Keys of This Blood (28 page)

To ask, meanwhile, as do many giant lenders of the North, why the South countries incurred such debt in the first place, if they had no hope of repaying it, is something Pope John Paul finds worse than begging the question. It is more in the nature of asking why a drowning man would grope for a lifeline if he hadn't the strength left to pull himself to safety. And it is, in any case, to ask the wrong question.

It might be more profitable in every sense to consider the shortsighted motives of North countries as they rushed to pour high-interest loans into areas that neither could prepare, nor were given significant help in preparing, those structures of finance, trade, education and industrialization without which almost any sum of money, no matter how grand the total, must be seen as no more than a doubtful and momentary life preserver.

Lest the North countries forget, meanwhile, there is still that rising
hillock of trouble already extending the mountain ranges of misery into certain nations of their own region.

In May of 1989, the American Economic Association published a study that confirmed a fact that had already become starkly evident. The wealthiest 20 percent of American families increased their share of the national income from 39 percent in 1973 to 43.7 percent in 1989. In the same period, meanwhile, the share of the nation's income in the hands of the poorest 10 percent of American families sank from 5.5 percent to 4.6 percent.

American children did not fare very well either. Another report showed that in 1966, back when superdevelopment was young, some 17.6 percent of American children were living below the poverty line. In 1987, the misery figure for the young had risen to 20.6 percent.

In such numbers is portrayed the fact that the United States—the giant who jump-started the global race for superdevelopment, and has ever been its inspirational leader—now has an unexpected and unwanted new growth industry: its quasi-permanent urban and rural underclass.

There is nothing foreign to the American public in Pope John Paul's insistence that we should be morally disturbed by an economic system in which the steeply rising earnings of professional corporate managers contrast shockingly with the condition of millions of their homeless and hungry fellow citizens. It is not hard to see that the highest incomes recorded in 1988 for a handful of individual Americans—incomes of $53.9 million, $45.7 million, $40 million—grossly exceed any common sense of equity and justice. And even discounting any extremes of wealth and poverty, it is difficult to justify structures in which the average chief executive of a large American company is paid ninety-three times more money than the average factory worker, and seventy-two times more than the average schoolteacher.

Whether it is applied in the confines of the United States, or in the world at large, John Paul's moral assessment of North and South is simple and clear. In a morally adjusted economy, he insists, the rich should not get richer if the poor get poorer.

The warning that goes with the papal assessment of North and South is just as simple and just as clear. It may well be that those suffering masses we refer to so impersonally as the South will be allowed no real say—and no real participation—in the building of our near-future global community. It may be that they will continue to be herded and dragooned down a tortuous path, increasingly bereft of human dignity.

But if that is the way matters are permitted to go, then the new world community already carries within it the seeds of its early disintegration,
seeds visible even now in the shooting war between desperate poverty and unlimited greed that erupts every day in the streets of cities such as Medellín and New York and Los Angeles, seeds whose harvest is more visible still in the rubble that was once Beirut.

As surely as a lethal cancer, warns Pope John Paul, the inhuman fate already afflicting millions upon millions of men and women, children and infants, must infect the entire body of humanity. It must surely produce convulsions and agonizing pain. It must surely end in our death as a civilized human community.

Geopolitically speaking, the two greatest contenders with Pope John Paul II in the arena of the millennium endgame are at one and the same time the best of enemies and the worst of friends. And thereby hangs the tale of the division of the world in our time into East and West.

That tale of East and West has its similarities, its differences and its points of direct intersection with the wretched story of North and South. The similarities are all told in terms of human misery and suffering created, fostered and maintained by means of sinful structures; and in terms of the motives of the West nations that spurred them to connivance with all of that.

The differences lie primarily in two areas. The first is the fact that to some degree at least, conscious decisions of West leaders at crucial turning points led directly to the creation of the East as an empire and as an increasingly dominant power in human affairs at the end of the second millennium.

The second is the fact that by those conscious decisions, the West connived for far longer than was justified by any crisis, and for its own material benefit, at the wholesale theft of people's sovereignty over their
own nations, their own lives and their own futures. Nations of rich and noble heritage were turned away from the banquet of freedom and development in the West and became the beggarmen of modern history, knocking at the back door of prosperity's mansion.

In Pope John Paul's moral assessment of the making of our twentieth-century world, it serves no useful purpose to characterize the mutual opposition between East and West in the economic terms that mark the North-South division so completely. On the contrary, one of the most significant things about the so-called confrontation between East and West nations is that the East has consistently been a nonrival of the West economically. In fact, the East bloc would not have survived economically—would not even be a factor in the millennium endgame now under way—had it not been for the financial, commercial and industrial subsidies supplied to it willingly and for profit by the West nations.

Yet for all its economic failure, there is no doubt in Pope John Paul's mind that the East has managed a kind of moral dominance of the West insofar as the West has been gulled into a moral equivalence with the East.

As early as April 1918, within six months of Lenin's takeover of the moribund Czarist Russia and of the emergence of the Leninist Party-State that would in 1922 become the USSR, Archbishop Achille Ratti, Apostolic Visitor at post-World War I Warsaw, sounded the alarm about Leninism that was to keep ringing in the Vatican until the mid-sixties. “The future configuration of Central and Eastern Europe is almost decided by the advent of an evil empire under the Bolsheviks in Moscow, and the bias of the three Allies. Poland is a test case. Warsaw is the focus….” The bias Ratti referred to was the decision taken by Britain, France and Italy in their top-secret treaty of London in 1915 that the Holy See be excluded deliberately from any peace settlement. Ratti's commentary: “Any such settlement will be a preparation for a far worse war and the victory of that evil empire.”

Those allies knew but did not want to take account of the papal moral appraisal. They wanted merely revenge. “What then was the difference between the combatants?” Ratti could have asked. “They are equivalent on the plane of morality.” The backbone of John Paul's moral appraisal of East and West is precisely that: If both sides act as if God did not exist, and both act for purely materialistic motives, what moral difference can be seen between them? Surely there is a moral equivalency between them?

Achille Ratti was named Pope Pius XI in 1922. His assessment of the USSR and later of Hitlerian Germany was based on that principle of
moral equivalence as the fatal flaw in the reaction of the Western powers in the face of the Nazi and the Leninist threats. Reduced to a practical rule of statecraft, that principle was: You may not proceed in the affairs of nations (or, for that matter, in the affairs of individuals) on the assumption that you are able to establish a modus vivendi with what is morally reprehensible, morally bad. This may suit your convenience and comfort, but it means that you have given a morally acceptable equivalence to the morally bad.

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.