Inevitably, this will corrupt whatever was morally good in your initial attitude. For you will not stop at mere tolerance, a sort of live-and-let-live treatment at a safe distance. Inexorably you will be led to compromise what was morally good in your original stance.
The plaint and criticism of Pius XI was precisely that: Toleration of the USSR led to the USSR’s being admitted into the comity of nations. He had the same critique to make of the treatment accorded both Hitler and Mussolini. Indeed, there is more than one reason to think that Pius XI’s life was successfully terminated by a Mussolini fearful that his regime would be rocked to its foundations by a blistering attack from the Pope such as he had launched against Hitler on March 14, 1937.
But already by the time Ratti became Pope in February 1922, the early pioneers of the historic process of material gain and the increase of raw power—leaders who were to the engines of geopolitical development what Ford and the Wright brothers were to automobiles and airplanes—were subject to the consequences of their passion; to a turning away in mind and action from God’s enlightening grace. Under such leadership, and in effect as a matter of policy, the great nations ceased to observe the First Commandment and worshiped freely and by consistent choice instead at the altars of the false gods of financial gain and political power.
The recognition accorded to the Soviet Union by the great nations in the early years after World War I was simply and principally rooted in the potential for increased trade. And in the beginning, it was no more than a de facto affair.
Trade, however, is always facilitated by diplomacy. And so by 1925, the great powers of the West, led by Germany and Great Britain—with the sole exception of the United States—had established full diplomatic relations with the Soviet government.
In the practical terms of profit and power, it was obvious that the United States could not afford to be odd man out. And in fact it joined the crowd in 1928 when, in the first breach of the “credit blockade” it had erected against the USSR, a contract was signed in New York between the Soviet Trading Company and General Electric.
If the West was prepared to argue, even at that early date, that in its trade and diplomatic arrangements it had done no more than acknowledge the Soviet Union as a practical fact of life in the world’s changing landscape, a far greater concession, which came in 1934, left any such argument without a leg to stand on. It was in that year that the League of Nations decided to admit the Soviet Union to its membership.
With that action, an entirely new status was accorded the ruling Soviet regime. Its recognition by the West was no longer a de facto affair; it was de jure. That is, the great world powers made a clear and deliberate decision to recognize not just the practical fact of the Soviet Union’s existence. They made a decision to recognize the right of the Soviet system to behave as it was behaving and to pursue the goals it was pursuing.
Not one of the great powers of the day didn’t know that those goals included the takeover of all nations of the West, the destruction of the capitalist way of life, the liquidation of all formal religion and the abrogation of all human rights.
Moreover, everyone responsible for the acceptance of the USSR into the community of nations—for its admission by right of international law to a place of equality with all the other nations—knew that the Soviet regime was built from the word go on the pillars of official atheism; the use of persecution, prison camps, torture and mass executions; and the systematic infusion into the world of lying propaganda.
In Pope John Paul’s view of history, this de jure recognition of the USSR, conceded principally for reasons of economic profit and material aggrandizement, was a policy step of the West that was based upon twin principles: acquiescence in the multiple sinful structures upon which the USSR had been built; and concession to the USSR of the right to continue on that same course.
It is Pope John Paul’s argument, moreover, that everything that happened for the next fifty years was no more than the logical follow-through of that conscious policy decision of the West nations, a policy decision that conceded moral equivalence to an immoral system and that was ratified over and again as time progressed.
Of course, the principles involved were not called the principles of acquiescence and concession. In fact, they weren’t really given a name at all until much later. But their outlines were so clear, and their acceptance in world affairs became so widespread, that when Pope John Paul II speaks privately, he refers to both of those principles together in appropriate shorthand as the principle of balance.
Whatever its name, this principle dictates that once a power emerges on the human scene, the primary judgment about its acceptability is not based on any moral—and certainly not on any religious—norms. The only judgment made concerns how aptly this new power can be integrated into the comity of nations so that international trade can be promoted, profits can be turned, and the “good life” can be continued in its upward course.
Even if the new power functions by means of sinful structures, therefore, its entry and acceptability are still not only feasible but desirable—provided only that those sinful structures do not terminate the balance necessary for the common pursuit by the other nations of those three goals of trade, profit and the development of the good life.
No source of wider trade, in other words, and no basis for the enhancement of prosperity need be excluded as long as that balance can be maintained.
Once that principle of balance had been set in place, it became a sort of lodestone of international policy, whose magnetic field was irresistible. As the decade of the thirties drew on, the same reluctance to declare the Soviet regime an outlaw among nations was shown for as long as possible in every quarter.
It was, in fact, only after most of the West nations had been literally forced at gunpoint to confront a threat to the principle of balance that came from another quarter—from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany—that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin Roosevelt each made personal agreements with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin by which whole populations in Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and Asia were handed over to Stalin lock, stock and barrel.
