Requiem for a Spectre

If you’re under forty, you were raised to fear Middle Easterners and Muslims.  For my generation, the bogeyman was communism.

This week marks the centenary of the October Revolution.  Strangely, the anniversary has attracted little comment in the media which is funny when you consider how large the U.S.-Soviet rivalry loomed over 20^th century history.

The Cold War was, in retrospect, more about national rivalry and global power politics than ideology.  While it’s true that the collectivist ethos of the former socialist states was inherently antagonistic to Americans’ individualistic worldview, the East-West standoff was really about global hegemony on both sides. 

Still, throughout my childhood and youth my teachers and the media played up the threat evil communism posed to our freedoms.  Atrocities such as the Cambodian genocide were offered up as proof of the ruthlessness of communist rule and what might befall us should they succeed in their goal of defeating the United States.

This statement, which seems overly dramatic from today’s perspective, would have been credible to a number of people when I was a kid.  Once, in a high school history class, the teacher asked us what was the goal of the communists.  A student in the back of the room promptly answered in a loud, emphatic voice, “The goal of communism is world conquest!”  No one disputed him.  The teacher appeared pleased.

This was in the early 1980s, when President Reagan was doing his level best to antagonize the Soviet leadership.  Anticommunism had become conflated with “patriotism,” and the popular rhetoric ignored realities on the ground.  The Sino-Soviet split had occurred twenty years earlier.  The recently concluded Vietnam War was more about national sovereignty than communism, a truth recognized by many scholars from its start though clearly not by most Americans and their poliicians.

We have a tenuous relationship with truth that goes back much further than the current debate as to whether we’re living in a “post-truth” era.  Our thinking tends toward either/or, black and white reasoning.  We categorically reject any evidence which contradicts our narrative, however manifest it may be to a less partial observer.  This tendency becomes pernicious when it results in defining ourselves not by what we are but by what we are not.

This is a recurring theme.  In our first century or so, we were not those corrupt, rotten Old World aristocrats.  During the Cold War our alliance with the Soviets against the Axis was forgotten as we proclaimed to the world that we were most certainly nothing like those godless commies.  Today, we are not those Muslims who hate our freedom, but this is a topic for another time.

Back to the dialectic between a free, virtuous America and a totalitarian, evil Soviet Union.  If you were with us, your country was a “democracy” and part of the “Free World.”  If you were not, your country was either enslaved or untrustworthy.  This fiction ignored two things.  First, many of the regimes in the so-called Free World countries were in fact corrupt and repressive.  Secondly, whenever the people of one of these countries dared assert their right to self-determination the U.S. and its allies would step in to stymie the attempt—witness the examples of Guatemala, Iran, Chile, East Timor, and Nicaragua.

All this sidesteps the question of the merits of the Soviet experiment, however.  Putting aside the chaos of the Civil War and the totalitarian excesses of the Stalin years, there were aspects of it which compare favorably with the capitalist West.  Many of the ills of capitalist economies were less manifest, such as fluctuating business cycles and unemployment.  The regime at least made the effort to attend to its people’s essential economic and social needs.  The state ideology encouraged the collective welfare over narrow self-interest. 

That last item probably doomed the system in the end.  The citizens of the Eastern Bloc were less interested in political freedom than in Levi’s and rock music.  During the so-called Era of Stagnation between the mid-1960s and the advent of Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s economic planners struggled to meet popular demand for consumer goods.  Appeals to the collective good fell on deaf ears when people stood on line for soap and razor blades.  Some Soviet clients, most notably Hungary, managed to satiate consumer demand.  Others, like Romania, were economically inept and politically crooked.

Watching from afar, the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath did seem breathtaking at the time.  The West was vindicated.  It wasn’t long before the downside became apparent, however.  Ethnic conflict in Russia and other former Soviet republics.  Terrorism.  Economic turmoil.  Organized crime.  Vladimir Putin.

The Soviet Union did not fall for the reasons we use to congratulate ourselves.  It wasn’t the absence of freedom or because of the Reagan administration’s military build-up.   It was that our comparatively free market was more efficient than their planned economy.  What was portrayed as a clash of ideologies ended on a disappointingly prosaic note.  Then again, it doesn’t matter as we’ve long since moved along to newer, suitably evil enemies.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar