The Waning of the West: an Inconvenient Truism: The Political Philosophy of a Conscientious Dissenter

By Peter J. Sandys

The Waning of the West: An Inconvenient Truism offers a comprehensive, geopolitical and philosophical commentary on global politics following the Cold War. Author Peter J. Sandys presents a series of extensive analyses on social and political movements and what kinds of challenges face the West in the twenty-first century.

 

Sandys gives what he describes as a politically incorrect examination of political philosophy and the socialist transformation of the West. He’s critical of the present Western political arrangement and, after analyzing the different systems, offers recommendations as to the methods of solving the readily apparent impasse. Topics include:

 

the screenplay of the Velvet Revolution; European federalism under German leadership; Russia’s newly found old identity; a critique of democracy; a critique of socialism; a critique of modern conservatism; and deteriorating social values.

 

The Waning of the West: An Inconvenient Truism delivers Sandys’ thoughts on the rejection of liberal democracy and the condemnation of the Western elite. It goes on to outline a new system termed “the essential option” that has the manners, values, and qualities associated with meritorious aristocracy and is intended to gently steer Western culture and politics onto a more sustainable course.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Feb 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781480874442

Peter J. Sandys

Peter J. Sandys was born and brought up in Hungary, where he was briefly imprisoned for attempting to escape from the country in 1963. After rehabilitation, graduating from technical high school, and finishing military service, he earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Budapest. Following his successful defection to the West, he settled in the United States and earned a master’s degree in business administration from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and a doctoral degree in international business from the University of California. He held various engineering and project management positions, mostly in the aerospace industry, and published The Waning of the West: An Inconvenient Truism. Retired, he has one daughter and lives in Germany.

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Copyright © 2019 Peter J. Sandys.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-7443-5 (sc)

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Archway Publishing rev. date: 2/11/2019

Nothing lifts up more than humility; nothing repels more than arrogance.

The truth only hampers compromising, but compromising always conceals the truth.

To Emily and Eva

CONTENTS

PREFACE

1.   THE SCREENPLAY OF THE VELVET REVOLUTION

Why Are the Perpetrators Still Among Us?

The Moral Dilemma: the Price of the Peaceful Political Transition

2.   THE WESTERN POLITICAL REALIGNMENT

The West’s Move to the Left

The New American Reality: Hesitation and Loss of Purpose

Israel’s Role in the Reshaping the World: the American–Israeli Alliance

The Eutopian Dream

The Specter of Separatism and Disintegration Haunting Europe

The Homogenization of the totalitarian Liberal Democracies

The Changing Western intervention Concepts

3.   EUROPEAN FEDERALISM UNDER GERMAN LEADERSHIP

The Ever-Present German Question

Binding Germany to Europe: the German Perspective

Europe’s Economic Crisis: A New Aspect of the German Problem

The Future Is Fraught With German Political Alternatives

German Leadership: Loss of National Sovereignty, Subjugation to the Supranational State

The German Destiny in European Affairs

4.   RUSSIA’S NEWLY FOUND OLD IDENTITY

Russian National Identity

The Effect of foreign Elements On the Russian and Soviet Empires

The Bolshevik Retardation of Russian Society

When Did the Soviet Union Truly Disappear?

1993–99: A Democratic Nightmare

Continuing Down the Once Lost Russian Liberal-Conservative Road

The Distortion of Culture and the Russian Conservative Mind

The Fear of the Russian Alternative: the Antagonistic West

5.   CHINA RISING

Building Socialism With Chinese Characteristics

China’s Hybrid Economy

No Big Bang

The Policy of the Central Government

China Rising—America Resisting

The Revisionist Danger

Exploiting the Problem of Taiwan

The Perils of Pluralism: Sugarcoated Threats

The China–Russia Relationship: Not Allies Just Yet

6.   POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Ethical Foundations

Methodological Issues

Western Political Schools of Thought

Desires and Aspirations

On Difference and Equality

Diversity Or Uniformity

The Search for Social Justice and the Rise of the Victim intimidator

Existentialism Without Context

The Left–Right Fallacy: A totalitarian Tactic

The Public Position: Within the infinite Range of Possibilities

Modern Western Nihilism

False Freedom, Relativism, and Nihilism

The Reformation: the Deformation of A Unifying Western Ideology, the Ideology of Revolutions

7.   A CRITIQUE OF DEMOCRACY

Definition of Democracy and the Democratic Problem

Ethics and Representation

The Applied History of Democracy

Disaffection and Decontextualization

Opinions, Majorities, and Other inherent Defects

Reproduction of Democracy: the Ultimate Trick

The Election Scam: Voting for the Devil We Know

Democracy Is Only A Single Component of Our Lives

Political Parties: Campaign Financing

Irrational Voters—Inefficient System

Oppression By the Majority: Mob Rule

Anxiety, Greed, Civic indifference, and the Perils of Democratic Dictatorship

Liberty (Freedom) Vs. Equality (Democracy)

Democratic Uniformity Leading to totalitarianism

Conclusion

8.   A CRITIQUE OF MODERN LIBERALISM

The Definition of Liberalism

Modern Liberalism and the False Idea of Liberty

The Age of Reason: the Birth of Philosophical Liberalism

Rational Liberalism and the Death of Nations

The American Liberal Left: Transformation From Classical Centrist to Modern (Leftist) Liberalism

The Liberal Metamorphosis of the West: Transformation From Classical Liberalism to Liberal Conservatism

The Emergence of Neoliberalism

The Struggle of Classical Old-School Liberalism in the Twentieth Century

Economic and Corrupted Neoliberalism

Neoliberal Class Project: Globalization

Opposing Neoliberalism

Liberal Democracy: the Sum of Hypocrisies

Western Liberal Machinations Around the World

Officially Endorsed Liberal Conspiracy theories Vs. the Disapproved Truth

9.   A CRITIQUE OF SOCIALISM

Central Ownership and the Redistribution of Resources

The Socialists’ Moral Critique of Capitalism

Starting With the French Revolution

The Definition of Horror: totalitarian Socialism

Totalitarian Logic Disguised As Oxymoron

The Second Generation of Antisocialist Critics

Nietzsche’s Acerbic Critique of Socialism

I.       The forerunners of Socialism

II.      the Grandfather of Socialist Thought: Christianity

III.    the Grandmother of Socialist Thought: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Eighteenth Century

IV.     he Birth of Socialism

V.      Nietzsche’s Critique of Socialist Idealism

VI.     Nietzsche’s Critique of Socialism As A Politics of Revenge

VII.   Categorizing Nietzsche’s Critique of Socialism: Where Nietzsche’s Critique Does Not Fit

VIII.  Joining Nietzsche’s View of Human Nature With Freud

IX.     Nietzsche and Oakeshott Against Rationalism in Politics

X.     Nietzsche’s Vital Socialism With Human Rights to the Proletariat

Socialism and the Proletariat

10. A CRITIQUE OF MODERN CONSERVATISM

American intellectual Conservatism

The Definition of Conservatism

The Perverted Conservatism of America

The Dead-End Street of Modern Conservatism

Who Still Speaks for Conservatism?

