Comparing the Western “Rule of Law”
with the Socialist “System of Injustice”
is a prelude to declaring war!

[From Karl Held and Theo Ebel, The Free World Wants War! (Resultate Verlag: Munich, 1986)

The free world considers its world politics to be a struggle of right against wrong. The Russian criminals must justify themselves before the “Right” world system and deserve to be justly punished by the forces of good.

The idea that communism is an aberration of human history whose last chapters are just being written can by no means be attributed specifically to President Ronald Reagan, who allegedly is not capable of differentiating and can only think in terms of good guys and bad guys. Even though the sentence originally came from Reagan, it is the common property of all those Western statesmen and their echoers in the media who are masters of “subtle thought” and “moderate” formulation. Every official political statement, every editorial in the press, and everything the free scientific world has to say on the subject is bent on proving one thing: that the socialist states, their economy, and their politics actually have no right to exist. The striking thing about this proof is not so much the idiotic argumentation put forward with such self-assurance to support it, but rather the unconditional hostility and the unshakably clear conscience of those who consider themselves authorized by history to execute the sentence that has been so long in waiting.

1. When Western peace and freedom fighters take a look at Soviet foreign policy, they come up with a kind of vocabulary which they have prohibited for at least sixty years in connection with the politics of their home countries. They discover unquestionable cases of expansion and imperialism when, in a westward-looking world of about 160 regional sovereigns registered at the U.N., the Russians court the favor of a few friendly governments (Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Vietnam – and that is virtually the whole list) by giving them gifts, building up their police forces, supplying them with weapons against their enemies or sometimes even having the Cubans send soldiers. All this is known as “maintaining our partnership” and “aiding the Third World” when Western states are at it.

When it becomes apparent that the Soviet Union cannot make much use of the international friendships it maintains, that it does not want to, and cannot, do more than obtain the negative result of having detached a country from its enemy’s front, or perhaps gain some strategic use – marine bases, etc. – this exceptional case when it comes to modern world politics is taken to prove how very evil the Soviet Union actually is. Yet it indicates that the reasons for the Russians wooing friendly governments do not lie in the socialist economy, but are of a purely defensive nature.

In a world of states which is organized by the enemy and in view of the threat this involves, the Soviet Union is out to strengthen its camp by acquiring new allies so that it can stand up for itself militarily all over the world. The fact that the economic planners of the country with the most natural resources do not even try to control the extraction of mineral resources and the cultivation of saleable agricultural products in their few friend’s countries never leads anyone to realize that maybe that is not what they are interested in. For a Western observer, this is merely further evidence that the Russians are not even able to manage that! The fact that they pay into the bargain when wooing “friends” – they really do give steel works as presents, and when they build roads, it is not because the transportation on them pays off for their or the native economy – is regarded, on the one hand, as just punishment for their rotten economy not even being able to exploit the “Third World,” which is why they have no right to it either. On the other hand, the same arbiters of Russian world politics are absolutely certain that the “Russians have nothing to give away.”

People here are not willing to acknowledge that the Russians’ international involvements have any benefit for them – and turn this into a tough argument: the Russians must be pursuing a thoroughly underhanded interest, directed solely – in view of its uselessness for economic gain – to power and oppression. In other words, the Soviets are supposed to have the absurd desire to dominate purely for the sake of dominating. The other system is simply believed capable of such viciousness, so that it appears well motivated and perfectly understandable, by contrast, that “we” must straighten things out with a lot of bloodshed in the “Third World” since “we” are not dependent on their raw materials.

NATO people find more than enough justification for this when they see how little “dependency” the Russians create by supplying arms and donating dams and, on the other hand, how government leaders in southern latitudes worry about being taken into consideration in the “world economy” and therefore make quite a few “commitments” of their own accord. These NATO partisans take some spiteful delight in interpreting China’s or Egypt’s switch to the Western camp as the liberation of these peoples from the stifling embrace of the Russian bear. The fact that Western credit and military “assistance” determine the “stability” and the interests of entire states comes up, if at all, in connection with the question of whether the debts are not too large for the calculations of the international banking system. The poverty and violence down there are known as “underdevelopment” – and the Russians are definitely not doing enough about it. Because the West has more to offer the leaders of friendly nations by way of arms and financial support for their state apparatus, the West is the natural friend of the peoples ruled by means of these arms and state apparatus, and the East is their enemy and has no business going beyond its own national borders.

2. The way the Russians run their economy is just as illegitimate at home as it is abroad; for it is hopelessly inefficient. This verdict on the socialist economy is reached by the same logic as is used for judging socialist foreign policy: because these countries do not measure the success of their economy by the growth of their capital, they prove to be absolutely incapable of bringing about capitalistic growth. The Russians are supposed to be failing at something they do not even want to do!

