After the Rain
How the West
Lost the East
1st EDITION
Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
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Lidija Rangelovska
Lidija Rangelovska
A Narcissus Publications Imprint, Skopje 2001
Published in association with Central Europe Review and
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C O N T E N T S
I n t r o d u c t i o n
The P E O P L E
The Author of this Article is a Racist
The Cavemen and the Alien
Is Transition Possible?
Can Socialist Professors of Economics Teach Capitalism?
The Poets and the Eclipse
The Rip van Winkle Institutions
Inside, Outside - Diasporas and Modern States
The Magla Vocables
The Elders of Zion
The Last Family
Rasputin in Transition
The Honorary Academic
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Who is Guarding the Guards?
Herzl's Butlers
The Phlegm and the Anima
An Impressionistic Canvass
The Dance of Jael
Homo Balkanus
The MinMaj Rule
The Balkans between Omerta and Vendetta
On the Criminality of Transition
The Myth of Great Albania
The Bad Blood of Kosovo
The Plight of the Kosovar
The Black Birds of Kosova
The Onset of Cultural Imperialism
The Defrosted War
Russia's Role in a Brave, New World
The Bones of the Grenadier
Endgame in the Balkans
Millenarian Thoughts about Kosovo
NATO's Next War
Why did Milosevic Surrender?
The Deadly Antlers
NATO, the EU and the New Kids on the Block
The Treasure Trove of Kosovo
Lucky Macedonia or Macedonia's Serendipity
The Good Fortune of Neighbouring a Human Catastrophe
Black Magic, White Magic - Managing our Future
The Friendly Club
The Books of the Damned
The PCM Trail
The Mind of Darkness
The E C O N O M Y
Central Europe - The New Colonies
New Paradigms, Old Cycles
Lessons in Transition
Lucky Russia
Russian Roulette
Foreigners do not Like Russia
Russia's New Economy
IMF - Kill or Cure
The IMF Deconstructed
Financial Crisis, Global Capital Flows and the International Financial
Architecture
The Shadowy World of International Finance
The Typology of Financial Scandals
The Revolt of the Poor
The Demise of Intellectual Property
Scavenger Economies, Predator Economies
Market Impeders and Market Inefficiencies
Public Procurement and very Private Benefits
Liquidity or Liquidation
The Predicament of the Newly Rich
The Solow Paradox
E p I l o g u e
The A u t h o r
I N T R O D U C T I O N
This is a series of articles written and published in 1996-2000 in
Macedonia, in Russia, in Egypt and in the Czech Republic.
How the West lost the East. The economics, the politics, the
geopolitics, the conspiracies, the corruption, the old and the new, the
plough and the internet - it is all here, in prose, as provocative and
vitriolic and loving and longing as I could make it.
From "The Mind of Darkness":
"'The Balkans' - I say - 'is the unconscious of the world'. People stop
to digest this metaphor and then they nod enthusiastically. It is here
that the repressed memories of history, its traumas and fears and
images reside. It is here that the psychodynamics of humanity - the
tectonic clash between Rome and Byzantium, West and East,
Judeo-Christianity and Islam - is still easily discernible. We are
seated at a New Year's dining table, loaded with a roasted pig and
exotic salads.
I, the Jew, only half foreign to this cradle of Slavonics. Four Serbs,
five Macedonians. It is in the Balkans that all ethnic distinctions
fail and it is here that they prevail anachronistically and
atavistically. Contradiction and change the only two fixtures of this
tormented region.
The women of the Balkan - buried under provocative mask-like make up,
retro hairstyles and too narrow dresses. The men, clad in sepia
colours, old fashioned suits and turn of the century moustaches. In the
background there is the crying game that is Balkanian music: liturgy
and folk and elegy combined. The smells are heavy with musk-ular
perfumes. It is like time travel. It is like revisiting one's
childhood."
How were the articles and essays contained herein - many of them
translated and published in local languages - received by people
everywhere?
My readers from the Balkans reacted to these essays with an admixture
of rage and indignation. They erected defensive barricades of
self-aggrandizement and of my devaluation. And they let their ingrained
paranoia run rampant (Jewish conspiracies, Western spies, world plots).
I asked a resident of this tortured region to write the foreword to
this book. People from other parts, from Central and Eastern Europe,
were more argumentative and contemplating, though much less passionate.
And Westerners - especially those with interest in these regions of the
world - reacted with great, cathartic enthusiasm.
In reading this book, I wish upon you the joy and the revulsion, the
dark fascination of this region and its surrealist dreams and
nightmares. This is what I experience daily here and it is my hope that
I succeeded to convey the siren's song, the honeyed trap, the lure and
the allure of this tortured corner of the earth.
