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The Age of Democratism (1972-1992)

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The Age of Democratism (1972-1992) THE AGE OF DEMOCRATISM (1972-1992) Volume XII of AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY From an Orthodox Christian Point of View Vladimir Moss © Copyright: Vladimir Moss, 2020. All rights reserved. 1 No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one 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. Man’s minds were out of balance. This explained everything and, by explaining it, condoned it. The penchant of psychology to explain the world solely in terms of the mind now received full play. Cruelty and sexual perversion were natural outlets for frustration induced by the suppression of the id by the ego. George L. Mosse, The Culture of Western Europe (1988).. The violence wrought by the sexual revolution is incalculable: 50 million dead babies, countless broken homes, and generations of grown ups who can't grow up. Photius Avant. The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide. T.S. Eliot, Thoughts after Lambeth. The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer. J.R.R. Tolkien. Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. Arnold J. Toynbee. Losing you is not a loss, and keeping you is no specific gain. Slogan in a concentration camp of “Democratic Kampuchea”. It is time, it is the twelfth hour, for certain of our ecclesiastical representatives to stop being exclusively slaves of nationalism and politics, no matter what and whose, and become high priests and priests of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Fr. Justin Popovich. We placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to discover that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The world needs oil. The world does not need America. Ayatollah Khomeini. We cannot be the world’s policeman. Henry Kissinger (1968). We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. US President George H.W. Bush. 2 The average person might well be no happier today than in 1800. We can choose our spouses, friends and neighbours, but they can choose to leave us. With the individual wielding unprecedented power to decide her own path in life, we find it ever harder to make commitments. We thus live in an increasingly lonely world of unravelling commitments and families. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). People have moved away from ‘religion’ as something anchored in organized worship and systematic beliefs within an institution, to a self-made ‘spirituality’ outside formal structures, which is based on experience, has no doctrine and makes no claim to philosophical coherence. Clifford Longley. A Communist economy never existed, nor will there ever be one: all it could establish was a perverted or disguised capitalist economy, good enough to maintain a gang of cute political parasites. Olavo de Carvalho (2008). The most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician’s head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and constitution. No one loves armed missionaries. Maximilien Robespierre. The total failure of Marxism… and the dramatic break-up of the Soviet Union are only the precursors to the collapse of Western liberalism, the main current of modernity. Far from being the alternative to Marxism and the reigning ideology at the end of history, liberalism will be the next domino to fall… Takeshi Umehara. We want even the sceptics to say: Yes, the Bolsheviks can do anything. Yes, the truth is on their side. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (1987). [Communism's] fatal dilemma [is that] its economic success can only be purchased at the cost of political stability, while its political stability can only be sustained at the cost of economic failure. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure (1989). 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). Russia will be regenerated only when in the soul of Russian man there again appears an altar for God and a throne for the Tsar. Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin (+1954). 