11. THE GERMAN DREAM COMING TRUE: THE SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION OF THE WEST

Prussian–German Socialism and Anglo-Saxon Liberalism

The Path From Authoritative Prussian–German Socialism to National Socialism

National Socialism Is A Natural Outgrowth of Socialism

Socialist Economy Leading to Terror

German Socialist Domination and the European Union

Western Political Correctness: Euphemism With Attitude

12. WESTERN ECONOMIC CHANGES

Capitalism, the Corporate State, and State Capitalism: the First Signs of the Social Market Economy

Between Ideologies: the Road toward the Social Market Economy

I.     The Social Market Economy As the Third Way

II.    Christian Social Doctrines

III.   Ethical Goals of the Social Market Economy

IV.   The Concept and Misuse of Subsidiarity

V.     Rules for the Market: Reversed Social Market

VI.   Social Security

VII.  Compulsory insurance

The Social Market Economy and Its Future in Eastern Europe

Russia and the Market Economy

Attempted Reconciliation: Economic Dynamics and the Social Market Economy

Globalization and Migration

I.     Globalization and Its Effect On the Home Base

II.    Globalism’s Failed Promise and Its War On the Nation-State

Free Trade’s Hidden Shackles

The Supranational Corporations and their Ignorance of Society

The False Fetish of Economic Growth

I.     Undermining the Foundations

II.    Confused Thinking

III.   Conclusion

13. THE CRUMBLING OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS AND THE PROLETARIANIZATION OF SOCIETY

The Historical Appearance of the Middle Class

Middle-Class Ideology: Outlook and Values

The Middle Class Under Attack: Trials, Tribulations, and Decline

The Destruction of the Middle-Class Ideology

Petit Bourgeois Rising

A New Performing and Achieving Ideology Is Needed

The New Proletarianization of the West

14. DETERIORATING SOCIAL VALUES

Education

Economic and Social Life Without Objective Truth

The Decline of Morality in Western Society

I.     Judeo-Christian Values Vs. Western Values

II.    Relative Morality Or Absolute Moral Standards?

III.   Right Or Wrong?

Western Values Imposed On Eastern Europe

The Problems of Immigration: Multiculturalism Creates Multiple Problems

Principles of Media Criticism

What Happened to the West? the False Faith in Progress

15.   THE DECAY OF CULTURE, ARTS, SPORTS, AND ENVIRONMENT

Internal Cohesion

Patriotism

Fighting Spirit

Repudiation of the Past: the New Culture of Imposed Arts

Cultural Degeneration: A Critique of Contemporary Art

I.       Spirit of the Renaissance

II.      From Impressionism to Expressionism

III.     Expressionist Reaction Sets In

IV.     Modernism: Schisms in Art

V.      the Placing of Modern Art

VI.    Cult of the Ugly

i       New Standard of Values: Mirroring the

Rejection of Moral Standards

ii.    Symbols in Art

iii.   The Ugliness, themes, and Death of Modernism

iv.   Themes of Postmodernism

VII.   The Future of Art: Not Without Moral Renewal

Modern Music: Akin to Modern Art

I.       Perverting Opera

II.      Classical Music Means Beauty

Modern Sport: Professionalism, Entertainment, and Business

I.       Amateurism in Sports

Environment: Climate Change Caused By Population Growth

16.   THE CULTURAL ABDICATION AND INTELLECTUAL ARROGANCE OF THE WESTERN ELITE

The Persistence of Nationalism

The Western Elite Against the Nation-State

The Death of Nations, the Death of Freedom

War On the Middle Class

The War On Terror

Liberal Democracy: the Terror Ideology of the West

Man, Men, and Misanthropy

17.   WESTERN RENEWAL PHILOSOPHY: CONSERVATISM AND SUBSIDIARITY

Conservatism As Part of the Western Renewal

The Western Renewer: the New Conservative

Remembering the Old Liberals

Distributism: the Subsidiarist Alternative to

Socialism and Plutocracy

18.   PROPOSAL FOR THE FUTURE: THE ESSENTIAL OPTION

Exploring Alternative Methods

Duality Vs. Absolutes

The Essential Option

I.        Elements of the Anglo-American System

II.       Elements of the Franco-German System

III.      Elements of the Russian System

Rebuilding the West Based On the Essential Option

I.        Political Philosophy of the Western Renewal: the Sandys Doctrine

II.       Hierarchical System of Government

III.      National-Conservative Ideology

IV.      Building On the Principle of Subsidiarity

V.       Real Social Market Economy Based On incentives

VI.      Foreign Policy Based On National interest, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination

VII.     Leadership Principles Based On Proven Merit, Not On Electioneering

VIII.   Supporting forgiveness, Distinction, Achievement, and Aspiration

IX.      Overcoming Evil With Grace, integrity, Morality, and Virtue

X.       Overcoming Angry Politics By Rebuilding Trust

XI.     Education: Returning to the Humanities and Recognizing the individual

XII.     Controlled Immigration Based On National interest, Merit, and Employment Opportunities

XIII.   Judiciary: Upholding the National Law

XIV.   Environment: Protecting From Uncontrolled Population Growth

XV.    Social Policy: Supporting the Return to Meritocracy

XVI.   Self-Limitation: Emphasizing Moral Justice instead of Social Justice

XVII.  High Culture Supported By the Meritorious Elite of the Hierarchical System

19.   REFLECTING ON THE FORMS OF GOVERNMENT—ARS POLITICA

Good Government, Good Society

Russia and Western Europe: Proposal for Eastern Europe

The Coming of the Postsecular Age

Ars Politica

The Politics of Richard Nixon

Epilogue

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ENDNOTES

PREFACE

Not unlike many people of my age, I hated growing up in a communist country. Born in Hungary in 1947, my early years were in all likelihood influenced by the trauma of living in a paranoid, closed society. The pathologically evil government and, above all, the omnipresent Communist Party took advantage of their control of the minds, media, and educational institutions and exercised an absolute monopoly over command of the youth.

