| | Empires are strange creatures. Watching the ruins of the Communist Empire is an interesting exercise. It roughly falls into three parts: the former Soviet, the Mainland Chinese, and the assorted rouge states and violent warfare left behind by the export of socialist revolution. At one point Moscow dominated the bulk of Asia, half of Europe and major portions of Africa and Latin America. The reasons for its collapse are to many to get into right now, but the first crack came When Nixon went to China, when Beijing stopped listening to the Soviets and began acting independently. Within fifteen years, the Soviet Union was in its death throws and China was becoming an economic power house with a capitalist economy.
As a Ukrainian I pay special interest to the fate of Moscow. I have no love for that city or its rulers. When I heard that the constituent republics were ending Muscovite control, I rejoiced. The last decade has been illuminating for me. In ten years, Moscow has gone from international bankruptcy to a rich oil-exporting nation. Its internal politics have been a return to the Czarism of before 1914: orthodoxy, nationality, autocracy. The Czars re-labled their conquered peoples as types of "Russians", harkening back to before the Mongolian Invasion of 1241. Today Moscow sees its former subjects growing in defiant to their former imperial masters. Moscow has seen fit to encourage separatism in these lands. Divided foes are easier to manipulate. The other message sent out is clear: "You are all small and divided and will only increase in this, join us to be great once more and share in our majesty." I look at political trends in the former Soviet Union and see similar paterns. Former communists continue to point at any sort of chaos or hardship as being caused by breaking away from Moscow. In truth the chaos and hardship is the direct result of being so solidly tied to Moscow for so long. The lands of the empire were stripped for any resource it provided, be it natural, industrial, military, or human. Even the modern wealth of Moscow is from elsewere: the petrolium wealth comes from the outlying lands that could not escape the death grip of Moscow in 1991. Meanwhile as Moscow's property values rank amoung the highest in the world, the territory it controls is being depopulated by emigration and negative birth rates. Ukraine and Kazakstan, the largest nations to come out of the Soviet sphere, may succede in building independent nations free of Muscovite influence, but other, smaller states may not fare as well. The long term prospects of Moscow are unclear. Its goal to reasert dominance may be obvious, but its ability to do so in the coming years is hazy.
China presents another side of the equation. As the first to break away from Moscow, Beijing has profited handsomely. China remembers its history; it remembers how the West humiliated it in the 19th Century. The basic doctrine followed since 1949 has been to assert "One China" centered in Beijing, and that, "Once China, always China," irregardless of the wishes of the local populations. China isn't so much Communist as it is Chinese: ever since the Qin Dynasty created the unified Chinese state, China has seen an endless line of absolute rule from the center, right down to our very day. Pearl Bucks novels about the difficulty of rural Chinese life could have been written yesterday or five thousand years ago. Dynasties may come and go, but life remains difficult, miserable and full of hardship. Mao Zedong was popular precisely because he promised to change things. His lasting legacy is that the mass murder he wraught was no different from the crimes of those whoo came before. The movie "Hero" vividly portrays China so many millenia ago and how "sha na," "our land," was unifed thanks to the "Nameless Hero." But as Jet Li's character says at the very end, it was unified through war and bloodshed. Rival power centers were brutally crushed and other cultures wiped out. When the students were slaughtered in 1989, Tianenmen Square was the latest in this ancient tradition of brutality in the name of stability.
The miscellanious nations left behind by Communism deserve some mmention here. They are the countries that once subsisted on foreign aid from Moscow (or the United States) to influence them ideologically. In Africa, after so much exploitation from European colonial masters, the dark continent was reduced to a chess game of tribes at war. Aside from vast amounts of guns, the continent remains dirt poor, its resources still only extracted to benefit foreigners. The legacy of communism was finance of "revolutionaries" by Moscow and "counter-revolutionaries" by the United States. Both groups have played out their influence and become nothing more than waring factions in areas that still suffer from coloial legacies. Nations that remained stable and held on to communism have only recieded into the depths of Anti-American Stalinism. |
| | Posted 12/15/2006 4:52 AM - 108 Views - 6 eProps - 3 comments
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We'll be starting after I get back from Louisville