Catching up

I finished the little alternative history I began some time ago. Sorry for the delay. Also, there is something I wanted to write about Burn rate I commented on earlier. I feel that I might have been too harsh. The point of the book is not the sale of Wolffe's company but the constant search as to what the Internet actually is. Is it TV? Is it newspaper? Is it telephone? Is there any way how to make money here? The book does not answer the question, but the burning search for the answer is interesting to watch.

The paths to liberation

I was reading The Guardian the other day and came across this comment, with refreshingly unambiguous view of the events in Iraq. It must have been many years since I saw the phrase "puppet regime" in print last time. Actually, today it may be fifteen years, to the day.

Fifteen years ago a train of events was set off that would eventually lead to the collapse of communist regime in Czechland. While on a large scale the demise of communism was surely caused by international events: the American offensive foreign policy, Soviet "perestroika" (in itself brought about by chronic wastefulness of centrally-regulated economy), etc., the actual overthrowing of the regime was accomplished by local forces and local activists.

Ever since these events I was wandering what would happen if Czechoslovakia was liberated by foreign armies. Let's assume that there would be a crisis in Russian leadership in, say, 1979. Brezhnev is dead. The politburo is paralysed by internal struggle for succession and CIA agents from Moscow report that the Red Army would be incapable of prolonged action for six months at least. The hawkish Jimmy Carter (now, that's stretching fiction too far), supported by German and UK leaders (and even farther) orders NATO troops to Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, claiming that they come to liberate these ancient Western countries from the communist yoke.

The draft armies of these countries are equipped with old and unreliable weapons and vehicles. The morale is low, nobody is particularly willing to die for communism, and after the first encounters where ageing T-54s and T-55s are flattened by Leopards and Pattons, even the most enthusiastic are losing heart. The desertions are rife, Prague falls after one week, in Poland the anti-communist popular rising in Warsaw, Gdynia and Gdansk liberate large swaths of the country even before the advancing Western armies, Budapest falls after two weeks, because Austria refused to allow NATO armies passage through its territory.

On the borders of Soviet Union the armies stop and uprisings in Baltic republics are brutally put down by the Red Army. New status quo is established.

Now, there are two paths open to the victorious armies, and these vary by the amount of involvement in the post-war process. One would be to go the way Allies went in 1945: write the new constitution for these countries, replace the local administration with bureaucrats from the US army, and de facto run the country for couple of years until the new administration is ready to take over. A parcel of this would be strict anti-communist laws: public display of hammer and sickle or red five-pointed star would be a punishable offence, Communist party would be banned and any party that would make "communism" or "revolution" part of its program would be banned as well.

The other way is a quick pull-out: new parties are hastily cobbled together, free elections are held at the shortest opportunity possible, and then the armies go home. The Communist party is probably still banned, but it soon regroups under a different name. There is an attempt to rid the administration of the most compromised communists, but it is soon found out that without these "valuable specialists" the state machine would come to a halt.

Now the interesting point is what would be the reaction of people to these two scenarios. The second one is actually almost exactly what happened in '89, only without the tanks rolling over Danube. And today, fifteen years after, this is the best thing about the end of communism: we can kid ourselves that it was our own achievement.

The era from '45 to '89 is something the Czechs are not exactly proud of, but also not unreasonably ashamed of. Surely, there is only a handful of people if any who realize that Czechoslovakia was an ally of a Power that had clearly intended to subjugate the whole world to its inhuman ideology, that Czechoslovakia supplied millions of soldiers to this very purpose, and that only its lucky stars and Western resolve prevented the Cold War turning Hot.

For most Czechs, there was no war at all. The crimes of communism, for them, were not political murders, unfair trials, forced labour, and restricted freedom, but long queues, lack of goods, and laughable statesmen.

My prediction is that this feeling would only deepen in my second scenario. If the end of communism was brought on us from outside, but without forcing the country into renouncing it; if the liberating armies set up the free elections, but left the administration – policemen, judges, state bureaucrats – intact, the people would be even more sentimental about communism. They would blame they problems on the new regime – they do anyway – but the new regime would not be their regime.

In the first case, i.e. more long-term involvement, it may be possible that the situation would be better, and the people actually would identify with the new regime more. This is a paradox, because this regime would actually be more "foreign" than in the previous case. It would depend on the ability of the new establishment to distance itself from communist era and discredit it enough in the eyes of the public.

The parallels with Iraq puppet regime are obvious and I will not dwell on them.

An Obligatory Bush post

Is there a blog on this planet that does not comment on Bush's victory? As stated earlier, it neither surprises nor worries me, though I have reservation about his policies. Actually, my support is emotional rather than rational: Bush is an underdog, in Europe at least. Bush's victory proves that the media are not as strong as they believe themselves to be.

There were elections in this country as well, and the two are worth comparing. Visiting Prague a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by a billboard with enigmatic message: "Prihoda neni nahoda" or, cumbersomely, but accurately, "The event is not random". An insurance company? No, it was the message from Mr. Prihoda (literally "Event") a conservative candidate for a Senate seat.

(The slogan can be traced at least twenty years back: "Nehoda neni nahoda" or "There are no random accidents" was a catchphrase of the then Czech State Insurance Company.)

