Jihad vs. McWorld (33 page)

Still unwilling to entrust their government to private-sector criminals, many newly “free” peoples have turned the reins back over to public-sector criminals: ex-Communists and nationalists who ruled in the
ancien
Communist
régime
and, having cashed in their commissar’s chips for a privileged place in the new capitalist order and supplanted old Leninist with still older tribalist dogmas, were more than ready to reinstate the heavy hand that an exasperated and weary electorate has now come to crave. The new political arithmetic equates crime and McWorld (and sometimes crime and democracy), and thereby gives the tribal Jihad against it the status of a war on behalf of decency and honesty. Lithuania, Belarus, the Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Mongolia are among the countries where frustrated citizens in the second wave of free elections elected “new” governments composed of old Communists wedded to nationalist and ethnic doctrines of one kind or another. Where even they are too moderate, radical right nationalists and antisemites—like Istvan Csurka in Hungary and those in the Romanian parliament who recently voted to honor Romania’s wartime fascist leader Ion Antonescu—stalk both the moderates and their parliamentary system as Hitler once stalked Weimar.
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They wait for popular impatience to overcome frail and unrooted political institutions, often because there is no civil society to root and secure them.

The most notorious of the new old world bigots, Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, hits exactly the right note in harmonizing the parochial interests of fanatic Russian nationalism and a struggle against McWorld that seems almost prudent when he shouts: “It was all the
same to them [the Western powers] who ruled Russia, czars or Communists, their goal was to destroy Russia.” Whereas in two previous world wars, Zhirinovsky thunders, the Germans came with brute force and blitzkrieg, the new aggressors invade with “pretty slogans about democracy and human rights…. The Americans are clever.” On this point, surely he is right: “They know it is better to come here with chewing gum, stockings and McDonald’s.”
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He’s a little out of date in his World War II allusion to nylons and sweets; but leave McDonald’s and replace chewing gum and stockings with Macintoshes and Nikes, and the advance guard of McWorld is accurately named.

There is no country in Eastern and Central Europe or the republics of the old Soviet Union that has proved immune to Jihad’s contagion, and that has not suffered politically and economically for it.
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Spawned by fear and insecurity and driven by the failure of clumsy and foolhardy attempts to impose Western economic and political institutions wholesale on societies wholly unprepared to accommodate them, a variety of small but toxic Jihads have flourished, leaving the region with no really convincing success stories. Not the Czech Republic despite its bloodless (if not quite “velvet”) revolution and its poet president who, for all his dissident legitimacy, could not thwart the divorce of his country from Slovakia; not Hungary, though it comes close to being ethnically monocultural and is thus supposedly immune to the ravages of tribalism;
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not Poland, notwithstanding its relative economic success and its traditions of Catholicism and unionism (Solidarity) that tie it to the West; certainly not Russia. In each of these countries, ethnic tensions, reawakened bigotries, separatist rumblings, or nationalist zealotry stalk governments committed in theory to the West’s constitutions and McWorld’s markets.

For tragic irony, no country can rival Yugoslavia, whose very name conjures the full meaning of Jihad within the domain of McWorld more eloquently than a library of books could ever do. Here was the only Communist nation to be admired at least a little by left democrats and idealists in the West, a state brave enough to reject Stalin, imaginative enough to federalize its socialist system and empower its workers, resourceful enough to bring its hostile ethnic fragments to heel, prudent enough to forge a pluralist army strong
and loyal to Yugoslavia.
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Its failure—the conquest of imagined history over actual achievement—has been the shame of the West ever since. The promise of the future in Belgrade was traded for reconstructed memories of nineteenth-century Pan-Slavic dreams like those of Nikolai Danilevsky, who postulated an Orthodox Russian soul at odds with the Catholic West, firing the imagination not only of Russians but of Bulgars, Macedonians, and Serbs. Czarist Russia actually dispatched volunteers in 1877 to support the uprising of Serbs and Montenegrins against the Turks, and (to oversimplify) Serbia returned the favor in 1914 by dragging Russia into World War I in the cause of its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Serbia today justifies its ethnic outrages in the region by appeal to anti-Vatican and anti-German sentiments and sulks about being “betrayed” by Russia (though a group of Russian volunteers called the “Czar’s Wolves” were involved in the Serbia campaign in Bosnia).
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I will not, however, try to do justice to the tragic narrative of carnage that quickly has become Yugoslavia’s destiny. That story has been in the headlines nonstop for the last three or four years. A quick glance at the absurdist maps drawn by desperate would-be peacekeepers trying to stay out of the conflagration without completely surrendering to brute force will show just how far back poor Yugoslavia has fallen into a brutal and fractious if also largely imaginary past. It is hard to tell which smacks of greater cynicism: the spirit of self-delusion and appeasement with which spineless “concerned” outsiders draw their successive maps; or the hypocrisy and deceit with which the protagonists within toy with and ultimately reject them. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. For in the end, the cynicism of all negotiations in the region is an apt response to their sheer futility.

