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Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
Volume 6, No. 19
5 Articles, 14 Pages
1. Sun Sets Early On The American Century
2. The Most Dreaded Enemy of Liberty
3. Forex-Dollar Falls vs. Euro as Housing Starts Plunge
4. Why They're Afraid of Michael Moore
5. Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and The Fast Track Saints
1. SUN SETS EARLY ON THE AMERICAN CENTURY
(Even hard-headed realists in the U.S. power elite fear the Iraq war has crippled America's ability to lead)
BY
The disastrous outcome of the invasion and occupation of Iraq has caused a crisis in the power elite of the United States deeper than that resulting from defeat in Vietnam 30 years ago. Ironically, it is the very coalition of ultra nationalists and neo-conservatives that coalesced in the 1970s, seeking to reverse the Vietnam syndrome, restore U.S. power and revive "the will to victory" that has caused the present crisis.
There has been no sustained popular mass protest as there was during the Vietnam War, probably because of the underclass sociology of the volunteer U.S. military and the fact that the war is being funded by foreign financial flows. However, at the elite level the war has fractured the national security establishment that has run the United States for six decades. The unprecedented public critique in 2006 by several retired senior officers over the conduct of the war, plus recurrent signs of dissent in the intelligence agencies and the state department, reflects a much wider trend in elite opinion.
Not all critics are as forthright as retired general William Odom, who tirelessly repeats that the invasion of Iraq was the "greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history"; or Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, who denounced a "blunder of historic proportions" and has recently suggested impeaching the president; or former National Security Council head Zbigniew Brzezinski, who called the war and occupation a "historic, strategic and moral calamity."
Most public critiques from within the institutions of state focus on the way the war and occupation have been mismanaged rather than the more fundamental issue of the invasion itself. Yet discord is wide and deep: Government departments are trading blame, accusing each other of the "loss of Iraq." In private, former senior officials express incandescent anger, denounce shadowy cabals and have deep contempt for the White House. A former official of the National Security Council compared the president and his staff to the Corleone mafia family in The Godfather. A senior foreign policy expert said: "Due to an incompetent, arrogant and corrupt clique we are about to lose our hegemonic position in the Middle East and Gulf."
"The White House has broken the army and trampled its honour," added a Republican senator and former Vietnam veteran.
None of these, nor any of the other institutional critics, could be considered doves: Whatever their political affiliations (mostly Republican) or personal beliefs, they were – and some are still – guardians of U.S. power, managers of the national security state, and sometimes central actors in covert and overt imperial interventions in the Third World during the Cold War and post-Cold War.
As a social group, these realists cannot be distinguished from the object of their criticism in terms of their willingness to use force or their historically demonstrated ruthlessness in achieving state aims. Nor can the cause of their dissent be attributed to conflicting convictions over ethics, norms and values (though this may be a motivating factor for some). It lies rather in the rational realization that the war in Iraq has nearly "broken the U.S. Army," weakened the national security state, and severely, if not irreparably, undermined "America's global legitimacy" – its ability to shape world preferences and set the global agenda. The most sophisticated expressions of dissent, such as Brzezinski's, reflect the understanding that power is not reducible to the ability to coerce, and that, once lost, hegemonic legitimacy is hard to restore.
The signs of slippage are apparent everywhere: in Latin America, where U.S. influence is at its lowest in decades; in East Asia, where the United States has been obliged, reluctantly, to negotiate with North Korea and recognize China as an indispensable actor in regional security; in Europe, where U.S. plans to install missile defence capabilities in Poland are being contested by Germany and other European Union states; in the Gulf, where old allies such as Saudi Arabia are pursuing autonomous agendas that coincide only in part with U.S. aims; and in the international institutions, the UN and the World Bank, where the United States is no longer in a position to drive the agenda unaided.
Transnational opinion surveys show a consistent and nearly global pattern of defiance of U.S. foreign policy as well as a more fundamental erosion in the attractiveness of the United States: The narrative of the American dream has been submerged by images of a military leviathan disregarding world opinion and breaking the rules. World public opinion may not stop wars but it does count in subtler ways. Some of this slippage may be repairable under new leaders and with new and less aggressive policies. Yet it is hard to see how internal unity of purpose will be restored: It took decades to rebuild the U.S. military after Vietnam and to define an elite and popular consensus on the uses of power.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq is not the sole cause of the trends sketched. Rather, the war significantly accentuated all of them at a moment when larger centrifugal forces were already at work: the erosion and collapse of the Washington Consensus and the gradual rise of new gravitational centres, notably in Asia, were established trends when President George Bush went to war. Now, as the shift in the world economy towards Asia matures, the United States is stuck in a conflict that is absorbing its total energies. History is moving on and the world is slipping, slowly but inexorably, out of U.S. hands.
