Keys of This Blood Page 3

  For Pope John Paul, the most interesting thing about Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary was that he did not respond to those potentially lethal ills of the USSR as any of his predecessors had done. He did not ignore the problems, for example, as Khrushchev had done in his unimaginative and doctrinaire confidence that the West was on its last legs and would collapse under the weight of its own corruption. Nor did he continue Moscow’s economically insane buildup of military superiority, as Brezhnev had done, preparing to take the West by storm if desperation led in that direction.

  Instead, Gorbachev began to make the kinds of moves that marked him at once in John Paul’s power ledger as the geopolitical champion of the East: the kinds of moves one geopolitician would expect of another. For in entirely new ways, the new Soviet leader began to activate the true and so far untapped geopolitical potential of the Soviet Party-State—the only other global apparatus that was already in place worldwide and that could be got up and running with relative ease as a rival to John Paul’s Roman Catholic georeligious institution.

  It quickly became apparent to Vatican analysts that Gorbachev read the problems of the Soviet Union as intimately related to the three areas outside the USSR that were already the object of John Paul’s geopolitical focus.

  On one flank, Gorbachev was faced with the fact that Western Europe, with West Germany as its heart, promised soon to become a community of 300 million people with enormous economic power.

  On a second flank, the People’s Republic of China not only outstripped the USSR demographically, with a population of 1.5 billion, but was more than likely to do so technologically and economically, as well, if the Soviet Union remained economically stagnant.

  Finally, a still-prosperous United States, with its own stepped-up military clout, had renewed the stigma of international unacceptability against the Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan’s often repeated “evil empire” epithet lay like an international shroud over every Soviet move.

  This was not the way to reach the Leninist geopolitical goal. As the second true geopolitician to enter the arena of the millennium endgame, therefore, Mikhail Gorbachev began a brand-new world agenda. Clamoring for attention, throwing off scintillating sparks of geopolitical dynamism and sheer tactical genius, he established himself on every level that mattered as progenitor and public hero of a new outlook for the nations.

  At one level, he conducted a personal public relations campaign that must have made Madison Avenue blush with envy. He wooed and won his two most adamant and conservative enemies among the leaders of the West, Ronald Reagan and England’s Margaret Thatcher. He wooed and won the United Nations with a bravura performance whose substance was drowned in the emotional tide of acceptance he created. In successive and indefatigable travels, he wooed and won vast populations in America, West Germany, England, France and Italy, leaving behind him a truly global tide of Gorbi-mania.

  At another level, meanwhile—at the level of the mechanics of geopolitical innovation—by 1989, within four years of his ascendancy to leadership in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had accomplished what no Soviet leader before him had ever thought to do, and would probably not have believed possible. He had forced the West into a complete, 180-degree reversal of its seventy-year policy toward the USSR. He forced the “Group of Seven” European nations to hold a seminal meeting precisely to deal with his presence and proposals on the world stage; and then he literally hijacked their meeting without even setting foot out of Moscow. And finally, he forced major meetings of the European nations in June and October 1990, to deal with unheard-of questions. Questions absolutely vital to the solution of the problems of the USSR and to the success of Leninist Marxism. Questions such as the integration of Eastern Europe, and even of some parts of the Soviet Union itself, into the new European power equation supposedly to take shape from 1992 onward.

  Every move Gorbachev made underlined for John Paul the Soviet leader’s complete understanding of European power as the first springboard of his geopolitical vision; his understanding that such power lay in a Europe that would run from the Atlantic to the Urals; and his understanding that the hinge of that power lies, as it always has, in the area of Central Europe from the Adriatic to the Baltic seas.

  In 1989, in a chessman’s move remarkable for its theatricality and its boldness, and redolent with the confidence of a master of the game, Gorbachev began what appeared to be the “liberation” of his Eastern European satellites. Thereby, in a single stroke, he accomplished a world of good for his cause.

  He banished the “evil empire” image from international sight. He removed an unbearable economic incubus from the outer carcass of the USSR and placed it on the West instead. And not least, he successfully transformed himself and his supreme leadership of the Soviet Union into the sine qua non of the foreign policies of the Western nations. Mr. Gorbachev had to be helped in every way. He must not be put at the mercy of the “conservative hard-liners” in the Kremlin. No truthful criticism must be risked of his cruel suppression of nationalism in the unwilling Soviet republics of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, for example; nor of his brutality with the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Even his flagrant violations of the U.S.-Soviet INF missile treaty, never before off limits for comment and complaint, were passed over in deafening official silence.

  The attitude toward Gorbachev by the opening of the final decade of the millennium was neatly, even lyrically, summed up in a letter from a respected American professor of political science, published in The New York Times on April 27, 1990. “Mr. Gorbachev has probably made greater contributions to the wellbeing of humankind than any other political figure in history,” wrote Professor Reo M. Christenson of Miami University in Ohio. “… ending the cold war, reversing the arms race, liberating Eastern Europe, introducing democratic and economic reforms in the Soviet Union as rapidly as feasible, withdrawing from Afghanistan and from most of the Soviet international mischief-making of recent decades, and changing the political atmosphere for the better constitute unparalleled achievements. I can think of no statesman in history to have done so much.”

