The Prince of Peace is Lord of Earth and Heaven
by Marc Batko (marc1seed@yahoo.com; freetranslations.foundations)
Big Trouble in the Former Land of Plenty and Fantasy
Everything is changed
On December 17, 2024, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates agreed on a $400 billion trade deal. They supply the oil and China builds dozens of 36-story skyscrapers! These skyscrapers can be built in close to one another since Arabs are not car-dependent.
After being an empire or hegemon since 1945, the US finds itself in rapid decline. China and BRICS are challenging the unipolar world. BRICS represents nearly 40% of the world’s population while the G7 represents only 7%. In 2024, the US economy of indebtedness and enrichment is paying $1 trillion in interest on its $35 trillion debt.
Only those who say a word for the Jews may sing Gregorian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer pleaded. The church is in the world and exists for the other, for refugees, the marginalized and the persecuted. The Old Testament prophets criticized the hypocrisy and meaninglessness of the feasts of Israel. Disobedient Israel wanted a king like the other nations and ran away from its infinite, selfless, and reconciling God. Now in 2024, instead of being a light for all the nations, political Israel is ruled by its most extreme right-wing premier and has killed over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and Lebanon since October 7, 2022.
The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned against cheap grace before he was murdered by Hitler fascism on April 9, 1945. Costly grace is grace won by responsibility and self-sacrifice in the example of the crucified and risen Christ. Different from everyday time, Kairos time is the time of decision when believers must resist the idolatrous state that takes the place of the matchless, transcendent God.
A map without utopia is worthless (Oscar Wilde). Utopia (literally non-place) is a vision or goal that guides everyday activity.
We carry in our hearts the true country/
and that cannot be stolen
We follow in the steps of our ancestry/
and that cannot be broken.
Midnight Oil
“When the Clock Broke” is the title of John Ganz’s 2024 bestseller. The chaos and irrationality of the new Golden Age with Donald Trump and Elon Musk has clear antecedents in the 20th century with David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan, and Pat Buchanan, the rival to George H. Bush’s quest for the White House who proposed erecting a fence around the US.
Demonizing immigrants is relating to the loss of memory and ahistorical consciousness. The current corporate mass media focuses on food and fashion history, celebrity news, weather updates and sensationalism. Social history has the rank of an incidental footnote. What wonder that Americans can’t name their vice-president or identify Africa, Brazil, Russia or Germany on a map!
Like most people in developed countries, Americans are conditioned and frightened. Advertising intimidates and deadens intercultural learning while only pretending to inform and educate. Advertising throws hearers into a cesspool of fear and insecurity where new material things are offered to fill false needs and the fragmentariness and alienation of modern life are papered over with smiles, children, and breath-taking nature.
Life must be understood backwards but lived forwards. Without humility, there is no sense of wonder, said Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard in 19th century Copenhagen, Denmark. Man cannot live by bread alone.
Trump and his rambling incoherence, mud-throwing, name-calling, and threats of imprisonment have dominated social media and corporate news since 2016. While Orwell in “1984” warned of “two minutes of hate” to unite the people, the right-wing moron has given us eight years of vicious racialized hate. What could have been a vibrant pluralist digital culture or information culture turned into a Trump culture! The corporate media obsessed with profit and ratings gave billions of dollars of platform and publicity to the orange celebrity!
Did consumerism drown out religious and philosophical questions? Did people “escape from freedom” (Erich Fromm) to the protection of a “strong man” who in truth was a paragon of narcissist weakness? Did neoliberalism lead to hyper-materialist spiritless life by crushing curiosity and rhythm? Can anyone remember culture, confidence, awe, wonder, and trustfulness? People cling to denial like a soft pillow and are trained to trivialize structural/systematic failure and blame foreigners for all evil and contradictions!
The loss of a sense of history goes hand in hand with the loss of memory. Kierkegaard emphasized the contemporaneousness of Christ. That God the universal identifies with the particular Israel and then with Jesus of Nazareth is the scandal of particularity that the believer must endure… The prolific German theologian Karl Barth said a believer must read the Bible and the daily newspaper at the same time. The world is our context or Sitz im Leben. There is no apolitical Christian existence.
Christian righteousness must exceed worldly righteousness. The church and God exist for the other, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Refugees, the poor, and the marginalized are supported in an active ethic of solidarity and not abandoned. When those invited to the great feast in Jesus’ parable made excuses, the householder invited the poor, the blind, and the lame to take their places.
