| Decline of the Age of Enlightenment | ||
| Frontispiece | ||
| Chapter I | Voltaire and the Encyclopedists | |
| Chapter II | The Hegelians | |
| Chapter III | Heaven on Earth | |
| Chapter IV | Empire of the Czars | |
| Chapter V | Llano Estacado | |
| Chapter VI | Dawn of the New Age | |
| Chapter VII | Man of Steel | |
| Chapter VIII | Wolves are Closing In | |
| Chapter IX | Roman à clef | |
| Chapter X | Shifting Alliances | |
| Chapter XI | Cold War | |
| Chapter XII | Lost Empire | |
| Chapter XIII | Apre le Deluge | |
| Chapter XIV | Paper Centerfolds | |
| Postscript | ||
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Disintegration of the Soviet Union |
When analyzing Quincy Wrights data on frequency and intensity of warfare among the Western countries, we noticed a cycle, superimposed on the cycle of wars with periodicity of about 200 years. Other researchers, independently analyzing the same data, have also observed this long wave cycle, identified by Denton and Phillips in Some Patterns in the History of Violence (1968) as likely caused by
"an action-reaction process in political philosophy, taken in the broad sense to include the general attitude of the elites toward the correct society, a cycle of profound changes, heralding a new epoch."
Then we noted that the time interval between the American (1786) and French Revolution (1789) and the fall of the Berlin wall (1989), presaging the fall of the Soviet Union, is about 200 years.
The major philosopher presaging the Age of Enlightenment epoch was Voltaire who opposed the intolerance of monotheistic religions sanctioning torture and burning of their opponents, often together with their books. The apostle of just, secular society was Karl Marx, who envisioned a new social order which for about 70 years was able to deny power to people who use the combination of economic power, religion, and information monopoly to create cruel, vulgar, and arrogant societies where the oligarchs rule. In this Orwellian world prisons are crowded, people are mesmerized by the media, and the gulf between the rich and the poor is getting wider and wider.
These societies, bent on destruction of other cultures, are creating a world subjugated to ideology based on religion and greed, reflecting the self-centered and internally consistent partiality of the ruling elites. This self-serving ideology reintroduced torture, abnegated on treaties limiting the use of nuclear weapons, and in some countries succeeded in banning books and firing and sometimes jailing scholars and intellectuals who dare to challenge their 'mainstream' ideology. Paul Wolfowitz asserts that
| With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity. The Soviets won't come in to block us. And we've got five, maybe 10, years before the next superpower emerges to challenge us ... We could have a little more time, but no one really knows." |
Soon afterwards the Soviet Union was partitioned, treaties affirming cooperation and nuclear disarmament between the Soviet Union and the United States were abnegated. The common wealth of the citizens of the Soviet Union was usurped and transferred abroad. Countries of the Eastern Europe transmuted into satellites of the United States and Russia was surrounded by the NATO armies. The United States constitution was subverted and the relative peace of the post- WWII with its nuclear balance ended. This book contains the phenomenological and quantitative analysis of some of these events that happened as the consequences of the reintroduction of capitalism and religion to the countries of the former Soviet Union and its allies.