After the Rain - How the West Lost the East [Paperback]

I admire Vaknin's ability to keep his intellectual balance, no mean feat in the circumstances. He is in the right place at the right time, because when Milosevic falls, there will be a reckoning that will shake Europe from Berlinto the Bosporus to Moscow. My father urged me to prefer small books over thick tomes, arguing that small books meant the author saw clearlyenough to write precisely. It's advice I have rarely had cause to regret. I have the same memory of Vaknin's small and beautifully produced book.

After the Rain is that rarest of reading experiences: principled and thoughtful and irritating and prescient, all at once. Vaknin will be proved right or wrong as history grinds on in the Balkans, but his is a book I will return to.

Moments of Frenzy The essays in the second part, "Economy," stand better on their own feet. Vaknin is on his scholarly turf here, apparently. His unusually lengthy analysis of the International Monetary Fund is highly informative. Still, I must say that I find the moments of frenzy to be the book's most fascinating feature. In any state of advanced social decay, such as a civil war, there comes a point when more "facts" merely move one to impatience. What does it matter how many dozens were assassinated yesterday, or which banker transferred how many millions to his private account? Names and dates become irrelevant when such facts designate a daily routine. I can see that Vaknin is quite capable of reporting a scandal in detail; I think I can see why he doesn't. There's just too much of it. The relevant datum is the great cloud of stench obscuring the heavens, not the location of isolated fires. What we ought to learn--but won't--from the Balkans is that (to use Vaknin's recurrent metaphor) an infection is sometimes best left to spread until it activates sufficient antibodies. The Western solution of treating symptoms and amputating limbs has condemned these people to a hopeless decline. The Foreward is right: the book's sub-title misses the point. I suspect that Vaknin was being diplomatic here, for he might well have written Why the East Detests the West After Attempting an Embrace."

When a man writes with his pen dipped in vitriol, a compilation of his articles are foreordained to make the reader react. Or they might even leave her/him numb, for Israel-born Sam Vaknin is hard-hitting. He does not mince his words, calls a spade a spade and has a sardonic-laconic way of putting things across. The subtitle of After the Rain says it all: the West has, for all practical purposes, lost the East. Vaknin landed in Macedonia in 1996. Between then and 2000, he was a prolific writer who penned down his thoughts mostly in The New Presence and Central Europe Review. The essays in the book in question were published mainly in these journals during the period.

Vaknin is severely critical of the West's duplicity. He quotes Edward Thompson, managing editor of Life from 1949 to 1961, as saying, "Life must be curious, alert, erudite and moral, but it must achieve this without being holier-than-thou, a cynic, a know-it-all or a Peeping Tom." The West has violated Thompson's edict and drive Europe to the verge of war and the region it "adopted" to the verge of economic and social upheaval. Vaknin says, "The Wst lost Eastern and Southeast Europe not when it lied egregiously, not when it pretended to know for sure when it surely did not know, not when it manipulated and coaxed and coerced -- but when it failed." The panacea of free marketry cum democracy that was shoved down the throat of the countries that had just broken free from Communism could not have worked.

The West was naove to believe that the masses who were waiting all these years to be liberated from the Communists, would one fine day revert to capitalism and onwards to development and prosperity. The West never understood how lethargic the Rip van Winkle institutions could render people. Vaknin asserts Communism "was a collaborative effort - a symbiotic co-existence of the rulers and the ruled, a mutual understanding and an all-pervasive pathology." The West failed to see through this incestuous relationship, just as they were fooled by the appearance of law and order. The courts, the police and the media were ossified skeletons that had been drained of any real power. What happened in the bargain was that one criminal association was substituted by another. More often than not these comprised the same people. "Post communist societies are sick and their institutions are a travesty." The kernel of good people here, a stifled, suppressed and mocked lot, should be the ones who must be given voices.

The socialist/communist professors of yesterday cannot be teachers of capitalism today. Intelligence and knowledge do not matter since capitalism is not a theoretical construct merely, but a way of life. Inefficiency, corruption and pathological economic thinking has castrated them emotionally and intellectually. Workers and managers of the communist era cannot function efficiently in a capitalist system for the same reason. Vaknin scoffs at Balkan intellectuals too insisting that they have no fire in them.

Vaknin derides instant education in a society where everything is up for sale; where students of economics have not heard of Kenneth Arrow and students of medicine offer sex or money or both to their professors to graduate. He delves into linguistics and semantics and argues that this is a solipsistic world where communication is permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is to throw others off the track. Vaknin examines the issue closely since he believes language is a leading indicator of the psychological and institutional health of social units. He stresses on the imperative need to bell the cat in a system where graft and fear rule. But then the West, particularly the United States, is in a morbid habit of "creating pairs of villains and heroes, monsters and saints where there are none". He believes the wars in Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia were nothing short of gangland warfare. These were skirmishes between gangs of criminals, disguised as politicians etc. Crime prevails since free market flourishes. Criminals, after all, are private entrepreneurs.

