Synopsis
This is a series of articles written and published in 1996-2000 in
Macedonia, in Russia, in Egypt and in the Czech Republic.
The book can be roughly divided to three. One part — social, political
and cultural critique. The author's main thesis is that the West missed a
unique historical opportunity to unite Europe and that the peoples of Central,
Eastern and Southern Europe are beyond salvation, deformed and pathologized by
communism irreconstructibly.
The second part comprises articles about the
economies of the region. Quite a few articles deal with the history of the
region with emphasis on the republics of former Yugoslavia, Albania and the
disputed regions in between them (Kosovo). This is the third part.
Annotation
From the Author:
How the West lost the East. The economics, the politics, the
geopolitics, the history, the conspiracies, the corruption, the old and the
new, the plough and the internet—it is all here, in prose, as provocative and
vitriolic and loving and longing as I could make it.
Reading this book, I wish upon the reader the
joy and the revulsion, the dark fascination of this region and its surrealist
dreams and nightmares. This is what I experience daily here and it is my hope
that I succeeded to convey the siren's song, the honeyed trap, the lure and the
allure of this tortured corner of the earth.
From the Publisher
Sam Vaknin came to my country (Macedonia) in 1996. In the space of 18
months, he succeeded to become a public figure, known for his courage in
standing up to what he perceived to be a kleptocracy. Subsequently, he left
Macedonia and lived in Russia and in the Czech Republic - only to return, a
year later, as the Economic Advisor to the Macedonian government during and
after the Kosovo crisis.
I published Sam's previous book ("Malignant Self Love - Narcissism
Revisited", also available from Barnes and Noble). "After the
Rain" was a natural extension.
The book contains articles and essays of differing nature but can be roughly
divided to three. One part - social critique in an almost biblical style, true
Jeremiads. Sam's main thesis is that the West missed a unique historical
opportunity to unite Europe and that the peoples of Central, Eastern and
Central Europe are beyond salvation, deformed and pathologized by communism
irreconstructibly.
The second part comprises articles about the economies of the region. Quite
a few articles deal with the history of the region with emphasis on Yugoslavia,
Albania and inbetween (Kosovo). This is the third part. I cannot say that I
fully agree with Sam. I can't even say that I MOSTLY agree with him. Yet, he
deserves to be heard with the same passion and love that he wrote. —Lidija
Rangelovska, Narcissus Publications
Sam Vaknin was born in Israel in 1961. A financial consultant and columnist, he lived and published in 11 countries. An author of short stories, the winner of many literary awards, an amateur philosopher - he is a controversial figure. This is his tenth book.
EXCERPT
From The Mind of Darkness:
"'The Balkans' - I say - 'is the unconscious of the world'. People stop to
digest this metaphor and then they nod enthusiastically. It is here that the
repressed memories of history, its traumas and fears and images reside. It is
here that the psychodynamics of humanity - the tectonic clash between Rome and
Byzantium, West and East, Judeo-Christianity and Islam - is still easily
discernible. We are seated at a New Year's dining table, loaded with a roasted
pig and exotic salads.
I, the Jew, only half foreign to this cradle of Slavonics. Four Serbs, five
Macedonians. It is in the Balkans that all ethnic distinctions fail and it is
here that they prevail anachronistically and atavistically. Contradiction and
change the only two fixtures of this tormented region.
The women of the Balkan - buried under provocative mask-like make up, retro
hairstyles and too narrow dresses. The men, clad in sepia colours, old
fashioned suits and turn of the century moustaches. In the background there is
the crying game that is Balkanian music: liturgy and folk and elegy combined.
The smells are heavy with musk-ular perfumes. It is like time travel. It is
like revisiting one's childhood."
From The Caveman and the Alien:
"The West has grossly and thoroughly violated Thompson's edict. In its
oft-interrupted intercourse with these forsaken regions of the globe, it has
acted, alternately, as a Peeping Tom, a cynic and a know it all. It has
invariably behaved as if it were holier-than-thou. In an unmitigated and
fantastic succession of blunders, miscalculations, vain promises, unkept
threats and unkempt diplomats - it has driven Europe to the verge of war and
the region it "adopted" to the verge of economic and social upheaval.