Faith becomes lukewarm when believers are indistinguishable from the world. They are like salt that has lost its saltness. In his parables like the Good Samaritan and throughout the synoptic gospels, Jesus makes the poor, tax collectors, and foreigners examples, not the religious leaders, the Pharisees and Sadducees.
Jesus warns his disciples to beware the false teachers, false Christs and the hypocrites who wear long robes, take the front seats in the synagogues and extol their personal goodness.
White nationalist transfigure their prejudices and stereotypes. Jesus is God’s Son, the eschatological Messiah who unites past, present and future and is more than a teacher or a prophet. No one can serve two masters; you cannot serve God and mammon. If you love father or mother more than me, you are not worthy of me.
Jesus relativized and radicalized the law. His disciples could pluck and eat corn on the Sabbath. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” The penultimate must not be confused with the ultimate. Jesus condemned the law that ordered the stoning of adulteresses. He upended the dietary and purity laws and regulations. Nothing that goes into man can defile him, only what comes out of man, the wars and threats of war.
In the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, those who worked one hour received the same wage as those who toiled all day. The knowledge and fellowship with the infinite, transcendent and ineffable God is the true reward.
Humans, Kierkegaard proclaimed, are divine and earthly, called to higher values and virtues than earthly success and momentary applause! “Rich in goods and poor in soul,” the ancient Christian hymn laments. Possessions possess us more than we possess them. Cars are not only metal boxes but status symbols, mindsets, and mentalities. “Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains,” declared Jean Jacques Rousseau, author of the social contract.
We don’t live in a culture of courage but in a culture of advertising and publicity, Kierkegaard said in the 1840s. Now in 2025, people are atomized and commodified, conditioned and frightened, and bombarded with never-ending ads and enticements. Children who live in simplicity and contentment are our models or teachers. Like the sparrows who don’t store in barns, children trust in the invisible God who created all things out of nothing.
What you have done to the least of these, you have done to me, Jesus said in Matthew 25. Who was the true neighbor in the Parable of the Good Samaritan? God is present in the incognito of the other, in the misery and want of the poor.
You are branches of the great vine. Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. Be tolerant and welcoming; let the weeds and wheat grow together.
Conditioning and dummification happen when Trump is the top story on 7 out of 8 days from 2016 to 2025 on Facebook and Twitter, and when the Trump-Musk clown show drowns out the housing, tax, foreign trade and indebtedness crises of the US. In January 2025, the BRICS countries represent 40% of the world’s population while the G7 only represents 7%. China controls 85% of the rare earth (including lithium), has a well-trained manufacturing workforce and a reliable supply chain. It will take years or decades for the US to become a manufacturing powerhouse. The US cannot compete in electric car, microchip, or battery production.
“When we call China, we get an airport. When we call Germany or the US, we get a lecture,” said the Nigerian-born head of the WTO. The US empire or hegemony is in rapid decline while the media and politicians hold stubbornly to their denial.
Every US president out of the last ten has campaigned on reviving manufacturing and none has achieved it. China has become the scapegoat. he decision to move manufacturing out of the US was made by the corporate leadership of American industry. The wage level in China is much lower than in the US. China’s enormous population makes it a much larger market. The same is true for Vietnam, Brazil, and other countries. If Trump is going to apply tariffs, he is not going to fight inflation. Mexico and Canada will reinvigorate their relations to China to repair their economies.
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) was founded in 2009. It continues to grow with Indonesia, the 4th most populous and 7th largest economy. In 1961, Indonesia was the leader of non-aligned countries that didn’t want to be enmeshed in the Cold War. The US aided the bloodbath in the 1960s.
Trump’s interests are entertainment and distraction. In the 1990s, the cable TV evangelist Gene Scott wore different hats every night and pretended to know how many stones were in every pyramid. After Trump gave $8 trillion to corporations and households with over one million dollars in his two 2017 tax heists, he now declares owning Greenland is “vital for our economic security.” In 2024, the US began paying $1 trillion interest on our $35 trillion debt. The economy of indebtedness and enrichment is really a casino economy and a former empire in a nosedive. In retaliation, China will no longer buy our soybeans. If we refuse the new way of partnership, it is time to develop a new appetite for soybeans – once we end the ice storms and the Los Angeles wildfires!
The times are changing! Trump and Gene Scott, David Duke and Pat Buchanan are figures in a long line of con-men and snake oil salesmen. Trump and Musk are money-worshipers, blind guides in love with themselves and ready to blow up the US economy and the global economy! The people are sovereign and ahead of the government. Change of consciousness and social, political and economic revolution are our only hopes!