An Essay in Universal History
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AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY From an Orthodox Christian Point of View PART 6: THE AGE OF MAMMON (1945 to 2001) Volume 2: from 1973 to 1991 Vladimir Moss © Copyright Vladimir Moss, 2017: All Rights Reserved 1 When communism goes on the attack, it is said to be defending itself; when democracy defends itself, it is charged with aggression. Jean-François Revel (1985). Losing you is not a loss, and keeping you is no specific gain. Official slogan in Democratic Kampuchea (1970s). That which is called democracy is always in fact plutocracy. The only alternative to the rule of the rich is to have a ruler who is deliberately made more powerful even than the rich. It is to have a ruler who is secure of his place, instead of rulers who are fighting for their place. G.K. Chesterton. 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. We, the Rockefeller Foundation, supported and funded the Women’s Liberation Movement. Why do you think we did it? There were two primary reasons for this: One was that before women’s right to work, we could only tax HALF of the population. The other was so that with women going out to work it would break up families. Women would have to spend all day at work away from the family. The children would begin to see the state and teachers as their family and this would make it easier to indoctrinate and control them. Nick Rockefeller to Aaron Russo. When ethnos becomes demos, the initial result is polemos or war. Bogdan Denitch. What is this “mutation,” the “new man”? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue’s dream; the “free-thinker” and skeptic, closed only to the truth but “open” to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the “seeker” after some “new revelation,” ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping “fact” because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is “possible”; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his “rights,” yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest “stimulus”; the “rebel,” hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only god; the “mass man,” this new barbarian, thoroughly “reduced” and “simplified” and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real complexity of life. Fr. Seraphim Rose, Nihilism. 2 3 III. CAPITALISM WAVERS (1973-1982) 6 41. THE GLOBAL CRISIS 7 42. THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS RIGHT 29 43. SOLZHENITSYN, DÉTENTE AND APPEASEMENT 37 44. THE COMMUNISTS ADVANCE ON ALL FRONTS 48 45. THE THIRD ALL-EMIGRATION COUNCIL 66 46. THE GEORGIAN CHURCH 80 47. “NIKODEMOVSCHINA” 83 48. SUPER-ECUMENISM (1) 86 49. THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION 92 50. FROM MARXISM TO HUMANRIGHTISM 103 IV. COMMUNISM IMPLODES (1982-91) 109 51. THE POLISH COUNTER-REVOLUTION 110 52. THE REAGAN-THATCHER ALLIANCE 115 53. REAGAN AND THE EVIL EMPIRE 124 54. FRIEDMAN ECONOMICS AND THE THIRD WORLD 127 55. THE ANATHEMA AGAINST ECUMENISM 135 56. CHAOS AMONG THE GREEK OLD CALENDARISTS 138 57. ROCOR BEGINS TO CRACK 162 58. SUPER-ECUMENISM (2) 172 59. ROCOR AND THE CATACOMBS 177 60. GLASNOST’ AND PERESTROIKA 183 61. RELIGIOUS LIBERALIZATION IN THE SOVIET UNION 193 62. ROCOR’S MISSION INSIDE RUSSIA 197 63. POLAND’S JOYS AND SORROWS 205 64. THE TIANANMEN MASSACRE 211 65. THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL 219 66. SUPER-ECUMENISM (3) 225 67. THE GULF WAR: THE NEW WORLD ORDER 235 4 68. THE FALL OF YUGOSLAVIA (1): THE REVIVAL OF NATIONALISM 240 69. THE SOVIET UNION DISINTEGRATES (1) THE AUGUST COUP 254 70. THE SOVIET UNION DISINTEGRATES (2) UKRAINE 262 71. THE END OF HISTORY? 273 1. Reason, Desire and Thymos 274 2. Democracy and Nationalism 282 3. Democracy and Religion 287 4. The Dialectics of Democracy 290 5. Democracy’s Inevitable Demise 296 5 III. CAPITALISM WAVERS (1973-1982) 6 41. THE GLOBAL CRISIS “The history of the twenty years after 1973,” writes Eric Hobsbawm, “is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis. And yet, until the 1980s it was not clear how irretrievably the foundations of the Golden Age [1953-73] had crumbled. Until one part of the world – the USSR and the Eastern Europe of ‘real socialism’ – had collapsed entirely, the global nature of the crisis was not recognized, let alone admitted in the developed non-communist regions. Even so, for many years economic troubles were