This Day in World History

February 26, 2008 – The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in six weeks, was published in London as a 23-page document featuring a green cover and measuring 21.5 to 13.4 cm.

The program was developed at the request of the Communist League, an organization of German émigré workers in London. Associate member J.E. Burghard composed the text hastily. Appropriately enough for a political economy text that left so much collateral damage in its wake over the years, the typeset book was riddled with errors.

“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism,” read the opening sentence, which turned out to be prematurely boastful. Even as revolution overtook Europe in the manifesto’s year of publication, in France, Germany, Hungary, and Italy, the manifesto made little impression, even though translated copies were sent to several countries.

When Communism finally became the reigning ideology of a government, nearly 70 years later, it took root in a nation—Russia—which had imploded because of a ruinous world war. Its next “great leap forward” (to use a phrase from the Marxist Mao Tse-tung that described a period in China that was anything but) took place as a result of another cataclysm: World War II.

In an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal nearly two years ago, business historian Louis B. Galambos noted President Dwight Eisenhower’s fear that before long, “the U.S. might soon have no trading partners, no allies dedicated to democracy or capitalism.”

Though one European country after another overrun was overrun or threatened by Communism in the middle of the twentieth century, it’s easy in retrospect to dismiss the concerns of Ike and others as overblown. As important as—advocates of “soft power” would insist, even more important than—the West’s military defenses, was the realization that Marxism was a philosophy that reduced the complexity of life to the ridiculously simplistic foundation of class.

Although I feel deep misgivings about many aspects of Pope John Paul II’s governance of the Roman Catholic Church, I believe that history will treat him kindly, in much the same way that it has done with Winston Churchill, another figure of frequent wrongheaded and bull tenacity: because, in a very dark hour of the world, in the most important cause of his time, he rallied the forces of freedom against oppression.

Jonathan Kwitny’s 1997 biography, Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II, is far more nuanced than its hyperbolic title might suggest. Kwitny itemizes, in detail, the damage done to the future of the church because of the pope’s refusal to accord women a role in the priesthood, to allow priests to marry, or to crack down on corruption inside the church. (And this was written before the sex abuse scandal had reached crisis proportions in America.)

Yet Kwitny does not scant on the greater greatness of the pontiff in taking on Communism. The victory over the Marxist-inspired Soviet regime was the greatest nonviolent revolution in the past century. An empire that held millions under its fearful sway collapsed without a shot being fired.

And, as Kwitny makes plain—disputing Carl Bernstein—the Pope saved the anti-communist opposition in its worst days, after the 1981 crackdown on Solidarity, at a point when the Reagan administration had left the dissident Polish labor movement to its own devices. No less an authority than Mikhail Gorbachev said, “"Everything that happened in Eastern Europe during these past few years would have been impossible without the pope."

Likewise, in a fine blog posting, “John Paul II, Communism and Liberalism” Canadian theologian Craig Carter notes: “John Paul II believed that the core weakness of Communism was a flawed concept of the human person and a shriviled and reductionistic concept of freedom.”

Marx might have derided religion as “the opiate of the people.” But in the 21th century, it is one ideology that has been revealed as the true hallucinogen, and it is the one created by the German economist-philosopher-journalist with the hyperbolic style in the Reading Room of the British Museum.

Marx’s 20th-century disciple Joseph Stalin asked, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” As John Paul knew, a soulless materialistic philosophy is far weaker than it believes.