Keys of This Blood (2 page)

The final contender in the competition for the new world order is not a single individual leader of a single institution or territory. It is a group of men who are united as one in power, mind and will for the purpose of achieving a single common goal: to be victorious in the competition for the new global hegemony.

While the acknowledged public leader and spokesman for this group is
the current American president, the contenders who compose this assemblage of individuals are Americans and Europeans who, taken together, represent every nation of the Western democratic alliance.

Unremittingly globalist in their vision and their activities, these individuals operate from two principal bases of power. The first is the power base of finance, industry and technology. Entrepreneurial in their occupations, the men in this phalanx qualify themselves, and are often referred to by others, as Transnationalist in their outlook. What they mean by the term “Transnationalist” is that they intend to, and increasingly do, exercise their entrepreneurship on a worldwide basis. Leaping over all the barriers of language, race, ideology, creed, color and nationalism, they view the world with some justification as their oyster; and the twin pearls of great price that they seek are global development and the good life for all.

Members of the second phalanx of this group of globalist contenders—Internationalists, as they are frequently called—bring with them invaluable experience in government, in intergovernmental relationships, and in the rarefied art of international politics. Their bent is toward the development of new and ever wider interrelationships between the governments of the world. Their aim is to foster increasing cooperation on an international basis—and to do that by maintaining the peace, at the same time they accomplish what war has rarely achieved: the breakdown of all the old natural and artificial barriers between nations.

In the current competition to establish and head a one-world government, Transnationalists and Internationalists can be said for all practical purposes to act as one; to constitute one main contender. The Genuine Globalists of the West. Both groups are products par excellence of the system of democratic capitalism. Both are so closely intertwined in their membership that individuals move easily and with great effect from an Internationalist to a Transnationalist role and back again. And not least important in the all-encompassing confrontation that is under way, both groups share the same philosophy about human life and its ultimate meaning—a philosophy that appears, in the surprised view of some observers, to be closer to Mikhail Gorbachev's than to Pope John Paul's.

There is one great similarity shared by all three of these geopolitical competitors. Each one has in mind a particular grand design for one-world governance. In fact, each of them talks now in nearly the same terms Karol Wojtyla used in his American visit in 1976. They all give speeches about an end to the nation system of our passing civilization.
Their geopolitical competition is about which of the three will form, dominate and run the world system that will replace the decaying nation system.

There is at least one other similarity among these groups that is worthy of note, primarily because it leads to misunderstanding and confusion. And that is the language each group uses to present its case to the world.

All three contenders use more or less the same agreeable terms when propagandizing their individual designs for the new world order. All three declare that man and his needs are to be the measure of what those individual designs will accomplish. All three speak of individual freedom and man's liberation from want and hunger; of his natural dignity; of his individual, social, political and cultural rights; of the good life to which each individual has a fundamental right.

Beneath the similarity of language, however, there lies a vast difference in meaning and intent; and greatly dissimilar track records of accomplishment.

The individual in Gorbachev's new world order will be someone whose needs and rights are determined by the monopolar government of Leninist Marxism. Indeed, all individual rights and freedom and dignity are to be measured by the needs of the Party to remain supreme and permanent.

In the new world order of the Wise Men of the West—the most powerful of the Genuine Globalists—the rights and freedoms of the individual would be based on positive law: that is, on laws passed by a majority of those who will be entitled to vote on the various levels of the new system of governmental administration and local organization. Ultimate rule, however, will be far removed from the ordinary individual.

The primary difficulty for Pope John Paul II in both of these models for the new world order is that neither of them is rooted in the moral laws of human behavior revealed by God through the teaching of Christ, as proposed by Christ's Church. He is adamant on one capital point: No system will ensure and guarantee the rights and freedoms of the individual if it is not based on those laws. This is the backbone principle of the new world order envisaged by the Pontiff.

Similarities of public rhetoric, therefore, do more to mask than clarify the profound differences between the contenders, and the profoundly different consequences for us all of the grand design each one proposes for the arrangement of our human affairs.

The three are contenders for the same prize; but they are not working in the vacuum of a never-never land. No one of them expects the others to change. Mr. Gorbachev knows that his Western competitors will not
renounce their fundamental democratic egalitarianism or cease to be capitalists.

The capitalists, meanwhile, know Gorbachev is a hard-core, convinced Leninist; his goal is the Marxist “Workers' Paradise”—however he may now configure that fearsome Utopia.

Similarly, neither of these contenders expects Pope John Paul to renounce his Christian optic on the world of man or cease to be Roman Catholic in his geopolitical strategy.

Indeed, so definitive is the cleavage and distinction among the three that each realizes only one of them can ultimately be the victor in the millennium endgame.

When he spoke in 1976 of “a test of two thousand years of culture and Christian civilization,” Karol Wojtyla was as aware as any human being could be that the pre-Gorbachev Soviets of the East and the Globalists of the West remained frozen in their political, economic and military stalemate.

Never mind that the Leninist-Marxist empire of the East was slowly deteriorating to the point of falling in on itself in shattered ruins.

Never mind that the West was bound to its treadmill of democratic egalitarianism, hard put to maintain its position but without any forward movement possible.

Never mind that countless nations were caught in the grinding maw of the East-West stalemate. Some countries in the West, and most in the Third World, paid the price of helpless pawns. They found themselves caught up in surrogate wars; in hopeless famine and want; in plots to destabilize the governments and economies of countries and of entire regions. Even imprisonment of whole nations was not too much to bear.

