Technology is freedom

The news from the former USSR is exhilarating. It's not over yet: with almost 1 million privileged, well-armed and disciplined KGB elite troops, including the black berets of the Soviet SS, mere decapitation still leaves lower chains of command intact, and next time the forces of freedom might not be as generously helped, as they were this time, by the stunning incompetence of the putschists. So the sick man of Eurasia is not yet dead; but, glory be, his disease is terminal. At the time of writing (8/30/91), Gorby may be contemplating whether to make a state visit to Minsk or apply for a transit visa to go to his Crimean dacha.

The collapse of the Soviet monstrosity can be traced to tech-nology. Fundamentally, if you educate people to become scien-tists and engineers, you train them to think; and individual thought is the ultimate enemy of totalitarianism. On a more im-mediate level, it was the opening of the window to the West through FAXes, computer networks and (above all?) satellite dishes that mortally wounded the beast.

The role of the West in all this is tragic, and often scandalous. The US will be among the last to abandon the Bush-Gorbachev-Ribbentropp policy of the forceful incorporation of the Baltic republics in the USSR. Whenever a jailed nationality, be it Kurds, Croats, Slovenes, Balts or Ukrainians, invokes its right to self-determination, George Bush has been unfailingly and with-out exception on the side of the jailers. His drivel about "ter-ritorial integrity" refers to the territorial integrity of unsavory, brutally repressive and illegitimate empires.

The latest ploy of the ex-apologists, now newly born free marketeers, is the danger of "chaos and anarchy." How can you go to a free market just like that? How can you untangle the myriad of economic ties that bind the slave to his master?

Princeton's Steven Cohen, who never missed a chance to apologize for the Stalinists nor craftily to reinterpret their atrocities, now weeps over the Baltic "rosy-cheeked orphans" who will be out in the cold, cruel world without their former economic ties. How will they survive?

By voluntarily exchanging the goods and services that they were hitherto forced to pay in tribute to the central planners. By living as they did before Molotov and Ribbentrop struck a deal. By imitating such rosy-cheeked orphans as Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Iceland.

Can't be done? It has been done. When post-war Germany lay in rubble and devastation that no camera can fully convey, one man spoke seven words and the world was stunned by the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) blossoming in West Ger-many within 18 months. The man was Adenauer's economy mini-ster Ludwig Erhard; and the seven words with which he introduced a truly free market were "Let the people and the money loose!"