Batman Is The Kind of Wealth Propaganda That Leads to Oppression
By: Walter Rhein
Tags: Police Brutality, BlackLivesMatter, Poverty, Comics, Police

Batman Is The Kind of Wealth Propaganda That Leads to Oppression

Photo by Obi Onyeador on Unsplash

America is built on the mythology of billionaires and it’s bizarre to witness. Working-class people living in dirt-floor shacks built from corrugated metal will violently oppose a 1% tax hike on corporations because of some delusional impulse to protect an imaginary fortune they’ll never possess.

The simple fact is that no good person can become a billionaire. Anyone possessed of a moral compass cannot stand by and watch the suffering of children, the elderly, the homeless, or any other group while holding the power to make a meaningful change. A person can only become a billionaire if they are the kind of sociopath that can observe preventable suffering and coldly stand by and refuse to offer aid.

One of the most glaring examples of insane wealth propaganda comes in the form of the comic book character Batman. Batman is the crime fighting alter-ego of billionaire Bruce Wayne. The comic presents the message that the only way to stop crime is through a brutal, militarized police force. In reality, Bruce Wayne would have greater success achieving his objectives if he used his vast wealth to open schools in impoverished areas. The simple fact is that the crime Batman fights is largely a direct consequence of Bruce Wayne’s own immoral choices.

You shouldn’t call someone a hero for putting out the fires they themselves started.

Class warfare

The second you make any kind of statement pointing out the injustices of wealth inequality, representatives of the elite class will start screaming they are the victims of “class warfare.” However, the only class war that truly exists is the one the rich constantly wage on the poor.

Nobody ever screams “class warfare” when uninformed jerks on social media spread offensive and inaccurate memes about impoverished people who can only survive through programs like welfare. The worst scenario is when people who claim to be Christians go off on tirades about how struggling, poverty class individuals are somehow gaming the system.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven — Matthew 5:3

It’s not some minor character in the Bible that says this, it’s Jesus and he says it a lot. Yet, somehow, American social conditioning is so powerful that individuals that claim to be Christians can embrace philosophies that are in direct contradiction to one of Christ’s most fundamental messages. At some point, our society either has to take a hard look in the mirror or endure a strong slap in the face.

Crime is a consequence of oppression

Faced with the choice of making a decent wage while engaged in honest labor or making a decent wage pursuing unlawful actions, the overwhelming majority of people will choose honesty. The problem we have in the United States is that so many people are born into hopeless situations with no chance of improvement.

The 400 richest Americans — the top 0.00025 percent of the population — have tripled their share of the nation’s wealth since the early 1980s, according to a new working paper on wealth inequality by University of California at Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman — Christopher Ingraham

There was a time when a person in America had the chance to improve his or her station through hard work, but those days are dead and gone. The insatiable desire for control among a small group of untouchable elites is steadily encroaching upon the average person’s ability to make their way in the world. The elites have taken the whole pie leaving us only the crumbs, and even as we speak they’re conspiring on how to get the crumbs as well.

Batman and militarized police

Make no mistake about it, Batman is a symbol of tyrannical control. When we sit in the comfort of an air-conditioned theater, it’s easy to be caught up in the thrill of the “heroic” crime fighter using a highly technological vehicle to undo the plan of a nefarious super villain. However, it’s prudent to pause and recognize that while the super villain doesn’t exist in reality, the militarized vehicles actually do.

Batman films condition us to see an object of oppression as a force of good. But what happens in real life when vehicles like that are deployed in your neighborhood? There is no Joker to be the focus of their attention. Instead, there exists only the very real possibility that these death machines will be coming after your children. The fact that there are so many news stories about fatal police interactions are a testament to this reality.

