Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  2. Peter Rossman, “Dashed Hopes for a New Socialism,” The Nation, May 7, 1990.

  3. Tageszeitung, August 4, 1990.

  4. In fact, tens of thousands of tainted functionaries found their way quickly back into the new Federal Republic of Germany’s bureaucracies. As Norman Birnbaum reminds us, war criminal Field Marshal Kesselring went straight from his jail term to tenure as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s military advisor, while Dr. Hans Globke who had written an authoritative commentary on the Nuremberg Laws for the Nazis ended up as his chief of staff. Norman Birnbaum, “How New the New Germany?,” Part I, Salmagundi, Nos. 88-89, Fall 1990/Winter 1991.

  5. The pastor of Martin Luther’s Castle Church in Wittenberg observed wryly that during the revenge attacks on former East German officials: “Those who were the most cowardly are now loudest in their demands for revenge.” ibid.

  6. Ferdinand Protzman, “Privatization in East Is Wearing to Germans,” The New York Times, August 12, 1994, p. D 1. According to its interim report published in The International Herald Tribune, as of August 1994, Treuhand had sold 247 chemical companies with only a dozen remaining; 181 steel and metal fabricating firms with 25 remaining; 238 iron and nonferrous metal manufacturers with 16 pending; 1,060 machine tool and die companies with 54 pending; 490 electronics firms with 14 left to be sold or liquidated; 512 textile manufacturers with 19 to go; and 1,017 construction companies with just 7 left. The liquidations comprised mainly sales to Westerners but also included the return of companies to pre-Communist ownership and liquidations. Most of the jobs lost came from downsizing to make companies more attractive to investors rather than from straight liquidations.

  7. The Week in Germany, July 15, 1994. Detlev Rohwedder, Treuhand’s first chairman, was assassinated on April 1, 1991, and replaced by Birgit Breuel.

  8. Even sober academic accountants with no political ax to grind such as Wolfgang Siebel have warned that the Unification Treaty had a “financially flawed basis,” despite the “gigantic transfer of funds to East Germany.” Wolfgang Siebel, “Necessary Illusions: The Transformation of Governance Structures in the New Germany,” The Tocqueville Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1992. Despite the fact that the transfers amount to roughly a third of Germany’s federal budget (about 9,500 Deutsch Marks per East German), “most of these federal transfers are not destined for productive investment. Sixty-two percent is spent subsidizing social benefits such as unemployment compensation and housing subsidies.” These subsidies make up nearly 70 percent of eastern Germany’s GNP, and can be compared with the Marshall Plan’s transfers in 1947 of roughly 800 Deutsch Marks per capita.

  9. Ibid. Saxony, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia are the eastern Laender, based on older provinces that had been eliminated by the Communists in 1947. Siebel concludes that privatization in Germany finally “undermines the basis of healthy municipal finance. Municipalities are left with only those programs that run at a loss. This in turn tends to undermine the political and administrative credibility of local administration as a whole.” Ibid., p. 187. Siebel suggests that hysteria about former Communist associations “appeared as a psychological compensation for the political incompetence to deal appropriately with the material consequences of unification.” Ibid., p. 189.

  10. Stephen Kinzer, “German Neocommunists Surging, Capture a City Hall,” The New York Times, June 29, 1994, p. A 6. The Democratic Socialist party has 130,000 disciplined members of whom perhaps 90 percent were Communists earlier and 20,000 are hard-liners. Gregor Gysi, a member of parliament, is its telegenic and politically astute chief, while Hans Modrow who was East Germany’s last Communist leader serves as its Honorary Chairman. The Party Handbooks insist, “Our goal is not the revolutionary overthrow of the democratic parliamentary order or the building of some kind of dictatorship, but rather the true democratization of Germany.” Party leader Gysi says: “People in Eastern Germany have lost important rights, and there is much social injustice … we are not facing the global social, ecological and cultural challenges that confront us. So for me there are still very good reasons to be anticapitalist.” See ibid.

  11. Stephen Kinzer, “Group Is Formed to Defend East German Interests,” The New York Times, July 12, 1992, p. A 11. Also see Kinzer, “In Germany, Too, an Effort to Mobilize Political Outsiders,” The New York Times, July 19, 1992, Section 4, p. 2.

  12. Stephen Kinzer, “Group Is Formed.”

  13. She remonstrated, “The people I worked with wanted to reform East Germany. We never thought the country would disappear and be swallowed up by the West.” A woman with little patience for politics, she scorned both the trial of former East German President Honnecker by the West Germans and the Committee for Fairness. Her wholly independent voice rang clear. Stephen Kinzer, “Berlin Journal: One More Wall to Smash: Arrogance in the West,” The New York Times, August 12, 1992, p. A 4.

