: Which side was he on?” the Globe and Mail, 3/14/13.]

All we are getting from most of the world's media is Vatican propaganda. The new “Pope” has already trotted out a propaganda slogan, “a poor Church for the poor.” Right. A multibillion dollar global empire with its own secret bank, troves of art, and exempt from taxes, that allies itself with the greatest enemies of the poor, namely the rich and their fascist attack dogs. This is beyond irony, beyond hypocrisy. This is rankest, coldest-hearted, calculated cynicism.

We've also been told by the admiring stenographers of the media that Bergoglio has dubbed himself “Pope Francis” after St. Francis of Assisi, as part of this “friend of the poor” branding campaign. This is all transmitted to us by the media hacks as wondrous news that's supposed to uplift all of humanity. Somehow, I'm unmoved. Guess I don't have enough “faith” (read: credulous naivete). Even sources that you'd expect better from, like the UK's Guardian and Independent, and Aljazeera, have drunk the Holy Kool-Aid and parrot the Vatican propaganda. It's pretty sickening.

What, exactly, have these “Popes” done for the poor? Well, aside from working with the enemies of the poor, namely the rich and their fascist guardians, they threaten them with Eternal Damnation in the fires of Hell if they use birth control, or terminate a pregnancy. (What is it with the RCC and sadistically burning people? Burning people alive is also how they murdered scientists, political opponents, and those unlucky enough to raise suspicions of insufficient loyalty to the RCC.)

We have also been breathlessly told by an admiring media that in his first homily, Bergoglio came out with some guff about “forgiveness,” namely the need to grant it, as ordered by Jesus and “God.”

That sounds like a sneaky way of saying “give me a pass on that Argentine death squad stuff. Jesus and God tells you to.” As with all Pope propaganda always, it's self-serving, aimed at defending and advancing the interests of the RCC and its Boss.

Genuflecting before these goons in their Byzantine era costumes affirms their sham “holiness,” which is a con job that rational people must reject.

1) We can trace the history of Roman Catholic Church support for fascism back at least as far as Franco, the traitorous general who rebelled against the Spanish government and took over Spain after a civil war (aided by Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, which also had the backing of the Vatican). During World War II, the Vatican stood aside and watched Hitler's genocidal war and extermination of most of the Jews in Europe. (Hitler's main enemies- Soviet atheistic socialism and Jews- were, respectively, the Vatican's number one foe, and millennial bete noire, ostensibly for “murdering Jesus.”) Many “good Catholics” participated in the extermination of Europe's Jewish population. None were excommunicated or told it was sinful to do so. And the Vatican since 1917 feared and loathed Bolshevism. (Yet another basis for the de facto alliance between the RCC and Western capitalist establishments.)

After the war, the Vatican issued false documents and set up a ratline for thousands of Nazi war criminals to escape to Latin America, where they aided future fascist regimes there in exterminating many tens of thousands of “communists.” (Major examples where they played a murderous role are Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Peru.) These regimes were consistently supported by the RCC. Those in the lower ranks of the Church who took the gospel of Jesus seriously and stood with the poor were targeted by those fascist regimes with the tacit approval of the bosses of the Church, who didn't even make a fuss when the archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, was assassinated by Roberto d'Aubuisson's goons. (d'Aubuisson was a maniacal fascist fanatic and favorite of the fascist elements in the U.S. government, including members of Congress like Jesse Helms, the racist, fascist Carolina Senator.) In fact, the fawned-over Pope John Paul II replaced Romero with a reactionary, who brought the Salvadorean franchise back to its traditional role of cozying up to the rich and their murderous fascist attack dogs. (El Salvador is a country ruled by seven rich families.) (I'm afraid there are really no synonyms for “fascist.” Gets repetitive, I know.)

2) I don't have enough information to pass judgment on this self-serving claim, but on its face it's plausible. Of course since Bergoglio's the one who effectively enabled the priests' seizure in the first place, he was certainly obligated to help them- as you would expect anyone claiming to be a humanitarian to do in any event, particularly for former colleagues. In fact, he and the rest of the Argentine power elite were morally obligated to oppose the fascist regime. But as they shared its aim of extirpating any and all progressive elements in their society, and used the existence of a few hundred leftist guerrillas as an excuse to annihilate 30,000 people, they went along with the program. Of course, the terror imposed by the junta was also a factor in quelling opposition, following the blueprint of all totalitarian regimes. (Indeed the Catholic Church itself ruled Europe for millennia partly through such terror. “Heresy” was punishable by the most gruesome torture and sadistic execution by being burned alive, etc. Their system was one of ideology imposed, and political subservience enforced, through terror. And the model of inquisitions, show trials, and purges to enforce ideological conformity and political fealty to the rulers would be copied by Bolsheviks and fascists, including in the U.S., where it is sometimes called “McCarthyism,” although in the U.S. few people were physically exterminated, unlike what happened to the native Americans. Thus the RCC was an early pioneer in developing and perfecting the socio-political blueprint of totalitarian control.)

