Of course, another development that panicked Stalin was the emergence of an independent-minded communist leader who wasn’t prepared to do his bidding in Yugoslavia. Tito made Stalin fearful because his model was quite attractive, not just in the Balkans. The Greek communists were attracted by the Yugoslav model, as were many in Eastern Europe. They said, if Tito can be independent minded, why can’t we? Why do we have to be under the Soviet thumb? And this encouraged the crushing of dissent within the communist parties and the communist movements. In the big show trials that took place in 1948 and 1949 in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, the charge was not simply that you were an agent of Western imperialism. You were also labeled an “agent of Titoite revisionism.” They didn’t want to lose control, and that was very shortsighted of them.
We know there was a Russian Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We know they fought Poland and various countries, but when was the Soviet Empire at its height?
The tsarist empire had been an internal empire. Russia added countries on its borders, much like the United States did in its early days. And these countries were then pretty much assimilated, though not completely assimilated. And it was only in the early 1990s that they began to want to move away. And that, too, largely because that was a direction in which the West wanted to take them. But the Eastern European countries weren’t an empire in the traditional sense, because it was largely a political empire, a socio-political empire, more than an economic one, and that’s what made it very different from the West.
Was the Soviet Union able to extract raw minerals from their satellite countries? Or you’re saying was it a trade policy that was highly favorable to the Soviet Union?
It was a trade policy, which was highly favorable to the Soviet Union in the sense that these countries were forced to buy Soviet goods or the economies were run in such a way that they were very heavily interdependent with the Soviet Union. But often the Soviet Union gave out more than it got back.
Such as in Cuba?
Cuba is a classic example of that. And even in East Germany, though they did dismantle a lot of factories in East Germany immediately after the war, so it took the East Germans a long time to recover, whereas what the United States was doing in West Germany was exactly the opposite, rebuilding the country in order to make it a showcase for the market. And they succeeded in doing that. The Russians didn’t do that.
How do you respond to the argument that, at the end of the day, the countries under the influence of the American empire to a large degree have prospered, such as Japan, and to a certain degree, Latin America, and to a certain degree elites in Africa, and certainly Western Europe—whereas the Soviet empire made Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, which were rich countries at one point, poor?
Well, the argument against that is that Eastern European countries were, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, largely economically underdeveloped. Poland was a very undeveloped, largely peasant country. East Germany, of course, was part of the old Germany, but Allied bombing had destroyed Dresden, which was an East German city. The Soviet Union didn’t have the wherewithal to rebuild these countries. It was mainly interested in rebuilding itself. We have to remember that the Russians suffered more during the Second World War than any other country in Europe. You know, they lost twenty million people. Their industries were destroyed, smashed. The United States lost people, but American cities were never bombed or attacked. What the United States did after the Second World War is unique in imperial history. They rebuilt their old rivals and brought them up to speed economically. No one has ever done that before, and I doubt whether any power will do it again. And the reason they did that is because they perceived that communism was a threat. They couldn’t allow these countries to go under because they would become very susceptible to communism. They had to be built up.
The Russians provided countries with a crude but effective infrastructure, a social structure. Education was free, health was free, housing was heavily subsidized. It was a sort of public utility socialism. You didn’t have freedom, but if you were a citizen in these countries, this is what you got. And you travel to these countries now, as I sometimes do, and the number of people who come up and say to you, we miss that period because that is all gone, is legion. So they did it in their own way. And the United States did it in its own way, creating rich elites in all these countries where the conditions of the poor didn’t necessarily improve.
How about the middle class?
There was a large middle class in some of them. Not all the Latin American countries developed a large middle class, but some of them did, Brazil for instance. In the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe, you also saw the development of a middle class, but with constrictions and restrictions.
France certainly was very poor after the war, and it did come back.
But this is the point I’m making: all these countries came back because of the Marshall Plan. The aim of the Marshall Plan was to rebuild Western European capitalism and Japanese capitalism. Why? Because we were now in a battle to the death against the communists, who have a different social system. So we have to show them that our social and political system is much better, which is why, if you compare the media that existed in the 1950s through the 1970s in the United States, and in most of the European countries, there was far more diversity, discussion, debate on the networks, in the press than there is today. Many, many more divergent voices were allowed to write then now that they no longer have to demonstrate this to anyone. You can censor at will, you can marginalize voices you don’t like. At that time they couldn’t do this as much because they were trying to show our big rivals: this is how we’re different than you. And it was effective. Lots of these German friends said we used to watch West German television, and see people like you on it, saying things that we could never say against our government, and that had an impact on us.
