TONY BLAIR, his hands still dripping with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and with financial scandals swirling all round him, from the alleged sale of honours, to the decision to halt the prosecution of corrupt business relations with Saudi Arabia, has just joined the Roman Catholic Church.
Its current pope served his fuhrer in the Hitler Youth, and the Church’s history is littered with atrocity after atrocity, from the foul deeds of the Holy Inquisition, the massacres of the Huguenots, its position and role as the anchor of feudalism, and in the 20th century its open support for Spanish and Italian fascism, along with its sponsorship of the Ustasha fascist state of Croatia.
The Papacy is wallowing in blood. Tony Blair has truly come home!
He is not the only one to find his true home.
A number of Tory and Labour politicians have also chosen to throw their lot in with the Roman Catholic Church in this period of growing capitalist crisis, when all of Bush’s and Blair’s plans for reorganising the world according to the principles of western capitalism have collapsed as the capitalist system heads into a banking crash and a worldwide slump.
In fact, all those who see their role as being the ‘thin red line’ that defends civilisation against the mob are greatly attracted by the Church’s counter-revolutionary certainty, which allows them to take the most ruthless and decisive actions against the working class and the poor in the days ahead.
The Church truly arms them for this task. Its position is that humanity since the ‘fall’ is intrinsically sinful. All humans are born with original sin on their souls. Sin is inevitable, and salvation lies through the Catholic Church, through its confessional.
Only those who are baptised can go to heaven. This means that all non-Christians are bound for hell or purgatory; none can enter the gates of heaven.
Central to the Catholic outlook is the denigration of the capacity of man to know the world.
It states that the world is made up of divine mysteries that human intellect can never grasp. A presumption that it can equals the mortal sin of pride, which in earlier days was punished by fire.
The lifeline is through the organisation of the Church. At its centre is the confessional, and the forgiveness of sins through a priest, and the direct connection between the Pope and God. Even the Borgias could not err on matters of faith and morals, the church teaches. This is the kind of certainty that is needed for counter-revolution.
The Church changes wine into the blood of Christ and a wafer into his body for the faithful to consume during their religious devotions.
With the primacy of the Church, and the belief of the general sinfulness of humanity, comes supreme and stinking cynicism: If sin is unavoidable then the Church should profit from it through the sale of indulgences – passports to heaven.
Rather like the sale of peerages for cash, another example of sin doing some good.
It is a matter of historical record that for modern capitalist society to emerge the Roman Catholic Church had to be destroyed in England and France during the period of the Reformation to the foundation of the English Republic in 1649 and the French Revolution in 1789.
Now the Roman Church is seeking to make a comeback, as the natural and certain leader of the counter-revolution, complete with all of its mystical rituals and divine mysteries, to prevent the working class from taking advantage of the crisis of capitalism to overthrow capitalism worldwide and establish socialism.
In fact, it will be no more successful than it was in preventing the emergence of capitalism in the first place, or than Bush and Blair’s war to reorder the world has been.
The most powerful class in capitalism worldwide is the working class. The capitalist crisis is driving it forward to carry out its historical role to bury capitalism. We must build up the necessary revolutionary leadership so that this task is carried out as quickly as possible.