Enamoured with the new ideology of free marketry cum democracy, the West first
assumed the role of the omniscient. It designed ingenious models, devised
foolproof laws, imposed fail-safe institutions and strongly
"recommended" measures. Its representatives, the tribunes of the
West, ruled the phlebeian East with determination rarely equalled by skill or
knowledge. Velvet hands couched in iron gloves, ignorance disguised by economic
newspeak, geostrategic interests masquerading as forms of government
characterized their dealings with the natives. Preaching and beseeching from
ever higher pulpits, they poured opprobrium and sweet delusions on the eagerly
deluded, naive, bewildered masses. The deceit was evident to the indigenous
cynics - but it was the failure that dissuaded them and all else. The West lost
Eastern and Southeast Europe not when it lied egregiously, not when it
pretended to know for sure when it surely did not know, not when it manipulated
and coaxed and coerced - but when it failed. To the peoples of these regions,
the king was fully dressed. It was not a little child but an enormous debacle
that exposed his nudity. In its presumptuousness and pretentiousness, feigned
surety and vain clichés, imported models and exported cheap raw materials - the
West succeeded to demolish beyond reconstruction whole economies, to ravage
communities, to bring ruination upon the centuries-old social fabric, woven
diligently by generations. It brought crime and drugs and mayhem but gave very
little in return, only an horizon beclouded and thundering with eloquence. As a
result, while tottering regional governments still pay lip service to the
Euro-Atlantic structures, the masses are enraged and restless and rebellious
and baleful and anti-Western to the core. They are not likely to acquiesce much
longer - not with the West's neo-colonialism but with its incompetence and
inaptitude, with the non-chalant experimentation that it imposed upon them and
with the abyss between its proclamations and its performance. In all this time,
the envoys of the West - its mediocre politicians, its insatiably ruthless
media, its obese tourists and its armchair economists - continued to play the
role of God, wreaking greater havoc than even the original. While knowing it
all in advance (in breach of every tradition scientific), they also developed a
kind of world weary, unshaven cynicism interlaced with fascination at the
depths plumbed by the local's immorality and amorality. The jet-set Peeping
Toms resided in five star hotels (or luxurious apartments) overlooking the
communist shantytowns, drove utility vehicles to the shabby offices of the
native bureaucrats and dined in $100 per meal restaurants ("it's so cheap
here'). In between sushi and sake they bemoaned and grieved over corruption and
nepotism and cronyism ("I simply love their ethnic food, but they are so
..."). They mourned the autochtonal inability to act decisively, to cut
red tape, to manufacture quality, to open to the world, to be less xenophobic
(while casting a disdainful glance at the sweaty waiter). To them it looked
like an ancient natural phenomenon, a force of nature, an inevitability and
hence their cynicism. Mostly provincial people with horizons limited by
consumption and by wealth, they adopted cynicism as shorthand for
cosmopolitanism. They erroneously believed it lent them an air of ruggedness
and rich experience and the virile aroma of decadent erudition. Yet all it did
is make them obnoxious and more repellent to the residents than they already
were.
Ever the preachers, the West - both Europeans and Americans - upheld
themselves as role models of virtue to be emulated, as points of reference,
almost inhuman or suprahuman in their taming of the vices, avarice up front.
Yet the disorder in their own homes was broadcast live, day in and day out,
into the cubicles inhabited by the very people they sought to so transform. And
they conspired and collaborated in all manner of corruption and crime and scam
and rigged elections in all the countries they put the gospel to. In trying to
put an end to history, they seem to have provoked another round of it - more
vicious, more enduring, more traumatic than before. That the West will pay the
price for its mistakes I have no doubt. For isn't it a part and parcel of their
teaching that everything has a price and that there is always a time of
reckoning?"
From Who is Guarding the Guards:
"Izetbegovic, the nominal president of the nominal Bosnian state, the
darling of the gullible western media, denies that he and his cronies and his
cronies' cronies stole 40% of all civilian aid targeted at Bosnia - a minor
matter of 1 billion US dollars and change, in less than 4 years. The tribes of
the Balkans stop bleeding each other to death only when they gang up to bleed
another. In this, there are no races and no traces - everyone is equal under
the sign of the dollar. Serbs, Bosnians and Croats divided the loot with the
loftiest of egalitarian instincts. Honour among thieves transformed into honour
among victims and their murderers. Mammon is the only real authority in this
god forsaken, writhing rump of a country.
And not only there.
In Russia, billions (3 to 5) were transferred to secret off shore bank accounts
to be "portfolio managed" by mysterious fly-by-night entities. Many
paid with their jobs when the trail led to the incestuous Yeltsin clan and
their byzantine court.
Convoys snake across the mountainous Kosovo, bringing smuggled goods at exorbitant
prices to the inhabitants of this parched territory - all under the avuncular
gaze of multinational peacekeepers.
In Romania, Hungary and Greece, UN forces have been known to take bribes to
allow goods into besieged Serbia. Oil, weapons and strategic materials, all
slid across this greasy channel of the international brotherhood of cash.
A lot of the aid, ostensibly intended to ameliorate the state of refugedom
imposed upon the unsuspecting, harried population of Kosovo - resurfaced in
markets, white and black, across the region. Food, blankets, tents, electrical
equipment, even toys - were on offer in bazaars from Skopje to Podgorica and
from Sofia to Thessaloniki, replete with the stamps of the unwitting donors.
Aid workers scurried back and forth in expensive utility vehicles, buzzing
mobile phones in hand and latest model, officially purchased, infrared laptops
humming in the air conditioned coolness of their five star hotel rooms (or
fancy apartments). In their back pockets they safeguarded their first class
tickets (the food is better and the stewardesses ...). The scavengers of every
carnage, they descended upon this tortured land in redundant hordes, feeding
off the misery, the autoimmune deficiency of the syndrome of humanism.
Ask yourselves: how could one of every 3 dollars - 50% of GNP - be stolen in
a country the size of a tiny American state - without the knowledge and
collaboration of the international organizations which ostensibly manage this
bedlam? Why did the IMF renew the credit lines to a Russia which cheated
bold-facely regarding its foreign exchange reserves? How was Serbia awash and
flush with oil and other goods prohibited under the terms of the never-ending
series of embargoes imposed upon it?
The answer is that potent cocktail of fear and graft. First came fear - that
Russia will collapse, that the Balkans will spill over, that Bosnia will
disintegrate. Nuclear nightmares intermingled with Armenian and Jewish
flashbacks of genocide. The west shut its eyes tight and threw money at the bad
spirits of irredentism and re-emergent communism. The long arm of the USA, the
"international" financial institutions, collaborated in constructing
the habit forming dole house that Eastern and Southern Europe has become. This conflict-reticence,
these approach-avoidance cycles led to an inevitable collusion between the
ruling mob families that pass for regimes in these parts of the planet - and
the unilateral institutions that pass for multilateral ones in the rest of it.
An elaborate system of winks and nods, the sign language of institutional rot
and decaying governance, took over. Greasy palms clapped one another with the
eerie silence of conspiracy. The world looked away as both - international
financial institutions and corrupt regimes - robbed their constituencies blind.
This was perceived to be the inevitable moral cost of stability. Survival of
the majority entailed the filthy enrichment of the minority. And the west
acquiesced.
But this grand design backfired. Like insidious bacteria, corruption breeds
violence and hops from host to host. It does not discriminate, this plague of
black conscience, between east and west. As it infected the indigenous, it also
effected their guardians. They were all engulfed by raging greed, by a degradation
of the inhibitions and by the intoxicating promiscuity of lawlessness.
Inebriated by their newly found powers, little ceasars - natives and financial
colonialists - claimed their little plots of crime and avarice, a not so secret
order of disintegration of the social fabric. A ghoulish landscape, shrouded in
the opaque mist of the nomenclature, the camaraderie of the omnipotent.
And corruption bred violence. The Chicago model imported lock, stock and the
barrel of the gun. Former cronies disappeared mysteriously, bloated corpses in
stale hotel rooms - being the only "contracts" honoured. Territories
were carved up in constant, unrelenting warfare. One billion dollars are worth
a lot of blood and it was spilled with glee, with the enthusiasm of the inevitable,
with the elation of gambling all on a single spin of the Russian roulette.
It is this very violence that the west tried to drown with its credits. But
unbeknownst to it, this very violence thrived on these pecuniary fertilizers. A
plant of horrors, it devoured its soil and its cultivators alike. And 120,000
people paid with their lives for this wrong gamble. Counting its losses, the
west is poised to spin the wheel again. More money is amassed, the dies are
cast and more people cast to die."
From Is Transition Possible:
"The intellectuals of the Balkans - a curse, not in disguise. a nefarious
presence, ominous, erratic and corrupt. Sometimes, at the nucleus of all
conflict and mayhem - at other times (of ethnic cleansing or suppression of the
media) conspicuously absent. Zeligs of umpteen disguises and ever-changing,
shimmering loyalties.
They exert no moderating, countervailing influence - on the contrary, they
radicalize, dramatize, poison and incite. Intellectuals are prominent among all
the nationalist parties in the Balkans - and rare among the scant centre
parties that have recently sprung out of the ashes of communism.
They do not disseminate the little, outdated knowledge that they do possess.
Rather they keep it as a guild would, unto themselves, jealously. In the vanity
typical of the insecure, they abnegate all foreign knowledge. They rarely know
a second language sufficiently to read it. They promote their brand of degreed
ignorance with religious zeal and punish all transgressors with fierceness and
ruthlessness. They are the main barriers to technology transfers and knowledge
enhancement in this wretched region. Their instincts of self preservation go
against the best interests of their people. Unable to educate and teach - they
prostitute their services, selling degrees or corrupting themselves in
politics. They make up a big part of the post communist nomenclature as they
have a big part of the communist one. The result is economics students who
never heard of Milton Friedman or Kenneth Arrow and students of medicine who
offer sex or money or both to their professors in order to graduate.
Thus, instead of advocating and promoting freedom and liberalization - they
concentrate on the mechanisms of control, on manipulating the worn levers of
power. They are the dishonest brokers of corrupted politicians and their
businessmen cronies. They are heavily involved - oft times the initiators - of
suppression and repression, especially of the mind and of the spirit. The black
crows of nationalism perched upon their beleaguered ivory towers.
The intellectuals of the Balkans failed miserably. Terrified by the sights
and sounds of their threatened territory - they succumbed to obscurantism,
resorted to the nostalgic, the abstract and the fantastic, rather than to the
pragmatic. This choice is evident even in their speech. Marred by centuries of
cruel outside domination - it is all but meaningless. No one can understand
what a Balkanian has to say. Both syntax and grammar are tortured into incomprehensibility.
Evasion dominates, a profusion of obscuring verbal veils, twists and turns
hiding a vacuous deposition.
The Balkan intellectuals chose narcissistic self absorption and navel gazing
over "other-orientation". Instead of seeking integration (as distinct
from assimilation) - they preach and practice isolation. They aim to
differentiate themselves not in a pluralistic, benign manner - but in vicious,
raging defiance of "mondialism" (a Serbian propaganda term). To
define themselves AGAINST all others - rather than to compare and learn from
the comparison. Their love affair with a (mostly concocted) past, their
future-phobia, the ensuing culture shock - all follow naturally from the
premises of their disconsolate uniqueness. Balkan intellectuals are all
paranoids. Scratch the surface, the thin, bow tied, veneer of
"kultur" - and you will find an atavistic poet, fighting against the
very evil wrought by him and by his actions. This is the Greek tragedy of this
breathtaking region. Nature here is cleverer than humans. It is exactly their
conspiracies that bring about the very things they have to conspire against in
the first place.
All over the world, intellectuals are the vanguard, the fifth column of new
ideas, the resistance movement against the occupation of the old and the banal.
Here intellectuals preach conformity, doing things the old, proven way,
protectionism against the trade of liberal minds. All intellectuals here - fed
by the long arm of the state - are collaborators. True, all hideous regimes had
their figleaf intellectuals and with a few exceptions, the regimes in the
Balkans are not hideous. But the principle is the same, only the price varies.
