Distant Voices (26 page)

As Paul Flewers wrote in the
Guardian
: ‘People really believed that unless they backed their capitalist rulers, Soviet troops would be marching down the street . . . Classic inter-imperialist rivalries which caused two world wars were suppressed, and war was mainly confined to the Third World. Socialism has largely been defined as Stalinism, and consequently capitalism has to a large extent been legitimised.'
¹

Like my generation, the young today are being subjected to the same old routine in a different guise. The crumbling of Stalinism in the Soviet Union will increasingly be used, as the repressive nature of Stalinism itself was used, as a
propaganda weapon against those who seek social change – principally, an end to the scourge of poverty.

This works on two levels. In the tracts exalting the ‘freedoms' of the market, much is made of the violent history of communism. Nothing is said about the victims of expansionist capitalism. While millions died at the hands of Stalin and his successors within the Soviet Union, millions more were blood sacrifices in wars of imperialist competition. Several million died in a ‘small war' in Indo-China. The blood-letting of apartheid in South Africa was underwritten by Western capital. In the Middle East, Anglo-American interests demanded the retention of feudalism and the dispossession of a whole people, the Palestinians.

The Soviet Stalinists were never in this league; they were lousy imperialists beyond the sphere of influence that Churchill and Roosevelt granted Stalin at Yalta. The West and Japan, on the other hand, have capital and debt as their levers of control.

Never before in history have the poor financed the rich on such a scale and paid so dearly for their servitude. During the 1980s, the Third World sent to the West $220 billion
more
than was sent to them in any form.
²
At the current rates of interest, it is a mathematical impossibility for most countries to pay off their debt. Many had to agree to ‘structural adjustment' by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This has often meant the end of uncertain protection for the old, young and sick and ‘wage restraint' in countries where the difference between wage and peonage is slight.

Debt and ‘market Stalinism' are to be capitalism's greeting to the new Soviet Union. Capital will flow at such a pace that the IMF is already having to ‘structurally adjust' Yeltsin's democracy. At the weekend I phoned Boris Kagarlitsky in Moscow and asked him about this. ‘Listen,' he said, ‘you can invest $1,000 here now and get $10,000 back immediately. And that's just the exchange rate. We are the new Brazil, just waiting to be Latin Americanised.'

On this side of the Atlantic, the new propaganda
concentrates on fortress Europe. The EC is the ‘new world', with open borders and markets, a hive of prosperous, liberal energy – as long as you can get in. It is a fine illusion, for in the wider world, economic inequality has reached the highest point in human history; during the 1980s the number of countries catching up the industrialised states, in per capita terms, fell by three quarters. In other words, poverty has never risen as fast.
³

The truth is quite simple: the rhetoric of Thatcher and Reagan was false, the literal opposite of the truth. Thatcher and her ideologues were brilliant propagandists and social destroyers – as those in Third World Britain and in structurally adjusted Africa, Chile and elsewhere bear silent witness. It is, of course, not necessary to look at the world through such a distorted prism. Socialism was never Stalinism: socialist struggles gave liberal democracy much of its gloss. The ignorant certainties are no less venal today than they ever were, whatever their disguise.

September 15, 1991

THE WAR AGAINST
democracy, which replaced the Cold War, had a notable success in Moscow this week. The promoters of the totalitarian ‘market' accelerated their assault on the lives of millions with the destruction of the second freely elected parliament in 1,000 years of Russian history. Boris Yeltsin, the former Communist Party boss of Sverdlovsk, a position he used to oppose basic democratic rights, brought troops and tanks into the heart of his Russian ‘democracy' and allowed them to murder the elected representatives of the people. He could have been a Pinochet or a Somoza. John Major, for his part, said he admired Yeltsin's ‘restraint'.

