Constantine’s Racist Sword Aided Imperialism

“Constantine’s Sword,” based on a book by former Catholic priest James Carroll, is a documentary film that depicts the vile history of Catholic anti-semitism.  During the 1960’s, influenced by the anti-war movement, Carroll became painfully aware that if the U.S. had been dropping contraceptive pills on the people of Vietnam, the Church would have been the first to condemn the war, but because it was dropping napalm, it supported it. He soon left the priesthood and became a writer.

Carroll decided to investigate the origins of Catholic anti-semitism. He went back to Emperor Constantine, who adopted Christianity as a way of uniting the Roman Empire around a strong ideology that placed him as God’s representative on earth. Other belief systems, including paganism and Judaism, were competitors that were violently suppressed. Jews were blamed for the death of Christ, a false charge that was repeated over the centuries in the Passion Plays that depicted the crucifixion and death of Jesus. In Europe the Passion Plays were often followed by pogroms, violent attacks on Jewish communities.

Later, the Crusades, which began in the late 11th century, lasted almost two centuries, and were aimed at seizing Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Muslims. Blessed by the Pope, fueled by Christian fanaticism, and led by the cross, the crusading armies marched toward the Holy Land, stopping along the way to murder thousands of Jews in German towns. Later, during the state-sponsored Spanish Inquisition, tens of thousands of Spain’s Jews were forced to convert, to become “conversos.” However, that wasn’t sufficient, because converted Jews were suspected of secretly practicing Judaism and were called “marranos,” or swine. 2,000 of them were burned at the stake. In 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain. Later, the Arabs (called Moors) were also expelled.

Carroll correctly points out that the 20th century persecution and mass murder of Eastern European Jews could not have occurred were it not for the centuries of Christian anti-semitism that prepared Germans, Poles and others to see Jews as Christ-killers and a threat to Christians. The film shows how the Vatican refused to speak out against fascist attacks and killings of Jews, either in Italy itself or in the rest of Europe. It signed a Concordat (treaty) with the Nazis in order to preserve the property and functioning of the Catholic Church, and shared much of the conservative vision of fascism, especially its anti-communism.

Though Carroll remains a Catholic, he warns about the growing theocratic danger of religion and government merging to become one. He shows how the Air Force Academy in Colorado has allowed cadets to proselytize evangelical Christianity on campus, and where non-Christians have been harassed. Yet Carroll fails to examine the dilemma for the ruling class when it comes to religion. On the one hand, evangelical fervor can motivate believers to join the military and risk their lives in the supposedly holy cause of fighting radical Islam. On the other hand, this resurrection of the “Crusades” creates considerable anger and resentment among Arabs and Muslims throughout the world.

Carroll’s critique of Catholic anti-semitism is limited, never seriously examining the overlap between the conservatism of Catholic and fascist ideology. The film neglects to mention the role of Vatican officials in helping high-ranking Nazis to escape to Latin America after the war. It says nothing about the role Catholicism has played in indoctrinating the oppressed to accept their unfortunate lot in life and wait for the kingdom of heaven, or the alliances that the Catholic hierarchy has made with wealthy elites and fascist regimes throughout the world.

Christianity became the official religion of Rome because it guaranteed the rule of the Emperor. It became one of the central institutions of feudalism, based on the exploitation of peasants. Today, the Vatican — worth billions of dollars –– hypocritically criticizes capitalism for its fixation on material wealth (profits), but even more avidly condemns Marxism for wanting to bring an end to capitalist exploitation and religious superstition. Based on medieval prejudices, Catholicism, like ALL religions, fights to keep working people subordinate to the rulers.

There will be bloodied capitalists….

The Academy-award nominated film, “There Will Be Blood,” with a spectacular performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, who won Best Actor, is said to be based on Upton Sinclair’s 1926 novel, “Oil!” Unfortunately, it is not. The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, borrowed only three aspects of the novel – the setting (southern California), the industry (oil) and the time period (first quarter of the 20th century). He omitted the heart of Sinclair’s wonderful book: an exciting and insightful description of the struggle between labor and capital, and the way in which the owners control government, Hollywood and the press for their own ends. It’s an unintended and welcome consequence of the film’s success that many people are reading ‘Oil!”

A terrific novel, it follows two main characters – J. Arnold Ross, a self-made, hard-driving owner of several oil fields, a millionaire who only has two interests. One is getting oil out of the ground and making money, and the second is the well-being of his son, affectionately called “Bunny.” Father and son care deeply for each other. But as “Bunny” grows up and becomes more socially aware, he becomes close friends with Paul Watkins, a young carpenter who works for Ross Sr. Paul helps lead a strike in the oil fields and is radicalized by left-wing organizers. Bunny is sympathetic to the strikers and begins to listen carefully to Paul’s socialist ideas.

During WWI, the newspapers were filled with crude anti-Bolshevik propaganda, believed by most people. But not by Paul, who sees things clearly from the point of view of the workers:

“Bunny,” he said, “do you remember our oil-strike, and what we read about it in the papers? Suppose you have never been to Paradise [an oil field], and didn’t know the strikers, but had got all your impressions from the Angel City newspapers! Well, that’s the way it seems to me about Russia; this is the biggest strike in history, and the strikers have won, and seized the oil-wells.”

Paul, drafted into the U.S. army, is sent to Vladivostok in the Russian far east, part of an intervention by a dozen imperialist armies aimed at helping the Russian aristocracy, the White Army, overthrow the new workers government. His friend comes back in poor health and when Bunny asks what had been the purpose of his expedition, Paul replies:

“I’ve told you – to break the strike. The biggest strike in all history – the Russian workers against the landlords and the bankers; and we were to put the workers down, and the landlords and bankers up! . . . .[T]hey would get together and call themselves a government, and it was our job to rush them supplies, and they would print money, and hire some adventurers, and grab a bunch of peasants and ‘conscript’ them, and that would be an army, and we’d move them on the railroad, and they’d overthrow another Soviet government, and slaughter a few more hundreds or thousands of workingmen. That’s been my job for the past year and half; do you wonder I’m sick.”

Bunny begins to question the capitalist system that was the source of his father’s and his own wealth. He comes to realize that there is a war going on every day in the factories and the fields. Describing one oil field and the accidents that occurred there as the men raced to produce more oil and more profits, Sinclair writes:

… of all the thousands of men who had worked here, seventy-three out of every hundred had been killed or seriously injured during the few years of the field’s life! It was literally true that capitalist industry was a world war going on all the time, unheeded by the newspapers.

His friend Paul becomes an organizer for the Communist Party, which tells the workers that capitalism needs to be overthrown with revolution. One of Bunny’s college friends, Rachel, is a member of the Socialist Party, which tells the workers that capitalism can be peacefully voted out through elections. Although Sinclair gives Paul all the best arguments, Bunny’s temperament – which is to avoid conflict – leads him to side with the Socialists, as did Sinclair himself. Yet Sinclair is respectful of the politics and accomplishments of the international communist movement.

This review only touches the surface of this powerful and thoughtful novel, which ends with both personal tragedy and a hope for the future.