The Capitalist Manifesto: Faith and freedom — the powerful combination that won the Cold War
National Post, 24 December 2021
Pope John Paul II was not one to gloat about the total annihilation of Soviet communism and the liberation of a continent, a history-shaping project of which he was a leading protagonist.
Forty years ago this month, Poland’s communist state declared war on the Polish nation, instituting martial law and rolling tanks into the streets to crush Solidarity, a trade union looking to advance workers’ rights and social change.
Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, Moscow’s quisling in Warsaw, would later justify the assault on his countrymen by claiming that if he did not declare martial law, Polish liberty would have been crushed by Soviet tanks instead of Polish ones. In Jaruzelski’s case, patriotism was indeed the refuge of the scoundrel.
Though not exculpatory, it was not an implausible claim. Soviet Marshal Viktor Kulikov, chief of the Warsaw Pact forces, and other senior Red Army officers were in Poland when martial law was declared. Just six months earlier, Pope John Paul II was nearly killed in St. Peter’s Square by an assassin linked to the Bulgarian communist security services. The assassination attempt was widely believed in Poland and Rome to have been ordered by the KGB.
The Polish government turning on its own people was one of the darkest hours of the Cold War. In an example of how genuine leaders respond to tyrants, U.S. President Ronald Reagan made an eloquent Christmas address to the nation, an impassioned plea for Poland’s liberty and a promise of concrete consequences for Moscow. He invited all Americans to put a candle in their windows — a Polish custom — that Christmas Eve, as he had done at the White House.
Ten years later, on Christmas Day 1991, the hellish inferno that was European communism was extinguished. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. The evil empire expired.
John Paul was not one to gloat about the total annihilation of Soviet communism and the liberation of a continent, a history-shaping project of which he was a leading protagonist. Yet he did offer a sustained reflection in 1991 about what the defeat of communism meant, reflections most relevant to the Post’s Capitalist Manifesto series.
John Paul was not a capitalist. He might not even be persuaded to give Irving Kristol’s “Two cheers for capitalism.” Kristol demurred from the third cheer for capitalism, because it leaves the ultimate, and most important, questions unanswered.
“Although we may be more materially better off than we’ve ever been before, modern society’s moral foundation seems weaker and more attenuated,” wrote Sean Speer on Kristol’s two cheers.
There is a pithier way to put that: man does not live on bread alone.
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