After the Rain : how the West lost the East Part 3

But the consensus was and is unharmed, appearances notwithstanding. And the Jews supported Israel in numerous straightforward and inventive ways. They volunteered to fight for it. They spied for it. They donated money and built hospitals, schools, libraries, universities and munic.i.p.al offices. They supported students through scholarships and young leaders through exchange programs. They managed and financed a gigantic network of educational facilities from youth summer camps to cultural exchanges. They bought the risky long-term bonds of the nascent state, which was constantly fighting for its life (and they did an excellent business in hindsight). Some of them invested money in centrally planned, periphery bound, lost economic causes - ghost factories that produced shoddy and undemanded goods. Year in and year out they poured an average of half a billion US dollars a year annually (about 200 million US dollars a year in net funds). Most of the money did not come from the stereotypical Jewish billionaires. Most of it came through a concerted effort of voluntary (though surely peer pressured) money raising among hundreds of thousands of poor Jews the world over. The Jewish people set up a horde of organizations whose aim was collection of funds and their application to the advancement of Zionist and Jewish causes. Every Jew deposited a few weekly cents into the "Blue Box" - "for the cause": to redeem land, to establish settlements, to open educational inst.i.tutions, to publish a Jewish newspaper, to act against anti-Semitism, to rebrand Judaism and fight nefarious stereotypes. It was a gra.s.sroots movement directed only by the dual slogans of "No Other Choice" and "The Whole World is Against Us". Emanating from posttraumatic and paranoiac roots - it later became a groundswell of goodwill, enthusiastic co-operation and pride.

And all this time, the Jews knew. Not only the sophisticated, worldly Jewish moneymen. Not only the cosmopolitan, erudite Jewish intellectuals. But also the more typical small time tailors and shoemakers and restaurateurs and cab drivers and plumbers and sweatshop textile workers. They all knew - and it did not sway them one bit. It did not drive them away. They did not gripe and complain or abstain.

They kept coming. They kept pouring money into this seemingly insatiable black hole. They kept believing. They kept waiting and they kept active. And all these long decades - they knew.

They knew that Israel was ruled by a caste of utterly corrupt politicians whose avarice equalled only their incompetence. They knew that central planning was going nowhere fast. They knew that elections were rigged, that red tape was strangling entrepreneurship and initiative, that inter ethnic tension was explosive. They knew that Israel lost its not to a demographically exploding Arab population coupled with endless acts of terrorism. They knew that Israel's conduct was not fair, not always democratic, and often unnecessarily aggressive. They knew that tenders were won by bribes, that transparency was a mockery, that the courts were negligent and inefficient. They knew that property rights were not protected and that people were pusillanimous and greedy and petty and self-occupied (not to say narcissistic). They witnessed the waste of scarce resources, the indefinitely protracted processes, the bureaucratic delays, the free use of public funds for private ends. They watched as ministers and members of the Knesset and top law enforcement agent conspired to engage in crime and then colluded in covering it up. And they felt betrayed and agonized over all this.

Yet, they NEVER - NEVER - not even for a second, considered giving up.

They NEVER - NEVER - stopped the money coming. They did not discontinue the dialogue intended to make things better, over there, the land of their so distant fathers. They always donated and invested and financed and visited and cajoled and argued and opined and hoped and dreamed.

Because this was THEIR country, as well. Because it was a partnership and the inexperienced, stray partner was given the benefit of indefinite doubt. Because they saw the opportunity - the economic opportunity, for sure - but, above all, the historical opportunity.

When Israel did mature, when it became a law state, orderly, transparent, efficient, forward looking, the high tech Israel we all know - it repaid them over and over again. They all made money on their decades of patience and endurance. The rich made big money. The small guys made less. But there is no Jew today who can say that he lost money in Israel because he became financially or economically active there in the long run.

They stuck to Israel primarily because they were Jews (and, by easy extension, Israelis). And this is what being a Jew meant. And they were richly rewarded by the Justice Minister of history. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learnt here by Macedonians in the Diaspora. I, for one, am sure there is.

