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as I please said america.....

George Orwell completed his most famous novel 1984 in 1948, shortly before his early death at 46. A few years earlier, in a remarkable short 1945 essay, Orwell foresaw a future world order overseen by America, Russia and China.

 

Richard Cullen

Orwell foresees the 21st century

 

In 1943, Eric Blair became, under his pen name, George Orwell, literary editor of the Tribune, a democratic-socialist newspaper, which was established in London in 1937. In that role, Orwell penned a series of columns under the title: “As I Please”. One of these, entitled You and The Atomic Bomb, prompted by the dropping of the atomic bombs in Japan in August 1945, was published in the Tribune in October 1945.

Orwell drew significantly, in this essay, on the work of the American political theorist, James Burnham, the author of The Managerial Revolution published in 1941.

Burnham helped organise the American Workers Party in 1933. He was allied with the Trotskyist wing of that party and became a friend of Leon Trotsky. He was later associated with other communist groups in the US. By 1941, he had severed these ties, eventually calling for an aggressive American strategy against the USSR. During the war he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy. Burnham helped found the leading conservative journal, The National Review and his principal books urged the US to take an adamant position as the Cold War began.

Orwell begins his 1945 essay on the atomic bomb with customary acuity:

“Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected.”

After noting how, at that time, only the US had the bomb and how exceptionally difficult and fantastically expensive such weapons were to manufacture (still true today) Orwell then argued:

  • That, prior to 1939 only five states were capable of waging war “on a grand scale” (America, Britain, the USSR, Germany and Japan).
  • But, by 1945 (after the introduction of atomic weapons) only two could wage war on such a scale (America and the USSR).
  • Given that, the USSR would discover the secret of making the bomb within a few years (this happened in 1949).

Orwell next summarised what Burnham’s new book illuminated:

“When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution [in 1941] it seemed probable to many Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not affect the main argument. For Burnham’s geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously, the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states — East Asia, dominated by China — is still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.”

Here Orwell provides an outline of his acutely focused, post-war geopolitical expectations, combined with an advance rendering of the foundational global political framework within which his ground-breaking novel, 1984, is set.

Orwell was right about Russia getting the bomb, though he did not discuss how others, including the UK and France, might come to do this. However, perhaps the most extraordinary prediction is how Orwell envisaged in 1945 — four years prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 — the clear potential for a China-dominated East Asian super-state to emerge. In fact, as he wrote, the Chinese Civil War was recommencing.

Note, too, how in 1945 he assumed all super-states discussed, including America, would be “ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy". Orwell thus revealed the foundational US political direction leading to 2025, where the second Trump administration is advancing confirmation of his expectations with uncommon enthusiasm.

However, early on in the essay, Orwell also argued that:

“It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. “

This is certainly true of Western civilisation, but this trajectory has been far less pivotal in the development of Chinese civilisation, where, as Jeffrey Sachs explains, avoidance of far off imperial wars has been consistently far more dominant over China’s exceptionally long history.

Moreover, the governance aspect of feudalism was already being superseded over 2000 years ago, in China, by professional; bureaucratic governance, which was consolidated about 1000 years ago during the Song Dynasty.

Finally, another crucial feature of Chinese civilisation has been the ability — drawing on a vast, exceptional high-understanding culture — to work together for the common good. This has been conspicuously apparent over the last four decades, where, according to Adam Tooze, China has produced “the greatest success story in developmental history”.

This has not, of course, prevented many instances of massively destructive civil conflict in China including the Tai Ping revolution, the Boxer rebellion, the Chinese Civil War and, in the PRC era, the terrible famine triggered by the Great Leap Forward plus the Cultural Revolution.

However, the extended successful eras in China’s very long history have affirmed that communal stability and prosperity stand on the shoulders of intelligent, collective hard work. In fact, the terrible consequences of the Cultural Revolution confirmed the fundamental importance of this principle. Believing in the state is, for the Chinese, “an expression and embodiment of Chinese civilisation”, according to Martin Jacques.

Orwell did not turn his mind to whether his aptly envisaged Chinese/East Asian super-state might craft a power-growth pathway that broke away from the inflexible template described by Burnham and developed in 1984. He was, though, critical of Burnham’s insistence that, “politics is essentially the same in all ages”. Orwell remained open to the possibility that a ruling group in such a state could perceive that “it will probably stay in power longer if it behaves decently”.

Recently, the distinguished author and commentator, Pankaj Mishra, observed that “there is much that is imperfect about China”, while also noting that China is “a very different kind of late modernising power that is setting an example that there are other ways of being a powerful country in the world”.

Orwell published two later articles that investigated the work of Burnham: Second Thoughts on James Burnham in 1946 and Burnham’s View of the Contemporary World Struggle in 1947. Both repay careful reading.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/10/orwell-foresees-the-twenty-first-century/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

worship.....

