Lunatic Crap Or the Devil's Dung?

Lunatic Crap Or The Devil's Dung?

By MarkarMelkonian

hetq.am - 31/7/2015

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than,

the establishing of a new truth or fact.

Charles Darwin

A commenter on a previous posting did not like the fact that yourstruly - "someone who [he doubts] ever visited Soviet Armenia, letalone lived through the miserable years of Soviet rule" - would dareto suggest that for most of our compatriots life in Armenia was betterthirty years ago than it is now.

This claim, it seems, is an example of what the commenter,felicitously, called "lunatic Marxist crap." (The comment, datedJune 14, was a response to my article "Women in Armenia Are Less FreeToday than 30 Years Ago", which appeared in Hetq on June 12, 2015)

With all of the free-market fairytales in the air, not to mention theracial theories of history and the nutty conspiracy theories, ourcommentator reserves his objection for "lunatic Marxist crap." Fora much larger dose of lunatic Marxist crap, he is invited to listento the young people on the streets in Greece, Japan, and Ecuador orperhaps to pick up a devastating bestseller by Thomas Piketty.

It might come as a surprise, moreover, to learn that none other thanthe U.S. State Department does its best to recruit Marxist analysts.

The free-market fairytales might be useful when it comes to propagandaaimed at willfully ignorant people, but even policy planners inWashington D.C. know that every now and then they need a REALISTICanalysis of what's going on.

After twenty-five years of capitalist rule, some of us still talkas if everybody agrees that Armenia is much better off today thanit was thirty years ago. But public opinion surveys register a verydifferent reality.

A study by the Washington-based International Foundation for ElectionSystems in August 2000 concluded that "...a majority (54%) would preferthe 'economic security we had in Soviet times' over the freedoms oftoday." (Thomas Carson and GevorkPogosian, "Public Attitudes towardPolitical Life: Electoral Experience, Confidence in Leadership andCivic Participation in Armenia," IFES, August, 2000.) The IFES cannotfairly be accused of pro-Soviet bias: it is funded in part by USAID,the U.S. Dept. of Education, and the U.S. State Department.

According to the IFES report, "Many Armenians speak of the height oftheir position during the last days of the communist (sic.) system.

They speak of these days as something taken from them. Many wouldreverse the vote for independence in the early 1990s if they couldhave foreseen their current position from that time." (IFES, p. 3)

A more recent Gallup survey in eleven former Soviet Republics,including Armenia and Russia, concludes that: "Overall, residents ofthese former Soviet republics are more than twice as likely to say thebreakup hurt (51%) than benefited their countries (24%)." ("FormerSoviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup: Residents More thanTwice as Likely to say Collapse Hurt Their Country," Dec. 19, 2013.)

Other surveys have registered similar results, even in such post-Soviet"success stories" as the Czech Republic and Poland.

More than a decade after John Paul II blessed the restoration ofcapitalism in Poland, for example, a public opinion survey in 2002by the Public Opinion Research Centre found that 56% of Poles saidtheir lives were "better" under the 1970s regime of Edward Gierek thanthey were twelve years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since theseopinions, as well as the IFES findings, were expressed years beforethe onset of the Great Recession, it is doubtful that the majorityview has changed in the intervening years.

Coming full circle, a more recent Pope this month described freemarket ideology as "the dung of the devil."

So what will it be, lunatic Marxist crap or the dung of the devil?

The point is not that these survey results are unknown or eventhat they are surprising. The point, rather, is that, DESPITE THESEFINDINGS, many Armenians, especially in the diaspora, continue todenigrate the genuine achievements of the Armenian Soviet SocialistRepublic.

To listen to them, one would think that there is a solid consensusthat capitalist rule has served the country better than the Sovietsystem. It is as if the street-level perspective of ordinary Armenianscounts for nothing compared to the slogans and catchphrases propagatedby Radio Liberty.

But who are the majority respondents to these polls, and why is itthat we so rarely hear from them?

The Gallup report goes on to make a common claim: "Older residentsin all 11 countries whose safety nets, such as guaranteed pensionsand free healthcare, largely disappeared when the union dissolvedare more likely to say the breakup harmed their countries." There isstatistical support for this common observation: our older compatriots,it seems, have a disproportionately higher opinion of the Soviet years,and a correspondingly lower opinion of the years of capitalist rule.

If this is right, then in Armenia and elsewhere, those who livedlongest under the Soviet order are the most sympathetic to it. Butthese are the very respondents who are likely to be most familiarwith the two alternative systems, and thus they would appear to bein the best position to compare them.