Dr. Sam Vaknin
Skopje, February 2000
Return
After the Rain
How the West
Lost the East
The PEOPLE
The Author of this Article is a Racist
Or, so say many of the readers, who react vehemently - not to say
minaciously - to my articles. They insist that I demonise, chastise,
disparage, deride and hold in contempt groups of people simply and
solely because they are born in a given geographical area or are of a
given genetic stock. Few stop sufficiently long to notice that the
above two accusations contravene each other. A territory as vast as CEE
cannot and is not inhabited by one "race". It is an historical cocktail
of colours and origins and languages and bloodlines. Disregarding the
pan-Slavic myth for a minute, a racist would find the CEE a very
discouraging neighbourhood.
Am I a racist? If this is taken to mean "do I believe in the inherent
inferiority or malevolence or impurity of any group of people (however
arbitrarily defined or capriciously delimited) just because of their
common origin or habitation" - then of course I am not. I am not an
adherent of genetic predetermination and I think that there is very
little point in discussing fictitious entities such as "pure races".
That people are what they are made out to be by their up-bringing,
society, and history and by the reactions of other humans to them - is
what I subscribe to.
Yet I do believe in the temporary inferiority, malevolence and impurity
of groups of people who experienced and were subjected to prolonged
corrupting and pathologising influences. Historical processes exact an
exorbitant toll. Ideologies, indoctrination, totalitarianism,
authoritarianism, command economies, statism, militarism, malignant
nationalism, occupation - all carry a hefty price tag. And the currency
is the mind of the people: their mental health, their socialization
processes and, ultimately, the social fabric. Beneath a thin veneer of
kultur - the masses were savaged, the individual was crushed into a
moral pulp. I do believe in mass pathology: mass hysteria, mass
personality disorders, mass psychoses. I do believe in common
depravity, all-pervasive venality and inescapable subornation of whole
societies and of each of the individuals who comprise them. I do
believe in the osmosis of evil, in the diffusion of villainy, in the
corruption of the soul. In short: I do believe in terminally sick
societies, whose prospects of recovery are nil. The only hope lies in
their demise. Not in the abstract sense of the word - but in the actual
death and decomposition of each and every individual until the whole
"generation of the desert" is done with and a new, less contaminated
one, emerges to take its place.
This is why I believe that the future of Africa, the Middle East and
the countries of the CEE and NIS is, for the time being, behind them.
Their horizon is dim and empty. They are looking forward to the past.
They are the zombies of the international arena, the walking dead and
it is death that they multiply. Their growth is stunted, their speech
is stifled, their leaders a vicious lot, the states that they inhabit
are dens of barbarous criminality and lawlessness. Their institutions
are a travesty, their parties nests of avarice and vile. Their media
prostituted and defiled. The farce of elections and the newspeak of
democracy and human rights and freemarketry are props to hide the vast
wilderness of moral bankruptcy. These are Potemkin states run by
Chicago mobs. Instruments of extortion and coercion no different to
their predecessors - only they provide less security, both physical and
economic. They know no different. They think no different. They swear
by their malaise and by their malaise they shall die.
And die they shall. The signs are auspicious. Biology, the West and
international financial institutions all conspire to retire the beast.
New blood, new ideas, new hopes and aspirations are in evidence. Still
overwhelmed by the abrupt and cruel exposure of their elders, still
taken aback by the enormity of the project of rehabilitating the very
psyche of their people, still torn between illegal self enrichment and
service to their fellow citizens - but there they are, the young ones.
The battle is on. The consensus of the baksheesh and the political
assassination is replaced, ever so gradually, by the dissension of the
market place. Wars are fought with spreadsheets, experience imported
from afar, new knowledge craved, corruption decried. It is a
refreshing, gargantuan, change. And it will consume yet one more
generation. But it has started and it is irreversible. And it is in the
eyes of the youth, a flickering flame, so ephemeral, so vulnerable and
yet, so irresistible. This flame is called the future.
(Article written on January 15, 2000 and published January 31, 2000
in "Central Europe Review" volume 2, issue 4)
Return
The Caveman and the Alien
"'Life' must be curious, alert, erudite and moral, but it must achieve
this without being holier-than-thou, a cynic, a know-it-all or a
Peeping Tom."
(Edward K. Thompson, managing editor of "Life", 1949-1961)
When Chancellor Kohl's party and Edith Cresson are suspected of gross
corruption - these are labelled "aberrations" in an otherwise honest
West. When NASA in collaboration with its UK counterpart blow a 130
million US dollars spacecraft to smithereens having confused the metric
system for its pound/feet archaic predecessor - people nod their head
in disapproval: "accidents happen". When President Clinton appoints his
wife to suggest an overhaul of the multi-hundred billion dollars US
health system - no one thinks it odd. And when the (talented) son of
the police investigated, rumoured to be hyper-corrupt Minister of
Interior Affairs of Israel becomes a Minister himself, no one bats an
eyelash. Yet, when identical events happen in the decrepit countries of
Eastern, Central, or Southern Europe - they are subjected to heaps of
excoriating scorn, to vitriolic diatribes, to condescending preaching,
or to sanctions. It is, indeed, a double standard, a hypocrisy and a
travesty the magnitude of which is rarely to be encountered in the
annals of human pretensions to morality.
