Keys of This Blood (29 page)

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 of 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.

The East nations remained as they were, grouped around the USSR as their dominant leader and as the Party-State it had always been—a counterintelligence state in form and function. The West nations remained as they were, grouped freely if sometimes grudgingly around the United States as military umbrella, and as financial and entrepreneurial leader. And the world remained as it was, tied to the global torture rack of mutual opposition and rivalry between the two major blocs—sometimes strained almost to the snapping point, at other times less ominously stretched, but never totally released from tension.

From the beginning of his pontificate, Pope John Paul has insisted that no worthwhile moral appraisal of the East-West rivalry, and no moral appraisal of its effects on the world, may, even for a moment, consider anything like a principle of balance. Nor will a moral appraisal even remotely base itself on a winking policy of containment. For principle and policy alike were no more than acquiescence in moral evil all dressed up in the latest “go-to-meeting” clothes. Less lightheartedly expressed, they were the ropes that kept the whole world bound to the torture machines of sinful structures.

True enough, there were always differences of the deepest kind between East and West. The East system was structured politically, economically and socially according to classical Marxism, modified and adapted by the Stalinist Soviets. The West system was structured according to classical capitalism, which underwent its own modifications and adaptations. And true enough, from these totally irreconcilable ideologies flowed the political, social and economic rivalry between the two blocs of nations. Totalitarian dictatorship in the East versus capitalist democracy in the West. Absolute statism in the East versus open and free market economies in the West.