Who killed Lenin?
The consensus in the mass media the days following John Paul II is that he brought down communism in East Europe. His contribution has been cited as high as 50%. Call me naive and ignorant, but I can't imagine one man's power to bring down a socio-economical experiment as big as the iron curtain/communist bloc. It seems that everyone points to his memorable return to Poland after he became the Pope. But of course he would. He is the Pope, who's going to touch him? He went back to the home country. Did he do anything to denounce the regime? No. Communism in Europe failed because it failed match the economical progress from the West, not because of token gestures by a religious leader. I don't think I ever heard of anyone who mentioned John Paul II's name in conversations about the fall of communism until this year!It seems that if anyone should be taking credit for helping the democratic movement in Poland and the neighboring countries would not be the Polish bishop and future Pope, but the cardinals that broke the stranglehold Italians had on the papacy and elected someone from a communist country as the next Pope. So I say, let's elect a Chinese Pope and we will just wait another 10 years for CCP to crack up.
posted by hedgehog @ 11:03 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home