After the Rain : how the West lost the East Part 2

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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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They do not disseminate the little, outdated knowledge that they do possess.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 prost.i.tute 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 s.e.x 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 succ.u.mbed 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 a.s.similation) - 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 ba.n.a.l. 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.

Prost.i.tuting their unique position in semi-literate, village-tribal societies - intellectuals in the Balkans sold out en ma.s.se. 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)

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The Rip van Winkle Inst.i.tutions

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 ma.s.ses 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 inst.i.tutions. 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 inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions: "parliaments", "judicial system", "police", "banks", and the "media". The West knew that these inst.i.tutions were dysfunctional - but not to which breathtaking extent.

It a.s.sumed that nothing more than technical a.s.sistance was needed in order to breathe life into the inst.i.tutional infrastructure. It a.s.sumed that market forces, egged on by a cla.s.s of new and increasingly wealthy shareholders, will force these inst.i.tutions to shape up and begin to cater to the needs of their const.i.tuencies. Above all, it a.s.sumed that the will to have better and functioning inst.i.tutions was there - and that the only thing missing was the knowledge.

These were all catastrophically wrong a.s.sumptions. In all post-communist countries, with no exception, one criminal a.s.sociation (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 ma.s.s devastation of the state by everyone - the ma.s.ses 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 inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions 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)

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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,

I was born to parents of the working cla.s.s in Israel, in 1961. It was a grim neighbourhood, in a polluted industrial area, a red bastion of the "socialist" labour party. The latter would have easily qualified as Bolshevik-communist anywhere else. It exerted the subtly pernicious decadently corrupt kind of all-pervasive influence that is so typical in one party states. Sure, there were a few token fringe opposition parties but Labour's dominance went uninterrupted for more than 90 years. And corruption was both rife and rampant - nepotism, cronyism, outright bribery. During the 70s, the recently appointed governor of the central bank was imprisoned and a minister committed suicide. Many more immolated themselves or ended serving long sentences in over-crowded jails. Ma.s.sive scandals erupted daily. Some of them cost the country more than 10% of its GDP each (for example, the crisis of the bank shares in 1983). In the 80s, privatisation turned into an orgy of privateering, sp.a.w.ning a cla.s.s of robber barons. Red tape is still a major problem - and a major source of employment. And then there were the wars and armed conflicts and vendettas and retributions and mines and missiles and exploding buses and the gas masks. In its 52 years of independence the country has gone through 6 major official wars and more than 10 war-sized conflicts.

Yet, despite all the above, Israel emerged as by far the most outstanding economic miracle. Its population was multiplied by 10 by surges of immigrants. During the 50s, it tripled from 650,000 (1948 - Jewish population figures only) to 2,000,000. The newcomers were all dest.i.tute, the refugees of the geopolitics of hate from both the Eastern block and from the Arab countries. The cultural, social and religious profile of the latter stood in stark contrast to that of their "hosts". Thus the seeds of long term inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, social and religious conflicts were sown, soon to blossom into full-fledged rifts. During the 90s - 800,000 Russian immigrants flooded a Jewish population of 4,500,000 souls. But these demographic upheavals did not disturb a pattern of unprecedented economic growth, which led to a GDP per capita per annum of 17,000 USD.

Israel is a world leader in agriculture, armaments, information technology, research and development in various scientific fields. Yet, it is a desert country, smaller in area than Macedonia and with much fewer and lesser natural endowments. It was subjected to an Arab embargo for more than 40 consecutive years. On average it had c. 3 million inhabitants throughout its existence.

Israel's secret was the Jews in the Jewish Diaspora the world over.

From its very inception - as a budding concept in the febrile brain of Herzl - the Jewish State was considered to be the home of all Jews, wherever they are. A Law of Return granted them the right to immediately become Israeli citizens upon stepping on the country's soil. The Jewish State was considered to be an instrument of the Jewish People, a shelter, an extension, a long arm, a collaborative and symbiotic effort, an ident.i.ty, an emotional apparatus, a buffer, an insurance policy, a retirement home, a showcase, a convincing argument against all anti-Semites past and present. There was no question whatsoever regarding the implicit and explicit contractual obligations between these two parties. The Jews in the Diaspora had to disregard and ignore Israel's warts, misdeeds and disadvantages. They had to turn a public blind eye to corruption, nepotism, cronyism, the inefficient allocation of economic resources, blunders and failures. They had to support Israel financially. In return, the Jewish State had to ensure its own successful survival against all odds and to welcome all the Jews to become its citizens whenever they chose to and no matter what their previous record or history is. Hence the constant arguments about WHO is a Jew and which inst.i.tution should be allowed to monopolize the endowment of this lucrative and, potentially, life saving status. Hence the bitter resentment felt in many circles toward the 200,000 or so non-Jewish immigrants, the relatives of the Jewish ones who flooded Israel's sh.o.r.es in the last decade.