Thank God—A Pope

To visit France nowadays is quite an experience for someone who, like me, comes from Austria -a theoretically “neutralized” country jutting like a promontory into the Communist world. Since no thinking Austrian believes for a minute that his country’s neutrality would be respected in the event of another global conflagration, the subject of a possible Third World War is delicately avoided (except, of course, by a few fatuous optimists who believe that Austria and Switzerland could remain a joint Island-of-the-Blessed in such a war). But in France the cat is out of the bag. Doomsday fears are discussed as openly as anything else, in a society where opinions and ideologies clash routinely, and public life is characterized by dissent, non-cooperation, and sabotage. One newspaper estimates that strikes have cost the French economy 23 billion francs this year alone.

But France has, in addition to its revolutionary leftist political tradition that everyone knows about, a rightist, conservative one as well. The latter is rarely aggressive, rarely decisive, sometimes at fault (cf. the Dreyfus case), but painfully accurate in its assessments and predictions. The conservatives knew only too well that the “peace” of 1919 would result in another world war, and they made the same prediction in 1945. In their eyes, the lessons of history would have ceased to make any sense if the combined efforts of Roosevelt, Truman, Attlee, and Stalin had created a world safe to live in. As if to confirm their stand, a book by Solzhenitsyn entitled L’Erreur de l’Oceident has just been published in France, warning forcefully against the seductive theory of East-West convergence and the illusion of peace. Compromise, so dear to the democratic nations, is regarded with contempt by the Communists, unless it serves their objectives. The West, meanwhile, remains flexible on principle, tolerating the enemy within its gates and suffering from a flaccidity which makes it seem incapable of producing strong leaders of its own. Hence it has been turning more and more to figures from the East: Solzhenitsyn and, now, John Paul II.

EK

About the Author

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Cold War

Europe

To visit France nowadays is quite an experience for someone who, like me, comes from Austria -a theoretically “neutralized” country jutting like a promontory into the Communist world. Since no thinking Austrian believes for a minute that his country’s neutrality would be respected in the event of another global conflagration, the subject of a possible Third World War is delicately avoided (except, of course, by a few fatuous optimists who believe that Austria and Switzerland could remain a joint Island-of-the-Blessed in such a war). But in France the cat is out of the bag. Doomsday fears are discussed as openly as anything else, in a society where opinions and ideologies clash routinely, and public life is characterized by dissent, non-cooperation, and sabotage. One newspaper estimates that strikes have cost the French economy 23 billion francs this year alone.

But France has, in addition to its revolutionary leftist political tradition that everyone knows about, a rightist, conservative one as well. The latter is rarely aggressive, rarely decisive, sometimes at fault (cf. the Dreyfus case), but painfully accurate in its assessments and predictions. The conservatives knew only too well that the “peace” of 1919 would result in another world war, and they made the same prediction in 1945. In their eyes, the lessons of history would have ceased to make any sense if the combined efforts of Roosevelt, Truman, Attlee, and Stalin had created a world safe to live in. As if to confirm their stand, a book by Solzhenitsyn entitled L’Erreur de l’Oceident has just been published in France, warning forcefully against the seductive theory of East-West convergence and the illusion of peace. Compromise, so dear to the democratic nations, is regarded with contempt by the Communists, unless it serves their objectives. The West, meanwhile, remains flexible on principle, tolerating the enemy within its gates and suffering from a flaccidity which makes it seem incapable of producing strong leaders of its own. Hence it has been turning more and more to figures from the East: Solzhenitsyn and, now, John Paul II.