Sometimes some articles are just funny, not in a silly way, but amusing, diverting, fantastic in a good way, travel journalism or travel essays that make you -- in a way -- want to go somewhere or at least feel happy to know that that somewhere exists, that there is palpable difference in our flat world. (Unfortunately, not if you actually lived in that far-off there, and only if you could leave, to jog the senses and jolt the philosophies and no more.) Such is the American Conservative essay on Belarus by Peter Hitchens, out of the most recent issue. I used to subscribe -- paper always beats photons -- but dollars decline before free(dom). Here are bits... but read the whole...
I have often half-seriously thought that the Western powers should have clubbed together to maintain the old East Germany as a theme park so that future generations could see what real socialism was truly like, right down to the soup, the beer, and the plumbing. Many East Germans, as is now clear, would have been surprisingly happy to live in such a place—another undoubted problem that we in the rich world have never bothered to try to understand. We are afraid of examining it because we know too well that our new united planet isn’t as good as it could have been.
Clever movies such as “Good Bye Lenin” and “The Lives of Others” make the former East Germany out to have been better than it really was. But then, that is the way it seems to many former East Germans disappointed and disturbed by the triumphant West. [...]
Travel a few hundred miles further east, though, passing through the latest version of Poland, and you come to the curious, accidental country of Belarus, which might have been invented for educational purposes. Such a place never existed before and probably will not for much longer. It is independent of Russia only as an unintended side effect of the break-up of the USSR at the end of the Gorbachev era. They broke it off and forgot to stick it back on again. Its independence from Moscow lacks conviction. There is in reality no proper border with Russia, whose citizens can slip in and out at will.
But there is certainly still a border with “The West,” a phrase that still means something here. And what a border it is. After nearly a thousand miles of passport-free travel, from the English Channel to Warsaw, the voyager is abruptly required to produce his documents, visa and all, properly stamped, just as in the old days. Trains cannot even cross without having their wheels removed, for long ago the Russian empire adopted a wider gauge to prevent a rail-borne invasion.
Here at Brest on the river Bug—travelers who wish to rest overnight may stay in the Hotel Bug—stands the final frontier of the European Union, an abrupt and total stop to that strange, postmodern empire of deliberately forgotten history, bureaucracy, and subsidy. The EU may dream of one day incorporating Ukraine and even Turkey. But Belarus? I don’t think so. The place is too troublesome and unpredictable. An inhabitant of Brest—provided he was on nobody’s death list and was generally lucky—might have lived in five different countries in one century without so much as moving house.
Creepy, like I always imagined Communism to be. Politically, yes, but moreover, aesthetically; it was a depressing thing, a dark idea, a bland, stale and, most of all, inhuman coldness that brought a Siberian rigidity and lifelessness to anywhere it unfortunately went, and while I can understand what attracted the third world to its rhetoric (democracy and free markets don't preach liberation, or social justice, or global justice, or acknowledge colonization, empire and racism), I pity how traumatized and hollowed Islam has become by the uncritical absorption of an anti-spirituality, producing an Islam that is incoherent and so triply dangerous: it is immoral; it is impractical and it is spiritually imperialist without any meaningful spirituality, kind of like running the world on free markets in order to make it Communist. Communism! How it feels in my head to be dirty, a bit old, tired, like it had jumped from hot-headed, red-flagged revolutionary fervor straight into a pathetic old age of a cynical, bitter, failed old man. Thank God at least the system is practically done. Minus the tens of millions it had to kill before it extinguished itself, an economic victim of its own literal inhumanity.
But, with all that, there is something that seeded Communism which is itself worthy of consideration, remembrance, reflection and purposeful utilization - and that is Marxism. How can something helpful produce something so hurtful? That is, on balance, a product of application by revolutionaries who imagined God, goodness and sinfulness were illusions, and that a basic human mode of living was purely and only oppressive. Here in fact we have the roots of a Sayyid Qutbian, or Maududian, or Khomeinian bifurcation of the world into radically pagan and suffocatingly Islamist; the roots are economic, but masked, and when reproduced in an Islamic framework, spiritually and socially and even economically devastating. Muslims have lost a lot, and lost themselves a lot, too: The faith was rushed into modernity in fear it was incapable of a measured reaction, as if the finality of the faith was not so final, and the haste was expectedly disastrous. We are still paying for it in Pakistan, in Iraq, in Afghanistan...
But the economic analysis is tremendously worthwhile for continued consideration, and all for the worse that we have in America generally lost its point (if ever we had seen it.) That is to say that capitalism itself is often rapacious and often violent: Wars are started for resources, and that because of the tremendous imbalance in their consumption, and the concurrent elevation of consumption as the end-all, be-all of humanity. To be is to buy; to be bought is to have value; we are made into products, and it is not our citizenship, our humanity, our souls or our constitution that make us valuable, but our ability to be priced that brings us value. Marxian analyses show us how this happens, why it happens, and often, quite helpfully, where it might happen next; how can we forget those kinds of insightful tools? Capitalism become consumerism is not mere free markets, rather it flattens and harshens and stiffens the world, and makes it often into an ugly and cold place, which we must take increasing amounts of drugs (medically or not) to be comfortable with. We have made ourselves a world we are not happy with and we have made ourselves a world we cannot sustain. That too is a great tragedy.
Do not sneer too much at those who do this. Not everyone can be protected by oceans and friendly neighbors from the ancient, abiding horrors of human strife. Those who are not so safe are keener on security than on liberty. Nor can we in the free world, who have lazily and thoughtlessly been cajoled into giving away so much of our own liberty since Sept. 11, 2001, look down on others who never had much liberty to give—especially in light of the near-suicidal bravery of those who dare to oppose Alexander Lukashenko.
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