By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
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 masses 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 institutions. 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, 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
institutions 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
institutions while draining them from any real power. Decisions were
made elsewhere, clandestinely, the outcome of brutal internecine
power struggles. But they were legitimized by rubber stamp
institutions: "parliaments", "judicial
system", "police", "banks", "media". The West knew that these
institutions were dysfunctional - but not to which breathtaking
extent. It assumed that nothing more than technical assistance was
needed in order to breathe life into the institutional
infrastructure. It assumed that market forces, egged on by a class
of new and increasingly wealthy shareholders, will force these
institutions to shape up and begin to cater to the needs of their
constituencies. Above all, it assumed that the will to have better
and functioning institutions was there - and that the only thing
missing was the knowledge.
These were all catastrophically wrong assumptions. In all post
communist countries, with no exception, one criminal association
(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 mass devastation of the state by everyone - the masses
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 institutions 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 institutions 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)
politicized "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 arm 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 waste basket 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 institutions 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.
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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com