still ‘recessions’. The half-century’s taboo on the use of the terms ‘depression’ or ‘slump’, that reminder of the Age of Catastrophe, was not completely broken. Simply to use the word might conjure up the thing, even if the ‘recessions’ of the 1980s were ‘the most serious for fifty years’ – a phrase which carefully avoided specifying the actual period, the 1930s. The civilization that had elevated the word-magic of the advertisers into a basic principle of the economy, was caught in its own mechanism of delusion. Not until the early 1990s do we find admissions – as, for instance, in Finland – that the economic troubles of the present were actually worse than those of the 1930s. “In many ways this was puzzling. Why should the world economy have become less stable? As economists observed, the elements stabilizing the economy were now actually stronger than before, even though free-market governments, like those of Presidents Reagan and Bush in the USA, Mrs Thatcher and her successor in Britain, tried to weaken some of them. Computerized inventory control, better communications and quicker transport reduced the importance of the volatile ‘inventory cycle’ of the old mass production which produced enormous stocks ‘just in case’ they were needed at times of expansion, and then stopped dead while stocks were sold off in times of contraction. The new method, pioneered by the Japanese, and made possible by the technologies of the 1970s was to carry far smaller inventories, produce enough to supply dealers ‘just in time’, and in any case with a far greater capacity to vary output at short notice to meet changing demands. This was the age not of Henry Ford but of Benetton. At the same time the sheer weight of government consumption and of that part of private income which came from government (‘transfer payments’ such as social security and welfare) also stabilized the economy. Between them they amounted to about a third of GDP. If anything both increased in the crisis era, if only because the cost of unemployment, pensions and health care rose. As this era was still continuing at the end of the Short Twentieth Century [1914- 1991], we may have to wait for some years before the economists are able to use the historians’ ultimate weapon, hindsight, to find a persuasive explanation. “Of course the comparison of the economic troubles of the 1970s-90s with those between the wars is flawed, even though the fear of another Great Slump haunted these decades. ‘Can it happen again?’ was a question asked by many, especially after a new, dramatic American (and global) stock exchange crash in 1987 and a major international exchange crisis in 1992. The 7 Crisis Decades after 1973 were no more a ‘Great Depression’ in the sense of the 1930s than the decades after 1873 had been, even though they were also given that name at the time. The global economy did not break down, even momentarily, although the Golden Age ended in 1973-75 with something very like a classical cyclical slump, which reduced industrial production in the ‘developed market economies’ by 10 per cent in one year and international trade by 13 per cent. Economic growth in the developed capitalist world continued, though at a distinctly slower pace than during the Golden Age, except for some of the (mainly Asian) ‘newly industrializing countries’ or NICs, whose industrial revolutions had only begun in the 1960s. The growth of the collective GDP of the advanced economies until 1991 was barely interrupted by short periods of stagnation in the recession years 1973- 75 and 1981-83. International trade in the products of industry, the motor of world growth, continued, and in the boom years of the 1980s even accelerated to a rate comparable with the Golden Age. At the end of the Short Twentieth Century the countries of the developed capitalist world were, taken as a whole, far richer and more productive than in the early 1970s, and the global economy of which they still formed the central element was vastly more dynamic. “On the other hand, the situations in particular regions of the globe was considerably less rosy. In Africa, in Western Asia and in Latin America the growth of GDP per capita ceased. Most people actually became poorer in the 1980s and output fell for most years of the decade in the first two of these regions, for some years in the last. Nobody seriously doubted that for these parts of the world the 1980s were an era of severe depression.