To give even Yugoslavia, let alone the dozens of emerging tribal fragments, their due here would require that I compile a Middle European encyclopedia of ethnicity and civil war that would surely run to dozens of volumes. There simply is no efficient way to do justice to the multiple Jihads that have sprung up within but against McWorld from a region that is within McWorld’s borders without being of McWorld. Let me offer just one case, an instance centered on a nation in the very middle of the middle in which, despite a strong nation-state, nearly every toxic attribute of disintegral Jihad is
present or threatening: the Ukraine. This largest and most powerful of the ex-Soviet Union’s newly autonomous non-Russian nations, to many “the sick man of the region,”
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boasts nuclear weapons (supposedly to be dismantled), a fleet (supposedly to be bartered off to Russia in return for fuel and gas credits), and the status of a major power (in negotiation).
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The Dnieper River, on which the Ukrainian capital of Kiev lies, divides the country between an eastern region heavily populated with Russians (nearly n million or more than 20 percent of a total Ukrainian population of 52 million) and firmly attached to Russia, especially in the Crimea, which is over 60 percent Russian; and a western region with its “capital” at Lvov, where ethnic Ukrainians cherish their autonomy even as they confront ethnic rivals in Romania across the Dniester River to the west and in Hungary, Slovakia, and Belarus to the northwest. The Ukraine’s big power status conceals a civic fragility: for not only is it in conflict with most of its neighbors, but it is also deeply divided from within. A senior Western diplomat has warned: “If Ukraine ruptures the whole of Central Europe and the Black Sea region goes up with it.”
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Ukraine thus faces dual risks from Jihad: rupture from within and conflict with neighbors. Its first post-Soviet president was Leonid M. Kravchuk, an ideological Communist who, much like Milosevic in Yugoslavia, converted to lethal nationalism following independence, thereby arousing the suspicion and fear of the 11 million Russians living primarily in the east and on the Crimea peninsula in the Black Sea. Under his regime, inflation grew at as much as 40 percent a month (in a period where critics assailed a 25 percent rate in Russia), and despite the Ukraine’s formidably educated workforce and natural and manufacturing resources, industrial production dropped by a third to a half (between 1991 and 1993) in what World Bank officials called a “hyper-depression.”
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In 1994, reformer Leonid D. Kuchma ousted Kravchuk and, to the consternation of ethnic Ukrainians in the west, seems to be cozying up to the Russians again. Nationalist Ukrainians have not forgotten how Stalin, after an initial period of “Ukrainization” when Ukrainian culture was celebrated and the language officially recognized by the Soviet Union, turned on the nationalists, murdering millions of them and exterminating intellectuals wholesale.

Hence, though Kuchma was Kravchuk’s prime minister (breaking with him eventually), he is now distrusted both in Western Europe
(he has had second thoughts about signing the nuclear proliferation treaty and seems likely to elicit a powerful anti-Russian reaction) and in the western Ukraine—which was brought into the Soviet Ukrainian Republic only after World War II and has even less use for the government in Moscow than the part that underwent Stalinist antinationalist excesses. There he has earned the epithet of traitor; how easily the language of treason comes to the warriors of Jihad! On the other hand, some have estimated that nearly half of all Ukrainians now disapprove of Ukrainian independence, and Kuchma’s rapprochement with Moscow has strong support in the east, above all in the Crimea.

