The dramatic Polish experiment that opened the decade of the 1980s failed. Who might have won at that moment in time—Gramsci or Wyszynski—will never be known. But the day was not far down the road when the gamble would be tried again. And when the time came, as the eighties drew to a close, the high cards were all in Soviet hands. For, despite Moscow’s loss of nerve in putting Gramsci’s formula to its first test within the Soviet orbit, the fundamental Marxization of the West itself had not been impeded or slowed in the least.
On the contrary, the originally Christian mind in the West nations was so far eroded already, that capitalist nations were persuading themselves that they had to be content with the conviction that the purpose and meaning of all life is life. Life rooted in loyalty to a nation. Life conducted with a maximum sense of solidarity among a society of nations. Life with a reverence for all living things, whether walking on two legs, or four legs, or no legs. Life, as onetime Marxist Milovan Djilas wrote with extreme pathos, “which is patriotic without being nationalistic, socially responsible without being socialist, and respectful of human rights and those of all creatures without calling itself Christian.”
With those conditions as a backdrop in the West, the Soviet refusal of Poland’s challenge to Gramsci’s process in Poland became a thing of the past, a mistake of history.
Mikhail Gorbachev burst upon the world scene as the first Soviet leader big-minded enough to appraise, appreciate and fully embrace the Gramscian formula. The only Soviet leader realistic and courageous enough to commit even his own satellite territories to the dead Sardinian’s plan for victory in Marxism’s consistent struggle for total geopolitical predominance among the nations, and for its total acceptance in the newly de-Christianized hearts and minds of the men and women who people those nations.
One by one, the former Soviet satellites are seen as liberated from the direct control of the USSR. The Communist parties in those individual countries have been shunted off their solitary perch on the dais of government; indeed, in Hungary, the former CP has renounced even calling itself “Communist.” And the Gorbachev-blessed changes are going further. Now the reunification of the “two Germanys” has his approval. No doubt, in a short time, the three Baltic States—Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia—will attain a status even more detached from the USSR than the former satellites.
In his Gramscian pattern, Gorbachev envisions a new governmental structure for the USSR itself and—unimaginable wonder of wonders!—a new status for several of the “Socialist Soviet Republics” that flesh out the USSR. Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, the Ukraine will all attain a new status other than that of fully integrated “Republics” in the former “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” The Gramscian process requires such changes. Gorbachevism implicitly endorses them. In this, as John Paul perceives, Gorbachev is being very faithful to his hard-core Leninism, while adding his own updating and correctives.
In John Paul II’s reading of the geopolitical arena of the 1990s, the secularized West would seem to be custom-made for Gorbachevism. The Soviet General Secretary has made it clear that he is perfectly aware of the barrenness afflicting the bloody-minded plans of Lenin, whom Pravda once hailed as “the radiant genius who lights the path of mankind to Communism.” Gorbachev has read his contemporary world instead, and unabashedly, in the more accurate light of the analysis of Antonio Gramsci, but keeping intact a basic tactical principle of that “radiant genius.” Gorbachev has even taken the trouble to explain that basic tactical principle. In his book, Perestroika, he has explained:
It would be appropriate to recall how Lenin fought for the Brest Peace Treaty in the troubled year 1918. The Civil War was raging, and at that moment came a most serious threat from Germany. So Lenin suggested signing a peace treaty with Germany.
The terms of peace Germany peremptorily laid down for us were, in Lenin’s words, “disgraceful, dirty.” They meant Germany annexed a huge tract of territory with a population of fifty-six million…. Yet Lenin insisted on that peace treaty. Even some members of the Central Committee objected … workers, too … demanding that the German invaders be rebuffed. Lenin kept calling for peace because he was guided by vital, not immediate, interests of the working class as a whole, of the Revolution, and of the future of Socialism … he was looking far ahead … he did not put what was transitory above what was essential…. Later, it was easy to say confidently and unambiguously that Lenin was right…. The Revolution was saved.
Probably Gorbachev regards the insistence of the West on liberalization of human rights as undue intrusion, and the insistence of the former satellite nations to be free as “disgraceful” and “dirty” actions by “socialist brothers.” But, to save the Revolution, to save the essentials of the Party-State, he does see it as necessary to liberalize the Soviet empire, even to disaggregate the present structure of the USSR. For only thus can he hope and expect to be admitted as a full-blooded member of the new globalist society of nations.
Leninist flexibility, colored by Gramscian subtleties and modified to supply whatever was lacking in Gramsci’s blueprints for victory—this constitutes Gorbachev’s program. For it is true that human affairs in the last decade of the twentieth century are not at all the same as in its first four decades, when Gramsci lived and thought and died. “Marx never saw an electric bulb,” commented China’s Hu Yaobang in November of 1986, “and Engels never saw an airplane.” Just so, globalism was a nonthought for the politically battle-hardened Sardinian whose mind and outlook were polarized between the parochialism of Lenin’s pseudorevolutionary Moscow and a Western European culture about to be drowned in all-out war.
