JOHN MAJOR’S SKILFULLY managed tour of the Far East recalls to mind the anonymous radical song circa 1820: ‘What land has not seen Britain’s crimson flying, the meteor of murder, but justice the plea.’ Major’s toasting of Li Peng, the accredited mass murderer, was in keeping both with British imperialist tradition and present-day Western Stalinism. True, Major’s career has been mostly as an apparatchik, although the keenness with which he engaged in the recolonisation of the Middle East and the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts and civilians suggested he was made of stronger stuff. His journey to China for the purpose of offering alliance and reassurance to those who ordered the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the crushing of the democracy movement, guarantees his prominent place above the mausoleum of the ‘new world order’.
None of this is surprising. The symbiosis of the actions and endorsements of grey men with bloody repression is well documented. Chamberlain fawned over Hitler; Kissinger unleashed the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on Cambodia; Bush dispatched several thousand Panamanians as the precursor of his ‘famous victory’ in the Gulf. And all were attended by a fellow-travelling media. Major’s Chinese exercise, amoral by any normal standards of human behaviour, was routinely misrepresented as an heroic ‘bullying stand’ on behalf of human rights. That Major’s concern for human rights did not extend to Hong Kong, where he has the power directly to influence policy on democratisation, was not considered important and was widely suppressed. The posturing of the old Soviet Stalinists was celebrated within similar fixed boundaries of public discourse.
Western Stalinism is by far the most insidious variety. In a democracy, manipulation of public perception and opinion is, by necessity, more subtle and thorough than in a tyranny. Major’s China trip is a case in point. Contrary to the managed headlines, its aim was to reassure the Beijing regime that the Western imperialist powers had no intention of disturbing the state of capitalism in Hong Kong by allowing genuine democracy to take root. China, after all, is the paragon of what the dissident Russian writer Boris Kagarlitsky has called ‘market Stalinism’; that is, an economic state in which there are consumer goods in the shop windows, growing unemployment, depleted public services and a totalitarian regime. Even that most inspirational of China’s revolutionary achievements – its system of barefoot doctors – is being swept aside by privatisation drawn from the same Thatcherite model that is undermining the National Health Service in Britain.
The new propaganda differs from the old only in the technology of its conveyance. It says that, following events in the Soviet Union, a market economy and democracy are indivisible and that the unrestrained forces of Western (and Japanese) capitalism equal freedom and life. This supersedes the Cold War refrain of the Russian Threat, which allowed the United States to construct its economic and strategic empire following 1945.
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