Keys of This Blood (32 page)

This judgment of the ever-continuing papacy comes reinforced by the sustained memory of the papacy, which, from the beginning of the Soviet Party-State, has watched each of the Champions of Hammer and Sickle and fully comprehended what is involved in the Leninist creation. Memory of that seventy-three-year-old history from Lenin to Gorbachev is the key to accurate interpretation of present events.

In the Hall of Communism's Heroes, Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin are ringed around with the ranks of no mean comrades.

Karl Kautsky, for example. A follower of Marx, Kautsky did more than systematize Marx's theories. More learned as a philosopher and more authoritative about Marxism than Marx himself, Kautsky came to be known as the “pope of international socialism”—a touch of irony he and Marx might have savored! And there was Friedrich Engels, of course, who was somewhat more humanistic and certainly more practical-minded than Karl Marx, but not a whit less bitter or less bloody-minded. As a lifelong colleague of Marx and Communist activist, he helped make the penniless Marx financially viable for most of his life.

Obscure as they may now be, there were hundreds of others among the “international socialist fraternity” who would be in such a Hall of Heroes. Men such as G. V. Plekhanov and P. B. Axelrod, for example, who pinpointed the masses of workers—the proletariat—as the pivot of any successful revolution, and so set the basic lines of Lenin's thinking about a Russian birth for political Marxism.

Even before Marx, there were some dozen social theorists and active experimenters who would have their hero's niches too. Wales's Robert Owen, with his “New Harmony” foundation in Indiana, and France's Charles Fournier, with his original “Phalanx” of workers, are but two who must come quickly to mind.

Name as many more such men as you please, however, and list all their accomplishments, and still the preeminent dais must be reserved for just those two. For Karl Marx, who developed a novel way of thinking about the death and burial of all social classes in the world, except the “working class”; and for Vladimir Lenin, the fierce and resourceful activist—the one man who set out to create an international body that would bring about the actual and violent death of capitalism. The man who would entomb capitalism beneath the sun-kissed meadows of a nearfuture and totally this-worldly “Paradise of the Workers.”

Like many others born and bred in the sterile world created by Leninist Marxism—like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, or like Milovan Djilas of Yugoslavia—Karol Wojtyla watched the twilight shadows lengthen decade by decade over that cruel and sterile Paradise. From the start of his pontificate, therefore, John Paul had been preparing for some sweeping and possibly convulsive change that he knew was inevitable in the Soviet East. And he was certain that once it came, such a change would have its profound effects in the very foundations of the capitalist West, tied as it had been for so long with the East nations.

In his mind, therefore, Pope John Paul II has always reserved two more places of special distinction in that Hall of Communism's Heroes. It was always possible, he thought, that a virtually forgotten Sardinian by the name of Antonio Gramsci would rise from the little covert of obscurity assigned him by Lenin, to claim his own and special place as nothing less than a genius of Marxist pragmatism. The remaining place on the dais, John Paul has always thought, would be reserved for the first Soviet leader with the practical sense, the breadth of mind and the political daring to listen at long last to Antonio Gramsci.

As it has turned out, that place will probably be occupied by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Since the emergence of Gorbachev as the standard-bearer of expected and long-overdue change, John Paul has focused on certain basic points about him, and about his Gorbachevism, that provide the most accurate reading of the mind and intent of the Soviet leader, and that therefore most accurately foretell the future course of his policies.

For those who share the Pope's belief, mind and outlook, the point of greatest significance about Gorbachev is that he is the head of the only government, and leader of the only political ideology in the world and in all of recorded history, that are officially antireligious—officially based on a belief that everything about human life is material. In all its manifestations and abilities and destiny, there is nothing more to mankind beyond gross matter. That is a basic belief of the genuine Marxist. As the Pontiff knows from the deep experience of a lifetime, any claim to the contrary is put forward as pretext, and is accepted out of ignorance or connivance or wishful thinking.

