NGO's

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch, May 24, 2002

"All politics is local?"

The Unbearable Lightness of NGOs

by Gavin Keeney

NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) in one form or another have
been part and parcel of the theory of civil society since at least
the 18th century. Today, the Enlightenment-era philosophy
underwriting such institutions has been hijacked by conservative
ideologues to support the downsizing of everything, including
federal, state, and local government. This is the neo-faith-based
version. Critically, this twisted vision of civil society has
attempted to downsize the rights of individuals and call into
question the rights of dissent and civil disobedience through
perverse, fundamentalist readings of its founding texts. Plugged into
the mantra of "family values" this doctored concept of civil society
reaches back to the Middle Ages when an individual conscience was a
liability and radical statements could land one in the stocks, or
worse. Giordano Bruno died for your pre-modern sins.

(clip)

NGOs & COWBOY CAPITALISM

In the Czech Republic, the principal agent of market reforms, after
the Velvet Revolution of 1989, was Václav Klaus, a Thatcherite
economist (schooled in the hifalutin nonsense of conservative
economists Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek). Klaus was finance
minister from 1989 to 1992 and served 1.25 terms as Prime Minister
(1992-1997) before resigning. During the Klaus period, Czech state
assets were pillaged by newly-wired consortia formed by businessmen,
financial institutions, and politicians who legally "tunnelled"
(looted) the assets of state industrial and financial structures and
dumped the depleted carcasses into the bankruptcy courts. Klaus
famously believed that civic culture was the "seasoning of life" and
not much more. The absence of a competent press and an independent
judiciary, for example, plus a dearth of laws to enforce
"transparency" in business transactions, made the scorch-and-burn
practices of Czech neo-capitalists all but inevitable. Civil society
-- with or without NGOs -- simply did not exist. Klaus, the die-hard
free-marketeer, apparently believed all too much in the hidden hand
of the market (even if that hand was stealing state property and
buying off politicians). Once a colleague of Vaclav Havel, in the
early days after the Velvet Revolution, Klaus became his most bitter
enemy.

Havel returned the favor in 1997 (the year Klaus fell from grace)
with a speech before the Czech Parliament regarding the
post-communist morass: "Human beings are social animals who feel a
need to form associations and to take part, even if it were only
within their small worlds, in the management of public affairs and in
the pursuit of universal benefit. This, too, was somehow forgotten:
under the motto the citizen and the state, the citizen was thrown
into a hopeless solitude. In order that he would not feel too lonely,
and because it was appropriate, the word family was added from time
to time. Beyond that, nothing but emptiness."

State assets continue to be plundered today in the Czech Republic,
most recently banks and heavy industry, and the highly-respected
journal Respekt is being sued by every single member of current PM
Milos Zeman's cabinet for publishing damning articles about the
machinations of the so-called "elite". The absence of civil society,
and meaningful recourse to law, continues to haunt the post-communist
world. What in the world could NGOs do in such an environment to make
even a pittance of a difference?

full: http://www.counterpunch.org/keeney0525.html

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 05/25/2002

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