“Your President,” Stalin growled in 1944 to a visiting group of United States senators inquiring belatedly about his postwar plans, “has given me total and sole influence in Poland and China, and what I plan to do there is none of your business.” The sorriest and most shamefaced page of Churchill’s wartime memoirs, meanwhile, records how, during one of his wartime visits to Moscow, with the flourish of a pen he blithely signed away the freedom and lives of millions in the Balkan States.
It may be, as Churchill was so fond of saying, that even the Soviet stick was good enough to beat the Nazi dog. Nevertheless, within a decade of the League of Nations action in 1934, the right of the Soviet Union to continue on its singularly brutal course not only was ratified by the two most important leaders of the West nations; that right was cemented and enormously enhanced in the spoils of war.
Given the motive of Roosevelt and Churchill in this affair, it is a most savage irony that in the annals of human cruelty and deliberately planned genocide, not even the bloody record of Adolf Hitler can match the Stalinist record. For without delay, the Soviet Union imposed its totalitarian dictatorship on the hapless nations of its new empire. And without delay, it resumed by fair means and foul the pursuit of its primary goal of world hegemony—its own version of the global village.
The catastrophic proportions of the East-West division to which he had contributed in a time of desperation was best characterized by Winston Churchill himself in 1946. In Fulton, Missouri, that British statesman gave one of his most famous postwar speeches. He conjured up for the world the forbidding but accurate image of an iron curtain that had been clamped into place by the Soviets from Stettin on the Baltic Sea all the way to Trieste on the Adriatic. Europe had been divided. East and West had become the coordinates that would dominate the international life o
f the world and all its people for the next forty years.
Logically enough—inevitably, in fact—it was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that usurped the role of sole leader in the East bloc. And just as inevitably, all human rights—civil, political, religious—as well as the right to organize labor unions and to exercise economic initiative, were denied or severely limited. Huge sums of money were devoted to the enrichment of the nomenklatura—that privileged class of bureaucrats and Party officials in the Soviet Union that was so quickly exported to each new satellite country as its new ruling class. Stockpiles of weapons ate up still more money, while the vital development needs of war-racked populations were stifled by military expenditure, by elephantine bureaucracy, and by an inefficiency that rapidly became as endemic throughout the satrap East nations as in the South nations.
Stalin, already guilty prior to World War II of the persecution, imprisonment, torture and death of some fifty million human beings, imposed the same kind of totalitarian dictatorship on the betrayed nations of the newly created East bloc.
We now have firsthand testimonies from inside the Soviet system itself about the mass arrests, deportations, tortures, imprisonments and executions that befell millions of innocent citizens in the USSR and throughout its satellite nations. In the network of labor camps; in the total censorship of the media; in the one-man totalitarian rule; in the dossiers kept on countless people; in the repressive police apparatus and the murders that continued throughout the post-World War II period; in deliberately planned genocide; in the total control of the daily life of millions—what they ate, what work they did, what they read, what they thought, how they lived and how they died—in all of that, Stalin’s record is unsurpassed in recorded history.
Though there were continual cries of outrage from around the world, in the main the reaction and studied response of the West nations to this spectacle of Soviet horror that had been expanded over an entire region of the world was a refinement of its earlier principle of balance. Or more aptly, it was the codification of that principle of balance into a policy by which balance could still be maintained. And this time, it did have a name. The doctrine of “containment.”
In fact, it even had an author. George F. Kennan was the West’s foremost international analyst and perhaps the finest mind to appear in the West since England’s Lord Acton died in 1902. Kennan was, as well, the nearest modern America has come to producing a genuinely geopolitical thinker.
In a now famous eight-thousand-word telegram dispatched from the American Embassy in Moscow to the State Department in Washington in 1946, Kennan, a junior at the embassy, proposed that the United States meet the Soviet expansionist thrust by “the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” He discouraged any unnecessary militarizing of the conflict with the Soviets, or any reliance on nuclear weapons. Military force, in his mind, should not be the principal means of countering the Soviet Union.
The motive force of Kennan’s thought was, at its base, a moral one of truly geopolitical intent. For him, the need to avoid war with the Soviets sprang from a moral imperative. All and every effort should be made to avoid such a war, because it would probably mean the total destruction of our present civilization.
At the same time, Kennan was explicit concerning what the West could or should do about the peoples now held captive in Russia and throughout the latest colonialist empire in the world’s history.
