The long and painful end of Marxism’s baleful sway

Press, 28 July 1989, Page 12

The long and painful end of Marxism’s baleful sway

WE ARE living through an era of contemporaneous democratic revolutions. The scale and pace of the changes is more significant than the simultaneous revolutions of 1848. The world is witnessing the long and painful death throes of Marxist autocracy. But we should be aware that, like a wounded jungle beast, the lumbering creature is probably more dangerous now than in its prime. The lack of popular support evident on the streets of China and nearer home in parts of Eastern Europe will increase Communist reliance upon military force and repression. It would be a heartless politician who did not welcome the moves to democracy and glasnost in the East. It would be a foolish politician who did not recognise the dangers and the threats, at a time when the Russian and Chinese empires are crumbling and when, many of their leaders may wish to halt this process. How have these revolutions come about? The techniques owe a great deal to the revolution in the Philippines, led by Cory Aquino against the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, where people took to the streets. Their protests were bloodless and orderly. They traded flowers for the solders’ weapons and used words where others would have used bullets. Whether they were consciously following Gandhi or not, they demonstrated yet again that in a densely-populated country, people power can be the deciding force in politics. ;; The support for Mrs Aquino, who emerged as a charismatic leader, was tangible on the streets’even many months after the revolution had succeeded. Similar techniques were used in the troubles in Myanmar (then Burma), Thailand, South Korea and in the early days of the Chinese student protests. The second origin of the revo-

lutions has come from within the Eastern European bloc. Mikhail Gorbachev has ordained that the centralised repressive Russian autocracy should loosen its grip by allowing more debate, dissent and even some organised opposition. The process has gone further than many commentators expected, but is still fragile. The Polish opposition, Solidarity, swept the board in an election where no single Communist from the governing party was returned to office by popular vote. Yet Solidarity had to play down its electoral triumph and rest happy with representation on the opposition benches in Parliament. In Russia itself the most charismatic opposition leaders swept to success against official Government Communist candidates, but they too are confined to modest opposition roles and are always conscious that they should not overstep the mark. Gorbachev came to Germany bearing fine words but few gifts. At the very time that he tells the West that removing the Berlin Wall is no great problem, there is news of another wall going up around Hungary and Yugoslavia. Reading some of the Western press a reader could be forgiven for forgetting that the wall in Berlin was built by the East Germans and Russians to keep their citizens in: sometimes the commentators forget to mention that the West never wanted the wall and would pull it down tomorrow if it thought it could do so without its citizens being shot in the process. Why has this democratic revolt broken out now? There has been a timely conjunction of forces and ideas in the world. Years of autocracy of both Right and Left, but especially of

the Left, have failed to deliver the goods. The growing divide in prosperity between the largely democratic, free-enterprise, Western-style societies and the largely Communist autocratic single-party States of the East has been too noticeable for too long. The peoples of the East have been kept down by propaganda and limited travel; but some of the intelligentsia have been able to see what goes on elsewhere and have made unfavourable comparisons. At the same time, the leadership of some of the most powerful Eastern bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, have realised that their highly centralised system has withheld incentive, enthusiasm and Innovation from their peoples to a point where even the military interests of the State are jeopardised. Gorbachev could see the outcome clearly when a light West German plane landed in Red Square apparently undetected by all the millions of roubles worth of equipment and the thousands of military personnel employed to detect just such an event. Every visit Gorbachev makes s, to the West must remind him of the huge technological lead enjoyed by the free societies and every contact with Western people must show him how stultifying, lacking in entrepreneurship and fearful of risk-taking his own peoples have become as a result of the Communist system. Into this powerful cocktail of popular disillusionment, shared with equal vehemence by both the governed and their governors, have been stirred the highoctane forces of old religions and old nationalities. It is at its most obvious in Eastern Europe, where whole countries and

John Redwood, M.P., analyses the reasons for the rise of democracy in the Communist world

whole churches have been ground down by Communism. Prussia became East Germany and found its contacts with West Germany, territory it conquered only a little more than a century earlier, completely severed. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, all separate nations with troubled histories bom of the strife to remain independent, had succumbed to the Russian yoke. Gorbachev's problem is that in an effort to unleash enterprise and enthusiasm the first thing he has released is nationalist energy. Marxism held the opinion that economics alone are important. It deliberately set out to starve people of spiritual nourishment and divorce them from their cultural, national and religious origins. The only conceivable excuse for such a violent torture would have been overwhelming economic success for all. Instead Marxism has heaped on top of spiritual impoverishment economic impoverishment as well. There is no future for a political system based upon the primacy of economics if its economics are rotten to the core and those who follow its creed fall further and further behind the rest of the world. People might be happier in Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia if they are allowed to keep enough of the reforms at least to return to the solace of their own national cultures and religions. Instead, in parts of the Eastern bloc people still face persecution for their religious views, their artistic interests, even for their way of life as Romania ploughs on with demolishing its villages and creating the concrete sprawls of Marxist architecture.

Economics are an important part of the tale, as the world turns to more free enterprise solutions and seeks to understand why it is that America, Japan, West Germany, Switzerland and other Western nations have been so much more successful at deploying the world’s existing technology than the subject peoples of the East. But, as I have argued in a recent book, economics on their own are not enough.

Who can have seen Chinese students erecting the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square without reflecting upon the wider spiritual significance of what they were doing? Who can ignore the fact that wherever people are given the ballot box they overwhelmingly reject Communist candidates, especially where Communists have been in government for any length of time without allowing anyone to question their legitimacy?

And who can ignore the growing feeling that people wish to be tied to their past and to their locality, whether it be the Basques in Spain, the Scots in Scotland, the Poles in Poland, the Cantonese in Canton or the Latvians in Latvia?

We should welcome democratic revolutions; but we in the free and prosperous West should tread warily, for the path to democracy will not be easy or without turmoil. Above all the West should be aware of the reemergence of the German question after 45 years in which a divided Germany has, in an ugly but effective way, helped keep the peace between rival systems.

JOHN REDWOOD is a British Conservative M.P. and was formerly head of Mrs Thatcher’s Downing Street policy unit. He is the author of "Popular Capitalism,” which has just been published in paperback by Routledge.