From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:
Does the fate of the old Soviet empire prefigure our own?
This past weekend marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reunification of Germany, an event that formalized the end of the cold war. The so-called “German Democratic Republic,” one of the most repressive of the Soviet-imposed regimes established in the wake of World War II, was no more. It imploded without a shot being fired.
The largely bloodless revolution that swept across Eastern Europe, toppling Communist dictatorships from Berlin to Budapest, soon penetrated the epicenter of the “evil empire” itself – and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics evaporated like mist on a sunlit morning. It was the end of the cold war, and peoples all over the world breathed a joyful sigh of relief – and yet that joy was not shared by all.
The cadre of that troublesome little sect known as the neoconservatives weren’t convinced that the Soviets were on their last legs: they had opposed the arms control agreements signed by Ronald Reagan in the Kremlin’s twilight years, attacking them as signs of “appeasement” and arguing that any rapprochement with the Soviets would give them breathing room and the strength to gather their forces for one last push against the West. The United States, they averred, should take the opportunity to push harder and institute a policy of “rollback,” because only a foreign policy of aggression could defeat the Evil Empire once and for all.
They were wrong.
What happened, instead, is that the captive nations of the Soviet bloc rose up all on their own, without any substantial support from us, and overthrew their oppressors. Not because we had weakened the USSR in any significant way, but because a system that never worked to begin with had finally reached its endpoint. As the great libertarian theoretician Ludwig von Mises had predicted as early as 1920 that it would.
Indeed, it could be argued that all our efforts during the cold war era had merely strengthened the Leninist project, unnaturally extending its lifespan. For Joseph Stalin realized two vital facts early on:
1) That in spite of Soviet propaganda, the Russian economy was no match for the West, and that it was necessary to build up Soviet industry on a massive scale. Thus began the various Five Year Plans that sought to make the leap from a backward agricultural economy into something resembling an industrial powerhouse.
2) That the old Bolshevik ideology of “proletarian internationalism” – the idea that the World Revolution was a perquisite for the survival of the Soviet state – had to be ditched. The Trotskyists, who clung to the original Leninist conception, were purged, and in the place of the old party line the Stalinists substituted Soviet “patriotism,” i.e. Russian nationalism, as the official ideology of the post-Leninist Kremlin.
While the economic project of the Stalinist regime rendered dubious results – slave labor cannot serve as the basis of a modern economic order, and the inability of the Soviet system to overcome the calculation problem could not be overcome – their ideological revisionism met with more success. Instead of appealing to some abstract ideal, i.e. egalitarianism, the theories of Karl Marx, etc., they instead evoked loyalty to real-world allegiances: in short, they became “patriots,” in whatever country they were operating in.
To continue reading: Role Reversal in the New Cold War
