The East nations remained as they were, grouped around the USSR as their dominant leader and as the Party-State it had always been—a counterintelligence state in form and function. The West nations remained as they were, grouped freely if sometimes grudgingly around the United States as military umbrella, and as financial and entrepreneurial leader. And the world remained as it was, tied to the global torture rack of mutual opposition and rivalry between the two major blocs—sometimes strained almost to the snapping point, at other times less ominously stretched, but never totally released from tension.
From the beginning of his pontificate, Pope John Paul has insisted that no worthwhile moral appraisal of the East-West rivalry, and no moral appraisal of its effects on the world, may, even for a moment, consider anything like a principle of balance. Nor will a moral appraisal even remotely base itself on a winking policy of containment. For principle and policy alike were no more than acquiescence in moral evil all dressed up in the latest “go-to-meeting” clothes. Less lightheartedly expressed, they were the ropes that kept the whole world bound to the torture machines of sinful structures.
True enough, there were always differences of the deepest kind between East and West. The East system was structured politically, economically and socially according to classical Marxism, modified and adapted by the Stalinist Soviets. The West system was structured according to classical capitalism, which underwent its own modifications and adaptations. And true enough, from these totally irreconcilable ideologies flowed the political, social and economic rivalry between the two blocs of nations. Totalitarian dictatorship in the East versus capitalist democracy in the West. Absolute statism in the East versus open and free market economies in the West.
Nevertheless, for all the differences between the two sides, and no matter how deep those differences may appear to be, John Paul points to one overriding bond between East and West—one common and lethal flaw that shackles them together as bitter but not always unwilling partners. There is no element in either of these two systems that finds sinful structures morally repugnant, provided that the systems themselves can function and pursue their individual and differing goals.
It is clear to Pope John Paul that the West, never systematically deprived of its right to make free choices, will ever have a multitude of silent accusers reminding the world of those in the West who accepted the Stalinist East as a dark and contentious partner in world affairs; reminding the world of those who accepted moral equivalence with a morally evil regime. For, following this principle of moral equivalence, the connivance of the West in the sinful structures of the East laid a trail that is clearly detectable in all its horrible details.
Following the principle of moral equivalence, the West restricted the advance of its Allied troops in the closing days of World War II in order to allow the Soviets first entry into Germany, Czechoslovakia and a wide swath of additional territories.
Following this principle of moral equivalence, the whole series of sinful structures erected by Soviet leaders was permitted to clone itself throughout Eastern Europe and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Unjust, corrupt, dictatorial, godless structures that directly and systematically violated human dignity in individuals and nations by a denial of all human rights; structures that violated basic justice and love of fellow man, structures that inflicted hunger, poverty, social and mental deprivation, pessimism and bodily violence upon millions of men, women and children. Above all, they were structures that were officially and by explicit state policy impregnated with godlessness—with a professional denial of God’s sovereignty and law.
Moreover, following the principle of moral equivalence, the United States and the main protagonists of the West under its leadership rarely looked back over their collective shoulder once they had officially signed away the lives, liberties and rights of all those millions into Soviet captivity.
Instead, steadily following that same principle, the West consented time and again to treat as a due member of the family of nations an officially godless and professionally anti-Christian, antireligious power. The West accepted the Soviets as bona fide, if admittedly troublesome, members of the international community, exchanging ambassadors, establishing cultural ties and fostering whole pyramids of commercial, industrial and financial links with the East.
By all these means, and with the principle of moral equivalence ever as guiding star, the West connived at the Big Lie that the captive nations were genuinely sovereign states, and not the unwilling captives of sinful structures that sustained themselves by harrowing a harvest of death among human beings who were never permitted a chance at sufficient sustenance for life.
As Pope and as Pole, John Paul II knows firsthand the depth and the breadth of suffering caused by such moral connivance between East and West leaders. He knows all too well that an entire generation was born that, to adapt George Kennan’s powerful words, has “never known security of peace in its lifetime.” An entire generation lived and died with no hope for the future.
In Poland, as John Paul has sometimes said, he and his people preserved a wistful hope and irrepressible faith in the future God would bring about, because Poles never allowed themselves to be robbed of their belief in God and in Christ as Savior, and because they never for a moment accepted the principle of moral equivalence under the self-serving guise of balance and containment, as did those who pretended that, despite the mounting human toll, the absence of a shooting war between the principal nations of East and West could pass for peace.
There will always be the ineradicable mass graves of Soviet citizens at Bykovnia near Kiev, at Kuropaty near Minsk, at Vinnitsa and Lwów and how many more sites that stretch from Archangel in the Arctic Circle all the way to Odessa on the Black Sea, and from Moscow to the Boguchany prison village in the Soviet highlands. Any attempt to justify the West’s feckless de jure acceptance of the Soviet empire and the Brezhnev doctrine will forever be countered for John Paul by the mass grave of 4,443 Polish officers in Katyn Forest, by the graves of 11,000 Polish officers at the Kozielsk and Ostaszkowo internment camps, by the abandoned graves at all of the 3,500 internment stations of the Soviet Gulag system throughout the USSR and its captive nations.
Surely, too, the millions who have lived and died unknown, undefended, unrecorded, unmourned and unaccounted for constitute a bill of indictment drawn in flesh and blood against Soviet authorities. But implicated just as certainly are all those who connived and acquiesced and accepted the masters of the Soviet regime, all those who insisted on pursuing that principle of balance so convenient to the capitalist system and so dear to the hearts of leaders in the West.
Still, not by a long shot are all the accusers of East and West silent witnesses. And not by a long shot are all of them in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Baltic region. For the principle of moral equivalence worked its way right around the world. In practical geopolitical terms, it turned out that George Kennan’s global strategy of “adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points” meant that nations and entire regions had to become pawns caught in the crossfire of East-West opposition and hostility.
The internal conflicts, famine, cruelty and even full-scale civil wars are but some of the miseries that resulted, in such far-flung “geographical and political points” as Pakistan, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Afghanistan.
How many more accusers must rise, as well, out of the no-win policies of the West in Korea and Vietnam, which took their own toll in the death of millions and in the heartbreaking misery of millions more? For John Paul, the conclusion is inescapable that the West was not anything so benign as an unreliable ally, despite the many assertions to that effect. On the contrary, under American leadership the West was the ever-faithful disciple of moral equivalence. It was dedicated to its policy of “polite neighborly relations” with the Soviets, whose surrogates joined the West in payin
g the price for conniving—even in war—with the Eastern masters of sinful structures.
Okinawa became another pawn of such “polite neighborly relations” between the power blocs of East and West. Okinawa was enforcedly included as the forty-seventh prefecture of Japan, despite the fact that Japan’s dubious claim rested only upon its seizure of the island in 1898. But Okinawa was needed as a strategic base for Japan and the United States vis-à-vis China. So Okinawa has not been given back to its people. On the contrary, nearly twenty percent of its land is occupied by American bases.
Western interest in China figures again in Tibet, where the United States has practiced a mincing delicacy concerning the brutality of the Communist Chinese government against human rights, and particularly against religious rights. Why? Because in the struggle between the East and West blocs, the West counted China as its trump card. Surely the Tibetans who have suffered so greatly as a result would, if they could, rise as witnesses against such “polite neighborly relations.” And just as surely, the more than one million homeless Tibetan refugees in India and elsewhere would join that throng of witnesses.
And then there is Lebanon, by any measure one of the most poignant examples of the hapless nations trapped in the policies of moral equivalence adopted by the West nations. For here the East-West crossfire of opposition and hostility is anything but a figure of speech. It is a way of life.
In the early spring of 1989—in one eight-week period alone—some 100,000 shells were pounded into the Christian area of Beirut by Syrian gunners, while Christian gunners lobbed another 30,000 shells on areas controlled by the Syrians. Clearly, then, as in Korea and Vietnam, both East and West have done far more than merely acquiesce in the daily suffering and decimation of Lebanon’s 3.5 million civilian residents. For Syria is the Soviet Union’s Middle East surrogate, while the Christian enclave has until recently been able to look to the West for what support it could garner.
In this region, however, unlike Korea and Vietnam, the hand-in-glove nature of moral equivalence was recently made almost surprisingly clear. For after the shelling and countershelling of the bloody spring of 1989, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and USSR Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze issued a joint communiqué calling for “a national dialogue on reconciliation in Lebanon.” The Arab League chimed in as well, calling for the withdrawal of all “non-Lebanese troops.”
From John Paul’s vantage point, it is clear that if East and West intend anything more than lip service to “reconciliation in Lebanon,” they need not bother with any joint communiqués. The Soviets can simply withdraw their financial and military support, which allows the Syrians to fight at all; and the Americans can withdraw the financial aid that makes it possible for the Christians to continue their part in the continuing rain of death in Lebanon. And the Arabs, too, can withdraw their contributions—which come to more than the annual sum they pay for the expenses of the PLO, and which make it so much easier for “non-Lebanese troops” to remain in Lebanon.
Just how easy it would be to stop the fighting in Lebanon—if the great players in the East-West game of “polite neighborly relations” were of such a mind—becomes even clearer to John Paul when he looks at the far different situation in the Bekaa Valley. The Bekaa, which lies in Lebanon and well within the reach of destruction such as Beirut is undergoing, is well known as one of the most fertile spots in the world for the cultivation of the cannabis plant. Under Syrian control, the Bekaa brought in $1 billion from drug exports in 1989 alone. Such an incentive apparently commands respect that rises above all other considerations; for the Bekaa Valley is consistently and, in that area, almost uniquely preserved from harm’s way.
Is it not at least instructive to ask, as John Paul does in many of his meetings with interested secular leaders, why the Bekaa has not become another of those countless “geographical and political points” where East and West alike have chosen to apply their “adroit and vigilant counterforce”? Might it not be even more to the point to ask, as the Pontiff also does, why Lebanon must be kept so consistently and so brutally within harm’s way?
In such circumstances, one news reporter remarked most aptly that what amounts in effect to the silence of both East and West about Lebanon’s agony is not only deafening; it is deadening.
