December 6--The Malta summit conference between Gorbachev and Bush has been highly publicized as ushering in a new era of peace. A barrage of propaganda in the capitalist press claims that the Cold War is virtually over. Military competition is now, it is said, being replaced by a new era of economic competition and even cooperation between the U.S. and the USSR.However, no one should close their eyes to what is actually happening in Eastern Europe and in particular in the German Democratic Republic. The Malta conference leaves in its train an unrestrained, wild, anti-communist witchhunt of the scope and proportions of the McCarthy period in the United States. Whoever overlooks this misses the fundamental ingredient of the Malta summit.
Arrests in GDR
In the GDR, dozens of government officials and high-ranking communists have been arrested or detained, some without charges, indictments, or any cover of law. The New York Times of Dec. 6 admitted that it is being done by "vigilantes." We have seen such mob scenes in earlier periods. We have heard slogans about uniting the fatherland under Hitler Germany.
The opening of the Berlin Wall, supposedly to facilitate freedom of travel, coincided with suspending air flights to Romania -- the only country in the Eastern bloc where the leadership has not been overthrown by the cooperative efforts of the Gorbachev administration and the imperialists.
Again, let there be no mistake. The sudden resignation of the Politburo in the GDR, followed by the resignation of the entire Central Committee, could not possibly have resulted from mere spontaneous demonstrations by an aroused popular mass movement. It is an officially engineered affair, promoted by the Gorbachev administration in collaboration with U.S. imperialism.
For 40 years, the leadership in the GDR has been most cooperative with the USSR. Now those in the GDR most closely associated with the Soviet Union in the past are the most under attack by the Gorbachev administration. The Party leaders are trapped and the masses who supported them are left entirely confused and demoralized.
Scapegoating the leaders
The leaders have become scapegoats. Whatever ideological differences may have existed between the Soviet and GDR leaders never took on such dimensions of acrimony or open hostility until the Gorbachev regime began to shove bourgeois, anti-socialist measures down their throats.
Now many of these same officials--some of whom spent much of the Nazi period in concentration camps--are under arrest or are being accused of corruption, etc. It is part and parcel of a cooperative effort between the imperialist bourgeoisie and the Gorbachev administration to unseat the officialdom in each of these countries who oppose the imposition of bourgeois, anti-socialist reforms, who oppose the import of capitalism and counterrevolution to their countries.
The leadership in the GDR as well as in Czechoslovakia are faced on the one hand by the imperialist armies and on the other by the threat that Gorbachev might use Soviet forces to intervene in a reactionary attack. It is to be noted that the civilian militias have been disrupted and dissolved, and workers' detachments to guard the plants have been stripped of their power and arms. Who did all this? How could all this suddenly happen if there was not joint collaboration between the so-called superpowers?
Had the reforms been of a militant socialist character, Gorbachev's open encouragement for them would have been the opportunity for the imperialist press to open a coordinated howl against Soviet domination. Had they been progressive in content, there would have been a clamor about "puppets of the Kremlin" and worse. But as it turns out, the changes in truth are anti-socialist and bourgeois in character, conciliatory to bourgeois economic penetration. Thus they are regarded as the acme of freedom and democracy.
How can one explain the mass demonstrations, the retreat and even collapse of the leadership, the rise of vigilantism?
An earlier witchhunt
Let us look at what we know about U.S. history. The McCarthyite witchhunt period is today universally regarded with scorn and hatred. But at the time, Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade was greeted with wild jubilation.
His political career began in 1946 in Wisconsin when he defeated an eminent progressive senator, Bob La Follette, Jr., in the race for Senate. He grabbed the national spotlight when in 1950 he charged in a speech that he had a list of "card-carrying Communists" in the State Department. From then on he was constantly in the news ferreting out "Reds."
McCarthy intimidated even some of the leading capitalist organs of the so-called Eastern Establishment. Not until he actually threatened the U.S. military command by hauling in a general to be interrogated by his congressional committee, and not until the financial house of J.P. Morgan itself became his target, was there any diminution in the witchhunt.
McCarthy had attacked both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations when he coined the phrase "20 years of treason" (1933 to 1953). But when he extended that to "21 years of treason," meaning he was going after "traitors" in the Eisenhower administration as well, the ruling class realized that things had gone too far.
However, the masses had become completely disoriented by the witchhunt. Among life-long liberals and Roosevelt Democrats, the name Roosevelt suddenly became synonymous with treason. A mood of paranoia, of looking under your bed for communists, swept the country.
But at the bottom of it all lay the frustration and fury of the ruling class over its "loss," as it was called, of China. The Chinese Revolution had succeeded in wrenching away the most populous nation on earth from the imperialist camp. The imperialists were making frenzied efforts to prepare the public for an atomic attack on the Peoples Republic of China, which almost happened during the Korean war.
What are we witnessing in Eastern Europe? The mobilization of the masses there on an artificial, reactionary basis that differs in no fundamental way from the McCarthyite drive in the 1950s in this country.
