MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
The Country to Come
It
is said that during the Cultural Revolution, the fashionable Chinese
curse was, "May you live in interesting times." Ours are, without a
doubt, and we have no cause for complaint. Each day surprises us, leaves
us open-mouthed at liberty's latest feat in the world: the Berlin Wall
coming down, Ceaucescu's fall, Vaclav Havel's transit from the dungeons
to the presidency of his country, Violeta Chamorro's triumph in the
Nicaraguan elections in spite of
all
the polls and the wishes of Western
"progressives." Watching television, we hardly believe our eyes. We see a
Red Square seething with demonstrators demanding free elections. We
see the Central Committee of Lenin and Stalin's Communist Party in a
rush, like many of its European siblings, to renounce even the most basic
axioms of Leninism and Marxism - class struggle, democratic centralism,
the monopoly of power, centralized planning, and social ownership of
the means of production. After all has been said and done, the Party has
renounced virtually all the myths, stereotypes, arguments, and methods by
which communism was born, nourished, and empowered to take over a
third of humanity, to drag it down into slavery, terror, and ignominy,
ultimately eroding itself to the point where it has provoked what seems
to be its own deliquescence (at least, as a significant force in the
contemporary world).
It is difficult, under the circumstances, not to resort to great pro–
nouncements. Are we not living through a new moment in the course of
civilization? Aren't we part of the inauguration of a new era in human
history? The word "history," the idea of history, is one of those that has
been prostituted for ideology, as it has served, above
all,
as a front for
the great intellectual deceptions of our times.
It
has been the sinister, all–
powerful god of the religion of totalitarianism and the justification for
the worst genocides and political crimes in memory. But we need not
Editor's Note: This essay was first presented as a speech given on March 4, 1990 in
Lima, Peru. Copyright
©
1990 Mario Vargas Llosa.
