Should we sum up the results of the past year or the past decade? The exact boundary between decades remains an old, and unresolved, question, but as I see it, the past decade began with Osama bin Laden’s attack on the United States in September 2001 and ended with the Wikileaks disclosures in late 2010. It can be described as a decade of the mad dog that bites the hand that feeds it.
They did not see the danger
When the CIA and other security services were building their super-weapon to use against Soviet troops in Afghanistan – Osama bin Laden’s army – they never dreamt their tame dog would turn on its master, and that we would all live in fear of a possible war between the Christian and Muslim worlds in the early 2000s.
Luckily, we have, so far, managed to avoid that war, for a number of reasons. A great deal has transpired between the two civilizations, but they have mercifully stopped short of an all-out war.
The decade ended with the exposures initiated by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Instead of a war of civilizations, western civilization, with its particular social structure and ideology, now faces a civil war.
Nobody has yet suggested that Assange was trained by the CIA, or some other security service, to undermine and destroy countries that could pose a threat to western civilization. Moreover, the last decade has seen thousands of smiling, idealistic Assanges of both sexes, in many countries, keen to sow the seeds of freedom, particularly freedom of information, in totalitarian countries. Sped on by their unquenchable thirst for freedom at any price, they used the Internet to enlighten the people of Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, Tibet, Timor and anyone else who proved receptive to their arguments.
People who know little or nothing about countries other than their own cannot easily distinguish between this “democracy for export” and its counterpart accepted for internal use across the EU, in the United States and Australia, not to mention Japan. Almost every country has its conservatives and liberals and hence a war of opinions. In the past few years, both the EU and the United States pretended that all was quiet on the home front, even though nearly everyone agreed that quite a few things had, in fact, gone wrong. For example, Europe kept refusing to admit, in public, to having problems with its Muslim populations.
At the same time, they exported ultraliberal ideals, for example regarding the media. In “democracy for export” it is the media’s job to oppose the government and use this freedom of information to curtail the state’s omnipotence. But what about the media’s multitude of other functions, such as educating and informing the general public?
Perhaps they thought that using liberal-minded people within NGOs for regime change in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere, was a risk-free strategy. They thought they would just get on with it, not bite their master’s hand. And then Julian Assange popped up and bit them.
New proletarians
European society, and to a lesser extent American society, differ from that of Russia in that they attempted to eradicate the breeding ground of revolution: the impoverished proletariat who has nothing to lose but its chains. Britain under Thatcher did especially well in that respect: outsourcing manual labor to China has made Britain a country of the middle class.
However, it turns out that there are other groups, apart from the proletariat, who are capable of staging revolutions. One is the lower middle class, or people of limited education who, sensing their inadequacy, are filled with hatred for everyone who can be described as elite. They hate the government and desperately cling onto the ideas of personal freedom and equality. Assange is their hero.
The worst part is that no one thought the world could contain so many Assanges. If there were fewer of them, his extradition and trial would have not raised any eyebrows. But it seems people are afraid of touching him, which is a very ill omen indeed.
This means the book of the decade is not Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” but Stieg Larsson’s “The Millennium Trilogy.” The main heroine of that impotent, glaring example of bad style, that cannot be described as literature, Lisbeth Salander, is a high-functioning autistic savant and genius hacker. Like many anti-heroes in the 19th century Russian literature, Lisbeth is an asocial harbinger of revolution. But she clearly has the author’s sympathy, and that of the readers’ to an even greater extent, which is an alarming symptom of a more widespread malady.
We need to analyze the new western society scrupulously if we are to pinpoint how it differs from those of the world’s future leaders: India and China. We must also locate the difference between anarchic autistics such as Assange and the football fans.
But the hardest part is that we should not be relieved that this phenomenon has, so far, failed to find any expression in Russian society. Although Russian society is very different from that of Europe, it has a tendency to catch European social diseases such as Marxism in their most acute forms.
The Internet monster
The dawn of the Internet age saw the promise of unhindered correspondence and an educational and enlightenment boom. All this was greeted with great enthusiasm. But none of this immense promise has yet transpired; worse still, the Internet has become a weapon used by autistic anarchists like Lisbeth: it has boosted something other than education.
In fact, the Internet is to blame for the overall decline in the standards of education and for the appearance of several semiliterate but extremely sociable and aggressive generations. This process of general degeneration is facilitated by the entertainment industry and the media.
This is not an endemically Russian problem; it concerns Europeans and Americans to an even greater extent. We could try to evade that disease by placing obstacles in the path of progress and putting social development on ice, but not forever.
Have the revolutions started?
Take a closer look at the recent youth revolts in European capitals. Many people explain them away as being a consequence of the financial crisis. But what if it was the other way around?
Ex-Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov recently told several international conferences that an information revolution precipitated the financial crisis because the financial system’s antiquated boundaries stunted the growth of new information opportunities. This fuelled the development of an information monster which in turn provoked a social crisis, in which the “new proletariat” uses the Internet as their weapon of choice as they wage their war on both society and government.
This has been the main outcome of the past decade. One can only hope that there will be fewer problems in the Year of the Rabbit, because the rabbit, after all, seems such a cute, fluffy creature.
The views expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
