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By Root 1493 0

“free” peoples have turned the reins back over to public-sector criminals: ex-Communists and nationalists who ruled in the ancien Communist régime and, having cashed in their commissar’s chips for a privileged place in the new capitalist order and supplanted old Leninist with still older tribalist dogmas, were more than ready to reinstate the heavy hand that an exasperated and weary electorate has now come to crave. The new political arithmetic equates crime and McWorld (and sometimes crime and democracy), and thereby gives the tribal Jihad against it the status of a war on behalf of decency and honesty. Lithuania, Belarus, the Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Mongolia are among the countries where frustrated citizens in the second wave of free elections elected “new” governments composed of old Communists wedded to nationalist and ethnic doctrines of one kind or another. Where even they are too moderate, radical right nationalists and antisemites—like Istvan Csurka in Hungary and those in the Romanian parliament who recently voted to honor Romania’s wartime fascist leader Ion Antonescu—stalk both the moderates and their parliamentary system as Hitler once stalked Weimar.7 They wait for popular impatience to overcome frail and unrooted political institutions, often because there is no civil society to root and secure them.

The most notorious of the new old world bigots, Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, hits exactly the right note in harmonizing the parochial interests of fanatic Russian nationalism and a struggle against McWorld that seems almost prudent when he shouts: “It was all the same to them [the Western powers] who ruled Russia, czars or Communists, their goal was to destroy Russia.” Whereas in two previous world wars, Zhirinovsky thunders, the Germans came with brute force and blitzkrieg, the new aggressors invade with “pretty slogans about democracy and human rights…. The Americans are clever.” On this point, surely he is right: “They know it is better to come here with chewing gum, stockings and McDonald’s.”8 He’s a little out of date in his World War II allusion to nylons and sweets; but leave McDonald’s and replace chewing gum and stockings with Macintoshes and Nikes, and the advance guard of McWorld is accurately named.

There is no country in Eastern and Central Europe or the republics of the old Soviet Union that has proved immune to Jihad’s contagion, and that has not suffered politically and economically for it.9 Spawned by fear and insecurity and driven by the failure of clumsy and foolhardy attempts to impose Western economic and political institutions wholesale on societies wholly unprepared to accommodate them, a variety of small but toxic Jihads have flourished, leaving the region with no really convincing success stories. Not the Czech Republic despite its bloodless (if not quite “velvet”) revolution and its poet president who, for all his dissident legitimacy, could not thwart the divorce of his country from Slovakia; not Hungary, though it comes close to being ethnically monocultural and is thus supposedly immune to the ravages of tribalism;10 not Poland, notwithstanding its relative economic success and its traditions of Catholicism and unionism (Solidarity) that tie it to the West; certainly not Russia. In each of these countries, ethnic tensions, reawakened bigotries, separatist rumblings, or nationalist zealotry stalk governments committed in theory to the West’s constitutions and McWorld’s markets.

For tragic irony, no country can rival Yugoslavia, whose very name conjures the full meaning of Jihad within the domain of McWorld more eloquently than a library of books could ever do. Here was the only Communist nation to be admired at least a little by left democrats and idealists in the West, a state brave enough to reject Stalin, imaginative enough to federalize its socialist system and empower its workers, resourceful enough to bring its hostile ethnic fragments to heel, prudent enough to forge a pluralist army strong and loyal to Yugoslavia.11 Its failure—the conquest of