Could you talk about the conflicts over the division of East and West Berlin?
The Soviet Union’s decision to impose a blockade on West Berlin in 1948 was meant to show the West that they were not totally cowed. All the pro-Soviet people had been chucked out of governments in most of Western Europe, France in particular. The Cold War had begun. And the Soviet Union thought, why don’t we make a bid for West Berlin and make Berlin the capitol of our Germany. That will show the West that we can’t be taken for granted, they can’t just ride right over us. And they imposed a blockade. Whether they really thought that they would get their way is difficult to know—I’m sure it’s in the archives somewhere—but certainly that blockade was broken. Another reason they wanted the blockade was because it was an anomaly to have Western armies in the middle of a country that had been partitioned. So there was a strategic element there. But certainly they went about it the wrong way, and they didn’t have much support.
My father was an economist. He was actually on Eisenhower’s economic staff at one point, and he worked in Berlin. He told me that the Soviets were trying to steal US currency printing plates. Apparently there was a lot of counterfeiting going on. There was disparate currencies, and the Soviets couldn’t keep their population in check or content with a black market, such as it was.
This is absolutely true. The Soviets couldn’t compete with the West economically. They certainly couldn’t compete with the United States economy, which had emerged from the Second World War much more strengthened. And so they thought, let’s end this anomaly of a Western showcase right on our doorstep.
Are you suggesting you don’t fault the Soviets for building the Berlin Wall, then?
Well, I do fault them for the wall because I think it was foolish to imagine that you can keep people in or change people’s minds by building a wall. It never works like that. We find that time and time again. If people are really determined to do something against the power that either occupies them or controls them, they find a way do it.
Chapter 4
Pax Americana?
Olive
r Stone: Conservatives take credit for Reagan ending the Cold War. I think the counterargument would be that the Soviet system had exhausted itself economically and that Afghanistan in some way presaged its own problems for the Soviet Union, as Iraq presaged some problems for the United States. I see some similarities the path the United States has traveled and the one the Soviets traveled.
Tariq Ali: When one system, the Soviet system and all that it entailed, collapsed, in its wake there was a triumphalism in the West for years. We won, we smashed you, we beat you, now we’re dominant. And all over the world, no alternative appeared to be emerging to this narrative. And I think a complacency set in among US leaders. They felt that we can now do whatever we want, get away with whatever we want. There is no one to challenge us. The system is unbeatable. And that is always a dangerous frame of mind for any imperial power—to believe that nothing can effect you, because the world isn’t like that. So the first challenge, curiously enough, came from South America, and it came from a continent that had experimented in neoliberalism. After all, the Chicago boys didn’t try out neoliberalism in Britain first. They tried it out in Chile under Pinochet, and later in Argentina. So you begin to see the emergence of social movements in a number of Latin American countries—Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela—that are fighting against attempts to deprive them of certain things they liked, like free water, transport subsidies, things which in the scale of the world appear very tiny but are very important for the everyday life of many people. And these social movements then produced reactions. In the case of Venezuela, three thousand people trying to protest against the IMF rules were killed in the streets by the military.
This is pre-Chávez?
Pre-Chávez, yes. That’s what produced Chávez. Chávez didn’t drop from the sky. He was produced from within the army, an army that used to massacre its own people. And Chávez and a whole group of junior officers met and said, this is not what we were created for. The only purpose of a military is to defend the country from outside invasion, and yet we’ve been used to kill our own people. That’s how a dissenting group emerged inside the Venezuelan army.
Related developments were taking place in other parts of South America. In Bolivia, the neoliberal government decided to sell the water supply of Cochabamba to a subsidiary of Bechtel, the US corporation. And one of the things the water privatizers got the government to do was to pass a law saying that, from now on, it was illegal for poor people to go onto their roof and collect rainwater in receptacles because that challenged their monopoly of water. There’s an uprising, an insurrection. The military intervened, a kid was shot to death, others were injured. More people came out, and they began to win. And these victories in South America were the first big sign that the old order could not be maintained, that things were changing. That the Washington consensus, postcommunist world ruled by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO no longer could carry on that the same way in South America. Interestingly, these movements were also throwing up political leaders, and these political leaders were winning elections democratically. So you had a big shift away from the guerrilla warfare phase of South American politics, toward mass involvement in democracy, which everyone should have been cheering. I certainly was. Politicians are promising people certain things, and they’re getting elected, and they’re now trying to deliver on those promises. It was totally misunderstood in my opinion, deliberately so by the Bush administration, which tried to crush all these developments, organizing military coups, backing the most reactionary people in these countries.