Prostituting their unique position in semi-literate, village-tribal societies -
intellectuals in the Balkans sold out en masse. They are the inertial power -
rather than the counterfist of reform. They are involved in politics of the
wrong and doomed kind. The Balkan would have been better off had they decided
to remain aloof, detached in their archipelago of universities.
There is no real fire in Balkan intellectuals. Oh, they get excited and they
shout and blush and wave their hands ever so vigorously. But they are empty. It
is full gas in neutral. They get nowhere because they are going nowhere. They
are rational and conservative and some are emotional and "leftist".
But it is all listless and lifeless, like the paces of a very old mechanism,
set in motion 80 years ago and never unwound.
All that day of the eclipse of the last millennium, even the intellectuals
stayed in their cellars and in their offices and did not dare venture out. They
emerged when night fell, accustomed to the darkness, unable to confront their
own eclipse, hiding from the evil influence of a re-emerging sun."
From the Critics
From Subir Ghosh
When a man writes with his pen dipped in vitriol, a compilation of his
articles are foreordained to make the reader react. Or they might even leave
her/him numb, for Israel-born Sam Vaknin is hard-hitting. He does not mince his
words, calls a spade a spade and has a sardonic-laconic way of putting things
across. The subtitle of After the Rain says it all: the West has, for all
practical purposes, lost the East. Vaknin landed in Macedonia in 1996. Between
then and 2000, he was a prolific writer who penned down his thoughts mostly in
The New Presence and Central Europe Review. The essays in the book in question
were published mainly in these journals during the period.
Vaknin is severely critical of the West's duplicity. He quotes Edward Thompson,
managing editor of Life from 1949 to 1961, as saying, "Life must be curious,
alert, erudite and moral, but it must achieve this without being
holier-than-thou, a cynic, a know-it-all or a Peeping Tom." The West has
violated Thompson's edict and drive Europe to the verge of war and the region
it "adopted" to the verge of economic and social upheaval. Vaknin
says, "The Wst lost Eastern and Southeast Europe not when it lied
egregiously, not when it pretended to know for sure when it surely did not
know, not when it manipulated and coaxed and coerced -- but when it failed."
The panacea of free marketry cum democracy that was shoved down the throat of
the countries that had just broken free from Communism could not have worked.
The West was naïve to believe that the masses who were waiting all these years
to be liberated from the Communists, would one fine day revert to capitalism
and onwards to development and prosperity. The West never understood how
lethargic the Rip van Winkle institutions could render people. Vaknin asserts
Communism "was a collaborative effort - a symbiotic co-existence of the
rulers and the ruled, a mutual understanding and an all-pervasive
pathology." The West failed to see through this incestuous relationship,
just as they were fooled by the appearance of law and order. The courts, the
police and the media were ossified skeletons that had been drained of any real
power. What happened in the bargain was that one criminal association was
substituted by another. More often than not these comprised the same people.
"Post communist societies are sick and their institutions are a
travesty." The kernel of good people here, a stifled, suppressed and
mocked lot, should be the ones who must be given voices.
The socialist/communist professors of yesterday cannot be teachers of
capitalism today. Intelligence and knowledge do not matter since capitalism is
not a theoretical construct merely, but a way of life. Inefficiency, corruption
and pathological economic thinking has castrated them emotionally and
intellectually. Workers and managers of the communist era cannot function
efficiently in a capitalist system for the same reason. Vaknin scoffs at Balkan
intellectuals too insisting that they have no fire in them.
Vaknin derides instant education in a society where everything is up for sale;
where students of economics have not heard of Kenneth Arrow and students of
medicine offer sex or money or both to their professors to graduate. He delves
into linguistics and semantics and argues that this is a solipsistic world
where communication is permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is
to throw others off the track. Vaknin examines the issue closely since he
believes language is a leading indicator of the psychological and institutional
health of social units.
He stresses on the imperative need to bell the cat in a system where graft and
fear rule. But then the West, particularly the United States, is in a morbid
habit of "creating pairs of villains and heroes, monsters and saints where
there are none". He believes the wars in Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia were
nothing short of gangland warfare. These were skirmishes between gangs of
criminals, disguised as politicians etc. Crime prevails since free market
flourishes. Criminals, after all, are private entrepreneurs.
