One thing which most liberals conveniently gloss over is the fact that communism is a type of liberalism.
Communism combines left-liberal faith in human equality with right-liberal faith in technological progress and rational management. Traditionalist blogger Mark Richardson suggest that communism is best defined as a type of radical liberalism.
The fact that communism is a type of enlightenment liberalism helps explain why western intellectuals have been far less critical of communism than right-wing fascism, and why right liberals like Christopher Hitchens do not seem to be particularly embarrassed about their Marxist past.
The Nazis may have been more merciless that the Soviets or the Maoists, but overall, communism created far more human misery over the course of the 20th Century. Moreover, its legacy is still causing major social, economic and environmental problems in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Say what what you like about the cruelty of extreme nationalism, but it has never created an environmental problem on a par with what Marxism has done to the Aral Sea.
In discussing the growth of skinhead attacks on foreigners in Russia, left-liberal journalist Mark Ames, of Exile fame, puts much of the blame on communism and neo-liberal economics, while carefully avoiding any criticism of liberalism per se:
“Over the past few decades, Communism and Western-style liberalism have been thoroughly discredited, first by the collapse of the Soviet Union and then with the collapse of the Russian economy by the end of the 1990s. Christianity has never recovered from the Bolshevik Revolution. All of this, put into the context of social, economic, cultural and geopolitical decline, has helped foster growing ultranationalism, including neo-Nazism–which seems strange in a country that lost 27 million people to the Nazis.”
Because Ames cannot see that western liberalism in general has aggravated many of the problems faced by Russia, he blames the relatively conservative government of Vladamir Putin for encouraging ethnic violence:
“Since Putin came to power in 2000, Russia has experienced an unexpectedly rapid yet uneven revival, and his government’s overt patriotism, as well as its ambivalent attitude toward Western liberalism, reflect and enable the growing appeal of ultranationalism.”
I would suspect that to understand the racial attacks in Russia, it is necessary to take into account one or two factors that liberal pundits tend to overlook.
A major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union was the economic burden Russia faced in having to support economically backward colonies. This drag on the economy became critical in the 1980s, when global prices for oil and minerals nose-dived. Russia was then faced with the unenviable problem of having to support backward countries like Turkmenistan, while its own economy was in economic free-fall.
It is probably hard to underestimate just how disruptive communism was in Russia. When communism collapsed it was found that many cities, of hundreds of thousands of people, were located in economically illogical places and some experts believe that the burden of relocating people to areas where they actually want to live, as opposed to where Soviet planner dictated they should live, is the country’s biggest economic problem.
Given that most Russians are still poor, and gain almost no benefit from the arrival of immigrants from former satellites, that used to be subsidised by the Russian government for little in return, it’s not really surprising that some of them are hostile to immigrants from former non-Slavic satellites.
The Putin government may be trying to impose conservatism and stability from above, in a rough and ready manner, but it seems preferable to re-visiting liberal approaches which have led to far more pervasive problems.
Posted by mikecourtman 