The West has grossly and thoroughly violated Thompson's edict. In its
oft-interrupted intercourse with these forsaken regions of the globe,
it has acted, alternately, as a Peeping Tom, a cynic and a know it all.
It has invariably behaved as if it were holier-than-thou. In an
unmitigated and fantastic succession of blunders, miscalculations, vain
promises, unkept threats and unkempt diplomats - it has driven Europe
to the verge of war and the region it "adopted" to the verge of
economic and social upheaval.
Enamoured with the new ideology of free marketry cum democracy, the
West first assumed the role of the omniscient. It designed ingenious
models, devised foolproof laws, imposed fail-safe institutions and
strongly "recommended" measures. Its representatives, the tribunes of
the West, ruled the plebeian East with determination rarely equalled by
skill or knowledge. Velvet hands couched in iron gloves, ignorance
disguised by economic newspeak, geostrategic interests masquerading as
forms of government characterized their dealings with the natives.
Preaching and beseeching from ever-higher pulpits, they poured
opprobrium and sweet delusions on the eagerly deluded, naive,
bewildered masses. The deceit was evident to the indigenous cynics -
but it was the failure that dissuaded them and all else. The West lost
Eastern and Southeast Europe not when it lied egregiously, not when it
pretended to know for sure when it surely did not know, not when it
manipulated and coaxed and coerced - but when it failed. To the peoples
of these regions, the king was fully dressed. It was not a little child
but an enormous debacle that exposed his nudity. In its
presumptuousness and pretentiousness, feigned surety and vain clichés,
imported models and exported cheap raw materials - the West succeeded
to demolish beyond reconstruction whole economies, to ravage
communities, to bring ruination upon the centuries-old social fabric,
woven diligently by generations. It brought crime and drugs and mayhem
but gave very little in return, only a horizon beclouded and thundering
with eloquence. As a result, while tottering regional governments still
pay lip service to the Euro-Atlantic structures, the masses are enraged
and restless and rebellious and baleful and anti-Western to the core.
They are not likely to acquiesce much longer - not with the West's
neo-colonialism but with its incompetence and inaptitude, with the
nonchalant experimentation that it imposed upon them and with the abyss
between its proclamations and its performance.
In all this time, the envoys of the West - its mediocre politicians,
its insatiably ruthless media, its obese tourists and its armchair
economists - continued to play the role of God, wreaking greater havoc
than even the original. While knowing it all in advance (in breach of
every tradition scientific), they also developed a kind of world weary,
unshaven cynicism interlaced with fascination at the depths plumbed by
the local's immorality and amorality. The jet-set Peeping Toms resided
in five star hotels (or luxurious apartments) overlooking the communist
shantytowns, drove utility vehicles to the shabby offices of the native
bureaucrats and dined in $100 per meal restaurants ("it's so cheap
here"). In between sushi and sake they bemoaned and grieved over
corruption and nepotism and cronyism ("I simply love their ethnic food,
but they are so..."). They mourned the autochtonal inability to act
decisively, to cut red tape, to manufacture quality, to open to the
world, to be less xenophobic (while casting a disdainful glance at the
sweaty waiter). To them it looked like an ancient natural phenomenon, a
force of nature, an inevitability and hence their cynicism. Mostly
provincial people with horizons limited by consumption and by wealth,
they adopted cynicism as shorthand for cosmopolitanism. They
erroneously believed it lent them an air of ruggedness and rich
experience and the virile aroma of decadent erudition. Yet all it did
is make them obnoxious and more repellent to the residents than they
already were.
Ever the preachers, the West - both Europeans and Americans - upheld
themselves as role models of virtue to be emulated, as points of
reference, almost inhuman or superhuman in their taming of the vices,
avarice up front. Yet the disorder in their own homes was broadcast
live, day in and day out, into the cubicles inhabited by the very
people they sought to so transform. And they conspired and collaborated
in all manner of corruption and crime and scam and rigged elections in
all the countries they put the gospel to. In trying to put an end to
history, they seem to have provoked another round of it - more vicious,
more enduring, more traumatic than before. That the West will pay the
price for its mistakes I have no doubt. For isn't it a part and parcel
of their teaching that everything has a price and that there is always
a time of reckoning?
(Article written on November 23, 1999 and published December 6, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 24)
Return
Is Transition Possible?
Can Socialist Professors of Economics
Teach Capitalism?
