The “captive nations” were said to be throwing off their shackles and “regaining their past freedoms.” It remained one of the media’s best kept secrets that the countries in question—with the exception of Czechoslovakia—had enjoyed few “past freedoms” before becoming communist states, and in fact had been right-wing autocracies or outright fascist regimes.
Consider the unpublicized history of Lithuania. In 1926 that country became the second fascist state after Mussolini’s Italy, upon which it modeled itself. Openly attempting to ally with Nazi Germany during the 1930s, the Lithuanian government banned all labor unions and opposition parties and newspapers. Thousands of political dissidents were executed or interned in concentration camps. A large portion of Lithuania’s industry and natural resources were sold off to foreign investors. Land was returned to rich owners, including the church. During the Nazi occupation, Lithuanian nationalists vigorously cooperated in the extermination of Jews, communists, and other “undesirables.”42 The US press was too busy celebrating Lithuania’s “democratic restoration” to take notice of its decidedly undemocratic background.
With the overthrow of communism in 1990, a variety of xenophobic, anti-Semitic, right-wing parties resurfaced in Lithuania. The Lithuanian Constitution was rewritten to make non-Lithuanians second-class citizens, including Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and other foreigners, some of whom had lived in the country for upwards of half a century. The Communist Party was outlawed and communist print and broadcast media were suppressed. In September 1991, one of the first acts of the newly independent Lithuanian government under President Vytautus Landsbergis (the son of a right-wing militia member who collaborated with the German occupation during World War II and signed a telegram of congratulations to Hitler) was to exonerate thousands of Lithuanians who had been judged guilty of assisting the Nazis, including some 120 members of the notorious Lithuanian 12th Battalion who had actively engaged in rounding up and murdering Jews. The new government even compensated former war criminals for the years they had served in jail.43
These moves evoked mild editorial rebukes from US newspapers and almost no mention in television newscasts. The US media celebrated the Lithuanian, Estonian, and Latvian secessions with front-page headlines, as in the San Francisco Chronicle: “BALTICS SAVOR THEIR NEW INDEPENDENCE”—giving little notice to how “democratic Lithuania” manifested an uncomfortable likeness to prewar fascist Lithuania.44
For decades the US press had characterized the East-West struggle as one of democracy versus communism, with no mention made that US foreign policy was dedicated to a defense of multinational corporate capitalism throughout the world. But when right-wing governments emerged in Eastern Europe determined to abandon state planning and move toward what they saw as the marvels of the “free market,” US political leaders and media began to acknowledge that a goal of US policy was to restore capitalism in the formerly communist nations. The struggle was not only—or even primarily—one of freedom versus communism but of capitalism versus socialism.
There were television interviews aplenty with Warsaw, Prague, and Moscow intellectuals singing hosannahs to the cornucopia that would come when private ownership and the profit system were introduced into their lands. At times, democracy and capitalism were even treated as coterminous and inseparable—even though there are many undemocratic and repressive capitalist countries (as we shall see in the next chapter). The “free market” was equated with political freedom, despite the fact that the free market gives freedom mostly to those who have money and can impose tyrannical travails on those who do not. Likewise state socialism was treated by the media as inherently inhospitable to democracy even though dramatic democratic reforms were instituted in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev well before capitalism was installed there.
Right-wing free-market advocates in the formerly communist countries were repeatedly described as “democrats,” “reformers,” and “liberals,” in the US news media. Their efforts to dismantle public ownership were called “reforms.” Those who resisted such steps, or who were not prepared to go the full measure, were called “Stalinists,” “conservatives,” and “hardliners.”
The newly installed “reformist” governments in Eastern Europe eliminated price controls and subsidies for food, housing, transportation, clothing, utilities, and a host of other items. They cut back on medical benefits and support for public education. They abolished job guarantees, public employment programs, and work place benefits. They sold publicly owned lands, factories, and news media at bargain prices to rich Western investors. They eliminated or reduced services for women, making it increasingly difficult for them to get employment, apartments, day care, safe and legal abortions, birth control, divorces, and access to public office. The overall effect of this “shock treatment” was severe economic recession. In Poland, for instance, the moves toward a market economy brought a drop in real income of about 33 percent by 1991.45
NEVER BLAME THE FREE MARKET
The homeless, unknown under the communist system, became such an obvious presence on the Hungarian landscape that even New York Times correspondent Celestine Bohlen was forced to take note. She finally got around to visiting the Keleti train station in Budapest, where scores of families spread their blankets. Here is how Bohlen and the Times explain this blight: “In the years of strict Communist rule, sleeping in parks and other places, as well as begging, were crimes of parasitism that were punishable by imprisonment. All citizens were obligated to live at the address at which they were registered. Under such conditions, rebellious people were less likely to leave families from which they felt alienated and families were less likely to expel hostile relatives.” Among the homeless also could be counted the “alcoholics, drifters or criminals who have surfaced from the underworld” and who “predate the free market” (New York Times, October 23, 1990).
