The European Left still laments the West’s victory in the Cold War
Not a happy day for everyone
Given the kind of campaign being waged in the Guardian to discredit the 20th anniversary of the end of communism, it would be no real surprise if the story turned up in the paper’s comment section as the peg for yet another op-ed mourning the passing of the old regimes.
For it has been a truly eye-popping couple of weeks for those who can bear the mental torture of trawling through that paper’s opinion pages.
Take star columnist Seumas Milne who helped build the paper’s appalling Comment is Free website and who ranks as one of its most prominent contributors. Milne is a neo-totalitarian writer with all the usual prejudices: he hates Israel, he thinks Iraq and Afghanistan are about Western imperialism, he regards Obama as a sell-out to Zionists and other agents of the capitalist-corporate conspiracy, he thinks terrorism is mainly the fault of the West for radicalising people who would otherwise be busy building egalitarian socialist democracies, he doesn’t quite call America the Great Satan but he can understand those who do.
You get the picture. Not a man in any mood to celebrate the momentous events which brought down communist dictatorship in central and eastern Europe 20 years ago this month.
For Milne, you see, the “real lesson of Berlin is that nothing is ever settled”.
“From the point of view of western self-esteem,” he noted last week in a spirit of angry sarcasm, “1989 is a year to die for: a tale of the triumph of individual freedom and the defeat of an ideological competitor, all captured live on television in the ritual destruction of a reviled enemy symbol in the heart of Europe. So the blanket coverage of the anniversary of the fall of the wall, and the parade of platitude-mouthing politicians in Berlin to mark the implosion of European communism it symbolised, was only to be expected.”
With a few “platitudes” of his own he manages a bare minimum of grudging and pointedly neutral remarks about “the end of authoritarian rule” but then moves straight on to his core theme about how east Europeans have been let down by the cruel realities of capitalist democracy. How so? Well, he informs, us:
“What the protesters in first Gdansk and then Leipzig were mostly demanding was not capitalism, of course, but a different kind of socialism.”
Oh, really. So that would explain why every single one of the reforming countries set about privatising their socialist economies lock, stock and barrel with the full support of the vast majority of their peoples. Obviously there were (and remain) problems. Privatisation was, in many cases, put into practice by former apparatchiks who in collusion with other remnants of the old regimes, mafia style crime gangs, and opportunists with an eye to a quick buck, did everything they could to line their own pockets.
The social, political and economic mess left by the communists was bound to lead to a deeply painful transition. But watch how slippery Milne is in blaming the pain of that transition not on the communists who made it inevitable but on the capitalists who tried to overcome it.
“…the crisis created under western tutelage and nomenklatura capitalism was comparable to the Great Depression in the US, and national income took more than a decade to recover,” he laments. It’s like blaming a doctor for the post-operative agony of orthodpaedic surgery while absolving the gang of thugs who set about the patient with baseball bats and put him in hospital in the first place.
But this, as they say, is the Guardian World View (GWV) and there have been plenty of others to push the same line.
I referred last week to the eulogy to communist East Germany in the Guardian by one Bruni de la Motte, a former lecturer at East Germany’s Potsdam University who now works as a negotiator for a British trade union.
The end of communism, the reunification of Germany and the transition process generally all brought, she ruefully said, “social breakdown, widespread unemployment, blacklisting, a crass materialism and an “elbow society” as well as a demonisation of the country I lived in and helped shape. Despite the advantages, for many it was more a disaster than a celebratory event.”
All those unemployed Stasi officers, eh? Truly, what a “disaster”!
And then there was Ulrich Duchrow, a professor of systematic theology, at the University of Heidelberg who was dredged up to tell us that:
“1989 can only be seen as good for humanity in the future if the people of the world learn from the “peaceful revolution” that they have the power of self-liberation from an oppressive and destructive system. If they interpret this year as the victory of the west they allow capitalism to continue to destroy humanity, the earth and eventually itself.” So liberation from communism can only be considered a good thing if it leads to the demise of the ideological, political and economic structures which effected that liberation in the first place. Clever.
We were also offered a piece by Gyula Hegyi, a Hungarian socialist member of the European parliament, who (be grateful for small mercies) cannot bring himself to regret the liberation in its entirety but confidently argues that:
“The ideal answer would be democracy without capitalist dogmas; but this, of course, is not only a Hungarian challenge.”
But which dogmas does he think underpin democracy anyway? Liberal democracy is impossible without capitalist economics, because only via a privatised economy can power be sufficiently dispersed across society to prevent the state from assuming authoritarian control.
In any case, it has been precisely the absence of fully fledged capitalist dogmas in Hungary — the Socialists rejected neo-liberalism as much as Fidesz, their nominally right-leaning but primarily nationalist-collectivist opponents — that has done so much harm to his country’s prospects. It is socialist (read, reformed-communist) government in Hungary of the type supported by Hegyi that has made the country a basket case. Neo-liberal dogmas have been nowhere to be seen.
