Liberty or Communism

Chimeras of Communism or Liberty

In this week's Camino a Ítaca, I reflect back on my time in Baku while traveling along the false dichotomies that are leading populist right wing parties to power across the world. Click over to read the original Spanish version or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

I spent some time living on the extreme fringes of Europe on a fingertip-like peninsula that juts out into the Caspian Sea. A country that sits on the blurry border between what we call the West and East. The Caucasus mountains rise at Azerbaijan’s back and the Iran of the Ayatollahs stews in front. This was just after the turn of the millennium and the ashes of the Soviet Union were still very present. Since the fall of the USSR, Azerbaijan and its neighboring ex-Soviet states had morphed into dystopian, neoliberal oligarchies under the guise of liberty and freedom. Ruled by 'strong' men who didn't shy away from boiling people alive if they disagreed with their style of freedom.

True, they no longer suffered the yoke of communism, but the only road that had been built and maintained in the previous 15 years was the highway that led out to BP’s oil refinery and pipeline. While the rest of the country crumbled, the oil that had once made Alfred Nobel rich was once again flowing west.

I had always been curious about the Soviet Union and what life had been like under communism. I had heard some firsthand descriptions from my classmates when they took a school trip to Moscow in the early 80’s, but they mostly talked about how much money they had made by selling all of their Levis jeans. The rest of my background knowledge came from Hollywood movies that amplified Reagan’s rhetoric of the evil empire.

So, when the topic came up in class, I would always take advantage of it to listen and learn from people’s stories. One that I particularly remember was when a student told me about what she missed most about the USSR. It was the news. “Back then there was never any bad news, everything was always good and if something bad did happen, it was someone else’s fault. Even if we knew it wasn’t true, at least it wasn’t depressing. Now, everything is about how awful things are and I just turn off.”

The right may have won the cold war but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t learn from their opponent. Think back to recent rightwing slogans from around the world. 'Make Brexit Happen' or its progenitor, ‘Make America great again’. In order to make it happen, ‘build the wall’. Trump didn’t say he was going to cut taxes that would mostly benefit billionaires, he just said cut taxes. He didn’t say that the American food industry would collapse overnight without illegal workers, he simply said that America needed to be great again. He never explained when or why it had stopped being great. It was somebody else’s fault.

This lesson from the Soviets and other totalitarian regimes has been forgotten by the moralizing left. People don’t want to hear about what they can’t do. They don’t want to hear that they can’t drive certain cars, hunt or go to bullfights. And they certainly don’t want to be publicly sacrificed on the pyres of political correctness for doing so.

'Libertad o comunismo' sounds a lot more attractive than paying more taxes for quality public services. This chimera of freedoms and facile slogans are as seductive as they are disingenuous. A chimera that will only grow if the left continues to forget its past.