  14. Catarina Kennedy-Bannier, “Berliners,” The New Republic, July 18-25, 1994, p. 11.

  15. Stephen Kinzer, “Luckenwalde Journal: In East Germany, Bad Ol’ Days Now Look Good,” The New York Times, August 27, 1994, p. A 2.

  16. Cited by Margaret Talbot, “Back to the Future, Pining for the Old Days in Germany,” The New Republic, July 18-25, 1994.

  17. Ibid.

  18. East Germans were once voracious readers, which is perhaps why the literate leaders of Neues Forum gained such an extensive following. First printings ran to a half million volumes. Poetry volumes could expect first printings of twenty thousand. Those days are over. East Germans remain one-fifth of the total German population but buy less than 2 percent of its books. While East-zone writers saw themselves as dissidents, they were also part of a reformist socialist project, working for their country as they wished it might one day be. To Stefan Heym, a Jewish writer who fled Hitler, fought in the American army, and has been a dissident under the Communists, new writers are another breed; they “see themselves less as East Germans than as writers who live in Germany.”

  19. Roger Cohen, “High Hopes Fade at East European Newspapers,” The New York Times, December 28, 1993, p. A 1.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Statistics and quote from “The Population Plunge That’s Wracking Eastern Germany,” Business Week, August 29, 1994, p. 20. Business Week noted that “such changes are unprecedented for an industrial country at peace.”

  Chapter 19. Securing Global Democracy in the World of McWorld

  1. Walter B. Wriston, Twilight of Sovereignty (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), pp. 170, 176. Wriston also thinks “modern information technology is also driving nation states towards cooperation with each other so that the world’s work can get done,” p. 174.

  2. A Western diplomat in China says, “the Chinese Government has decided and I think logically that it really can’t shut out satellite television entirely, whatever the threat. We’re not talking about a few dissidents here. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese have now invested their life savings in these dishes, and there would be a nasty public uproar if the Government really forced the dishes down.” And in Iran, the Teheran Times concludes that “The cultural invasion will not be resolved by the physical removal of satellite dishes.” Both quotes from Philip Shenon, “A Repressed World Says ‘Beam Me Up,’”The New York Times, September 11, 1994, Section 4, p. 4. Note that the danger is not of political propaganda but of pop cultural contamination. Murdoch willingly took the BBC World Service off of his China service and in Iran the problem is not CNN, but Dynasty, which is the most popular program in Teheran today.

  3. Robert Reich, Work of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), Chapter 23, “The New Community.”

  4. See Brock, Telecommunications Policy(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

  5. Channel One currently is in about twelve thousand junior high and high schools. It offers free televisions, VCRs, and a satellite dish to schools (usually needy ones) willing to dish up two minutes of soft news, two minutes of commercials, and eight minutes of infotain
ment to its students during regular school hours. Channel One sells spots for up to $195,000 for thirty seconds, and has attracted many of the corporations on McWorld’s frontier, including Pepsi and Reebok. Chris Whittle has sold it to K-III, an educational publisher, for profit.

  6. J. G. A. Pocock, “The Ideal of Citizenship Since Classical Times,” Queen’s Quarterly, Spring 1992, p. 55.

  7. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 52.

  8. Pocock, “Ideal of Citizenship.”

  9. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), p. 73. Solzhenitsyn thinks “the former crisis of the meaning of life and the spiritual vacuum (which during the nuclear decades had even been deepened from neglect) stand out all the more” in the new age of evaporating “self-restraint.” Solzhenitsyn, “To Tame Savage Capitalism,” The New York Times, November 28, 1993, Section 4, p. 11.

  10. Quoted by Dirk Johnson, Its Not Hip to Stay, Say Small-Town Youth, The New York Times, September 5, 1994, p. A I. Meanwhile, teenage ex-subjects of the commissars, wooed by the same seductive voices of McWorld, flock to the new punk clubs like Tam-Tam and the World Jeans Festival in St. Petersburg and to Cokefest and Moscow’s hot new radio stations that specialize in Annie Lennox, Cyndi Lauper, and Urban Cookie Collective. “We reach for the young adult,” says the manager of Moscow’s most popular radio station, “we play what people want to hear, and believe me, that is not opera.” Nor even Russian rock (the Russians do not share East Germany’s taste for local bands): “It wouldn’t be fair to the native musicians to cram them in between UB40 and Prince. That would sound so bad.” Michael Specter, “Could We Tell Tchaikovsky This News?” The New York Times, February 20, 1994, Section 1, p. 5. There is only one classical music station left in Moscow, and the explanations are pretty much identical to those offered in explaining a similar situation in New York.