The floodgates of meaninglessness were opened earlier this year by the PM of our social-democratic government, Mr. Gross. His boyish face with motto "I mean it sincerely" were watching you like the Big Brother from every quarter. Though a great target of parodies and derision, the tone for the campaign was set. There will be no issues. There are no matters. This is a popularity contest.

It was remarked that this pre-election campaign degenerated to the level of a marketing promotion for some FMCG. This is a slight to any self-respecting advertising agency. The ads may mislead, they may lie, but they always try to give you some reason: Buy us, we'll make you happier! Make you younger! Make you look as hip as this happy, shiny people! But what did we get from our politicos? Vote for us because Event is no Accident.

Whatever. The point I was trying to make that the US campaign, for all the bad blood that was spilt, was impressive in its thoroughness. There are important issues for US policy, both domestic and foreign, and all candidates had to take stand on them (some candidates took even more than one stand on many of them; this might have been too much thorough for their own good). Surely there was sloganeering and oversimplifications, but over all I cannot but wish that the level of public discourse here was as 'simple' as in that dumb America.

The suicide of the WestAtomised, by Michel Houellebecq

In a studiously detached prose, this book describes the consumption bonfire consuming the bedrock of Atlantic civilization: the pointless 'replacement' activities of intelligent, educated people deprived of any reasonable purpose, sex devoid of anything but carnal pleasure, life devoid of dignity, as it can be casually terminated by a suicide or an abortion, the loss of moral code, religion, dichotomy of right vs. wrong replaced with pleasant vs. unpleasant.

Of the two half-brother heroes, it would be difficult to say which is more despicable or more pitiful. The failed poet, bobbing along the eddies of life toward that inexorable sinkhole, or the scientist, unable to form any human bond, destroying the life around him, finally Frankenstein-like creating a race of monsters.

Many compare Atomised with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (taking a hint from Houellebecq himself). There are interesting points here: the most obvious one is the difference between the anticipated collectivism of Huxley, and existing individualism described by Houellebecq. Huxley assumed that the breakdown of traditional family and unlimited promiscuity would lead to a sort of collectivism; what would be the point of private property if there is no family, no children one could really call his own? Houellebecq shows that the breakdown of traditional family and unlimited promiscuity lead to increased individualism, if by individualism one means a lonely aloofness.

(The Brave New World however is a book that is chillingly accurate in many other respects: The wheels must turn! A new sport is only allowed when it can be shown that it will require more and more expensive equipment than the existing sports.)

The difference between Atomised and BNW runs deeper. The latter is at its core an optimistic book. It is a warning and you don't warn those whom you consider incapable of changing their ways. The author of Atomised has no such belief. This book is not a warning, it is a statement of fact.

One thing the two books have in common, though, is that they can be both incorrectly described as science fiction. Atomised purports to be written in about 2050. What passes for plot deals with a significant scientific discovery.

The book opens with an interesting point about 'metaphysical changes': both Christianity and modern rational science have risen when the then mainstream school of thinking was at the height of its power – Roman empire or Scholastic church. It follows then that now, when the rational science is untouchable, we are due for another 'metaphysical change' and we turn the first page wondering what this would be and hoping we'll soon find out. When we turn the last but one page we know, and it is an anti-climax. The hero of the book invents a way of stabilizing human DNA so it does not degenerate during cell division, this in turns makes possible a creation of race of immortals – enhanced humans, happy and secure and ready to inherit the Earth as the effete humankind withers away.

(This is Brave New World backward: in BNW a human of our own time comes among the race of happy new men, in Atomised a happy new race of men comes among humans of our own time.)

The ending lends to two readings: one that is literal and one that consider the ending to be just more of assorted irony. With literal reading, it would be easy to dismiss the plot of the book altogether: even if the genetic information does not deteriorate during life, the 'new humans' are still mortal due to accidents or diseases. The cloning does not help, my clone has not my memories and experiences, for all practical purposes it is a different entity. It could be speculated that such society would be more afraid of death than our own, not less. If you can be immortal just by being careful, this does not make for a vibrant society, I would guess.

Besides, it is all just a dirty trick: the two metaphysical changes Houellebecq mentions – Christianity and rational science – did what they did with very little material evidence. That is what is so interesting about them. Why would anybody during the reign of the emperor Trajan think that the Roman empire will not last forever? Why would anybody think that its gods and goddesses are not perfectly adequate for whatever needs man may have? And again, why would anybody in fourteenth or fifteenth century France or Italy think that the Roman Church is not going to last forever? Why would they think that the Church philosophers won't be able to answer all questions eventually?

If the evangelists could turn water into wine wherever they preached the gospel to pagans, if Leonardo could show his masters an atomic bomb, then there would be nothing strange about the victory of their ideas. Yet this is the case for Houellebecq's world; his heroes have a tangible evidence of their preaching and the dilemma facing the mankind is not whether to adopt a new unproven theory but whether to adopt its own demise.

This is not my reading of the book. The book is not about the dilemma mentioned in the preceding paragraph. The book is about the suicide of the West and I think it is obvious that the story of the 'new humans' is intended to show us the depth of our fall. In this respect, the book may be a warning, after all.