HAIFA, Israel — The Jews came out of Egypt long ago, they came out of the Soviet Union, but they did not go out of fashion at all: at every stage of history someone was bound to seek to throw them into the sea. The Jews, however, had already been to the sea — when they left Egypt — and got out safely. That sea was the Red Sea. When I got out of the red, socialist sea, I found a sea of democracy in Israel. Democracy was enough for several neighboring Arab countries. But democracy is not oil, they do not consume it that eagerly, and it does not flow to the neighboring countries. Maybe that is why there is so much bloodshed in the region.
Like the former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, I was born in Kiev. Unlike Golda Meir, who left Russia at the age of eight, I left Kiev at the age of 32. In her autobiography, My Life, Golda Meir notes: “Kiev was famous for its antisemitism.” I was in agreement with her. Kiev’s anti-Semitic fame reached and haunted me all the years of my life in the USSR. As in tsarist Russia during Golda Meir’s life there, antisemitism in the USSR of my time was state-sponsored. But since the Soviet Union was different from the Russian Empire, anti-Semitism was somewhat different: There were no pogroms typical of the Russian Empire, there was the case of the “homeless cosmopolitans” (1949) against Jews in art and culture, the “doctors’ plot” (1953) against a group of predominantly Jewish doctors from Moscow who accused of a conspiracy to assassinate (poison) Soviet leaders, restrictions on admission to universities and jobs and a strong sense of second-rate. I did not fight to eradicate antisemitism in the USSR, Russia, and Ukraine, but repatriated to Israel. Like Golda Meir, I was a Zionist. Unlike Golda Meir, I was not a socialist. After living in the socialist country of the USSR, I did not believe in socialism.
Looking back at the sea of socialism from which I emerged in Israel, I noticed something I had not realized before. Under Soviet socialism, an important element of Soviet existence was the queue for food and goods. We Soviet people had known since childhood that one had to stand in line. We knew that socialism was a set of lines, or one big line, leading, of course, to the bright goal of communism. We thus had an unmistakable criterion: a society with queues is a society with a goal. Western countries in which queues have been eliminated are utterly unpromising. Sisyphus, as interpreted by Albert Camus, overcame widespread prejudice. He removed his punishment by seeing meaning in the absurd. The stone that comes down just before the summit, the queue that ends just before one’s nose, the endless work of lifting the stone, the endless standing in queues — there is a deep hidden meaning that is not understood by a Western unpromising society. The meaning is that lifting a stone, standing in queues, is life itself, a way of life, a modus vivendi. In the novels and stories of socialist romanticism, we have been wrongly taught that queues can cease to exist, that we are experiencing temporary difficulties.
But like the myth of the afterlife, the myth of the end of the queue was a religious prejudice of developed socialism. The queue was never supposed to end, for along with the queue, socialism would end. The queue was a socialist existence and played a guiding role in the life of the Soviet man. It was the primary cell of Soviet society. Not the communist party or trade union cells constituted the basis of society, but the queue. Despite the apparent differences between its members, the queue was united and patriotic. It could criticize individual shortcomings in the USSR, but, in essence, it was deeply for Soviet socialism. The basic law of the queue was justice in the observance of the queue. The queue was a continuation of political and trade union meetings by other means. Turnout everywhere was mandatory. Standing in queues people rested from meetings, and sitting in meetings they rested from queues. Socialist consciousness consisted in the verbs of queues. Soviet people said “give” instead of “sell,” and “take” instead of “buy.” Capitalist buying-selling was replaced by socialist taking-giving. “They give — thank you, we take. They don’t give – we’ll do without – so they can’t give. It was worse during World War II.” Despite the fact that the monthly newspaper Izvestia reported an unchanged ruble exchange rate, the language of the queue testified to inflation: It was important what “give,” but not at what price, because you can no longer buy, but only “get,” that is, buy for any money. The queues were not reported in the newspapers or on the radio. What was not reported did not, in fact, exist.
Under Soviet socialism there were no democracy, no automobile disasters, no mine collapses, no factory fires, no train, streetcar or airplane crashes, no earthquakes or floods. There were no natural disasters under socialism. If cold winds blew in the USSR, they came from the West. Imported cold currents and cyclones also came from there. If hot winds blew, they were called Afghans. If there were organized thefts of socialist property, their authors were known to have Jewish surnames. Bad news was forbidden under socialism. How much easier to live as a person who is not constantly bombarded with reports of catastrophes and crimes. His life, calm and epic, was streamlined in long queues for food and goods, which were sorely lacking under “developed socialism.”
In a totalitarian state, the majority of the population is doomed to be content, for the alternative is dangerous. In a democracy, the majority of the population is condemned to dissatisfaction, for the alternative is boring: one is too free to enjoy freedom. Suicide and mental illness rates in democracies exceed these rates in non-democratic societies. Listening to the news in democracies can turn a healthy person into a psychopath. In democracies, news and commentary in newspapers, on the radio, on television, and on the Internet are contraindicated for people with a weak nervous system and unstable psyche. Democracy is a regime whose means of strengthening it contain undermining it. It criticizes itself, otherwise it risks degenerating into a pseudo-democracy.