My parents, born and raised in Hungary around the First World War, came from bourgeois families. After 1945, Hungary’s bourgeois middle-class citizens (rather a minority in that country at the time) had their properties confiscated, nationalized, and flatly appropriated without any compensation. Some of them were expelled from their homes and sent to live like peasants in the countryside, following a similar justification to that which the Khmer Rouge used in Cambodia a few decades later.

The situation of the dispossessed and displaced German refugees after 1945 and the hardships they endured while being expelled from their homes in areas that today are the Czech Republic, Poland, and Russia to the parts of Germany occupied by the United States, Great Britain, and France, were horrible. However, I consider them to be the lucky ones; they could at least leave and start new, meaningful, and useful lives. The natives had to stay and rot under the Soviet/Bolshevist rule, eking out a living for many lost decades to come while not only being brutalized and oppressed but also having their very lives taken away from them.

I still remember traveling in cattle cars with primitive wooden benches and no toilet facilities. My father could give me only handmade small wooden toys for Christmas that I still have and cherish as treasures. I still remember being sick at home sometime in the 1950s and how happy my parents were when they could get me a lemon (my father was able to obtain the fruit from a good-hearted Soviet officer who probably also had his own children somewhere).

Unlike in Western Europe, there was no Marshall Plan in the socialist countries to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure and ruined cities, towns, and industries to start providing the population with the basic necessities of life again. The bombed-out and completely leveled cities that had been exposed to the vicious fighting and had become the victims of brutal successive occupations by Germans and Soviets were stripped bare of whatever value they once possessed. Everything had to be rebuilt from ground zero, from nothing, with nothing, and without any capital. Then came the punishment: the scraped-together products had to be shipped to the Soviet Union as war compensation. The people could not even enjoy even real weekends, and Saturday was a full working day. All too often, rationing was a cover-up for shortages, and even coupons did not guarantee a purchase. That was life in Soviet-occupied Hungary in the 1940s and ’50s.

An entire population of ten million people was not given proper wages but only small allowances, the kind one gives to children, except for the privileged class who occupied leading positions in the party and administration. Monthly salaries in postwar Hungary were in the range of 400 Hungarian forints. On the black market, one dollar was worth at least one hundred Forints. Thus, monthly earnings were worth about three to ten dollars. My mother made four dollars per month; my father made about eight dollars—and we were the lucky ones.

In Hungary, as in the other Soviet-occupied Eastern European socialist countries, the intimidated, oppressed, and exploited people lived like this for decades.

However, I, as a young, impressionable, and enthusiastic boy, was taken by my country’s call at first and wanted to be a good soldier—a real patriot. This unquestioning enthusiasm—one could say blind fanaticism—that is typical of young boys the world over lasted until I reached about fourteen or fifteen years of age. Then, rather inconspicuously, as if I had been touched by a magic wand slowly lifting the veil from my eyes and giving me the light to see, my brain cells connected, and I started to think. I wanted to start asking questions, but whom could I have asked? Could it be that even my parents would not tell me the truth?

The situation was frustrating; I was getting more and more desperate, like a person drowning in a storm. There were more and more questions and more and more confused thoughts. Could it be that I had been lied to?

Finally I ran away—or, rather, tried to run. I was fifteen years old when caught very near the Austrian border and put in jail—in three different prisons, to be exact: first a military prison of the frontier guard troops, followed by a regular prison under police surveillance, and then, finally, a juvenile detention camp. The charge was the attempt of forbidden border crossing, an anathema to the ruling Communists, who would consider any act of trying to leave the dictatorship of the proletariat as outright treason. I was released only due to the direct intervention of one of my mother’s work colleagues—a woman whose family had been in the communist movement long before the war and who therefore enjoyed all the special privileges of the ruling Communists. Only because of such fortuitously high-level protection obtained by my desperate mother was I released without any further charges. Still, I had to present myself periodically to the Communist authorities for personal conversation for years to come.

I quickly learned that I had to play the game—their game—if I wanted to survive. I had no other choice, as I was locked in a prison—a country-size jail this time. Soviet Bloc countries were, in fact, large prison camps disguised as people’s republics. As in any prison, inmates of the Bloc could not leave at will. There were only a few ways of crossing the border that did not involve risk of capture, injury, or even death. Nevertheless, I vowed then and there to leave the workers’ paradise, should the opportunity ever arise.

The outlook was not good. The Communist rule seemed assured as long as the Soviet occupation continued and no one harbored realistic hopes about the Soviets leaving voluntarily.

Accordingly, I pretended to be a passive believer just like everybody else—a nominal and silent follower of their socialist system. But my hatred of communism grew with time. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, socialism’s vocabulary, words, phrases, definitions, and repertory of tools, procedures, practices, and mannerisms were etched in my brain. Party functionaries spoke as if playing back a tape from a tape deck inside their skull; every wicked deed was done for the sake of world peace. The source of all virtue was the Soviet man; the source of all evil was the imperialist oppressor. Likewise, good people were progressive; bad people were reactionary.

After graduating from technical high school, I was accepted to engineering college, which automatically meant I needed to serve in the army first. Only after completing army reserve officer school could I begin my studies at the technical university—while keeping one and only one goal in mind: getting away from here, away from this system, away from this life.

Then, after years of careful planning and preparation, I was able to escape in 1972, exactly five days after receiving my engineering diploma. I legally crossed the Hungarian border to Romania and was then illegally able to continue to Yugoslavia and finally to Italy, where, without a valid passport, they put me in one of their refugee camps. The West maintained these camps for those lucky escapees who could get through the Iron Curtain one way or another.

In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, thousands of refugees from the Eastern Bloc communist states called the three Italian towns of Padriciano, Capua, and Latina home for months as they waited to be processed. I was housed in a former World War II prisoner of war camp just outside of Capua, the worst camp of the three. Breakfast consisted of bread and black coffee, and lunch was a plate of spaghetti or pastasciutta (a traditional Italian pasta dish) every day. There were occasional incidents with the Italian residents of Capua getting into fights with refugees who illegally visited the town, but nothing too serious. Many of the refugees were a source of cheap manual labor for local farms, where many people picked watermelons for hours and either got the payment that was promised to them or did not. Many times the compensation consisted of a big sandwich and a bottle of Coca-Cola, which was a rare treat after months of eating nothing but spaghetti.

