My Century And My Many Lives, by Frank Munk
Memoirs, 1993
Postscript, 1994
Frank Munk, my grandfather, wrote this autobiography to record his memories
from 1901 onwards. This history and its postscript are available on our family website in his
memory as they tell a complete story of the 20th century. These memoirs may be referenced as
long as proper attribution is made; our family retains ownership and copyright. We have one
request: if you reference this material in any way, please send us email at
feedback@theragens.com and a copy of the paper, if possible, as we would
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© Copyright 1993, 1994, The Munk/Ragen Families
EPILOGUE
POSTSCRIPT 4
It
has been more than a year since I wrote the chapter entitled “Towards 2085.”
Upon rereading it, I find nothing I would not say today, but I would like to
focus more on the world in which my children and grandchildren will spend their
lives.
During
this last year, in spite of some decrepitude, I have continued my interest in
computers, including a venture into the world of e-mail and Internet, which I
found exhilarating. It has helped me to compensate for a decline in my ability
to travel by expanding infinitely my ability to communicate allover the globe.
It
also illuminates the accelerating tempo of technological progress in other
fields of human endeavor: in medicine and medical technology, in understanding
the origin of the world and the finality of human life on earth and in other
areas of research. At the same time, there has been a gradual improvement in the
economic performance of the industrialized countries and a few of the less
backward developing ones. There is a growing awareness of the need to start
controlling the environment and at least a tentative rapprochement between old
foes: Israelis and Arabs, Irishmen and Englishmen, or of blacks and whites in
South Africa.
Having
said that, I still feel that secular forces are still at work in the opposite
direction. The progress in technology has not slowed the growing erosion of
human relations and societal cohesion in practically all areas of the world.
Genocide continues unabated in such places in Rwanda-Burundi or Somalia or
Bosnia, in spite of U.S. and U.N. intervention. Human rights are trampled in at
least two-thirds of the world's countries. The latest example is Haiti. Even
though the American invasion is only a couple of weeks old, I have no hesitation
in saying it will end in a debacle. Haiti is about the last place that can be
truly democratic and peaceful. It has never experienced democracy or peace and I
doubt it ever will (although “ever” covers a very long time). I predict the
United States will regret having sent troops once more to that unfortunate
island.
And,
since I specifically mentioned the United States, I have to confess a growing
disenchantment with the processes that govern it. Not only has it been unable to
put the federal budget on a self-sustaining basis, but also it seems less and
less able to legislate urgent reforms. Congress is increasingly unwilling to
tackle such needed laws as health reform or welfare reform or election reforms
or elimination of control of the electoral process by well-heeled lobbies. As a
result of extreme partisanship, now practiced mostly by the Republican Party,
the citizens grow ever more disenchanted with government as such. In essence,
they divorce themselves from the polity, further contributing to what people see
as an emerging anarchy, already visible in the spread of crime, drugs and racial
conflict. The deliberate destruction of a President inescapably damaged the very
fabric of liberal democracy, apart from a long-term economic decline
domestically and internationally. The inability of the Democratic Party to make
up its mind as to whether it wishes to be a part of the left or of the center
has not helped either.
The
devaluation of the government and popular disenchantment is by no means limited
to America. It is also apparent in Europe, the birthplace of democracy. And
naturally it is prevalent everywhere else where government never really worked,
except as a dictatorship.
The
decline of consensus domestically, as well as the multiplication of conflicts
worldwide, is in turn closely related to the growth of racial and ethnic
divisions, which I have described earlier. American society especially is
presently being rent by a new variety of apartheid. Not the same variety that
prevailed in South Africa under the old Boer-dominated regime, the purpose of
which was to keep racial minorities down. The new American apartheid is well
intentioned, since it is designed to help African-Americans overcome old
indignities.
However,
in reality it establishes racial origin as a basic legal category and, thus,
helps to continue racism -- even though this racism is positive and not
negative. By definition, it is divisive and in the end it must lead to racial
conflict. A good example of this new apartheid is a recent executive order
providing that applicants for credit in the inner cities must first state their
race, gender and ethnicity.
