Keys of This Blood (45 page)

Running through the ancient arteries of once Christian lands, Pope John Paul sees the soul-killing, watery serum of what he has called “superdevelopment,” and an always nervous striving for economic soundness. The ideal is exclusively here and now. Every aim is totally immanent to historical man in his cities and his houses and his pleasures; in his industries and his factories; and, above all, in his banks and his money markets. This is the predeath trickle of serum that has replaced the blood of culture in the West.

Given such a state of Western culture—including the much vaunted Nordic models of social democracy—it might have been laughable, had it not been so painful, for John Paul to hear the recent, almost mystical, judgment of Krister Ahlstrom, CEO of the Finnish Employers Confederation. “Something indefinable binds Nordic countries together,” pondered Ahlstrom, “as though they had an invisible force.” That force, maintains Pope John Paul, is not invisible at all. It is the force of Gramsci's success. Not only the Nordic countries but the entire West has given birth at last to the child of Gramsci's ghost: a completely secularized society. And in what is still called “the spirit of Vatican II,” John Paul's worldwide Roman Catholic institutional organization has been both midwife and wet nurse for that force.

Only once was there a truly serious threat to the Gramscian process. It came, of all places, in Poland. And it followed Pope John Paul's “pilgrimage” of 1979, with its risky, dramatic and compelling challenge to the status quo of the Communist regime in his homeland.

Bitter and sustained experience—first under post-World War II Stalinism; and then under Khrushchev and Brezhnev—had taught John Paul one basic lesson. Stalin's brand of Leninist Marxism would brook no tampering with the nuts and bolts of the Soviet Union's imperial hold on Poland. Any attempt to dilute Soviet control of the Polish Armed Forces, or of the KGB-organized security police, or the rubber-stamp Polish
parliament, would be met with the full force of the Soviet mailed fist—which was to say, with total repression, with the use of Soviet divisions stationed in Eastern Poland if necessary, and with the clampdown of even closer surveillance by the KGB itself.

The effective answer to that insistent hands-off-our-turf requirement of the Polish regime came from Cardinal Wyszynski, Primate of Poland, and mentor of Pope John Paul during his days as priest and bishop in Krakow. Wyszynski always insisted that in other Eastern satellite countries—notably in Hungary—the Church's tough and intransigent fight with the atheist puppet regimes of the USSR had met with disaster. On the other hand, neither could the Church in such countries run away from the hostile and oppressive situation that engulfed them. The Cardinal devised a third way. The Church had to cohabit Poland with the Marxist political regime, he said; but at the same time, it had to preserve its people intact in their culture.

Under Wyszynski's canny and guiding hand, the all-pervasive Catholic Church in Poland developed its own anti-Gramsci version of Gramsci's process, its own network within which Polish culture could be preserved and developed.

The underground or “flying” university, of which Pope John Paul himself was a product; underground publications and libraries; underground cultural activities and artistic pursuits—all of these efforts and countless others blanketed Poland and constituted a popular stratum of Polish culture. All of it was Church-related—devised, fomented, nourished and solidly supported under Wyszynski's guidance. And all of it was untouched by the deadening hand of Marxism.

In the months following Pope John Paul's careful but unequivocal call for change during his 1979 papal speeches in Warsaw and Gniezno and Krakow, the Solidarity movement—originally based among shipyard workers in the Baltic ports—found its way throughout Poland. It came into official existence in 1980, when the first accords were signed in the Lenin Shipyards of Gdansk.

The success and vogue of the Polish Solidarity movement added a whole new dimension to the Wyszysnki concept. Almost insensibly, a new proposition was born in many minds. It was true—and as nearly as anyone could see at the time, it was going to remain true—that Poles were forced to concede political, military and security powers to the Soviet regime in Moscow. But that regime could allow exactly the aboveground freedoms John Paul had called for in all areas of culture. In education and art and literature, to be sure, but also, and at long last, in the field of labor relations.

When just that proposition was actually made, the officials of the CP in Poland found it appealing in a number of respects. Warsaw was being badgered continually by Moscow to do something about Poland's economy, which was in shambles, and about its labor unrest, which was always ready to boil over, and about its $30 billion debt to Western creditors.