  Gorbachev’s greatest triumph can only be described as a phenomenal victory in the opening phase of the millennium endgame. For, by the early days of 1990, not only scholars and commentators but virtually every political and entrepreneurial leader of the West, on both sides of the Atlantic, was not only contemplating but talking and planning about Mikhail Gorbachev’s proposal for a new “European” community, comprising some 800 million people and stretching westward from the train yards of Vladivostok to the sun-drenched beaches of California.

  Whatever geopolitical fate might ultimately await Gorbachevism, Gorbachev had indeed taken up John Paul’s Poland challenge with gusto. He had done more than crank open the floodgates of geopolitical change. He had created a new mind in the West. Or, more precisely, he had got the West to adopt his mind and cater to his needs. He had successfully included the Soviet Union in the very entrails of the economic life and machinery of the new world aborning. From now on, Gorbachevism—and Wojtylism—will be potent factors activating the society of nations, even if either or both leaders should leave the human scene or be toppled from positions of supreme leadership.

  As the Pope he is, John Paul would typically pray that one day Mikhail Gorbachev will enter the house of God that Peter built—not because as a Leninist he covets the Roman Church as the geopolitical power tool it is; and not because he needs the cooperation of the Pontiff as a fellow Slav and a geopolitical equal; but as a prayerful penitent. Gorbachev was baptized as an infant, after all; and he was a churchgoing believer in his boyhood. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that the Soviet leader is not totally impervious to the grace of his erstwhile faith.

  As the geopolitician he is, however, John Paul would just as typically not let such prayers and hopes, deeply genuine though they are, cloud or replace his crystal-clear understanding of the design Mikhail Gorbachev has formed for the new w
orld order: the design he and his associates in the Soviet Party-State are fully confident they will install as victors in this “greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through.”

  There is no mystery for John Paul about Gorbachev’s design. It is the late-twentieth-century version of Lenin’s old “Workers’ Paradise,” but intelligently purged of the crudities and stupidities that marred Lenin’s vision. Lenin’s definition of the Proletarian Revolution, for example, has been expanded to encompass something much wider than the masses of workers. The new Leninist Revolution will liberate all people from slavery to the meaninglessness of daily life, including the meaninglessness formerly characteristic of Marxism. It will share common ground with capitalists in the solution of world problems. And it will do all that unremittingly and pointedly for man’s sake only. Man will take credit for it all in the certainty that man himself is the creator of all things good and pleasant.

  At the geopolitical level, the Gorbachevist design for a new world order envisages a condition in which all national governments as we now know them will cease to exist. There is to be one central governing hub located in Moscow and dominated exclusively by the Communist Party of the World (CPW). Governing structures in the various nations will be peopled with appointees of the CPW, and will be reproductions of the CPW in structure, though not in power.

  All military and security matters will be in the hands of the CPW and its surrogates throughout the nations. The geo-economy of the new world order, meanwhile, will incorporate all the practical lessons Communists have learned from the market economies of the Western democracies; but it will preserve the centralizing principle of Leninist Marxism.

  The CPW will also take charge of the cultural value system of the new world order. Religion will be banned. But because the spirit in man requires a specific nourishment to which the organized religions catered in the past, such catering will continue as a matter of practical necessity. However, it will ensure that the bone and marrow of the new value system are constructed not of God’s worth and God’s qualities, but exclusively of human worth and human qualities.

  To this end, the education of each individual must be a womb-to-tomb affair. On the one hand, there must be constant and lifelong revision and reinforcement of the individual’s grasp of pure Leninism, with its emphasis on that individual’s total dependency on the overall directorate of the CPW. On the other hand, a parallel educational effort will filter out all ideas about civil and political rights that presently cluster around capitalist democracy—most notably, the notion that there are certain inalienable rights of the citizen that are superior to the needs of the CPW.

  Pope John Paul is aware that such a reading of Gorbachev’s geopolitical vision for the new world order runs counter to the hopeful rhetoric current in the West. Rhetoric content for the moment to purr that democracy has won its long battle with Leninist Marxism at last; that Gorbachev has seen the light at the top of the capitalist hill and is making his way bravely up that slope.

  Nevertheless, the reality as John Paul sees it appears to weigh in another direction. Mikhail Gorbachev has said straight out to the world that he is a Leninist, and a Leninist he will remain. In almost those very words, in fact, Gorbachev told the Moscow cadres of the CPSU in November of 1989, “I am a Leninist, devoted to achieving the goals of Leninism and the worldwide Leninist association of all workers under the banner of Marxism.” Pope John Paul has learned from long experience when to take a Soviet leader at his word.

  Moreover, Gorbachev does have the global machinery of the Leninist structure available to carry out his design; and he has the fuel of an abiding geo-ideology that is shared by countless millions of men and women the world over.