On
a global level, I have been impressed by Samuel P. Huntington's “Clash of
Civilizations,” as first presented in Foreign Affairs in the summer of
1993. His central hypothesis is that “the fundamental source of conflict in
the new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great
divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be
cultural.” Until now all the major wars in the contemporary world were in
reality Western civil wars. Emerging conflicts will be, and increasingly are,
conflicts between major civilizations. Huntington lists these as “the Western,
Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox-Slav, Latin American, and possibly
African.” Not everybody's list would be the same as his; for instance many
would include the Western-Orthodox as a subsystem of Western (a long-lasting
division between Russians), but, in his words “the central axis of
international politics in the future is likely to be the conflict between the
West and the Rest.” Underlying his philosophy is the assumption that there
will be in the future not one universal civilization but instead a world of
different civilizations.
There
might of course be other conflicts: as of now many of the violent clashes are
intra-civilizational, like the present one in Rwanda-Burundi or those in Liberia
or Mozambique, or the deepening split between modernizers and fundamentalists
throughout the Muslim world, or the one in Northern Ireland, to name only a few.
In Africa, which lags in many ways behind the rest of mankind, the basic
dividing line is still between tribe and tribe. One such potential civil war
threatens between Xhosas and Zulus in South Africa. It is questionable whether
the war in Bosnia is one between civilizations, namely between the Western, the
Islamic and the Eastern-Orthodox, or whether it is really a civil war within a
largely homogenized Yugoslav society. There certainly was little divisiveness
visible to a visitor during the Tito years, even less in Bosnia than in Croatia.
After all, almost everybody in Yugoslavia spoke the same language, descended
from the same racial stock, and lived for decades under Communism. In Bosnia
especially, the fault lines were barely visible. Perhaps one more argument for
Huntington' s forecast.
Another
global overview that has made a lasting impression on me was an article by
Robert D. Kaplan (incidentally an expert on the Balkans) titled “The Coming
Anarchy” in the February 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. After
describing the breakdown of government in much of Africa, Kaplan writes that:
“West Africa is becoming a symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental and
societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real strategic danger.
Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee
migrations, the increasing erosion of nation states and international borders,
and the empowerment of private armies... provides an appropriate introduction to
the issues that will soon confront our civilization.” It is his belief that
Africa may be as relevant to the future of world politics as the Balkans was a
hundred years ago. The African illness may spread around the globe, just as AIDS
did -- also thought to be of African origin.
Kaplan
too is skeptical about the future of the United States. He thinks that it is
much more fragile than more homogeneous societies, like Germany or Japan. In the
past it successfully homogenized its immigrants. But now, increasingly,
immigration comes from other cultural areas. To quote Saul Bellow, American used
to be a country, not a collection of cultures, which it is in the process of
becoming. Not only is it a congress of cultures and races, but also these races
are increasingly solidifying into political power groups competing for advantage
over other groups, which makes consensus almost impossible.
All
my life I was a believer in human rights, humanism and democracy. Masaryk's
ideas have left a deep imprint from the days of my youth, when my father's store
was a kind of political club where the small town' s intelligentsia congregated
in the late afternoon to discuss politics and the state of the world. It dawned
on me only much later how Euro-centered the world was then and for many years
thereafter. In fact, I realized the full diversity of mankind only after I came
to America. At that time, in the late nineteen-thirties, I also realized how
America-centered America was. It was of course the heyday of isolationism.
Now,
it seems, we are witnessing a similar phenomenon. At a time when the economy and
information are fully globalized, human perception is returning to separation.
Incidentally, the same trends have again surfaced in Europe. On the one hand,
Europe is for the first time becoming more unified. The European Union is the
one and only positive development in a darkening world picture. On the other
hand, we now see a move towards a Europe more concentrated on its own problems.
This is partly a sequel to the liquidation of European colonial empires, and
partly a consequence of a gradual divorce from the United States, now that the
threat of Russian imperialism seems to have disappeared. However, there is no
guarantee of a steady progression to a federated Europe, as envisioned by the
Maastricht treaty. Great Britain is not the only country that has second
thoughts about being deprived of her separate identity.
Much
as I would like to believe that men are not only equal, but also possessing an
innate desire for democracy and respect for the rights of others, I must confess
my disbelief. I have always had a penchant for empiricism and realism, rather
than blind optimism or blind pessimism. But just about everything I have
observed during these last two decades has led me to the conviction that
democracy and human rights will continue for the foreseeable future to be
limited to the countries of Western civilization. Others occasionally and
temporarily may experiment with democracy, some a little more successfully than
others, but it always looks more like an imitation than the real thing.