Lest you hold your breath to the end of this article - the answers to
both questions in the title are no and no. Capitalism cannot be
"learned" or "imported" or "emulated" or "simulated". Capitalism (or,
rather, liberalism) is not only a theoretical construct. It is not only
a body of knowledge. It is a philosophy, an ideology, a way of life, a
mentality and a personality.
This is why professors of economics who studied under Socialism can
never teach Capitalism in the truest sense of the word. No matter how
intelligent and knowledgeable (and a minority of them are) - they can
never convey the experience, the practice, the instincts and reflexes,
the emotional hues and intellectual pugilistics that real, full scale,
full-blooded Capitalism entails. They are intellectually and
emotionally castrated by their socialist past of close complicity with
inefficiency, corruption and pathological economic thinking.
This is why workers and managers inherited from the socialist-communist
period can never function properly in a Capitalist ambience. Both were
trained at civil disobedience through looting their own state and
factories. Both grew accustomed to state handouts and bribes disguised
as entitlements were suspicious and envious at their own elites
(especially their politicians and crony professors), victims to
suppressed rage and open, helpless and degrading dependence. Such
workers and managers - no matter how well intentioned and well
qualified or skilled - are likely to sabotage the very efforts whose
livelihood depends on.
When the transition period of post-communist economies started,
academics, journalists and politicians in the West talked about the
"pent up energies" of the masses, now to be released through the twin
processes of privatisation and democratisation. This metaphor of humans
as capitalistically charged batteries waiting to unleash their stored
energy upon their lands - was realistic enough. People were, indeed,
charged: with pathological envy, with rage, with sadism, with
pusillanimity, with urges to sabotage, to steal, and to pilfer. A
tsunami of destruction, a tidal wave of misappropriation, an orgy of
crime and corruption and nepotism and cronyism swept across the
unfortunate territories of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Transition
was perceived by the many either as a new venue for avenging the past
and for visiting the wrath of the masses upon the heads of the elites -
or as another, accelerated, mode of stripping the state naked of all
its assets. Finally, the latter propensity prevailed. The old elites
used the cover of transition to enrich themselves and their cronies,
this time "transparently" and "legally". The result was a repulsive
malignant metastasis of capitalism, devoid of the liberal ideals or
practices, denuded of ethics, floating in a space free of functioning,
trusted institutions.
While the masses and their elites in CEE were busy scavenging, the West
engaged in impotent debate between a school of "shock therapists" and a
school of "institution builders". The former believed that appearances
will create reality and that reality will alter consciousness (sounds
like Marxism to me). Rapid privatisation will generate a class of
instant capitalists who, in turn, will usher in an era of real,
multi-dimensional liberalism. The latter believed that the good wine of
Capitalism could be poured only to the functioning receptacles of
liberalism. They advocated much longer transition periods in which
privatisation will come only after the proper institutions were
erected. Both indulged in a form of central planning. IMF-ism replaced
Communism. The international financial institutions and their hordes of
well-paid, well-accommodated experts - replaced the Central Committee
of the party. Washington replaced Moscow. It was all very familiar and
cosy.
Ever the adapters, the former communist elites converted to ardent
capitalism. With the fervour with which they recited Marxist slogans in
their past - they chanted capitalist sobriquets in the present. It was
catechism, uttered soullessly, in an alien language, in the marble
cathedrals of capitalism in London and Washington. There was commitment
or conviction behind it and it was tainted by organized crime and
all-pervasive corruption. The West was the new regime to be suckered
and looted and pillaged and drained. The deal was simple: mumble the
mantras of the West, establish Potemkin institutions, keep peace and
order in your corner of the world, give the West strategic access to
your territory. In return the West will turn a blind eye to the worst
excesses and to worse than excesses. This was the deal struck in Russia
with the "reformists", in Yugoslavia with Milosevic, the "peacemaker",
in the Czech Republic with Klaus the "economic magician" of Central
Europe. It was communism all over: a superpower buying influence and
colluding with corrupt elites to rob their own nations blind.
It could have been different.
Post-war Japan and Germany are two examples of the right kind of
reconstruction and reforms. Democracy took real root in these two
former military regimes. Economic prosperity was long lived because
democracy took hold. And the ever tenuous, ever important trust between
the citizens and their rulers and among themselves was thus enhanced.
Trust is really the crux of the matter. Economy is called the dismal
science because it pretends to be one, disguising its uncertainties and
shifting fashions with mathematical formulae. Economy describes the
aggregate behaviour of humans and, in this restricted sense, it is a
branch of psychology. People operate within a marketplace and attach
values to their goods and services and to their inputs (work, capital,
natural endowments) through the price mechanism. This elaborate
construct, however, depends greatly on trust. If people were not to
trust each other and/or the economic framework (within which they
interact) - economic activities would have gradually ground to a halt.
