An Essay in Universal History
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AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY From an Orthodox Christian Point of View VOLUME VI: THE AGE OF MAMMON (1945 to 1991) PART 1: from 1945 to 1973 Vladimir Moss © Copyright: Vladimir Moss, 2017. All rights reserved. 1 No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the tone and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon. Matthew 6.24. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1945), quoting the Bhagavad Gita. As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy. C. H. Dawson. The only way to convince oneself and the rest of humanity that the socialist system is best is to see to it that there are no other systems. Jean-Francois Revel (1985). We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. The Soviet Union is a state at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of Cold War with its neighbours. George Orwell. Totalitarianism probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. George Orwell. “Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.” “Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.” Soviet anecdote. ‘The nations of Europe must be guided towards a Superstate without their peoples understanding what is happening. This can be carried out in successive stages, each camouflaged as having an economic goal, but which will end up by leading them irreversibly into a federation’. Jean Monnet (1952). Au dessus (de cette foule innombrable) s’élève un pouvoir immense et tutélaire, qui se charge lui seul d’assurer leur joussance et de veille sur leur sort. It est absolu, détaillé, reguiler, prevoyant et doux. Il ressemblerait à la puissance paternelle, si, comme elle, it avait pour object de preparer les hommes à l’âge viril; mais il ne cherche au contraire qu’ à les fixer irrévocablement dans l’enfance. Alexis De Tocqueville. Of the three forms of state power: monarchy, democracy and despotism, strictly speaking, only the first, monarchy, is based on a religious-ethical principle, the second, democracy, is based on an a-religious ethical principle, and the third, despotism, is based on an anti-religious, satanic principle! Professor-Confessor I.M. Andreyev (+1976) 2 3 INTRODUCTION 6 I. THE DANGEROUS YEARS (1945-1953) 11 1. THE AMERICAN JANUS 12 2. ANARCHY IN EUROPE 22 3. THE SOVIET OLD ORDER 29 4. THE SORROWS OF THE RUSSIAN CHURCH 38 5. THE CHURCH IN EASTERN EUROPE 48 6. THE YUGOSLAV WAY 55 7. AMERICA, JAPAN AND CHINA 65 8. MAOIST COMMUNISM 72 9. WESTERN DECOLONIZATION AND SOVIET IMPERIALISM 75 10. THE UNITED NATIONS 83 11. THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES 90 12. THE STATE OF ISRAEL 94 13. THE KOREAN WAR 104 14. DIVISIONS IN THE GREEK CHURCH 108 15. THE CULT OF STALIN 124 16. DNA, DARWINISM AND THE NEW AGE 127 II. THE AFFLUENT YEARS (1953-1973) 134 17. THE DECLINE OF ENGLAND 135 18. THE SEXUAL AND THERAPEUTIC REVOLUTIONS 144 19. THE EUROPEAN UNION 158 20. FROM MARXISM-LENINISM TO CULTURAL MARXISM 166 21. THE SUCCESSORS OF STALIN 175 22. ROCOR AT THE CROSSROADS 181 23. PAN-ARAB NATIONALISM AND THE SUEZ CRISIS 195 24. THE COMMUNISTS BECOME ECUMENISTS 202 25. THE “THEOLOGY OF PEACE” 210 26. NUCLEAR WAR AND THE CUBAN CRISIS 213 4 27. THE KHRUSHCHEV PERSECUTION 223 28. THE PASSPORTLESS MOVEMENT 228 29. THE OLD CALENDARISTS RESTORE THEIR HIERARCHIES 233 30. MAO’S WAR ON CHINA 242 31. FROM PARIS TO PRAGUE 250 32. THE LIFTING OF THE ANATHEMAS 259 33. THE FALL OF THE SERBIAN AND BULGARIAN CHURCHES 270 34. “THE HERESY OF HERESIES” 288 35. MOSCOW AND THE METROPOLIA 294 36. RUSSIAN AND GREEK COUNCILS 297 37. THE VOICE OF MOUNT ATHOS 306 38. ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN DISSIDENCE 308 39. THE VIETNAM WAR AND THE SIXTIES GENERATION 311 40. NIXON IN CHINA 318 5 INTRODUCTION This book is the sixth volume in my series entitled An Essay in Universal History. The earlier volumes were: Part 1: The Age of Faith (to 1453), Part 2: The Age of Reason (1453 to 1789), Part 3: The Age of Revolution (1789 to 1861), Part 4: The Age of Empire (1861 to 1914) and Part 5: The Age of Catastrophe (1914 to 1945). In the five earlier volumes of this series, I surveyed the history of the world from the beginning to 1945 from the point of view of Orthodox Christianity. In this work I am essentially doing the same thing for the period 1945-1991, from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the end of the Cold War and the Fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. This