The Slovak Assassin and the Riots in Georgia

Gwydion M. Williams

(The photo shows Robert Fico, PM of Slovakia)

Georgia Defending its Sovereignty
Slovakia Condemned for Disagreement

Georgia Defending its Sovereignty

If it is wrong for foreign powers to meddle in the politics of sovereign nations, surely it is sensible to make a law exposing those who have been meddled with?

To insists that those who get more than 20% foreign money are honest about it?

That’s been the issue in the former Soviet state of Georgia. But for the Western media, asking their Georgian friends to be honest about who pays them is a threat to democracy.

This comes from media owned by people who’ve done nicely out of four decades of New Right dominance. Rival ways of life threaten to weaken this cosy set up. So in their view, the West interfering with the rest of the world inhabits a different moral universe from them possibly interfering with us.

That’s the classical imperialist attitude. The former imperial powers regained enthusiasm for global bullying when the Soviets weakened. When the Chinese were wrongly thought to have capitulated. When it appeared that China was swallowing Western values in the way Japan did after World War Two.

I was strongly doubting this from the mid-1990s, after correctly predicting in 1989 that the Tiananmen tragedy would do nothing to undermine Communist Party power.^[1] And then Chang and Halliday’s silly book about Mao provoked me to look further.^[2] I discovered that far less had changed than outsiders thought.^[3]

Western experts may be wrong even about Japan. Japan is suspicious of both China and Russia, and has border disputes with both. But I recently saw a Japanese live-action series called The Silent Service, which has a Japanese submarine captain heroically confronting the US Navy in a bid for world peace.^[4] A story based on a controversial but popular comic series.^[5] Japan might suddenly switch in the next few years.

China might be wise to abandon some small islands near Japan that it has no need for, but which Japan is obsessed with. Different from the South China Sea, where all claims other than those by Vietnam are recent inventions.

And Chinese can defend their politics as a system that gives Chinese most of the functional freedoms they seek.

My view – and I’ve not seen the Chinese put it quite like that – is that it is meaningless to talk about ‘Freedom’ without a social context. All human society involves limits on freedom. It is tempting to deny this when you approve of that particular freedom being curbed. But temptations are things that should be resisted, unless you decide that the rules on the undesirable or the forbidden should be changed.

It is all about what we class as Legitimate Freedoms. Which changed a lot in 20^th century Britain: smoking is de-legitimised, and so is wife-beating. Many aspects of sex are now legitimised, with male homosexuality only the most notable case. There was no law against lesbianism, but plenty of discrimination. But when some people tried extending this to under-age sex, there was a very strong reaction against.

But for our mainstream Western media, and for many of their critics, Freedom is always Absolute, but only some of the time. Two different moral universes, and they commute between the two without noticing the contradiction.

For the main Western media, riots and fist-fights in Georgia’s parliament are a grand defence of democracy. A bold stand against pro-Russian laws.

There are no pro-Russian Georgians, or at least none with significant power. For me, the current government are the proper Georgian nationalists, choosing not to trust the West after the West was untrustworthy in their hour of need. They got no serious support when they tried to suppress the separatism of South Ossetia.^[6] They must have noticed that Western policies were different with separatist Kosovo, which had a war fought for it by NATO. Which has been awarded recognition as a sovereign state, though many UN members still reject the claim. And which was allowed to keep majority-Serb areas in the north, even though they wanted to stay with Serbia.

Personally, I sympathise with the South Ossetian wish to be sovereign. Or to join with North Ossetia and be safe as part of the Russian Republic. I’m also aware that the United Nations almost always rejects the right of regional majorities to secede from sovereign states. I wrote about it in the May issue of this magazine: Secession and Ineffective Law.^[7] My gloomy conclusion is that ‘international law’ was never more than a sham. The USA chose to keep it a sham in the 1990s, when they were briefly dominant. When they would have been wiser to have established binding rules that could have been strongly biased towards their own world-view.

But shysterism is basic and traditional in US politics, though called something else when the shyster is powerful.

Continuous disrespect for the United Nations seemed tough and clever at the time. But just look at the result!

Slovakia Condemned for Disagreement

I doubt there was any direct connection between the Georgian riots and the lone assassin who tried to kill the recently re-elected Prime Minister of Slovakia.

Western leaders have voiced the expected shock and outrage. But there had also been great offence at the man’s failure to support the idea that the Ukraine War must continue until Kiev has captured Crimea:

“In February as the world marked the conflict’s second anniversary, Mr Fico reiterated his opposition to the west’s policy of arming Kyiv.

“There was no military solution to the conflict, he said, and sending weapons to Ukraine would only fill more graves in the country’s cemeteries.

“Russia would never relinquish Crimea, or the parts of the eastern Donbas region it has taken, and instead Kyiv should lay down its arms and sue for peace, he said.

“Vladimir Putin, Mr Fico said, had been ‘wrongly demonised’ by the west.”^[8]

Crimea includes the Russian naval base of Sevastopol. Without it, Russia would lose most of its power in the Black Sea, and in the Mediterranean beyond. Without it, they might not have been able to keep Assad in power in most of Syria. Syria might have dissolved into the same complete chaos as Somalia and Libya, which the West has found very acceptable.

