Reinventing Collapse

When Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” this label, impolitic though it was, made sense to a great number of people and the label stuck. But what a difference two decades can make! Shortly after Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and spoke the words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!,” the Berlin wall was indeed broken down into souvenir-sized pieces, but twenty years later big political walls are again fashionable, except now it is Americans and their clients that are putting them up. There is a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, countless walls carving up Palestine into a pattern Jimmy Carter accurately labeled as “apartheid,” a currently stalled plan to partition Baghdad into Shiite and Sunni ghettos and numerous walls within the U.S. itself around gated communities and exclusive compounds.

For an American, hiding behind a wall is becoming an increasingly good idea. Over the last two decades, memory of the Soviet Union has faded from view, while the United States has taken its place as the symbol of all that is evil throughout much of Europe, the Muslim countries and many other parts of the world. Wherever there is public protest, be it against war, injustice, globalization, violations of human rights, environmental destruction or policies that accelerate catastrophic climate change, it is the United States that offers a conveniently large and easy target. While much of the population throughout the world is dead set against cooperation with the United States, their political leaders have to be careful: the United States is still a little too powerful to oppose directly. On the other hand, any appearance of overt appeasement of American ambitions has come to spell automatic disaster at the polls, so the politicians stall and bide their time.

As the ultimately futile nine-year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan wore on, the economy stagnated and a succession of dour, gray-faced, geriatric General Secretaries succeeded each other atop the Lenin mausoleum, a number of people within the higher echelons of the Communist party started to find their evilness somewhat humiliating. The imperial status was non-negotiable, as was the socialist ideology, but some sort of work-around strategy was clearly required for the evilness bit. Gorbachev gave voice to these official yearnings through his glasnost and perestroika campaigns. A great number of partial excuses, of the “mistakes were made” variety, were offered.

I remember a certain conversation that took place around that time, in the late 80s. The topic of discussion was, “What could these bastards (meaning the Soviet government) possibly want now? “ A wizened old lady offered an answer that seemed nonsensical at first, but made a lot of sense upon reflection: they want shame. They are tired of being bad as in “evil”; now they just want to be bad as in “not very good.” They are even willing to feel a little bit ashamed about it and to offer some vaguely worded apologies, provided that these fall well short of them actually accepting any responsibility. You see, evil and incompetence do not mix. Our imagination cannot conceive of the Devil who would have your immortal soul in a jiffy, if only he could locate the paperwork. It’s one Hell of a mess down there. The demons who handle the paperwork have become so lazy it’s a sin. “To hell with them! “ the Devil would like to say, but that’s where they reside already, plus he can’t recall the details of who lost what when, and so there is nothing to be done. As mistakes continue to be made, the sinners can breathe more easily.

Twenty years later, it is the American officials that are making a spectacular show of their incompetence. But rather than mincing words Gorbachev-style, the Americans are able to achieve a wonderful theatrical effect, thanks to their plain-spoken, straight-talking President. From “Mission accomplished,” spoken as the Iraqi insurgency takes off, to “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job! “ as New Orleans drowns, to many other, similarly preposterous statements, we hear a Presidential clarion call to national incompetence. It is a mistake to view such utterances as gaffes or blunders or flights of whimsy: they are true thought leadership. Other high officials have their own strategies: the Vice President pretends to be delusional, producing a steady stream of strongly worded statements of fiction, while the former Attorney General simulates early onset Alzheimer’s with a compelling display of fogged memory. Other administration officials make a show of accidentally destroying important documents but, for added effect, they destroy them incompetently, so that copies are soon retrieved. American officials at all levels should fall in line with this brilliant strategy that has been handed down to them from on high as stone tablets from Mount Sinai. Should they fail to do so, history will remember them as evil. Should they succeed, history will mercifully consign their memory to oblivion, judging them to be merely incompetent.

Dmitry Orlov. Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. ^{Next Excerpt. © 2008 Dmitry Orlov.}