Once the home of Tatars, the Crimea underwent a Russian ethnic cleansing in 1944 when Stalin murdered or relocated its Turkic population to Tatarstan along the Volga River (which with nearly 5 million Tatars today is the largest of the Russian Republic’s semi-autonomous regions), leaving the Crimea entirely Russian. But after the breakup of the Communist empire, a quarter of a million Tatars returned to the Crimea where they reside today, three-quarters of them unemployed, complicating the Crimea’s uncertain status under Ukrainian sovereignty. The majority of Crimean Russians would probably favor reunion with Russia, but the Tatar minority, with historical claims to a Crimean homeland, favor neither Ukrainian nor Russian suzerainty. What has ensued has been an ever more inscrutable Eastern feudal (that is, Byzantine) politics. The current Crimean regional president Yuri Meshkov is followed everywhere by Kalishnikov-carrying guards (at least a half dozen politicians in the region have been gunned down), and though he leans to Moscow, probably does so because he has so few viable options.

On the other side of the Ukraine, where there are few Russians and where native Ukrainians face west, another conflict brews, this one with Romania. The Romanians and the Ukrainians have feuded over the region called Moldavia (including Bessarabia) for centuries. In World War II, after a brief interlude in 1940 (the Stalin-Hitler Pact) when it lost Transylvania to the Hungarians and Romanian Moldavia to the Soviets, the Nazi-supported Romanian regime wrested away both Bukovina in the north and Bessarabia in the east (where Romanian was spoken) once again joining all of Moldavia to Wallachia; it also took control of the purely Ukrainian trans-Dniester
region including Odessa. After the war, the Ukraine was restored but Moldavia was established again as an independent Soviet Republic, a buffer between the Ukraine and Romania but also a sore point. Its independence in 1989 exacerbated tensions, especially after Ukrainians on the east bank of the Dniester shelled Romanian-speaking Moldavians on the west bank. The campaign for a trans-Dniester autonomous region continues, leaving both Romania and the Ukraine in a state of agitation. Although President Ion Iliescu of Romania insists, “Our priority is full integration into the Western and the world economy,” Romania seems even more focused on ethnic rivalries than its rival, the Ukraine.
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In the northwestern Transylvania region, a million and a half Hungarian speakers (of a total Romanian population of 23 million) represent a potential army in Csurka’s campaign for a “greater Hungary.” Although they have recently been appeased by new laws permitting them to use their own language, they still are called Mongolian Vandals by nationalist Romanians.
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The Romanians have also continued to persecute gypsies, who suffered as much as Jews from Romania’s wartime profascist racial policies. Romania is hardly the only country to oppress gypsies or “Romani” (“Roma”)—a Times Mirror poll suggests “the one sentiment that unites Western and Eastern Europe is hatred of Gypsies”
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—but it is the only one where official opinion seems to support popular prejudice.
Romania Mare
, Romania’s largest weekly, recently demanded the expulsion of all gypsies from the country (there are 2½ million) and a number of gypsy dwellings have been burnt down and several gypsies murdered.
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Unlike the Free Democrats in Hungary, which includes a statement about fair treatment of gypsies in its party platform, Romania’s political parties are eloquently mute on the subject.

Prime Minister Roman (like ex-Ambassador to the United States Sylviu Brucan) is Jewish, but President Iliescu’s National Salvation Front party does nothing to disavow Romania wartime leader Ion Antonescu whose Iron Guard of the Legion of Saint Michael assisted the Nazis in exterminating gypsies and Jews alike.
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Indeed, Romania was the only power outside Germany to set up and run extermination camps. In the western Ukraine, Antonescu’s minions buried children alive to save bullets and finally drew the ire of
Adolph Eichmann
[sic]
, who was appalled by the inefficient and clumsy brutality of the Romanian camps.
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Late in the war, with the writing on the wall, Antonescu changed his stripes, but not soon enough to avoid execution by the Russians in 1946. But today his reputation has been refurbished (he appears as “the great Patriot”), while Jews are again accused of betraying Romanian national interests by siding with the Soviets during the Holocaust and thus made responsible for precipitating their own liquidation! Revisionist history places blame for the mass murders in the Ukraine on the Russians and their allies the Jews.