Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [200]
Chapter 13. Jihad Within McWorld: “Transitional Democracies”
1. Cited by John Kifner, “The World through the Serbian Mind’s Eye,” in the Week in Review, The New York Times, April 10, 1994, Section 4, p. 1.
2. Vladimir Goati as cited in ibid.
3. Domljan cited by Milton Viorst, “The Yugoslav Idea,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1991, pp. 58–79. “Whirlwind” citation from “A Whirlwind of Hatreds: How the Balkans Broke Up,” The New York Times, February 14, 1993, p. E 5.
4. In the summer of 1994, Russia’s largest investment company witnessed the collapse of its stock from a high of $50 a share to less than 50 cents. The so-called MMM fund was in fact “built on sand,” having “reported no earnings, revealed no investments, explained no financial strategy.” Its soaring share prices resulted from the sale of more and more shares, new buyers in effect providing profits for old buyers in the classic pyramid scheme strategy. The company blamed the government both for interfering and for not regulating, while the millions of Russian shareholders blamed mainly the government. See Michael Specter, “10,000 Stampede as Russian Stock Collapses,” The New York Times, July 30, 1994, p. A 1.
5. According to Alexander Paskhaver of The Center for Economic Reform in Kiev; cited by Misha Glenny, “Ukraine’s Great Divide,” The New York Times, July 14, 1994, p. A 23.
6. Nikolai Zlobin, “Mafiacracy Takes Over,” The New York Times, July 26, 1994, p. A 19. As surprising as the essay is The New York Times’s willingness to give it prominent Op Ed attention.
7. On the forty-fifth anniversary (1991) of his execution as a war criminal, Marshal Ion Antonescu, who had joined Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II and was responsible for the death of 250,000 Jews, was honored by the new Romanian parliament. The legislative honors were unanimous and Prime Minister Iliescu, though he had expressed disapproval earlier, remained silent.
8. Celestine Bohlen, “Zhirinovsky Cult Grows,” The New York Times, April 5, 1994, p. A 1, 12. Zhirinovsky speeches have been collected and annotated in Graham Frazer and George Lancelle, Absolute Zhirinovsky: A Transparent View of the Distinguished Russian Statesman (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).
9. Within a year of the collapse of communism, “GNP in every East European country has declined…. [I]ndustrial output fell 10% in Hungary, 28% in Romania, 30% in Bulgaria” and in every case ethnic tensions had augmented the impact of economic problems. Serge Schmemann, “For Eastern Europe, Now a New Disillusion,” The New York Times, November 9, 1990, p. A 1, 10.
10. In addition to ferocious nationalist sentiments within Hungary, which often takes the form of Jew bashing, the Hungarians are making a cause of the millions who live outside of Hungary in Serbia, Romania (7 percent of the population), and Slovakia (11 percent)—outside of the Russians living beyond Russian borders, one of the largest minority groups in Europe. The cause of “greater Hungary” has become the rallying cry of internal zealots like Csurka who are calling (using the literal translation of the German term “lebensraum”) for Hungarian living space. See, for example, Stephen Engelberg, “Now Hungary Adds Its Voice to the Ethnic Tumult,” The New York Times, January 25, 1993, p. A 3. Istvan Csurka was in the Hungarian Democratic Forum (Hungary’s ruling party under Joseph Antall until the 1994 elections), and led Antall’s antipress campaign. Though once a friend of the dissidents, he has become distanced even from the conservatives. His media appointees did a great deal of damage, however. He’s known as “an idiot, and no one has ever taken him seriously.” Milos Vamos, “Hungary’s Media Apparatchiks,” The Nation, December 13, 1993, p. 725.
11. So loyal that in