According to the Urban Institute, in 2017, American state and local governments spent $115 billion on policing. If you add in the cost of incarcerating the people police arrest, the total comes out to $194 billion. On average, a city spends $354 on police for every citizen — unless you live in D.C. or New York, where those numbers shoot up above $900 and $500, respectively — AC Shilton

Force is not an effective way to control people

Americans often exhibit a contradictory philosophy. They claim to love freedom, but they also demonstrate a deeply ingrained desire to force people to behave as they’re told. Everyone has experienced a moment of frustration that involved a fantasy of punching an agent of opposition in the face. However, back in the real world, violence has been proven again and again as the least effective way of resolving an issue.

Using force to stop crime does not eliminate the root cause of the behavior. Even confronted with a militarized police force, people still will aspire to improve their station in life. They still need to pay for the basic necessities like shelter and food.

Forcing people to “behave” and “be satisfied” with their dirt floor and their corrugated metal walls requires a far greater dedication of resources than engaging in the charitable pursuit of simply building them a better home. The cries of “socialism” are inherently dishonest. It’s not “socialism” that the elites fear, instead, they live in terror that oppressed individuals will be allowed, by our society, to discover their own worth and humanity.

This is the essential argument of the movement to defund the police. What happens if instead of spending billions on weapons of war that are deployed in our neighborhood to kill our children, we spent that money on programs that ensured these children received a better life? It’s the only humanitarian choice, yet the proposal is often met with blatant hostility. The fact is, Americans have been conditioned to demand the majority of the population exists under the threat of oppressive control.

Billionaires won’t build schools

A high-quality school in an impoverished area represents a massive downward transfer of wealth. With better resources available, the property value of everyone in that area will rise considerably. This is exactly the reason that billionaires refuse to do it without first buying up all the properties in the region so that they can corner all the benefits.

In a fair game, every now and then you’d see members of the poverty class win this kind of urban development lottery ticket. But it almost never happens. People living in the poverty class don’t have the resources to fight encroachments on their autonomy. They’re usually forced out at below-market prices, leaving a billionaire to swoop in, purchase the property, and steal all the gains.

To make matters worse, these kinds of developments are almost always funded by taxpayer money. The working class is always leveraged and exploited. They are taxed into submission, and billionaires use their connections to ensure the benefits of those tax revenues are always leveraged to help the wealthy. Consider the CARES act passed in March of 2020. Of the 2.2 trillion allotments, 0.2 went to the people in the form of stimulus checks. The other 2 trillion was given to those that already have an obscene amount of wealth.

The ‘Joker’ film blew it

The ad campaign for Joker teased that the film might engage the issue of wealth tyranny, but it instead elected the “safer” route of exploiting the mentally handicapped. The film implies that Joker is the illegitimate child of Thomas Wayne, who leveraged his personal power to have Joker’s mother committed rather than deal with his responsibilities, thus leading to Joker’s insanity. Alas, the film abandoned this plot direction in the final act.

It’s a shame because the abandoned storyline is the exact type of oppression that is commonplace in our society. Rich people do exploit and discard women and then leverage their power to have them dismissed as lunatics. Giving voice to the victims of such oppression is long overdue.

But you can’t expect a Hollywood film to be that kind of champion because they fundamentally benefit from the existing oppressive system. Their “courage” extends as far as dabbling with the idea only to eventually capitulate and contribute to the false narrative of benevolent wealth.

Batman isn’t the only tool for brainwashing

Batman’s alter ego is entitled billionaire Bruce Wayne, who routinely succumbs to a personal psychosis to prowl the streets at night to torment struggling people and violate civil liberties behind the protection of advanced technology. We watch it and cheer, somehow not recognizing that this story represents everything that’s most reprehensible about true American society.

But Batman isn’t the only character in this nefarious propaganda campaign. Everything from our schools to our churches to our politics has somehow been corrupted to give credibility to the concept that billionaires are something other than power-hungry sociopaths intent on exploiting and oppressing everyone around them.

Perhaps, at some point, we can endeavor to live in a world where average citizens have enough empathy and education that they do not cheer at the prospect of militarized police beating average, powerless citizens into submission. We aren’t going to achieve that society, however, until we start denouncing overt symbols of oppression when we recognize them.