After the Rain : how the West lost the EastVaknin, Samuel
History
After the Rain : how the West lost the East
Vaknin, Samuel
Europe, Eastern -- Economic conditions -- 1989-; Europe, Eastern -- Politics and government -- 1989-
Some New Rich chose to undermine the existing order. This was perceived
by them to be an inevitable, gradual, slow and "historically
sanctioned" process. The transfer of wealth (and the power associated
with it) from one elite to another constituted the subversive element.
The ideological shift (to meritocracy and democracy or to
mass-democracy as y Gasset would have put it) served to justify the
historical process and put it in context. The successes of the new
elite, as a class, and of its members, individually, served to prove
the "justice" behind the tectonic shift. Social institutions and mores
were adapted to reflect the preferences, inclinations, values, goals
and worldview of the new elite. This approach - infinitesimal,
graduated, cautious, all accommodating but also inexorable and all
pervasive - characterizes Capitalism. The Capitalist Religion, with its
temples (shopping malls and banks), clergy (bankers, financiers,
bureaucrats) and rituals - was created by the New Rich. It had multiple
aims: to bestow some divine or historic importance and meaning upon
processes, which might have otherwise been perceived as chaotic or
threatening. To serve as an ideology in the Althusserian sense (hiding
the discordant, the disagreeable and the ugly while accentuating the
concordant, conformist and appealing). To provide a historical process
framework, to prevent feelings of aimlessness and vacuity, to motivate
its adherents and to perpetuate itself and so on.
The second type of New Rich (also known as "Nomenclature" in certain
regions of the world) chose to violently and irreversibly uproot and
then eradicate the old elite. This was usually done by use of brute
force coated with a thin layer of incongruent ideology. The aim was to
immediately inherit the wealth and power accumulated by generations of
elitist rule. There was a declared intention of an egalitarian
redistribution of wealth and assets. But reality was different: a small
group - the new elite - scooped up most of the spoils. It amounted to a
surgical replacement of one hermetic elite by another. Nothing changed,
just the personal identities. A curious dichotomy has formed between
the part of the ideology, which dealt with the historical process - and
the other part, which elucidated the methods to be employed to
facilitate the transfer of wealth and its redistribution. While the
first was deterministic, long-term and irreversible (and, therefore,
not very pragmatic) - the second was an almost undisguised recipe for
pillage and looting of other people' property. Communism and the
Eastern European (and, to a lesser extent, the Central European)
versions of Socialism suffered from this inherent poisonous seed of
deceit. So did Fascism. It is no wonder that these two sister
ideologies fought it out in the first half of the twentieth century.
Both prescribed the unabashed, unmitigated, unrestrained, forced
transfer of wealth from one elite to another. The proletariat enjoyed
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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