Keys of This Blood (46 page)

Gramsci never saw the deadly mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, the fearful opening announcement of a new and unheard-of interdependence of nations. He never had even a glimmering of the idea of the
computer chip, which has revolutionized industrial development in regions whose populations were, until what seems only moments ago, locked into their Asian rice paddies and their African savannas and their Brazilian rain forests. Nothing in Gramsci's pre-World War II surroundings so much as hinted at the possibility of a “global village.”

In Gorbachev's hands, however, Gramsci has entered into the globalist competition. Of that Pope John Paul is convinced. As the Pontiff leads the tattered but still powerful and unique structure of his universal Roman Catholic Church through the unpredictable volatility of our times, he is certain that Mikhail Gorbachev will move confidently into the deep waters of the new globalism, with the ghost of Antonio Gramsci as companion and guide.

The Pope sees Gorbachev as supremely confident that he can maneuver the Leninist geopolitical structure and organization he now heads into a position of total domination in that new globalism. Nor has the Pontiff any of the illusions nourished by other West leaders about the General Secretary's vision of how that new globalism can be turned in the direction of Leninism and skillfully adapted to the Leninist geopolitical goal. Gorbachev's vision is still animated, as Chilean journalist Jaime Antunez has written, by “an immanentist sense, and [by] its purpose … to change social [and] economic relations with a view to producing a ‘new man' fully liberated from ‘Old moral ties' [of] Western Christian civilization.”

While, in the Pontiffs mind, the success or failure of the Gorbachev gamble with the new globalism remains an open question—the odds being heavily in Gorbachev's favor—John Paul's analysis of the new globalists and their plans makes him pessimistic about their chances of any acceptable degree of success.

At some moment very soon after World War II, while the ghost of Antonio Gramsci was just getting up a good head of steam in the world, an extraordinary revolution he did not foresee began to take hold around the planet. The mood of the world arena began to change. Whether or not Gramsci's policies fed that mood, it seemed that almost suddenly there was a hankering for some truly workable system of interdependence among nations. A new kind of interdependence. An international unity that would not come riding like death on the back of conquest or subversion or crude takeovers. The time was past for yet another polished-up version of the ancient empire of Rome, in which all the world was forced to be Roman.

Rather, the new globalist mind envisioned an interdependence that would somehow accommodate the fact of the world as a shrinking place, but would also leave each nation its own identity.

As blurry as the concept of interdependence among nations might have been, a single aim did come to the fore fairly early on. And, though, since then, a great deal has changed among the many contenders for predominance in the global arena, that aim has remained constant at least for the most powerful of them: development. Some means was energetically sought by a few, was desired by many, and came to be expected by all, through which every national and cultural entity would actively share in and contribute to the material development of all. Everyone would have to be on board, for interdependence required an absence of strife. And an absence of strife required that there be no have-nots or “outsiders” among the nations.

Blurry or not, the new globalist vision was enough to ignite fires of longing among men and women the world over. Whole generations had lived all their lives amid global, regional and local wars. Even peace—what there was of it—could only be guaranteed by the threat of war. Compared to such a world as that, interdependence and material development could only sound like heaven on earth.

By about the end of the seventies, it seemed that nearly everyone in every nation and condition of life was following the barrage of practical news and not-always-so-practical editorial opinions about what was commonly accepted as a global competition for power going on in earnest among individuals, groups and nations. It became commonplace for men and women in every walk of life to appraise their own interests—their family situation, their job or profession, their company, their city, their country, their cause—Sin the light of such global developments. Increasingly, people came to see themselves and the circumstances of their lives in what they understood to be new and unprecedented globalist terms.

Given such widespread globalist yearnings—or at least the widespread yearning for international peace and material development—and given the fact that no practical means for achieving such overall goals seemed to emerge, the world was prepared in advance to be drawn into the orbits of two powerful leaders. Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Soviet Union loomed taller and seemed able to stride farther than any of their contemporaries on the shifting world stage.

As these two world leaders burst so unexpectedly upon the scene of global affairs, one after the other within seven short years, there was a common perception that, as different as they might be in every other respect, one thing they shared set them apart from every other leader and from every other globalist visionary: The Roman Catholic Pontiff and the Soviet General Secretary each seemed to stand in sight of what would perfect the incipient globalism on the horizon of our world.

That public perception of both men was and remains accurate. For both came to their positions of power as died-in-the-wool globalists. Both have a truly geopolitical bent of mind. Both have a clear geopolitical mandate and purpose. And each of them is backed up by a geopolitical organization.

John Paul and Gorbachev both understand already what practical working structures are needed to create a geopolitical system among nations. They have long since seen clearly that geopolitics must and will transfer national politics to a global plane—will induce all the transformations and adaptations necessary in today's local political structures, so that they may flourish in tomorrow's truly geopolitical system of interdependence.
They have long since understood that no nation of the world will remain in the next century as it has been or is in this century. They have long since seen that the very concept of nationhood will be deeply altered.

Much of the world may be uncomfortable with Gorbachev's Communism. Much of the world may be repelled by John Paul's Roman Catholicism. But it is clear to all the world—leaders and people alike—that over and above Communism and Catholicism, there is in each of these two men a secure point of view that can at long last take the idea of globalism beyond the stage of a blurry dream. Either of them can—and each of them intends to—infuse the present inchoate globalism with the values it lacks, give it flesh-and-blood reality, and transmute it into a veritable new world order.

