Japan and continental Europe recovered from the recession of the early 1980s, though without resuming earlier growth rates. US recovery involved massive borrowing and state stimulation of the economy, mainly through the Pentagon-based public subsidy to high technology industry, along with a sharp increase in protectionist measures and a rise in interest rates. This contributed to the crisis of the South as interest payments on the debt rose while investment and aid declined, and the wealthy classes invested their riches in the West. There was a huge capital flow from South to North, with effects that were generally disastrous, apart from the NICs (newly industrialized countries) of East Asia, where the state is powerful enough to control capital flight and direct the economy efficiently. The catastrophe of capitalism in the 1980s also had an impact on Eastern Europe, contributing to the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the virtual disappearance of Russia from the world scene.³⁰

In earlier years, the nonaligned countries had sought to gain some control over their fate. Initiatives were taken through UNCTAD (the UN Conference on Trade and Development) to create a "new international economic order" with support and stabilization programs for primary commodities, in the hope of stemming the deterioration in terms of trade and controlling the sharp price fluctuations that have a devastating impact on economies that rely on few primary exports. UNESCO undertook parallel efforts to provide Third World countries with access to international communications, a virtual monopoly of the advanced industrial societies.

These initiatives naturally elicited enormous hostility on the part of the world rulers, and were turned back decisively in the 1980s. The US led a fierce attack on the United Nations that effectively eliminated it as an independent force in world affairs. UNESCO inspired particular hatred, because of its Third World orientation and the threat to ideological domination. The demolition operation and the return of the UN to US control have been lauded here as a restoration of the ideals of the founders, not without justice. Extraordinary deceit has been required to conceal the fact that it has been primarily the US, secondarily Britain, that have vetoed Security Council resolutions and generally undermined the UN for over 20 years, and to sustain the standard pretense that "Soviet obstructionism" and "shrill Third World anti-Americanism" are what rendered the UN ineffective. The no less extraordinary levels of deceit that accompanied the government-media campaign to eliminate UNESCO heresies are documented in an important study, which, needless to say, had no effect whatsoever on the flow of necessary lies.³¹

The hysteria about "political correctness" is an interesting domestic analogue. Its extent is truly something to behold, including a stream of best-sellers with anecdotes, many concocted, about alleged horrors in the universities, angry speeches, and a flood of articles from the news columns to the sports pages and journals of opinion that gushed forth suddenly, as if on command; a study of one six-month period found over a mention per day in the Los Angeles Times. The outrage has a basis in reality. There really are a great many people who oppose racist and sexist oppression, have respect for other cultures, and do not look kindly upon atrocities in a "good cause," and the abuses that so horrify the faithful are not entirely fanciful; even the clumsiest propaganda usually takes off from something real. But as in the case of official enemies abroad, the real abuses, whatever they may be, have little relation to the drama constructed around them.

The phenomenon did not emerge from nowhere. One crucial component of the post-affluence class war has been a far-reaching takeover of the ideological system by the right, with a proliferation of right-wing think tanks, a campaign to extend conservative control still further over ideologically significant sectors of the colleges and universities, now replete with professorships of free enterprise, lavishly funded far-right student journals, and so on; and an array of other devices to restrict the framework of discussion and thought, as much as possible, to the reactionary end of the already narrow spectrum. Things actually reached such a point that a respected liberal foreign policy analyst could describe the statist-conservative New York Times, without irony, as the "establishment left" (Charles Maynes). In the political system, "liberal" joined "socialist" as a scare word; by 1992, the Democratic Party scarcely needed to make a gesture to popular constituencies it had once professed to represent. Gore Vidal hardly exaggerates when he describes US politics as a one-party system with two right wings. One aspect of this ideological triumph has been the deeper implantation of Orwellian rhetoric and standards of Political Correctness to which one must adhere to join respectable discussion, a number of examples already illustrated. Departure from these conventions of belief and rhetoric is virtually unthinkable, in the mainstream.³²

The next chapter comes as no surprise to students of cultural management. After a period of intense and one-sided ideological struggle, in which business interests and the right-wing have won a remarkable victory in the doctrinal and political institutions, what could be more natural than a propaganda campaign claiming that it is left-fascists who have taken the commanding heights and control the entire culture, imposing their harsh standards everywhere? The situation is even more dire than 25 years ago, when calls for destroying the university "rang across every campus in the United States, and libraries were burned, and universities wrecked" and "it was impossible to imagine anything more slimy, sickly and stifling than the moral climate" in universities where black students were "a curse" until at last "the pus" was "squeezed out of the university," to quote some of the imagery that entrances the British right.³³ We hear heartfelt pleas for succor for the fading remnants who still resist the relentless left-wing onslaught, courageously upholding the banner of historical truth and Western culture in some embattled newspaper or isolated state college in central Idaho. What could be better designed to suppress the serious questions about doctrinal control, or a look at the hand that firmly holds the rod?

The complaints of those who continue to maintain their iron control with little challenge are not without their comic aspects. For every 100 articles berating the left-fascists who control everything, there might be one responding weakly that the takeover is not so complete as claimed, and none telling the truth -- which is obvious enough, if only from the distribution of views allowed to surface. But restricting thought is a serious matter, and respected figures do not crack a smile as they march in the parade, bewailing the fact that they may have lost some comparative literature department (perhaps to a right-wing "deconstructionist" or liberal "relativist" denounced as left-fascists).

To the totalitarian mentality, even the slightest deviation is an awesome tragedy, and evokes the most impressive frenzy. And the spectacle makes a useful contribution to entrenching further the ideological controls that prevent the rascal multitude from attending to what is happening around them.

³⁰ See DD, 98, on capital flow.

³¹ NI, 84f., App. IV.4. DD, ch. 6, "Afterword," sec. 5; my essay in Peters, Collateral. UNESCO, Preston et al., Hope & Folly.

³² TTT, ch. 5, and sources cited; NI, ch. 1. LAT, Extra! (FAIR), July/August 1992, the six months before the April 1992 Rodney King verdict. Maynes, editor, Foreign Policy, Summer 1990.

³³ G. Rees, Alain Besançon, Encounter, Dec. 1976, June 1980.