But the prize for the most tortured and revealing piece of writing on the whole subject goes to the editorial team of the Guardian itself with a piece on November 10 headlined: “The Fall of the Berlin Wall — The Lost Decades”.
If you are in generous mood, you can take at face value comments along the lines that, “Millions regained their basic freedoms, and countries such as Poland that had disappeared altogether under foreign occupation regained their independence.”
But you only have to wait for the very next words in that paragraph to see what is really at work in the Guardian World View and simultaneously to get an insight into a mentality which pervades the European Left and much of Europe with it.
“But,” the editorial continues, “Mr Gorbachev can also rue the day he accepted at face value western promises of a new world order, only to see an old and very familiar one arise in its place. The west was not as good as its word. The Russian leader was promised, but only verbally, that Nato would not expand into the bases left by departing Russian troops in east Germany.”
And, we are later told: “..this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a neutral eastern Europe..”
Let us not dwell on the contemptuous attitude herein displayed towards sovereign democracies in central and eastern Europe who themselves regarded membership of NATO as national priorities in order to secure the precarious democratic freedoms they had just won.
For the key reality to be so much lamented here is that 1989 was in fact a victory for the West, a victory, moreover, which the American-led alliance had the courage and vision to press home. It is the geo-strategic victory itself that the European Left is so vexed by. The shallow and distorted analysis of the shortcomings of the post-communist transition which falsely blames “neo-liberalism” for the region’s ills is beside the point. The Guardian and its ideological fellow travellers never cared much for the people of central and eastern Europe during the Cold War and there is no reason to believe they care for them now.
The fact is that they are not now and never have been truly committed to the liberal-democratic capitalist agenda that forms the core inheritance of the western tradition. They cannot, therefore, have anything other than mixed feelings for an anniversary which, more than any other in living memory, marks the victory of that tradition over the forces of barbarism.
And I conclude this piece with a question that you might like to ponder at length: If you are in the middle ground between liberal-democratic capitalism and totalitarian socialism, where exactly are you on the great issues of our time and how much credence should we really be expected to give to your claim to adhere to basic standards of decency?
November 16th, 2009 at 5:22 am
Milne (and fellow-traveler Pilger) are, frankly, incredible - it is incredible that people like these can actually get published in what purports to be a respected newspaper. He is a throwback to a sort of 1930’s Trotskyite, endlessly mouthing his platitudes and his bizarre view of Western society (while cheerfully living there and accepting its rewards).
I think a significant number of CiF readers, if they read his columns at all, find him simply risible.
The greater question is why there are enough forces at work in the Guardian to continue posting his articles, which, in their fantasies, represent an world that has no bearing on reality - and, in fact, represent a sort of crazed fantastical alternative reality that exits only in his mind and those of a few who somehow share his opinions.
November 16th, 2009 at 6:10 am
It only gets worse - or funnier:
————
Ulrich Duchrow
Capitalism will implode
Our current system is doomed. But 1989 gives us hope at least that we have the power of self-liberation.
———–
Yes - and the world will come to an end in 2012, according to a new movie.
Which will come first?
November 16th, 2009 at 7:50 am
As a unfortunate ex-citizen of one of these workers paradise I find it utterly immoral and disgusting that these fighters for social justice are working in their free societies enjoying its every advantage but preaching to hundreds of millions of people who lived and suffered in these bizarre and absurd societies.
Regarding Mr. Hegyi’s opus he conveniently forgot to mention in it that his party (MSZP) and its leaders are considered the most corrupt entity in Hungarian history, and their behavior and amazing impotence gave way to the success of the nationalist right.
November 18th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Amusingly, there was an “op-ed” piece commemorating the fall of the wall in the New York Times by none other than Slavoj Zizak, reputed to be the world’s number one intellectual, stating pretty much the same thing, that what eastern Europeans wanted was not capitalism, but “socialism with a human face.” I was reminded to the remark by George Orwell, that some things are so silly that “only an intellectual can believe them.”
November 19th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
“If they interpret this year as the victory of the west they allow capitalism to continue to destroy humanity, the earth and eventually itself.”
Yeah, as if only wester capitalist economies harm the environment and exploit workers.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
I cannot help but think that the disillusionment with capitalism in many eastern European countries is less to do with capitalism itself and more to do with the fact that when they privatised their bloated state sector it was done so as to enrich the former communist party bosses, keeping the same corrupt elite in power and influence.
November 21st, 2009 at 8:42 am
Seamus Milne is an idiot. That much is clear, at least since his bizarre review of the book ‘Comrades’ about the history and fall of Communism, in which he grumbled that there should be some appraisal of the ‘good points’ of Soviet Communism and its ‘popularity’. And failed to present them: what a surprise!
There is a Polish saying ‘There’s no conservative like a successful revolutionary’ which sums up the paradox of the radicalism that became more reactionary once in power. Once you have taken power, are you really going to relinquish it to someone who had more of a right to it or had broader support?