This Obituary of the West
I generally like Dimitry Orlov’s outlook. He is more apocalyptic than I am, but his heart is in the right place. He thinks the West’s Establishment is the Wizard of Oz. So do I. But let us not forget that the Wizard ran Oz without opposition for quite some time.
Orlov thinks we are getting close to the end of the movie, when the Wizard gets exposed. Recall that it was Toto who did it. Here is his latest article.
There are times when a loud cry of “The emperor has no clothes!” can be most copacetic. And so, let me point out something quite simple, yet very important.The old world order, to which we became accustomed over the course of the 1990s and the 2000s, its crises and its problems detailed in numerous authoritative publications on both sides of the Atlantic–it is no more. It is not out sick and it is not on vacation. It is deceased. It has passed on, gone to meet its maker, bought the farm, kicked the bucket and joined the crowd invisible. It is an ex-world order.
We’re not there yet. That’s because central banks still create counterfeit money to keep things going. But there are limits to this process. I just can’t time it.
ORLOV ON THE USSR
He says that the USSR collapsed in a heap without warning, 1985-91.
If we rewind back to the early 1980s, we can easily remember how the USSR was still running half of Europe and exerting major influence on a sizable chunk of the world. World socialist revolution was still sputtering along, with pro-Soviet regimes coming in to power here and there in different parts of the globe, the chorus of their leaders’ official pronouncements sounding more or less in unison. The leaders made their pilgrimages to Moscow as if it were Mecca, and they sent their promising young people there to learn how to do things the Soviet way. Soviet technology continued to make impressive advances: in the mid-1980s the Soviets launched into orbit a miracle of technology–the space station Mir, while Vega space probes were being dispatched to study Venus.
Soviet technology, outside of weaponry and rockets, was a joke. It was always mythological. From 1917 until 1970, at least 95% of Soviet technology was imported from the West: either stolen, imported, or built in the USSR by Western corporations. That was proved in the mid-1960’s by Antony Sutton’s path-breaking three-volume study, Soviet Technology and Economic Development. Also, three premiers died in rapid succession, leaving the Empire leaderless.
The 1980 Olympics revealed to the Soviet leadership that they were poorly dressed bumpkins when compared to the Western tourists who came to see the festivities. Despite all of their power, Soviet leaders could see that Western tourists made them look like rubes just in from the farms, which they had always been. From 1917 on, the Communists were the dregs of the Russian social order. They got worse over time. Overseeing genocide does that to bumpkins. Hayek’s chapter 10 in The Road to Serfdom is correct: “Why the Worst Get on Top.”
Soviet universities were known for nothing. Nobody outside of the Soviet bloc ever sent his children to be educated in the USSR.
The USSR in 1980, in the words of journalist Richard Grenier, was Bangladesh with missiles.
In the second half of the 1980’s, the giant Potemkin village went bankrupt. Gorbachev, hat in hand, went begging for loans in the West. He did not get them.
Orlov continues.
But alongside all of this business-as-usual the rules and principles according which the “red” half of the globe operated were already in an advanced state of decay, and a completely different system was starting to emerge both at the center and along the periphery. Seven years later the USSR collapsed and the world order was transformed, but many people simply couldn’t believe in the reality of this change.
He is correct. But the rot was there from October 1917. The USSR never was a serious social order, except for weaponry and masses of troops to throw at the enemy. Communism never built anything of value, anywhere.
In the early 1990s many political scientists were self-assuredly claiming that what is happening is the realization of a clever Kremlin plan to modernize the Soviet system and that, after a quick rebranding, it will again start taking over the world. People like to talk about what they think they can understand, never mind whether it still exists.
I knew conservatives who said this. A few still do. I was not one of them. What the Soviet Union’s leaders did in December 1991 convinced me. They buried the stinking corpse. They became Russian leaders overnight. Then they re-named the cities: back to old Russian names. That was the symbolic announcement of the death of the USSR.
