Liberation movements in a historical echo: Latin America to West Asia

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“The Cold War never really ended” German ex-chancellor Angela Merkel confessed after 31 years in politics. Despite being a long-awaited confession, it definitely did not come as a shock. Merkel argued that the Cold War never ended because the West has not been able to “pacify Russia.” However, this argument has not been quite convincing. The new world will differ at its core from the current world, as liberation movements and rising powers share a new set of value scales. The humanism of Liberation theology has echoed in Western Asia and now the noise must liberate the oppressed.

Cold War: The world as we know it

Since the end of World War II and the rise of the unipolar world under US leadership, the world has been warring between those who sought to establish a moral-ethical value scale as integral to global politics, while others ought to maintain sole materialism as the ruling scale of the world order.

This is not to say that the prior group would offer a world of incomparable morality, however, it will maintain that humanism is at the core of political decisions despite the fact that wars, conflicts, and constructive capitalism will continue to exist.

Jeffery Sachs, an internationally renowned economist with a focus on sustainable development, summed up the current world order in a few words: 

“Capitalism is a system that is absolutely susceptible to grave injustice,” Sachs said. “It was born with injustice—it has grown up with injustice—it has continued with injustice.”

For many in the Global South, the morality-centered world resonates as they fight settler colonization, colonialism, imperialism, and forced underdevelopment. This political approach to the world offers them liberation from a Leviathan that has often torn their nations apart and murdered thousands of their peoples under the pretexts of Humanitarian intervention, Responsibility to Protect, the IMF, and color revolutions.

The call for liberation from imperialist fangs has reverberated across Latin America to the heart of West Asia.

St. Oscar Romero assassinated at the altar of the oppressed speaks a new tongue

“A church that doesn't provoke any crisis, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone's skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed -- what gospel is that? Very nice, pious considerations that don't bother anyone, that's the way many would like preaching to be. Those preachers who avoid every thorny matter so as not to be harassed, so as not to have conflicts and difficulties, do not light up the world they live in.”
― Oscar A. Romero, The Violence of Love

On March 24, 1980, a car stopped outside the Church of the Divine Providence in San Salvador and a bullet was aimed directly at El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero as he stood at the altar during mass.

In 2000, The Guardian wrote a piece questioning the role of the CIA in the killing of Romero as he was the "voice of those without voice" in El Salvador. 

During that time, and as The Guardian holds testimony, priests joined leftwing rebels and reasserted the poor’s right to justice. A justice that must be obtained in this world and not just in the next, referencing heaven.

This was highly problematic at the time for both the Catholic church and the rising imperialist world order run by the United States of America. 

At the foundation of the call for the liberation of the poor was the liberation of the oppressed. These were the reverberations of Latin America’s Liberation Theology. 

Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the founders of Liberation Theology, a Peruvian philosopher, Catholic theologian, and Dominican priest, was able to call for Christian justice by reframing Christianity and its purpose without denouncing its sacred values. 

In his book A Theology of Liberation, Gustavo clearly noted that “the denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.”

Today, clear echoes of this philosophical understanding of religion as a tool for human liberation for both believers and non-believers alike, continue to extend across the world. While Eastern Christians have historically held such beliefs, it remained that colonization had taken its toll with the rise of the West.

However, most recently, an Arab priest has written an open letter to the pontiff to reaffirm these religious values. In his letter, father Elias Zahlawi noted that he had wanted to offer his greetings to share the commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ with the pontiff, however, before doing so he found himself refraining. 

Zahlawi noted that Christ, “repeatedly and openly,” throughout his journey and through several of his statements “identified akin with every human being, especially the tormented and oppressed.”

The letter explained that billions of people across both East and West have become oppressed, “especially in the Arab world, in Palestine, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, and Syria.” In that regard, the letter significantly noted that the pontiff has “truly and effectively ignored all these tormented people.”

Zahlawi did acknowledge that the pontiff called for prayer, however, he reaffirmed the argument of Gutirez mentioned here above and asked the pontiff “If Jesus Christ were in your place, would he have only called for prayer?!”

Liberation could also be in a Muslim veil

For many, there is an understanding that religions contradict each other and that their coexistence is near impossible. However, both Latin America and Western Asia, amongst others, have proven otherwise.

Most recently, the case of the Venezuelan diplomat, Alex Saab, that was kidnapped by the US for daring to break unilateral sanctions imposed against Venezuela, was most significantly brought to light. 

In fact, Saab was not only breaking the siege against Venezuela but also breaking it with yet another country that the US has also imposed unilateral sanctions against it. 

A leftwing, Christian nation, coordinating and collaborating with a Muslim nation to break the siege against two Global South countries is proof that liberation is about shared values and with utter respect to individual beliefs within that spectrum of the value scale.

The shared values were prominent in the Islamic Republic of Iran since its inception. In 1989, Sayyed Ruhullah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic Revolution, wrote a letter to then President Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union, in which he marked the foundation of his discussion as one of an addressing a world that will be able to face the rising West. Khomeini stated that “it is possible that as a result of wrong economic policies of former communist authorities, the Western world, an illusory heaven, will appear to be fascinating; but the truth lies elsewhere.”

The leader of the Islamic Revolution and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran then added that “if you hope, at this juncture, to cut the economic Gordian knots of socialism and communism by appealing to the center of Western capitalism, you will, far from remedying any ill of your society, commit a mistake which those to come will have to erase.”

Khomeini asked the Soviet President to reconsider the values of God and religion, and today Orthodox Russia faces the West's “vulgarism.”

According to Khomeini, the “main problem” confronting the USSR was not one “of private ownership, freedom, and economy,” but rather “the absence of true faith in God.” This, Khomeini argued, was the “very problem that has dragged, or will drag, the West to vulgarism and an impasse.”

In that regard, Khomeini, and his revolution reverberated across West Asia and beyond. It found a way to connect, defend, and grow as an idea that protects the collective of the nation and with it all the religious and ethnic components that have existed throughout history.

Liberation is not a Religious institution but a human duty to the collective

The echoes of Christian Liberation Theology have not been limited to Christianity; rather, it both accompanied and inspired liberation movements elsewhere. 

If one looks thoroughly into the readings of Global South liberation movements, though there will be disagreements, there will be more unified values that underline both trade and identity. And in doing so cultural differences are protected and even supported as those values, inherently put the need of the collective ahead of that of the individual making space for believers and non-believers alike to share the human experience within more equitable ratios.

Sachs acknowledged “We’re so rich that it’s only [due to] our complete disdain for the poor that we don’t solve the remaining problems of global poverty,” adding that “The essence of the ethics of the Anthropocene is, fundamentally, a choice—the choice of pro-sociality, of supporting humanity, versus the choice of uncontrolled greed.”

In this regard, Christians, Muslims, and any liberation movement within the Global South must regain its voice even at the risk of losing one’s life at the altar because the price of not doing so is further oppression, torment, injustice, and death of both humanism and humanity.

Read more: The Palestinian Resistance is beyond sectarian disintegration