  11. Vaclav Havel, Summer Meditations, translated by Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 6.

  12. Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1995, p. 65.

  13. Harry Boyte and Sara Evans, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Changes in America (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1992).

  14. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927), p. 137.

  15. Joshua Muravchik, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1994).

  16. Democracy requires patience and flexibility and an architect’s sense of place, and cannot be delivered ready-made to peoples unprepared to make it function. Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned would-be founders that “as, before putting up a large building, the architect surveys and sounds the site to see if it will bear the weight, the wise legislator does not begin by laying down laws good in themselves, but by investigating the fitness of the people, for which they are destined, to receive them.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book II, chapter 8.

  17. David B. Truman, The Governmental Process, first published in 1951, second edition (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1971), p. 51.1.

  18. There is a new international organization called CIVICUS dedicated to creating a framework for transnational N.G.O. cooperation. See also Peter J. Spiro, “New Global Communities: Nongovernmental Organizations in International Decision-Making Institutions, The Washington Quarterly, 18:1, Winter 1995, pp.45-56.

  19. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Joseph C. Cabell, February 2, 1816.

  20. Regis Debray warns that “An American monoculture would inflict a sad future on the world, one in which the planet is converted to a global supermarket where people have to choose between the local Ayatollah and Coca-Cola.” Cited by Roger Cohen, “Aux Armes, France Rallies,” The New York Times, January 2, 1994, p. H 1.

  Afterword

  1. Cited in David Brooks, “Buchananism: An Intellectual Cause,” The Weekly Standard, March 11, 1996, p. 18. Buchanan, with his penchant for “cultural war” (see his 1992 Republican National Convention Speech), is as close to an official (respectable) leader of American Jihad as we have.

  2. Phil Patton, “Now It’s the Cars That Make the Characters Go,” The New York Times, Sunday, April 21, 1996, H 13.

  3. Glenn Collins, “Coke Drops Domestic and Goes One World,” The New York Times, January 13, 1996, B 1.

  4. “The Walt Disney Company is helping build one of the most unusual public schools in the nation—a high-tech model for the next century, a learning laboratory with fiber optic cables linking classrooms to the homes of every student. But the most unusual aspect of this public school … is that it is linked to an adjacent national teacher training academy that could make Disney a lot of money. Disney will use the academy and school to develop classroom videos, software, and other educational products to be sold nationally.” Mary Jordan, “This School’s No Mickey Mouse Operation,” The Washington Post, National Edition, July 25–31, 1995, p.33. The town of Celebration (in Florida), where the school will be located, will have 800 homes, hospital, fire station, lake, inn, barber shop, churches, movie theaters, and ice cream parlors. Disney has also opened a for-profit Chautauqua called The Disney Institute. Meanwhile, through its ABC division, Disney fired controversial talk show hosts on the left and right, including Jim Hightower in 1995, and Alan Dershowitz and Bob Grant in 1996—Dershowitz because he called Grant a racist, Grant because he was a racist!

  5. Kinsley drew Newsweek cover attention and a long New Yorker profile, earning back his salary almost instantly. See “Swimming to Seattle,” Cover Essay, Newsweek Magazine, May 20, 1996. Ken Auletta, Gates/Kinsley essay, The New Yorker, April 8, 1996.

  6. Cited by Thomas L. Friedman, “Revolt of the Wannabes,” The New York Times, February 7, 1996, A 19.

  7. Even the Nazis played this game: “Work will make you free!” (“Arbeit macht frei!”) was the slogan that greeted incoming “guests” of the work/death camps.

  8. See, for example, Fareed Zakaria, “Paris is Burning,” The New Republic, January 22, 1996, pp. 27-31.

  9. Fareed Zakaria, ibid.

  10. See my op ed essay “From Disney World to Disney’s World,” The New York Times, August 1, 1996.

  11. See, for example, Philip Gourevitch, “Misfortune Tellers,” The New Yorker, April, 1996.

  12. President Clinton, in an extended critical exposition of the book’s themes before a breakfast gathering of religious leaders in Washington, September 7, 1995, C-Span.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BENJAMIN R. BARBER is Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and director of the New York office of the Democracy Collaborative. He is the author of the classic Strong Democracy and most recently of The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House and A Place for Us. In 2001 he was honored with the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin and the Palme Académiques (Chevalier) of the French Government. With Patrick Watson, Barber also created and wrote the prizewinning television series and book The Struggle for Democracy. He writes regularly for The Nation, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications. He is married to the dancer and choreographer Leah Kreutzer.

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1995 by Benjamin Barber

  2001 Introduction copyright © 2001 by Benjamin Barber

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1995.

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  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96061

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