You Can’t Worship God and Money    Theological Abominations in Trump’s America     BY 

 

It was a moment somewhat like this, 30 years ago, that turned me into a biblical scholar. In the lead-up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, political and religious leaders quoted scripture to justify shutting down food programs and kicking mothers and their babies off public assistance. Those leaders, many of them self-described Christians, chose to ignore the majority of passages in the Bible that preached “good news” to the poor and promised freedom to those captive to injustice and oppression. Instead, they put forward unethical and ahistorical (mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations of biblical texts to prop up American imperial power and punish the poor in the name of a warped morality.

Three decades later, the Trump administration and its theological apologists are working overtime, using Jesus’s name and the Bible’s contents in even more devastating rounds of immoral biblical (mis)references. In July, there was the viral video from the Department of Homeland Security, using the “Here I am, Lord. Send me” quotation from Isaiah — commonly cited when ordaining faith leaders and including explicit references to marginalized communities impacted by displacement and oppression — to recruit new agents for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, a job that now comes with a $50,000 signing bonus, thanks to Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s former pastor went even further in marrying the Bible to anti-immigrant hatred by saying, “Is the Bible in favor of these ICE raids?… The answer is yes.” He then added: “The Bible does not require wealthy Christian nations to self-immolate for the horrible crime of having a flourishing economy and way of life, all right? The Bible does not permit the civil magistrate to steal money from its citizens to pay for foreign nationals to come destroy our culture.”

A month earlier, during a speech announcing the bombing of Iran, President Trump exhorted God to bless America’s bombs (being dropped on innocent families and children): “And in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

And in May, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Republican congressional representatives formed a prayer circle on the floor of the House as they prepared to codify the president’s Big Beautiful Bill. Of course, that very bill threatens to cut off millions of Americans from life-saving food and healthcare. (Consider it a bizarre counterpoint to Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 and providing free health care to lepers.)

The Antichrist

And if that weren’t enough twisting of the Bible to bless the rich and admonish the poor, enter tech mogul Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the man behind the curtain of so much now going on in Washington. Though many Americans may be increasingly familiar with him, his various companies, and his political impact, many of us have missed the centrality of his version of Christianity and the enigmatic “religious” beliefs that go with it.

In Vanity Fair this spring, journalist Zoe Bernard emphasized the central role Thiel has already played in the Christianization of Silicon Valley: “I guarantee you,” one Christian entrepreneur told her, “there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel.”

Indeed, his theological beliefs grimly complement his political ones. “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief,” he said, “you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.” Remember, this is the same Thiel who, in a 2009 essay, openly questioned the compatibility of democracy and freedom, advocating for a system where power would be concentrated among those with the expertise to drive “progress” — a new version of the survival of the fittest in the information age. Such a worldview couldn’t contrast more strongly with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus demonstrates his preferential option for the poor and his belief in bottom-up strategies rather than top down ones.

More recently, Thiel has positioned himself “right” in the middle of the Republican Party. He served as Trump’s liaison to Silicon Valley in his first term. Since then, he has convened and supported a new cohort of conservatives (many of whom also claim a right-wing Christianity), including Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump’s Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton, AI and crypto czar billionaire David Sacks, and Elon Musk, who spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected the second time around. Thiel is also close to Curtis Yarvin, the fellow who “jokingly” claimed that American society no longer needs poor people and believes they should instead be turned into biofuel. (A worldview that simply couldn’t be more incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.)

Particularly relevant to recent political (and ideological) developments, especially the military occupation of Washington, D.C., Thiel is also close to Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founder of the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank behind a coordinated attack on the homeless now sweeping the nation. That’s right, there’s a throughline from Peter Thiel to President Donald Trump’s demand that “the homeless have to move out immediately… FAR from the Capital.” In July, Trump produced an executive order facilitating the removal of housing encampments in Washington, a year after the Supreme Court upheld a law making it a crime, if you don’t have a home, to sleep or even breathe outside. And Thiel, Lonsdale, and the Cicero Institute aren’t just responsible for those attacks on unhoused people and “blue cities”; they also bear responsibility for faith leadersbeing arrested and fined for their support of unhoused communities and their opposition, on religious grounds, to the mistreatment of the poor.

On top of this troubling mix of Christianity and billionaires, however, I find myself particularly chagrined that Thiel is offering an oversold four-part lecture series on the “antichrist” through a nonprofit called ACTS 17 collective that is to start in September in San Francisco. News stories about the ACTS 17 collective tend to focus on Christians organizing in Silicon Valley and the desire to put salvation through Jesus above personal success or charity for the poor. That sounds all too ominous, especially for those of us who take seriously the biblical command to stop depriving the poor of rights, to end poverty on earth (as it is in heaven), and defend the very people the Bible prioritizes.

For instance, Trae Stephens (who worked at Palantir and is partners with Thiel in a venture capital fund) is the husband of Michelle Stephens, the founder of the ACTS 17 collective. In an interview with Emma Goldberg of the New York Times, Michelle Stephens describes how “we are always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized… I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”

In an article at the Denison Forum, she’s even more specific about her biblical and theological interpretation of poverty and the need to care for those with more rather than the poor. She writes, “Those who see Christ’s message to the poor and needy as the central pillar of the gospel make a similar mistake. While social justice movements have done a great deal to point out our society’s longstanding sins and call believers to action, it can be tempting for that message to become more prominent than our innate need for Jesus to save us.” Such a statement reminds me of the decades-long theological pushback I lived through even before the passage of welfare reform and the continued juxtaposition of Jesus and justice since.