A clear inverse relationship exists between the general trust level and
the level of economic activity. There are four major types of trust:
a. Trust related to Intent - the market players assume that other
players are (generally) rational, that they have intentions, that these
intentions conform to the maximization of benefits and that people are
likely to act on their intentions;
b. Trust related to Liquidity - the market players assume that
other players possess or have access, or will possess, or will have
access to the liquid means needed in order to materialize their
intentions and that - barring force majeure - this liquidity is the
driving force behind the formation of these intentions. People in
possession of liquidity wish to maximize the returns on their money and
are driven to economically transact;
c. Trust related to knowledge and ability - the market players
assume that other players possess or have access to, or will possess,
or will have access to the know-how, technology and intellectual
property and wherewithal necessary to materialize their intention (and,
by implication, the transactions that they enter into). Another
assumption is that all the players are "enabled": physically, mentally,
legally and financially available and capable to perform their parts as
agreed between the players in each and every particular transaction. A
hidden assumption is that the players evaluate themselves properly:
that they know their strengths and weaknesses, that they have a
balanced picture of themselves and realistic set of expectations,
self-esteem and self-confidence to support that worldview (including a
matching track record). Some allowance is made for "game theory"
tactics: exaggeration, disinformation, even outright deception - but
this allowance should not overshadow the merits of the transaction and
its inherent sincerity;
d. Trust related to the Economic horizon and context - the market
players assume that the market will continue to exist as an inert
system, unhindered by external factors (governments, geopolitics,
global crises, changes in accounting policies, hyperinflation, new
taxation - anything that could deflect the trajectory of the market).
They, therefore, have an "investment or economic horizon" to look
forward to and upon which they can base their decisions. They also have
cultural, legal, technological and political contexts within which to
operate. The underlying assumptions of stability are very much akin to
the idealized models that scientists study in the accurate sciences
(indeed, in economy as well).
When one or more of these basic building blocks of trust is fractured
that the whole edifice of the market crumbles. Fragmentation ensues,
more social and psychological than economic in nature. This is very
typical of poor countries with great social and economic polarization.
It is also very typical of countries "in transition" (a polite way to
describe a state of total shock and confusion). People adopt several
reaction patterns to the breakdown in trust:
a. Avoidance and isolation - they avoid contact with other people
and adopt reclusive behaviour. The number of voluntary interactions
decreases sharply;
b. Corruption - People prefer shortcuts to economic benefits
because of the collapse of the horizon trust (=they see no long term
future and even doubt the very continued existence of the system);
c. Crime - Criminal activity increases;
d. Fantastic and Grandiose delusions to compensate for a growing
sense of uncertainty and fear and for a complex of inferiority. This
nagging feeling of inferiority is the result of the internalisation of
the image of the people in their own eyes and in the eyes of others.
This is a self-reinforcing mechanism (vicious circle). The results are
under-confidence and a handicapped sense of self-esteem. The latter
undulates and fluctuates from overvaluation of one's self and others to
devaluation of both;
e. Hypermobility - People are not loyal to the economic cells
within which they function. They switch a lot of jobs, for instance, or
ignore contracts that they made. The concepts of exclusivity, the
sanctity of promises, loyalty, future, and a career path - all get
eroded. As a result, there is no investment in the future (in the
acquisition of skills or in long term investments, to give but two
examples);
f. Cognitive Dissonance - The collapse of the social and economic
systems adversely affects the individual. One of the classic defence
mechanisms is the cognitive dissonance. The person involved tells
himself that he really chose and wanted his way of life, his decrepit
environment, his low standard of living, etc. ("We are poor because we
chose not to be like the inhuman West");
g. The Pathological Envy - The Cognitive Dissonance is often
coupled with a pathological envy (as opposed to benign jealousy). This
is a destructive type of envy, which seeks to deprive others of their
successes and possessions. It is very typical of societies with a
grossly unequal distribution of wealth;
h. The Mentality (or the Historical) Defences - these are defence
mechanisms, which make use of an imagined mentality problem ("we are
like that, we have been like this for ages now, nothing to do, we are
deformed") - or build upon some historical pattern, or invented pattern
("we have been enslaved and submissive for five centuries - what can
you expect");
i. The Passive-Aggressive reaction: occurs mainly when the market
players have no access to more legitimate and aggressive venues of
reacting to their predicament or when they are predisposed to
suppressing of aggression (or when they elect to not express it). The
passive-aggressive reactions are "sabotage"-type reactions: slowing
down of the work, "working by the book", absenteeism, stealing from the
workplace, fostering and maintaining bureaucratic procedures and so on;
j. The inability to postpone satisfaction - The players regress to
a child-like state, demanding immediate satisfaction, unable to
postpone it and getting frustrated, aggressive and deceiving if they
are required to do so by circumstances. They engage in short term
activities, some criminal, some dubious, some legitimate: trading and
speculation, gambling, short-termism.
