Post-Communist Traumas East and West; T. R. Machan

THEFREEMAN IDEASON UBERTY POST-COMMUNIST TRAUMAS EAST AND WEST by Tibor R. Machan [We] cannot say that democratic institutions re flect a moral reality and that tyrannical regimes do not reflect one, that tyrannies get something wrong that democratic societies get right. -PROFESSOR RICHARD RORTY, The New Republic, July 1, 1991 D uring an international conference on what we might have said but could not come political theory several of us were sit-up with a sensible answer. In a while she ting in a restaurant in Tallinn, Estonia. calmed down a bit and told us. Among us was a participant from Bucharest, All of this amusing banter called to our Romania, a young woman, who listened as friend's mind not only what she had been some from the West poked fun at the evident living with for all of her life but what in her inefficiencyof the Russians who still have a country is still largely the case, namely, the significant presence in the Baltic countries complete control of the Soviet-type bureau and who happened to be running this estab-cracy over the society. She then went on to lishment. We noted the drabness of the recount, in halting English and tearfully, decor, the ineptness of the help, the slow-how the daily lives of her family and friends ness of the service, and reminisced about had been utterly trapped in the abyss that so the even worse olden days when the gray-many in the West championed as the prom looking Russians who dominated the Com-ising wave of the future. She gave example munist culture would run roughshod over after example of how people suffered, from everyone in sight. moment to moment-how every ounce of Suddenly we saw our friend from Bucha-some modicum of joy and pleasure, never rest in tears. She was apologizingbut unable mind genuine happiness, was rendered ut to keep herself from sobbing. We were terly impossible and inconceivable for them.

stunned-we didn't know what we did to She noted that people simply lost the will to upset her. We all searched our minds for live, that they could not even smile, not to mention laugh heartily, and how the most minute matters, such as the way in which parents played and talked with their chil dren, suffered from this totalitarian impact. It is often only when one finds oneself facing the facts directly, inescapably, that 253 254 THE FREEMAN • MAY 1994 one can appreciate their meaning. This is especially true about facts that so many people would just as soon obscure with clever rationalizations. In the West, especially in American news papers, academic journals, and college classrooms, the collapse of the Soviet em pire is now nearly forgotten. People every where are talking about why there isn't some kind of major economic boom in response to this fall. A Business Week editorial remarked, "Communism has been vanquished in much of the globe, the victim of its own failure to deliver a decent living to its citizens under its rule. Yet capitalism in the industrialized nations is limping along."

It is as if "one, two, three," and our world will simply put 40 to 70 years of bloody dictatorship and command economy out of mind and bounce back as if nothing had happened. Assessing the Damage The damage inflicted by the Communist reign is not nearly well enough understood. It is certainly no longer treated as a big deal. What has taken its place as a vital item of concern isjust how bad conditions are in the wake of the efforts to live without Commu nism, without the mighty Soviet State im posing its warped vision of human life on all the colonies within its sphere of impact. The question that seems to titillate the interest of many people is why the recovery is so slow, if a recovery was needed in the first place. The question on the minds of many promi nent journalists, for example, is: "What should be substituted for the admittedly harsh and clumsy form of socialism, in the wake of the evident unworkability of the freedoms that the people gained after the fall?"

Despite all the talk about free markets and free institutions in the newly liberated coun tries of Eastern Europe, the intellectual consensus among political theorists and sci entists seems to be that some kind of middle way is needed between socialism and capi talism. There is little encouragement toward a truly vibrant capitalist system either from our politicians and political theorists or the voices of moral leadership. Just consider what the word on this is from the Vatican Secretary of State, Angelo Cardinal Sodano: "Capitalism is no less dangerous [than Communism] because of its basic materialism and the unbridled con sumerism and selfishness it encourages" (La Stampa, December 28, 1992).Instead of the truly productive capitalist system, the preferred alternative seems to be social democracy, the welfare state or communi tarianism, a hybrid of liberalism and social ism, with the emphasis not on the value of the freedom of the individual, including freedom to engage in free production and trade, but on the value of individuals' re sponsibilities to the community, not unlike the creed preached by Marx and his follow ers. The new vision involves a system in which free trade is here and there "permit ted," but only under the watchful eyes of planners and regulators who knowjust when to limit people's liberty good and hard.

