JOURNALISM AND JOACHIM'S CHILDREN

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Another Gnostic, Nietzsche, went a step further than Comte. Said Nietzsche: "Love yourself through grace. Then you are no longer in need of your God, and you can act the whole drama of Fall and Redemption to its end in yourself." Nietzsche's extravagant tone and his "fascism" repel many "liberals" who do not recognize the essential similarity in idea and historical origin of Naziism and Communism. Harold Laski, a Socialist with a great influence on "liberals" and "progressivists," summed up the Russian Revolution in a political translation of Nietzsche:

"Lenin was surely right when the end he sought for was to build his heaven upon earth and to write the precepts of its faith into the inner fabric of a universal humanity. He was surely right, too, when he recognized that the prelude to peace is a war ... It is, indeed, true in a sense to argue that the [Soviet] Russian principle cuts deeper than the Christian since it seeks salvation for the masses by fulfillment in this life, and, thereby, orders anew the actual world we know."

Besides seeking salvation on earth and thereby lapsing into political absolutism, the modern Gnostic as described by Voegelin has another tendency, one that he shares with ancient and medieval Gnostics. Both Greek and Christian thought holds that man reflects the order of the universe (or of God) when he understands cause & effect and correctly fits his means to his purposes in earthly affairs. But Gnosticism, even in earthly matters, substitutes dreams for reason because it disregards the facts of the world that exists, misunderstands cause & effect, and has no luck in getting where it wants to get. Voegelin believes the Western World far gone in Gnosticism. The symptoms:

"Gnostic societies and their leaders will recognize dangers to their existence when they develop, but such dangers will not be met by appropriate actions in the world of reality. They will rather be met by magic operations in the dream world, such as disapproval, moral condemnation, declarations of intention, resolutions, appeals to the opinion of mankind, branding of enemies as aggressors, outlawing of war, propaganda for world peace and world government, etc. . . ."

The substitution of "magic operations in the dream world" for a politics of reality brought on World War II, which Winston Churchill, its great warrior, called "The Unnecessary War." Voegelin describes the process:

"The model case is the rise of the National Socialist movement to power with the Gnostic chorus wailing its moral indignation at such barbarian and reactionary doings in a progressive world—without, however, raising a finger to repress the rising force by a minor political effort in proper time."

Gnostic influence on Western policy did not stop with the peace of 1945. Says Voegelin: "If a war has a purpose at all, it is the restoration of a balance of forces and not the aggravation of disturbance; it is the reduction of the unbalancing excess of force, not the destruction of force to the point of creating a new unbalancing power vacuum. Instead, the [Western] Gnostic politicians have put the Soviet army on the Elbe, surrendered China to the Communists, at the same time demilitarized Germany and Japan, and in addition demobilized our

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