News programs inform the Western public that working people over there go about their daily work without that terribly motivating threat of possibly losing their jobs, and without competing with an ever ready host of unemployed to increase their performance. And lo and behold! They do not accomplish a thing! People can occasionally come to work late, they can go to the doctor and put in their daily queuing during their work hours, and nobody breaks his neck while working either. Standard of living? Or at least a nice leisurely pace of things? Not a bit of it – the socialist economists sin against the people’s right to an economy which makes proper use of them and “grows” at their expense!

The same commentators have no problem announcing the exact opposite as well; medals for the “heroes of socialist labor” are no indication to them that increases in performance are stimulated there by moral means, i.e. pretty feebly; they realize even less that Russian society does not have that “silent pressure of circumstances,” i.e. the workplaces of capitalistic factories programmed for profitable performance. Their diagnosis is different and fairly simple: over there, exploitation “pure and simple” prevails, and “everyone” is at the mercy of the sole employer, the state, which does not reward people with wages, but with cheap medals – in capitalism, you only get a medal after working for your company for 30 years.

One is told that extremely low prices are fixed in the socialist countries to ensure that the population is supplied with the necessities of life; housing, staple foods and public transportation cost so little that no one needs to stint on them. Although this actually shows that at least the basic necessities are not used in the socialist countries to relieve people of their wages and put the good money back where it belongs – in the hands of people who are able to increase it – expert critics of socialism can make out only one thing: distortion – nothing but false prices! An economy can never work, of course, if it does not make every commodity as expensive as possible for as much money as possible to be made out of it. For experts, trained by capitalism, cheap food means incomprehensible “subsidizing,” which indicates “mismanagement” and is actually impossible in view of the low rate of labor productivity.

In the eyes of critical Western economic experts, the socialist countries are maintaining a system not at all capable of surviving, which cannot escape contempt even in view of dubious achievements in technical disciplines such as aircraft construction. The Soviet Union’s civilian and military showpieces only go to show how insidious the socialist system is: although its economy does not really allow for it, it constructs absolutely modern weapons – which it is not entitled to have due to its underproduction of food (that was too cheap a minute ago!). A state is only allowed to possess technically perfect weapons if it has progressive rent increases on a free housing market, low wages, uncontrolled meat and petrol prices and an anti-inflationary sales tax rate. This makes its arms harmonize perfectly with humanity’s wishes for articles of consumption.

3. Since Westerners prove the inefficiency of the socialist economy simply by measuring it by the standards of capitalistic success, they arrive at the intended condemnation all the more reliably by the method of openly comparing the systems.

This comparison cannot fail for the simple reason that the analytic mind making it is certain from the start that everything bad over there is due to the system, whereas the mystery that people actually do live there can only be explained by their industriousness, which they summon up in spite of everything. Conversely, the comparer of the systems knows that in the free world life itself is due to the excellent organization of the state and the economy, whereas all the imperfection which also exist over here must be answered for by us “human beings,” with our human failure. This self-understood bias is what prevents these comparers’ ridiculous findings from being greeted with gales of laughter since it is clear from the very start that deficiencies over here must by no means be evaluated the same way as deficiencies over there.

The business section of a newspaper will publish, on the left hand side of the page, an anxious report on the economic crisis which is still not overcome in Western countries after three years of real stagnation and, on the right-hand side of the page, a scornful remark that East Germany’s economic growth, being 4.5%, has once again lagged far behind the figure in the plan. This kind of problem is solved in the West by having everyone lend a helping hand and moderating their demands, being a problem about which no one should make any “hasty” generalizations, and for which no one and nothing can be blamed. But in the case of the socialist countries, even a difference between planned growth and actual growth proves how hopelessly unrealistic it is to attempt to plan economic processes, just as every real or imaginary bottleneck behind the “iron curtain” entitles the observer to make any generalization he pleases about the “system” and immediately gives it the blame. In a system like that, any efforts to make reforms only conceal its inviability.

Due to this method, sheer facts become evidence: one need only mention that there were no bananas to be had in Leipzig or that factories are idle in Poland due to a lack of spare parts – and a NATO friend knows exactly what to think of it. The “system”– and this is the only thing one needs to know about it – is to blame. No one is prepared to count the condemned buildings or the shut-down factories in the West, and no one could ever get upset in such a fundamentally anti-system way about the lack of affordable housing in Western cities as people do about the lack of bananas in the East (while fruit is being destroyed over here in the meantime to keep the prices stable).

In the golden West, millions of people starve each year – and not just on the southern fringes of the free market economy, but also in the middle of the richest country in the world, in the American automobile city of Detroit. Is this the fault of the system? Impossible! This is a problem – and an inexplicable one at that: President Reagan is financing – no, not food stamp programs, he cut those shortly before the winter of starvation in Detroit – a scientific investigation of the utterly obscure causes of such poverty. In the socialist countries, on the other hand, where a host of accredited snoops ferret out the most out of the way defects, there are no reports of hunger, not to mention starvation; instead, even people with higher incomes have to queue up at times. This is due to the planned economic system and could never be a mere mishap.