Vaknin also writes about his impressions on the economy (or, whatever is left of it) in these liberated countries. It is, however, the essays classified under the head "The People" that are more acerbic and provocative than the ones categorised under "The Economy". Maybe, because it is finally the people who matter.

This is a series of short essays, written and published over the last few years, on the politics and economics of present-day Central and Eastern Europe. More specifically, it is about the breakup of Yugoslavia, written from the perspective of someone who has spent the last several years living in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Therefore, the author has seen many things from the "inside" (a very rare perspective here in the West). When politicians or government agencies in the West are accused of corruption or gross stupidity, no one bats an eyelash. When the same thing happens in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the offenders are subject to heaps of scorn, diatribes and/or sanctions. The West firmly believed that if the communist hierarchy was removed in Eastern Europe, millions of common people would embrace capitalism like a long-lost relative; all the West had to do was provide the opportunity. The West didn't realize that communism was a mutual undertaking, a decades long symbiotic relationship between all parts of society.

"Post communist societies are sick and their institutions are a travesty."

Privatization, the selling of state assets to private companies to encourage capitalism, is little more than a "spastic orgy of legalized robbery of state assets" where millions lost their jobs while a few people became rich. Large amounts of foreign aid, intended to help the suffering people of Kosovo, ended up in markets, both white and black, all over the region, still carrying the stamps of their donors. UN forces have been known to require bribes to let goods into Serbia. A system of winks and nods, plus lots of palm greasing, came into existence between the multilateral institutions and the "ruling mob families that pass for regimes in these parts of the planet."

Some knowledge of present-day European politics and economics (more than comes from watching the TV evening news) would help in reading this book. Otherwise, this is a very good and well-written group of essays from an extremely needed perspective (here in the West). This one is well worth reading.

This is a series of articles written and published in 1996-2000 in Macedonia, in Russia, in Egypt and in the Czech Republic.

The book contains articles and essays of differing nature but can be roughly divided to three. One part social critique in an almost biblical style, true Jeremiads. The author's main thesis is that the West missed a unique historical opportunity to unite Europe and that the peoples of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe are beyond salvation, deformed and pathologized by communism irreconstructibly.

The second part comprises articles about the economies of the region. Quite a few articles deal with the history of the region with emphasis on Yugoslavia, Albania and inbetween (Kosovo). This is the third part.

The Alien and the Cavemen
Sam Vaknin came to my country (Macedonia) in 1996. In the space of 18 months, he succeeded to become a public figure, known for his courage in standing up to what he perceived to be a kleptocracy. Subsequently, he left Macedonia and lived in Russia and in the Czech Republic - only to return, a year later, as the Economic Advisor to the Macedonian government during and after the Kosovo crisis.

I published Sam's previous book ("Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited", also available from Barnes and Noble). "After the Rain" was a natural extension.

The book contains articles and essays of differing nature but can be roughly divided to three. One part - social critique in an almost biblical style, true Jeremiads. Sam's main thesis is that the West missed a unique historical opportunity to unite Europe and that the peoples of Central, Eastern and Central Europe are beyond salvation, deformed and pathologized by communism irreconstructibly.

The second part comprises articles about the economies of the region. Quite a few articles deal with the history of the region with emphasis on Yugoslavia, Albania and inbetween (Kosovo). This is the third part. I cannot say that I fully agree with Sam. I can't even say that I MOSTLY agree with him. Yet, he deserves to be heard with the same passion and love that he wrote. —Lidija Rangelovska, Narcissus Publications

Sam Vaknin was born in Israel in 1961. A financial consultant and columnist, he lived and published in 11 countries. An author of short stories, the winner of many literary awards, an amateur philosopher - he is a controversial figure. This is his tenth book.

In Noah's Ark
This is a series of articles written and published in 1996-2000 in Macedonia, in Russia, in Egypt and in the Czech Republic.

The book contains articles and essays of differing nature but can be roughly divided to three. One part—social critique in an almost biblical style, true Jeremiads. The author's main thesis is that the West missed a unique historical opportunity to unite Europe and that the peoples of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe are beyond salvation, deformed and pathologized by communism irreconstructibly.

The second part comprises articles about the economies of the region. Quite a few articles deal with the history of the region with emphasis on Yugoslavia, Albania and inbetween (Kosovo). This is the third part.

How the West lost the East. The economics, the politics, the geopolitics, the history, the conspiracies, the corruption, the old and the new, the plough and the internet—it is all here, in prose, as provocative and vitriolic and loving and longing as I could make it.

Reading this book, I wish upon the reader the joy and the revulsion, the dark fascination of this region and its surrealist dreams and nightmares. This is what I experience daily here and it is my hope that I succeeded to convey the siren's song, the honeyed trap, the lure and the allure of this tortured corner of the earth.

SHMUEL (SAM) VAKNIN Sam Vaknin was born in Israel in 1961. A financial consultant and columnist, he lived (and published) in 11 countries. An author of short stories, a winner of literary awards, an amateur philosopher - he is a controversial figure. This is his ninth book.

