That people are what they are made out to be by their up-bringing, society, and history and by the reactions of other humans to them - is what I subscribe to. Also, I do believe in the temporary inferiority, malevolence and impurity of groups of people who experienced and were subjected to prolonged corrupting and pathologising influences. Historical processes exact an exorbitant toll. Ideologies, indoctrination, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, command economies, statism, militarism, malignant nationalism, occupation - all carry a hefty price tag. And the currency is the mind of the people: their mental health, their socialization processes and, ultimately, the social fabric.
I do believe in the osmosis of evil, in the diffusion of villainy, in the corruption of the soul. In short: I do believe in terminally sick societies, whose prospects of recovery are nil. The only hope lies in their demise. Not in the abstract sense of the word - but in the actual death and decomposition of each and every individual until the whole "generation of the desert" is done with and a new, less contaminated one, emerges to take its place.
This is why I believe that the future of Africa, the Middle East and the countries of the CEE and NIS is, for the time being, behind them. Their horizon is dim and empty. They are looking forward to the past. They are the zombies of the international arena, the walking dead and it is death that they multiply. Their growth is stunted, their speech is stifled, their leaders a vicious lot, the states that they inhabit are dens of barbarous criminality and lawlessness. Their institutions are a travesty, their parties nests of avarice and vile. Their media prostituted and defiled. The farce of elections and the newspeak of democracy and human rights and freemarketry are props to hide the vast wilderness of moral bankruptc..... Instruments of extortion and coercion no different to their predecessors - only they provide less security, both physical and economic. They know no different. They think no different. They swear by their malaise and by their malaise they shall die.
And die they shall. The signs are auspicious. Biology, the West and international financial institutions all conspire to retire the beast. New blood, new ideas, new hopes and aspirations are in evidence. Still overwhelmed by the abrupt and cruel exposure of their elders, still taken aback by the enormity of the project of rehabilitating the very psyche of their people, still torn between illegal self enrichment and service to their fellow citizens - but there they are, the young ones. The battle is on. The consensus of the baksheesh and the political assassination is replaced, ever so gradually, by the dissension of the market place.
Wars are fought with spreadsheets, experience imported from afar, new knowledge craved, corruption decried. It is a refreshing, gargantuan, change. And it will consume yet one more generation. But it has started and it is irreversible. And it is in the eyes of the youth, a flickering flame, so ephemeral, so vulnerable and yet, so irresistible. This flame is called the future.
(Article written on January 15, 2000 and published January 31, 2000
in "Central Europe Review" volume 2, issue 4)
Excerpt from Shmuel Vaknic's 'After the Rain'.
