rewriting the history of communism's collapse(Gorbachev -not Pope/Reagan)

[papau]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,12272,1454928,00.html

We are rewriting the history of communism's collapse

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. <snip>


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.
<snip>
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. <snip>

[daydreamer]

1. It started with Willy Brandt in Germany with the Entspannung's politik

I think. Nixon had a lot to do with the decline of Communism in China with a handshake with Mao. China's liberalization has chain effect on other Communist countries in Asia.

[papau]

2. It started with Trosky's murder by Stalin and the beginning of a dictarshi

that had no goal except survival- using " 'the West' wants to change us" as the motivation for accepting evil at home.

Indeed the storyline sounds a lot like Bush and the US media.

But the major move was economic over-reaching-

the CIA said in 1979 to Carter that the percentage of GDP being spent on unproductive things like military could not be sustained for another 10 years and that the USSR would fold. Gorby actually tried to save the USSR by changing the budget priorities - but was too late with the small changes that the powers that be would allow him to make.