THE PROPAGANDA machine of AKEL usually does a very good job. It may have failed to absolve Demetris Christofias of responsibility for the collapse of the economy, but that was an impossible task, that not even the best PR firm in the world could have performed successfully. The real success of the AKEL propaganda machine is in the low level work, such as dictating public sentiment and the consensus view.
With regard to the Cyprus problem, for instance, it imposed the narrative that suited its paymasters in the Kremlin during the Cold War – the Western powers were behind the coup and the invasion which was allegedly a conspiracy by NATO which in Cyprus was, for decades, a synonym for evil. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union which did nothing for Cyprus in the post-’74 period other than, occasionally, utter some platitudes, was the force of good that was always by our side.
This became the dominant view among Cypriots who, to this day, express hostility towards the West and NATO and still consider the successor of the Soviet Union, Russia as the biggest supporter of the Greek Cypriots, ignoring her very close economic co-operation with Turkey.
AKEL has also been very successful in dictating what is good and bad for the economy. Totally absurd that people could embrace the economic views of a party that idealised Soviet central planning and bankrupted the Cyprus economy in the five years it was in government, but most people have been persuaded that privatisation of SGOs is by definition bad – no arguments required. Public sector unions were agents of good, no arguments required.
‘Neo-liberal’ economic policies are intrinsically bad according to AKEL, which routinely uses this as a term of abuse. The Anastasiades government “identified with the neo-liberal recipes of the troika,” said the party’s spokesman the other day. It is a very clever propaganda ploy, implying that the cause of all our economic woes – state bankruptcy, high unemployment, business closures – was neo-liberal policies and not the recklessly incompetent, Christofias government.
The state went bankrupt because Christofias and AKEL shunned neo-liberal policies which envisage balanced budgets, a small state and free operation of market forces. It was the irresponsible policies of reckless spending, uncontrolled growth of the public sector and union greed that destroyed the economy and not neo-liberalism as AKEL’s propagandists would have us believe.
But the propaganda has worked, because nobody dares challenge AKEL’s dogmatic position. Nobody wants to be labelled a neo-liberal, because AKEL has decreed that neo-liberals are nasty people who take the food from the mouths of starving children and condemn pensioners to live on the streets. All parties now share this view, ignoring the fact that it was a communist, not a neo-liberal, president who bankrupted the state.