Walking as they do in the unobstructed light of their separate globalist visions, these two men—the Pope and the General Secretary—act like magnets, drawing popular emotions and a vast enthusiasm to themselves around the world.

National leaders, meanwhile, are drawn in the wake of these two men. In such company, John Paul and Mikhail Gorbachev are perceived with less emotion and not always with enthusiasm. But they are seen as having a clear picture of what is needed to create a true geopolitical unity in a world groping for exactly that. They are known to have their differing blueprints of the global unity that would absorb all local unities. Blueprints, in other words, of the centralization needed in order to eliminate the thousand and one separate nationalist-minded governments pulling this way and that in the current international system. Blueprints, moreover, of the values that must act as the glue—the sticky tape of cohesion—indispensable to any geopolitical arrangement among nations but lacking to individual nations in the world of the 1990s.

The fact that John Paul and Mikhail Gorbachev are the towering figures in the world arena where globalism is perceived as the prize does not in the least discourage other contenders from crowding in.

On the contrary, champions of globalism are in ready supply. Some have entered the arena alone. Some have come with a bevy of camp followers. Some form short- or long-term alliances with fellow contenders. Some remain aloof from all the others. Most of them have an international forum they have never enjoyed before. And all of them are beset by problems they either deny, or have not yet figured out how to overcome, on their way to the future. But every one of them is bitten by
the same bug—the will to lead the way to the new globalist pattern that will hold sway over all nations.

From John Paul's vantage point, the first big problem faced by most of his competitors in the globalist arena is that, as individuals and as groups, they still approach the world situation with a local mind-set.

Their second major problem is that with the sole exception of Mikhail Gorbachev, none of the other contenders has a system of values around which a new globalist structure for the nations of the world can form and maintain itself over time.

And yet a third difficulty is that none of them has managed to create or to gain control of the practical machinery they need for success—a functioning, up-and-running geopolitical organization such as Gorbachev's global Leninist machine, or John Paul's universal Roman Catholic structure.

Despite even such deep shortcomings, however, there are certain globalist-minded groups—some score or so in all, by the Pope's reckoning—that are powerful forces in their own right. These contending groups fall rather naturally, in the Pontiff's analysis, into three broad categories.

The first category is the most crowded. There are so many groups in contention here, in fact, that they form themselves into subcategories. But generally speaking, and allowing for differences and divisions aplenty, included here is every globalist-minded group of some importance that maintains a vision of the new world in its own image. Each of them is certain that the world is about to become what that group already is. Each sees the world as a whole in its own terms. These are the Provincial Globalists.

The second broad category comprises a smaller number of globalist-minded groups than the first—only three in all. And the number of people represented is not vast. Nevertheless, the characteristic of this category is that each group included within it sees the world as already in its own globalist basket. Without fear or favor, each will ride on the back of any current that will take it forward. But for them, it's not so much that the world will become what they are. It's that they are the world. These are the Piggyback Globalists.

The third category is made up of only two groups. But these are the true globalist contenders. Humanly speaking, very little seems to stand in the way of their ultimate success in the globalist arena. And though John Paul knows they have not yet crossed the Rubicon that separates globalism from a true and workable geopolitical system, he sees them nevertheless as the Genuine Globalists.

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The Pontiff maintains an intimate knowledge of each of these many globalist groups. And he does analyze them in terms of such categories and subcategories as these. He has spoken about many of them publicly from time to time. In the Vatican, and around the world on his never-ending travels, he has met publicly and privately with representatives and leaders of them all.

No one is more aware than John Paul, therefore, that some of the groups in question may have a romantic idea of what global interdependence will look like, or of how it will be achieved. And no one knows better than he that some of these globalist contenders are downright unrealistic about the practical ways to get from one stage of development to the next.

Nevertheless, whatever their own chances of ultimate victory in the millennium endgame, John Paul takes them seriously for several reasons.

First, there is the practical reality that, with few exceptions, these groups stand in serious and very effective hostility to John Paul and his Church, far more than they do to Gorbachev and his Party-State. They constitute points of deep opposition to the Pope's own acceptance as a world leader. And they wreak harm on his Church through the influence they exert over its members.

John Paul feels impelled to take these globalist contenders seriously, moreover, because whether they are realists or not, and whether they are persons or nations or systems builders or religious or ideological groups, their contention revolves around the stern stuff of the world. Around finance, trade and industry, politics, territory and military matters, and—not least—around religion. Whatever may happen to them ultimately, at the present moment they influence the fortunes of the world as surely as Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Gramsci did. The undeniable influence of these groups and their globalist mind-set—their irresistible desire for interdependence among nations, and the total allegiance of the most important of them to material development—have already transformed the former rigidities of the nations into the soft, malleable material from which the world expects its new order will be formed.

And John Paul maintains that these groups are of major importance for yet another reason. It is among these incipient globalists that both he and Mikhail Gorbachev must now operate. It is within the climate these groups create as a passing condition of our world that John Paul must pursue his own vision and his own goal. And he knows that Mikhail Gorbachev must do the same.

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From his vantage point at the hub of the Vatican—the world's greatest listening post—Pope John Paul is so acutely aware of the daily moves and the long-range plans of each major globalist group, that it is as though each of those groups maintained a “situation room.” A sort of high-command headquarters in which tactics and strategies and ultimate aims are laid out across the maps and action models on display. It is as though the Pope himself could enter those imaginary “situation rooms,” unseen in his white robes, to watch the leaders of each group survey those maps and action models. It is as though he could listen to all the discussions and debates about the shape of the coming world and about each group's hoped-for system of global order.