The Soviet Union’s decision to impose a blockade on West Berlin in 1948 was meant to show the West that they were not totally cowed. All the pro-Soviet people had been chucked out of governments in most of Western Europe, France in particular. The Cold War had begun. And the Soviet Union thought, why don’t we make a bid for West Berlin and make Berlin the capitol of our Germany. That will show the West that we can’t be taken for granted, they can’t just ride right over us. And they imposed a blockade. Whether they really thought that they would get their way is difficult to know—I’m sure it’s in the archives somewhere—but certainly that blockade was broken. Another reason they wanted the blockade was because it was an anomaly to have Western armies in the middle of a country that had been partitioned. So there was a strategic element there. But certainly they went about it the wrong way, and they didn’t have much support.
My father was an economist. He was actually on Eisenhower’s economic staff at one point, and he worked in Berlin. He told me that the Soviets were trying to steal US currency printing plates. Apparently there was a lot of counterfeiting going on. There was disparate currencies, and the Soviets couldn’t keep their population in check or content with a black market, such as it was.
This is absolutely true. The Soviets couldn’t compete with the West economically. They certainly couldn’t compete with the United States economy, which had emerged from the Second World War much more strengthened. And so they thought, let’s end this anomaly of a Western showcase right on our doorstep.
Are you suggesting you don’t fault the Soviets for building the Berlin Wall, then?
Well, I do fault them for the wall because I think it was foolish to imagine that you can keep people in or change people’s minds by building a wall. It never works like that. We find that time and time again. If people are really determined to do something against the power that either occupies them or controls them, they find a way do it.
Chapter 4
Pax Americana?
Oliver Stone: Conservatives take credit for Reagan ending the Cold War. I think the counterargument would be that the Soviet system had exhausted itself economically and that Afghanistan in some way presaged its own problems for the Soviet Union, as Iraq presaged some problems for the United States. I see some similarities the path the United States has traveled and the one the Soviets traveled.
Tariq Ali: When one system, the Soviet system and all that it entailed, collapsed, in its wake there was a triumphalism in the West for years. We won, we smashed you, we beat you, now we’re dominant. And all over the world, no alternative appeared to be emerging to this narrative. And I think a complacency set in among US leaders. They felt that we can now do whatever we want, get away with whatever we want. There is no one to challenge us. The system is unbeatable. And that is always a dangerous frame of mind for any imperial power—to believe that nothing can effect you, because the world isn’t like that. So the first challenge, curiously enough, came from South America, and it came from a continent that had experimented in neoliberalism. After all, the Chicago boys didn’t try out neoliberalism in Britain first. They tried it out in Chile under Pinochet, and later in Argentina. So you begin to see the emergence of social movements in a number of Latin American countries—Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela—that are fighting against attempts to deprive them of certain things they liked, like free water, transport subsidies, things which in the scale of the world appear very tiny but are very important for the everyday life of many people. And these social movements then produced reactions. In the case of Venezuela, three thousand people trying to protest against the IMF rules were killed in the streets by the military.
This is pre-Chávez?
Pre-Chávez, yes. That’s what produced Chávez. Chávez didn’t drop from the sky. He was produced from within the army, an army that used to massacre its own people. And Chávez and a whole group of junior officers met and said, this is not what we were created for. The only purpose of a military is to defend the country from outside invasion, and yet we’ve been used to kill our own people. That’s how a dissenting group emerged inside the Venezuelan army.
Related developments were taking place in other parts of South America. In Bolivia, the neoliberal government decided to sell the water supply of Cochabamba to a subsidiary of Bechtel, the US corporation. And one of the things the water privatizers got the government to do was to pass a law saying that, from now on, it was illegal for poor people to go onto their roof and collect rainwater in receptacles because that challenged their monopoly of water. There’s an uprising, an insurrection. The military intervened, a kid was shot to death, others were injured. More people came out, and they began to win. And these victories in South America were the first big sign that the old order could not be maintained, that things were changing. That the Washington consensus, postcommunist world ruled by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO no longer could carry on that the same way in South America. Interestingly, these movements were also throwing up political leaders, and these political leaders were winning elections democratically. So you had a big shift away from the guerrilla warfare phase of South American politics, toward mass involvement in democracy, which everyone should have been cheering. I certainly was. Politicians are promising people certain things, and they’re getting elected, and they’re now trying to deliver on those promises. It was totally misunderstood in my opinion, deliberately so by the Bush administration, which tried to crush all these developments, organizing military coups, backing the most reactionary people in these countries.
Bush, Junior?
Bush, Junior. Bush, Junior did all that, backed by Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice in a very reactionary state department.
What about Clinton in Bosnia?
The intervention by the United States in Bosnia, seen by many people as humanitarian, turned out to be a straightforward attempt to increase American power and influence. So you have now a big permanent US missile base in Tuzla, and one of the largest helicopter bases ever in Kosovo. So this was the expansion of US power after the end of the Cold War, but the real resistance in terms of countries began in South America. And that is where it has remained ever since, with this exception: what’s happened now is that the collapse of the neoliberal system, the bursting of the bubble, means the whole world now is waiting for alternatives.
I think it is quite possible that this particular world economic crisis, which is by no means over, is going to change people’s ideas again. To what extent and in what direction we will see. But suddenly the South American experience becomes very important because these leaders who have been attacked in the media, the Bolivarians attacked as crazy, wild people, now seem very sober. And a new administration in Washington is having to deal with them rationally as elected politicians who represent their people. So if this example spreads to other continents, we could be in for interesting times again.
And everywhere we see taxpayers’ money being used to bail out the rich. The whole ideology of neoliberalism is that the state is useless, the market will do everything. The market is supreme. The market collapses, and they fall on their knees before the state, and say to the state, “Help, please.” And taxpayers’ money goes to bail out every single bank in the Western world, more or less. But the effect this will have on popular consciousness, we are waiting to see.