World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [73]
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Although there may have been economic justifications for the state takeovers of Indonesia’s failing, corruption-soaked banks, it is telling that most of the vast nationalized holdings have not been reprivatized despite the availability of buyers, the ongoing massive economic waste, and the government’s repeated assurances that the assets will be sold. Apart from bureaucratic incompetence and infighting, the explanation is that the potential buyers are typically ethnic Chinese or foreign investors, and the government has been paralyzed by fear that sales to such groups will trigger another violent nationalist backlash. As a result, Indonesia is “now like a communist country,” one observer recently lamented, “where the government owns, controls or manages almost 80 percent of productive assets.” Four years after Suharto’s fall, intense ethnic resentment and xenophobia continue to drive Indonesian economic policy. Among the pribumi majority there is a pervasive dread that ethnic Chinese and other “foreigners” will “swoop in like vultures” to carry off the nation’s resources. These “vultures” include the hated ethnic Chinese Salim Group, which is rumored to be making a rebid for its former companies from Singapore.
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Anti-Semitism and Nationalization
in Democratic Russia
In Russia, economic and political liberalization has unleashed widespread—and in parts of the country like Cossack-dominated Krasnodar, virulent—anti-Semitism. As chapter 3 discussed, many of the Yeltsin government’s most reviled market reformers—including “shock therapy” champion Yegor Gaidar and “privatization tsar” Anatoly Chubais—are well known to be part Jewish. Moreover, the principal beneficiaries of Russia’s chaotic transition to capitalism were also disproportionately Jewish.
To repeat, it would be preposterous to suggest that Russian anti-Semitism is caused by either markets or democracy. Anti-Semitism has poisoned Russia since long before 1989. Over a century ago, for example, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his self-published magazine A Writer’s Diary, blamed the “Yids” for their exploitation of the noble Russian peasant:
And so the [tsar] liberator came and liberated the native People [the serfs]; and who do you think were the first to fall upon them as on a victim? Who was foremost in taking advantage of their weaknesses? Who, in their eternal pursuit of gold, set about swindling them? Who at once took the place, wherever they could manage it, of the former landowners—with the difference that though the landowners may have thoroughly exploited people, they still tried not to ruin their peasants, out of self-interest, perhaps, so as not to wear out the labor force, whereas the Jew doesn’t care about wearing out Russian labor; he takes what he can and he’s gone.
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The point, however, is that the combined effect of post-perestroika marketization and democratization has been to galvanize anti-Semitism in Russia (as well as in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic republics) in highly predictable fashion. Markets have generated starkly visible Jewish wealth—Forbes in 2002 listed Jewish oligarchs Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Roman Abramovich, and Mikhail Friedman as Russia’s three richest billionaires, with Vladimir Potanin in fourth place—while democracy has made anti-Semitism a political force with a strength not seen in Russia since Stalin.
Since perestroika, the new democratic rights of free speech