Jihad vs. McWorld (61 page)

26.
Claire Sterling, “Redfellas,”
The New Republic
, April 11, 1994, pp. 19-20. Also see her new book
Thieves’ World: The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

27.
Celestine Bohlen, “Russian Mobsters Grow More Violent and Pervasive,”
The New York Times
, August 16, 1993, p. A 1.

28.
Serge Schmemann, “Russia Lurches into Reform,”
The New York Times
, February 20, 1994, p. A 1.

29.
In recent times, even foreign businesses have become targets and prudent investors have had to hire their own heavily armed security forces. Only McWorld’s symbolic masters like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola have been spared, not perhaps because they are totems but because the publicity
would be bad (because they are totems!). See Michael Specter, “US Business and the Russian Mob,”
The New York Times
, July 8, 1994, p. D 1.

30.
About measures that only Zhirinovsky’s party supported in parliament, the newspaper
Isvestia
commented: “Every time Russia has tried to do something for the greater good of the state, it has ended in political terror and dictatorship and extraordinary powers in the hands of extraordinary bodies.” David Gurevich is moved to ask, “Is there no third way between Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Michael Corleone?” in “The MOB—Today’s K.G.B.,”
The New York Times
, February 19, 1994, p. A 19. There is not yet a clear answer to his question.

31.
Andrew Solomon, “Young Russia’s Defiant Decadence,”
The New York Times Magazine
, July 18, 1993, pp. 16–23; see also his book
The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
  Michael Specter, in “Could We Tell Tchaikovsky This News?,”
The New York Times
, February 20, 1994, Section I, p. 15, writes: “Driven by advertising and money, radio here is beginning to bear a resemblance to stations in NY and LA, where classical broadcasts are under siege.”

32.
Janusz Glowacki, “Given the Realities It’s Impossible to Be Absurd,”
The New York Times
, September 19, 1993, Section 2, p. 7. Glowacki is the author of “Antigone in New York.” Recalling Sartre’s paradox—we were never so free as under the Nazi occupation, he mused—another writer Glowacki interviews complains: “The worst thing is there is no censorship anymore, and when everything is allowed you don’t feel like writing.”

33.
Liesl Schillinger, “Barbski,”
The New Republic
, September 20, 1993, pp. 10–11.

34.
See William Schmidt, “Moscow Journal: West Sets Up Store and the Russians Are Seduced,”
The New York Times
, September 27, 1991, p. A 4.

35.
David Lempert, “Changing Russian Political Culture in the 1990’s—Para-sites, Paradigms, and Perestroika,”
Journal for the Comparative Study of Society and History
, Vol. 35, No. 3, July 1993, pp. 628–646.

36.
Quoted by Andrew Solomon, “Defiant Decadence.”

37.
“Russian Gadfly From TV to Politics,” unsigned special to
The New York Times
, December 26, 1993, p. A 18.

38.
Cited in Margaret Shapiro and Fred Hiatt, “The Agony of Reform,”
The Washington Post
, National Weekly Edition, March 14–20, 1994, p. 6.

39.
In an interview, “L’ecrivain international choisit la Grande Russie,”
Liberation
, April 6, 1992. My translation.

40.
Cited by David M. Kotz, “The End of the Market Romance,”
The Nation
, February 28, 1994, p. 263.

41.
Cited in
The Washington Post
, Weekly National Edition, April 5–11, 1993.

42.
Michael Scammell, “What’s Good for the Mafia Is Good for Russia,”
The New York Times
, December 26, 1993, Section 4, p. 11.

43.
This would be a sort of democracy since “Russians are used to firm control from the top. If domination by a mafia bureaucracy offered a return to the relative order enjoyed by many under the communist rule, many would
embrace it.” Nikolai Zlobin, “The Mafiacracy Takes Over,”
The New York Times
, July 26, 1994, p. A 19.

44.
Along with other fans of order (if not law) at any price, Zlobin will be pleased to know that at least one high-flying member of the criminal class agrees with him: “The Mafia is what’s holding this country together. We do provide structure, and when we take over a business, that business works. It’s noble work.” Andrew Solomon, “Defiant Decadence.”

45.
Boris Yeltsin, Address to the Federal Assembly, February 24, 1994, pp. 32-37; translated by Nina Belyaeva, “Rule of Law for Civil Society,” paper prepared for the XVI World Congress of the International Political Science Association in Berlin, August 1994, p. 10.

46.
Interview with S. F. Cohen, “What’s Really Happening in Russia,”
The Nation
, March 2, 1992, pp. 259-264.

  1.
The Christian Democrat poster features slogans like “Off to the future, but not with red socks.” Supporters played on Kohl’s name, which means both cabbage and cash in German, by shouting “Keine Kohl ohne Kohl”—no cash without Kohl.

  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.”

  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 infotainment 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.