Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [151]
West German biases and aggressive commerce combine to undermine both dissident and traditional East German culture. In the summer of 1990, shortly after the elections and only six months after the collapse of the East German regime, reporters called to the little town of Kommlitz near Leipzig discovered a vast bibliobonfire. Ten million books had been torched, including volumes by such dissident authors as Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym, Hermann Kant, and Anna Seghers—not as an act of political repression but in a kind of instant and terminal remaindering of a stock of books that publishers did not wish to deal with. The old books were cheap and serious. The new are expensive and frivolous. New stores in the east carry more Stephen King than Stefan Heym, and prefer travel guides, tax advice, and language texts to classical authors. Books that could once be had for $4 now cost $30 (a month’s rent in the former East Germany).18
In place of the radical broadsides and political magazines published by samizdat writers, the new western-owned magazines avoid political subjects altogether. Lubos Beniak, the editor of Mlady Svet, a Czech weekly, describes changes that are common throughout central Europe: “People are sick of politics. They want to be entertained, they want snappy journalism, they even want trash.”19 Hungary’s most prestigious radical paper, Reform, with a circulation of over 400,000, was purchased by Rupert Murdoch in 1990. In 1992, its editor Peter Toke admitted: “It was exciting under the Communists, and it was easier because it was obvious what to attack. Since the revolution we’ve been in an identity crisis, and Mr. Murdoch is not happy at all.” New German editors are looking for “readable rock critics, witty headlines, good crossword puzzles … classified advertisements.”20 That should placate Mr. Murdoch.
The persistence of the East-West rift within Germany along with the costs privatization has imposed on the East, where official unemployment rates hover at 16 percent and the real rate is above 30 percent, is of grave concern. So are plummeting birth rates, even more precipitous than those of Russia. In eastern Germany between 1989 and 1993, the rate per thousand people fell 60 percent while mortality rates surged, leading demographer Nicholas Eberstadt to warn that the transition from a planned economy to a liberal market order entails “far-reaching, often traumatic adjustments.”21 Yet these grim statistics do not tell the whole story. Privatization will eventually improve industrial output, and markets will offer those who never had goods the chance to get them. Reunification will gradually impose a reality that resentment cannot resist. But what the German case suggests is exactly what the Russian case establishes: that McWorld’s markets, tied here to the West German political and economic leviathan, have not and probably cannot produce a democratic civil society; indeed, in East Germany, they helped destroy one in its infancy. McWorld is the problem, not the solution.
19
Securing Global Democracy in the
World of McWorld
THE EVIDENCE FROM Russia and Germany highlights the shortcomings of markets as vessels of democratization, but markets are only part of the story. McWorld has also brought with it technological innovations in the infotainment telesector that are less inimical to democracy. The old Baconian dictum that knowledge is power and that through science we can command the world, the belief that the improvement of men’s minds and the improvement of his lot are finally the very same thing, was at the heart of the Enlightenment’s conviction that reason embodied in science and technology could liberate the human race from prejudice, ignorance, and injustice—could eventually