When you read about “liberation theology,” you swiftly discover that it has deep roots in Marxist thought. When you read about liberation theology, you quickly see that the “redistribution of wealth” is a central pillar of the movement. And, when you read about “black liberation theology,” you find out that the typical class distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is extended to include the race distinction between the blacks and the whites.
The problem with Marxism from the outset has always been that the beatific potrait of a classless society – with the evil bourgeoisie purged from its ranks – has in actual reality never amounted to more than a sick joke. When we looked at how Stalin and his Communist Party hierarchy lived in relation to the poor, simple proletariat in the U.S.S.R., or whether we looked at how Mao Tse Tung and his Communist party hierarchy lived in relation to the poor, simple proletariat in the People’s Republic of China, we saw the same rampant, arrogant, hypocritical corruption and oppression.
And – of course – the oppressor class of rich, wealthy bourgeoisie was immediately replaced by an oppressor class of rich, wealthy Marxists who swiftly employed levels of brutality and control that dwarfed the wildest imaginings of any political system that had come before. In the name of “the people,” a State system whose leaders lived unimaginably more luxurious lives than those in whose names they ruled engaged in campaigns of disinformation and brutal terror to keep “the people” under their abject dominion.
It didn’t matter where you turned – Kim Jung Il’s North Korea or Fidel Castro’s Cuba – it was invariably the same thing. Marxism had a perfect track record. The leaders of Marxism preached an idyllic “Absurdity of Hope”-style message promising “change” as the policies of the redistribution of wealth took root thoughout the society. But all the while, they were in fact hoarding that wealth for themselves even as they demonized economic and political systems that were in fact far superior to Marxism in producing and providing economic benefit for the poor.
So now we turn to Jeremiah Wright, who has been an advocate of black liberation theology throughout his 35 year-plus tenure at Trinity United Church of Christ. For all those years, he railed against white greed, and the oppressive white society that oppressed the poor class of blacks and usurped its wealth for themselves. He implemented a black value system that included a “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.”
And now – just like Joseph Stalin, just like Mao Tse Tung, just like Pol Pot, just like Fidel Castro, just like Kim Jung Il and his father before him, just like so many Marxists leaders – Jeremiah Wright gets to enjoy his moment when he lavishly lives just like the people he spent his life demonizing.
Jeremiah Wright gets to live large, just like all the Marxist leaders who came before him.
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is retiring to a 10,000 square foot, $1.6 million home on the fairway of high-class Tinley Park, courtesy of his loving flock. And the same loving flock has provided him with a $10 million line of church credit to live on.
http://www.slate.com/id/2188414/
The gated country club community, by the way, consists an elite population consisting of 98% lilly white rich people.
Now, I am perfectly willing to admit that I may be the only human being on the face of the planet who thinks he sees massive hypocrisy here. But somehow I just don’t interpret “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness” to mean, “Bypass middleclassness altogether and go straight for filthy rich.”
Jeremiah Wright spent his career screaming for a massive redistribution of wealth. And he got one: from all the families of the mostly poor black congregation to his own wealthy estate on a nearly all white country club. He railed for black separatism under a black value system. But it appears that his black value system simply doesn’t suit him any more.
Had Reverend Wright NOT embraced black liberation theology, there would have been nothing wrong with his retiring to such wealth. But when you become the very thing you rail against and urge others to abandon, you become the very definition of “hypocrite.”
This doesn’t in any way directly condemn Senator Barack Obama, of course, other than to point out just how flawed his judgment truly was in aligning himself with a man like Jeremiah Wright, and to raise the legitimate question as to whether Obama’s own “Audacity of Hope” message is as hypocritical and self-serving as the man who was the source of that message turned out to be.
Tags: $10 million, audacity of hope, black liberation theology, black value system, bourgeoisie, corruption, Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness, hypocrite, Jeremiah Wright, Kim Jung Il, Mao, Marxist, proletariat, redistribution of wealth, Stalin, Tinley Park, wealth
Start Thinking Right 
April 19, 2008 at 4:47 am
…the oppressors have always been ‘white maggots’ (including the chinese albeit they’re a bit yellow). Read-up dumbo…!
April 20, 2008 at 2:23 am
What an oppressive thing to say! And for that matter, what a racist thing to say.
You’re never revealed to be more correct than when your opponents’ own remarks prove what you’re saying about them is true.
But thank you for taking the time to read the article, Tall-Eagle.
May 5, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Marxism inspired Liberation theology–Black Liberation theology simply replaces bourgeoisie and proletariat with white and black…But, does not Marxism do this with biblical theology? The biblical struggle btwn good and evil, culminating in Armageddon and the emergence of the perfect society. Does this not sound like the epic struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, culminating in the Revolution and the ushering in of the perfect (“communist”) society? Who are the “Good” in the bible? They are the ancient Israelites, the downtrodden, the oppressed, the “Slaves.” Who is the Evil? Why he is Pharoah, the oppressor. All that Marx did was take God out of the equation. He secularized Jihad–the epic struggle between good and evil.
May 6, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Phat Kat,
You are right. Here’s a couple of interesting factoids:
Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote in “Moral Philosophy,”
“This is to say that Marx is a heretic of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that Marxism is a ‘Christian heresy’, the latest Christian heresy.” He observes that historian Arnold Toynbee had described communism as a Christian heresy in a footnote .
————–
Someone wrote the following:
For that matter, scholarship over the last 20 years, when more mainstream academics have begun to think more clearly about the subject of Marxism, has noted the strange respects in which Marxism itself reads like a Christian heresy, in which a new age is to be ushered in by a transformation of human nature in a grand historical dialectic. In traditional Christianity, the ennobling of human nature takes place because of Christ’s Incarnation; in Marxism, the State takes His place. Marxism offers a theory of sin (private property) and salvation (collective ownership), a church that dispenses grace (the State, as administered by the vanguard of the proletariat), and a litany of saints and sinners. (Of course, it was far more violent than even the worst of the excesses of the Inquisition.)
So, in fact, it is not too much of a stretch for Christian heresy to embrace Marxism as a creed, since, as G.K. Chesterton said, heresy is often truth gone mad. Liberation theology is the admixutre of one small truth (God cares about the poor) with so much error that it resulted in a madness that saw Christians champion what amounted to terrorism against propertied elites. Of course, it didn’t work out the way the theologians imagined it would.
May 6, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Liberation theology, like Marxism, can only have limited appeal in America as it is so wealthy as to accomodate a high degree of class mobility. The downtrodden want to become rich capitalists themselves, not destroy the system. Liberation theology is an improvement on atheist Marxism. What of a society without God? In Stalin’s view, he was accountable to no one but himself (or perhaps history in which case he is condemned). Speaking realpolitik, “justice” is whatever the stronger says it is–be it a tyrant (stalin) a class or faction. In a society rooted in faith, the strongest is a transcendent God before which every faction is equal. “Justice” is what Yahweh (or Allah or Jehovah) says it is, not what serves the interests of this faction or that leader. All the western religions support some resource redistribution to the poor (charity) and all support protecting the industrious from unfair resentment.
As for Wright–it is hard to say if his wealth is fair. Even before this controversy, books/articles cited him as the foremost example of Black Liberation theology from the pulpit. CDs/DVD’s of his sermons, his books are all big sellers. Does he retain the rights to those, or did he assign those rights to his church? If he brings in big $$$ for the church, buying him a house and giving him a line of credit may be quite fair. The fact that his financial affairs are intermingled with his church is their issue to deal with.