sabato 28 gennaio 2006

Disintegration as Hope, a first seed

 


Disintegration as hope

A draft against the greatest nightmare of human history: the advent of a global state, which would necessarily be a worldwide totalitarian regime.
 

Pisa, 28 Tevet 5766, Saturday, January 28, 2006, St. Thomas Acquinas Day 

by Mauro Vaiani
(International Relations Volunteer Scholar - Department of Political Science - Faculty of Politics - University of Pisa)

In some part in the immense Ukraine, in the spring of 1944, in the deepest, torn and terrible heart of Europe of those times, while listening to a conversation between officials of the Red Army, a traveller collected a vital testimony of an immense danger that threatens the entire humanity.

The traveler, Milovan Djilas, was an important Yugoslav politician, for years one of the assistants of Tito, who had later fallen in disgrace. Thrown in jail from 1957 to 1961, Djilas wrote a memorial titled “Conversations with Stalin” (1) in which he tells the emotion and the enthusiasm with which, as a devote communist leader, he visited for the first time the homeland of socialism, where his dreams and hopes were realized, but also his first disillusions.

Djilas had left for the Soviet Union with a high level Yugoslav political and military delegation, on the search for concrete support for the partisan war and the political and social revolution lead by Tito in the Balkan peninsula. He returned home with few concrete results for Tito and the peoples of Yugoslavia, but transformed internally. Slowly but laboriously, the first doubts on the dictatorship of Stalin, the threat of the Soviet totalitarianism, the danger that the Russian
expansionism would have represented for the Yugoslav Federation and therefore also for his native Montenegro, began to form within him.

After the official encounters in Moscow it was proposed to the Yugoslav delegation to visit the Southwestern front, the so-called Second Ukrainian front. Djilas arrived in the city of Uman, in the middle of a region devastated by war, but not only by it. The Ukraine became divided between those who had suffered the war passively, those who had taken sides with the Germans in an anti-Soviet function, those who had lastly chosen to fight on the flank of the Russians. The
consequences of these internal divisions had not been any less ferocious than the external invasions.

Through the Ukrainian spring mud, the Yugoslavs went on the tracks of the victorious communist troopers, frequently encountering destroyed German equipment and humble, tough, self-denial Russian soldiers, able of enduring weeks “to the waist, without bread or sleep, under a hurricane of fire and steel brought by the desperate onslaughts of the Germans” (2).

Djilas confesses he had a dogmatic and romantic enthusiasm for everything he saw on those days, but he confirms, “even as then, to rate highly the qualities of the Red Army and particularly its Russian core. True, the Soviet commanding cadres, and its soldiers and underofficers in even greater measure, receive a one-sided political education, but in every other respect they are developing initiative together with a breadth of culture. The discipline is severe and unquestioning, but not unreasonable; it is consonant with the principal aims and tasks. The Soviet officers are not only technically very proficient, but they also compose the most
talented and boldest part of the Soviet intelligentsia. Though relatively well paid, they do not constitute a caste in themselves, and though not too much Marxist doctrine is required of them, they are expected all the more to be brave and not to fall back in battle” (3).

“Stalin had carried out sweeping purges, especially in the higher commanding echelons, but these had had less effect than is sometimes believed, for he did not hesitate at the same time to elevate younger and talented man; every officer who was faithful to him and his aims knew that his ambitions would meet with encouragements” (4).

Between these kind of men, forged by sacrifice, sincerely committed to their Homeland liberation, educated by regime’s propaganda, faithful member of the Communist Party, devoted to Stalin who selected them and whom they were grateful for their brilliant professional and social position, Djilas firstly heard, from a commander, the unexpected thought that he found strange, but bold: “When Communism triumphs in the whole world – so when the dream of every faithful Communist would become true – wars would then acquire their final bitter character” (5). According to Marxist theory, which the Soviet commanders knew as well as Djilas, “wars are exclusively the product of class struggle, and because Communism would abolish classes, the necessity for men to wage war would also vanish” (6).

Nevertheless that general, many Russian soldiers, Djilas himself, survived to the worst battles of their life, heroes of the victory against the awful Nazism, sincere believers in Communism as possible paradise on Earth, “came to realize some furthers truths in the horror of war: that human struggles would acquire the aspect of ultimate bitterness only when all men came to be subject to the same social system, for the system would be untenable as such and various sects
would undertake the reckless destruction of the human race for the sake of its greater 'happiness'.” (7).

Independence and diversity of each human community is natural and moral, for those who want mankind have a future. Disintegration was, is and will be the only hope against the fallacy of those who candidly believe in globalism, the silliness of those who want greater supranational powers, the apprentice wizards who are looking forward the advent of a global state, understating the terrible consequences of it. 

A global state would mean the greatest nightmare of human history come true. Such a political construction would necessarily become a worldwide totalitarian regime.
 

* * *
(1) Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego – New York; translated from Serbo-Croation by Michael B. Petrovich. Italian Edition: Conversazioni con Stalin, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1962; translated
from English to Italian by Elena Spagnol Vaccari.
(2) Ibidem, page 49.
(3) Idem.
(4) Ibidem, pages 49-50.
(5) Ibidem, page 50.
(6) Idem.
(7) Idem.

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