And if Bergoglio's claim of intervening to save the priests is true, that is damning in its own way as it proves that objecting to a regime crime was far from an automatic death sentence for high-status members of Argentine society. Of course, that depends on individual circumstances. The Jewish Argentine newspaper publisher Jacobo Timerman was imprisoned and tortured, but not murdered. His class probably saved his life, while his Jewishness was probably a big part of why the anti-Semitic junta seized him. His Jewishness, not just his opposition to their extermination program, made him a object of their hatred, and was also a way of setting him apart from the rest of the Argentine business and social elite. (Timerman himself provides ample evidence of junta anti-Semtism in his memoir of his imprisonment and torture, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.)

3) The New York Times, instead of running a story on Bergoglio's complicity with the bloodthirsty Argentine butchers and his betrayal of his own priests and of the poor, made the Vatican's denials the story. [“Vatican Rejects Claims of Pope’s Ties to Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’” 3/15/13.] Indeed their story advocates the Vatican's “position,” while pretending to merely be “reporting.” And the NYT's version of events is sharply at odds with the Globe and Mail, El Pais, and Reuters. The NYT even claims the priests deny Bergoglio was at fault!

Notice also that the Globe story came first, and the NYT in effect responded to it the next day, after having ignored the “charges” initially. But anybody following events in Argentina, where this “Pope” hails from, could not have been unaware of the brouhaha there. The Mothers of the Disappeared denounced the new “Pope,” for example. This is far from a dead issue in Argentina. And the various media hacks obviously had to look at the Argentine reaction in preparing their puff pieces on the new Pope and his background. So we can presume conscious suppression of information here, not innocent “oversight” or “incompetence,” the usual alibis that even putative “media critics” all too often feed us in these situations of information suppression. (But we did get media soundbites of dutiful Argentina Catholics verbally genuflecting at the new Pope's knees, the standard capitalist media behavior for each new Pope. In fact there's nary a critic of the “Church” in the media to be heard, not about protecting pedophile priests, not about its hidebound, repressive ideology, and certainly not about its alliances with fascism.)

Indeed, the NYT's version of reality flies in the face of the priests' own written accounts as reported by the Globe and Mail (and virtually ignored by the rest of the U.S. and UK media). Comparing the details in the Globe and Mail (and El Pais) with the radically different story offered by the NYT, it is inescapable to conclude that at a minimum the NYT is being deceptive, but more likely is flat out lying. (Shocking!)*

Given the NYT's history of support for fascist regimes in Latin America, and its systematic minimization of the crimes of those regimes, there is no reason to trust the NYT here. The NYT hid the terror and mass murder in Argentina for many years, among other crimes of complicity in Latin American fascism.

I'll have more on media mendacity around this at www.propagandaanalysis.blogspot.com shortly.

*Hey, this is a “newspaper” that once invented a story about 8 LSD users blinding themselves by staring at the sun. It also created the apparently immortal myth that Kitty Genovese was murdered in Queens, NY, while dozens of neighbors ignored her screams. [See “On The Media” for that one. There's audio and a transcript available.] There's probably about 500,000 or more other lies and fabrications the NYT has come up with over its history. Space considerations prevent me from listing them all here. To be fair, more of the NYT's trickery and deception is done by omission and slant (aka “spin”) than by making like Pinocchio. So I wouldn't say that the NYT is “full of lies,” just that it contains a lot of lies. Big difference (I guess).

Popes, Presidents, Party Bosses: Does It Make a Difference?

The media blather about the new capo of the Catholic Church continues, now that one has actually been named. We're hearing a lot of fatuous comments apparently designed to obscure the fact that nothing is different and no structural changes in that organization's practices and dogma are likely.

The new guy is being hailed in cherry-picked soundbites by mostly unidentified Catholics, who may be the proverbial "man in the street" or church apparatchiks. What is known already is that the Cardinals picked one of their own kind, a "conservative" who abhors gays, abortion, the concept of women priests, end of celibacy, or marriage for priests. (Gotta maintain that chaste image, reality be damned!) One particularly idiotic line I heard pushed in a radio broadcast implied he's some kind of "liberal" because he denounced priests who wouldn't baptize babies of unmarried women. Hey, that's just a business decision! He doesn't want to drive away customers!

At the same time, in China they're having their once-in-ten-years "leadership change" at the top of the oppressive "Communist" Party of China, the oligarchy that holds a monopoly on power without even the pretense of contested elections (such pretense being the kind of sham run by the PRI in Mexico for 75 years until their upset). Here too, nothing actually changes, despite the endless empty speculation as to "what it means" in the Western media. (Some of the yakkers are called "analysts," but with nothing to analyze, how can they be analysts?)

In the U.S., different Presidents make more of a difference, but again, nothing fundamentally changes. The U.S. remains a corporate oligarchy fronted by a two-party dictatorship which manages a global empire. A disguised empire, to be sure, but with bases in over a hundred foreign countries, and the self-arrogated right to choose governments for other nations, can any rational person deny it is imperialist?