Suffering of a different kind, meanwhile—but equally a product of the West’s connivance in the sinful structures erected by the East—befell the people of Romania within the same decade that has seen the virtual destruction of Lebanon. Like all the Communist dictators of the Soviet satellite nations of Eastern Europe, Romania’s Nicolae Ceauşescu put his nation heavily in debt to the West. Between 1981 and 1989 he borrowed $11 billion, in fact. But unlike the rest of the satellite leaders, and unlike the debtor nations of the South, Ceauşescu did not look for debt relief or for a refinancing scheme that might be acceptable to the West. Instead, he repaid that $11 billion to the last cent.
More than any other world leader, perhaps, John Paul appreciates what that meant for the Romanian people. For he knows in detail that such a scheme, accepted readily by the West, added to the sufferings the Romanians already had to bear—meatless months, milkless months, uprooted villages and towns, scores of labor camps. All the omnipresent cruelty of a police state bested in its ruthlessness only by Communist Albania and by Stalin’s USSR of the thirties and forties was only intensified by what must be thought of as the financial arm of the East-West “foreign policy wars.”
Pope John Paul does not end his moral assessment of East and West even with such a damning global portrait of the consequences of moral equivalence. For that portrait looks out at us all through the eyes of the millions upon millions of refugees in our world, refugees whose number and whose condition of misery may have no equal in all the annals of history.
Governments count this toll in numbers—12 million refugees by the end of 1988—more than the population of entire nations. And to no one’s astonishment, the largest concentrations are to be found in precisely those South nations that were assigned their places along the lethal coordinate of East-West contention: 817,000 refugees in the Sudan; 625,000 refugees in Ethiopia; 852,750 in Jordan; 600,000 in Malawi; 105,220 in Malaysia; 447,850 in the Gaza Strip; 259,850 in Syria; 165,000 in Mexico; 430,000 in Somalia; 250,000 in South Africa. The list goes on. The terrible numbers mount without relief.
For Pope John Paul, this portrait is the very face drawn by the hands of those who rule the world by means of the principle of moral equivalence. It is a portrait that looks out at the whole world from the sunken eyes of too many children he has personally encountered who are literally dying from hunger. It looks out on the world from the eyes of too many young mothers condemned with their babies to a fate of perpetual migration and want. It looks out on the world from the eyes of too many men, old far before their time, emaciated and all but lifeless, who wait only for the release of death. It looks out from the terrified eyes of too many youths who, fleeing from enforced conscription by opposing armies, run headlong instead into the homeless and hopeless deserts of life.
The Pope has seen too many of these refugees in too many lands not to realize that they are the children begotten by sinful structures. Global surrogate wars and politics and other East-West “diplomacy” has made all of this possible. But as long as the West continues its policies dictated by the principle of moral equivalence, no amount of money or of effort from any quarter will be enough to halt and reverse this starkest and still growing flood tide of human deprivation and misery.
Worse still, the West is so deeply committed to the brand of development that constantly produces such by-products of suffering, that even when Third World nations at least try to attain some degree of modern development of their own, John Paul sees their way constantly obstructed, and their efforts consistently hampered by the same moral deficiency shared for so long by East and West.
In Helsinki in May of 1989, for example, representatives of eighty countries gathered at an i
nternational forum aimed at countering the problem of chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals eating away at the earth’s ozone shield. The developing nations present pointed out that they could not develop environmentally sound alternatives by the year 2000 as the target date and at the same time maintain even their present slow pace of national development. The developed countries present balked, however, at demands by some that, for the benefit of all, an international pool of money be established to enable the poorer nations to include this critical factor in their already troubled and overburdened national agendas.
In its successful moral domination of the West nations, the East has been aided mightily by something more than its ability to lure its adversary onto its own terrain in the struggle for world domination. It was aided at least as much by the snowballing of what has accurately been called the “industry of blame.”
For over forty years, the rulers of the East nations explained away their total failure to provide their populations with a decent standard of living as the exclusive result of the machinations of West nations. As part and parcel of the Big Lie that the Eastern satellite nations were sovereign states happy in their bondage, and that Marxist totalitarianism is democracy perfected, this industry of blame was foisted on East and South alike. Anything bad in those regions—any ill fortune, including natural catastrophes—was blamed on the devilish doings of the West. Perhaps the most ludicrous and evil-minded recent example was the idea launched by the KGB that the West had deliberately scattered toxic material abroad in order to create the AIDS epidemic, first in Africa and then in the countries of the “socialist fraternity.”
Just how successful the East has consistently been in its domination of this industry of blame can be seen in the degree to which many, both individuals and organizations within the West, have bought into the Soviet arguments. In what one American politician aptly named the “blame-America-first” syndrome, representative segments of the world of the West have steadily widened the scope of “freedom of expression” to include a moral distortion of the first order. Freewheeling agencies of democracies in Europe and North America have joined with increasing energy in corroding the self-knowledge of the peoples of the West nations. Every channel in the powerful communications industry has become implicated in the destruction of moral accuracy of judgment.
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