I was free to stay in these facilities under police guard, technically not allowed to work or leave the compound, delivered to the whims and grace of unknown and unseen bureaucrats somewhere who could care less about strange foreigners. We were these strange foreigners—we, the refugees coming from the Eastern European socialist countries. Welcome to the West.

West? What kind of West was this? Was it the enemy of communism? The democratic countries enjoying freedom and offering refuge to the few who could get away from the dictatorship of the proletariat? I just had to wait and see.

And so I did. I had to endure eight months of humiliation, living as a stateless person under prison-like conditions while followers of the Italian Socialist and Communist Parties marched and demonstrated under my window. They were free to do that in their democratic and open country, but I was not. They were free to protest against the capitalist West, and they were free to support the socialist and communist parties from whose brothers and criminal accessories I had just escaped. And I had to watch them silently.

While the real West—the Free World, the democracies—ignored us Eastern Europeans fleeing from Soviet-occupied countries, some private citizens, civic organizations, members of the clergy, and even sympathetic police officers and carabinieri tried to help in any way they could. And I will never forget their understanding, sympathy, support, and courage.

Yes, they needed courage to help us, fellow Europeans, refugees from the communist East, in the free, liberal, and democratic Western European countries in 1972–73. Their help was a statement—an unofficial, subtle political protest of the right helping the escapees from socialism.

Therefore, I duly noted that the official liberal, if not already socialist, West was silent, disinterested, ignorant, and, above all, hypocritical—the characteristic that I find to this day the most distinctive attribute of liberal democracy.

When I finally arrived in the United States in May 1973, I was incredibly thankful, inspired, driven, and thinking that socialism, in both its Eastern and Western European forms, was forever behind me. How little I knew.

The United States was a new country and new world for me, with a new language, new culture, and new life—but that much one could have expected.

Richard Nixon had already been elected to the presidency by a landslide for a second term. The Watergate protests were at their peak. I could not understand it: Wasn’t the West, we, fighting the most abominably wicked political force on the planet? Communism crippled the lives of my fellows, ruined the lives of my parents, and destroyed the lives of generations. Communism obstructed the private lives and personal development of at least two generations in Central Europe (and perhaps four in Russia) by restricting access to what could be read, listened to, and discussed, and where one could live or travel. Communism subjected the people of Hungary to terror-initiated poverty that required bartering ability and exceptional vigilance (unknown in the West) just to obtain simple household goods. Communism made them live on monthly allowances of ten to fifteen dollars. It moreover impaired them by preventing any chance of advancement in many professions without membership in the Communist Party.

American students did not know or care about any of this, and when I went back to college to study business administration, my liberal professors did not want to know. They not only believed that socialism or communism stood for a new era in the development of humanity and that interference with them was unacceptable, but they also taught their students accordingly.

I remember the protesters in New York chanting that Nixon was worse than Hitler. This ridiculous act was the last straw. To me, a naive newcomer from the East, Nixon was the champion of trying to stop communism in Vietnam, and I considered American intervention to be a heroic act by a great power that I hoped would halt the spread of Bolshevism around the world.

The brainwashing performed by socialist apologists in the United States was universal at the time, and only people on the right were bold enough to say that the pro-Soviet permissiveness was based on idealistic desires rather than fact. As always, the liberals were like drunken ropewalkers on a worn-out cord fastened between two swaying poles.

How could it happen that in the United States, a supposedly free and democratic country, the media, the academia, and a significant part of the intelligentsia had all fallen under the influence of the sly spell of socialism? Their deliberate indifference toward the malevolence, brutality, and deception of the Soviet system made me take a second look at other generally accepted ideas (i.e., apologies) of Western liberal thinkers.

I discovered that they praised the French Revolution, which started the change of direction of Western civilization (see my comments later), just as it had been in the textbooks I read in Soviet-occupied Hungary.

I discovered that, just as in the of Hungarian People’s Republic, the Spanish Civil War was always described in one-sided, biased, and simplistic terms, Franco being all black, fascist, and revisionist, and the Republicans all white, democratic, and progressive.

I discovered that the rise of communism in Hungary (and in Germany) after the First World War was artfully and purposely smoothed over, as if the Hungarian (or German) Communists were the morally upright heroes opposing the all-bad dark forces of the fascist gangs.

I discovered that the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the second successful communist takeover in the world after the Russian Revolution in 1917, was merely a rather neutral footnote in the history books. The Communist misrule, which caused lawlessness, political anarchy, economic chaos, and enormous suffering in the newly defeated, truncated, and humiliated Hungary, received only some ignorant, apologetic leftist remarks. Although it had a consequential catastrophic aftereffect not only on that country but also on Germany (with the resulting rise of National Socialism there) and, indirectly, the world, this disastrous Communist dictatorship remained hushed up.

I discovered that the Polish-Soviet war of 1920—in which the newly reconstituted, if still quixotic and vengeful, Poland spectacularly stopped and defeated the Red Army, thus blocking the spread of communism westward and arresting Trotsky’s goal of world revolution—had been erased from America’s historical memory.

I discovered that the flimsy articles and airy comments by the American sovietologists on the Soviet Union misrepresented the forced and dubious connection between the Soviet Union and the conquered and subjugated nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

I discovered the Left’s effort to hush up the fact that were it not for Stalin’s understanding with Hitler manifested in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, possibly the Second World War would not have begun.

I discovered that to get accepted in sophisticated intellectual circles in America, one had to accede to a substantial amount of the politically correct misconceptions that I knew were wrong and profess disinterest in any historical inquiry that did not correspond to an agenda friendly to the Left. Additionally, the power of money combined with the desire to get accepted, societal pressure, and political correctness lured superb authors to concede to the Left. Liberal writers, journalists, and professors stamped in the public’s head their doctored version of European history.

I discovered that the West met any anticommunist action with systematic rejection. The media, of course, demonized the Chilean coup d’état by General Pinochet that prevented a second Cuba in Latin America by the Soviet-supported socialist government of the Marxist Salvador Allende. The media deprecated the Argentine military’s desperate fight against the Maoist guerillas terrorizing South America in the 1970s or any force fighting Bolshevism and gave lopsided, biased, and manipulated news about the facts; it was not unlike the media coverage of the Vietnam War. Who remembers today the Marxist Tupamaros guerrillas or the Montoneros mercilessly gunning down people on the streets of Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, or Brazil? All these terrorists have become martyrs brutally killed by the military dictatorships, while the indiscriminate killings perpetrated by the communist-supported terror brigades to bring about the total collapse of society have been forgotten.