The results are, usually, catastrophic: A reduction in economic
activity, in the number of interactions and in the field of economic
potentials (the product of all possible economic transactions). An
erosion of the human capital, its skills and availability. Brain drain
- skilled people desert, en masse, the fragmented economic system and
move to more sustainable ones. Resort to illegal and to extra-legal
activities Social and economic polarization. Interethnic tensions and
tensions between the very rich and the very poor tend to erupt and to
explode.
And this is where most countries in transition are at right now. To a
large extent, it is the fault of their elites. Providing orientation
and guidance is supposed to be their function and why society invests
in them. But the elites in all countries in transition - tainted by
long years of complicity in the unseemly and the criminal - never
exerted moral or intellectual authority over their people. At the risk
of sounding narcissistic, allow me to quote myself (from "The Poets and
the Eclipse"). Replace "intellectuals of the Balkan" with
"intellectuals of the countries in transition":
(Article written on October 31, 1999 and published November 15, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 21)
Return
The Poets and the Eclipse
Poets in Somalia hold an inordinate sway over the indigenous
population. They sing the praises of war with the same alacrity and
vehemence that they invest in glorifying peace. And the population
listens and follows these dark skinned pied pipers. Lately, they have
been extolling peace and peace prevails in Somaliland and the other
state-like enclaves in this tortured shadow of a country.
In the evening we celebrate a birthday party under deciduous trees, in
floodlit darkness, somewhere in the Balkans. The voices of industrious
crickets, of late chirping birds, of the cesma - the fabled Balkan
water fountain - all intermingle to produce an auditory magic. A famous
satirist and poet catapults slurred, vitriolic diatribes at a guest
from the West that I brought with me. His words ring inebriatedly
authentic. He need not learn the language, he exclaims, of people
without a spirit and without a mind. He is referring to English. His
country - he triumphantly shrills - is the best, an island of
civilization among the barbarians at the gates. He enumerates his
neighbours and proceeds to describe in vivid, gut wrenching detail what
he would do to them all, given the opportunity. "The rotten core of our
national apple" - a melancholy contribution from a professor of
psychiatry.
Another day. As the moon bit into the otherwise scorching sun - the
streets emptied. Shops closed, the traffic halted, workers remained
cooped up in steamy offices. Why all this - I asked my friend. He is a
leading journalist, an author, an editor and a media personality. He
looked at me warily and proceeded to expound upon the health risks
entailed in being exposed to the eclipse. He was serious as was
evidenced by his subsequent descent into his basement and by the
resounding bolting of the anti-nuclear double plated armoured door. He
offered me to join him and was appalled to hear that I had every
intention of watching the eclipse - and from the street.
The intellectuals of the Balkans - a curse, not in disguise, a
nefarious presence, ominous, erratic and corrupt. Sometimes, at the
nucleus of all conflict and mayhem - at other times (of ethnic
cleansing or suppression of the media) conspicuously absent. Zeligs of
umpteen disguises and ever changing, shimmering loyalties.
They exert no moderating, countervailing influence - on the contrary,
they radicalise, dramatize, poison and incite. Intellectuals are
prominent among all the nationalist parties in the Balkans - and rare
among the scant centre parties that have recently sprung out of the
ashes of communism.
They do not disseminate the little, outdated knowledge that they do
possess. Rather they keep it as a guild would, unto themselves,
jealously. In the vanity typical of the insecure, they abnegate all
foreign knowledge. They rarely know a second language sufficiently to
read it. They promote their brand of degreed ignorance with religious
zeal and punish all transgressors with fierceness and ruthlessness.
They are the main barriers to technology transfers and knowledge
enhancement in this wretched region. Their instincts of
self-preservation go against the best interests of their people. Unable
to educate and teach - they prostitute their services, selling degrees
or corrupting themselves in politics. They make up a big part of the
post communist nomenclature as they have a big part of the communist
one. The result is economics students who never heard of Milton
Friedman or Kenneth Arrow and students of medicine who offer sex or
money or both to their professors in order to graduate.
Thus, instead of advocating and promoting freedom and liberalization -
they concentrate on the mechanisms of control, on manipulating the worn
levers of power. They are the dishonest brokers of corrupted
politicians and their businessmen cronies. They are heavily involved -
oft times the initiators - of suppression and repression, especially of
the mind and of the spirit. The black crows of nationalism perched upon
their beleaguered ivory towers.
They could have chosen differently. In 1989, the Balkans had a chance
the likes of which it never had before. In Yugoslavia, the government
of the reformist (though half hearted) Ante Markovic. Elsewhere,
Communism was gasping for a last breath and the slaughter of the beast
was at hand. The intellectuals of Central Europe, of the Baltic States
- even of Russia - chose to interpret these events to their people, to
encourage freedom and growth, to posit goals and to motivate. The
intellectuals of the Balkans failed miserably. Terrified by the sights
and sounds of their threatened territory - they succumbed to
obscurantism, resorted to the nostalgic, the abstract and the
fantastic, rather than to the pragmatic. This choice is evident even in
their speech. Marred by centuries of cruel outside domination - it is
all but meaningless. No one can understand what a Balkanian has to say.
