The inestimable Mark Almond, of Oxford University and the British Helsinki Group, captures here beautifully the complex world of the post Cold War regime-changers. The heady days of the late Soviet era sucked many into its vortex, including as Mark reveals here, himself. It was a formula that was just being tested in the laboratory in those days, and many honest pro-liberty intellectuals willingly signed on hardly knowing a larger plan for which they were being recruited.
As Mark writes in this essential article, the seemingly noble task of supporting the Adam Michniks in Poland or the Miklos Harasztis and Gábor Demszkys of Hungary with smuggled cash and equipment was, essentially, a method of preserving the communist-style of governance and economic central control without the burden of the embarrassing brown polyester-suit wearing old guard. "Dissidents" like Haraszti and Janos Kis in Hungary operated as a kind of internal, unofficially approved opposition within but outside the Party structure once the realization was reached among some that: a) the game as it had been played was up, and b) there were marvelous opportunities being created by this phenomenon.
This means that essentially an understanding was formed by these official opposition and the likes of the Communist Youth League (in Hungary Kommunista Ifjúsagi Szovetseg) that privatization was an enormous opportunity to turn political power to economic power and then back to political power to preserve that economic power. Once the taint of the Communist Party was cleansed in Hungary -- amazingly simply by renaming the Communist Party the Socialist Party, to the applause of the US and the West -- the Communist Youth League (KISz) types actually joined the "dissident" types officially in government coalition. Twice. Of course the terminally hopeless -- or worse -- international press billed it as a great achievement in reconciliation: the communists and the great anti-communists putting their differences aside for the good of the nation.
The current Hungarian government is the epitome of this phenomenon, where the KISz faction of the former Communist Party rules with the "opposition" Free Democrats as a way of consolidating ill-gotten economic gains and ensuring that future gains from EU membership will not be "wasted" on political parties and philosophies made up of individuals who had always been opposed to communism, who had been oppressed by communism, and who, ironically, viewed the West they thought they would be joining as their true, if secret, allies through the dark days of communist rule.
As a renegade editorial page editor of the leading English language paper in Budapest in the 1990s, I as often as possible tried to point out this nexus between communist apparats, "dissidents," and the US Embassy in Budapest and by extension US foreign policy. I was often on the receiving end of exasperated calls from the embassy after managing to get in another piece on this, the real story of the "transformation." The embassy officer would sigh, huff and puff, "your article is ridiculous! Why would the UNITED STATES want to support communists in Hungary?" They would demand with a semi-smirk that is no doubt carefully taught in the FSO training schools. They either never understood or pretended to not understand the real value of trusted allies who would betray their own people for the promise of riches and power. And conversely, the real danger of independent-thinking pro-sovereignty forces emerging to set the former East back on the natural historical trajectory from which it had been forcibly removed when the totalitarians seized power and installed a totally new yet "inevitable" historical track. The inevitability of "progress" according to the dialectic.
But now the goals of the NWO lay bare for many of us to see and...they look very familiar to those of us well-versed in the communist dictatorships. As Mark puts it:
People Power is, it turns out, more about closing things than creating an open society. It shuts factories but, worse still, minds. Its advocates demand a free market in everything - except opinion. The current ideology of New World Order ideologues, many of whom are renegade communists, is Market-Leninism - that combination of a dogmatic economic model with Machiavellian methods to grasp the levers of power.
I would only add that their dogma of "free markets" is mere propaganda for Western consumption. In reality it is an economic system every bit as closed to entry to those not "of the Party" as was the one they just over a decade emerged victorious from. It is only free in that they are free to steal that which is not theirs and to use the muscle that buys them to keep anyone else out of the game.
(to be continued if anyone is interested)