Bush, Junior?
Bush, Junior. Bush, Junior did all that, backed by Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice in a very reactionary state department.
What about Clinton in Bosnia?
The intervention by the United States in Bosnia, seen by many people as humanitarian, turned out to be a straightforward attempt to increase American power and influence. So you have now a big permanent US missile base in Tuzla, and one of the largest helicopter bases ever in Kosovo. So this was the expansion of US power after the end of the Cold War, but the real resistance in terms of countries began in South America. And that is where it has remained ever since, with this exception: what’s happened now is that the collapse of the neoliberal system, the bursting of the bubble, means the whole world now is waiting for alternatives.
I think it is quite possible that this particular world economic crisis, which is by no means over, is going to change people’s ideas again. To what extent and in what direction we will see. But suddenly the South American experience becomes very important because these leaders who have been attacked in the media, the Bolivarians attacked as crazy, wild people, now seem very sober. And a new administration in Washington is having to deal with them rationally as elected politicians who represent their people. So if this example spreads to other continents, we could be in for interesting times again.
And everywhere we see taxpayers’ money being used to bail out the rich. The whole ideology of neoliberalism is that the state is useless, the market will do everything. The market is supreme. The market collapses, and they fall on their knees before the state, and say to the state, “Help, please.” And taxpayers’ money goes to bail out every single bank in the Western world, more or less. But the effect this will have on popular consciousness, we are waiting to see.
So, we have seen these hugely important developments in South America. On the other hand, the economic center of the world has moved eastward. China is the new workshop of the world. Every cheap product you can buy all over the world is produced in China. And when the economy moves in such a big way, can politics be far behind? So the question that will haunt the twenty-first century is whether a new imperial power is emerging on a global scale to challenge the United States from the east. Will this happen? What will the United States do to block it? These are the questions now, which can only be understood by seeing the history of what has happened in the preceding two centuries. You can’t run away from history. I don’t think we will have a repeat of the First World War, because that would mean obliteration. On the other hand, the big question, which couldn’t be asked a hundred years ago but has to be asked now, is put at its simplest, does the world have the resources for every single family to live like an American middle-class family lived in the 1950s and 1960s? And I think the answer is no. The world doesn’t have the resources to do that. In which case, what is the point of this crazed, endless competition? Wouldn’t it be better to find a different way of living for people all over the world?
You’re talking about global problems, but you don’t have much respect for one of the bodies that was allegedly established to address such problems, the United Nations, for instance. Is that correct?
Yes, this is true. I don’t go for the international institutions. I think a lot can be done regionally. Here again, I return to the one example we have of a certain amount of regional cooperation in South America. I’m not one of those who thinks that what is going on in South America is a revolution, even though some of the leaders, such as Chávez, call it that. Essentially what is going on is that elected politicians are pushing through important social-democratic reforms to benefit the poor. That is very important in itself. One doesn’t have to give it a new coloration. That’s what they’re doing. And the fact that, over the last fifty years, the Cubans have created a social infrastructure that produces more doctors per person in the population than any other country in the world, and these doctors can be provided as human capital in return for other things to Latin America and Africa is an amazing development. So when Hugo Chávez is confronted by a strike of middle-class professionals and the hospitals are closing down, he rings his friend Fidel Castro and within a few days, sixteen to twenty thousand Cuban doctors with their cheap medicines are on planes, coming over to set up clinics in the poorest parts of the country. That has an impact on people, including people who disagree with you.
I’m not saying that the world is going to be just changed like this everywh
ere, but for countries to collaborate regionally becomes important. Why shouldn’t China, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula form a sort of a union, like the European Union? Why? Because the United States won’t let it happen.
Why is that?
Because the United States sees the Far East as the biggest threat to its global hegemony. The Japanese, unlike the Germans, have not even been allowed a foreign policy of their own since the Second World War. They more or less do what they’re told. This is dangerous, because it could give rise to dangerous forms of nationalism again, which wouldn’t be good either for Japan or anyone else. What might be better is if the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans were encouraged to work together. Within that framework you could settle the North Korean question as well.
On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation Page 6