I noted with incredulity and disgust that even Gerald Ford, the Republican president of the United States, claimed that the People’s Republic of Poland was not dominated by the Soviet Union.

I noted when Time magazine published a curiously sympathetic article about János Kádár, the Communist ruler of Hungary since the people’s uprising there in 1956, claiming that his goulash communism was so successful and popular that he could probably even be elected—provided there were free elections there.

The only people who unequivocally proclaimed that the Evil Empire was indeed evil were on the conservative right.

As years went by and my political and philosophical horizons broadened, I also realized that, although it is not exactly what I had expected from it, the most acceptable and persuasive arguments about reality also came from the right. I also discovered, albeit rather slowly, that to be intellectually a liberal in this world, one needed only to ignore facts, logic, and reason.

What I had not expected, however, was an early political awakening, maturing, or sobering up after only a relatively short time. This process was a sort of political enlightenment that, after the long and painful experience gained in the socialist East and burned indelibly into my brain, seemed rather a surprisingly recognizable revelation to me even then. I was quite aware, sensitive, conditioned, or well trained to pick up any suspicious sign of either latent or apparent similarity with the socialist East in the free and democratic West. Such signs included the use of the media for official propaganda, political double-talk, manipulation of the masses, confusing and misleading reasoning, corruption, hypocrisy, etc.

About thirty-five years ago, I first put together some notes analyzing the world’s most critical political issues of the time, at least from my perspective. It is striking how much of these matters have changed since my thoughts were first put down on paper in 1982. Not only did the Eastern Bloc disappear in its entirety with the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, et al., but also a seemingly complete turnaround took place in the political ideologies of the onetime adversaries, East and West. For someone like me, who rose against the Soviet system, it was stupefying to see the 180-degree turn the world has taken since the 1980s.

The West has since openly adopted a left-leaning liberal, mainly socialist, philosophy, hoping to stem the tide of the upward-moving, fast-developing, non-Western, and largely nondemocratic nations by spreading democracy around the world. At the same time, the West kept westernizing, liberalizing, and democratizing (meaning socializing) former European dictatorships like Spain, Portugal, and the formerly socialist countries that had not been progressive leftist in the Western sense of the term.

However, the previously socialist Eastern European countries are still searching for their national identity, just like Russia, which, after a rather painful and desperate attempt at Western democracy, started down its original Russian-liberal-conservative path, which was interrupted in 1917. Meanwhile, China, having adopted state-controlled capitalism as its chosen economic system while retaining one-party rule Singapore-style, already has the second largest economy in the world and is striving to become the world’s leading power—as it had been before. None of these countries, including India, Brazil, and South Africa, is actually left-liberal socialist in the Western sense. Politically they are, to a certain extent, nationalist; economically they are pursuing their very own form of state-controlled capitalism, which is the most important single element they took from the West.

Has the Western world turned on itself? By condemning and even physically attacking countries to promote, spread, or push democracy as a political system around the globe and Jacobin definitions of human rights, the West identifies with the international left today. Russia, after the catastrophic experience with Bolshevism, is slowly reasserting her historic role as leader of the international right. To all outward appearances, this seems to be a historic reversal, but is it really that? Isn’t it, in fact, only the latest political, philosophical and historical realignment by the old precepts? After all, the West is the birthplace of liberalism, socialism, leftist movements, and revolutions. And where is the home of morality-based conservatism and religion-supported self-identity if not in the East?

As the above developments show, as soon as the Soviet danger, the Bolshevik alternative to the West, was over, the once conservative, anti-Communist, capitalistic West of the Cold War period quickly changed into a left-leaning, modern-liberal, and socialistic bloc both politically and morally. By the same token, the once communist East became more identity conscious and capitalistic while remaining illiberal and conservative.

Who would have thought this in the middle of the Cold War, thirty-five years ago? Does the seeming unpredictability of these changes tell us it is futile to pretend we can foretell anything real and tangible that could happen in the future?

I wanted to find the reasons and correlations of the systemic changes first in the Soviet Union, then in Central Eastern Europe, and finally in the West. The reader will see that my representation of the events differs in many respects from what the media typically reports on the subject. The significant developments, such as wars, revolutions, and major crises, do not always take place in reality as the newspapers and other media would have readers and viewers believe. What happens backstage is different from what the audience is presented.

The above applies in particular to recent times concerning the upheavals after the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, the so-called Arab Spring in North Africa, the Ukrainian developments, or the War on Terror in the Middle East. Relevant facts do not come to the fore, because the framers of politics, for whatever reasons or interests, do not want them to.

It has been a commonly held and eagerly disseminated opinion of the Western liberal media that the Left is somehow good and the Right is bad. This thread does not allow enough characters to expose the folly of this opinion.

But the sad legacy of two world wars, fascist and communist dictatorships, socialist revolutions, and antirevolutionary uprisings, followed by a left-liberal final assault, is that the Western bourgeoisie has massively weakened and the middle class has practically disintegrated.

The cultural vacuum was filled with mediocre, flighty, and preconceived ideas that pointed almost categorically to the Left in the 1960s. These partly antidemocratic and totalitarian ideologies led to political radicalism. It was not surprising when Oskar Lafontaine, at the time in the leadership of the West German Social Democratic Party (SDP), was against German reunification, arguably less because of the cost than out of sympathy for the former socialist system.

It cannot simply be that every leftist provocation is considered fair and just but any hint of mildly critical centrist ideas is branded extremist. No one with a modicum of historical consciousness can remain unmoved when cultural cities like Berlin, London, Paris, Athens, Stockholm, Hamburg, or Vienna are ignited, burned, and looted by black-clad thugs today. And this happens in the great cities of the European Union pretending to be the flag bearers of Western civilization.

While cars burn day and night during the demonstrations, there is massive violence against police officers, who are regarded as attempted murderers. Meanwhile, violent leftist criminals do not hesitate to attack police stations. This state of affairs is already close to the sort of civil war that is known only in Afghanistan or Iraq—and some still rant about the extreme danger to the democratic state coming from the right’s corner.

The supposedly right-wing and purportedly nationalistic and conservative perpetrators calling themselves skinheads are the work of a handful of bewildered, confused, sad, and disoriented creatures whose violent acts can be counted on the fingers of one hand in comparison with the massive acts of terrorism by the Left.

