Thousands of Cans and Cartons

Letters

Vol. 12 No. 12 · 28 June 1990

From Andrew Horn

Christopher Hitchens’s review (LRB, 24 May) of Boris Yeltsin’s ghosted apologia tells us, like Dylan Thomas’s unwanted Christmas gift, ‘everything about the mosquito except why’. Yeltsin’s voluble anti-Communism made him an instant Western media hero. A bemused BBC initially called him a ‘leftist’ (on the specious grounds that anyone opposed to the status quo must be of the Left), but now refers to him more ambiguously as a ‘radical’. Even this morning’s Fiji Times (proprietor: Rupert Murdoch) captions an aggressive portrait, ‘Democracy warrior Boris Yeltsin’. What seems to have eluded Hitchens and his colleagues, from Tavistock Square to Suva, is that far from being a democrat, Yeltsin represents the terrifying resurgence of xenophobic nationalism and anti-semitism now threatening to engulf Central and Eastern Europe. His relationship with the neo-fascist Pamyat movement in Russia is intimate, if unofficial. This is not the voice of progress and enlightenment, but that of the pogroms and fierce Slavophilia of centuries past. What should be more widely realised is that Yeltsin’s natural allies in the West are not liberal democrats or even Tories, but Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and Franz Schönhuber’s Republican Party. L’Evénement du Jeudi (No 273) warned of these developments last January. Where are such warnings in the Anglophone press?

Andrew Horn
University of the South Pacific, Fiji