For the other contenders in the geopolitical arena with these two Slavs, Pope John Paul II and President Gorbachev, meanwhile—whether
or not such contenders share the belief, mind and outlook of either one—the point of greatest significance about Mikhail Gorbachev is exactly parallel to the point of greatest significance about John Paul. For just as the Pontiff's foothold on the geopolitical plane derives from his position as the head of the world's only georeligious institution, so Gorbachev's foothold on the geopolitical plane is guaranteed him by the fact that he is titular head of the world's only existing geo-ideology—the Soviet Marxist version of Communism.

In strictly geopolitical terms, in other words, the parallel between these two leaders holds firm because of one simple and inescapable circumstance: At a critical moment in world history, each assumed an office through which he inherited an already functioning and geopolitically structured institution.

Geopolitically, it matters little that Gorbachev has but six predecessors—Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko—whose lives taken together span barely more than a single century, while John Paul's 263 predecessors reach back to Simon Peter as the first to take in hand the Keys of authority as Christ's earthly Vicar.

For in the geopolitical arena, it is not age or lineage, but institutional structure and historical opportunity, that are the operative factors of overriding importance.

There are other factors about Gorbachev, and about Gorbachevism, that are of prime significance in John Paul's thinking.

For one thing, the Pope recognized in Mikhail Gorbachev a leader as deeply endowed as he is himself with an instinct for the geopolitical issue. The Soviet leader has his eyes fixed just as surely as the Pontiff does on a geopolitical goal. Each man, in fact, displays precisely those talents that facilitate his geopolitical policy and action in order to attain the goal he has in mind.

John Paul II, himself emergent from the maw of the Russian Bear, is as intimately acquainted as Gorbachev with the lineaments and the gut issues of the Soviet system. For more than one visiting representative from free-world governments who seek the Pontiff out in this matter, as in many others, he has ticked off the early highlights and pointed to the future aims of Gorbachev's innovation. “Gorbachev,” he remarked to one such visitor, “is potentially as great an innovator as his founding father, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known to you Anglo-Saxons as Lenin.”

John Paul is fully convinced that the purpose of Gorbachev's innovation has everything to do with adaptation of failed Soviet structures and nothing at all to do with change of Soviet ideology. There is not the
slightest doubt in the Pontiff's mind that Gorbachev understands as clearly as anyone that the non-Marxist nations are now building international structures in which eventually to house a geopolitical world. Nor can there be much question that his dramatic innovations are intended in the first instance to take full advantage of the tried-and-true formula of balance still favored by the West. The Soviet Union must establish itself quickly as an acceptable partner in the building of those new international structures. Indeed, it is fairly certain that Gorbachev will, if he can, chisel the Soviet name deeper than even Lenin might ever have dreamed into the very cornerstones of those new structures.

If Gorbachev can accomplish that much—and he appears to be well on his way—then John Paul is convinced that the USSR has a fair chance at its long-term goal: the effective and thoroughgoing domination of those same structures.

If those near- and long-term goals sound simplistic to some; or if they seem too much like the goals always nurtured and nourished by less appealing Soviet leaders of the past; or if they fall as uncomfortably on the mind as John Paul's moral assessment of the East-West division of the world, the Pope suffers no embarrassment for that. For it has been his experience that most modern leaders of nations, and most ordinary people in the West, do not realize that Mikhail Gorbachev is thoroughly soaked in the Marxism of Lenin; or that Lenin was deeply, sincerely committed to his hatred of everything about capitalism and capitalists. Only those who do not really accept that ugly fact about Soviet Leninist Marxism as a backdrop to all Gorbachev says and does, only they can blithely do business with the Soviet Union and its surrogates as if their doing so invited no danger to what they hold most dear—their fortunes, their lives and their way of life.

Not for a moment does Pope John Paul share such attitudes. On the contrary. Because he finds them unrealistic—and potentially at least as deadly as the policy of containment that housed them for so many decades—the Pope cannot even label those attitudes as hopeful.

