Launching the Labour manifesto for the recent British election, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stood against the backdrop of a golden cornfield and promised a future fair for all. As I watched, I was struck by a powerful sense of deja vu. Where had I seen and heard all that before? Yes, of course, the Soviet Union circa 1980 — the old propaganda that spoke of bumper harvests and five-year plans fulfilled and overfulfilled.
Not that the British Labour Party — or indeed crisis-hit Britain — are alone in making me feel like I am back in the Soviet Union. I spent most of 2009 in sunnier and economically healthier Australia, but that too turned out to be a surprisingly Soviet experience.
Is it just me or is the West really starting to resemble Russia under former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, just as Russia is beginning to look a bit more like the free world?
Every schoolchild knows what was missing in the old Soviet Union: freedom. Information was power, and the authorities made sure that the people received only a diluted dose that came through the filter of censorship.
The state still controls the media in modern Russia, and elections are manipulated to ensure a satisfactory outcome for the Kremlin. But if they make an effort, today’s Russians can find out whatever they want to know by surfing the Internet. They can speak freely — and they do.
Meanwhile in the West, it seems to me that we are putting gags over our own mouths, censoring ourselves lest we give offense and otherwise tying ourselves up in self-defeating knots. Political correctness, excessive fear of litigation and absurd considerations of health and safety are all making us live smaller, more cautious lives. ?
Like any Westerner, I am shocked when I hear the overtly anti-Semitic, racist, sexist and homophobic things that some Russians say. I deeply believe in equality. But I also believe in the right for idiots to express themselves.
Gagging ourselves is no guarantee that we are not still thinking our poisonous or misguided little thoughts. And when we are all wearing gags, there is a danger that we assume what others are thinking, rather than know what is on their minds.
All of this I said to my students at the Australian university where I taught journalism for a semester last year. I think it came as a breath of fresh air to them. The students had been told that they would be writing mainly for people with a mental age of 15. The students themselves had been victims of dumbing-down at school and in the media, as I could see from the generally low standard of their work. They hadn’t been allowed to fail, and thus they couldn’t excel either. They were reduced to the level of the lowest common denominator. Wasn’t it the Communists who used to do that?
University policy did not allow the students to go out and do street interviews. Apparently the university feared lawsuits or the consequences of one of the students tripping on the sidewalk. All the future journalists could do was sit in class and interview one another.
In one lesson, I asked the students to look at a text about the high proportion of aboriginal men in Australia’s prisons.
“You couldn’t print this,” one young man said. “It’s politically incorrect.”
“No,” another said, “that’s inverted racism. The question you have to ask is why there are so many aboriginal men in prison.” Indeed.
So we had a lively discussion. Within the four walls of my classroom, it was possible for anything to be said out loud and dealt with. I began to feel like a Russian dissident, running an underground seminar, hoping that the room wasn’t bugged, praying that the thought police weren’t waiting outside.
Was it just me remembering a Soviet past that I knew only too well?
A Russian friend, who migrated to Sydney, told me of his experiences working for a corporation. He’d been called to a meeting, he said, and ordered to write an essay on why he loved his company. “Just like in the old days, when we had to say why we loved the Communist Party.”
Perhaps the management meant to weed out the obedient workers and promote the free thinkers who refused to write the essay. But either way, one would have thought that the customer should have been paramount in company policy. Don’t get me going on a rant about “customer service,” or we’ll be here all day.
Rather, let us consider corruption, which we always used to think of as an East European problem until we discovered that Britain’s members of Parliament were mired in it, blowing taxpayers’ money on moats and duck houses. Not to mention corruption scandals in Australia.
Now what do you do when you have a plank in your own eye? You look for the mote in someone else’s, of course.
As Russia’s rulers have always known, the best way to divert attention from internal problems is to focus on the enemy outside. So the United States and its allies pursue its war on terrorism and send their troops to Afghanistan. I can hardly believe that I am writing this.
In May 1988, I was one of a few Western journalists to ride in the first convoy of Soviet tanks to pull out from Afghanistan. The stream of body bags coming home from the unwinnable war had become too much for the leadership, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had ordered a withdrawal.
Fast forward to 2010, and almost nightly on British television we hear that another soldier has been killed in the Helmand province. “He was defusing a roadside bomb. His family has been told,” the announcer says. “His family has been told” — as if that somehow makes it better. “His family has been told” is a formula used again and again, like nails being hammered into a coffin, like the cliches of Soviet news.
The draining involvement in Afghanistan was a painful period in Russian history. Indeed, it contributed to the Soviet collapse. But it also led to some national soul-searching and rethinking. The withdrawal was an important part of perestroika.
And now I think the time has come for some perestroika in the West. It needs to look in the mirror and admit what’s rotten, what’s absurd and what’s limiting about its own society.
The fact that I can publish this article means that Western society is still free. But freedom is hard-won and easily lost. The West cannot allow any more erosion but must fight to strengthen what remains of its liberty.
Russians must strengthen their freedom, too. Under Vladimir Putin, they slipped back into some Soviet habits that perhaps, for a while at least, made them feel secure.
As a journalist writing from Moscow, the question I always asked was: “Are ordinary Russians living better?” I now ask the same question about ordinary people in the West. Are we eating junk food or good bread? Are we living like mice or free men and women?
Helen Womack recently returned to Moscow as a correspondent of the Fairfax newspapers. This article first appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald.