The central implication of recent events, as I see it, is so stunning that I am scared of stating it. But even at the risk of appearing to be out of my mind, I would say that 1989 could well mark the end of the period beginning with the French revolution in 1789 and the inauguration of a radically new one.
The feeling has been growing in on me for some years that Western civilisation has passed the peak of its creative phase and was set on a downward path. Gradually I have found it increasingly difficult to dismiss the holocaust in Germany (whereby millions of Jews were gassed to death) and the Gulag archipelago in the Soviet Union (where many more million were tortured and killed) as aberrations in an otherwise humane and beneficent Christian West. I have come to believe that these developments speak of ineradicable sickness at the core of that civilisation. And as I have pursued the philosophical implications of modern science, especially quantum physics, it has become reasonably clear to me that the very basis, on which the Western perception of reality has rested, has disappeared, and that instead of the world of matter (inanimate, in the Western view), we live in a world of energy, or spirit as we Hindus would say.
Such, however, is the force of mental inertia that the issue was not clinched for me till recently when different ethnic groups began to clamour for autonomy in the Soviet Union and one communist government after another collapsed in Eastern Europe without resistance, except in Romania, in the face of popular protests. Indeed, I must admit that the formulation finally crystallised in my mind only on X-mas day when the Romanian Salvation Front announced the execution of Ceausescu and proclaimed that the anti-Christ had been disposed of. The title, in my view, belongs to Stalin and not even to Hitler. But that is another matter.
I am perhaps in a minority of one in holding the collapse of communist ideology and practice as an expression of a general decline of the West. All other commentators, to the best of my knowledge, are in fact treating it as a victory of the capitalist, liberal and Christian West over the totalitarian and atheistic ‘East’. But I am persuaded that this is a largely, though not wholly, interested and partisan view intended, even if unconsciously to cover up the truth regarding the West as a whole, especially the modern west.
I find it extraordinary that anyone should regard Marxism as a deviation from the general run of Western philosophy. It is in reality a summing up of Western thought and tradition. Marx himself was a baptised Jew, that is, a man who carried in his person the Judaic messianic tradition and its gentile Christian version. Indeed, it is widely recognised that he was a prophet in the Judaic tradition and that his communist doctrine was a secularised form of Christianity with its angels, prophets and clerics; if the supposedly ineluctable march of history took the place of the jealous God of his Jewish forbears in his case, it was only appropriate; for one thing, the Christian truth is not limited by ethnicity, and for another, the Kingdom of God had to be given a secular orientation in our secular age.
Voltaire proclaimed God was dead; Marx amplified the statement to declare all forms of religion to be a superstructure, the so-called relations of production constituting the base, and an opiate for the people; and it was left to his followers in possession of the machinery of the state, first in the Soviet Union, to declare war on God and religion, as no one had done ever before.
Stalin and his murderous reign have by and large been explained in terms of his paranoia. This is nothing but a cover-up even if it contains an element of truth. Stalin was trained for the Church and as such qualified to carry to their logical conclusion two important traditions of the Church – inquisition and witch hunting – in the name of a secular version of the kingdom on the hill. It is not generally known that as many as nine million women were killed as witches in Europe in the period of ‘enlightenment’ – from the last quarter of the fifteenth to the last part of the eighteenth century – clearly indicating that witch hunting was a substitute for heresy hunting. Stalin, of course, did not distinguish between males and females and between heretics and witches. But then he was a Marxist-Leninist Pope.
All in all, it cannot be seriously disputed that the French revolution in 1789 constituted a massive assault on traditional society and inaugurated an era of which the Russian revolution in 1917 was the culmination in Europe and the Chinese revolution in 1949 an extension into Asia. Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, the hodge-podge labelled the thought of Mao Zedong in China, was to be the cutting edge of the Western thrust in Asia. If it has not succeeded, it has not at all been due to the US policy of containment. It has been partly due to the inherent strength of traditional societies in Asia, partly to the blunting of the cutting edge itself as reflected in Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, and partly to the Sino-Soviet split.
The era of revolution is over in the West. The search for the Utopia, which is what revolutions are about, has ended in a nightmare for one-half of the continent. Gorbachev represents the tired resignation directly of Russia and indirectly of Europe just as Marx represented its exuberant self-confidence in the nineteenth century and Lenin and Trotsky even after the shock of World War I which made the first big dent in the theory of linear and unlimited progress. In China too we see eloquent signs of loss of self-confidence among the leadership.
The French revolution did not materialise out of the blue; it was preceded by a series of developments beginning with Renaissance in the sixteenth century. The Communist collapse is similarly not a sudden development; indeed, the Russian revolution carried within it the seeds of its decay and decomposition as do all climaxes; the death of at least five million people by starvation as a result of collectivisation from 1928 to 1934 was followed by show trials of leading Communists and the reign of terror in which whole groups of people were arrested, tortured, shot and sent to concentration camps. In any event, Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin at the twentieth party Congress exposed the stinking corpse of communism for all to see. It is a terrible indictment of our age of ‘rationality’ and ‘information’ that so many million Communists, fellow travellers and others should have refused to recognise the corpse for what it was – a stinking corpse incapable of being restored to life.