The Times was asking us to believe that the homeless in Budapest were not the victims of the free market but the beneficiaries. Homelessness was caused by family quarrels and nether world restlessness. Freed from the restrictions of communism, people now could pursue their preferred life-style, abandoning their domiciles and sleeping on the floors of train stations. Not once did the Times suggest that the new government and the free market itself—with its unemployment, wage cuts, inflation, and a doubling of rents—had anything to do with the homeless families of Hungary.
Adapted from Conn Hallinan, “Hungary for News,” Lies of Our Times, January 1991, pp. 19-20.
In a country like Hungary, long considered one of the more prosperous socialist countries, these capitalist reforms resulted in serious unemployment, a 30 percent inflation rate, a doubling of rents, and a 45 percent rise in consumer energy costs. In order to survive, most employed Hungarians held more than one job, working twelve to fourteen hours a day. Street robberies and violent crime increased by 40 percent, while homelessness, suicides, and mental depression rose dramatically.44 But the New York Times and most other US media had little to say about these things. Instead the Times ran upbeat articles on how retail stores were being privatized in Budapest and how Hungary now enjoyed a “higher standard of living” with an abundance of quality commodities and foods.47 The Times failed to note that most Hungarians could not afford to buy these items. Real wages had fallen 35 percent; food purchases were off 4 percent; clothing sales, 7 percent; and meat sales, 30 percent. Too often shoppers had to spend all their money on food.48
Along with higher crime rates and severe economic hardship, the market reforms in Eastern Europe brought increased corruption in the banking and finance systems, together with a resurgence of nationalistic hatreds, ethnic clashes, anti-Semitism, and neo-fascist organizations.49 While the corruption and abuses of the former communist regimes received repeated attention from the media, these new developments were accorded relatively brief mention and failed to dampen press enthusiasm for the “democratic capitalist” era in the East. Instead, the hardships were universally dismisse
d as part of a temporary “transition” from state socialism to capitalism. Thus the 'Washington Post referred to “the painful transition to a free-market system.”50
In one NBC telecast, Tom Brokaw explained the tribulations of transition to a Soviet official: “In order to go up you have to first go down.”51 Thus the press transformed the harsh cutbacks inflicted upon the working people of these nations into nothing more than the pains of change, a brief passing through purgatory on the way to heaven. In fact, the Thatcher-like cutbacks were not the products of transition but of free-market capitalism, the raw, undiluted variety practiced throughout the Third World and increasingly within Western industrial nations.
The elections that brought anticommunists to power were, according to the New York Times, the work of “inspired amateurs and improvisers.”52 Largely unmentioned was how the United States poured millions of dollars into the Eastern European elections through the National Endowment for Democracy (funded by the US Congress) and other US agencies, monies that went exclusively to anticommunist opposition parties.53 While US laws prohibit foreign nationals from injecting themselves into the finances and campaign operations of American elections, US interference in the Eastern European political contests went unnoticed— or was depicted as benign assistance to peoples unpracticed in the ways of democracy.
Not even lavish US financial support could guarantee anticommunist victories in all the former communist countries. As elections approached in Romania and Bulgaria, the press, anticipating the same anticommunist results as had occurred in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany, heralded the impending contests as a faceoff between communists and “democrats.” When the communists won surprising victories in both Romania and Bulgaria, the press began to offer excuses. The New York Times reported that Bulgarians failed “to break old habits,” while the opposition “was handicapped because its candidates were less well known.”54 In a follow-up story, the Times noted—in a grudging single sentence—that British observers found the election in Bulgaria to have been fair. More emphatically, the story quoted the anticommunist losers who claimed there had been “fraud and intimidation” (of a kind that had escaped the view of foreign observers). But the losers oddly “stopped short of calls to invalidate the vote.” The Times also reported the bizarre claims of the National Democratic and Republican Institutes (financed by the National Endowment for Democracy) that found “evidence of the legacy of dictatorship— ‘psychological and sociological’ pressures ‘not visible to the naked eye.’ ”55
Despite what most foreign observers described as free and fair democratic elections in Romania and Bulgaria, the US press continued to apply the “democrat” label exclusively to the conservative minority that had lost. When these same opponents refused to accept the majority vote in Romania and carried out a series of protests and riots, the press treated this as a clash between “democrats” seeking reforms and communists unwilling to relinquish power to the people. The impression left was that democratic elections had never occurred and that totalitarianism was still in the saddle. As press critic Ellen Ray ironically noted: “According to the media, if the Communists win, then by definition the election is not free.”56
After puffing the anticommunist government of Hungary for its systematic dismantling of socialism, the New York Times tried to explain why that same government took such a beating in the October 1990 local elections. It was all because the voters were weary of frequent elections and felt “distaste for the noise and confusion of unaccustomed political debate.” Furthermore, the anticommunist government was burdened by the “legacy inherited from 40 years of Communist rule”—not by its own harsh free-market policies.57
Blaming the baneful effects of Eastern European anticommunist governance on a “legacy” inherited from past communist regimes became a regular exercise in the US press. The Washington Post noted some of the autocratic tendencies of Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a ferocious anticommunist who won election in 1991 and then arrested opposition leaders and shut down newspapers. But the Post attributed his behavior to “the old psychology of Bolshevik politics... . Many leaders appear to be prisoners of their own pasts,” and were suffering from “the sort of messianic arrogance perfected by the Bolsheviks”—apparently even the anti-Bolsheviks.58
In August 1991, Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin took advantage of a bungled coup attempt by some anti-reform Soviet leaders. He suppressed six Communist Party newspapers, suspended the Communist Party, seized its funds and assets, and prohibited workers from forming political organizations of any sort at the work site. These moves were hailed in the US news media as democratic initiatives.