Vaknin also writes about his impressions on the economy (or, whatever is left
of it) in these liberated countries. It is, however, the essays classified
under the head "The People" that are more acerbic and provocative
than the ones categorised under "The Economy". Maybe, because it is
finally the people who matter.
—The Reviewer, May 28, 2000
From John Harris - Blue
Iris Journal
The essays in the second part, "Economy," stand better on their own
feet. Vaknin is on his scholarly turf here, apparently. His unusually lengthy
analysis of the International Monetary Fund is highly informative. Still, I
must say that I find the moments of frenzy to be the book's most fascinating
feature. In any state of advanced social decay, such as a civil war, there
comes a point when more "facts" merely move one to impatience. What
does it matter how many dozens were assassinated yesterday, or which banker
transferred how many millions to his private account? Names and dates become
irrelevant when such facts designate a daily routine. I can see that Vaknin is
quite capable of reporting a scandal in detail; I think I can see why he
doesn't. There's just too much of it. The relevant datum is the great cloud of
stench obscuring the heavens, not the location of isolated fires. What we ought
to learn--but won't--from the Balkans is that (to use Vaknin's recurrent
metaphor) an infection is sometimes best left to spread until it activates
sufficient antibodies. The Western solution of treating symptoms and amputating
limbs has condemned these people to a hopeless decline. The Foreward is right:
the book's sub-title misses the point. I suspect that Vaknin was being
diplomatic here, for he might well have written Why the East Detests the West
After Attempting an Embrace.
From Brendan Howley - Blue
Ear: Global Writing Worth Reading
Life Is Cheap, History Is Dear
"When Milosevic falls, there will be a reckoning that will
shake Europe from Berlin to the Bosporus to Moscow," writes Brendan
Howley, reviewing After the Rain: How the West Lost the East by Sam Vaknin.
For us in the West, the Balkans are a kind of condensed Russia, dark,
knotted, unknowable. Macedonia, where author Sam Vaknin is an economics advisor
to the government, is the fulcrum of the Balkans, historically the most
polarized and violent of the Balkan mini-states; Macedonian terrorists fomented
a guerilla war in the eerily beautiful country south of Serbia in 1912 and set
in motion the events which culminated in the assassination of Archduke
Franz-Josef and his wife in Sarajevo in July 1914.
The roundrobin Bosnian wars and the recent Kosovo campaign created a number
of subgenres of writing about the Balkans: the exegesis of war crimes;
deconstructions of the blood imperative expressed in ancient enmities still on
the boil; propaganda by all sides. Most Western journalism on the Balkans is
well-intentioned but often dangerously narrow in compass. In the media
surrounding the bombing campaigns against the Serbs in 1993 and again in 1999,
the West's reportage was often dismally biased, largely through ignorance, lack
of real access, and the consequent temptation to scoop at all costs.
This opened the doors to the likes of the KLA, an avowed terrorist
organization (now, it seems, armed and bankrolled by a multinational narcotics
web) metamorphosed into a romantic army of liberation. That's but one example.
Since 1993, one Pultizer Prize winner has openly questioned the objectivity of
his own prize-winning (and policy-changing) work in Sarajevo, and a senior
BBC-TV assignment editor has likewise questioned that esteemed newsgathering
organization's failures - such as failing to balance reports of Serb atrocities
at Sarajevo with Croat atrocities at Mostar - during the Bosnian wars.
No, the Balkans are not a place where one can simply parachute in and start
writing and filming and hope to be relaying to an uncomprehending, comfortable
audience at home something like the truth. But then what is journalism to be in
a region so marinated in internecine conflict that there may well be no single
reportable truth?
I first met a Macedonian in a Toronto parking garage late one winter's night
after an evening at the theatre. He had maps and flags on his grimy wall and
spoke at once poetically and brutally about his lifelong enemies so far away.
