NeoZine

The Reign of Oppression

“I’m so lonely!” Lennon screamed, “Wanna die!”  His heart was tortured, his guitar wailed, and he is dead now.

What kind of world kills minds like Lennon or Martin Luther King? Why did they kill Jesus Christ?

It still happens, all the time. Every day when a child begins school, the parents know things will never be the same. That small spirit will be ground down, slowly, and he’ll die long before he’s dead. The tragedy is captured in a father’s words to his son:

May you always be courageous,
Stand upright,  and be strong!
And May you stay forever young! — Dylan

Those words sting in the hearts of parents. Much courage and strength is needed to stay “forever young” in a world so random.

But it isn’t madness, the Bible says. It’s oppression. More precise, a child steps into slavery, where life is cheap, expectations are overwhelming, and precious emotions like love are ridiculed,  where significance is tortured.

The Bible calls it “a spirit of slavery leading to fear”  where people are “subject to slavery all their lives” (Romans 8:15; Hebrews 2:15).

Blind Obedience

Only performance matters, and it is fear-driven: compliance, production, high expectations no matter how overwhelmed. Why is everyone so frantic? Because the consequences of delay are too frightful to imagine.

Why does everyone comply?

American democracy is smug and pompous the way it forces its brand of Capitalist “freedom” on the rest of the world. Freedom of the press, speech and even religion are more propaganda than free expressions. The press, speech and religion are tolerated only when conforming to the dictates of Madison Avenue moguls, who churn-out brain-dead marketing propaganda financed by the the rich and powerful. Today it’s called “Politically Correct” (what does it mean?), but tomorrow a different message will dominate everyone, and who can challenge it? Our jobs and station in life are measured by conformity:

So goes the cancer of the Western World: everyone is just doing his “Job.” Nobody learned the lesson of Eichmann. Everyone still points the finger elsewhere. America and the West suffer from a great spiritual crisis. — Jerry Rubin¹

Behind the curtain of so-called freedom, millions are chained in harsh expectations. The stories of suffering are endless.

The Origins

Exploitation fuels the economy, and this is the source of both pain and conformity in our culture. Capitalism smashes the weak under the iron boots of American Captains of Industry, Wall Street Icons, and the wealthiest corporation on earth called the Federal Government. How many tried to change the cruelty of these systems? Working together, they always grow more sophisticated and cloaked–systems within systems.

Who sets the expectations, does anyone know?

Money drives everything, so we forget the greedy characters who own the money. Capitalism is not kind. It is cold and demanding, like any slave-owner, but without crude whips or chains. People are driven under the lash of economic forces beyond their control, at the whims of unknown faces in lavish boardrooms, issuing edicts from leather chairs.

Occasionally the Overlords emerge, especially when the economy collapses.

When stocks are tumbling along Wall Street and monolithic institutions across America are shaken, suddenly exposed are the vermin and thieves, fools and impetuous rich perpetrating the collapse. What greed was hiding in the boardrooms! They were already rich beyond reason, but not rich enough, so they manipulated the economy and stuffed their pockets with money by squeezing millions of victims. How many families lost their homes because these men wanted another $100 million dollars?

Everybody knows Capitalism thrives on greed, but everybody somehow overlooks the evil nature of greed. The most brilliant minds are somehow deceived on this point, as the legendary head of the Federal Reserve admitted:

“Those of us who have looked to…lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” Alan Greenspan, 10/23/2008 Congressional Testimony

How could such a brilliant man think greedy people will protect shareholders? His faith in American greed was rattled, but not by just a few oddballs. Nobody should believe those few disgraced CEOs and CFOs from the current Wall Street crisis are gone, because more greedy chieftains are lining up to replace them. They too will dash hopes for well-behaved greed to run the country.

Such is the beast controlling America: economic slavery. Everyone knows it, everyone fears the lash, nobody wants to lose their cash, and everyone submits to it peacefully.

Systems of Oppression

The fact of economic slavery is not merely a Christian teaching. It’s evident to anyone who stands back to look at it, even famous atheists:

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
Bertrand Russell

How can it be that everyone knows the human spirit is so degraded by a system we so adore? The Bible offers a viable explanation for the mind-numbing source behind human slavery:

Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe. 2 Corinthians 4:4

This is not a local problem, it’s a hideous problem. Human oppression and slavery is systematic across the globe. It describes history. New ideologies and new forms of government arise, but human slavery remains the underlying glue holding societies together.

Karl Marx eloquently exposed the undercurrent of oppression in the late 1800s, but his solution created the most brutal and oppressive regimes of history. The atheist regimes of Communism killed 200 million or more and turned vast populations into slave camps. What a terrible embarrassment it is for evangelists of atheism like Richard Dawkins, who claims atheism brings emancipation–so he avoids discussing the bloody fruit of Communism.

It’s an organized oppression, it’s not accidental. It’s pervasive, not isolated to a few greedy rich.

It’s called the World System in the Bible, and it kills any thoughts or interest in God. This is why the Bible pleas for for us to understand:

Do not love this World System nor the things it offers you, for when you love the World System, you do not have the love of the Father in you. 1 John 2:15

American economics “prevents us from living freely and nobly”, as Russell said, because the World System excludes God, who created us to live “freely and nobly.”

The World System is the reason why John Lenin was so lonely, why he was murdered, why Martin Luther King and Jesus Christ were murdered, and why a child’s sweet spirit is ground to dust: it’s a cruel system, even if it is antiseptic on its surface. The author is evil and oppressive, and to keep people from considering God, the World System subjugates and destroy what remains of the human spirit.

Revolution!

Social revolution will not produce freedom. It is a sad fact. Thus the failure of the youth revolution in the 60s and early 70s. The “Yippie Manifesto” is a pathetic and whining document of all the terrible things wrong with the world, but offers no solutions.

Communism replaced Czarism with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat that enslaved billions.

Democracy and Capitalism create massively-oppressed populations, based on the morality of rational self-interest, as Ayn Rand described.

Anarchists claim freedom comes from throwing off the shackles of government altogether, but history proves whenever this happens oppression and cruelty only become more chaotic and widespread, not less.²

A movement among famous scientists in the early 1900s claimed they could be trusted to form a benevolent society led by enlightened scientific minds, but they were the same scientists who created our Nuclear nightmare. They quickly lost their following.

But there is one point in history where real human freedom and dignity thrived under a kind and benevolent government:

• It wasn’t a social revolution.
• It was a revolution of the heart.
• It was led by the most successful revolutionary in history.
• His name was Jesus Christ.

Footnotes:

1. A Yippie Manifesto, retrieved 2/20/2009 [↩]
2. The onset of the Russian Revolution was initially anarchistic, until people began starving. The French Revolution was anarchistic as well, until Napoleon brought order. [↩]

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