For the U.S. power elite this is deeply unsettling. Since the mid-20th century U.S. leaders have thought of themselves as having a unique historic responsibility to lead and govern the globe. Sitting on top of the world since the 1940s, they have assumed that, like Great Britain in the 19th century, they were destined to act as hegemon – a dominant state having the will and the means to establish and maintain international order: peace and an open and expanding liberal world economy. In their reading of history it was Britain's inability to sustain such a role and America's simultaneous unwillingness to take responsibility that created the conditions for the cycle of world wars and depression during the first half of the 20th century.
The corollary of this assumption is the circular argument that since order requires a dominant centre, the maintenance of order (or avoidance of chaos) requires the perpetuation of hegemony. This belief system, theorized in U.S. academia in the 1970s as "hegemonic stability," has underpinned U.S. foreign policy since World War II, when the United States emerged as the core state of the world capitalist system. As early as 1940 U.S. economic and political elites forecast a vast revolution in the balance of power: The United States would become heir to the economic and political assets of the British Empire.
A year later, Time magazine publisher Henry Luce announced the coming American Century: "America's first century as a dominant power in the world" meant that its people would have "to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation and exert upon the world the full impact of our influence as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." By the mid-1940s the contours of the American Century had already emerged: U.S. economic predominance and strategic supremacy upheld by a planetary network of military bases.
The postwar U.S. leaders who presided over the construction of the national security state were filled, in William Appleman Williams's words, with "visions of omnipotence": The United States enjoyed enormous economic advantages, a significant technological edge and briefly held an atomic monopoly. Though the Korean stalemate (1953) and the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons and missile programs dented U.S. self-confidence, it took defeat in Vietnam and the domestic social upheavals that accompanied the war to reveal the limits of power. Henry Kissinger's and Richard Nixon's "realism in an era of decline" was a reluctant acknowledgment that the overarching hegemony of the previous 20 years could not and would not last forever.
But Vietnam and the Nixon era were a turning point in another more paradoxical way: Domestically they ushered in the conservative revolution and the concerted effort of the mid-1980s to restore and renew the national security state and U.S. world power. When the Soviet Union collapsed a few years later, misguided visions of omnipotence resurfaced. Conservative triumphalists dreamed of primacy and sought to lock in long-term unipolarity. Iraq was a strategic experiment designed to begin the Second American Century. That experiment and U.S. foreign policy now lie in ruins.
Historical analogies are never perfect but Great Britain's long exit from empire may shed some light on the present moment. At the end of the 19th century few British leaders could even begin to imagine an end to empire. When Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee was celebrated in 1897, Britain possessed a formal transoceanic empire that encompassed a quarter of the world's territory and 300 million people – twice that if China, a near colony of 430 million people, was included. The city of London was the centre of an even more far-flung trading and financial empire that bound the world. It is unsurprising that, despite apprehensions over U.S. and German industrial competitiveness, significant parts of the British elite believed that they had been given "a gift from the Almighty of a lease of the universe forever."
The Jubilee turned out to be "final sunburst of an unalloyed belief in British fitness to rule." The Second Boer War (1899-1902) fought to preserve the routes to India and secure the weakest link in the imperial chain, wasted British wealth and blood and revealed the atrocities of scorched-earth policies to a restive British public. The world war that broke out in 1914 bankrupted and exhausted all of its European protagonists. The long end of the British era had started. However, the empire not only survived the immediate crisis but hobbled on for decades, through World War II, until its inglorious end at Suez in 1956. Still, a nostalgia for lost grandeur persists. As Tony Blair's Mesopotamian adventures show, the imperial afterglow has faded but is not entirely extinguished.
For the U.S. power elite, being on top of the world has been a habit for 60 years. Hegemony has been a way of life; empire, a state of being and of mind. The institutional realist critics of the Bush administration have no alternative conceptual framework for international relations, based on something other than force, the balance of power or strategic predominance.
The present crisis and the deepening impact of global concerns will perhaps generate new impulses for co-operation and interdependence in future. Yet it is just as likely that U.S. policy will be unpredictable: As all post-colonial experiences show, de-imperialization is likely to be a long and possibly traumatic process.
