| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
08 Apr 2005 08:46:31 AM |
| Object: |
OT: We are rewriting the history of communism's collapse |
We are rewriting the history of communism's collapse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1454825,00.html
It was Gorbachev, not the Pope, who brought the system down
Jonathan Steele
Friday April 8, 2005
The Guardian
The deaths of the powerful elicit extravagant claims, and many of the
tributes to the man being buried in Rome today have been little short
of grotesque. Dumbing-down comes over obituary writers, and in their
eagerness to define a clear legacy they often produce simplifications
that take no account of how the world and people change.
The way Poles saw communism in the 1970s is not the way they see it
now. The Polish Catholic church was in regular dialogue with the
communist authorities, and both worked subtly together at times to
resist Soviet influence. John Paul altered his own views as he
travelled.
Jonathan Steele
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/7df6298d42c06d95
Mikhail Gorbachev
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/c9bc013c718f5b30
Communism
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/c10caff5f5ec2a6e
Popes
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/4b1145d02ab62402
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| User: "LinDaKat" |
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| Title: Re: We are rewriting the history of communism's collapse |
08 Apr 2005 12:55:24 PM |
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"maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1112949991.512077.140420@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
We are rewriting the history of communism's collapse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1454825,00.html
It was Gorbachev, not the Pope, who brought the system down
Jonathan Steele
Friday April 8, 2005
The Guardian
The deaths of the powerful elicit extravagant claims, and many of the
tributes to the man being buried in Rome today have been little short
of grotesque. Dumbing-down comes over obituary writers, and in their
eagerness to define a clear legacy they often produce simplifications
that take no account of how the world and people change.
The way Poles saw communism in the 1970s is not the way they see it
now. The Polish Catholic church was in regular dialogue with the
communist authorities, and both worked subtly together at times to
resist Soviet influence. John Paul altered his own views as he
travelled.
Thanks for the article, Maff! I'm engaged in a meat-life discussion about
this very issue with a professional colleague. More ammunition for me,
while he sees his tenuous-at-best position further melt away from him. He's
beginning to see the flaws of his argument. Seriously...the pope, the
President, any agents of either-- indeed, the whole world could spout as
much rhetoric as they wished but change still had to come from within; and
Gorbechev opened the first chink in communism. A country, a culture, a
society won't undergo meaningful or lasting change because of outside
pressure, the urge, the desire and need for change must come from within.
And one other aspect of the Pope-as-the-ender-of-communism theory has a huge
fundemental flaw...communism is still out there. There are still communist
countries and they aren't going away any time soon.
Thanks for digging through the cat box of media sources to find these gems.
*<A litterbox is a metaphor for life. Dig in!>*<
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| User: "maff" |
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| Title: Re: We are rewriting the history of communism's collapse |
09 Apr 2005 08:20:32 PM |
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"LinDaKat" <nobodySPAMTHIS@nowhere.com> wrote in message news:<wcv5e.23553$Fy3.1504824@news20.bellglobal.com>...
"maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1112949991.512077.140420@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
We are rewriting the history of communism's collapse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1454825,00.html
It was Gorbachev, not the Pope, who brought the system down
Jonathan Steele
Friday April 8, 2005
The Guardian
The deaths of the powerful elicit extravagant claims, and many of the
tributes to the man being buried in Rome today have been little short
of grotesque. Dumbing-down comes over obituary writers, and in their
eagerness to define a clear legacy they often produce simplifications
that take no account of how the world and people change.
The way Poles saw communism in the 1970s is not the way they see it
now. The Polish Catholic church was in regular dialogue with the
communist authorities, and both worked subtly together at times to
resist Soviet influence. John Paul altered his own views as he
travelled.
Thanks for the article, Maff! I'm engaged in a meat-life discussion about
this very issue with a professional colleague. More ammunition for me,
while he sees his tenuous-at-best position further melt away from him. He's
beginning to see the flaws of his argument. Seriously...the pope, the
President, any agents of either-- indeed, the whole world could spout as
much rhetoric as they wished but change still had to come from within; and
Gorbechev opened the first chink in communism. A country, a culture, a
society won't undergo meaningful or lasting change because of outside
pressure, the urge, the desire and need for change must come from within.
And one other aspect of the Pope-as-the-ender-of-communism theory has a huge
fundemental flaw...communism is still out there. There are still communist
countries and they aren't going away any time soon.
Thanks for digging through the cat box of media sources to find these gems.
*<A litterbox is a metaphor for life. Dig in!>*<
In Russian Church, Still an Undercurrent of Animosity to the Vatican
and the Pope
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/07/international/worldspecial2/07russia.html
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and ERIN E. ARVEDLUND
Pope John Paul II pope never managed to heal the millennium-long
schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: We are rewriting the history of communism's collapse |
11 Apr 2005 02:31:34 PM |
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On 8 Apr 2005 01:46:31 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote:
We are rewriting the history of communism's collapse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1454825,00.html
It was Gorbachev, not the Pope, who brought the system down
Jonathan Steele
Friday April 8, 2005
The Guardian
The deaths of the powerful elicit extravagant claims, and many of the
tributes to the man being buried in Rome today have been little short
of grotesque. Dumbing-down comes over obituary writers, and in their
eagerness to define a clear legacy they often produce simplifications
that take no account of how the world and people change.
