MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
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say, as Francis Fukuyama has, that communism's death throes constitute
the real Hegelian "end of history." My own impression is that the
opposite is true. The successes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
have unexpectedly revitalized the very notion of "history" in the eyes of
the world, extricating it from the fables, distortions, and fictions with
which Marxists - heterodox and orthodox - have denatured it: history's
freshness has been restored, its salutary improvidence, its unembraceable
(at least not by the intellect or by knowledge) nature, consisting of
multiple and spontaneous improvisations, which always breaks apart
conceptualizations that purport to reduce it to pure logic, to cause and
effect, or disclose, beneath its tumult and phosphorescence, any recondite
rationality. Nowadays we can verify what a Karl Popper or a Hayek or a
Raymond Aron has always maintained against a Machiavelli, a Vico, a
Marx, a Spengler, or a Toynbee: that history is never "written" before it
takes place, that it is not the representation of some pre-existing libretto
worked out by God, nature, or the unfolding of reason, or by the
struggle of classes and the relationships of production. History is, rather, a
continual and diverse creation that can choose the most unforeseen tra–
jectories, developments, involutions, and contradictions, always ruining,
in its fantastic complexity and multiplicity, whoever is bold enough to
predict or explain it.
The directions taken these days - the vindication of the individual
against the state, a free economy against a planned one, ownership and
private enterprise against collectivism and statism, liberal democracy
against dictatorship and mercantilism - justifiably elate us . But this
shouldn't mislead us. It wasn't "written." No hidden, latent force, lurk–
ing in the catacombs of old-fogeyism and terror that impoverished and
humiliated those who have today regained their freedom, determined
Ceaucescu 's fall, Solidarity's triumph, or the tumbling of the stone that
divided Berlin. These events and the others that excite us who have
fought totalitarianism for years have been robustly won by the tough re–
sistance, active or passive, of its victims, or by the taking hold of con–
science in the governing communist oligarchies (the
nomenklatura),
in its
incapacity to resolve economic and social problems, and in the unpar–
donable disaster towards which their nations were heading unless there
were drastic rectifications of ideas, politics, and, of course, leadership.
A formidable victory of the culture of freedom against totalitarian–
ism has occurred, but it is not definitive. Now comes the hard part. The
dismantling of the state, the transfer to civil society of political and eco–
nomic power that was expropriated to its own advantage by a despotic
bureaucracy, is an extremely complex process.
It
is going to require, in
the first phase, enormous sacrifices by those who currently deceive them-