Gramsci never saw the deadly mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, the fearful opening announcement of a new and unheard-of interdependence of nations. He never had even a glimmering of the idea of the computer chip, which has revolutionized industrial development in regions whose populations were, until what seems only moments ago, locked into their Asian rice paddies and their African savannas and their Brazilian rain forests. Nothing in Gramsci’s pre-World War II surroundings so much as hinted at the possibility of a “global village.”
In Gorbachev’s hands, however, Gramsci has entered into the globalist competition. Of that Pope John Paul is convinced. As the Pontiff leads the tattered but still powerful and unique structure of his universal Roman Catholic Church through the unpredictable volatility of our times, he is certain that Mikhail Gorbachev will move confidently into the deep waters of the new globalism, with the ghost of Antonio Gramsci as companion and guide.
The Pope sees Gorbachev as supremely confident that he can maneuver the Leninist geopolitical structure and organization he now heads into a position of total domination in that new globalism. Nor has the Pontiff any of the illusions nourished by other West leaders about the General Secretary’s vision of how that new globalism can be turned in the direction of Leninism and skillfully adapted to the Leninist geopolitical goal. Gorbachev’s vision is still animated, as Chilean journalist Jaime Antunez has written, by “an immanentist sense, and [by] its purpose … to change social [and] economic relations with a view to producing a ‘new man’ fully liberated from ‘Old moral ties’ [of] Western Christian civilization.”
While, in the Pontiffs mind, the success or failure of the Gorbachev gamble with the new globalism remains an open question—the odds being heavily in Gorbachev’s favor—John Paul’s analysis of the new globalists and their plans makes him pessimistic about their chances of any acceptable degree of success.
Four
Champions of Globalism
14….
with Interdependence and Development for All
At some moment very soon after World War II, while the ghost of Antonio Gramsci was just getting up a good head of steam in the world, an extraordinary revolution he did not foresee began to take hold around the planet. The mood of the world arena began to change. Whether or not Gramsci’s policies fed that mood, it seemed that almost suddenly there wa
s a hankering for some truly workable system of interdependence among nations. A new kind of interdependence. An international unity that would not come riding like death on the back of conquest or subversion or crude takeovers. The time was past for yet another polished-up version of the ancient empire of Rome, in which all the world was forced to be Roman.
Rather, the new globalist mind envisioned an interdependence that would somehow accommodate the fact of the world as a shrinking place, but would also leave each nation its own identity.
As blurry as the concept of interdependence among nations might have been, a single aim did come to the fore fairly early on. And, though, since then, a great deal has changed among the many contenders for predominance in the global arena, that aim has remained constant at least for the most powerful of them: development. Some means was energetically sought by a few, was desired by many, and came to be expected by all, through which every national and cultural entity would actively share in and contribute to the material development of all. Everyone would have to be on board, for interdependence required an absence of strife. And an absence of strife required that there be no have-nots or “outsiders” among the nations.
Blurry or not, the new globalist vision was enough to ignite fires of longing among men and women the world over. Whole generations had lived all their lives amid global, regional and local wars. Even peace—what there was of it—could only be guaranteed by the threat of war. Compared to such a world as that, interdependence and material development could only sound like heaven on earth.
By about the end of the seventies, it seemed that nearly everyone in every nation and condition of life was following the barrage of practical news and not-always-so-practical editorial opinions about what was commonly accepted as a global competition for power going on in earnest among individuals, groups and nations. It became commonplace for men and women in every walk of life to appraise their own interests—their family situation, their job or profession, their company, their city, their country, their cause—Sin the light of such global developments. Increasingly, people came to see themselves and the circumstances of their lives in what they understood to be new and unprecedented globalist terms.
Given such widespread globalist yearnings—or at least the widespread yearning for international peace and material development—and given the fact that no practical means for achieving such overall goals seemed to emerge, the world was prepared in advance to be drawn into the orbits of two powerful leaders. Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Soviet Union loomed taller and seemed able to stride farther than any of their contemporaries on the shifting world stage.
As these two world leaders burst so unexpectedly upon the scene of global affairs, one after the other within seven short years, there was a common perception that, as different as they might be in every other respect, one thing they shared set them apart from every other leader and from every other globalist visionary: The Roman Catholic Pontiff and the Soviet General Secretary each seemed to stand in sight of what would perfect the incipient globalism on the horizon of our world.
That public perception of both men was and remains accurate. For both came to their positions of power as died-in-the-wool globalists. Both have a truly geopolitical bent of mind. Both have a clear geopolitical mandate and purpose. And each of them is backed up by a geopolitical organization.
John Paul and Gorbachev both understand already what practical working structures are needed to create a geopolitical system among nations. They have long since seen clearly that geopolitics must and will transfer national politics to a global plane—will induce all the transformations and adaptations necessary in today’s local political structures, so that they may flourish in tomorrow’s truly geopolitical system of interdependence. They have long since understood that no nation of the world will remain in the next century as it has been or is in this century. They have long since seen that the very concept of nationhood will be deeply altered.
Much of the world may be uncomfortable with Gorbachev’s Communism. Much of the world may be repelled by John Paul’s Roman Catholicism. But it is clear to all the world—leaders and people alike—that over and above Communism and Catholicism, there is in each of these two men a secure point of view that can at long last take the idea of globalism beyond the stage of a blurry dream. Either of them can—and each of them intends to—infuse the present inchoate globalism with the values it lacks, give it flesh-and-blood reality, and transmute it into a veritable new world order.
Walking as they do in the unobstructed light of their separate globalist visions, these two men—the Pope and the General Secretary—act like magnets, drawing popular emotions and a vast enthusiasm to themselves around the world.
National leaders, meanwhile, are drawn in the wake of these two men. In such company, John Paul and Mikhail Gorbachev are perceived with less emotion and not always with enthusiasm. But they are seen as having a clear picture of what is needed to create a true geopolitical unity in a world groping for exactly that. They are known to have their differing blueprints of the global unity that would absorb all local unities. Blueprints, in other words, of the centralization needed in order to eliminate the thousand and one separate nationalist-minded governments pulling this way and that in the current international system. Blueprints, moreover, of the values that must act as the glue—the sticky tape of cohesion—indispensable to any geopolitical arrangement among nations but lacking to individual nations in the world of the 1990s.
The fact that John Paul and Mikhail Gorbachev are the towering figures in the world arena where globalism is perceived as the prize does not in the least discourage other contenders from crowding in.
On the contrary, champions of globalism are in ready supply. Some have entered the arena alone. Some have come with a bevy of camp followers. Some form short- or long-term alliances with fellow contenders. Some remain aloof from all the others. Most of them have an international forum they have never enjoyed before. And all of them are beset by problems they either deny, or have not yet figured out how to overcome, on their way to the future. But every one of them is bitten by the same bug—the will to lead the way to the new globalist pattern that will hold sway over all nations.
From John Paul’s vantage point, the first big problem faced by most of his competitors in the globalist arena is that, as individuals and as groups, they still approach the world situation with a local mind-set.
Their second major problem is that with the sole exception of Mikhail Gorbachev, none of the other contenders has a system of values around which a new globalist structure for the nations of the world can form and maintain itself over time.
And yet a third difficulty is that none of them has managed to create or to gain control of the practical machinery they need for success—a functioning, up-and-running geopolitical organization such as Gorbachev’s global Leninist machine, or John Paul’s universal Roman Catholic structure.
Despite even such deep shortcomings, however, there are certain globalist-minded groups—some score or so in all, by the Pope’s reckoning—that are powerful forces in their own right. These contending groups fall rather naturally, in the Pontiff’s analysis, into three broad categories.
The first category is the most crowded. There are so many groups in contention here, in fact, that they form themselves into subcategories. But generally speaking, and allowing for differences and divisions aplenty, included here is every globalist-minded group of some importance that maintains a vision of the new world in its own image. Each of them is certain that the world is about to become what that group already is. Each sees the world as a whole in its own terms. These are the Provincial Globalists.
The second broad category comprises a smaller number of globalist-minded groups than the first—only three in all. And the number of people represented is not vast. Nevertheless, the characteristic of this category is that each group included within it sees the world as already in
its own globalist basket. Without fear or favor, each will ride on the back of any current that will take it forward. But for them, it’s not so much that the world will become what they are. It’s that they are the world. These are the Piggyback Globalists.
The third category is made up of only two groups. But these are the true globalist contenders. Humanly speaking, very little seems to stand in the way of their ultimate success in the globalist arena. And though John Paul knows they have not yet crossed the Rubicon that separates globalism from a true and workable geopolitical system, he sees them nevertheless as the Genuine Globalists.
· · ·
The Pontiff maintains an intimate knowledge of each of these many globalist groups. And he does analyze them in terms of such categories and subcategories as these. He has spoken about many of them publicly from time to time. In the Vatican, and around the world on his never-ending travels, he has met publicly and privately with representatives and leaders of them all.
No one is more aware than John Paul, therefore, that some of the groups in question may have a romantic idea of what global interdependence will look like, or of how it will be achieved. And no one knows better than he that some of these globalist contenders are downright unrealistic about the practical ways to get from one stage of development to the next.
Nevertheless, whatever their own chances of ultimate victory in the millennium endgame, John Paul takes them seriously for several reasons.
Keys of This Blood Page 35