Apologists for capitalist rule ignore the opinions of our compatriots,or they dismiss them as unimportant. The rhetorical trick here is towave the evidence away with the word "nostalgia." We are supposed tobelieve that our older compatriots, inexplicably, have a sentimentalattachment to those "miserable years of Soviet rule."

Imagine that you spent years of your life fighting against Hitler'sinvading Wehrmacht, and that well over 20 million of your compatriotsdied in this effort before you achieved victory, against all odds.

Imagine then that you worked for decades in the belief that youwere building a country where your grandchildren and your greatgrandchildren would be safe, healthy, and educated; where workerswould not have to be ashamed of being workers, and elderly people onfixed income could live out their days in dignity and honor.

And then imagine that one day several of the privileged beneficiariesof the system you worked to build stride up the steps at Yerevan'sOpera Square and announce that all of your sacrifice, sweat, and hopeswere worthless; that every value you stood for was a lie; that everyfriend you thought you had was an enemy, and every enemy was a friend.

Now, years later, reduced to a ward of foreign-sponsored soup kitchens,you watch as those who ruined your country describe your indignation as"nostalgia."

This is called adding insult to injury.

The counter-revolutionaries with the bullhorns shouted and shamedtheir elders into silence, and shunted them away to die poor andvoiceless. Thanks in part to their efforts, Soviet Armenia is gone,and--unfortunately for most of us--it will never come back.

And yet the counterrevolutionaries continue to malign Soviet Armenia.

Their target these days, it seems, are young people. The whole point ofthe propagandists today is to make sure that young people never imaginethat workers could rule in Armenia, instead of just capitalists.

But this only goes to show that at Nairit, on Baghramyan Avenue,and in hundreds other locales, the class struggle continues.

Here is a bit more lunatic Marxist crap to consider: Thirty years ago,children did not pick through garbage dumps in Armenia; one-leggedveterans were not begging at stop lights; families did not dig holesin the ground to live in, and Armenian prostitutes did not fill thebrothels of Istanbul.

And for now, one last item of lunatic Marxist crap: In 1989, thepopulation of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was 3.3 million,having almost quadrupled from 880,000 in 1926. This population increasetook place despite the enormous loss of 300,000 Armenians in the warto defeat the Nazi invaders. Compare this to the post-Soviet record:thirty years ago Armenia had one million more inhabitantsthan it does today, and there were almost twice as many Armenians in the southernCaucasus as there are today. In 2005, United Nations experts predictedthat Armenia's population would drop by another half a millioninhabitants by 2050. Let us hope that this forecast is inaccurate.

The apologists for capitalism have few achievements of their ownto point to, and so they continue to denigrate the achievements ofSoviet Armenia. But as it becomes clearer and clearer that Armenia'sreturn to capitalist rule has brought ruin to the majority, thepropagandists must constantly ramp up the horror stories about the"miserable years of Soviet rule" and invent new crimes to foist ontotheir Soviet predecessors.

Many of our compatriots, for example, still believe that Armenia'sterrible 1989 earthquake was deliberately triggered by a Soviet atomicbomb. And then there are the tales about death tolls: today we hearabout "100 million victims of Communism," but stay tuned: if thingsget worse under capitalism in the coming years, we will be hearingabout 200 million victims of Communism. (The former President of theRepublic of Cuba once wryly observed that the Soviet Union was theone unique state in human history that had no enemies, but only hadvictims.) We have even been told that communists engineer faminesand, naturally, "eat babies" (as the disgraced former Italian PrimeMinister publicly claimed during an election cycle).

The worse life gets under capitalism, the wilder and more preposterousthe horror stories get. L.A. Times staff writer Annie Jacobsen informsus in her recent book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's TopSecret Military Base (2011) that in 1947 Joseph Stalin attempted toenlist Nazi physician Joseph Mengele in a sinister plot to producea race of "grotesquely deformed" miniaturized pilots to terrorizeAmerica by flying around in UFO's. (In a May 15, 2011 review of thebook, Janet Maslin wrote that it "is noteworthy for its author's doggeddevotion to her research.") So now we can add the flying saucer crewof Area 51 to the growing list of "victims of communism."

Radio Liberty programmers must make sure that a generation raisedunder capitalist domination will not be able to measure the depththat Armenia has fallen in the past quarter-century, and will not beable to imagine a fundamentally different alternative.

This observation goes a long way to explain why there is plenty oflunatic ANTI-Marxist crap to go around.

MarkarMelkonian is a philosophy instructor and an author. His booksinclude Richard Rorty's Politics: Liberalism at the End of the AmericanCentury (1999), Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer (Westview Press,1996), and My Brother's Road (2005).