Partisan Humanism, Ideology & The Limits Of Political Passion

Edmund Burke and Lord Acton were the first to meaningfully engage the eclipse of Christian transcendence that was the French Revolution.  Many other writers throughout the West have done the same in articulating the humanism that embodied Soviet Marxism:  Raymond Aron, Winston Churchill, Andre Girard, Henri De Lubac and others were brave enough to recognize that the rise of militant humanism threatens the gift that is liberty and the order that is civilized life.

Many historians begin examining the rise of a militant humanism not only in France but the militant idealism engendered by Hegel and Kant.  Both are correct historical avenues to examine the rise of a Satanic Presence in history elevating man to eclipse the natural order of Civilization.  Even a cursory review of the political passion that was the ruling House of Bourbon and its dynastic intrigue with Jesuit reformers is earlier than the French Revolution.  Indeed, there are several historical points whereby any historian can infer a Satanic Presence in examining the rise of a militancy threatening Western Civilization.

Not until the rise of Industrial mechanized life did such Satanic Presence as militant humanism truly threaten the foundation of Western Civilization that informed and shaped the West.  As Huxley, Tocqueville, Orwell and Fredrich Hayek have detailed throughout their writings, the impact of mechanized life itself has now been usurped with the arrival of the welfare state, instantaneous electronic media and Nuclear technique.

It seems that progress itself is dependent on the ever widening gap between ethics and the impact of superior technique.

Markus Wolf and Dmitri Bystrolyotov (pronounced Bye-Stroll-Yo-Foff) fit the image of self made men perfectly informed and conformed to the intellectual ratio that was Slavic and Teutonic political idealism.  Both men lived long enough to witness the death that was a fatal conceit:  militant Marxism!

Markus Wolf was the East German Stasi Commander for decades.  His identity was so secret that until the fall of Communism their remained only one photograph taken by Danish Immigration officers in the 1960’s.  To their own surprise they hadn’t known of its significance until years later.

Wolf fits the Alger Hiss of Germanic militant idealism.  Until his death in November of 2006 in East Germany, most people remain unaware of the bureaucratic evil he embodied a Chief Spy for the German Stasi.

Dmitri Bystolyotov (Bye-Stroll-Yo-Toff) was the loving favorite militant spy for Stalin.  He remained the single most daring KGB officer of his time.  He was a larger than life figure.  Extraordinarily handsome, extremely resourceful he was well suited to the cultural and political ambiance that dominated the 1920’s & 1930’s.  He did not survive Stalin’s political purges and was sent to the Gulag until his release in 1954 where he lived out his impoverished life as a translator.  He was denied a KGB pension.  He suffered for his militant idealism.  Now, at last is a meaningful biography written by Emil Draitser published by Northwestern University Press that outlines the success and ravages of Stalin’s most infamous operative.

His death in 1975 revealed an ambitious writing career that is only now unearthed.  A photograph of him now resides at the headquarters of the former KGB Hall of Fame at the Foreign Intelligence Service in Yasenevo, just outside of Moscow.

Bystrolyoto’vs three volume memoir titled ‘Feast Of The Immortals’ is treasure for readers who appreciate the rigors of sleeper agents in foreign residence.

Only with the rise of Hitler did Stalin need the impressive skills that was Bystrolyoto: Hitler publicly introduced conscription to vastly increase the size of the German army; more secretly he launched a massive rearmament program. An alarmed Soviet Union, desperate to learn the plans of this potential enemy, dispatched an intelligence officer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov, to Berlin. Bystrolyotov had already proved himself a deft operative, one particularly skilled at seducing women who had access to valuable information. But as Emil Draitser shows in “Stalin’s Romeo Spy,” Bystrolyotov’s latest assignment tested even his vaunted skills.

The agent’s target was a female SS officer whose face had been disfigured by fire in a childhood car accident. Dorothea Müller was “embittered and unpleasant to deal with,” Mr. Draitser says, and she was a fanatical Nazi Party member who had been entrusted with the safekeeping of military-industrial secrets. Flattering her appearance was out of the question, so Bystrolyotov embarked on a campaign to flatter Müller’s devotion to the Führer. Posing as a dashing, dissolute Hungarian count, he engineered a series of encounters with Müller, astonished her with his ignorance of the Nazis’ glorious policies and became her eager student.

A romance began, and when at last Müller “was completely under his power as a lover,” Mr. Draitser says, the count proposed marriage. But a complication stood in the way: An aunt who had (supposedly) subsidized his life in Berlin was cutting him off. Marriage was out of the question, he said, until his finances were secure. Then a solution surfaced: A friend of the count’s said that there was a lot of money to be made on the stock market if Müller would provide them with inside information about military industrial orders. She agreed; the hook was set.

Throughout the lives of both men we learn the capricious nature of both Fascist and Marxist life.  That capriciousness itself is at odds with the goodness that life affords can only be acknowledged with painful disillusion.  Both men were not spared as their fates collided with a rising West under John Paul II, Thatcher and Reagan.

We were lucky to have men and women of conviction.  In a word:  virtue.  Pray we still have access to such people.