Keys of This Blood (67 page)

In reaction, Soviet spokesman Georgi A. Abatov could afford a little modesty: “We did not expect such a welcome.”

The second element of Gorbachev's neo-Leninism—the full implementation at long last of the principles of Antonio Gramsci—is surprising for John Paul only in Gorbachev's singular mastery of the techniques required, and the icy nerves he displays as he carries them out.

Central to this element of Gorbachev's neo-Leninism is one point of Gramsci's with which Pope John Paul is in total agreement: Between raw Leninism and raw capitalism, there never was and still is not any essential difference. In each case the driving force is materialism. At heart, each system is exclusively materialistic. Neither looks beyond the
material here and now. Neither values or defines man and the life of each individual beyond the material goods he produces and consumes.

It seems clear to John Paul that Mikhail Gorbachev's reading of Gramsci is the same as his own. It's just that, from their vantage points on opposite sides of the materialist fence, these two leaders must and do see the whole process of Gramscian policy from an exactly contrary point of view.

Gramsci warned that Leninism could not compete with the West in the economic and military fields. More, he warned that, even if such a competition were possible, it would not mean the ultimate victory of Leninism. Instead, said Gramsci, such competition would likely lead to a long and wearing struggle, would erode the willpower and the resources of the Leninist Party-State and, worst of all, would leave intact and unconquered the high cultural ground of the West—the popular mind, complete with its transcendent ideals so alien to Leninism.

At the very best, predicted Gramsci, any such economic and military struggle between Leninism and capitalism as he knew it would come down to a boring stalemate.

Competition there must be, of course. But, exhorted Gramsci, as if speaking directly to the genius of Gorbachev, let it be for the popular mind. Let that competition be led by the Party-State; but let it be waged day by day in the bailiwick of the capitalists themselves. And let the means be not military might but sweet acculturation of ideas and ideals. Promote all areas of cultural convergence. And above all, strip the West of any last clinging vestiges of Christianity's transcendent God. Then will the West be gravely vulnerable to penetration by the fundamental “dialectic” of Marxist materialism.

By what appeared to many—but not to Pope John Paul—as the luck of the draw in this round of history, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power at a moment so perfect that Gramsci himself could not have wished for a better one.

By 1985, the influence of traditional Christian philosophy in the West was weak and negligible. The influence of Christian believers was restricted. The truly vibrant areas of Christian life were reduced. The secularization of church hierarchies, bureaucracies and clergy—including the Roman Catholic Church and its once vaunted religious orders—was extensive. And the ever more pervasive moral license of Western countries was well entrenched.

Looking coldly at the genius of Mikhail Gorbachev, and attending
always to his own principle of judgment regarding the Soviet Party-State as an intact counterintelligence organization par excellence, John Paul knew that Gramsci's master strategy was now feasible. Humanly speaking, it was no longer too tall an order to strip large majorities of men and women in the West of those last vestiges that remained to them of Christianity's transcendent God.

In Pope John Paul's analysis, in fact, the bigger challenge for Gorbachev would be for him to mesmerize the capitalist West in its single-minded preoccupation with its tripod model for international development and stability.

For that reason, the Pope was not surprised at the General Secretary's “new thinking” in his United Nations speech. It was in that speech, in fact, that the Soviet leader himself confirmed John Paul's analysis that there had been a switch in Kremlin operations, and that Gramsci's blueprint was on the table in Moscow.

In a nutshell, Gorbachev's speech was Gramsci brought up to date. It put the mind of the West at ease about military preoccupation and danger. It sought to fascinate that mind even further with money and goods and profits and technological advances. And underpinning it all was a fascinating change in emphasis. Gorbachev was asking for help, all right. But he was doing so by proposing what appeared to be a genuine partnership with the West in the areas of its deepest preoccupation. Surely, Gramsci would have been proud.

Given the papal analysis of Gorbachev and the neo-Leninism of the USSR, John Paul did not find the deepest significance of the General Secretary's U.N. speech in its contents. It was not even all that significant in the Pontiff's view that Gorbachev had effectively claimed for himself the center spot of international action; that much, at least, was not new, for the West had always reacted to Soviet initiative. The real importance of the hour he took to deliver his address lay in that fact that Gorbachev was able to disassociate himself so successfully from seventy years of history. And it lay in the fact that he had taken over the center spot of international acclaim. That was new.

From John Paul's point of view, therefore, the fact that Gorbachev had been able to fly in the face of history and stand before the world as its new hero was the only new element that had to be factored into the formula by which the Holy See must judge the changed and changing condition of human society.

To understand the Pope's reading of what made Gorbachev's U.N.
triumph possible in those terms is to understand the deep difficulty John Paul faces in Gorbachevism.

For one thing, even on the face of it, when Gorbachev rose to address the U.N. delegates that December day, in actual fact no one there had done less than he had to ease the problems of which he spoke with such passion. No one had done less than he and his Party-State for world peace; or for the cleansing of our polluted environment; or to relieve the misery of millions. Of East Germany's forests, 41 percent are dead or dying; 10 percent of its people drink substandard water. Air pollution is so bad in northern Czechoslovakia that life expectancy is shortened by three to four years. In Hungary, one in seventeen deaths is due to air pollution. Almost all the water in Poland's rivers is unfit for human consumption, and 50 percent is so toxic it is unfit for industrial use. The river Vistula, flowing through Warsaw, is a lifeless sewer. At least 25 percent of Polish soil is too contaminated for safe farming. Vegetable farming in the Silesia region will have to be forbidden because of the abnormal quantities of lead and cadmium in the soil. In the Soviet Union, 102 cities (50 million people) are exposed to industrial pollution ten times greater than safety norms. The Aral Sea and Central Asia have been polluted by indiscriminate use of water, pesticides and fertilizers. Large tracts of Poland and the USSR now are witnessing the birth of deformed babies and the mysterious outbreak of skin diseases not described in medical books—apparently the results of the Chernobyl disaster.

In addition, many of the delegates listening to Gorbachev's speech represented governments that had labored and had spent their time and resources to help cure the ills of nations that had suffered grievously from the wrongdoing of the system now headed by Mikhail Gorbachev. Many more of those delegates came from nations whose fields and gardens and unborn babies had been sown with seeds of death from Soviet inefficiency and fecklessness in dealing with the environment. Still others represented peoples who had been ground down by the heels of Soviet militarism.

Moreover, in and of themselves, Gorbachev's words that day were not different or fresher or more heartening than the clarion calls to our consciences that President Reagan had made on at least half a dozen occasions—in his Normandy address commemorating the Allied invasion of 1944, for instance, or in his Moscow University address of May 1988.

Yet, no such appeal by the American president—or by any other leader of the West nations—was ever received with anything like the enthusiasm meted out to Gorbachev's U.N. address.

Where did the difference lie? Pope John Paul's answer to that question was disheartening—but, once again, not surprising.

The difference, it would seem, lay in the religious, political and moral climate that now attends the nations in their efforts to find new leadership for the world at the end of the second millennium. For that climate is such that an international body as widely representative of the nations as the U. N. wishes no reliance on God and has no intention of presenting gifts on any altar.

In that climate, the American president as titular head of the West is not in a position to galvanize the nations, because Americans typically announce their plans and ideas with a righteousness originally born of a religious womb. And their European counterparts are even worse off, because they speak of their ideas in the jaded terms of leaders who once tended the Altars of God, but have now turned their backs on their own past.

In the present climate, only someone resident at the heart of the only self-proclaimed and officially antireligious, anti-God empire our world has ever known could carry the day. Only someone above the slightest suspicion of being morally good for an otherworldly reason. Only someone dedicated to success and triumph in this world exclusively. Only someone at the center of hard-core, hard-nosed Marxism. Only that someone had a chance of being heard on his own terms—and of moving the West from its ingrained and long-held policy of containment.

Given all the givens, therefore, Mikhail Gorbachev was the perfect leader to herald the new era. And he was the perfect servant of the natural forces the society of nations has now agreed we must all obey.

Given the difficulties of the Soviet Union, it was only logical that he would ask for help and cooperation. Given the desire of the West nations to find new and profitable markets for their goods and services, it was only reasonable that they would respond with a heady combination of relief and enthusiasm. Given the fact that, as a generation, we are notorious even among ourselves for knowing little or nothing of what preceded the forty-five years that have molded the actions and initiatives of nations, it was only natural that Gorbachev's carefully honed appeal would meet with resounding success.

Even granting the four or five half-truths uttered by Gorbachev in his U.N. address, and the one or two major lies he repeated, and the duplicitous and merciless behavior of the Soviet Union past and present, it was obvious to John Paul and his advisers that this Soviet's globalist sense was far superior to that of any Internationalist or Transnationalist leader. They had simply been outclassed.

Moreover, as official point man of the Leninist process, Gorbachev
had even managed a more accurate reading than the Wise Men of the deep emotions running like a current beneath the surface among the peoples throughout all the nations. The bravura effect of Gorbachev's U.N. performance traced to that very fact. For he put into words straight out the widely felt, if not always frankly expressed, sentiments among peoples and nations.

As someone who might have been expected to brandish intransigence and threat, Gorbachev spoke instead of solving the problems that beset us all. Assuming an unsurpassed globalist posture, he declared for the world that we have all had enough of those problems. Assuming an almost unique geopolitical posture, he proposed that we face into the erection of international structures and begin to deal with economic repression, to deal with pollution of air and land and water, to deal with starvation and disease and broken lives.

Reading the popular mind of the West as if born to it himself, he proposed an end to mortal fear for our survival as a race. And in that, Gorbachev tapped the deep urge of men and women everywhere to leave behind all the threats of extinction. He held out the hope that the human family can revise—if all goes well, perhaps even shatter—the sense of drifting helplessness that has come to lie like a secret sorrow within our lives.

Finally, that was the glittering attraction of Gorbachevism. Help for all our pain and all our fear lay in perfectly achievable human institutions that would unify society economically; and, ultimately, politically as well.

The bloody history and the present problems of the Soviet Union notwithstanding, within a mere four years as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev had forced a redefinition of the terms on which international development will be pursued from now on. And he had left his political peers on the world stage to eat his dust.

During the spring of 1989—that is, in the months between Gorbachev's U.N. statement of intent and his forays into West Germany and France to begin its implementation—Pope John Paul had an unneeded and unwelcome confirmation that, no matter what the country or the context, the basic principles remain all too accurate by which he judges the Leninist mind as against the mind of the leaders of the capitalist West.

The context this time was China, where another
ballet d'invitation
—not the first since Mao Zedong's revolution won the day—was played
out in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. While it is true that China's Leninist regime is not so far along in history's march as Gorbachev's Soviet Union and that Chairman Deng Xiaoping is no rival to Gorbachev when it comes to urbanity, the tragic events that began in Beijing on April 21, 1989, took the West through each step of reaction so familiar by now to the Holy See.

Still taken with its own international agenda, the West was first surprised, then fascinated, then mesmerized, then taken in, and finally, it was disappointed—but ready to enter the cycle all over again. And again, the mind of the West could not fathom the attitude of the genuinely Leninist mind. As Western intelligence had failed to predict, analyze correctly or even keep pace with the phenomenon of Gorbachevism, so that intelligence made gross miscalculations about the students who led the Beijing uprising, as well as about the nature of the Chinese government.