After the Rain : how the West lost the East Part 32

It is conceivable that certain parts of the Internet will be "nationalized" (for instance, in the form of a licensing requirement) and tendered to the private sector. Legislation will be enacted which will deal with permitted and disallowed content (obscenity? incitement?

racial or gender bias?).

No medium in the USA (not to mention the wide world) has eschewed such legislation. There are sure to be demands to allocate time (or s.p.a.ce, or software, or content, or hardware, or bandwidth) to "minorities", to "public affairs", to "community business". This is a tax that the business sector will have to pay to fend off the eager legislator and his nuisance value.

All this is bound to lead to a monopolization of hosts and servers. The important broadcast channels will diminish in number and be subjected to severe content restrictions. Sites, which will not succ.u.mb to these requirements - will be deleted or neutralized. Content guidelines (euphemism for censors.h.i.+p) exist, even as we write, in all major content providers (CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy).

The last, determining, phase is The Bloodbath.

This is the phase of consolidation. The number of players is severely reduced. The number of browser types will be limited to 2-3 (Netscape, Microsoft and which else?). Networks will merge to form privately owned mega-networks. Servers will merge to form hyper-servers run on supercomputers. The number of ISPs will be considerably diminished.

50 companies ruled the greater part of the media markets in the USA in 1983. The number in 1995 was 18. At the end of the century they will number 6.

This is the stage when companies - fighting for financial survival - strive to acquire as many users/listeners/viewers as possible. The programming is shallowed to the lowest (and widest) common denominator.

Shallow programming dominates as long as the bloodbath proceeds.

In hindsight, 20 years hence, we might come to understand that computers improved our capacity to do things differently and more productively. But one thing is fast becoming clear. The added benefits of IT are highly sensitive to and dependent upon historical, psychosocial and economic parameters outside the perimeter of the technology itself. When it is introduced, how it is introduced, for which purposes is it put to use and even by who it was introduced - largely determine the costs of its introduction and, therefore, its feasibility and contribution to the enhancement of productivity. The CEE countries better take note.

(Article written on July 26, 1999 and published August 9, 1999

in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 7)

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E P I L O G U E

The Balkans, an eternal crossroad of different civilizations and cultures even today, is considered to be the "navel of the world" or as Sam Vaknin puts it in his erratic, eruptive, intellectual volcano of a book, "After the Rain - How the West Lost the East" - "is the unconscious of the world" ("The Mind of Darkness") or worse, probably a navel, but "the Balkan is a body without a brain" ("h.o.m.o Balka.n.u.s").

There are a few other, similarly neuralgic points on Earth, but what distinguishes the Balkans from the rest is that it is precisely via its central part - Macedonia - that Christianity and modern literacy invaded Europe. The Byzantine civilization - traceable in today's Balkans as a junction of the h.e.l.lenic spirit and the wisdom of Byzantium, deeply rooted in the cultures of Babylon and the old Mesopotamian civilizations - is still of high interest to modern scholars of the Balkans.

Dr. Sam Vaknin is one of these contemporary detectors of the "transitions" in the East, who is trying to discover, understand and direct the Balkans and the East through his publicist work. In his book "After the Rain - How the West Lost the East", Dr. Sam Vaknin is a sincere investigator of the "h.o.m.o Balka.n.u.s", of the Easterner, his mind, culture and way of living, defining him "a full fledges narcissist". Immediately after that, in "The Magla Vocables" he says that even linguistically "it is impossible to really understand an Easterner", mocking or more precisely reaching the level of real offence in portraying the image of the intellectuals of the East ("The Poets and Eclipse").

Reading this large book of essays, however, one should bear in mind that the author is limited by the cliches of his framework of values and thinking given to him by the culture and system of rules from which he originated. Thus, his articles are provocative, turbulent, irritating, revolting. The impact of his writing is terrible with the strength of hurricane. His word often kill, his defeatism nullifies.

Sometimes pretentious, still "After the Rain" represents a serious, lucid and transcendent effort to make the Balkan closer, to introduce the East to the West, ignoring for a moment the pessimistic a.s.sertion that the West already lost the East.

But if this were right, it would have meant that the West is lost, had disappeared in the East. The truth is completely the opposite: The West has yet to find the East. The East, which provided the foundation of contemporary Western civilization, literacy and Christianity, still hibernates within its traditional values as an essential element of the endurance of the people and perhaps as the unique salvation of mankind.