The one system that gets the least playas a proper candidate to replace the tyranny just overthrown is free-market capitalism or, as the Europeans call it, classicalliber alism. No, that would unleash all the beasts. Such freedom cannot work and must not be tried, lest anarchy and rapaciousness break out all over. Look what freedom's promise has already unleashed on Bosnia-Herzegov ina. Look how greed and profiteering has already spread all over the old Soviet sphere. So the proper answer is not to let it happen-some people must become the stern tamers of the rest, if only we could quickly decide who are so clever and de pendable as to take the reins of power. Not only, then, is there little left of true capitalism and free-market economies in the West but there is little chance of such a system taking over where the Communist dictators failed. In addition to this, few people in the West seem to fully appreciate just how horrible the Soviet experiment really was and how difficult it is to recover from it. There are no expressions of earnest mea culpa anywhere. Publications such as The Nation, The New Republic, The ProPOST-COMMUNIST TRAUMAS EAST AND WEST 255 gressive, The New York Times, The Wash ington Post, and the hundreds of other more scholarly outlets or related media do not spend much time acknowledging that their different degrees of softness on Commu nism, the thesis of moral equivalency be tween capitalism and Communism, their subtle but evident apologies for the Lenins, Stalins, Brezhnevs, and others in the Soviet debacle may have had a bit to do with the horrors the people had been subjected to, as well as with their current difficulties in recovering from these horrors and starting a new life, and recapturing some measure of hopefulness and the will to live and flourish.

I was rereading Naming Names, the book about the black list period in America during the 1950s by Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation (which is still proudly championing socialism with some kind of human face for all countries). In it Navasky made clear that he thought that despite the brutality of Soviet Marxism there was something mor ally noble about the system because its intent was to help the poor and powerless. I also read some passages ridiculing the Russian-born American novelist Ayn Rand who once claimed that a movie that depicted Russians smiling was a travesty, a sly pro paganda piece since no ordinary Russian could be presented in such a way without a gross distortion of the truth-it would be comparable to depicting Jews in concentra tion camps having a good time playing volleyball. Not that this may never have happened, but that highlighting such char acters in a work of fiction amounts to a vile distortion. Navasky and his ilk, of course, scoffed at this and still do.

A Complex, Painful Ordeal But that is just what our Romanian friend was telling us about the millions and millions of victims of the Soviet terror, one that only a lunatic could imagine to have been moti vated from compassion and care. What is worse, today many of these same naive reporters of the meaning and impact of Soviet socialism still do not appreciate just how complex and painful an ordeal it is to attempt to recover from it all. People are not simply changing from one game to another when they finally are able to leave the Soviet system behind. They are undergoing recovery from massive and pro longed injury to their whole beings. They and everyone they know and love had been beaten and derided and terrorized by thugs for decades on end. When finally they are left alone, they are expected to, as the song says, just pick themselves up, brush them selves off, and start all over again-with cheer in their hearts.

We are seeing some extremely painful recovery as well as relapses in the lives of those who had been the victims of the Soviet experiment that so many of our comfortable intellectuals watched with vile neglect. We will see normal imperfect human beings undergo a slow convalescence or stand around hesitatingly coping with new prob lems and nearly forgotten ones as well. For the many people who have given their support to socialism and Communism over the years-if only by not being brutally honest about them-on such grounds as that, well, these systems were motivated by compassion for the poor and downtrodden, the failure to see all this is a blatant confes sion of hypocrisy. The victims of the Soviet vision of human life deserve compassion and caring and yet all they seem to be getting is the callous disregard for their plight and the quick judgment that they are, after all, unable to handle freedom, aren't they?

What the yearning for self-justification will not permit some people to do in the face of the gravest of human tragedies!. D THEFREEMAN IDEASON LIBERTY THE ECONOMIC WAY OF THINKING PARTS by Ronald Nash I n June of 1992, I was nearing the end of a set of lectures in Moscow, Russia, when I learned that a member of the Congress of Peoples' Deputies was coming by my hotel to meet some people in our party. I decided that I would use the meeting to try to learn more about what makes Boris Yeltsin' s opponents in the Russian Congress tick. When the deputy revealed that he was an important player in economic decisions made by the Congress, I brought up the subject of the massive increase in Russia's money supply that hadjust been announced. In a matter of weeks, Russia planned to double its money supply. Didn't anyone in the Russian Congress realize, I asked the deputy, what the announced action would do to the Russian economy? Didn't anyone understand the horrendous inflation that would result?