What he emphasizes instead is a seemingly unmistakable line of heredity and evolution leading from Marx's Marxism, through Lenin's Leninism and Stalin's Stalinism, all the way up to Gorbachev and his Gorbachevism. Four different styles distinguish these four men one from the other, no doubt about it. But one common thread can be seen that unites them all—the frustrated would-be university professor who lies buried in London's Highgate Hill Cemetery, the dapper little zealot mummified beneath Red Square in Moscow, the black-toothed tyrant hidden away in the Kremlin's wall, and the current mover and shaker of our international community.

For all their many differences, these are the four great Champions of Hammer and Sickle. The four greatest visionaries who share a utopian ideal that has already left the world a misshapen place, and that would remake the whole of the human race according to a mind John Paul recognizes as filled with hatred for all that is divine in the human condition.

Leaving aside that question of personal style, the most important differences between Mikhail Gorbachev and his predecessors lie in three areas for Pope John Paul.

First, this new Soviet leader has an extraordinary grasp of the geopolitical capability of the Leninist-Marxist system he now controls. Second, he has a clear understanding of the basic errors in Lenin's thinking. And finally, he realizes that Lenin should have listened to Antonio Gramsci—the one man who got the scenario right the first time, because he had taken the measure of the West in the twentieth century as no other Marxist before or since has ever done.

For John Paul, therefore, no understanding of Mikhail Gorbachev or of his Gorbachevism will be possible in the West as long as the West leaders insist on wearing historical blinders. There will be no understanding of Gorbachev as a prime contender in the geopolitical arena, or of Gorbachevism as his intended vehicle for ultimate Soviet success in that arena, unless the West rids itself once and for all of the international pretense that has permitted it to accept the Big Lie that the Soviet Union was founded and developed as a normal nation by normal means.

It is essential, insists John Paul, to understand that the USSR was never a nation at all, in fact, but a hybrid system of structures forced upon a hundred ethnic groups and a variety of nations. It is a system of thoroughly sinful structures that gave itself a clever name, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, under which it has been allowed to masquerade as a normal nation in the family of nations. Moreover, it is essential to trace how all this happened; and to do so without draping the Big Lie any longer in the acceptable folds of principles of balance and policies of containment.

To understand Gorbachev and his Gorbachevism, insists Pope John Paul, understand the real and unromanticized Marx and what drove him. Understand the real Lenin together with the vision and purpose of his Leninism. Understand the successful, blood-soaked mania of Stalin. And understand the fundamentally Leninist turn that Gorbachev has given to the direction of world affairs. When all of that is digested, understand the one man who might have saved Lenin's vision from Stalin's rape.

Understand the one man whose voice Gorbachev seems to have heard
as the clarion of Soviet triumph. Understand the role of Antonio Gramsci in the geopolitical endgame of our age.

If the West nations fail to do all or any of that, then, John Paul warns, they will also fail to understand Mikhail Gorbachev. They will fail to understand Gorbachevism. And they will fail to see how Gorbachev configures the future of the Soviet Union and of our coming world.

Meanwhile, and whether or not Gorbachev remains personally in power, it is a certainty, in John Paul's unblinking assessment of past and future, that this most appealing and most theatrical of Soviet leaders has triggered events that prefigure an unparalleled new course for East and West alike. And for East and West alike, there is no turning back now from a future whose roots lie deep within the ineradicable truth of Soviet history.

Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a Jewish family at Trier, Germany, on May 5, 1818. He passed rapidly from the undigested Judaism of his childhood into a short but perfervid period of Lutheranism, to which he converted with his whole family; and during that time he wrote touching poems to Christ as his Savior.

That moment gave way to another intense period of his youth, however, as he progressed through the universities of Bonn, Berlin and Jena. At Berlin University, he indulged in a virulent form of ceremonial, confessional Satanism. Dating from that period, his youthful poems in adoration of “Oulanem”—a ritualistic name for Satan—contrast eerily with his earlier poems in homage to Christ. But the chief outward effect of his early personal Satanist attachment was to be seen in his consistently and professionally anti-God and godless outlook. Marx remained violently opposed to faith and religion for the rest of his life.