Currently the Democrats and Republicans both agree that social services not just for the poor but for almost everyone has to be slashed to reduce deficits. The differences come down to a quibble over whether the rich will have to pay a little more in taxes, or nothing at all. The fact that Social Security runs a surplus, and will continue doing so for at least the next 20 years, is regularly ignored. The propagandists keep insisting the problem is mainly Social Security and Medicare, and the solution to the budget imbalance is to cut them. (Actually, with the U.S. government able to borrow money at rock bottom rates, the government should load up on debt at these prices, as Ford Motor company did, and use the money to invest in infrastructure, education, etc. Fat chance, obviously. The U.S. seems determined to self-destruct, long-term. It won't be the first empire to meet its demise through its own mad stupidity. What a waste, as America could contribute so much to humanity if it used its power for good.) The role of the gigantic military budget (I remember Carter increasing it 50% over 4 years, to $150 billion, and he's "remembered" as "weak" on "defense." Now when you add up all the hidden extras, and the two-thirds of the "Energy" Dept. budget that in fact is for nuclear weapons, it's almost a trillion dollars a year (1000 billions). And we're hearing histrionic moaning about what a disaster cutting it will be! Why, we'll practically be left defenseless!

And of course decades of slashing taxes for big corporations and the wealthy have something to do with all this. The 400 richest Americans hailed by Forbes collectively control about $2 trillion in wealth. Likewise public corporations have amassed trillions in cash on their books. (All that welfare they get from the government helps. And not having to pay much if any taxes. But look at all the jobs they're creating!)

Bottom line: in all these cases and others of "leadership change,"  the yakkers want to play to people's desire for change, with these cruel teases, raising false hopes. The changes are similar to a new CEO  at a corporation. They mean very little.

Nothing will change until people put real pressure on the respective systems of repression- or abandon them, as Catholics have the option of doing with their "church." Unlike in so many centuries past, the Catholic Church no longer holds state power- although it holds something close to it in benighted lands like Ireland, where it still imposes its sick law on everyone, and various Latin countries, which also ban abortion among other outrages.

The Suspense Builds! Who Will Be The Next Pope?

[Yes, they just picked one. That will be at the end.]

Most of the media around the world insists on breathlessly “covering” an ongoing non-event- a gaggle of Catholic Church poohbahs meeting in secret to pick a successor to Ratzinger, who recently retired as Godfather of “God's” flock on earth.(1) The only actual news will occur when they announce their pick for new cult chairman of the board.

Since nothing visible is happening except dumb brainwashed acolytes hanging around outside to stare at a chimney from which smoke signals are emitted, the “coverage” consists of broadcasting their ooh-and aahs (as BBC did 3/13) and endless uninformed and sure-to-be-wrong speculation about Who It Will Be.

You've gotta hand it to those cunning capos of the Catholic Church, They have a masterfully manipulative means of building suspense- by using the “smoke” part of smoke and mirrors. Figuratively and literally. Literally with this daily ritual of emitting a puff of smoke so “the faithful” will know when the Great Decision has been made: Black Smoke: not yet! White Smoke: It's a Pope!! [Now, is it “God” who makes the choice or the “Cardinals?” Oh, “God” guides the Cardinals to pick the right (white European for the last 1,000 years) man.]

This is how they communicate with their flock of sheep- with non-verbal signals, like with a trained dog.

And the figurative smoke is the shrouding of the whole process in deep secrecy.

They also have mirrors too, a hall of mirrors, a vast cathedral of mirages- the whole huge illusion of Holiness, of mythical beings, of eternal life, of Heaven and Hell, with the endless myths and detailed dogma. (They closed down one area of fantasyland a while back, “Limbo,^TM” the imaginary bin they consigned the “souls” of dead unbaptized babies to. Apparently they couldn't sell enough tickets.)

The suspense is totally fraudulent. We already know the new Boss will be another “conservative.” There will no change in Church dogma or reactionary policy, contrary to empty speculation media prattlers feed us.

Now, drumroll. Envelope please: And the winner is- Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires! He has now become an infallible human being manning the hotline to “God.” “The First Jesuit, the First Latin American and the First Francis,” hails the NY Times."Of newly-elected pope,a Buenos Aires city worker says: 'He speaks the truth. Listening to him is like hearing Jesus speak.'" Ooooh, he sounds heavenly...(so to speak). Hey, what else do you need to know? (And the Jewish NY Times sure isn't holding a grudge for about 2,000 years of anti-Semitic persecution by Catholicism. Big of them.)

Yes, he's the first non-European in over 1,000 years. But he's of Italian heritage. So he's kinda European.

The establishment media finds the authoritarian Church a useful ally in its preferred hierarchical social order based on power and repression. Religion is a vital means of indoctrination and control, along with schools and media. Hence the media's motive in acting as trumpeting angels heralding this Church personnel change.

1) A thought: if life on another planet is confirmed, will that be yet another blow against religious superstition, as the discoveries of Copernicus, Keppler, Darwin, and other scientists were? Or will religions land on their feet and declare that “God,” in his magnificence, wasn't content to create life on merely one planet but decided to populate the rest of the universe? Perhaps that was what “He” was up to after that first week! What a great opportunity to spread the Good Word to other worlds!