Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [144]
Soaring crime rates underscore the dangers to the Russian body. The most pessimistic observers have estimated that up to 40 percent of the Russian GNP is crime-related and up to forty thousand shops and small enterprises are reputedly owned or infiltrated by a thousand or more crime syndicates. Of several thousand crime families, 150 or so boast prominent international connections. According to Yeltsin himself, 80 percent of banks and private enterprises are paying tribute to the new Russian mafia26—a term Russian criminals have chosen for themselves as they dress and act the part of the gangsters they encounter on Western videos of The Godfather and Goodfellas, as well as films noires from the 1930s featuring the strutting criminal portraits of Capone and others by James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson (more testimony to the intersection of Jihad and McWorld).27
Moscow’s First City Hospital treats forty serious mugging victims daily, and the victims are not just casualties of street violence.28 Between 1989 and 1992, more than a thousand Russian policemen were killed in crime-related violence, while in 1993 alone ten directors of Russia’s largest commercial banks were murdered.29 In 1994, Yeltsin’s government moved frontally against what it called “criminal filth,” but the remedy appears no more conducive to democracy than the disease since it includes provisions to suspend civil liberties, to detain suspects without bringing formal charges for up to a month, and to legitimize nonconstitutional search and seizure procedures.30
In figures like Zhirinovsky, Jihad continues to stalk Russian society. But for the Russian soul, Slavophile and nationalist sentiments may seem necessary fires to warm the long cold winter of McWorld. Nationalist folk songs are regularly pushed off the radio by Western rock music, and not even native Russian rock musicians can withstand the onslaught. Boris Grebenshchikov once sold rock albums in the millions: exposed to the competition of the “real thing,” he does well nowadays if he sells fifteen thousand.31 Is it a wonder then that even cosmopolitan Russians express a certain nostalgia for yesterday’s Greater Russia? Or that this nostalgia must compete with and is a distant second to the grasping desire for tomorrow’s greater markets? Nationalists resist Western culture, but slogans appear everywhere on behalf of the popular new cigarette West screaming, “Test the West!” What playwright Janusz Glowacki says about Poland applies to the sinking high culture of Russia and every other ex-Communist state: “Today, theaters close one after another. Warehouses are filled with books people used to risk their freedom to read. Weekly literary magazines are going bankrupt. Harlequin books are omnipresent, as are movies starring Schwarzenegger or Stallone.”32
Russia today sells more Barbies than babushkas and more Veronikas (a Russian imitation of Barbie) than Russian bears.33 Does this mean more or less choice? Traditional wooden toys are pushed off the shelves by Legos, plastic warriors, and Gameboys. The Gameboys are stealth cultural networks reaching into Russian homes and children’s minds with a steady diet of Western games, comic characters, and attitudes about competition, violence, consumption, and winning that are indispensable to McWorld’s marketing strategy. Russia’s famed Ministry of Culture, now the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, is well on the way to turning the nation’s artistic heritage into a theme park—to be sure, in the name of preserving a domain that can no longer depend on state subsidies. Six teams with names like the Swans and the Bears play in an American-style football league