Thank you.

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The Magla Vocables

The Macedonians have a word for it - "Magla", fog. It signifies the twin arts of duplicity and ambiguity. In the mental asylum that the swathe of socialist countries was, even language was pathologised. It mutated into a weapon of self-defence, a verbal fortification, a medium without a message, replacing words with vocables. Easterners (in this text, the unfortunate residents of the Kafkaesque landscape which stretches between Russia and Albania) don't talk or communicate. They fend off. They hide and evade and avoid and disguise. In the planet of capricious and arbitrary unpredictability, of shifting semiotic and semantic dunes that they inhabited for so many decades (or centuries) - they perfected the ability to say nothing in lengthy, Castro-like speeches. The ensuing convoluted sentences are Arabesques of meaninglessness, acrobatics of evasion, lack of commitment elevated to an ideology. The Easterner prefers to wait and see and see what waiting brings. It is the postponement of the inevitable that leads to the inevitability of postponement as a strategy of survival.

It is impossible to really understand an Easterner. The syntax fast deteriorates into ever more labyrinthine structures. The grammar tortured to produce the verbal Doppler shifts essential to disguise the source of the information, its distance from reality, the speed of its degeneration into rigid official versions. Buried under the lush flora and fauna of idioms without an end, the language erupts, like some exotic rash, an autoimmune reaction to its infection and contamination.

And this newspeak, this malignant form of political correctness is not the exclusive domain of politicians or "intellectuals". Like vile weeds it spread throughout, strangling with absent minded persistence the ability to understand, to agree, to disagree and to debate, to present arguments, to compare notes, to learn and to teach. Easterners, therefore, never talk to each other - rather, they talk at each other.

They exchange subtexts, camouflage-wrapped by elaborate, florid, texts.

They read between the lines, sp.a.w.ning a mult.i.tude of private languages, prejudices, superst.i.tions, conspiracy theories, rumours, phobias and ma.s.s hysterias. Theirs is a solipsistic world - where communication is permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is to throw others off the scent.

This has profound implications. Communication through unequivocal, unambiguous, information-rich symbol systems is such an integral and crucial part of our world - that its absence is not postulated even in the remotest galaxies, which grace the skies of science fiction. In this sense, Easterners are nothing short of aliens. It is not that they employ a different language, a code to be deciphered by a new Champollion. The Cyrillic alphabet is not the obstacle. It is also not the outcome of cultural differences. It is the fact that language is put by Easterners to a different use - not to communicate but to obscure, not to share but to abstain, not to learn but to defend and resist, not to teach but to preserve ever less tenable monopolies, to disagree without incurring wrath, to criticize without commitment, to agree without appearing to do so. Thus, Eastern contracts are vague expressions of intentions at a given moment - rather than the clear listing of long term, iron-cast and mutual commitments. Eastern laws are loopholed incomprehensibles, open to an exegesis so wide and so self-contradictory that it renders them meaningless. Eastern politicians and Eastern intellectuals often hang themselves by their own verbose Gordic knots, having stumbled through a minefield of logical fallacies and endured self inflicted inconsistencies.

Unfinished sentences hover in the air, like vapour above a semantic swamp.

In some countries (the poorer ones, which were suppressed for centuries by foreign occupiers), there is the strong urge not to offend. Still at the tribal-village stage of social development, intimacy and inter-dependence are great. Peer pressure is irresistible and it results in conformity and mental h.o.m.ogeneity. Aggressive tendencies, strongly repressed in this social pressure cooker, are close under the veneer of forced civility and violent politeness. Constructive ambiguity, a non-committal "everyone is good and right", an atavistic variant of moral relativism and tolerance bred of fear and of contempt - are all at the service of this eternal vigilance against aggressive drives, at the disposal of a never ending peacekeeping mission.