Condemning the Stalinist regime as one of “unparalleled ruthlessness and jealousy,” he counseled the West to become and to behave as a “benevolent foreigner,” to maintain “polite neighborly relations with the Soviets, and then to leave the Russian people—encumbered neither by foreign sentimentality nor by foreign antagonism—to work out their destiny in their own particular way…. The benevolent foreigner, in other words, cannot help the Russian people; he can only help the Kremlin. And, conversely, he cannot harm the Kremlin; he can only harm the Russian people. That is the way the system is geared.”
One admiring commentator wrote about the Kennan doctrine that it was based on “a realistic assessment of America’s and Russia’s respective power and interests.” And true enough, if one considers “polite neighborly relations” by a “benevolent foreigner” as the means to maintain the principle of balanced development in the West; and if one considers “an assessment of Russia’s power and interests” an acceptable basis for justifying moral connivance with the horrors of life in the East nations—then Kennan had indeed provided a thoroughgoing and realistic general framework within which the West could pursue its development interests with as little moral discomfort as possible.
The deep human consequences of the Kennan doctrine of containment were clarified beyond doubt, if clarification were called for, when in 1956 the people of Hungary staged a desperate uprising against the brutal police presence, starvation wages, crowded homes, empty larders and makeshift substitutes for the merest necessities of life that had been foisted upon them by Stalin. The Hungarians were convinced that the West would come to their aid. Unfortunately, they had not assessed the West’s reliance on the balance-of-power principle. If Stalin wiped out the entire nation of Hungary, the West could still see its way to flourish. The nation in revolt was suppressed bloodily. In 1968, there was a repeat performance of the same scenario, this time in Czechoslovakia.
Fatally compromised from its beginning of “life with Uncle Joe,” the West had entered into a spiraling bipolar relationship of antagonism over which it had only the most tenuous control. Not only had it accepted the East as a parallel power, the East had succeeded in the dream of every classical strategist: it had lured the West onto the particular terrain it had chosen for the struggle.
Inevitably East and West, each with its own forms of propaganda and indoctrination, evolved their ideological opposition into a professional military opposition of the most curious kind. Two blocs of armed forces, though suspicious and fearful of each other’s plans for world domination, were each as frightened of direct conflict as of the geopolitical threat from the opposing side.
Given the elements of the Kennan doctrine of containment, the armed tension between the East nations and the West, the atmosphere of distrust and suspicion that reigned between them, and given above all the deep ideological contest between the two blocs, it was only a matter of a short time before the East-West coordinate of opposition spilled over to affect the South nations.
For one thing, the vast outlay of billions of dollars in foreign aid became a means by which West and East alike hoped to further their divergent foreign policy interests. For the East-West rivalry was global; and funds were meant to buy loyalties, not relieve endemic poverty.
The South nations in turn, in desperate need of effective, impartial and prudently administered aid from the richer developed countries of the North, found themselves overwhelmed instead by the ideological conflicts of East and West. For it was in the South nations that East and West alike found the most convenient targets for what George Kennan had called “the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” The South nations found that they were assigned one position or another along the East-West coordinate.
More often than not, and unfortunately for the South, the inevitable results were internal conflicts and divisions, famine, cruelty, and even full-scale civil war. The South is replete with monuments to this policy, monuments with names we all know: Nicaragua, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, to name but a few.
Despite the fact that tragedy on an international scale became the order of the day, no concerted plan was ever thought out and put into action in order to prevent the still-widening gap between North and South—the rich and the poor—because it was the global rivalry between East and West—the beggarman and the thief—that dictated the expenditures of the West nations. In fact, over time every local government even among the East nations
received its own ration from the billions of dollars in credits and aid paid out by the West nations in their continuing balancing act.
Out of this mutually accepted arrangement of association and opposition between East and West sprang one major factor in modern life—the armaments race—which has caused the nations to squander so many hundreds of billions of dollars every year that even the giants of the West became debtor nations. Had it been managed prudently and for other motives, that expenditure alone could probably have wiped out endemic hunger, disease and homelessness in all the lands of the South.
Despite so dismal a harvest, the West nations put the final cap on their systematic acquiescence in the institutionalized injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy, lies and anti-God intent of the East bloc of nations.
In the Helsinki Agreement of 1975, the entire West again, and as a bloc, officially ratified the principle of balance. The inviolate character of the Soviet empire, composed of and erected upon sinful structures, was confirmed officially and on treaty paper. All the compromises with and acquiescence in institutionalized sin—in sinful structures—were ratified with international fanfare as the global policy of the West nations. The Kennan doctrine had led to the triumph of what has been called the Brezhnev doctrine: the untouchable right of the Soviet Party-State to control its captive nations.
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Such were the barest facts of association and rivalry in 1978, when Karol Wojtyla came to Rome from the Soviet East; and so they remained in essence for all the years of his reign as Pope John Paul II, until the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.
Keys of This Blood Page 22