Given recognition and status, it was just possible that Solidarity could do away with the crippling strikes that bedeviled Polish industry. It might even prevent the subtle and costly “go slow” tactics used by Poland's workers, who saw reduced productivity as their only means of protest against starvation wages, food shortages, police brutality and all the other forms of governmental oppression.

It might even be that, if such a prescription could work in Poland, the Soviet Union might see in it a formula to be tried in other ailing economies of its Eastern satellite empire.

It is unlikely that the record of private conversations between the participants in the negotiations, or the cable traffic between Cardinal Wyszynski's Warsaw, Pope John Paul's Vatican and General Secretary Brezhnev's Moscow, or the few additional documents involved, will ever be laid bare to the eyes of today's historians. It does seem certain, however, that with Moscow's approval, at least a verbal agreement was finally reached between the background organizers of Solidarity and the Polish Communist regime.

It was a brilliant idea. A mixed bag of carrots and sticks for both sides. It would make any penetration of Polish culture by the Gramscian process difficult. But there would be common agreement at last to leave security and political control of Poland in the hands of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party. And it promised economic relief in at least one of the satellite countries that were draining Moscow's already strained resources.

The plan might have worked, had the agreement concerning exclusive political control by the Communist regime not been violated. But among Solidarity's organizers were members of another organization—the Committee for the Defense of the Workers, known internationally by its Polish initials: KOR. Whether by design or by tactical error, KOR managed to push Solidarity's policies and demands beyond the bounds of culture. KOR wanted a share of the regime's political power, as well; and it was not content to wait for time to ripen the possibilities.

KOR's demand was too much too soon for the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev and for its surrogate regime in Poland. The agreement collapsed. The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul took place. And
by December of 1981, Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski had imposed martial law in Moscow's name. The alternative, as the General insisted in his own defense to Cardinal Wyszynski and Pope John Paul, was a direct military takeover by the Soviet Union.

In retrospect, both Moscow and Warsaw seem to have suffered a loss of nerve. In Poland, Gramsci's process had been met head-on and squarely for the first time by the dedicated use of its own tactics. And when those tactics seemed to threaten the control of Soviet Marxism within its own domain of Polish politics, all thought of Gramsci's call for the CPSU to foster different faces of Communism in different countries was lost in the panic.

What Brezhnev saw in the situation was a threat to total Soviet control in its own territory. In those unprecedented circumstances, he reverted to his Stalinist roots. He abandoned the Gramscian experiment in Poland—the first, but not the last that would surface in the satellite countries.

Even here, however, the aftermath of Brezhnev's action demonstrated still one more time the unwisdom of classical Leninism. For once again, such heavy-handed policies failed to change the way the people thought about their lives and their problems. Poles remained fundamentally Christian in tradition. Their culture, with its moral laws and civic customs, was only driven underground. True, the people were again forced to behave outwardly according to hated rules within a hated sociopolitical regime. But just as Gramsci had said, the religious transcendent—God, with his laws and his worship—continued to flourish, and to nourish enmity for what Poles everywhere saw was the alien superstructure of a Soviet Marxist dictatorship.

The dramatic Polish experiment that opened the decade of the 1980s failed. Who might have won at that moment in time—Gramsci or Wyszynski—will never be known. But the day was not far down the road when the gamble would be tried again. And when the time came, as the eighties drew to a close, the high cards were all in Soviet hands. For, despite Moscow's loss of nerve in putting Gramsci's formula to its first test within the Soviet orbit, the fundamental Marxization of the West itself had not been impeded or slowed in the least.

On the contrary, the originally Christian mind in the West nations was so far eroded already, that capitalist nations were persuading themselves that they had to be content with the conviction that the purpose and meaning of all life is life. Life rooted in loyalty to a nation. Life conducted with a maximum sense of solidarity among a society of nations. Life with a reverence for all living things, whether walking on two legs, or four legs, or no legs. Life, as onetime Marxist Milovan Djilas wrote
with extreme pathos, “which is patriotic without being nationalistic, socially responsible without being socialist, and respectful of human rights and those of all creatures without calling itself Christian.”

