MORE THAN 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the repressive, totalitarian regimes of the Eastern Bloc, Cyprus’ communists continue to live in the Cold War era, still repeating the same anti-Western propaganda they were taught by their Soviet masters. For Cyprus’ communists the class struggle and the war against the evil forces of Western imperialism and capitalism continues unabated, at least in the rhetoric.
We were reminded of these pitifully obsolete views by the AKEL leader Andros Kyprianou who spared none of the traditional communist targets during his speech at his party’s 21st conference that opened on Thursday and will end today. Thursday’s ‘international meeting’ attended by representatives of leftist parties from different countries was titled ‘The struggle of the Left and the fight of the peoples for global peace and security against the imperialist order’.
Kyprianou predicted that the class struggle would intensify because as a result of the world recession, caused by a “structural crisis of the capitalist system”, millions of jobs were lost while workers’ rights and conquests were being eroded. A communist ideologue is duty-bound to take such a line and to lambast “the neo-liberal conservative model”, while conveniently ignoring that the growth in affluence and the dramatic improvement of workers’ living standards in the capitalist West in the last 20 or 30 years is thanks to this repugnant economic model.
It is when Kyprianou starts analyzing the international world order and “capitalist barbarity” that he reverts to the Soviet propaganda of the Cold War era. “The US, NATO and governments are exponents and defenders of the interests of big capital, monopolies, the war industry, the financial oligarchy and totally ignore the people.” It was obvious that “NATO is claiming the role of world guardian of the geo-strategic and economic interests of imperialism,” and was “sidelining the UN and international justice.”
In developed, democratic countries, this anti-Western drivel would have been laughed at and dismissed as the warped world-view of loony Leftists. However in Cyprus, the influence of AKEL in setting the political agenda cannot be underestimated. Anti-West, anti-US sentiment remains strong to this day, AKEL having cleverly blamed all Cyprus’ woes on the evil, imperialist forces of the West. NATO and the US were behind the coup that led to the Turkish invasion and had never pressured Turkey to withdraw its occupation troops.
By subscribing to this simplistic view we ignore the misguided Non-Aligned orientation of Makarios and his diplomatic flirting with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. We had chosen as a country to side with the anti-Western bloc and paid a very high price for this stupidity, which was dogmatically supported by the Kremlin-controlled AKEL. Why did we expect NATO and the US to come to our rescue when their dependable ally Turkey invaded? If the invasion suited one superpower, it was the Soviet Union, which, incidentally, never issued a statement condemning the invasion. For the enlightened Soviets the invasion was welcome as it brought two NATO countries – Greece and Turkey – to the brink of war.
We mention this only to show how successful and effective AKEL’S anti-Western propaganda has always been. Even today, long after the demise of communism, President Christofias promotes the myth that Russia is by Cyprus’ side, ignoring her close ties with Turkey based on trade and co-operation worth billions of dollars. It was during a visit to Moscow two years ago that he boasted that as long as he was president, Cyprus would never join NATO. He will not even entertain the idea of joining Partnership for Peace, despite calls to do so by all the political parties of Cyprus. If it were up to him and AKEL, Cyprus would not even be a member of the EU, which he regularly criticizes for its close ties with NATO and its neo-liberal economic values.
That Christofias still markets his anti-Western prejudice and Kyprianou spent a good part of his speech slamming the imperialist NATO and US, is because nobody challenges their propaganda. Nobody stands up to tell them that the world is much better off since the free world won the Cold War and that we are very fortunate that the world power is the democratic US rather than the totalitarian Soviet Union. Whether they like it or not, Cyprus is part of the imperialist West, culturally and politically, but also by choice since joining the EU. If Kyprianou and Christofias would rather we entered an alliance with North Korea or Cuba to fight imperialism they should say so.