The way Poles saw communism in the 1970s is not the way they see it
now. The Polish Catholic church was in regular dialogue with the
communist authorities, and both worked subtly together at times to
resist Soviet influence. John Paul altered his own views as he
travelled.
So the notion that anti-communism was always a consistent part of his
motivation is off the mark. It was prominent in his early trips to
Poland but less important in his dealings with Latin America. Pacifism
was also a key principle for John Paul, and when it came to preserving
power in his own domain, authoritarianism was his watchword rather
than the protection of freedom.
The retrospectives that draw a line between his first visit home as
Pope in 1979, the rise of Solidarity a year later and the collapse of
the one-party system in 1989 are especially open to question.
They ignore martial law, which stopped Solidarity in its tracks and
emasculated it for most of the 1980s. It was a defeat of enormous
proportions that John Paul could not reverse until the real
power-holders in eastern Europe, the men who ran the Kremlin, changed
their line.
The Pope's 1979 tour, with vast crowds at his open-air masses,
undoubtedly gave Poles a tremendous sense of national revival. It
added an unpredictable factor after decades of periodic crises between
discontented workers, communist leaders who wanted to show their
national credentials by finding a "Polish road to socialism" and
narrow-minded rulers in Moscow.
The Pope's support when workers struck in Gdansk and founded the
Solidarity union as Poland's first independent national organisation
helped it to grow with amazing speed.
But things had changed a year later. Solidarity was split over tactics
and goals. At its 1981 autumn congress, where western reporters were
given full access, delegates fiercely debated priorities: was the key
issue to be workers' demands for better wages and self-management in
their factories or the call for political freedoms that the
intellectuals on the Solidarity bandwagon saw as paramount? Should the
union accept or reject the Communist party's leading role in
government?
All sides agonised over whether and how Moscow would intervene. There
were already strong hints that the Polish army would be used rather
than Soviet tanks. None of us thought a clamp-down could be avoided.
Within weeks we were proved right. The Kremlin got its way with
relative ease. Poland's own communist authorities arrested thousands
of Solidarity's leaders and drove the rest underground.
John Paul's reaction was soft. Armed resistance was not a serious
option, but there were Poles who favoured mass protests, factory
occupations and a campaign of civil disobedience. The Pope
disappointed them. He criticised martial law but warned of bloodshed
and civil war, counselling patience rather than defiance.
After prolonged negotiations with the regime, he made a second visit
to Poland in 1983. Although martial law was lifted a month later, many
Solidarity activists remained in jail for years. The government sat
down to negotiate with Solidarity again only in August 1988, by which
time Mikhail Gorbachev had already launched the drive towards
pluralistic politics in the USSR itself and publicly promised no more
Soviet military interventions in eastern Europe.
The impetus for Gorbachev's reforms was not external pressure from the
west, dissent in eastern Europe or the Pope's calls to respect human
rights, but economic stagnation in the Soviet Union and internal
discontent within the Soviet elite.
The Pope's cautious reaction to martial law was prompted by his firm
belief in non-violence. If it tempered his anti-communism, so did the
high value he put on national pride.
His line on communist Cuba differed sharply from his line on Poland.
He realised that Castro's resistance to US pressures reflected the
feelings of most Cubans. He saw that nationalism and communist rule
went hand in hand in Cuba in a way that they did not in Poland, where
the party was ultimately subordinate to Moscow. In Havana the Pope
mentioned freedom of conscience as a basic right, but his visit
strengthened Castro. His critique of capitalism and global inequality
echoed Castro's and he denounced the US embargo on Cuba.
Nor was John Paul's attack on liberation theology in the 1980s
motivated primarily by the fact that the so-called "option for the
poor" was infused with Marxism. The Pope was worried by other features
too. He felt it was being used to justify violence and leading
Catholic parish priests to support armed struggle by peasants against
repressive landowners and feudal dictatorships.
In Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas toppled the US-backed Somoza
regime by force, three priests became ministers. In El Salvador
priests were often reporters' best conduits to guerrilla commanders,
taking us into remote villages to meet them. In the Philippines some
priests carried guns themselves. "The situation required more than a
human rights group. I went underground and joined the defence forces,"
Father Eddy Balicao, who used to serve in Manila Cathedral, told me in
the mountains of Luzon.
John Paul also opposed liberation theology because he saw priests defy
their bishops and challenge the church's hierarchical structure. Even
while communism still held power in Europe, he had more in common with
it than many of his supporters admit. He recentralised power in the
Vatican and reversed the perestroika of his predecessor-but-two John
XXIII, who had given more say to local dioceses.
With the fall of "international communism", the Vatican was left as
the only authoritarian ideology with global reach. There was no let-up
in the Pope's pressures against dissent, the worst example being his
excommunication of Sri Lanka's Father Tissa Balasuriya in 1997, an
impish figure who questioned the cult of Mary as a docile, submissive
icon and argued that, as a minority religion in Asia, Catholicism had
to be less arrogant towards other faiths.
The Pope could not accept that challenge to the Vatican's absolutism.
So it is fitting that he will be buried in the crypt from which John
XXIII was removed, symbolically marking the primacy of Wojtyla's
conservative era over the liberal hopes of an earlier generation.
· Jonathan Steele reported from Poland, the Soviet Union and Latin
America in the 1970s and 1980s
j.steele@guardian.co.uk
© 2005 Guardian Newspapers
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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