4. This “proof” that socialism is a fairly useless kind of capitalism demonstrates at most how backward and how inferior it is – but never justifies hostility. If they are incapable of doing anything right, who needs to be afraid of them? This is why the comparison of the system is expanded into a demonstration that the other system conflicts with Human Nature. People never tire of proving that no Western citizen could ever live under Russian rule, the essential argument being that it is “human nature” to be a subject of a capitalist democracy. An imaginary projection of Western citizens into the other system proves that the latter does not correspond to the virtues and habits which people must acquire over here – i.e. it is hostile to humans.

a) Poverty is by no means unknown to people in the free world. Never-ending uncertainty about one’s economic existence, the need to save money and go into debt are constant for the great majority in the model Western democracies, and there are a lot of pleasures most people have only read about in magazines. However, everyone is free to choose from a wide selection of interpretations of his own modest life: unfair treatment, chances one has missed and personal failure are comforting, though mistaken, ways people are allowed to account for their situation. Expert instruction is provided by the media.

Poverty in socialism is quite different. People have no chance to get rich – and this is the fault of the state, which deprives its citizens of the possibility – which the Western ones missed anyway – of getting ahead in competition. This is an assault on human beings, who supposedly have, of all things, a right to have been the architects of their own bad luck.

b) This right flourishes in the free world and becomes manifest as freedom of speech, which is neither granted nor protected in the socialist countries. Western citizens know all about it, especially when someone starts talking big over here. They do not refute the criticism that has been voiced, but they certainly take the critic to task. They remind him that he is allowed to have an opinion, should be grateful for this and therefore consider his objections to the state and capital trivial. This very fundamental prohibition of all criticism of one’s own system is the only thing people come up with when they profess a fondness for the permission to oppose the system – in the socialist countries, that is.

Those who demand that the socialist state should grant permission to be hostile toward it deliberately overlook what kinds of free opinions circulate in the paradise of democracy. It is irrelevant to them that a whole free press, along with radio and television, are constantly busy telling citizens which interests must make way for the other ones. This is just as irrelevant as the criteria – so easy to detect – which is obeyed by the popular papers or on the news programs. One is in fact allowed to be terribly concerned about the success of politics and business, to search for the guilty party, and to nail everyone down to his “contribution.”

If anyone takes the – dissenting – view that the objectives of the nation and its business world are not at all good for him or most other people, he learns how unpleasantly a self-respecting democracy treats its “dissidents.” And this is just what the admirers of free speech consider extremely fair; when they say, “if you don’t like it, why don’t you move to Moscow!” they are making no secret of their political recipe. They would like to slap everyone they think goes too far over here with exactly the same thing they disapprove of so vehemently over there – namely, state control of sentiments dangerous to the state! Their implication that this state control has yet to be established here has to do with the fact that they are not personally acquainted with the techniques of observation by the democratic secret service, the prohibition on pursuing their professions, etc. – because they “toe the line.” Furthermore, they would immediately welcome the usual Western methods if they knew about them. After all, they do not merely plead for restraint when it comes to criticism on the grounds that “it is allowed over here.” They consider criticism to be unjustified as such and use their freedom of speech to contribute to its repudiation, which in practice lies in the competence of diverse authorities!

With this attitude, one really does not need to waste time considering that the Eastern bloc tolerates plenty of dissenting opinions – starting with the jokes about the Russians including the Church opposition and workers’ struggles and going as far as renegade governments within the “bloc” – and that the free world, on the other hand, is not at all squeamish about eliminating its troublesome elements.

When virtuous Western citizens go about criticizing the socialist countries, they will certainly never come up with a comparison between the two “systems.” When they are out to prove that existing socialism is inhuman and unworthy of life, not even unemployment, which is really jabbered about enough in the West (“social problem number one”), gives socialism a chance to gain some credit. Not even the millions of permanently unemployed in the free world would consider crossing the “iron curtain” in their imagination when they compare their own certain and continual descent into poverty with the modest solidity of socialist job security. They too – especially such people! – are expected to attach more importance to their right to free elections so that they can use it, like their colleagues on the other side of the “curtain,” to fall into line with the 95% of parties which support the state! This allows them to savor without restraint their unrenounceable right to free speech and to curse the commies and the foreigners all they want.