Democracy continues to be the most difficult of political crafts. It has had ups
and downs even in Europe, let alone on other continents.
I
have by now pretty much concluded that democracy can only persist in those
areas, which are based on ancient Greece and Rome, on the impact of the
Judeo-Christian tradition, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment,
the French and American revolutions, and modem liberalism. That excludes even
parts of Europe, especially Russia and the Balkans, not to mention Asia, and
even more so of Africa. After World War II, American occupation foisted a
democratic constitution on Japan and South Korea, but they have not taken deep
root and there is a strong likelihood that they will not be permanent. Similarly
I would not take any bets that most of Latin America is safely in the democratic
fold. And I cannot imagine a democratic China; had the students won on Tiananmen
Square, China might by now have been split up between contending states or
warlords.
In
my younger years, I shared the belief that education and technology will lead to
peace and democracy. I regret to say I do not believe it any more. After all,
the best-educated nation in Europe, the Germans, used the latest technology in
mass genocide. I would even say education itself may have contributed to the
spread of armed conflict. There would have been no Reformation and, therefore,
no Thirty Year War had Guttenberg not invented printing. Similarly, modem
fascism and all the other crazy mass movements that have poisoned this century
owed their spread and intensity to the invention of radio and later of
television. It is now possible to spread propaganda almost universally and
instantaneously, and hate spreads more easily than love. I am sure that the
decline of popular participation in American elections is largely due to
television, which can only too easily be bought.
Unfortunately,
American efforts to convert other peoples do not seem to be doing so well. Other
civilizations do not take kindly to the preaching of democracy. To a Chinese, it
must seem almost comical that an upstart culture wishes to preach to the Middle
Kingdom with its thousands of years of Confucian tradition, which does not
encompass popular democracy. Perhaps the least promising efforts are those to
spread human values by economic embargoes or military intervention. The failure
of such efforts last year in Somalia may well be succeeded by a similar
shortfall in Haiti in 1994.
I
am far from alone in thinking so, although it goes counter to what is now
politically correct. Robert H. Johnson put it succinctly the other day in The
New York Times: “The fundamental problem with basing foreign policy on the
defense of democracy through intervention is that the government lacks the means
-- and will lack the domestic political support -- to carry out such a policy.
When other countries lack the political and cultural roots of democracy, it is
impossible for outsiders to create them and the use of force in support of
democracy will be unavailing.” Anyway, it would be an uphill fight. It has
been estimated that only some 19% of the world's population now enjoy some
semblance of basic human rights, while some 55% live under oppressive regimes.
I
present my latter day views with some reluctance. Not only was I reared to
believe in progress towards democracy in my youth; I have also participated in
two major crusades toward that goal during my mature life. These were the fight
against Nazism in the thirties and forties, and the opposition to Communism in
the fifties and later -- until the collapse of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev.
I was actively and demonstrably engaged and committed to both efforts.
I
ought to perhaps explain that my objection to Communism did not entail
necessarily rejection of a Socialist economy. In fact, pre-1939 Czechoslovakia
might be described as a Social Democratic state. I was an active member of the
National Socialist Party and chairman of its Economic Council in the crucial
thirties. I also sympathized with the New Deal in the United States and with
regimes like the one in Sweden.
My
opposition to Communism was based entirely on the political structure of the
USSR, of Mao's China, and of their colonies and satellites. While these systems
practiced a type of socialism through their economic system, the political
structure was an exact copy of Fascism: a monopoly party, a monopoly ideology, a
monopoly press and propaganda, a monopoly education, together with concentration
camps, an oppressive police apparatus, and an imperialist foreign policy. In its
political aspect, the Soviet Union was an exact copy of Fascist Italy, of Nazi
Germany, or of Franco Spain. It is only now that we can observe a divorce
between the economy and the political state in China: it is a marriage of brutal
capitalism on the one hand and brutal Communism on the other. Nicholas Kristof
and Sheryl Wudunn in their new book China Wakes have a good name for it:
Market-Leninism.