2. THE MOST DREADED ENEMY OF LIBERTY
BY
JAMES MADISON (1751 – June 28, 1836)
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. . . . [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and . . . degeneracy of manners and of morals. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. . . .
[It should be well understood] that the powers proposed to be surrendered [by the Third Congress] to the Executive were those which the Constitution has most jealously appropriated to the Legislature. . . .
The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war . . . the power of raising armies . . . the power of creating offices. . . .
A delegation of such powers [to the President] would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments.
The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it, is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted.
The separation of the power of raising armies from the power of commanding them, is intended to prevent the raising of armies for the sake of commanding them.
The separation of the power of creating offices from that of filling them, is an essential guard against the temptation to create offices for the sake of gratifying favourites or multiplying dependents.
3. FOREX-DOLLAR FALLS VS EURO AS HOUSING STARTS PLUNGE
BY
VIVIANNE RODRIGUES
The dollar fell broadly on Wednesday after a report showed housing starts dropped to their lowest level in 14 years in September, adding to concerns that the housing market may drag on the U.S. economy.
Traders sold dollars after the Commerce Department said home construction starts fell 10.2 percent last month, below Wall Street's consensus forecast. For details, see [ID:nN17336451].
A weaker housing market and a slow U.S. economy may prompt Federal Reserve policy-makers to cut benchmark interest rates again from the current 4.75 percent. Policy-makers meet next on Oct. 30-31.
"The U.S. housing market is going to continue to be a significant drag on the overall U.S. economy, and the U.S. dollar is going to weaken as a result," said Firas Askari, head currency trader at BMO Nesbitt Burns in Toronto.
"The Federal Reserve is more likely to be easing rates, maybe not on October 31, but definitely within the next three to six months," he added.
In morning trading in New York, the euro was 0.35 percent higher at $1.4213
Against the yen, the U.S. currency edged higher to 116.94
According to another government report, U.S. consumer prices rose at the sharpest rate in four months in September. Still, core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy costs, rose in line with expectations. [ID:nN17260664]
"CPI came in about as expected, so there's more focus on the big drop in housing starts," said Shaun Osborne, a senior currency strategist at TD Securities in Toronto. "The general trend is toward risk-taking again today after the rebound in Asian equities."
Later in the session, the Federal Reserve's "beige book" snapshot of the U.S. economy, slated for release at 2 p.m. (1800 GMT), may provide further clues on the Fed's next move on rates.
The yen retreated from sharp gains and higher-yielding currencies also recovered as some investors got back into carry trades. In carry trades investors fund purchases in higher-yielding currencies by borrowing in low-yielding units.
The euro was 0.4 percent higher at 166.22 yen
Minutes from the Bank of England's last policy meeting showed an unexpected dissenting vote calling for a rate cut. However, this had a limited impact on the pound because it was offset by stronger-than-expected labor market data.
Sterling last traded 0.3 percent higher at 2.0381 to the dollar
4. WHY THEY'RE AFRAID OF MICHAEL MOORE
BY
JOHN PILGER
In "Sicko", Michael Moore's new film, a young Ronald Reagan is shown appealing to working-class Americans to reject "socialised medicine" as commie subversion. In the 1940s and 1950s, Reagan was employed by the American Medical Association and big business as the amiable mouthpiece of a neo-fascism bent on persuading ordinary Americans that their true interests, such as universal health care, were "anti-American".
Watching this, I found myself recalling the effusive farewells to Reagan when he died three years ago. "Many people believe," said Gavin Esler on the BBC's Newsnight, "that he restored faith in American military action [and] was loved even by his political opponents." In the Daily Mail, Esler wrote that Reagan "embodied the best of the American spirit – the optimistic belief that problems can be solved, that tomorrow will be better than today, and that our children will be wealthier and happier than we are".
Such drivel about a man who, as president, was responsible for the 1980s bloodbath in Central America, and the rise of the very terrorism that produced al-Qaeda, became the received spin. Reagan's walk-on part in "Sicko" is a rare glimpse of the truth of his betrayal of the blue-collar nation he claimed to represent. The treacheries of another president, Richard Nixon, and a would-be president, Hillary Clinton, are similarly exposed by Moore.
Just when there seemed little else to say about the great Watergate crook, Moore extracts from the 1971 White House tapes a conversation between Nixon and John Erlichman, his aide who ended up in prison. A wealthy Republican Party backer, Edgar Kaiser, head of one of America's biggest health insurance companies, is at the White House with a plan for "a national health-care industry". Erlichman pitches it to Nixon, who is bored until the word "profit" is mentioned.