Still, even though people may come to the conclusion on the basis of such “evidence” that they would rather die than live under socialist rule – this never amounts to more than their being pleased about how lucky they are to live in the West. The extreme contortions of Western ideologists also makes it clear that it is not you or I who are bothered by the Russians; they bother states, not private individuals. In any case, people’s satisfaction about having their home in the better half of the world is no basis for drawing those particular conclusions which are always due when the socialist countries once again come off badly after all the advantages and disadvantages have been weighed. It is not the private individual happy with his democracy who draws these conclusions, but the citizen and nationalist who has made his rulers’ wishes and annoyances his own business. Only someone who considers his government’s problems to be the catalog of his own needs, completely forgetting which “problems” his rulers imposed on him, feels bothered by the Russians.

Only this kind of person thinks the Russians in the Kremlin violate the rules of international etiquette while depriving their own people of their human rights and mismanaging their economy. And that they prevent their violations from being corrected – due to their political force! This is why Western politicians, like their loyal partisans, always discover their powerlessness when it comes to the Eastern bloc. They are evidently keen on exporting the blessings of a free market economy to the people in the socialist countries, whether they want them or not.

The fact that this unnatural planned economy still exists at all is for Western know-it-alls an indication of the force the nation-wide prison uses to combat its natural downfall. People who openly support “our” government’s force and just cannot get enough of it do not hesitate to call every government over there a “regime.” And this is because they are unwilling to tolerate an alternative power beyond the control of their own state. For such a power obstructs justified interference by the only state that deserves recognition. For the simple reason that the use of force by a Western state conforms with the law and human nature, a socialist state’s use of force makes it “despotic”; the much more generous use of the Western state’s instruments of violence against demonstrators and other enemies of the state only goes to show what chaotic elements the rule of law must deal with. From this point of view, it does not matter that the socialist state powers also have their laws, their constitution, and their organs of justice. The difference between the illegality of socialist state power and the legal Western kind is simply that Western law does not hold over there. Over there, the constitution is not dedicated to the freedom of property and business, but to the planned increase in socialist national income. This does not cause the socialist state power to get in the way of a single Western street sweeper, but it obstructs the right of the West to interfere and is therefore illegal.

This fundamental excommunication from the world of humane rule is older than Reagan’s presidency and older than NATO’s double-track decision – it goes back to the foundation of NATO, when the capitalist states in charge agreed on the following foremost objective for their foreign policy (it was not intended for domestic use at all): joint, and therefore world-wide, defense of the “rule of law,” its “liberal traditions” and “democracy.”

The useless power was accused of having an infamous bent for power politics and aiming to change all the lovely and undeniably positive achievements of the second world war. The masters of the West borrowed their catchword for the forbidden intervention of the Soviet Union in world politics from socialist ideology itself. “World revolution,” that ideal of a world freed from capital, from the violent laws of private property, was still part of the Kremlin catechism. The fact that the Kremlin was practicing a somewhat different interpretation of the matter than dead old Karl Marx was no cause for confusion for the NATO masters. For them, there is no difference whatsoever between removing useful states and peoples from the Western “sphere of influence” and abolishing capital and its mightily exercised freedom. The Soviets’ definition of their world politics as “peaceful coexistence” was not of any use either: the interest known by this name, i.e. to compete for partners and influence as a world power with equal rights, had to be denied. And this denial was to be put into action at all times and in all places by thoroughly contesting and weakening Soviet power – it was time to preserve the world from the only powerful alternative that existed.

NATO is therefore sure that its task is legitimate – so sure that it does not hesitate to count dictators among the champions of democratic traditions. After all, it must be left to the fundamentally rightful system in the world to decide what kind of government is needed where. There are populations which are simply not mature enough for democracy and dictators who lead their beloved peoples down the long path towards democracy in a slightly authoritarian manner. Conversely, governments which have come about in accordance with the sacred democratic procedures are “incompetent,” “unstable” (“stability” is obligatory for democracy’s partner's! Lack of partnership is punished by “destablization”!) and even breach the constitution when they waste good money on milk for schoolchildren – as the Chilean one did a while ago – instead of promoting capital; especially when they fail to condemn the Soviet Union to boot. A dictatorship which complies with the Western democracies economically, politically, and strategically is automatically on its way (back) to democracy; a democracy which tries to escape this role and pursue leftist objectives is always covert Leninist tyranny!

When powers sort out the world so uncompromisingly, so resolutely declaring the only exception to the capitalistic world economic order, the Eastern bloc, to be both incapable and unworthy of surviving, they are making one thing clear about their world politics: the capitalistic democracies will not put up with the existence of a camp in which their principles do not hold and which is not at their unlimited disposal. They prophesy the inevitable downfall of the decrepit socialist system and set about provoking it with the biggest armament program of all time to make sure their prophesy comes true.

People who talk this way – thereby merely justifying what they have been putting into practice for some time – cannot be victims of some anonymous threat of war or victims of a superior force they do not know how to defend themselves against; they are producing the “threat of war” themselves and planning war with the firm intention of eliminating an entire camp of states.