The defeat of the coup was hailed as a triumph of the Soviet people. Only a month later did the Washington Post note that it was especially a triumph of moneymaking speculators. The coup’s most militant opponents consisted of thousands of “yuppies,” members of the Russian stock exchange and “private entrepreneurs, who routinely make ten times the average wage of ordinary Soviets.” They headed “into the streets of Moscow to defend their right to wheel and deal. The coup collapsed. Democracy triumphed,” concluded the article with a straight face.59 The Post went on to report that “private business men contributed more than fifteen million rubles to buy food and equipment” for the anti-coup defenders of the Russian legislature. One broker “was struck by how few workers responded to Yeltsin’s call to defend democracy.” Another broker noted: “Up until the coup, we were just interested in making money... . We did not want to become involved [in politics]. But after the coup, we realized that we risked losing everything we had won.”60 Once again democracy was equated with the right to make lots of money.
In September 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev went before the democratically elected Soviet Congress to urge it to dissolve itself. During a heated session he threatened to dissolve the chamber himself, amend the constitution, or rule by presidential edict without the Congress’s consent. For one particularly controversial clause of the law revamping the legislature, he conducted three consecutive ballots until the Congress gave him what he wanted. At one point he smothered debate by refusing to yield the floor. He also refused to switch on microphones and talked loudly into his own to drown out protests from delegates.61 These tactics either went unreported or were presented matter-of-factly without critical editorial comment in the US media.
MEDIA’S DOUBLE STANDARD ON EAST/WEST POLLUTION
A study of ten major publications (including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times) found thirty-seven stories on pollution in Eastern Europe during the nine months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This greatly exceeded the number of articles that would normally have been found dealing with pollution in the West during a similar time frame. The stories carried headlines like “POLAND LEFT CHOKING ON ITS OWN WASTES” (Boston Globe, December 18, 1989) and “EAST BLOC’S ENVIRONMENT A NIGHTMARE” [Atlanta Constitution, March 11, 1990). The New York Times (June 23, 1990) compared East Germany to “a country after chemical warfare.” In most cases, the articles were determined to lay the blame for Eastern Europe pollution with the communist system. Pollution was a “failure of Marxism and Stalinism,” a “Stalinist Legacy of Foul Air,” the result of communism’s “forced industrialization,” and an “inevitable by-product of a centralized, totalitarian system.”
This eagerness to ascribe a systemic cause, blaming state socialism for the pollution, stands in marked contrast with the way the media usually cover pollution in the Western world. Private corporate pollution, like Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez, or Three Mile Island, is treated as an isolated tragic mishap. It would be highly unusual for a US newscaster or reporter to attribute the ultimate responsibility for US ecological devastation to the capitalist system, which puts profit before environment, encourages high energy consumption and a consumerist life-style, and requires perpetual growth.
Peter Dykstra, communications director for Greenpeace USA, note
d the media’s double standard: “Under Marxism, the environment is ‘sacrificed’ to production goals. Under capitalism, the environment is ‘balanced’ with production goals.”
Adapted from Miranda Spencer, “Cold War Environmentalism: Reporting on Eastern European Pollution," Extra! January!February, 1991, pp. 6—7.
At that same time in Warsaw, the Polish president urged parliament to grant him temporary special powers to issue economic decrees. The parliament was holding up “many free market reform measures,” including “cuts in public spending” that the president wanted to introduce. The emergency presidential powers would apply to “commercial codes, political parties, associations and trade unions.”62 While the proposal drew strong opposition from former communists and members of the Peasant Party, some of whom accused the president of dictatorial tendencies, it was but routinely noted in US news reports and caused hardly a stir among our TV pundits, commentators, columnists, and editorialists. One could imagine the reaction if such requests for dictatorial powers had been made by elected communist officials. Having used the populace to sweep away unpopular communist rule, the “democratic reformers” now sought to put democracy back in the bottle, so as to impose a draconian free-market capitalism upon that same populace. The US press seemed to have no problem with that.
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