Democracy is not a rigid structure, but a process that goes with the failures associated with its inherent weaknesses, which are also its advantages over dictatorship: the lack of comprehensive control over society, the opposition of the legislative, executive, judicial and economic powers and the press. Democracy necessarily lacks something. Often it lacks a dictatorship. In a democracy, the human mood is worse than in a totalitarian regime, for democracy carries with it a great burden of choice. The description of the futility of a democratic society is its characteristic feature. Under a totalitarian regime, the state seeks to enhance the mood of the individual by creating and imposing the illusion of well-being. Democracy intends to dispel as many illusions as possible by working to bring a member of society into a depressed state. Unlike despotism, democracy is an imperfect regime.
There are fewer flaws in a dictatorship than in a democracy because, from the point of view of the system, one knows what is right and wrong; there is more right and understandable than wrong and ambiguous. In a democracy, the difference between right and wrong is not always clear. Not only is contemporary democracy far from building a bright future, it is skeptical of its bright present. Democracy is dissatisfied with itself. A dictatorship is content with itself. Democracy feeds on doubt. The dictatorship rejects it.
In one of Goethe’s letters an image was drawn which Friedrich Nietzsche described as follows: “The serpent that cannot change its skin perishes. So, too, is the spirit that is not allowed to change its convictions: it ceases to be a spirit.” Democracy is not always effective and does not always produce good results. In Nazi Germany, democratic elections brought an extremist regime to power. The Republic of Haiti has been tossed from one dictatorship to another for about two hundred years. Democracy is not an aesthetic rule, nor is it beautiful or perfect. Democracy is able to criticize and control itself. A dictatorship is incapable of this. Totalitarian regimes suffer from an innate blindness, an insensitivity to the dangers that an exaggerated assessment of their power can bring upon themselves. A lack of democratic immunity, self-control and self-criticism drags empires into the abyss. The German and Austro-Hungarian empires were stable and prosperous countries and safely embroiled themselves in the adventure of World War I, in which they suffered a crushing defeat and disappeared from the historical scene.
Democracy, by definition, is majority rule. Liberalism is an ideology that puts one person, the individual himself, not an aristocrat, not a rich man, not a representative of the government or the majority, not a member of the power structure. It does not accept the cult of any one “great” person, but accepts the cult of any single person. The intent of liberalism is not to privilege the powerful, to prevent them from ideologically placing themselves at the center of the world. Liberalism pays the same price as extremism. Liberalism promotes extremism and disgusts conservatives with its tolerance, amorphousness and omnivorousness. Tolerance as one of the central ideological principles of liberalism also applies to extremists who use it in their power struggle against society.
A characteristic feature of liberalism is that it seeks to create a society in which man, not God, not the earthly ruler, not the hegemonic class, is the highest value. Western liberalism takes the struggle for individual rights to an extreme. After the overthrow of God, Western non-conservatives have deified man. Instead of God, they created a new idol — the individual — and began to give divine honors to the individual. In a totalitarian structure, man is nothing. In liberalism, man is a deity. Liberals have created a humanoid idol and make sacrifices to it. Such a human idol began to take for himself the rights that previously did not belong to people. There was a cult of personality, but not the cult of one person, the personality of the tyrant, but the cult of any person. There was an absolutization of the person himself, even if he has few merits. The absurd tendency of “man for himself” has become a tendency of “man only for himself. In an outburst of unprecedented love for himself, man loses a friend, a relative and a loved one. But he fiercely defends the right to have all the rights and to be the center of the universe.
Freedom can turn into promiscuity. Anyone who notices the difficulties of raising children in an atmosphere of triumphant liberalism feels the destructive tendencies to absolutize the individual. Individualism, as an important part of liberalism, ignores the collective in the individual and encourages selfishness and self-centeredness that threaten the foundations of the state and society. These trends were noted as early as 1835 by the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville in his book Democracy in America: “Each person, withdrawn into himself, behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. His children and his good friends constitute for him the whole of the human species. As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains in his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society.”
Anti-religious liberalism has created a religion according to which the formerly weak are placed on a pedestal in the name of equality. In his book Philosophy of Inequality (1923), in the seventh letter (on liberalism), the philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev writes: “Freedom and equality are incompatible. Freedom is first of all the right to inequality. Equality is above all an encroachment on freedom, a restriction of freedom. […] Freedom is linked to the qualitative content of life. Equality is directed against every qualitative difference and qualitative content of life, against every right of elevation. […] Liberalism begets democracy, […] but democracy destroys the very foundations of liberalism, equality devours freedom. Equality devours freedom.”