Both syntax and grammar are tortured into incomprehensibility. Evasion
dominates, a profusion of obscuring verbal veils, twists and turns
hiding a vacuous deposition.
The Balkan intellectuals chose narcissistic self-absorption and navel
gazing over "other-orientation". Instead of seeking integration (as
distinct from assimilation) - they preach and practice isolation. They
aim to differentiate themselves not in a pluralistic, benign manner -
but in vicious, raging defiance of "mondialism" (a Serbian propaganda
term). To define themselves AGAINST all others - rather than to compare
and learn from the comparison. Their love affair with a (mostly
concocted) past, their future-phobia, and the ensuing culture shock -
all follow naturally from the premises of their disconsolate
uniqueness. Balkan intellectuals are all paranoids. Scratch the
surface, the thin, bow tied, veneer of "kultur" - and you will find an
atavistic poet, fighting against the very evil wrought by him and by
his actions. This is the Greek tragedy of this breathtaking region.
Nature here is cleverer than humans. It is exactly their conspiracies
that bring about the very things they have to conspire against in the
first place.
All over the world, intellectuals are the vanguard, the fifth column of
new ideas, the resistance movement against the occupation of the old
and the banal. Here intellectuals preach conformity, doing things the
old, proven way, protectionism against the trade of liberal minds. All
intellectuals here - fed by the long arm of the state - are
collaborators. True, all hideous regimes had their figleaf
intellectuals and with a few exceptions, the regimes in the Balkans are
not hideous. But the principle is the same, only the price varies.
Prostituting their unique position in semi-literate, village-tribal
societies - intellectuals in the Balkans sold out en masse. They are
the inertial power - rather than the counterfist of reform. They are
involved in politics of the wrong and doomed kind. The Balkan would
have been better off had they decided to remain aloof, detached in
their archipelago of universities.
There is no real fire in Balkan intellectuals. Oh, they get excited and
they shout and blush and wave their hands ever so vigorously. But they
are empty. It is full gas in neutral. They get nowhere because they are
going nowhere. They are rational and conservative and some are
emotional and "leftist". But it is all listless and lifeless, like the
paces of a very old mechanism, set in motion 80 years ago and never
unwound.
All that day of the eclipse of the last millennium, even the
intellectuals stayed in their cellars and in their offices and did not
dare venture out. They emerged when night fell, accustomed to the
darkness, unable to confront their own eclipse, hiding from the evil
influence of a re-emerging sun.
(Article written on August 14, 1999 and published August 30, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 10)
Return
The Rip van Winkle Institutions
The West - naive, provincial and parochial - firmly believed that the
rot was confined to the upper echelons of communist and socialist
societies. Beneath the festering elites - the theory went - there are
wholesome masses waiting to be liberated from the shackles of
corruption, cronyism, double-talk and manipulation. Given half a decent
chance, these good people will revert to mature capitalism, replete
with functioning institutions. It was up to the West to provide these
long deprived people with this eagerly awaited chance.
What the West failed to realize was that communism was a collaborative
effort - a symbiotic co-existence of the rulers and the ruled, a mutual
undertaking and an all-pervasive pathology. It was not confined to
certain socio-economic strata, nor was it the imposed-from-above
product of a rapacious nomenclature. It was a wink and nod social
contract, a co-ordinated robbery, and an orgy of degeneration,
decadence and corruption attended by all the citizenry to varying
degrees. It was a decades long incestuous relationship between all the
social and economic players. To believe that all this can be erased
virtually overnight was worse than naive - it was idiotic.
Perhaps what fooled the West was the appearance of law and order. Most
communist countries inherited an infrastructure of laws and
institutions from their historical predecessors. Consider the Czech
Republic, East Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia and even Russia. These
countries had courts and police and media and banks long prior to the
calamitous onset of communism. What the latter did - ingeniously - was
to preserve the ossified skeletons of these institutions while draining
them from any real power. Decisions were made elsewhere, clandestinely,
the outcome of brutal internecine power struggles. But they were
legitimised by rubber stamp institutions: "parliaments", "judicial
system", "police", "banks", and the "media". The West knew that these
institutions were dysfunctional - but not to which breathtaking extent.
It assumed that nothing more than technical assistance was needed in
order to breathe life into the institutional infrastructure. It assumed
that market forces, egged on by a class of new and increasingly wealthy
shareholders, will force these institutions to shape up and begin to
cater to the needs of their constituencies. Above all, it assumed that
the will to have better and functioning institutions was there - and
that the only thing missing was the knowledge.