Behind Gorbachev's collaboration with U.S. imperialism
Why would Gorbachev and his colleagues be collaborating in this? Why be party to an agreement with U.S. imperialism of the type concluded at the Malta conference?
Gorbachev is acting under the impetus of the same social and economic forces which in 1938 forced foreign ministers Neville Chamberlain of Britain and Edouard Daladier of France to meet with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich and sign a pact which, in essence if not in form, opened up Eastern Europe to domination by the Hitlerite regime.
That pact, too, was hailed as ushering in "peace in our time."
Understanding the Malta summit in light of the Munich pact will throw more light on contemporary developments between East and West, on the direction of the U.S. capitalist economy in particular and its critical need for expansion in a pre-crisis period, than all the prognostications of the bourgeois economists and political commentators on the new era of peace.
How interesting that the news of a mammoth job cut at IBM, the biggest high-tech and industrial corporation in the capitalist world, was held back over the weekend until the Malta summit was over. What does that indicate? Economic stability?
Also to be kept in mind when looking back at the Munich pact is that the decade of the 1980s has been one of an unprecedented, gargantuan "peacetime" military buildup by the U.S., similar to the massive investment in the Nazi war machine in the 1930s.
Munich pact and Eastern Europe
What was the Munich pact all about? Wasn't it about the struggle for the control and domination of Eastern Europe? In the summer of 1938, Hitler was making "piecemeal" demands. All that was involved, he said, was an improved status for the Germans living at that time in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. All he demanded, said his apologists and propagandists, was self-determination for that area.
But it ended up in an agreement that in reality dismembered Czechoslovakia and handed it over to the Nazis. However, the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia was only one aspect of the struggle. The broader objective of Nazi Germany was the occupation of all Eastern Europe as the gateway to the USSR. Isn't that why Chamberlain and Daladier agreed with Hitler on that perspective?
Before the Munich pact was signed, the Soviet Union had mutual assistance pacts with both France and Czechoslovakia, made effective in 1935, declaring that they would support each other against aggression by Germany. Instead of abiding by these pacts and taking advantage of assistance from the USSR, Britain and France instead signed the Munich pact to surrender Czechoslovakia.
Eastern Europe today, regarded from the viewpoint of the geopolitical struggle of U.S. imperialism for world domination, still plays the same role as 50 years ago--or even 180 years ago. Napoleon in his day could not reach Moscow without first taking control of Eastern Europe. In Napoleon's quest for world domination, he like his successors was stopped short. He had to renounce these ambitions with the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807.
Let it be said in justice to Napoleon that he did undermine serfdom and in effect abolished feudalism in his sweep over Eastern Europe. Hitler also brought internal reform, but of a fascist character using unmitigated terror of unprecedented proportions.
Surrender to counterrevolution
The Malta summit banks on a process of economic as well as political export of counterrevolution. It opens wide the door to economic penetration and ultimate domination of Eastern Europe by the imperialist powers, particularly the U.S. The U.S. has been determined to take over Eastern Europe ever since World War II, but can't do so in a military way as this would be hazardous under any circumstances in the nuclear age. So the economic reforms are the most plausible solution.
The bourgeois-minded, reformist Gorbachev administration, in a Munich-like surrender, is meeting the demands of the Bush administration. In this way it is yielding to U.S. imperialism without a military confrontation. At least, that's the hope. Yet despite all the honeyed phrases about the end of the conflict, the Bush administration has declared its intent of maintaining vast U.S. forces in Europe indefinitely. No date has been set for even a token removal of the U.S. armies in Europe. New spy satellites continue to be launched and new missiles tested.
Of course, workers and progressives everywhere hope for the reduction of nuclear armaments. The USSR has focused a great deal of its efforts on this objective, accelerating its initiatives in recent years. But let there be no confusion about the matter. Most of the nuclear arms reductions that the imperialists have agreed to are the result of either redundancy or the necessity to modernize and get rid of old weapons systems.
Nor can workers expect that the imperialists will "beat their swords into plowshares." Bush made it very clear in his press conference after the Malta summit that any savings coming from military reductions will not go for social services.
In view of the barrage of capitalist propaganda against the progressive forces in El Salvador and the governments of Nicaragua and Cuba, it was incumbent on the USSR to make a strong affirmation of solidarity with them in their struggle against imperialist aggression. Yet nothing like that emanated from the summit conference. Bush was allowed to attack Cuba, Nicaragua and the revolutionary liberation movement of El Salvador with impunity. Instead of a statement of revolutionary solidarity with the struggling people of El Salvador against the death squad government, the Soviet Foreign Ministry released a statement on Nov. 14 that in effect equates the "opposing sides" in the conflict.
The McCarthy era was but an ephemeral event arising out of the victory of the Chinese Revolution. The attempt of the Gorbachev administration to foist capitalist reforms on the Soviet Union will not succeed. The oncoming capitalist depression and a resurgent working class movement will compel the U.S. imperialists to back off from their plans for world domination, in the same way they backed off from attacking China in the 1950s.