A Battle for the Bible

Of course, such a battle for the Bible is anything but new in America. It reaches back long before the rise of a new brand of Christianity in Silicon Valley. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul’s epistles to claim that slavery had been ordained by God, while ripping the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached what was called a “prosperity gospel” that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism. Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubber-stamp Jim Crow practices, while the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, Sr., helped mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists in national politics.

Over the past decades, the use of the Bible to justify what passes for “law and order” (and the punishing of the poor) has only intensified. In Donald Trump’s first term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border with a passage from the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans: “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders summed up the same idea soon after in this way: “It is very biblical to enforce the law.” And in his first speech as speaker of the House, Mike Johnson told his colleagues, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” an echo of the New Testament’s Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul writes that “the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”

Over the past several years, Republican politicians and religious leaders have continued to use biblical references to punish the poor, quoting texts to justify cutting people off from healthcare and food assistance. A galling example came when Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX), rebutting a Jewish activist who referenced a commandment in Leviticus to feed the hungry, quoted 2 Thessalonians to justify increasing work requirements for people qualifying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). And that was just one of many Republican attacks on the low-income food assistance program amid myriad attempts to shred the social welfare system in the lead-up to President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history and a crowning achievement of Russell Vought’s Project 2025.  Arrington said: “But there’s also, you know, in the Scripture, tells us in 2 Thessalonians chapter 3:10 he says, uh, ‘For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: if a man will not work, he shall not eat.’ And then he goes on to say ‘We hear that some among you are idle’… I think it’s a reasonable expectation that we have work requirements.”

And Arrington has been anything but alone. The same passage, in fact, had already been used by Representatives Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Stephen Lee Fincher (R-TN) to justify cutting food stamps during a debate over an earlier farm bill. And Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) used similarly religious language, categorizing people as deserving and undeserving, to argue against a healthcare plan that protects those of us with pre-existing conditions. He insisted that only “people who lead good lives” and “have done the things to keep their bodies healthy” should receive reduced costs for health care.

Such “Christian” politicians regularly misuse Biblical passages to blame the impoverished for their poverty. There is never a suggestion, of course, that the rich, who have functionally stolen people’s wages and engorged themselves by denying them healthcare, are in any way to blame.

A Theology of Liberation for a Time Like This

Such interpretations of biblical texts are damaging to everyone’s lives (except, of course, the superrich), but especially the poor. And — though you wouldn’t know it from such Republicans — they are counter to the main themes of the Bible’s texts. The whole of the Christian Bible, starting with Genesis and ending with the Book of Revelation, has an arc of justice to it. The historical equivalents of anti-poverty programs run through it all.

That arc starts in the Book of Exodus with manna (bread) that shows up day after day, so no one has too much or too little. This is a likely response to the Egyptian Pharaoh setting up a system where a few religious and political leaders amassed great wealth at the expense of the people. God’s plan, on the other hand, was for society to be organized around meeting the needs of all people, including describing how political and religious leaders are supposed to release slaves, forgive debts, pay people what they deserve, and distribute funds to the needy. The biblical arc of justice then continues through the prophets who insist that the way to love and honor God is to promote programs that uplift the poor and marginalized, while decrying those with power who cloak oppression in religious terms and heretical versions of Christian theology.

My own political and moral roots are in the welfare rights and homeless union survival movements, efforts led by poor and dispossessed people organizing a “new underground railroad” and challenging Christianity to talk the talk and walk the walk of Christ. Such a conviction was captured by Reverend Yvonne Delk at the 1992 “Up and Out of Poverty Survival Summit,” when she declared that society, including the church, must move to the position that “poor people are not sinners, but poverty is a sin against God that could and should be ended.”

Delk’s words echo others from 20 years earlier. In 1972, Beulah Sanders, a leader of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the largest organization of poor people in the 1960s and 1970s, spoke to the National Council of Churches. “I represent all of those poor people who are on welfare and many who are not,” she said, “people who believe in the Christian way of life… people whose nickels and dimes and quarters have built the Christian churches of America. Because we believe in Christianity, we have continued to support the Christian churches… We call upon you… to join with us in the National Welfare Rights Organization. We ask for your moral, personal, and financial support in this battle for bread, dignity, and justice for all of our people. If we fail in our struggle, Christianity will have failed.”

In a Trumpian world, where Christian extremism is becoming the norm, we must not let the words of Beulah Sanders be forgotten or the worst fears of countless prophets and freedom fighters come true. Rather, we must build the strength to make a theological and spiritual vision of everybody-in-nobody-out a reality and create the capacity, powered by faith, to make it so. Now is the time. May we make it so.

https://tomdispatch.com/you-cant-worship-god-and-money/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.