3 INTRODUCTION 6 I. CAPITALISM WAVERS 9 1. THE ARAB/ISRAELI CONFLICT 10 2. THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS 16 3. THE MORAL CRISIS IN THE WEST 26 4. THE FALL OF SAIGON 33 5. CAMBODIA’S KILLING FIELDS 41 6. THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS RIGHT 47 7. THE ORTHODOX ZEALOTS CLOSE RANKS 56 8. SOLZHENITSYN, DÉTENTE AND APPEASEMENT 72 9. ROCOR’S THIRD ALL-EMIGRATION COUNCIL 88 10. ROCOR AND THE DISSIDENTS 94 11. THE GEORGIAN CHURCH AND THE KGB 106 12. “NIKODEMOVSHCHINA” 116 13. THE COLD WAR IN LATIN AMERICA 120 14. THE COLD WAR IN ASIA 123 15. THE COLD WAR IN AFRICA 128 16. WEST EUROPEAN SOCIALISM 135 17. THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION 146 18. THE TURIN SHROUD 153 19. SUPER-ECUMENISM (1) 168 II. CAPITALISM RECOVERS 175 20. THE SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN 176 21. COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA 180 22. THE POLISH COUNTER-REVOLUTION 183 22. THE REAGAN-THATCHER ALLIANCE 190 23. THE CHICAGO SCHOOL AND THE THIRD WORLD 208 24. ROCOR’S ANATHEMA AGAINST ECUMENISM 219 25. CHAOS AMONG THE GREEK OLD CALENDARISTS 224 4 26. ROCOR BEGINS TO CRACK 249 27. SUPER-ECUMENISM (2) 259 28. FROM THE DEATH OF MAO TO TIANANMEN SQUARE 273 III. COMMUNISM IMPLODES 281 29. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (1) THE COMING OF GORBACHEV 282 30. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (2) CHERNOBYL 288 31. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (3) GLASNOST’ AND PERESTROIKA 293 32. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (4) THE LIBERATION OF EASTERN EUROPE 298 33. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (5) ORTHODOXY AND PERESTROIKA 314 34. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (6) THE REUNIFICATION OF GERMANY 321 35. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (7) THE SOVIET NATIONALITIES 332 36. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (8) THE GULF WAR 338 37. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (9) PERESTROIKA HITS THE BUFFERS 343 38. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (10) THE AUGUST COUP 349 39. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (11) ORTHODOXY AND THE PUTSCH 355 40. THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION: (12) UKRAINIAN INDEPENDENCE 365 41. YUGOSLAVIA DISINTEGRATES 374 42. ROCOR’S MISSION INSIDE RUSSIA 389 IV. THE GLOBALIST AFTERMATH 401 43. MAASTRICHT: THE EUROPEAN UNION IS BORN 402 44. WHO WON THE COLD WAR? 414 45. GLOBALIZATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER 423 CONCLUSION. THE END OF HISTORY? 433 1. ReaSon, DeSire and Thymos 434 2. Democracy and NationaliSm 442 3. Democracy and Religion 447 4. The DialecticS of Democracy: (i) The LeftiSt Threat 450 5. The DialecticS of Democracy: (ii) The RightiSt Threat 452 6. Democracy’S Inevitable DemiSe 456 AFTERWORD. THE ABOLITION OF MAN 459 5 INTRODUCTION This book is the twelfth volume in my series entitled An Essay in Universal History. It covers the period from the crisis in capitalism in the early 1970s to the Fall of the Soviet Union (1991) and the Treaty of Maastricht (1992). By the end of the period the whole of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals and beyond confessed its adherence to the principles of democracy, free trade and human rights. Therefore this volume is called The Age of Democratism. Such an outcome would have seemed impossible to many at the beginning of this period. It is therefore not surprising that others should have hailed the triumph of democracy at the end of the period as “The End of History” in the sense of the final stage in the evolution of statehood. However, I shall argue that this is not so for the following main reasons: (1) the internal contradictions within the theory of democratism, (2) the survival of clearly despotic tendencies in the two major regional hegemons of the European Union and China (incipient in the former, already full-blown in the latter), (3) the revival, almost immediately, of nationalism in Yugoslavia and Russia, and (4) the movement towards a global world government in the West – a state that could never be truly democratic… In the forty-odd years from Roosevelt’s New Deal to the early 1970s, American democracy had given the world, to use an American expression, “its best shot”. First it had pulled America itself out of a devastating depression. Then it had defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Then it had given Western Europe and Japan the opportunity to recover both politically and economically, and in general, as the prophecy of St. Aristocles of Moscow had predicted, had “fed the world”. Finally, it had contained, if not permanently defeated, the terrible menace of Soviet Communism, and provided refuge for millions of refugees from communist oppression. Had not American democracy proved itself to be the best kind of government? Not quite… For, for all its achievements, America had a major weakness: the State had no symphonic “partner”, no Church that proclaimed the immutable truth to its own people and the world.
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