Ages of Enlightenment

    Frontispiece
    Prologue
  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 Stalin and Roosevelt
  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

It depends only on us
When for all of us
Heaven will be on Earth

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.

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.


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

 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 prostitution
 

and the list could go on.

Karl Marx reasoned that wars are inherent to the old societies, and that among their main causes are the economic and religious reasons. By changing the economy and by removing religion from the public sphere, warfare should 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
Somalia
Bosnia
Sudan
Afghanistan
Yugoslavia
Iraq
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
1998
1999-2000
2003-?

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