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More about challenging those old assumptions about trickle down and
supply side economics, and proving that government shrunk down by privatizing
and cronyism is a sure-fire way to attract disaster. kwc America's chip off the old block can't promise
potatoes forever The T-word of the era
was not terrorism but totalitarianism. The "total" in totalitarianism
signified that the Soviet take on realpolitik was all-consuming, blinding them
to the realities on the ground.
Here's an example. When I visited the
Soviet Union for the first time in the summer of 1964, I heard a joke there
about Nikita Khrushchev, who was then the head of government. The joke began
with Khrushchev, on a visit to a kolkhoz
(collective farm) that produced potatoes, calling in the director. "So," said
Khrushchev, "how's the harvest this year?" "Why, the harvest
is unbelievable," enthused the farm's director. "We've got potatoes
growing on trees. We've got potatoes growing on the roofs of houses. There are
mountains of potatoes all the way up to the knees of God!" "But,
comrade," scowled Khrushchev. "There is no God." "Well, there are
no potatoes either." In October that year
Khrushchev was deposed; and when I went back to the Soviet Union in 1965, the
country was being run by Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, both of whom were
being hailed inside and outside their realm as technocrats who were more
democratic, more pragmatic and more open to discourse than their predecessors. Opposite paradigms of planning The background to the polemic -- which shall prevail, having an
ideologically pure approach to issues or a methodical one that stresses
expertise -- goes back to the very first years of the USSR in the 1920s.
"Red" and "expert" were the two opposite paradigms of
planning. Was it advantageous to have planners who were unstinting communists,
or to promote academics and experts who were not tied down by dogma? With
Stalin's accession as Vozhd,
which is the Russian equivalent of Fuhrer, the case was closed. Undying loyalty
to the Vozhd's cause became the only criterion of expertise; and the result was
a government run by apparatchiks, mountebanks and toadies. If you examine the doctrinaire approach to governance of the
current Bush administration in the United States, the similarities with the
Soviet Union of the 1960s and '70s are striking. Personal loyalty to the
president and faith-based assessments of the state of the country and the world
underpin the principles of leadership. Rhetoric replaces reason. When President George W. Bush cites "liberty and
democracy" as his goals, it is clear to anyone but the faithful that these
are cover-words for American "involvement." Brezhnev, once he nudged
the real technocrat Kosygin aside and surrounded himself with nodding
sycophants, spoke constantly of "freedom" and "peace and
friendship with all nations." His disastrous invasion of Afghanistan was
undertaken precisely in the name of those noble principles. The greatest disaster for Brezhnev's leadership and the
future of his country was not Afghanistan, just as it will not be Iraq that
will ultimately discredit the ideology of Bush and his circle. It was the gross
deterioration of the environment -- air, water and land -- in the Soviet Union
that opened people's eyes to the vacuity of the leadership's ideology. Brezhnev and his planners certainly believed that
"scientific Marxism-Leninism" assured the success of their economic
enterprises. If your "experts" said there were potatoes, then there
were potatoes. All along the line from the drawing board to the farm and the
market, all you had to do was believe that there were potatoes. When it came,
finally, to the table, you promised the people that someday they would have
more potatoes than you could shake a stick at. The future was rose-colored and
potato-rich. During the stagnation that occurred in virtually all aspects
of Soviet life in the 1970s, people began to see through the empty promises, to
realize that the ideology was no more than a ruse for retaining power. Unmitigated catastrophe The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in April 1986 dealt the final blow to
the Soviet faith, and the ideology that had propped up the ruling elite for
70-odd years came down to earth with the fallout. If Iraq turns out to be for Bush what Afghanistan was for
Brezhnev -- an unmitigated strategic and political catastrophe -- then it is
likely that Hurricane Katrina will be Bush's Chernobyl -- though, of course,
the American democracy is much too stable and vibrant for there to be any
fundamental changes in the structure of government. (Bush's fall will, on the
contrary, prove that the enduring rule of law outlives its renegades.) The American press has finally begun to focus the main
anti-Bush argument on the hypocrisy of faith- and rhetoric-inspired
policies. Maureen Dowd and Paul
Krugman, both writing in The New York Times, argue that cronyism and loyalty
appointments have led to appalling miscalculations in the planning and
execution of policy. Theories like "intelligent design" are no more
scientific than was Marxism-Leninism; and the ignoring of the real effects of
global warming by Bush and "Halliburton Hegel" (Dick Cheney) will
only lead to hurricanes with different names that will, one by one, wreak havoc
on the land. The Bush-Cheney political religion cannot stand too much reality,
just as the Brezhnev-Kosygin ideology could not bear the brunt of truth. It is often said that history repeats itself. What this
means is that history is ripe with analogy. The sounds and the trappings of the
faith may not be the same. The names of the apparatchiks, mountebanks and
toadies may differ. But the policies and events that overwhelm and destabilize
them are remarkably similar. The moral of the analogy is: The show can't go on
forever. Mr. Bush, where are the potatoes? http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20050925a1.htm |
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