In the teeth of all that, leaders of East and West remained stubbornly engaged in the ancient exercise of international politics reduced to its grossest terms—the maintenance of the status quo through constant interplay between the threat and the use of raw power.

That unacceptable and untenable world condition was one that Karol Wojtyla knew intimately. By the time he was elected Pope, he had worked for nearly thirty years beside the tough and canny Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski of Warsaw, a man who earned his stripes as the “Fox of Europe” by planning and executing the only geopolitical strategy—the only successful strategy—ever carried out by an Eastern satellite nation against the Soviet Union.

All during those years, the two Churchmen—the Cardinal and the
future Pope—already thought and worked in terms of what Wyszynski called the “three
Internationales
.” That was the classical term he used to talk about geopolitical contenders for true world power.

There exist on this earth, Wyszynski used to say, only three
Internationales
. The “Golden
Internationale
” was his shorthand term for the financial powers of the world—the Transnationalist and Internationalist globalist leaders of the West.

The “Red
Internationale
” was, of course, the Leninist-Marxist Party-State of the Soviet Union, with which he and Wojtyla and their compatriots had such long and painfully intimate experience.

The third geopolitical contender—the Roman Catholic Church; the “Black
Internationale
”—was destined in Wyszynski's view to be the ultimate victor in any contention with those rivals.

Surely such a thought seemed outlandish to much of the world—including much of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Vatican and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it was a view that Karol Wojtyla not only shared. It was one that he had helped to prove against the Soviets and that he now carried into the papacy itself.

According to the outlook Wojtyla brought to the office and the role of Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Church, it was unthinkable that the Marxist East and the capitalist West should continue to determine the international scheme of things. It was intolerable that the world should be frozen in the humanly unprofitable and largely dehumanizing stalemate of ideological contention, coupled with permissive connivance that marked all the dealings between those two forces, with no exit in sight.

In a move that was so totally unexpected at that moment in time that it was misread by most of the world—but a move that was characteristic in its display of his independence of both East and West—Pope John Paul embarked without delay on his papal gamble to force the hand of geopolitical change.

In the late spring of 1979, he made an official visit as newly elected Roman Pope to his Soviet-run homeland of Poland. There, he demonstrated for the masters of Leninism and capitalism alike that the national situations that obtained in the Soviet satellites, and the international status quo that obtained in the world as a whole, were outclassed and transcended by certain issues of a truly geopolitical nature. Issues that he defined again and again in terms based solely and solidly on Roman Catholic principles, while Soviet tanks and arms rumbled and rattled helplessly all around him.

It is a measure of the frozen mentalities of that time that few in the
West understood the enormous leap John Paul accomplished in that first of his many papal travels. Most observers took it as the return of a religious leader to his beloved Poland; as an emotional but otherwise unremarkable apostolic visit, complete with sermons and ceremonies and excited, weeping throngs.

One commentator, however, writing in the German newspaper
Frankfurter Zeitung
, not only read the papal achievement accurately but read the papal intent as well: “A new factor has been added to the presently accepted formula of international contention. It is a Slavic Pope. The imbalance in our thinking has been unobtrusively but decisively and, as it were, overnight corrected by the emergence of John Paul. For his persona has refocused international attention away from the two extremes, East and West, and on the actual center of change,
Mitteleuropa
, the central bloc of Europe's nations.”

Presciently as well as by planned design, the Pontiff's first step into the geopolitical arena was eastward into Poland, the underbelly of the Soviet Union. In John Paul's geopolitical analysis, Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals is a giant seesaw of power. Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea is the center of that power. The Holy Father's battle was to control that center.

World commentary and opinion aside, therefore, the point of John Paul's foray into Poland was not merely that he was a religious leader. The point was that he was more. He was a geopolitical pope. He was a Slav who had come from a nation that had always viewed its own role and its fate within a geopolitical framework—within the large picture of world forces. Now he had served notice that he intended to take up and effectively exercise once more the international role that had been central to the tradition of Rome, and to the very mandate Catholics maintain was conferred by Christ upon Peter and upon each of his successors.

For fifteen hundred years and more, Rome had kept as strong a hand as possible in each local community around the wide world. Still, because what might be advantageous for one locale might be detrimental for another, it had always been an essential practice for Rome to make its major decisions on the premise that the good of the geocommunity must take precedence over all local advantages. International politics might be driven and regulated according to the benefit to be derived by certain groups or nations at the cost of others. But geopolitics properly conducted must serve the absolute needs of the whole society of nations.

By and large, and admitting some exceptions, that had been the Roman view until two hundred years of inactivity had been imposed on the papacy by the major secular powers of the world. By and large, that
had been the Polish view, as well, until some two hundred years of official nonexistence had been imposed on the Poles as a nation by those same powers.

It was the first distinguishing mark of John Paul's career as Pontiff that he had thrown off the straitjacket of papal inactivity in major world affairs.

On his trip to Poland in 1979, barely eight months after his election, he signaled the opening of the millennium endgame. He became the first of the three players to enter the new geopolitical arena.

Karol Wojtyla's mentor, Cardinal Wyszynski of Warsaw, used to say that “certain historical developments are willed by the Lord of History, and they shall take place. About many other—mostly minor—developments, that same Lord is willing.” He allows men the free will to choose between various options, and he will go along with those choices; for, in the end, all human choices will be co-opted as grist into God's mill, which grinds slowly but always grinds exceedingly fine.”