With those conditions as a backdrop in the West, the Soviet refusal of Poland's challenge to Gramsci's process in Poland became a thing of the past, a mistake of history.

Mikhail Gorbachev burst upon the world scene as the first Soviet leader big-minded enough to appraise, appreciate and fully embrace the Gramscian formula. The only Soviet leader realistic and courageous enough to commit even his own satellite territories to the dead Sardinian's plan for victory in Marxism's consistent struggle for total geopolitical predominance among the nations, and for its total acceptance in the newly de-Christianized hearts and minds of the men and women who people those nations.

One by one, the former Soviet satellites are seen as liberated from the direct control of the USSR. The Communist parties in those individual countries have been shunted off their solitary perch on the dais of government; indeed, in Hungary, the former CP has renounced even calling itself “Communist.” And the Gorbachev-blessed changes are going further. Now the reunification of the “two Germanys” has his approval. No doubt, in a short time, the three Baltic States—Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia—will attain a status even more detached from the USSR than the former satellites.

In his Gramscian pattern, Gorbachev envisions a new governmental structure for the USSR itself and—unimaginable wonder of wonders!—a new status for several of the “Socialist Soviet Republics” that flesh out the USSR. Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, the Ukraine will all attain a new status other than that of fully integrated “Republics” in the former “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” The Gramscian process requires such changes. Gorbachevism implicitly endorses them. In this, as John Paul perceives, Gorbachev is being very faithful to his hard-core Leninism, while adding his own updating and correctives.

In John Paul II's reading of the geopolitical arena of the 1990s, the secularized West would seem to be custom-made for Gorbachevism. The Soviet General Secretary has made it clear that he is perfectly aware of the barrenness afflicting the bloody-minded plans of Lenin, whom Pravda once hailed as “the radiant genius who lights the path of mankind to Communism.” Gorbachev has read his contemporary world instead, and unabashedly, in the more accurate light of the analysis of Antonio
Gramsci, but keeping intact a basic tactical principle of that “radiant genius.” Gorbachev has even taken the trouble to explain that basic tactical principle. In his book, Perestroika, he has explained:

It would be appropriate to recall how Lenin fought for the Brest Peace Treaty in the troubled year 1918. The Civil War was raging, and at that moment came a most serious threat from Germany. So Lenin suggested signing a peace treaty with Germany.

The terms of peace Germany peremptorily laid down for us were, in Lenin's words, “disgraceful, dirty.” They meant Germany annexed a huge tract of territory with a population of fifty-six million…. Yet Lenin insisted on that peace treaty. Even some members of the Central Committee objected … workers, too … demanding that the German invaders be rebuffed. Lenin kept calling for peace because he was guided by
vital
, not
immediate
, interests of the working class as a whole, of the Revolution, and of the future of Socialism … he was looking far ahead … he did not put what was transitory above what was essential…. Later, it was easy to say confidently and unambiguously that Lenin was right…. The Revolution was saved.

Probably Gorbachev regards the insistence of the West on liberalization of human rights as undue intrusion, and the insistence of the former satellite nations to be free as “disgraceful” and “dirty” actions by “socialist brothers.” But, to save the Revolution, to save the essentials of the Party-State, he does see it as necessary to liberalize the Soviet empire, even to disaggregate the present structure of the USSR. For only thus can he hope and expect to be admitted as a full-blooded member of the new globalist society of nations.

Leninist flexibility, colored by Gramscian subtleties and modified to supply whatever was lacking in Gramsci's blueprints for victory—this constitutes Gorbachev's program. For it is true that human affairs in the last decade of the twentieth century are not at all the same as in its first four decades, when Gramsci lived and thought and died. “Marx never saw an electric bulb,” commented China's Hu Yaobang in November of 1986, “and Engels never saw an airplane.” Just so, globalism was a nonthought for the politically battle-hardened Sardinian whose mind and outlook were polarized between the parochialism of Lenin's pseudorevolutionary Moscow and a Western European culture about to be drowned in all-out war.