The leftists, however, with their consistent and successful marching through and taking over the Western state institutions since 1968, have changed the entire political and cultural landscape of the Western world. They made the United States a shadow of its previous self and reduced Europe from a postwar international success story to a sick and socialist EUtopia. Lo and behold, their helpers and supporters even warn that, by the old cry Stop, thief! the danger is coming from the right.

Whoever orchestrated this absurd theater did it at the expense of Western society, which has already lost to a large extent.

I worry about the breakdown of civil society in the West caused by individual rights not being paired with personal responsibility. The growing culture of entitlements has convinced Westerners that failure is not their fault but is rather the fault of the political-economic system. Once charity becomes an entitlement, the stigma of living on charity disappears. As a result, entitlement costs outpace government resources, resulting in enormous debts for future generations. In the meantime, the political leaders of the West kick the can down the road to win elections. Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, believing that all problems are solvable by good government.

I could not decide for a long time if I should write down some events occurring in my lifetime, the underlying concepts behind them explained with a few of my thoughts. There were many reasons for this hesitation; the main one for going ahead was my ever-strengthening notion that after Europe lost its thousand-year hegemony over the world, the entirety of Western civilization began following in its path.

The Age of the West is ever so slowly but inexorably coming to close, and the new world will need new people to replace the enervated ones of the old. Even if a United States of Europe would ever come into being (although I see no danger of it ever happening), its role would still be similar to that of Spain’s within Europe: old brilliance, past power, and honorary glory, but without any real authority, strength, or influence.

It is like when a senile old man is revered for his age.

Any dissenter today who insists on upholding the prevailing law is a natural enemy in the eyes of the rulers. With all the energy at the rulers’ command, he will be denounced and defamed, charged and sued. Thoughts are not free in the West today but are dangerous. Words could become actions; therefore, any arguing is to be avoided. The characteristic signs of a totalitarian state are the persecution of certain tendencies, the harassment of certain attitudes, and the relentless assault on certain philosophies of life. The dehumanization of the opponents appears to be the highest concern; the rivals’ motives are represented as illegitimate. The intentions of the antagonist are outrageous, disgraceful, and infamous; the official causes are sacrosanct, perfect, and inviolable. The purpose does not sanctify the means, but the utilized means desecrate the purpose. As soon as any form of inimical act is contemplated, the affair immediately exposes itself as fascist—and thus automatically worth the fight. And then ideological ditches will rapidly become genuine graves.

Such is the Western world today.

Peter J. Sandys

Memmingen, Germany

January 2017

1

THE SCREENPLAY OF THE VELVET REVOLUTION

D uring the Cold War (1948–91), there were two poles of this world: the West, led by a so-called superpower, the United States; and the East, which was one superpower, the Soviet Union.

The United States–led West also included the modern, industrialized, and most democratic countries of Western Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Japan. The East, other than the Soviet Union itself, nominally included the semi-industrialized Eastern European socialist countries, as well as China, Vietnam, and North Korea.

The so-called nonaligned nations, such as Yugoslavia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Ghana, were, in reality, third-world, nondemocratic, mostly less-developed countries.¹

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Warsaw Pact, and its member countries, the East, or left, pole ceased to exist as such. The total economic and political collapse of it was also a significant tectonic shift—a social implosion—that was rapid in its finality. It was not only a moral shock but also a philosophically profound one that the world had not experienced for many years.

The socioeconomic and political breakdown created an ideological vacuum that has been reshaping and reforming our world ever since. This real cataclysm is similar to volcanic eruptions, whereby existing social formations disappear only to reappear a few years later—or at least this was the popular theory during the early 1990s.

WHY ARE THE PERPETRATORS STILL AMONG US?

What would the people and the media in the West have said if the victors of the Second World War had permitted the political elite of the Nazi regime, the war criminals, to continue functioning unpunished—even to keep their leading positions in postwar German society? Alternatively, what if they had been given the opportunity not only to have and distribute the Jews’ confiscated property among themselves but also to declare them openly as their private assets?

The above assumption would have outraged and disgusted everyone indeed. For this reason—and, of course, because of the determination and resoluteness of the wartime allies—it would never have become a reality.

Nevertheless, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, such absurdities happened in the formerly Communist countries. The evidence that the Soviet system was also based on a monstrous ideology (to which millions of people fell victim) will not diminish the exceptional brutality of the Nazi crimes. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and despite the opening of the archives, one can still hardly find any exhaustive and detailed examination of the Red version of mass murders committed against innocent people in so many countries. Dealing with the past is evidently a subject not to be tinkered with in Russia, in the Commonwealth of Independent States, or in the former Eastern European satellite countries.

The liquidation of innocent people who had been declared enemies of the (Communist) state, or enemies of the people, was the natural governing method of the Soviet regimes. The apparent goal was to intimidate and terrorize the population for the sake of keeping it in constant fear. Even members of the ruling Communist Party were not spared from the periodic purges, and thousands of them paid for their illusions with their lives. Power struggles and political infighting at the highest levels of the party hierarchy often ended with the liquidation of the opponent. The number of victims of the Communist terrors amounts to several million. Not many prisoners survived their detention in the penal camps, the gulags, which constituted a network in the entire area of the former Soviet Union and remained in existence in various forms until the collapse of the system.

The perpetrators of the Red crimes—many of whom enjoy retirement today—not only are able to live unmolested in the successor states but can also even occupy higher political offices, as if nothing happened or as if all that happened was only a nightmare.

No scrutiny has taken place in any of the countries involved after the supposed political change or transition either to punish the perpetrators and their auxiliaries or even to discover their identities.

Direct outside pressure by the victorious Allies forced the denazification process in Germany after the war, but who could or should have objectively conducted these post-Communist investigations in Eastern Europe? Above all, the Communist powers with their governments, administrations, courts, political police, and intelligence apparatuses carried out the transition from dictatorship to democracy—or at least they did not foil the plot by force in most of the states.

Since the Communist Party secretaries of all political organizations, regional administrations, and even business firms had to work together with the state security services, it becomes quite apparent what a vast circle and what a high percentage of the population comprised the perpetrators in the society. Virtually the entire elite of the inhumane system was involved in the functional machinery of the state. About every tenth worker or employee was an informant of the state security services.

