Decline of the Age of Enlightenment

	Table of Contents
	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 ŕ clef
	Chapter X	Shifting Alliances
	Chapter XI	Cold War
	Chapter XII	Lost Empire
	Chapter XIII	Apre le Deluge
	Chapter XIV	Paper Centerfolds
		Postscript

In the ultimate analysis, the "spirit of Judaism”
 means “the spirit of capitalism.”

Meszaros (1970)

Heaven on Earth
 
The goals of the communist movement were outlined in Marx and Engel's (1848) Communist Manifesto and summarized in Eugene Pottier's (1871) L'Internationale. After the Internationale, which was the Marseillaise of the communist movement, one of its popular songs was ‘Heaven on Earth.’ If memory serves me, its key verses were

The natural experiment of the first magnitude was the disintegration of the Soviet Union that started with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This event is celebrated, but seldom objectively studied.

Flag of the Russian  Revolution with Liberte, Equalite, Fraternite in Cyrillic Characters.

To build heaven on earth requires an isolated territory and constraints on the aggressive and acquisitive sides of the human nature. The word Utopia means ‘no place’ in Greek and the utopias of the English speaking world, be it Thomas More's Utopia, Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, James Harrington's Oceana, Samuel Butler's Erewhon, or B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two were located on an island or in an isolated corner of Earth. Finally, the Utopia was built on the territory of the Russian Empire.

Even though many objective indicators showed the socialistic society as superior to the capitalistic societies, it was disliked as it was a closed, prescriptive social system.

 

The Marxist ideal of communism was that of a society in which many social, political, and economic evils of capitalism have been eradicated. There was

health care for all

low crime rate
no unemployment       no homeless
no prostitution

and the list could go on.

Karl Marx taught that among their main causes of wars are economic and religious reasons. By changing the economy and by removing religion from the public sphere, warfare will be reduced

Wars of the Soviet Union and of the United States	Soviet Union	Years	United States	Years
	Hungary Czechoslovakia Afghanistan	1956 1968 1980	Korea China Guatemala Indonesia Cuba Congo Peru Laos Vietnam Cambodia Grenada Libya El Salvador Nicaragua Panama Iraq I Somalia Bosnia Sudan Yugoslavia Afghanistan Iraq II	1950-1953 1950-1953  1954, 1960, 1967-1969 1958 1959-1960 1964 1965 1964-1973 1961-1973 1969-1970 1983 1986 1980s 1980s 1989 1991-2001 1990s 1994, 1996 1998 2001-? 2003-?

 In Soviet Union and other socialist countries Jewish communities did not dominate economy and mass media.