After the Rain : how the West lost the East Part 1

After the Rain.

by Sam Vaknin.

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 pa.s.sionate.

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

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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 c.o.c.ktail 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 fict.i.tious ent.i.ties 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 ma.s.ses were savaged, the individual was crushed into a moral pulp. I do believe in ma.s.s pathology: ma.s.s hysteria, ma.s.s personality disorders, ma.s.s 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 inst.i.tutions are a travesty, their parties nests of avarice and vile. Their media prost.i.tuted 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 inst.i.tutions 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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)

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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 s.p.a.cecraft 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 c.u.m democracy, the West first a.s.sumed the role of the omniscient. It designed ingenious models, devised foolproof laws, imposed fail-safe inst.i.tutions 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 ma.s.ses. 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 cliches, 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 ma.s.ses 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 inapt.i.tude, 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 G.o.d, 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)