By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
Four years ago, the most unusual event has gone unnoticed in the
international press. A former minister of finance has accused the
more prominent members of the diplomatic corps in his country of
corruption. He insisted that these paragons of indignant
righteousness and hectoring morality have tried to blackmail him
into paying them hefty commissions from money allotted to exigent
humanitarian aid. This was immediately and from afar - and,
therefore, without proper investigation - denied by their superiors
in no uncertain terms.
The facts are these: most (though by no means all) Western diplomats
in the nightmarish wasteland that is East Europe and the Balkans,
the unctuously fulsome and the frowzily wizened alike, are ageing
and sybaritic basket cases. They have often failed miserably in
their bootless previous posts - or have insufficiently submerged in
the Byzantine culture of their employers. Thus emotionally injured
and cast into the frigorific outer darkness of a ravaged continent,
they adopt the imperial patina of Roman procurators in narcissistic
compensation. Their long suffering wives - bored to distraction in
the impassibly catatonic societies of post communism - impose upon a
reluctant and flummoxed population the nescient folderol of their
distaff voluntary urges or exiguous artistic talents. Ever more
crapulous, they aestivate and hibernate, the queens of tatty courts
and shabby courtiers.
The cold war having ebbed, these emissaries of questionable
provenance engage in the promotion of the narrow interests of
specific industries or companies. They lobby the local
administration, deploying bare threats and obloquies where veiled
charm fails. They exert subtle or brutal pressure through the press.
They co-opt name-dropping bureaucrats and bribe pivotal politicians.
They get fired those who won't collaborate or threaten to expose
their less defensible misdeeds. They are glorified delivery boys,
carrying apocryphal messages to and fro. They are bloviating PR
campaigners, seeking to aggrandize their meagre role and,
incidentally, that of their country. They wine and dine and banter
endlessly with the provincial somnolent variety of public figures,
members of the venal and pinchbeck elites that now rule these
tortured territories. In short - forced to deal with the bedizened
miscreants that pass for businessmen and politicians in this nether
world - they are transformed, assuming in the process the identity
of their obdurately corrupted hosts.
Thus, they help to sway elections and hasten to endorse their
results, however disputed and patently fraudulent. They intimidate
the opposition, negotiate with businessmen, prod favoured
politicians, spread roorbacks and perambulate their fiefdom to
gather intelligence. More often than not, they cross the limpid
lines between promotion and extortion, lagniappe and pelf,
friendship and collusion, diplomacy and protectorate, the kosher and
the criminal.
They are the target and the address of a legion of pressures and
demands. Their government may ask them to help depose one coalition
and help install another. Their secret services - disguised as
intrusive NGOs or workers at the embassy - often get them involved
in shady acts and unscrupulous practices. Real NGOs ask for their
assiduous assistance and protection. Their hosts - and centuries old
protocol - expect them to surreptitiously provide support while
openly refrain from intervening, maintaining equipoise. Other
countries protest, compete, or leak damaging reports to an often
hostile media. The torpid common folk resent them for their colonial
ways and hypocritical demarches. Lacking compunction, they are
nobody's favourites and everybody's scapegoats at one time or
another.
And they are ill-equipped to deal with these subtleties. Not of
intelligence, they end where they now are and wish they weren't.
Ignorant of business and entrepreneurship, they occupy the dead end,
otiose and pension-orientated jobs they do. Devoid of the charm,
negotiating skills and human relations required by the intricacies
of their profession - they are relegated to the Augean outskirts of
civilization. Dishonest and mountebank, they persist in their
mortifying positions, inured to the conniving they require.
This blatantly discernible ineptitude provokes the "natives" into a
wholesale rejection of the West, its values and its culture. The
envoys are perceived as the cormorant reification of their remote
controllers. Their voluptuary decadence is a distant echo of the
West's decay, their nonage greed - a shadow of its avarice, their
effrontery and hidebound peremptory nature - its mien. They are in
no position to preach or teach.
The diplomats of the West are not evil. Some of them mean well. To
the best of their oft limited abilities, they cadge and beg and
press and convince their governments to show goodwill and to
contribute to their hosts. But soon their mettle is desiccated by
the vexatious realities of their new habitation. Reduced to
susurrous cynicism and sardonic contempt, they perfunctorily perform
their functions, a distant look in their now empty eyes. They have
been assimilated, rendered useless to their dispatchers and to their
hosts alike.
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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