From The Mind of Darkness:

"'The Balkans' - I say - 'is the unconscious of the world'. People stop to digest this metaphor and then they nod enthusiastically. It is here that the repressed memories of history, its traumas and fears and images reside. It is here that the psychodynamics of humanity - the tectonic clash between Rome and Byzantium, West and East, Judeo-Christianity and Islam - is still easily discernible. We are seated at a New Year's dining table, loaded with a roasted pig and exotic salads.

I, the Jew, only half foreign to this cradle of Slavonics. Four Serbs, five Macedonians. It is in the Balkans that all ethnic distinctions fail and it is here that they prevail anachronistically and atavistically. Contradiction and change the only two fixtures of this tormented region.

The women of the Balkan - buried under provocative mask-like make up, retro hairstyles and too narrow dresses. The men, clad in sepia colours, old fashioned suits and turn of the century moustaches. In the background there is the crying game that is Balkanian music: liturgy and folk and elegy combined. The smells are heavy with musk-ular perfumes. It is like time travel. It is like revisiting one's childhood."

From The Caveman and the Alien:

"The West has grossly and thoroughly violated Thompson's edict. In its oft-interrupted intercourse with these forsaken regions of the globe, it has acted, alternately, as a Peeping Tom, a cynic and a know it all. It has invariably behaved as if it were holier-than-thou. In an unmitigated and fantastic succession of blunders, miscalculations, vain promises, unkept threats and unkempt diplomats - it has driven Europe to the verge of war and the region it "adopted" to the verge of economic and social upheaval. Enamoured with the new ideology of free marketry cum democracy, the West first assumed the role of the omniscient. It designed ingenious models, devised foolproof laws, imposed fail-safe institutions and strongly "recommended" measures. Its representatives, the tribunes of the West, ruled the phlebeian East with determination rarely equalled by skill or knowledge. Velvet hands couched in iron gloves, ignorance disguised by economic newspeak, geostrategic interests masquerading as forms of government characterized their dealings with the natives. Preaching and beseeching from ever higher pulpits, they poured opprobrium and sweet delusions on the eagerly deluded, naive, bewildered masses. The deceit was evident to the indigenous cynics - but it was the failure that dissuaded them and all else. The West lost Eastern and Southeast Europe not when it lied egregiously, not when it pretended to know for sure when it surely did not know, not when it manipulated and coaxed and coerced - but when it failed. To the peoples of these regions, the king was fully dressed. It was not a little child but an enormous debacle that exposed his nudity. In its presumptuousness and pretentiousness, feigned surety and vain clichs, imported models and exported cheap raw materials - the West succeeded to demolish beyond reconstruction whole economies, to ravage communities, to bring ruination upon the centuries-old social fabric, woven diligently by generations. It brought crime and drugs and mayhem but gave very little in return, only an horizon beclouded and thundering with eloquence. As a result, while tottering regional governments still pay lip service to the Euro-Atlantic structures, the masses are enraged and restless and rebellious and baleful and anti-Western to the core. They are not likely to acquiesce much longer - not with the West's neo-colonialism but with its incompetence and inaptitude, with the non-chalant experimentation that it imposed upon them and with the abyss between its proclamations and its performance. In all this time, the envoys of the West - its mediocre politicians, its insatiably ruthless media, its obese tourists and its armchair economists - continued to play the role of God, wreaking greater havoc than even the original. While knowing it all in advance (in breach of every tradition scientific), they also developed a kind of world weary, unshaven cynicism interlaced with fascination at the depths plumbed by the local's immorality and amorality. The jet-set Peeping Toms resided in five star hotels (or luxurious apartments) overlooking the communist shantytowns, drove utility vehicles to the shabby offices of the native bureaucrats and dined in $100 per meal restaurants ("it's so cheap here'). In between sushi and sake they bemoaned and grieved over corruption and nepotism and cronyism ("I simply love their ethnic food, but they are so ..."). They mourned the autochtonal inability to act decisively, to cut red tape, to manufacture quality, to open to the world, to be less xenophobic (while casting a disdainful glance at the sweaty waiter). To them it looked like an ancient natural phenomenon, a force of nature, an inevitability and hence their cynicism. Mostly provincial people with horizons limited by consumption and by wealth, they adopted cynicism as shorthand for cosmopolitanism. They erroneously believed it lent them an air of ruggedness and rich experience and the virile aroma of decadent erudition. Yet all it did is make them obnoxious and more repellent to the residents than they already were.

Ever the preachers, the West - both Europeans and Americans - upheld themselves as role models of virtue to be emulated, as points of reference, almost inhuman or suprahuman in their taming of the vices, avarice up front. Yet the disorder in their own homes was broadcast live, day in and day out, into the cubicles inhabited by the very people they sought to so transform. And they conspired and collaborated in all manner of corruption and crime and scam and rigged elections in all the countries they put the gospel to. In trying to put an end to history, they seem to have provoked another round of it - more vicious, more enduring, more traumatic than before. That the West will pay the price for its mistakes I have no doubt. For isn't it a part and parcel of their teaching that everything has a price and that there is always a time of reckoning?"