He was in his late forties, a grandfather-to-be, who, when he discovered I had
been to Serbia and Montenegro in 1993, wanted to know what I thought of the
women there, rather as if I'd been to a new wing of some distant human zoo. He
proceeded, in an easy, conversational way, to detail for some long minutes his
hatred of these women, who had done nothing to him that he chose to mention.
His rant was as chilling as it was base. I am by no means singling out
Macedonians in this: I have been subjected to this off-hand barbarism dozens of
times in the Balkans, as has many a writer. A Croat professor told me that
Muslims are best set against one another, to save Christians the trouble of
killing them off - and then served coffee on superb bone china, in a bizarre
setpiece of hospitality. One effusive Serb priest told me much the same thing
at a famous Montenegrin shrine one fine afternoon and a moment later invited me
to lunch with his bishop. "A very cultured man," he told me, as if he
himself knew what civilization is. I mention this because, in a profound way that
Vaknin understands, life is very cheap in the Balkans because history is so
dear. We in North America fail to understand this in a realistic way, because
our own history is shrink-wrapped and diluted by the immigrant experience and
vast geographic isolation. Rather, as Vaknin so rightly underlines in his
dissections of the West's failure via the IMF to do very little correct in
Russia but a great deal that's pernicious, we persist in believing in a
culpably ignorant way that Balkan peacekeeping will be a finite commitment, or
that streamlined neoliberal economics can be grafted onto deeply crippled
societies and resurrect them in an eyeblink.
I agree with Vaknin that most of the Balkan diseases are not those of the
heart, but rather stem from corruption and - much the same thing - prolonged
economic idiocy. Tito has a great deal to answer for in the Balkans, not least
the avalanche of paper debt he allowed the West to sell his kludged-together
country in the name of keeping first Stalin and then Khrushchev and finally
Brezhnev out. The average guy, as Vaknin well knows, does not go hunting for
his neighbour with an AK-47 unless the wheels have well and truly come off his
world. When, eleven years after Tito died, the fiscal fiction that was
Yugoslavia disemboweled itself, the bloodthirstiness was rooted in religious
bigotry, that's true, but hate was the symptom, not the disease. One should
never forget that the first war in Yugoslavia was a short and sharp one, fought
for the Slovenian customs posts on the Austrian frontier, fitting metaphor for
the economic disaster suppurating under the Yugoslav skin.
What distinguishes Vaknin's writings on the Balkans from those before him?
He is an Israeli, trained in physics, with supplemental degree work in
financial theory. His technical mindset and skeptical but humane Jewish ethos
permeate his writing. Both are exceedingly useful in deconstructing the mess
the pseudoscience of Communism left behind in the countries where he's worked,
and the mess that Western pseudoscience of the New World Order/IMF sort is
currently brewing.
Most writers who have taken on the Balkans with some proficiency have been
English or English-educated: Rebecca West, Nora Beloff, Neal Ascherson, Misha
Glenny. Vaknin's considerable intellectual armory reminds me of that of the
ex-MOSSAD people I met in Poland in the early 1990s, retired spooks now running
trading houses: utterly realistic, Talmudically concise in their opinions, and
damn relentless. Vaknin is living in a political hothouse in Macedonia; his
fertile output for Central Europe Review is fired by the urgency I recall when
I first worked in post-communist Poland: events demand recording, but the sheer
rate of change of the society itself is as draining as it is exhilarating. I
admire Vaknin's ability to keep his intellectual balance, no mean feat in the
circumstances. He is in the right place at the right time, because when
Milosevic falls, there will be a reckoning that will shake Europe from Berlin
to the Bosporus to Moscow. What will the West do if there is a Serb civil war?
Or a Serb incursion in Montenegro, Serbia's last link to the Adriatic - a
mobilization requiring only that the barracks gate be open for the tanks to
roll into Podgorica and Cetinje?
My father urged me to prefer small books over thick tomes, arguing that
small books meant the author saw clearly enough to write precisely. It's advice
I have rarely had cause to regret. After the Rain is the title of the most
famous Macedonian film of the past decade, a circular parable of memory and
blood feud and journalism that many film people of my acquaintance swore was a
new kind of storytelling. I am not so sure, but I do know it lived on in my
imagination for days after I saw it. I have the same memory of Vaknin's small
and beautifully produced book.