The Orwellian cover given these events in the west is astonishing even by the standards of previous propaganda models, such as the Gulf War, in which the slaughter of 200,000 people was dispatched down the media's memory hole. It would be illuminating to see a comparative study of
Pravada
's reporting of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union and western reporting of Yeltsin's Russia. The similarities of systematic, ideological distortion would say much about the progaganda that we in the west often call news.

The BBC, ever conscious of its ‘impartiality', has led the propaganda barrage, constantly referring to Yeltsin's draconian methods as ‘reforms' and his parliamentary opponents as ‘hardliners' and ‘extremists'. Boris the Good, on the other hand, is ‘the democrat whose patience finally snapped': such a generous description of a man whose troops had just
burned the nation's parliament.
⁴
(Imagine a BBC report from Berlin in 1933, ‘The Reichstag was burned down only after Herr Hitler's patience snapped.')

Since Yeltsin discovered ‘democracy' under Gorbachev, he has played to the western media gallery, whose reporting of his rise has helped to sustain him in power. With his American advisers and with American presidents propping him up, here, after 75 years, was a dictator who could deliver the Russian hinterland to foreign capital.

The necessary media mythology quickly followed. This summer, it has been Yeltsin versus the ‘hardline communist' parliament. In fact, the parliament was neither undemocratic nor run by so-called hardliners. All the deputies were democratically elected in multi-candidate contests. Like Yeltsin himself, the majority were ex-communists; but most of them were, until recently, Yeltsin supporters. They elected him as the parliament's first chairman, passed the constitutional amendments that launched his presidency and stood by him during the abortive coup in 1991 when the White House and its parliament were the very symbol of Russian democracy.

‘Far from defending democracy,' wrote Renfrey Clarke, a Russian specialist not published in Britain, ‘Yeltsin's coup was launched because democratic institutions were beginning to work. The system of checks and balances was functioning as intended, with the legislature and the judiciary curbing the ability of the president to continue implementing policies that had failed and lost popular support. But instead of accepting that the other branches of government had the right to insist on a change of course, Yeltsin responded as a committed totalitarian.'
⁵

Renfrey Clarke writes for Australia's
Green Left Weekly
. Together with another freelance, Fred Weir of the
Morning Star
, and Jonathan Steele of the
Guardian,
his reports are rare in a coverage that has served the expectations of Western economic interests – just as the Western press did before and after the 1917 revolution (with the honourable exception of Morgan Philips Price of the
Manchester Guardian
).

The largely untold truth in the West is that Yeltsin has
returned Russia to military Stalinism, that
he
is the hardliner, and that the blood spilt this week is the direct result of ruthlessly applied ‘market reforms' – the same ‘reforms' that have caused so much suffering in Britain. ‘Yeltsin's policies have met opposition,' wrote Clarke, ‘not because the Russian parliament is dominated by bloody-minded conservatives – an absurd claim – but because these policies are both contrary to the interests of most Russians and deeply flawed. Few economic programmes have been so ill suited, and few have failed so comprehensively.'
⁶

Under Yeltsin, Russian industrial output has collapsed to 60 per cent of the level of January 1990. Price rises amount to 2,600 per cent. Real
per capita
incomes have dropped to Third World proportions, placing many Russians, who once enjoyed a certain social security, on a par with Mexicans. The obsessiveness of Yeltsin's ‘shock therapy' – prescribed by Thatcherite advisers using discredited models – has been accompanied by a campaign against pluralism reminiscent of Thatcher.

In decree after decree, Yeltsin has undermined the new democratic institutions. In Decree No. 1400, he suspended the constitutional court, Russia's third arm of government. When the chairman of the court, Valery Zorkin, challenged the legality of this, his telephone was cut off on the personal order of the president. During the referendum campaign in April 1993, the national television service was hijacked by Yeltsin, then refused all but token airtime to opposition candidates.