"All the incentives," says Erlichman, "run the right way: the less [medical] care they give them, the more money they make." To which Nixon replies without hesitation: "Fine!" The next cut shows the president announcing to the nation a task force that will deliver a system of "the finest health care". In truth, it is one of the worst and most corrupt in the world, as "Sicko" shows, denying common humanity to some 50 million Americans and, for many of them, the right to life.
The most haunting sequence is captured by a security camera in a Los Angeles street. A woman, still in her hospital gown, staggers through the traffic, where she has been dumped by the company (the one founded by Nixon's backer) that runs the hospital to which she was admitted. She is ill and terrified and has no health insurance. She still wears her admission bracelet, though the name of the hospital has been thoughtfully erased.
Later on, we meet that glamorous liberal couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton. It is 1993 and the new president is announcing the appointment of the first lady as the one who will fulfil his promise to give America a universal health-care. And here is "charming and witty" Hillary herself, as a senator calls her, pitching her "vision" to Congress. Moore's portrayal of the loquacious, flirting, sinister Hillary is reminiscent of Tim Robbins's superb political satire Bob Roberts. You know her cynicism is already in her throat. "Hillary," says Moore in voice-over, "was rewarded for her silence [in 2007] as the second-largest recipient in the Senate of health-care industry contributions".
Moore has said that Harvey Weinstein, whose company produced "Sicko" and who is a friend of the Clintons, wanted this cut, but he refused. The assault on the Democratic Party candidate likely to be the next president is a departure for Moore, who, in his personal campaign against George Bush in 2004, endorsed General Wesley Clark, the bomber of Serbia, for president and defended Bill Clinton himself, claiming that "no one ever died from a blow job". (Maybe not, but half a million Iraqi infants died from Clinton's medieval siege of their country, along with thousands of Haitians, Serbians, Sudanese and other victims of his unsung invasions.)
With this new independence apparent, Moore's deftness and dark humour in "Sicko", which is a brilliant work of journalism and satire and film-making, explains – perhaps even better than the films that made his name, "Roger and Me", "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" – his popularity and influence and enemies. "Sicko" is so good that you forgive its flaws, notably Moore's romanticising of Britain's National Health Service, ignoring a two-tier system that neglects the elderly and the mentally ill.
The film opens with a wry carpenter describing how he had to make a choice after two fingers were shorn off by an electric saw. The choice was $60,000 to restore a forefinger or $12,000 to restore a middle finger. He could not afford both, and had no insurance. "Being a hopeless romantic," says Moore, "he chose the ring finger" on which he wore his wedding ring. Moore's wit leads us to scenes that are searing, yet unsentimental, such as the eloquent anger of a woman whose small daughter was denied hospital care and died of a seizure. Within days of "Sicko" opening in the United States, more than 25,000 people overwhelmed Moore's website with similar stories.
The California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organising Committee despatched volunteers to go on the road with the film. "From my sense," says Jan Rodolfo, an oncology nurse, "it demonstrates the potential for a true national movement because it's obviously inspiring so many people in so many places."
Moore's "threat" is his unerring view from the ground. He abrogates the contempt in which elite America and the media hold ordinary people. This is a taboo subject among many journalists, especially those claiming to have risen to the nirvana of "impartiality" and others who profess to teach journalism. If Moore simply presented victims in the time-honoured, ambulance-chasing way, leaving the audience tearful but paralysed, he would have few enemies. He would not be looked down upon as a polemicist and self-promoter and all the other pejorative tags that await those who step beyond the invisible boundaries in societies where wealth is said to equal freedom. The few who dig deep into the nature of a liberal ideology that regards itself as superior, yet is responsible for crimes epic in proportion and generally unrecognised, risk being eased out of the "mainstream", especially if they are young – a process that a former editor once described to me as "a sort of gentle defenestration".
None has broken through like Moore, and his detractors are perverse to say he is not a "professional journalist" when the role of the professional journalist is so often that of zealously, if surreptitiously, serving the status quo. Without the loyalty of these professionals on the New York Times and other august (mostly liberal) media institutions "of record", the criminal invasion of Iraq might not have happened and a million people would be alive today. Deployed in Hollywood's sanctum – the cinema – Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" shone a light in their eyes, reached into the memory hole, and told the truth. That is why audiences all over the world stood and cheered.