After the Rain is that rarest of reading experiences: principled and
thoughtful and irritating and prescient, all at once. Vaknin will be proved
right or wrong as history grinds on in the Balkans, but his is a book I will
return to.
From Paul Lappen -
Bookreview.com Syndicated review also appeared in Dead Trees Review, Under the
Covers Book Review, Footle.net Book Review and Blether Book Review, January 14,
2001
This is a series of short essays, written and published over the last few
years, on the politics and economics of present-day Central and Eastern Europe.
More specifically, it is about the breakup of Yugoslavia, written from the
perspective of someone who has spent the last several years living in the
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Therefore, the author has seen many
things from the "inside" (a very rare perspective here in the West).
When politicians or government agencies in the West are accused of corruption
or gross stupidity, no one bats an eyelash. When the same thing happens in the
countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the offenders are subject to heaps of
scorn, diatribes and/or sanctions. The West firmly believed that if the
communist hierarchy was removed in Eastern Europe, millions of common people would
embrace capitalism like a long-lost relative; all the West had to do was
provide the opportunity. The West didn't realize that communism was a mutual
undertaking, a decades long symbiotic relationship between all parts of
society.
"Post communist societies are sick and their institutions are a
travesty." Privatization, the selling of state assets to private companies
to encourage capitalism, is little more than a "spastic orgy of legalized
robbery of state assets" where millions lost their jobs while a few people
became rich. Large amounts of foreign aid, intended to help the suffering
people of Kosovo, ended up in markets, both white and black, all over the
region, still carrying the stamps of their donors. UN forces have
been known to require bribes to let goods into Serbia. A system of winks and
nods, plus lots of palm greasing, came into existence between the multilateral
institutions and the "ruling mob families that pass for regimes in these
parts of the planet."
Some knowledge of present-day European politics and economics (more than comes
from watching the TV evening news) would help in reading this book.
Otherwise, this is a very good and well-written group of essays from an
extremely needed perspective (here in the West). This one is well worth
reading.
Table
of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
The Author
The PEOPLE
1. The Author of this Article is a Racist
2. The Cavemen and the Alien
3. Is Transition Possible?
Can Socialist Professors of Economics Teach Capitalism?
4. The Poets and the Eclipse
5. The Rip van Winkle Institutions
6. Inside, Outside - Diasporas and Modern States
7. The Magla Vocables
8. The Elders of Zion
9. The Last Family
10. Rasputin in Transition
11. The Honorary Academics
12. Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? (Who is Guarding the Guards)
13. Herzl's Butlers
14. The Phlegm and the Anima
15. The Dance of Jael
16. Homo Balkanus
17. The MinMaj Rule
18. The Balkans between Omerta and Vendetta
19. The Myth of Great Albania
20. The Bad Blood of Kosovo
21. The Plight of the Kosovar
22. The Black Birds of Kosova
23. The Defrosted War
24. The Bones of the Grenadier
25. Millenarian Thoughts about Kosovo
26. NATO's Next War
27. Why did Milosevic Surrender?
28. The Deadly Antlers
29. The Treasure Trove of Kosovo
30. Lucky Macedonia
31. Black Magic, White Magic
32. The Friendly Club
33. The Books of the Damned
34. The PCM Trail
35. The Mind of Darknes
The ECONOMY
1. Central Europe or The New Colonies
2. New Paradigms, Old Cycles
3. Lessons in Transition
4. Lucky Russia
5. Russian Roulette
6. Foreigners do not Like Russia - Russia's New Economy
7. IMF - Kill or Cure
8. The IMF Deconstructed
9. Financial Crisis, Global Capital Flows and the International Financial
Architecture
10. The Shadowy World of International Finance
11. The Typology of Financial Scandals
12. The Revolt of the Poor: Intellectual Property
13. Scavenger Economies, Predator Economies
14. Market Impeders and Market Inefficiencies
15. Public Procurement and very Private Benefits
16. Liquidity or Liquidation
17. The Predicament of the Newly Rich
18. The Solow Paradox