JOURNALISM AND JOACHIM'S CHILDREN

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own army . . . Never before in the history of mankind has a world power used a victory deliberately for the purpose of creating a power vacuum to its own disadvantage . . . Phenomena of this magnitude cannot be explained by ignorance and stupidity. These policies were pursued as a matter of principle, on the basis of Gnostic dream assumptions about the nature of man . . . The enumerated series of actions, as well as the dream assumptions on which they are based, seem to show that the contact with reality is at least badly damaged and that the pathological substitution of the dream world is fairly effective."

Gnosticism, seeping down from the intellectuals to politicians to the people, had become a mass movement affecting the basis of Western life as well as thought. Intellectual imagination, unbridled by reality, produced disregard for both the facts of life and the principles of Western culture, and cut away much of the common ground on which men could meet in rational debate. Gnosticism is the source of 20th century intellectual confusion, the "pattern" in the chaos.

GNOSTICISM IN CURRENT EVENTS

If Voegelin is right, his analysis should throw light on the present and future. Journalism can apply his theory to some areas of "current events":

The Cold War. Gnostics readily accept total "war to end war" or the Lenin-Laski formula of war as a "prelude to peace." Cold war they shun because its objectives are less than the salvation of mankind, and because cold war requires careful calculation of causes & effects, means & ends in the real world. It is hard for a Gnostic to believe that a successful cold war can avoid a total hot war, or that a successful limited war can avoid a larger war.

The Korean War. That is why Gnostics denounce as steps to total war all efforts to win the Korean war. The only war Utopians can think about is Armageddon.

The U.S.S.R. Today. Though a product of Gnosticism, the Soviet Union is not a Gnostic state because the dream cannot be applied to the actual world of man. Internally, the U.S.S.R. is a primitive absolutism of the Genghis Khan type. Like Genghis its rulers manipulate for their own ends their claim as the earthly (and only) representatives of the highest truth At e higher levels of Communist strategy, however, Gnostic ideas lay still dominate the Kremlin mind. The world revolution has not yet been made reality, and Communists are therefore still free to dream about it in Gnostic terms. This accounts for a seeming contradiction: tactically, Russian policy is realist and therefore more effective than Gnostic Western policy strategically and long-range, Russian policy is Gnostic and still seeks trie Marxist millennium of world revolution

The United Nations. The U.N. offered sensible, practical hope jf working put many problems of international politics. Its defects and limitations were serious, numerous and obvious, but on the whole the chance for some political progress seemed to outweigh the dangers. But the Gnostic chorus immediately began chanting of "the Parliament of Man," an instrument of political salvation. This has brought public disillusionment and the practical effect is to damage the U.N.'s prestige among sensible men, who note that the U.N. does not do what the Gnostics say it can do. Yet the extreme U.N. cult flourishes. In