sixth volume is subtitled “The Age of Mammon” because while Mammon, the power of money, has always been important in world history - it is, after all, “the root of all kinds of evil”, as St. Paul says - it was only in the period covered by this book that we may be so bold as to affirm that it became the decisive factor in life outside the True Church of Christ. It did so in several ways. First, the outcome of the Cold War – the great event that dominates this period - came to be determined, under God, not so much by the relative numbers of soldiers on the two sides, nor by the relative strength of the will to win on the one side by comparison with the other, nor even by the superior attractiveness of Capitalism as an ideology, but by technology – and it was their backwardness in technology compared to the West that finally compelled the Soviet leaders to throw in the towel. In other words, the Capitalists defeated the Communists (at least temporarily) because of their greater financial resources and economic productiveness.1 Secondly, political ideologies came more and more to be dominated by the theme of the redistribution of money from the rich to the poor: one of the main factors distinguishing Communism from Socialism and the western-style welfare state was their attitude to how, and how radically, money should be redistributed. And thirdly, the vast increase in general prosperity in this period – beginning in the West and spreading outwards - decisively influenced in a negative way men’s attitudes to the world around them and God above them… In Das Kapital (1867), Karl Marx explained how communism would come about in terms that sound eerily prophetic today: "Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until 1 With greater financial resources enabling them to exploit nuclear technology, the Nazis may well have won World War II. Thus Eric Hobsbawm writes: “Essentially it is now clear that Nazi Germany failed to make a nuclear bomb not because German scientists did not know how it could be made, or try to make it, with different degrees of reluctance, but because the German war-machine was unwilling or unable to devote the necessary resources to it. They abandoned the effort and switched to what seemed the more cost-effective concentration on rocketry, which promised quicker returns” (Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (1914-1991), London: Abacus, 1994, p. 527, note). 6 their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism." Capital and capitalism is therefore the real master of the world that worships Mammon. As Yanis Varoufakis writes: “The German philosopher Schopenhauer castigated us modern humans for deceiving ourselves that our beliefs and actions are subject to our consciousness. Nietzsche concurred, suggesting that all the things we believe in, at any given time, reflect not truth but someone else’s power over us. Marx dragged economics into this picture, reprimanding us all for ignoring the reality that our thoughts have become hijacked by capital its drive to accumulate. Naturally, although it follows its own steely logic, capital evolves mindless. No one designed capitalism and no can civilize it now that it is going at full tilt. “Having simply evolved, without anyone’s consent, it quickly liberated us from more primitive forms of social and economic organization. It bred machines and instruments (material and financial) that allowed us to take over the planet. It empowered us to imagine a future without poverty, where our lives are no longer at the mercy of a hostile nature. Yet, at the same time, just as nature spawned Mozart and HIV using the same indiscriminate mechanism, so too did capital produce catastrophic forces with a tendency to bring about discord, inequality, industrial-scale warfare, environmental degradation and, of course, financial freefalls. In one fell swoop, it generated – with neither rhyme nor reason – wealth and crises, development and deprivation, progress and backwardness…”2 But we don't have to be Marxists – or accept Varoufakis’ deterministic and Darwinist premises - in order to reach this truth. Christ said that we can choose to be ruled either by God or by Mammon (in its modern form, Capitalism); we cannot serve both. So a civilization that places free markets and economic growth at the head of the corner is not Christian, and will inevitably degenerate into anti-Christianity. Similarly, the moderate form of socialism called welfarism is no substitute for truly Christian faith and values.