  And finally, even among the world population that may not share or care about the Leninist-Marxist ideal, the materialist view of human life that has become so rampant has already shown itself to be entirely compatible in important ways with Gorbachev’s classical Leninism, refurbished as it is in the light of historical events subsequent to Lenin’s time.

  On the other side of the coin, meanwhile, two principal weaknesses dog Gorbachev’s every move. First, he stands or falls depending on the support of the KBG; the support of the Red Army Central Command Corps within the supersecret Soviet Defense Council of the USSR; and the support of the Central Committee of the CPSU. All three are Leninist to the core. He has to make sure that his Leninist credentials remain spotless and unsullied. For without that troika, Gorbachev’s chariot of geopolitical conquest would be immobilized. He would be finished.

  And second, he cannot with any degree of impunity jettison the centralized authority of the Party-State. Shorn of that authority, the USSR has no further reason to exist. Yet Gorbachev must, if he is to succeed in the endgame, build a workable bridge between that centralizing organization and the Western-style market economy without which his perestroika will never get off the ground.

  Both weaknesses provoke one torturing question for him: How far is too far? How far can he go in “liberating” the satellites and the dissident republics of the Party-State without violating the strategic requirements of that Party-State? How far can he liberalize the economy of the USSR without its de facto conversion into a capitalist system, so repugnant to his Leninist supporters?

  From Pope John Paul’s point of view, however, the greatest weakness of the Gorbachevist design for the new world order lies in its denial of God’s existence; in its bedrock cultivation of man as completely and solely a creature of nature and of the CPW. Any design based on such a principle is both unacceptable and unworkable, the Pope maintains, for one and the same reason. It is a cruel denial of man’s highest aspirations. It is a violation of man’s deepest instinct—to worship God; and of his deepest desire—to live forever, never to die.

  “The claim to build a world without God,” the Pope stated bluntly in Czechoslovakia during his visit in April of 1990, “has been shown to be an illusion…. Such a hope has already revealed itself as a tragic Utopia … for man is unable to be happy if the transcendent relationship with God is excluded.”

  On the face of it, the champions of Western capitalism—the Transnationalists and Internationalists of America and Europe—appear to be far and away the most effective and powerful architects of a new world order, for the simple reason that their power base rests on the indispensable pillars of money and technology.

  Given their background and their history, these Globalists of the West have developed a totally different design from Gorbachev’s, both for establishing a new world order and, once it is in place, for nourishing and developing it. Their plan is to broaden the scope of what they do so well; to exploit democratic capitalism and democratic egalitarianism to the full. The new world order, they say, will develop organically from the fundamental idea of a nation-state democracy into a geopolitical system of world regulation.

  The father of this version of the new world order is to be the interdependence of nations. Its mother is to be that peculiarly modern process called international development. It is to be midwifed by the entrepreneur, the banker, the technocrat, the scientist and, ultimately, the lawyer. It is to be born between the printed sheets of compacts and agreements; joint ventures and mergers; contracts and covenants and international treaties signed and countersigned by the political bureaucrat, and sealed with the stamp of united nations.

  It is a tribute to the geopolitical skill of Mikhail Gorbachev that there is an almost perfect coincidence between the framework he has chosen as his method of approximating his geopolitical goals and the framework adopted by President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III as the public leaders and spokesmen for the Transnationalist-Internationalist Globalists of the West. They express that framework in terms of three concentric spheres of international unity: the European Economic Community; Greater Europe, composed of the Western European states, the former Eastern satellites of the Soviet Union and the USSR itself; and finally, both of those welded geopo
litically with the United States.

  Again, as Gorbachev has done, the most influential leaders of this Globalist group, the Wise Men of the West, have taken account of the main sources of disequilibrium that must be addressed before their globalist design for a new world order can be stabilized. The ominous threat of an isolated People’s Republic of China could be the spoiler and must therefore be offset and diverted. The role of West Germany—already powerful and now to be reunified with its eastern half—must be regulated in order to quell the fears of the Soviets and of most Western Europeans concerning any renascence of German imperialism. And—tribute of tributes—Mikhail Gorbachev must be aided so that he will be able with impunity to reform the economico-political structure of the Soviet Union.

  If these main sources of disequilibrium can be taken care of, then—given the time—this third contender group in the millennium endgame sees itself within reach of a geopolitical structure. Indeed, the Globalists already see themselves in the very midst of an orderly transition—an organic evolution—from the divisive nation-state politics of yesterday to a new world order. More, they see the whole process as in the nature of a logical consequence. Their presumption is that the old internationalism, allied with the new capitalist-based transnationalism, will carry democratic egalitarianism to a geopolitical level. They presume, in short, that the new world order will be a logical consequence of yesterday’s mode of democratic politics.

  With that facile transition already visibly under way around the world, the Western Globalists don’t feel they are jumping the gun by much when they speak of the final prize to come. Just over the horizon, they say, still out of sight but firmly presumed to be there waiting for us all, stretch the smiling upland meadows of plenty for all; and not far beyond that lie the rolling plains of man’s continuing perfectibility.