After Long Years | Page 6

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 masses. 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 clichés,
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
masses 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
inaptitude, 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 God, 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)
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Is Transition Possible?
Can Socialist Professors of Economics
Teach Capitalism?

Lest you hold your breath to the end of this article - the answers to both
questions in the title are no and no. Capitalism cannot be "learned" or
"imported" or "emulated" or "simulated". Capitalism (or, rather,
liberalism) is not only a theoretical construct. It is not only a body of
knowledge. It is a philosophy, an ideology, a way of life, a mentality
and a personality.
This is why professors of economics who studied under Socialism can
never teach Capitalism in the truest sense of the word. No matter how
intelligent and knowledgeable (and a minority of them are) - they can
never convey