The assassin’s own belief may be a complex mix of feelings. But everything in Slovakia is complex. The government is a coalition with 42 seats from a left and pro-Russian party, 27 seats from a left and pro-EU party, and 10 from a right-wing and pro-Russian party. 79 seats, a working majority in the 150-member parliament.^[9]

It gets mentioned that Fico had resigned as Prime Minister in 2018 over the murder of Jan Kuciak, who had been investigating corruption. Investigating links with the Italian organized crime syndicate ‘Ndrangheta, widely reckoned to have replaced the Camora and the Sicilian Mafia as the most dangerous and influential Italian mobsters.

A Slovak businessman widely accused of being the moving spirit has been twice acquitted of organising it.^[10] He was convicted of financial fraud, but only some less-powerful people were actually convicted of the murder. It hardly seems reasonable to accuse Fico, operating at a much higher level, of actually wanting the murder.

Fico may have been too tolerant of corruption, but that has been a universal feature of what the former Soviet Bloc became under Western influence and a mania for privatisation. In Russia, Yeltsin allowed oligarchs to become legal owners of enterprises through shares that were given to workers in those enterprises, but with no protection against them selling the unwanted shares for ready cash.^[11] There was also a strong criminal element: you could not be rich without a criminal ‘roof’ to protect you.

Russia’s ‘capitalist revolution’ turned into a clear demonstration that New Right visions of capitalism were a total fantasy. But somehow that lesson was not learned even by their critics.

The actual history of Britain’s industrial revolution involved a strong state enforcing property laws, and taking an increasing share of the growing national income. Adam Smith believed that success had happened despite the actual process, rather than because of it. But all later industrialisations followed a similar pattern. All except Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, where it was entirely state-run.

The awkward fact of vast economic growth up until the 1960s by the Soviet Union and Soviet-ruled Middle-Europe is evaded by the New Right. Likewise the unwelcome fact that China under Mao grew faster than the USA or UK, despite the much-publicised errors of the Great Leap Forward.^[12]^[13] Of course the pro-Moscow Communists after 1956 were reluctant to admit that their darling Khrushchev made a total mess of what he’d inherited from Stalin. And Trotskyists are offended that any anti-Trotsky Leninists should have achieved anything. They prefer to badmouth all achievements by other brands of socialism.

We could talk briefly about Trotskyist achievements. Very briefly: it you count it as something that re-emerged in the 1920s after being absorbed into Bolshevism in 1917. With that definition, there have been absolutely no positive achievements by any of the diversity of Trotskyist movements. Useful individuals like Ken Loach might have celebrated the leftists who had a possibility of winning in the Spanish Civil War,^[14] rather than the quarrelsome POUM who made defeat more likely.^[15]

In Russia, Putin got the changes under control, rather than cause a fresh wave of chaos by denying that any of the shifts of ownership had been legal. He did this to stop a possible return to power in open elections by the refounded Russian Communists, which at the time seemed very possible. They were the largest opposition party: they remain strong, peaking at 24% in 1999 and getting nearly 19% in 2021.^[16] Yabloko, the largest of the pro-Western parties, was never strong and is now insignificant.^[17] Falling from 7.86 in 1993 to 1.34 in 2021.

Only in the propaganda of Western media can such people seem a serious alternative to Putin. I’ve long tried explaining that any replacement would almost certainly be harder-line.^[18]

For the attempt to kill Fico, there have been plenty of suspicious assassinations blamed on Western secret services. And a freely admitted CIA campaign to assassinate Fidel Castro, which got nowhere and has been presented as a joke.

I’d also suppose that some profitable killings must have been achieved just by stoking up the heat. By assuming that this would cause some overstressed individual to act.

One final point about Slovakia. For me, the peaceful separation of Czechs and Slovaks is a model for what should have happened in Yugoslavia and in Ukraine. Thankfully, no one tried spreading panic about the process. I don’t know if this influences the Slovak view of Ukraine, but it seems possible.

Trust in the West has declined since the New Right took over. Masked by the Soviet collapse. But a Russia dominated by Russian nationalism is not a threat, except to countries with significant regional majorities of Russians within their borders. And even there, only Ukraine has counted. NATO membership should keep the Baltic States safe, however discriminatory they get against their Russian population.

I’m not sure quite how it will fall apart, or how many decent people will get hurt in the process. But the New Right project is clearly failing.

There’s an old joke about there being one reliable way to go gambling in Las Vegas and return with a small fortune. You go there with a large fortune.

The New Right in the 1980s was the equivalent of someone gambling in Las Vegas with an initial large fortune. They had vast freedom of action, at a time when Russia was pro-US and China was being very modest. But their creed was very far from the truth, and has repeatedly misled them.

Nasty hard facts have a habit of asserting themselves.

^[1] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazine-001-to-010/magazine-012/what-tiananmen-1989-was-really-about/

^[2] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/42-china/42-1-chinese-politics/a-review-of-mao-the-unknown-story/

^[3] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/how-mao-greatly-strengthened-china/

^[4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26452638/

^[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silent_Service

^[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Ossetia_war_(1991%E2%80%931992)

^[7] https://labouraffairs.com/2024/05/01/secession-and-ineffective-law/

^[8] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqene5z41y0o

^[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Slovak_parliamentary_election

^[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mari%C3%A1n_Ko%C4%8Dner

^[11] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazines-020-to-029/magazine-030-not-yet-placed/kleptocracy-in-yeltsins-russia/