By John Pilger
The war against democracy, which replaced the cold war, had a notable success in Moscow this week. The promoters of the totalitarian "market" accelerated their assault on the lives of millions of ordinary people with the destruction of arguably the second freely elected parliament in 1000 years of Russian history.
Boris Yeltsin, the former Communist Party boss of Sverdlovsk, a position he used to oppose basic democratic rights, brought troops and tanks into the heart of his Russian "democracy" and allowed them to murder the elected representatives of the people. He could have been a Pinochet or a Somoza. [British Prime Minister] John Major, for his part, said he admired Yeltsin's "restraint".
The Orwellian cover given these events in the West is astonishing even by the standards of previous propaganda models, such as the Gulf War, in which the slaughter of 200,000 people was dispatched down the media's memory hole. It would be illuminating to see a comparative study of Pravda's reporting of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union and Western reporting of Yeltsin's Russia. The similarities of systematic, ideological distortion would say much about the propaganda that we in the West often call news.
The BBC, ever conscious of its "impartiality", has led the propaganda barrage, constantly referring to Yeltsin's draconian methods as "reforms" and his parliamentary opponents as "hardliners" and "extremists". Boris the Good, on the other hand, is "the democrat whose patience finally snapped": such a generous description of a man whose troops had just burned the nation's parliament. (Imagine a BBC report from Berlin in 1933: "The Reichstag was burned down only after Herr Hitler's patience snapped".)
Since Yeltsin discovered "democracy" under Gorbachev, he has played to the Western media galley, whose reporting of his rise has helped to sustain him in power. With his American advisers and with American presidents propping him up, here, after 75 years, was a dictator who could deliver the Russian hinterland to foreign capital.
The necessary media mythology quickly followed. This summer, it has been Yeltsin versus the "hardline communist" parliament. In fact, the parliament was neither undemocratic, nor run by so-called hardliners. All the deputies were democratically elected in multi- candidate contests. Like Yeltsin himself, the majority were ex-communists; but most of them were, until recently, Yeltsin supporters. They elected him as the parliament's first chairman, passed the constitutional amendments that launched his presidency and stood by him during the abortive coup in 1991 when the White House and its parliament was the very symbol of Russian democracy.
"Far from defending democracy", wrote Renfrey Clarke, a Russian specialist not published in Britain, "Yeltsin's coup was launched because democratic institutions were beginning to work. The system of checks and balances was functioning as intended, with the legislature and the judiciary curbing the ability of the president to continue implementing policies that had failed and lost popular support. But instead of accepting that the other branches of government had the right to insist on a change of course, Yeltsin responded as a committed totalitarian."
Renfrey Clarke writes for Australia's Green Left Weekly. Together with another freelance, Fred Weir of the Morning Star, and Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, his reports are honourable exceptions in a coverage that has served the expectations of Western economic interests — just as the Western press did before and after the 1917 revolution (with the honourable exception of Morgan Phillips Price of Manchester Guardian).
The largest untold truth in the west is that Yeltsin has returned Russia to military Stalinism, that he is the hardliner, and that the blood spilt this week is the direct result of ruthlessly applied "market reforms" — the same "reforms" that have caused so much suffering in Britain. "Yeltsin's policies have met opposition", wrote Clarke, "not because the Russian parliament is dominated by bloody-minded conservatives — an absurd claim — but because these policies are both contrary to the interests of most Russians and deeply flawed. Few economic programs have been so ill suited, and few have failed so comprehensively."
Under Yeltsin, Russian industrial output has collapsed to 60% of the level of January 1990. Price rises amount to 2600%. Real per capita incomes have dropped to Third World proportions, placing most Russians, who once enjoyed a certain social security, on a par with Mexicans. This winter an estimated 60 million pensioners will be at risk, many of them from starvation. The fanaticism of Yeltsin's "shock therapy" — prescribed by Thatcherite advisers using discredited models — has been accompanied by a campaign against pluralism reminiscent of Thatcher.
In decree after decree, Yeltsin has undermined the new democratic institutions. In Decree No 1400, he suspended the Constitutional Court, Russia's third arm of government. When the chairman of the court, Valery Zorkin, challenged the legality of this, his telephone was cut off on the personal order of the president. During last April's referendum campaign, the national television service was hijacked by Yeltsin, and then refused all but token airtime to opposition candidates.
This week, he has banned a swathe of opposition parties and newspapers with hardly a word of protest from Washington and London. When the Sandinistas briefly suspended an opposition newspaper, funded by the CIA, the American press made this a cause celabre. The Sandinistas were not approved by Washington; Yeltsin is.
Adding to the Orwellian lexicon, the New York Times described his thuggery as a "democratic coup". He has now drained the promised December elections of all democratic substance; millions who suffer from and oppose his "reforms" will have no-one to vote for. His crime, this week, is to have crossed a threshold of violence beyond which lies an abyss well documented in Russian history.
What has happened in Russia is a vivid example of the war against democracy being waged all over the world in the name of "global economy" and "development": the euphemisms for market imperialism. It has brought about what has been described as an "economic holocaust" in the poorest countries, which are 61% more in debt than they were a decade ago and where, according to Unicef, half a million children die every year as a result of a peonage imposed by IMF "structural adjustment" programs. This is seldom news in the west.
Of course, a Boris Yeltsin is not always available; and when democratically elected leaders dare to place the interests of their country before those of the rulers of the world, they become the targets of economic warfare. This happened in Chile under Salvador Allende, in Jamaica during Michael Manley's first term and in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas ("We got rid of the communists in Nicaragua", boasted former President Carter recently.)
When the Guatemalan human-rights activist Ramiro de Leon was elected president last June, he pledged to make his "first priority" the ending of the poverty that afflicts almost 90% of his people. Within a month, the pressure from Washington was such that de Leon complied with IMF demands for an "open market" and economic austerity for the majority. Had he not complied, he said, his country would have been "destabilised".
Such honest nuggets are rare. Last January, the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled "Why Global Investors Bet on Autocrats, Not Democrats". Shortly afterwards, the head of the American bankers, Morgan Stanley and Company, told Business Week: "There is a saying on Wall Street that you buy when there is blood on the streets."
[This article first appeared in New Statesman & Society.]