So this society, with its tightly meshed security network, organized the transition of the political systems. Given that each country has only one nation, and each population remains almost identical before and after the day of transition, it goes without saying that neither the Russians nor the Czechs nor the Hungarians had a fundamental interest in dealing with the past. One could not expect from them a policy of self-destruction or self-cleaning.

In the Soviet Union, there was no politically unblemished and still-functioning organization, or strong opposition, that could have undertaken the investigation of the Red crimes. Interestingly, such an effort did not take place even in the Eastern European countries where there were some stronger groupings of political dissidents.

All this implies that a backdoor, undisclosed screenplay—a master plan—arranged the peaceful political transition in the form of a gently rolling Velvet Revolution, which also stipulated that awkward questions about the political crimes of the past will not be brought up by the victors.²

The above supports the conjecture that there had to be an agreement between East and West (to be precise, between Moscow and Washington) as to the modalities of a peaceful dismantling of the Communist system in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European sphere of control—in fact, a peaceful surrender under certain conditions.

THE MORAL DILEMMA: THE PRICE OF THE PEACEFUL POLITICAL TRANSITION

The proposal for peaceful political transition must have come from the Soviet rulers, who had concluded that the system, imposed on the population by the most brutal means, was neither politically nor economically viable any longer and could not hope to be competitive against the capitalistic societies of the West.

Without an understanding of the actions about to happen, it would have been unthinkable for the West to enter into a maneuver fraught with risks. However, the West did join the Soviet plan—without any critical comments, meddling, scoffing, or ridicule.

According to reliable sources, Gorbachev’s proposal was supposed to contain the following five points:

1. The Soviet Union would do away with the communist system and open itself up to other political infrastructure and forms through free elections.

2. The communists may not be punished for their criminal acts committed in the past.

3. The Soviet Union would stay clear of the Yalta Agreement of 1945 and the division of Europe; it would grant freedom to its European satellite states.

4. As compensation for the abrogation of power, the communist elite may acquire the productive public property of the Soviet Union through privatization.

5. This form of political and economic transformation was to also apply to the other countries of the Eastern Bloc without any further curtailment.³

This Soviet proposal appeared to the Western Allies (the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) as the capitulation of their nemesis after the long years of the Cold War. Under the intoxicating effects of their unexpected victory, they had not considered their decision long. The Soviet proposal offered the West numerous advantages, of course. First of all, the unique perspective of ridding itself of the Communist challenge, and with it the permanent international tension as well as the enormous costs of the nuclear arms race, was attractive. On the whole, Washington, London, and Paris saw no reason to deny their approval, since the Soviet proposal asked them neither to forgo nor compromise on anything; nor did it ask them to get involved in the process of transition.

Washington considered Gorbachev’s plan of doing away with communism as a once-in-a-lifetime political bonanza for which the groundwork had been laid chiefly by Americans, as President Reagan proclaimed: We are going to outspend the Russians forever.⁴

However, that the end came so quickly to the Soviets still very much surprised the West. They had overestimated the cohesiveness of the Soviet political system while at the same time underestimating the already noticeable power erosion in the 1970s and 1980s. The importance, consequences, and momentousness of Moscow’s proposal were so overwhelmingly great that the details of it were apparently not even fully grasped.

The West did not express either moral or political compunction about letting the Communists’ political crimes go virtually unnoticed, the living perpetrators stay unpunished, and the politically tired and economically exploited population whose fate had been the product of the Communist system come out from the distribution of the national wealth empty-handed.

The allied powers of the West, combating Nazi Germany, had no compunction about embracing the Soviet Union as their ally (where the murdering of people under Stalin had already reached to the millions). So why would they be entitled to demand from Gorbachev the handling of the wrongdoings committed for decades now? This argument sounds good indeed, but it still tremendously misses the point.

Stalin, ideologically stubborn and unchallenged, became the enemy of the free world after the Second World War. After he had driven the enemy out of his land and then engrossed Eastern Europe as well, he started an expansion policy to stretch further the Soviet sphere of influence. Stalin completely changed the relationship between the Western powers and the Soviet Union after 1945. Since he wanted the complete isolation of the Soviet area of domination, the erection of an Iron Curtain between East and West became a reality. Stalin’s struggle to acquire nuclear weapons at any price to solidify the power of the Soviet Union, making it invulnerable and equal to the West, also made it the enemy of the Western world.

The establishment of NATO, the Marshall Plan, the World Bank, the reintegration of West Germany in the West, and the signing of the Treaty of Rome, just to name a few, were all the main Western strategic milestones. They were the pillars of the great effort to stop the spread of communism in Europe and of the building the central front against Stalin’s aggressive policies. A similar pacification and reintegration of Japan were taking place in Asia, where, after losing China to the communists, the West had to fight a major war in Korea.

Still, despite the enormous economic successes of the West both in Europe and in Asia, the Soviet Union seemed to be on the move in the 1960s. After launching the first Sputnik satellite, putting the first man (and woman) in space, and putting robots on the moon, there was a desperate race for superiority, with the Communist Parties of Italy and France exerting pressure on Western democracy.

Even the Vatican reckoned with the possibility during the 1970s that Western Europe could turn to communism and tried to come to an accommodation with the Eastern European governments, as the sad example of Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary infamously proves.⁵

There was a real and present danger to Western liberal democracy; it cost tremendous sacrifices regarding lives and wealth, particularly on behalf of the American people, to slowly turn the tide of the Cold War. Therefore, the Western powers did not have to feel obligated to take the onetime friendship with the Soviet Union into consideration at the collapse of communism. It was something entirely different.

Gorbachev had to explain to the Americans that he could guarantee the success of his undertaking only if his conditions were met. Meeting his conditions would be the price of a peaceful political transition; there would be no total defeat, no capitulation, and not even a conditional surrender, but only the abandonment of the socialist ideology with all of its consequences—under the above conditions.

That the Americans and the Europeans accepted all this without any qualification can be seen in their attitude ever since the political transition. They accepted everything, guided by political expediency and disregarding their basic moral principles and the otherwise so eagerly practiced human rights policy. Not even the United Nations objected to the second expropriation of the populations of those nations that had lived under communist rule.

This chapter of European history indeed cannot yet be regarded as closed. The legitimacy of the new rulers will sooner or later be called into question in their countries, even if the West unreservedly accepted it. The Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary already provide some examples.

The so-called reform socialists led the political transition in Eastern Europe’s top-down revolution, and the people did not feel at all that the new system faced up to the old system. To have a real political transition, the political mentality—the political frame of reference—must also change.

Where does Eastern Europe belong, then—the West or the East? A certain feeling of duality lives in the souls of all Eastern European nations; there is no clear, unequivocal answer to the question. There is something that causes the Eastern Europeans to scrutinize their belonging to the West. It could be a reaction of instability, uncertainty, or even malevolence that is not necessarily rooted in the souls of the people because of some grievance. Instead the people of Eastern Europe subconsciously know that to survive and prosper, they must belong to the West. They do not necessarily like it, but they do not, in fact, have much choice in the matter.

This is precisely the point the West should understand, which it has failed to do so far, if it ever has the intention to finally integrate Eastern Europe. Some people there know their histories and forget slowly; they cannot, or do not want to, change their culture; it is the culture that rules their minds, rather than only the indelible memory of socialism. They have been looking for Western leadership, guidance, and political and, yes, moral advice—but they have not received them as yet. Moreover, it is doubtful they ever will.

The spirit of Eastern Europe, based on a strong sense of morality, kept on living during the long decades of socialism. The essence of repression was not the idea of communism itself but rather the Soviet military occupation, without which the communists could never have gained power.

For the above reasons, similarly to the thorough investigations conducted regarding the Nazi regime after World War II, the Communist dictatorships should have been, and still should be, scrutinized after the political transition.

If the West considers that liberal democracy is supposedly based on the guarantee of human rights and that the separation of power is essential to the successful political transition from communist dictatorship, then why did it not directly intervene from the outside just like it did after the Second World War? Why have the ever-vigilant Western journalists, the all-observant investigative reporters, and the conscientious upholders of freedom of speech never bothered to ask any relevant questions concerning the fate of the leading men of the collapsed regimes?

Sadly enough, the answers to the above questions are quite evident.

The West allegedly won the Cold War against communism. Did it truly? Were there any big celebrations, military parades or victory marches through New York City? Was this great political and economic success, this tectonic shift, immortalized in any memorable way for the people of the victorious West to remember?

No. In reality, there was not any total or unconditional—even decisive or conditional—victory, and consequently, there was not even a thank-you heard from anyone in power. There was no expression of gratitude to the millions in the West, especially in America, who sacrificed so much of their lives and wealth—not only their own but also those of future generations—to hold the line and prevail against communism. The West seems to or pretends to believe that it won the Cold War, but it has apparently never considered the possibility that the internal contradictions of communism caught up with it before the internal contradictions of the Western liberal democracies will catch up with them.

At the heart of the problem is the festering wound that keeps gnawing on the still living parts and values of the West: the communists were never thoroughly defeated. Perhaps communism as an ideology has no message for the future currently, but unlike Nazism, it prevailed for so long that its leaders could create their culture, which maintained, and still maintains, their power. They upheld envy as a perception of life, making people disagree with the world as it is and try to destroy it. Their ideology and mentality have been allowed to be safely and surreptitiously transferred into the body of the West and accepted there.

Practically no one is a Communist today. It must be one of the most amazing spectacles of history to be flooded with the rhetoric, theory, and practice of communism and yet see not one Communist around. We read and hear daily about class warfare, redistribution of wealth, the dispossessed masses, the disadvantaged, universal health care, speech codes, sensitivity training, restrictions on parents’ rights, the need to centralize and federalize—the list goes on and on. The political agenda is still with us, only the party, at least directly by its old name, is not.

However, the lessons have been learned by the Left and absorbed into the latest mature and brilliantly reconstituted incarnation of communism, which is busily constructing its bridges to the twenty-first century—and already organically built into the West under its camouflage of social justice.

The moral decline of the West, if it did not start at the moment, certainly accelerated with the winning of the Cold War—a victory that was nothing but a wily deal struck with the devil. So with that Faustian act, the cold peace has begun.

2

THE WESTERN POLITICAL REALIGNMENT

T he victorious West had no problem or difficulty filling in the vacuum economically or militarily. However, the sociopolitical implications of the change have been reverberating around the world ever since the alleged disappearance of the left pole.

The fact that the countries of all three of the previous blocs found themselves suddenly living in a unipolar world has caused a reevaluation of the situation. The old left temporarily disappeared, only to reemerge, reorganize itself, and reassert its values, ideology, and goals under new names, new political parties, and new alliances.

The remaining sole superpower, the United States of America, could immediately fill the vacuum militarily and assume the role of the world’s police. However, its socioeconomic values did not coincide with those of most nations—including those of Western Europe.

Western Europe suddenly found itself in an entirely new age. With its old and traditional enemy, the Soviet Bloc, disappearing, its enduring and latent animosity against the United States needed a new outlet.

The new, heretofore ignored or misapplied question of the real meaning of superpower has come to the surface. What is a superpower? It is a country represented by a government that can influence or even annihilate any other country on the face of the earth.

With the removal of the Soviet Union from the world stage, the question arose as to whether the Soviet Union was a real superpower. If it was, what made it one? The answer to the first question is in the affirmative; the Soviet Union could and did influence even the last remaining superpower, the United States, and it could have delivered a devastating attack on America or any other country. Economically speaking, it was not significant as an inefficient, bureaucratic, semi-industrialized socialist command economy. The country could have and should have belonged to the Third World rather than being called a superpower. Its economy, wealth, ideology, and social structure did not make it possible for the Soviet Union to gain the status of a real superpower. What did then?

It was the possession of nuclear, thermonuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. It was the possession of a military machine, based in essence on a war economy and its military industry, that made it possible for the Soviet Union to achieve superpower status. It was the fear and knowledge that the Soviet Union would not hesitate to use its might to prove that point, as it repeatedly did in Korea, Hungary, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Other than the United States, only the Soviet Union possessed weapons of mass destruction that it could deliver from starting points on land, at sea, in the air, and in space against any other country on earth. In short, only its military capability made the Soviet Union a superpower (which is the case with any country).

The Western European powers had feared the Soviet Union and communism during the Cold War. Although they did not necessarily subscribe to the American form of democracy or to the US socioeconomic political system or its values, they needed US protection and support.

THE WEST’S MOVE TO THE LEFT

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and without the left bloc behind them, the newly organized leftist socialist parties quickly recognized that their survival and ideology depended on the fusion, alliance, cooperation, or coalition with existing more liberal parties—even those that were nationalistic.

The anti-imperialism of the old socialist and communist parties quickly became the anti-Americanism of the new red and green social-democratic and socialist alliance. Moreover, an ever-expanding Western Europe was ready to welcome the