The West has to burst into the wisdom of the East to keep the very roots of life, the wisdom to live in peace and in harmony with G.o.d and with nature. If this should not happen, we will all finish like in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World".

Consequently, when reading these essays, it will not be asking for much to have a dose of restraint towards Dr. Vaknin's sometimes lethal "absolute truths" regarding the Balkans and the East. After you finish reading this book, you can find out not only what the East is - but also what the East is, indeed, not. This is because Dr. Vaknin observes the Balkan and the East only from the dark side, regarding its people as zombies who do not have any idea at all why they are walking on this Earth. Unfortunately for him, life, neither in the Balkans in particular, nor in the East in general, is a pathology as he enjoys saying. That is why some of his articles contain an overly heavy-handed personal touch, momentary sensations and impressions too strong, amounting to exaggeration, or, in other words, he puts things headlong.

In "The MinMaj Rule" his paranoiac fear of the "nation-state" can be felt. His perversity reaches a climax when he finds a justification for the West and its three months long NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (an act without precedent in modern history, which indeed resulted in the same pitiless kind of bombing in Chechnya) and in the acknowledgment that for the Albanian residents of Kosovo "it has not protected their right to self-determination".

Dr. Vaknin likes to see the state as "a community, a majority of minorities united by common rules, beliefs and aspirations ... no longer utopian, it is a realistic model to emulate". In "Herzl's Butlers", he even goes further and in the modern nation state he sees "a reflection of something more primordial, of human nature itself as it resonated in the national founding myths (most of them fict.i.tious or contrived)". Still, he is sufficiently honest to admit that "the Jews (and Germans) came up with the 'objective', 'genetic', 'racial' and 'organic' nation". Indeed, through the periodically harsh critique of the West's actions in the East, transferring into its body Western malignant cells of mafia, drugs, organized crime, corruption etc., the careful reader will discover the glorification of the subjugation of the East by the West.

Dr. Sam Vaknin is not the first one to try to put all the books which deal with the so called "world conspiracy" in the domain of illusion or man's gullibility ("The Elders of Zion"). That was done before in a fine literary manner mixed with factography by another Jew (by father), the writer Danilo Kish from ex-Yugoslavia, in his novel "A Book about Kings and Fools". But if Danilo Kish was exploring the world archives to prove that it is only by coincidence or through an accidental knot of circ.u.mstance that "the book of Nillus" about a "world conspiracy"

was created, thus far Dr. Vaknin is not only mocking the intellectuals and ordinary mortals of the East, but he humiliatingly attributes the existence of that "conspiracy" to the "paranoiac and schizoid nature"

of their minds.

It is interesting that the author uses a tour of the abundant history of the region just to explain the "darkness" of today's. Or, without necessity and astonis.h.i.+ngly, he is giving a huge treatment only to the idea of the - in essence illusory and never existing - "Great Albania", adapting history for his own needs. He even smoothly, in only few lines, gives "the definite historical truths" about the Illyrians and their descendents, a subject on which historians composed large tomes and which they investigated all their lives and about which they still have dilemmas.

Finally, where does Dr. Vaknin think that the West lost the East? Is it on its way from Babylon towards some new "promised lands"? Or, is it maybe - After the Rain - in a Biblical flood?

Although both in the West as well as in the East, it is precisely the Jewish version of the Bible out of the thirteen existing ones that is the dominant (a version which is rather a copy of the prehistoric Bible text of the Sumerians from Mesopotamia) - nevertheless G.o.d promised himself: "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, however evil his inclinations may be from his youth upwards" and G.o.d said: "This is the sign of the covenant which I establish between myself and you and every living creature with you, to endless generations:

My bow I set in the cloud,

Sign of the covenant

Between myself and earth.

When I cloud the sky over the earth,

The bow shall be seen in the cloud.

Then will I remember the covenant which I have made between myself and you and living things of every kind. Never again shall the waters become a flood to destroy all living creatures. The bow shall be in the cloud; when I see it, it will remind me of the everlasting covenant between G.o.d and living things on earth of every kind."

In the Balkans, all things aside, this blessing of G.o.d - the bow - can be often felt and enjoyed. Or as one of our proverbs says - After the Rain always cometh the Sun!

Emilija Geleva

Skopje, February 2000

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T H E A U T H O R

SHMUEL (SAM) VAKNIN

Curriculum Vitae