Totalitarianism now and then

Jul 10, 2015

During our holiday last week in Provence I read a series of interviews with Aung San Suu Kyi, noting some of the similarities and differences between her own non-violent democracy movement and the movements of Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and indeed Jesus, who all get a mention in the book. But more striking to me were the parallels between the totalitarianism of “SLORC” in Burma and that of the medieval popes in Avignon. Yes, Jesus would have been horrified at what his followers had done in his name at this particularly low point in European history. But more remarkable is the resilience of the Jesus movement against the stupidity of his “followers” across twenty centuries – so far. I guess that must be some kind of testament to the power of the story itself, the gospel story, which has demanded successive revisions of the history it generated. That makes me pretty happy to be one of his followers.