His point is this: what looked powerful in 1985 went belly-up in 1991. My comment: looks can be deceiving, especially if your politics blinds you to reality. Non-Leftist analysts were never taken in by the USSR. Paul Samuelson was — totally. In 1989, two years before the USSR collapsed, as its economy was visibly falling apart, Samuelson and co-author Wllliam Nordhaus wrote this: “The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.” (Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, Economics, 13th ed. [New York: McGraw Hill, 1989], p. 837.) Ludwig von Mises wasn’t deceived for a minute. He had written “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” in 1920. In 1966, at the age of age of 84, he wrote an article on the futility of Soviet economic reforms. Then he showed why, based on economic analysis. As he put it, “The present-day strength of communism is entirely due to the mentality of the pseudo-intellectuals in the Western nations who still enjoy the products of free enterprise.” Twenty-three years later, Samuelson proved Mises’s point as well as it could have been proved. As Bugs Bunny said, “What a maroon!”
Orlov then switches to the West. It, too, looks unstoppable, he says. It isn’t, he says. Here is my point: there is substance in the West’s social order that never existed in the USSR. The West will not suffer a comparable disintegration. The West is not a Potemkin village.
STUPID POLITICAL TRICKS
Orlov continues:
And what do we see today? The realm that self-identifies itself as “The West” is still claiming to be leading economically, technologically, and to be dominant militarily, but it has suffered a moral defeat, and, strictly as a consequence of this moral defeat, a profound ideological defeat as well.It’s simple.
1. How can they talk of the inviolability of private property while confiscating the savings of depositors in Cypriot banks?
2. How can they talk of safeguarding the territorial integrity of countries while destroying, in turn, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine?
3. How can they talk of free enterprise and then sign contracts to build ships but refuse to deliver them because of pressure from Washington, as happened with Mistral ships which Russia ordered from France?
4. How can they talk of democracy and then use naked threats against the premier of Greece–the birthplace of European democracy–forcing him to ignore the unprofitable results of the Greek national referendum?
5. How can they talk about fighting racism while in the US they are constantly shooting mass quantities of unarmed Negros, all the while forbidding people to call them Negros.
6. How can they accuse the Serbs of genocide while refusing to acknowledge what they did to supposedly “independent” Kosovo, which has been turned into a European criminal enclave specializing in the production and distribution of narcotics?
7. How can they claim to oppose extremism and terrorism while training, arming and financing ISIS and the Ukrainian Neo-nazis?
8. How can they talk about justice while the US maintains the largest prison population in the history of the world and has executed many people subsequently discovered to have been innocent?
9. How can they talk about freedom of religion after the US federal government exterminated the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and then imprisoned the survivors, even though the government’s allegations against the sect have subsequently been proven to be false?
10. How can they accuse others of corruption after the colossal financial embarrassment of 2008, in the run-up to which obvious financial bubbles that were ready to bust were assigned the highest ratings?
What has happened is the worst thing that could have possibly happened: in full view of the entire world, “Western values” have been demonstrated to be null and void.
Western political values, yes. Western private values, not yet.
If you think that these are just some specific examples of difficulties or mistakes that could potentially be overcome in some dim and foggy future, then you are wrong: this is all of the “Western values” worth mentioning, and they have all been invalidated by observation. Note the past tense: they already have been invalidated. Are there any “Western values” left intact? Oh yes, just one: the rights of sexual minorities. But it is not possible to maintain Western civilization on the strength of gay marriage alone.Is it any wonder then that the rest of the world is trying to put as much distance between itself and the morally bankrupt “West” as it possibly can, as quickly as it can? China is working on developing its own model, Russia is striving for self-sufficiency and independence from Western imports and finance, and even Latin America, once considered the backyard of the US, is increasingly going its own separate way.
But the separate ways that all of these societies are heading are in fact side roads along the same highway. Western fascism is still the model for all of them. They call it something else, but that is what it is. It is the alliance between the state and the private sector. This is the dominant Western economic outlook today.
Putin is an ex-KGB apparatchik. He is now the supreme bureaucrat and the supreme politician. He has no ideology. He has no vision. He has no commitment to a new world-and-life view. He is not offering a different philosophy. He is a Russian nationalist, a former Russian bureaucrat, and a master of what is a Russian version of crony capitalism.
Chinese politicians are just the same.
Latin America’s revolutionary leaders are a bunch of third-rate socialists, trying to do a Fidel Castro impersonation. They are basically Hugo Chavez, but without the oil.
In other words, the rest of the political world is just as corrupt as the West’s is. As George Wallace used to say, there is not a dime’s worth of difference among any of them. I would modify this. There is not an SDR’s worth of difference.
We are back to the old political slogan, which I invoke again and again: “You can’t beat something with nothing.”
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