What struck me when I first saw "Roger and Me", Moore's first major film, was that you were invited to like ordinary Americans for their struggle and resilience and politics that reached beyond the din and fakery of the American democracy industry. Moreover, it is clear they "get it" about him: that despite being rich and famous he is, at heart, one of them. A foreigner doing something similar risks being attacked as "anti-American", a term Moore often uses as irony in order to demonstrate its dishonesty. At a stroke, he sees off the kind of guff exemplified by a recent BBC Radio 4 series that presented humanity as pro- or anti-American while the reporter oozed about America, "the city on the hill".
Just as tendentious is a documentary called "Manufacturing Dissent", which appears to have been timed to discredit, if not "Sicko", then Moore himself. Made by the Canadians Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, it says more about liberals who love to face both ways and the whiny jealousies aroused by tall poppies. Melnyk tells us ad nauseam how much she admires Moore's films and politics and is inspired by him, then proceeds to attempt character assassination with a blunderbuss of assertions and hearsay about his "methods", along with personal abuse, such as that of the critic who objected to Moore's "waddle" and someone else who said he reckoned Moore actually hated America – was anti-American, no less!
Melnyk pursues Moore to ask him why, in his own pursuit of an interview with Roger Smith of General Motors, he failed to mention that he had already spoken to him. Moore has said he interviewed Smith long before he began filming. When she twice intercepts Moore on tour, she is rightly embarrassed by his gracious response. If there is a renaissance of documentaries, it is not served by films such as this.
This is not to suggest Moore should not be pursued and challenged about whether or not he "cuts corners", just as the work of the revered father of British documentary, John Grierson, has been re-examined and questioned. But feckless parody is not the way. Turning the camera around, as Moore has done, and revealing great power's "invisible government" of manipulation and often subtle propaganda is certainly one way. In doing so, the documentary-maker breaches a silence and complicity described by Günter Grass in his confessional autobiography, Peeling the Onion, as maintained by those "feigning their own ignorance and vouching for another's... divert[ing] attention from something intended to be forgotten, something that nevertheless refuses to go away".
For me, an earlier Michael Moore was that other great "anti-American" whistleblower, Tom Paine, who incurred the wrath of corrupt power when he warned that if the majority of the people were being denied "the ideas of truth", it was time to storm what he called the "Bastille of words" and we call "the media". That time is overdue.
5. MOTHER TERESA, JOHN PAUL II, AND THE FAST TRACK SAINTS
BY
MICHAEL PARENTI
What usually went unreported were the vast sums she received from wealthy contributors, including a million dollars from convicted savings & loan swindler Charles Keating, on whose behalf she sent a personal plea for clemency to the presiding judge. She was asked by the prosecutor in that case to return Keating’s gift because it was money he had stolen. She never did. She also accepted substantial sums given by the brutal Duvalier dictatorship that regularly stole from the Haitian public treasury. Mother Teresa’s “hospitals” for the indigent in India and elsewhere turned out to be hardly more than human warehouses in which seriously ill persons lay on mats, sometimes fifty to sixty in a room without benefit of adequate medical attention. Their ailments usually went undiagnosed. The food was nutritionally lacking and sanitary conditions were deplorable. There were few medical personnel on the premises, mostly untrained nuns and brothers. When tending to her own ailments, however, Teresa checked into some of the costliest hospitals and recovery care units in the world for state-of-the-art treatment. Teresa journeyed the globe to wage campaigns against divorce, abortion, and birth control. At her Nobel award ceremony, she announced that “the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion.” And she once suggested that AIDS might be a just retribution for improper sexual conduct. Teresa emitted a continual flow of promotional misinformation about herself. She claimed that her mission in Calcutta fed over a thousand people daily. On other occasions she jumped the number to 4000, 7000, and 9000. Actually her soup kitchens fed not more than 150 people (six days a week), and this included her retinue of nuns, novices, and brothers. She claimed that her school in the Calcutta slum contained five thousand children when it actually enrolled less than one hundred. Teresa claimed to have 102 family assistance centers in Calcutta, but longtime Calcutta resident, Aroup Chatterjee, who did an extensive on-the-scene investigation of her mission, could not find a single such center. As one of her devotees explained, “Mother Teresa is among those who least worry about statistics. She has repeatedly expressed that what matters is not how much work is accomplished but how much love is put into the work.” Was Teresa really unconcerned about statistics? Quite the contrary, her numerical inaccuracies went consistently and self-servingly in only one direction, greatly exaggerating her accomplishments. Over the many years that her mission was in Calcutta, there were about a dozen floods and numerous cholera