This week, he has banned a swathe of opposition parties and newspapers with hardly a word of protest from Washington and London. When the Sandinistas briefly suspended an opposition newspaper, funded by the CIA, the American press made this a
cause célèbre.
The Sandinistas were not approved by Washington; Yeltsin is. Adding to the Orwellian lexicon, the
New York Times
describes his thuggery as a ‘democratic coup'.
⁷
He has now drained future elections of democratic substance; the millions who suffer from and oppose his ‘reforms' will have no one to vote for. His crime,
this week, is to have crossed a threshold of violence beyond which lies an abyss well documented in Russian history.

What has happened in Russia is a vivid example of the war against democracy being waged all over the world in the name of the ‘global economy' and ‘development', the euphemisms for market imperialism. Of course, a Boris Yeltsin is not always available; and when democratically elected leaders dare to place the interests of their country before those of the rulers of the world, they become the target of economic warfare. This happened in Chile under Salvador Allende, in Jamaica during Michael Manley's first term and in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. (‘We got rid of the communists in Nicaragua,' boasted former President Carter recently.)
⁸
When the Guatemalan human-rights activist Ramiro de Leon was elected president last June, he pledged to make his ‘first priority' the ending of the poverty that afflicts almost 90 per cent of his people. Within a month, the pressure from Washington was such that de Leon bowed to IMF demands for an ‘open market' and economic austerity for the majority. Had he not complied, he said, his country would have been ‘destabilised'.

Such honest nuggets are rare. Last January, the
Wall Street Journal
published an article entitled ‘Why Global Investors Bet on Autocrats, Not Democrats'.
⁹
Shortly afterwards, the head of the American bankers Morgan Stanley and Company told
Business Week
: ‘There is a saying on Wall Street that you buy when there is blood on the streets.'
¹⁰

October 8, 1993

Manila

IT IS MORNING
and the sun is like a burning branch, but not here. Just as night consumes winter days in the far northern hemisphere, so dusk is permanent here. Silhouettes drift up the main street, through the smoke and haze. The ashen rain, like the stench, is constant; it stiffens your hair; your eyes weep with it and your throat is coated with it. There are two dominant sounds: the thud-thud of the dump trucks, and coughing. The children hack and spit as they descend on the trucks like crows waiting for the clod to turn.

Much of the road is the texture of bracken. It is the same on the embankments, where fire crackles. There is a shop with a fire smouldering next to it; the people in it are unconcerned; they are from Hogarth's London. A truck from the markets arrives. ‘This stuff won't sell,' says Eddie. ‘They'll keep it and eat it.' Each dragging a hessian bag and an iron hook, the children haul away their rotting catch. They are beaming.

This is Smoky Mountain, a massive rubbish tip that rises out of Manila Bay above the slum at Tonda. Eddie, Teresita and their four surviving children live in the
barrio
at the foot of Smoky Mountain. Eddie was a fisherman on one of the Philippines' southern islands until cash cropping, most of it prawns for restaurant tables in America and Europe, forced him to take his chance in Manila.

Teresita was a ‘domestic' who, unable to feed herself, began scavenging on Smoky Mountain on her twentieth birthday, eleven years ago. ‘We are here', she says, ‘because
every day we can get money; this is work and
life
.' Only Eddie is working now, as Teresita has been told she has heart disease. From collecting pieces of glass, tin and plastic for six hours, he makes fifty pesos, the equivalent of £1.10: just enough to supply the next meal. They live from meal to meal with only a breakfast of leftover rice assured. ‘I used to like scavenging,' says Teresita, ‘because you had to concentrate on the search, and you forgot about eating.'

Their shack is made from plywood, which is as precious here as pesos; it is the currency of barter and increases in value. In order to pay a midwife to deliver baby Mary Grace two weeks ago, Eddie borrowed half from a neighbour and paid her the rest in plywood. They so treasure the wood that none of it is spared for the roof over their second room, which is open to the ash. When the monsoon rain comes, the six of them huddle in a corner two feet by two feet beneath the only piece of corrugated iron.