In Europe, writers and intellectuals generally believe Gorbachev's regime is a greater friend of peace than the United States. The answer, I think does not lie in a lack of knowledge about the Communist record, but, rather, in the presence of a form of religious belief. Their enthusiasm is that of the convert, because, in their hearts, they have been converted. They have, in a real sense, changed sides. Nor should this be unexpected in our age of disbelief.
Ideology often fills the void left by a dying religious belief.
Communism is, in the last analysis, a Christian heresy, and it has the magnetism of a heresy. Where Christianity teaches that we are all children of God, with God-given human rights, destined for a heavenly kingdom, communism teaches there is no God, that life begins and ends here, that the Communist state is man's teacher and guide, that building paradise is the business of this world. Indeed, the alienated son who hates his father and finds happiness in his father's economic ruin is not different in attitude from the Americans who exulted in the final victories of the North Vietnamese Communists over the allies of their own country. Seven years after his assassination, Somoza remains a reviled figure, though his crimes against the Nicaraguan people do not remotely approach the scale or scope of those committed by the decadent Sandinistas, whose survival seems the constant concern of the American Left. And it is, I am persuaded, not some deep-seated love of the downtrodden Xhosa or Zulu that has caused America's press and clergy to insist upon the most severe of sanctions upon South Africa.