To
my surprise I have also drifted from the acceptance of Locke to a more Hobbesian
concept of human relations. I still do not buy Hobbes' description of relations
between men and men as fundamentally “bellum omnium contra orones” (a war of
everybody against everybody else). I still believe a world government and the
prevalence of democratic regimes across the globe would be preferable to
dictators and conflict after conflict, but I do not expect that it will happen
in the next century.
To
me, the most disquieting aspect of contemporary world politics is my impression
that we are not even moving in that direction, but perhaps retrogressing. The
atmosphere during these last few years of the twentieth century has been
described as distrust of the future or as a feeling of floating anxiety .It is
probably best exemplified by Paul Kennedy, professor of history at Yale
University. In his latest book Preparing for the Twenty-First Century,
Kennedy takes the measure of the major challenges -- demography, technology and
ecology -- that will dominate the scene over the next four or five decades.
The likely threats, he says, will range from disquieting to catastrophic. No
nation will emerge unscathed, some will be devastated, above all those that
suffer most even now, Africa being the prime example. The U.S. will have a
better chance, but even so he predicts “a slow, steady, relative decline -- in
comparative living standards, educational levels, technical skills, social
provisions, industrial leadership and, ultimately, national power.”
Somewhat
the same perspective is offered by the Hungarian-born historian John Lucacs in
his latest work. The title is -- rather pointedly -- The End of the 20th
Centurv and the End of the Modern Age. A review in The New York Times of
January 26, 1993, summarizes his views as follows: “The Year 1989, when the
Berlin Wall came tumbling down and Eastern Europe emerged from the shadows of
the Soviet Union, not only marked the end of the 20th century but also the
waning of a great historical epoch, the passing of the Modern Age, which
witnessed the rise of liberalism, humanism and bourgeois culture throughout the
Western world.”
He,
like Paul Kennedy, predicts that the 21st century will not be an American one,
the decline in American power reflecting “both specific shifts in the
country's fortune and the fading of the age of superpowers. “ He blames
nationalism, especially populist nationalism, for the decline of the Western
world and foresees a proliferation of small states and statelets. Lucas deplores
the growing evidence of a New Barbarism all around us.
One
reason for that relative decline is the diminishing capability of the nation
state to deal with major problems. This is largely due to the tension between
the emerging transnational economy and an erosion of the powers of government,
due to the growing distrust of politics and politicians. New threats cloud the
horizon: some of the fears are legitimate; others may be premature. One thing is
clear: already the trend seems to forecast a growing spread between the
well-to-do and the majority of the nation, and a relative decline of the powers
of governments compared with the power of global corporations and global
cartels, including the drug cartels.
I
am however not entirely given to despair. Above all, I recognize that futurology
is a risky business. Looking back at predictions during the whole of my
lifetime, I have to admit that almost all of them were wrong. There is always
the element of the unpredictable. Nothing progresses linearly, and technology
always has surprises. Who would have anticipated the computer revolution, among
others?
Secondly,
some developments are self-corrective. In the October 1994 issue of Scientific
American, Robert W. Kates has an article “Sustaining Life on the Earth.”
He draws cautious encouragement from two trends: first, there are changes
already apparent in the currents carrying us into the future, and, second, he
points out human adaptability in the form of the emergency of new institutions,
technologies, and ideas.
During
known history, and certainly in pre-history, what we now call homo sapiens has
survived catastrophes of all kinds and probably will in the future, barring
another collision with a major celestial body like the one which doomed the
dinosaurs. Nature, of which we are a part, may be more robust than we realize.
In
the last analysis, says Robert Kates in the article I quoted, “Hope is simply
a necessity if we as a species, now conscious of the improbable and
extraordinary journey taken by life in the universe, are to survive.”
Whenever I waver in my
outlook, I am encouraged when I think of my grandchildren and
great-grandchildren. They seem so full of life and promise. They are so well
educated and enterprising that I have great expectations at least for this small
segment of that great experiment – the human race.
The
books listed below are referenced on this page. They provide additional background on this period of history to
help illustrate this portion of my grandfather's memoirs.
The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking World Order; Samuel Huntington
The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War;
Robert D. Kaplan
China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power; Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
Preparing for the Twenty-First Century; Paul Kennedy
The End of the Twentieth Century: And the End of the Modern Age; John
Lukacs
My grandfather did not add any additional chapters after this
date. He passed away in 1999. I have posted the
notes from his
memorial service.
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