An Essay in Universal History
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY From an Orthodox Christian Point of View VOLUME 5: THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE (1914 to 1945) PART 2: from 1925 to 1945 Vladimir Moss © Copyright: Vladimir Moss, 2017. All rights reserved. 1 It is well the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. Henry Ford. For liberation, something more is necessary than an economic policy, something more than industry. If a people is to become free, it needs pride and will-power, defiance, hate, hate and once again hate. Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s democratic triumph [in 1933] exposed the true nature of democracy. Democracy has few values of its own: it is as good, or as bad, as the principles of the people who operate it. In the hands of liberal and tolerant people, it will produce a liberal and tolerant government; in the hands of cannibals, a government of cannibals. In Germany in 1933-34 it produced a Nazi government because the prevailing culture of Germany’s voters did not give priority to the exclusion of gangsters… Norman Davies (1997). Patriotism does not call for the subjugation of the universe; to liberate your people does not at all imply overtaking and wiping out your neighbours. Ivan Ilyin. The nation, this collective organism, is just as inclined to deify itself as the individual man. The madness of pride grows in this case in the same progression, as every passion becomes inflamed in society, being refracted in thousands and millions of souls. Metropolitan Anastasy (Gribanovsky) of New York (+1964). The practice of Communist states and… Fascist states… leads to a novel conception of the truth and of disinterested ideals in general, which would hardly have been intelligible to previous centuries. To adopt it is to hold that outside the purely technical sphere (where one asks only what are the most efficient means towards this or that practical end) words like ‘true’, or ‘right’, or ‘free’, and the concepts which they denote, are to be defined in terms of the only activity recognized as valuable, namely, the organization of society as a smoothly-working machine providing for the needs of such of its members as are permitted to survive… Sir Isaiah Berlin. The Lord has revealed to me, wretched Seraphim, that there will be great woes in the Russian land: the Orthodox Faith will trampled on, the hierarchs of the Church of God and other spiritual persons will fall away from the purity of Orthodoxy, and for that the Lord will punish them terribly. I, wretched Seraphim, besought the Lord for three days and nights that He would rather deprive me of the Kingdom of Heaven but have mercy on them. But the Lord replied: 'I will not have mercy on them, for they teach human teachings and honour me with their lips but their hearts are far from Me.' St. Seraphim of Sarov (+1833). 2 3 III. THE RISE OF THE DICTATORS (1925-1933) 6 33. LIBERALISM, COMMUNISM AND FASCISM 7 34. TOTALITARIANISM AND RELIGION: (1) FASCIST ITALY 23 35. TOTALITARIANISM AND RELIGION: (2) NAZI GERMANY 28 36. TOTALITARIANISM AND RELIGION: (3) SOVIET RUSSIA 37 37. THE RISE OF CHINA 41 38. TURKS, ARABS AND PERSIANS 49 39. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH DECENTRALIZED 57 40. THE DECLARATION OF METROPOLITAN SERGIUS 61 41. THE BIRTH OF THE CATACOMB CHURCH 68 42. STALIN’S WAR ON RUSSIA 78 43. KING ALEXANDER I OF YUGOSLAVIA 99 44. THE OLD CALENDARIST MOVEMENT 115 45. THE RISE OF HITLER 127 46. THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM 131 47. THE VATICAN AND RUSSIA 139 48. AMERICA’S HUNDRED DAYS 143 IV. THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1933-1945) 148 49. HITLER’S IDEOLOGY 149 50. THE JAPANESE INVASION OF CHINA 154 51. APPEASEMENT: (1) ABYSSINIA AND THE RHINELAND 160 52. APPEASEMENT: (2) SPAIN 165 53. APPEASEMENT: (3) AUSTRIA AND CZECHOSLOVAKIA 170 54. THE GREAT PURGES 176 55. A PARABLE OF SOVIET REALITY 183 56. THE FRUITS OF SERGIANISM 188 4 57. THE SECOND ALL-DIASPORA COUNCIL 194 58. PERSECUTION IN ROMANIA 204 59. THE MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT 212 60. THE FASCISTS INVADE THE BALKANS 220 61. YUGOSLAVIA UNDER THE FASCISTS 225 62. THE NAZIS INVADE RUSSIA 233 63. CHURCH LIFE DURING THE GERMAN OCCUPATION 240 64. THE STALIN-SERGIUS PACT 248 65. THE BIG THREE 260 66. THE BALKANS AND THE COMMUNISTS: (1) YUGOSLAVIA 275 67. THE BALKANS AND THE COMMUNISTS: (2) GREECE 279 68. THE BALKANS AND THE COMMUNISTS: (3) ROMANIA AND BULGARIA 283 69. THE MOSCOW COUNCIL OF 1945 285 70. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH ABROAD IN 1945 290 71. THE CATACOMB CHURCH IN 1945 293 72. VICTORS’ JUSTICE IN 1945 297 5 III. THE RISE OF THE DICTATORS (1925-1933) 6 33. LIBERALISM, COMMUNISM AND FASCISM Some political philosophies are of the head; others – of the heart. Liberalism is of the first kind. It appeals to the rational (but false) idea that if governments are formed through elections on the basis of universal suffrage, then they will act for the benefit of all: “government by the people for the people”. “People” here means “a multitude of voters, each voting rationally for his own interests”: it does not mean a single unity having a single will (Rousseau’s concept of “the general will” is a communistic, not a liberal idea). And once enough individuals see that they as individuals are not benefiting from democracy, then they will seek salvation in a philosophy with a more powerful, more unitary and more emotive definition of the word “people”, where “people” means something closer to “nation”, not a chance aggregate of unrelated individuals, each wanting something different and forming unities only on the basis of fleeting and constantly shifting parliamentary majorities, but a mystical organism with a single will and soul and heart. After the Great War, western leaders such as Lloyd George proclaimed that it had been fought for the sake of democracy against tyranny. True: the Kaiser’s Germany had been aggressive and tyrannical, and the victory of the Allies did spell, as we have seen, the demise of monarchy in many countries and the rendering of lip-service to democracy throughout Europe. However, Lloyd George himself had closed down cabinet government in Britain in December, 1916. And both the British and the French fought less for democracy in the Versailles negotiations than for a return to the status quo ante the war. The only country that genuinely fought first of all for democracy was probably America. For, as Philip Bobbitt writes, “America went to war in 1917 to create a system of nation-states whose legitimacy would be based on democracy and self-determination. Within this system all states were to be legally equal, because Wilson and [his friend and adviser, Colonel] House believed that such a system would prevent future wars against the democracies. This system would reflect American conceptions of the relationship between nation and state and for that reason it could call upon an American commitment to intervene if necessary to protect the system. The establishment of the League of Nations came to be America’s principal war aim because it gave an institutional structure to these ideas. A world order based on a German victory would not be one that was ultimately safe for the American democracy, but neither would an Allied victory that merely reinstated in Europe the state system that had collapsed in the first place. As Lord Devlin, a Wilson biographer, shrewdly observed: ‘Indeed [Wilson] never lost his distrust of Allied motives… The Allies did not, he believed, genuinely care about democracy and the right to self-government.’ “And of course Wilson was right: the Allies, like the Central Powers they opposed, shared a European conception of sovereignty, that held the State’s authority to have come by descent from its predecessors, and not to arise directly from the people. Even democratic states like Britain and France held 7 sovereignty to be distinct from elections; sovereignty was an attribute of the State. European states were not limited sovereigns. Because their peoples had wholly delegated their sovereignty to the State the nation could scarcely demand the creation of a new state by withholding sovereignty from that power that ruled them. Yet this was the reason American entered the Long War [from 1914 to 1990]: to allow the democratic form to fulfil its role in creating the proper relation between a State and its nation…”1 But America’s war aim was not achieved, at least in the short run. The Versailles Peace appears to have disillusioned everyone who took part in it (Wilson and House never met thereafter). It certainly did not bring peace to Europe, although it did cause a lot of chaos, fear and resentment. And the League of Nations, as we shall see, failed as an arbiter of international conflict. It was the failure of the Versailles peace that especially exposed the myth of freedom and equality in our time; for very many individuals and nations in Europe felt, not more, but less free and equal in 1919 than they had in 1914 – and still more after the anarchy, poverty and violence of the early 1920s, followed by the Great Depression of 1929… Italy was the first country that lost confidence in democracy. Mussolini’s march on Rome in March, 1922 proved the government’s impotence. And in August he declared: “Democracy has done its work. The century of democracy is over. Democratic ideologies have been liquidated.”2 The next failed democracy was Germany’s Weimar Republic, which was plagued by violence and, as the Reichmark plummeted in value, by widespread poverty and despair.