In other countries, language is used cruelly and ruthlessly to ensnare one's enemies, to saw confusion and panic, to move the ma.s.ses, to leave the listeners in doubt, in hesitation, in paralysis, to gain control, or to punish. There, symbols are death sentences in both the literal and the figurative senses. Poets, authors and journalists still vanish regularly and newspapers and books are compiled into black lists with dreadful consequences. In these countries, language is enslaved and forced to lie. There is no news - only views, no interest - only interests, no facts - only propaganda, no communication - only ex-communication. The language is appropriated and expropriated. It is considered to be a weapon, an a.s.set, a piece of lethal property, a traitorous mistress to be gang raped into submission.

And yet in other places in the East, the language is a lover. The infatuation with its very sound leads to a pyrotechnic type of speech which sacrifices its meaning to its music. Its speakers pay more attention to the composition than to the content. They are swept by it, intoxicated by its perfection, inebriated by the spiralling complexity of its forms. Here, language is an inflammatory process. It attacks the social tissues with artistic fierceness. It invades the healthy cells of reason and logic, of cool-headed argumentation and level headed debate. It raises the temperature of the body politic. It often kills.

It moves ma.s.ses. Submerged in and lured by the notes issued forth by the pied piper of the moment - nations go to war, or to civil war, resonating with the echoes of their language.

Language is a leading indicator of the psychological and inst.i.tutional health of social units. Social capital can often be measured in cognitive (hence, verbal-lingual) terms. To monitor the level of comprehensibility and lucidity of texts is to study the degree of sanity of nations (think about the rambling "Mein Kampf"). There can exist no hale society without unambiguous speech, without clear communications, without the traffic of idioms and content that is an inseparable part of every social contract. Our language determines how we perceive our world. It IS our mind and our consciousness. The much-touted transition starts in the mind and consciousness determines reality. Marx would have approved.

(Article written on December 8, 1999 and published December 13, 1999

in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 25)

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The Elders of Zion

I was shown the same book in Yugoslavia, in Macedonia and in Bulgaria - "The World Conspiracy" - a shabby tome written by an ageing "scholar".

The main, unabashedly anti-Semitic, hypothesis (presented as undisputed fact) is that the Jews rule the world supreme - always have, probably always will. Lists of prominent Jews in the world of international finance reprinted with lists of influential Jews in the Soviet communist regime. And it all amounts to a well-organized secretive machinery of illicit power, claims the author with all the persuasion of a paranoid. In here, trash magazines dwell endlessly on these and similar themes.

Yet, anti-Semitism is only one species in a zoo of rumours, conspiracy theories, Meta histories and metaphysics. Superst.i.tions, prejudices and calumny thrive in the putrid soil of disinformation, mis-information and lack of information. In the void created by unreliable, politicised and corrupt media - rumour mills spring eternal. It is a malignant growth, the outcome of a breakdown of trust so compleat - that communication is rendered impossible. This is the main characteristic of the East (from Russia to Albania): distrust. Citizens and politicians, businessmen and government, the media and its consumers, manufacturers and service providers, the sick and their doctors - all suspect each other of ulterior motives and foul play. All are more often than not quite right to do so.

It is a Kafkaesque, sealed universe in which nothing is, as it appears to be. This acrimonious divorce between appearances and essence, facade and truth, the Potemkin and the real - is a facet of daily life, of the most mundane exchanges, of the most trivial pursuits. Motives are sought with increasing urgency - why did he do it, what did he try to achieve, why had he not chosen a different path, why here, why with us, why now, what can it teach us. Information is pursued frantically, appearances discarded, data juggled, heated debates ensue, versions erupt, only to subside and be replaced by others. It is a feverish ritual, the sound of clashing exegeses, of theories constructed and demolished in vacuo.

At the heart of it all, is the unbearable uncertainty of being.