These were all catastrophically wrong assumptions. In all
post-communist countries, with no exception, one criminal association
(the communist or socialist party) was simply replaced by another
(often comprised of the very same people). Elections were used (more
often, abused) simply to queue the looters, organized in political
parties. The mass devastation of the state by everyone - the masses
included - proceeded apace, financed by generous credits and grants
from unsuspecting (or ostrich-like) multilaterals and donor conferences
(recall Bosnia). If anything, materialism - the venal form of
"capitalism" that erupted in the post communist planet - only
exacerbated the moral and ethical degeneracy of everyone involved.
Western governments, Western banks, Western businessmen and Western
institutions were sucked into the maelstrom of money laundering,
illicit trading, corruption, shoddiness and violence. To perpetuate
their clout and prowess, the new rulers did everything they could to
hinder the reform of their institutions and their restoration to
functionality.
In communist societies, banks were channels of political patronage
through which money was transferred from the state to certain
well-connected, enterprises. Bankers were low-level clerks, who handled
a limited repertoire of forms in a prescribed set of ways. Communist
societies had no commercial credits, consumer credits, payment
instruments, capital markets, retail banking, investment banking, or
merchant banking. The situation today, a decade after the demise of
communism is not much improved. In most countries in transition, the
domestic powers that be conspired to fend off foreign ownership of
their antiquated and comically (or, rather, tragically) politicised
"banks". The totally inept and incompetent management was not replaced,
nor were new management techniques introduced. The state kept bailing
out and re-capitalizing ailing banks. Political cronies and family
relatives kept obtaining subsidized loans unavailable to the
shrivelling private sector.
The courts, in the lands of socialism, were the vicious long arms of
the executive (actually, of the party). A mockery of justice, law and
common sense - judges were ill trained, politically nominated,
subservient and cowed into toeing the official line. Of dubious
intellectual pedigree and of certain unethical and immoral lineage -
judges were widely despised and derided, known to be universally
corrupt and ignorant even of the laws that they were ostensibly
appointed to administer. This situation hasn't changed in any post
communist society. The courts are slow and inefficient, corrupt and
lacking in specialization and education. The legal system is heavily
tilted in favour of the state and against the individual. Judges are
identified politically and their decisions are often skewed. The
executive, in many countries, does not hesitate to undermine the
legitimacy of the courts either by being seen to exploit their
political predilections, or by attacking them for being amenable to
such use by a rival party. This sorry state is only aggravated by the
frequent and erratic changes in legislation.
In communist times, the law enforcement agencies - primarily the
police, the customs and the secret service - were instruments of naked
aggression against dissidents, non-conformists and those who fell out
of favour. In the centre of immeasurable corruption, policemen were
often more dreaded than criminals. Customs officers enriched themselves
by resorting to extortion, bribe taking and acts of straightforward
expropriation. The secret services often ran a state within a state,
replete with militias, prisons, a court system, a parallel financial
system and trading companies. Again, the situation hasn't changed much.
Perhaps with the exception of the secret services, all these phenomena
still exist and in the open.
And then there is the media - the wastebasket of post communist
societies, the cesspool of influence peddling and calumny. Journalists
are easily bought and sold and their price is ever decreasing. They
work in mouthpieces of business interests masquerading as newspapers or
electronic media. They receive their instructions - to lie, to falsify,
to ignore, to emphasize, to suppress, to extort, to inform, to
collaborate with the authorities - from their Editor in Chief. They
trade news for advertising. Some of them are involved in all manner of
criminal activities, others are simply unethical in the extreme. They
all have pacts with Mammon. People do not believe a word these
contortionists of language and torturers of meaning write or say. It is
by comparing these tampered and biased sources that people reach their
own conclusions within their private medium.
One should hope that the disillusionment of the West is near. Post
communist societies are sick and their institutions are a travesty. As
is often the case with the mentally ill, there is a strong resistance
to treatment and recovery. The options are two: to disengage - or to
commit to an asylum with force-feeding, forced administering of
medication and constant monitoring. The worst behaviour is to go on
pretending that the problem does not exist, or that it is much less
serious than it really is. Denial and repression are the very sources
of dysfunction. They have to be fought. And sometimes the patient's own
welfare - not to mention that of his environment - requires
arm-twisting or the infliction of pain. There is a kernel of good
people in every society. In the post communist societies, this kernel
and suppressed and mocked and sometimes callously silenced. To give
these people a voice should be the first priority of the West. But this
cannot be done by colluding with their oppressors. The West has to
choose - and now.
(Article written on December 10, 1999 and published January 10, 2000
in "Central Europe Review" volume 2, issue 1)
Return
Inside, Outside
Diasporas and Modern States
A speech given at the meeting of the Canada-Macedonia Chamber of
Commerce in Toronto, Canada on December 4th, 1999
Distinguished Guests,