All this, of course, calls for a careful and detailed discussion, and not merely in the context of Russian history, but of European history from the rise of Christianity. But such a discussion is neither possible in a newspaper article nor does it fall within the purview of what is intended to be no more than a summing of the decade which ends today and an attempt to look slightly ahead.
The seventies, as is well known, ended with a massive Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. It was a mad act on the part of a tired, cynical and often drunk Brezhnev and his clique in Moscow. It could not be justified on any ground whatsoever and finally it ended in ignominious defeat for the Soviet Union. But the pertinent point about it for the purpose of the present discussion is neither the lack of justification for it nor its failure, but that in 1979 the dominant group in the Soviet leadership could still think in terms of expanding their empire. What a contrast with the easy willingness with which the present Soviet leadership has acquiesced in, if it has not encouraged, the liquidation of the empire in Eastern and Central Europe.
It can legitimately be argued that the Soviet intervention could have succeeded if it were not for the resistance organised and financed by the United States. Certainly in that sense America might well have played the role of a catalyst in the great change in the Soviet perspective and policy. But the importance of the failure in Afghanistan should not be exaggerated. Gorbachev launched his policy of glasnost and perestroika long before he finally decided to pull out of Afghanistan and he did so in obedience to domestic compulsions. The Soviet Union, as a Soviet scholar put it to me, had degenerated into a Botswana with nuclear weapons.
No one could have anticipated so peaceful (barring Romania) an end to so cruel an imposition partly because no one quite knew how abysmal was the situation in the Soviet Union and partly – and more importantly – because no one was willing to look beyond the need for the management of the cold war. No one did.
In a sense, the British example is relevant. The British empire had become a potential burden in the context of the post-war conditions and was, therefore, wound up. But Britain was not an ideological construct. Its own survival, in fact wellbeing, was not to be adversely affected by the liquidation of the empire. The Soviet Union is not so fortunately placed. A big question mark hangs over its future. Gorbachev will have wrought one of the biggest miracles in history if he can prevent the disintegration of what is without question the product of the use of military power over centuries.
The risk he has taken is a true measure of the greatness of the man; he is assured of a place among the truly great in history. The empire by itself was never a security asset, though it has been so presented in the context of the cold war; Soviet Union armed with ballistic missiles did not need Eastern Europe as a buffer against a possible invader. And it had long ceased to be an economic asset; the era of loot ended in the fifties. It was not even an ideological barrier since modern communication instruments easily skip frontiers. But the Soviet Union had linked its future with that of the empire in Eastern Europe. It has to face the consequences. Serious they shall be. How serious alone can be a subject of speculation and discussion at this stage.
With the empire the cold war too is over. This is cause for relief and happiness but up to a point. Beyond the end of the familiar cold war lies an unknown world with no signposts of any kind.
To talk of a possible reunification of Germany and its possible sway over Eastern Europe is barely to scratch the surface. Similarly to speak of increased American arrogance is to state the obvious, especially in the light of Panama. We are simply in the dark. We just do not know what we are in for. The futurologists should be busy packing their bags. It will no longer suffice to project the present trends into the future with some modifications and call it futurology. No one needs to be advised to wait for events to unfold. No one has any other choice.
As stated earlier, the collapse of one Communist regime after another and the threat to the very integrity of the Soviet Union has inevitably been seen as triumph of the liberal West headed by the United States. And so it is, but only in a superficial sense. In reality Western leaders must feel lost. The cold war had been fully manageable for almost three decades, that is since the construction of the odious Berlin Wall in 1961 and the confrontation over Cuba in 1962; ‘peace’ must pose new challenges.
Even more important, Westerners could define not only their policies but also themselves in relation to the ‘godless’ Communists, an euphemism, in their perception, for representatives of the devil himself, and feel good for battling the forces of evil’ on behalf of the ‘forces of good’. When he described the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’, Reagan had only articulated the deepest psychological source of the cold war. Christianity is inseparable from Manichaeism. I for one wonder how the West will now define itself to itself.
A return to old style imperialism and proselytisation does not appear feasible to me. Imperialism was rooted in intra-European nationalist competition and proselytisation derived its strength in no small measure from the endless schisms in Christianity itself. In Europe both nationalism and intra-Christian schisms lack their former legitimacy even if they continue to exist.
It is generally not realised that Europe owed much of its dynamism and expansion to the endless conflicts and wars within it and its need for other peoples’ resources and markets. A Europe broadly at peace with itself and assured of comfortable life mainly on the strength of its scientific and technological resources will surely lack, to a substantial degree, the old impetus.
The conservative reaction against radicalism (distributive justice) and permissiveness (search for instant satisfaction) as exemplified by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the United States cannot possibly fill the gap which the end of messianic dynamism embodied in the ideologies of imperialism and revolution – the two fused in the case of the Soviet Union with China as a pale imitator – must create in the Western man’s psyche. Conservatism of the British and the American variety is the reaction of tired societies and it is an appeal to gross selfishness and materialism unredeemed by any kind of idealism which can be said to be the West’s most redeeming feature.
So we are back in the dark tunnel with not a flicker of light visible at the end of it.
I have deliberately kept developments in India out of this review. I propose to take these up next week.
Sunday Mail, 31 December 1989