epidemics in or near the city, with thousands perishing. Various relief agencies responded to each disaster, but Teresa and her crew were nowhere in sight, except briefly on one occasion. When someone asked Teresa how people without money or power can make the world a better place, she replied, “They should smile more,” a response that charmed some listeners. During a press conference in Washington DC, when asked “Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?” she said “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.” But she herself lived lavishly well, enjoying luxurious accommodations in her travels abroad. It seems to have gone unnoticed that as a world celebrity she spent most of her time away from Calcutta, with protracted stays at opulent residences in Europe and the United States, jetting from Rome to London to New York in private planes. Mother Teresa is a paramount example of the kind of acceptably conservative icon propagated by an elite-dominated culture, a “saint” who uttered not a critical word against social injustice, and maintained cozy relations with the rich, corrupt, and powerful. She claimed to be above politics when in fact she was pronouncedly hostile toward any kind of progressive reform. Teresa was a friend of Ronald Reagan, and a close friend of rightwing British media tycoon Malcolm Muggerridge. She was an admiring guest of the Haitian dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and had the support and admiration of a number of Central and South American dictators. Teresa was Pope John Paul II’s kind of saint. After her death in 1997, he waved the five-year waiting period usually observed before beginning the beatification process that leads to sainthood. In 2003, in record time Mother Teresa was beatified, the final step before canonization. But in 2007 her canonization confronted a bump in the road, it having been disclosed that along with her various other contradictions Teresa was not a citadel of spiritual joy and unswerving faith. Her diaries, investigated by Catholic authorities in Calcutta, revealed that she had been racked with doubts: “I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist.” People think “my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing and that my intimacy with God and union with his will fill my heart. If only they knew,” she wrote, “Heaven means nothing.” Through many tormented sleepless nights she shed thoughts like this: “I am told God loves me-and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.” Il Messeggero, Rome’s popular daily newspaper, commented: “The real Mother Teresa was one who for one year had visions and who for the next 50 had doubts—up until her death.” Another example of fast-track sainthood, pushed by Pope John Paul II, occurred in 1992 when he swiftly beatified the reactionary Msgr. José María Escrivá de Balaguer, supporter of fascist regimes in Spain and elsewhere, and founder of Opus Dei, a powerful secretive ultra-conservative movement “feared by many as a sinister sect within the Catholic Church.” Escrivá’s beatification came only seventeen years after his death, a record run until Mother Teresa came along. In accordance with his own political agenda, John Paul used a church institution, sainthood, to bestow special sanctity upon ultra-conservatives such as Escrivá and Teresa—and implicitly on all that they represented. Another of the ultra-conservatives whom John Paul made into a saint, bizarrely enough, was the last of the Hapsburg rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Emperor Karl, who reigned during World War I. John Paul also beatified Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, the leading Croatian cleric who welcomed the Nazi and fascist Ustashi takeover of Croatia during World War II. Stepinac sat in the Ustashi parliament, appeared at numerous public events with top ranking Nazis and Ustashi, and openly supported the Croatian fascist regime. In John Paul’s celestial pantheon, reactionaries had a better chance at canonization than reformers. Consider his treatment of Archbishop Oscar Romero who spoke against the injustices and oppressions suffered by the impoverished populace of El Salvador and for this was assassinated by a right-wing death squad. John Paul never denounced the killing or its perpetrators, calling it only “tragic.” In fact, just weeks before Romero was murdered, high-ranking officials of the Arena party, the legal arm of the death squads, sent a well-received delegation to the Vatican to complain of Romero’s public statements on behalf of the poor. Romero was thought by many poor Salvadorans to be something of a saint, but John Paul attempted to ban any discussion of his beatification for fifty years. Popular pressure from El Salvador caused the Vatican to cut the delay to twenty-five years. In either case, Romero was consigned to the slow track. John Paul’s successor, Benedict XVI, waved the five-year waiting period in order to put John Paul II himself instantly on a super-fast track to canonization, running neck and neck with Teresa. As of 2005 there already were reports of possible miracles attributed to the recently departed Polish pontiff. One such account was offered by Cardinal Francesco Marchisano. When lunching with John Paul, the cardinal indicated that because of an ailment he could not use his voice. The pope “caressed my throat, like a brother, like the father that he was. After that I did seven months of therapy, and I was able to speak again.” Marchisano thinks that the pontiff might have had a hand in his cure: “It could be,” he said. Un miracolo! Viva il papa!