Political uncertainty under communism was replaced by economic uncertainty under the insidious and venal form of capitalism that replaced it. Tucked in identical cubicles, the citizens of planet communism were at least a.s.sured of a make belief job in a sprawling bureaucracy or in a decrepit factory, manufacturing redundant doc.u.ments or shoddy goods. Subsistence was implicitly guaranteed by the kleptocracy that ruled them and, in principle, it was always possible to ignore the moral stench and join the nomenklatura, thereby developing instant upward mobility. Corruption, theft and graft were tolerated by the state as means of complementing income. Life was drab but safe as long as one abstained from politics and subserviently consumed the bitter medicines of acquiescence and collaboration. The vast majority (with the exception of the USSR under Stalin) were not affected by the arbitrary capriciousness of history. They decayed slowly in their housing estates, morally degenerate, possession-less but certain of a future that is the spitting image of their past.

Under the spastic orgy of legalized robbery of state a.s.sets that pa.s.sed for privatisation, millions were made redundant while thousands enriched themselves by ch.o.r.eographed looting. The results were instability, unpredictability, uncertainty and fear. In a world thus unhinged, the ma.s.ses groped for reason, for a scheme, for a method in the madness, for an explanation, however sinister and ominous. Anything was preferable to the seemingly random natural forces unleashed upon them with such apparent vengeance. Even a "World Government" (a favourite), the Illuminati (a Freemasonry-like movement but much more odious), the Jews, the USA, aliens. The greatest conspiracy theory of them all - the Phoenix of religion - sprang back to life from the ashes it was reduced to by communism. A host of mystical beliefs and sects and cults mushroomed noxiously in the humid shadows of irrationality.

Thus, every event, no matter how insignificant, any occurrence, no matter how inconsequential and any coincidence, no matter how coincidental - a.s.sume heraldic meaning. People in these domains carry their complex jigsaw puzzles with them. They welcome each new piece with the zeal of the converted. They bellow triumphantly with every "proof" of their pet theory, with every datum, with each rumour. Things don't just happen - they whisper, conspiratorially - things are directed from above, ordained, regulated, prevented, or encouraged by "them". A group of 400 rule the world. They are Jews, they are the Serb mafia, or the Bulgarian. Or the Americans who plan to dominate (which obviously puts Kosovo in context). They are the rich and powerful, the objects of envy and frightened admiration, of virulent hate and rage.

They are responsible. We pay the price - we, the small and powerless and poor. And it is hopeless, it has been like that forever. The disparity between them and us is too great. Resistance is futile.

Why was this president elected? Surely, the West demanded it. Or political parties conspired to rig the vote. Or rich businessmen supported him. What is the real aim of foreign investors in coming to these G.o.dforsaken places, if not to infiltrate and penetrate and establish their long-term dominion? And wouldn't it be safe to a.s.sume that al the foreigners are spies, that all the Jews collaborate, that the neighbours would have liked to conquer and to subjugate us, that the world is a colossal puppet show? In other words, is it not true that we are puppets - victims - in a theatre not of our making? They filter out that which does not conform to their persuasion, does not accord with their suspicions, and does not fit within their schemes.

This deferral of responsibility brings relief from shame and blame.

Guilt is allayed by symbolically and ritually pa.s.sing it onto another.

Fear is quelled by the introduction of schemata. These are potent psychological incentives. They provide structure to the amorphous, bring order to the chaos that is the brave, new world of the economies in transition. Flux is replaced by immutable "truths", possibilities by certainties, threats by "knowledge". It is a re-construction and reconquest of a paradise lost by giving up the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

It is this hyper-vigilance, this elevated suspicion, these instant certainties fabricated from frail pseudo-theories and conspiracies - that make the Man of the East so easy to manipulate, so vulnerable, so amenable to collude in his own downfall. Bewitched by his self-spun myths, captivated by his own paranoia, under the spell of his magical, immature, thinking - non critical, non a.n.a.lytical, non discriminating - he is exquisitely susceptible to crooks and charlatans, to manipulators and demagogues, to the realization of the very threats he tried to fend off in the first place.

Here is what the DSM ("Diagnostics and Statistics Manual") IV (1994) published by the APA (American Psychiatric a.s.sociation) has to say about paranoids and schizotypals:

The Paranoid Personality Disorder

A pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following:

1.Suspects without sufficient basis, that others are exploiting, harming, or deceiving him or her;