Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire (51 page)

Anyone making a reasonable study of the history of this century should be convinced that Russo-Soviet imperialism seriously threatens the peace and prosperity of the world. In 1945 republic had clearly beaten empire: the United States had the military and industrial power to dominate the world. That we did not do so is to our credit. But how did it happen that we allowed that power to dissipate, so that now the very survival of liberty and the republic is threatened?

For that matter, why is there any doubt about Soviet intentions? Are they not made clear in hundreds of ways? And why is there "controversy" over something so simple as strategic defense—not over technical feasibilities, but over the desirability of defenses against the ICBM?

Ten minutes' thought will convince you that the West has more than enough technical, industrial, economic, and military potential to overcome the threats of the Russian empire. After all, the Soviet Union is little more than a Third World Nation with weapons. Take away Russia's ICBMs and hydrogen bombs, and she would cease to be a superpower. For a plausible model, think of Bulgaria and Rumania with ICBMs.

Moreover, it's pretty obvious that the glib assertion of the moral equivalence of "the superpowers" is absurd. It isn't that the West is without faults, but the worst horror stories of the West come from violations of Western law and tradition—and don't measure a patch on the standard practices of the Soviet Empire.

Since everyone knows this, why is it "controversial" and "divisive" to say so?

The problem is that while the West enjoys moral, technological, and economic superiority, we have fallen way behind in intellectual resources. In part this is a failure of the schools, but there is considerably more to it than that. Our real problem is that much of the intellectual class of the United States has abandoned the West. It isn't that the intellectuals have gone over to the enemy; a witch hunt to eliminate communists would be about the worst thing we could do. It would also be futile. Intellectuals and academics don't side with the Soviet Union against the United States: they consider
both
to be the enemy.

Richard Pipes lists "a number of factors in Western societies which create an atmosphere favorable to Moscow's strategy of political divisiveness. The resentment of intellectuals and academics of what they consider shabby treatment at the hands of their societies; the desire of businessmen to trade without political interference; the need of politicians and special-interest groups for funds from the defense budget; the quest of climbers for social symbols in a world where these have become scarce—all these combine to make influential segments of democratic society unwilling to face the threat to their country's security and prone to minimize it or even to deny that it exists.

"The power of these groups is much magnified by the influence they exert over the media. That the media, especially the prestige organs, are dominated by people given to anti-anti-Communist views—people for whom the main danger to the United States comes from internal failures rather than external threats—can be in some measure statistically demonstrated. In a 1979-80 survey, 240 editors and reporters of the most influential newspapers, magazines, and television networks in the U.S. indicated that in the preceding two decades, four out of five of them had voted for Democratic candidates; in 1972, 81 percent had cast ballots for George McGovern, a Presidential candidate rejected by the voters in forty-nine of the fifty states . . . Among members of the self-designated public-interest groups in the U.S. (e.g., consumer and environmental-protection societies), the prevalence of such views is higher still—96 percent of the persons polled from such groups stated that they had voted for McGovern; they further expressed preference for Fidel Castro over Ronald Reagan by a margin of nearly seven to one."

Pipes wasn't the first to note the defection of the intellectuals. Eric Hoffer, one of America's genuine home-grown philosophers, noted as far back as 1952 that intellectuals throughout the world were hostile to Western civilization, and that "their search for a weighty and useful life led those of Asia and Africa, as it did their counterparts in Europe, to the promotion of nationalist and Socialist movements.

"Now, although the homelessness of the intellectual is more or less evident in all Western and Westernized societies, it is nowhere so pronounced as in our own common-man civilization. America has been running its complex economy and governmental machinery, and has been satisfying most of its cultural needs, without the aid of the typical intellectual. It is natural, therefore, that the intellectuals outside the U.S. should see in the spread of Americanization a threat not only to their influence but to their very existence." (Eric Hoffer,
The Ordeal of Change)

By the late 1960s, Hoffer noted that although intellectuals in the U.S. had gained considerably expanded influence and power, they were also increasingly disaffected. "The attitude of the intellectual community toward America is shaped not by the creative few, but by the many who for one reason or another cannot transmute their dissatisfaction into a creative impulse, and cannot acquire a sense of uniqueness and growth by developing and expressing their capacities and talents. There is nothing in contemporary America that can cure or alleviate their chronic frustration. They want power, lordship, and opportunities for imposing action. Even if we should banish poverty from the land, lift up the Negro to true equality, withdraw from Vietnam, and give half the national income as foreign aid, they will still see America as an air conditioned nightmare unfit for them to live in.

"When you try to find out what it is in this country that stifles the American intellectual, you make a surprising discovery . . . What he cannot stomach is the mass of the American people—a mindless monstrosity devoid of spiritual, moral, and intellectual capacities. Like the aging Henry Adams, the contemporary American intellectual scans the daily newspapers for evidence of the depravity and perversity of American life, and arms himself with a battery of clippings to fortify his loathing and revulsion."
(The Temper of Our Times)

Given the views of those who control most of the media, it's not surprising that TV and the papers will carry plenty of stories about depravity and perversity—possibly more than the public at large really wants.

The problem is not to find fault but to find a way out. That, alas, isn't going to be easy. One consequence of the defection of the intellectuals from Western values—including dedication to scholarship—has been the progressive deterioration of the schools, to the point that the National Commission on Excellence concluded that "If a foreign country had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would consider it an act of war."

The result is that we're losing in a war of words. In fact, it has gotten to the point where it's hard to tell who's talking. As Joe Sobran put it in a review of Soviet America-expert Georgi Arbatov:

The eerie thing about
The Soviet Viewpoint
, written in the form of several long interviews . . . conducted by Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans, is that Georgi Arbatov seems to be impersonating Cyrus Vance.

What the book stunningly reveals is Arbatov's sophistication about American liberalism. He knows its peculiar gullibility, and he speaks its idiom with near-perfect nuance. No "running dogs" or "Wall Street lackeys" or "capitalist bloodsuckers" here; Arbatov utters the Leninist vision in terms that might have been lifted from
Foreign Affairs
.

Soviet-American relations have need of
reciprocity
. We must seek
mutually acceptable solutions
. Let us avoid
confrontation
, but instead confront
new realities
, eschewing the while any
mood of nostalgia
that might lead to a
new cold war
(much as such a development might please
hard-liners in Washington
, who are fond of
saber-rattling
).

This is a time for
international cooperation
. We face
global problems
, such as the
depletion of natural resources
, which can't be dealt with through
old perceptions inherited from the cold war
.

Whether one likes it or not, we are chained together on this planet.
We dare not treat the situation as a
zero-sum game
, or
continue to squander our resources through the arms race
. Not
if we are to avoid doomsday
. It is imperative that we pursue the
possibility of lessening tensions, of lowering the level of military confrontation
.

Despite our
different social systems
, there are
overriding common interests, that call for cooperation. We are talking of human survival on this planet, of today's increasingly complex, fragile, and interdependent world.

The real issue is the
quality of life
. If we are serious about
building a new society
, we must combine a genuine commitment to
social spending
with
a new, broader approach to human rights
.

Remember,
the Vietnam War torpedoed the Great Society
, and in a nuclear war,
there will be no winners
. Think of the
human cost!
Not only of
the war threatening humanity
, but of any
new massive military buildup
.

Any
significant improvement
in the
infrastructure
must be
viewed in the context
of the phenomena of
wide-spread alienation
and
social atomization
stemming from
McCarthyist witch-hunts
, and the
long-term trends
that culminated in
Watergate
with all its attendant
pressures for change
in the
military-industrial complex
whose
macho
posturing has thus far precluded
meaningful redistribution . . . social expenditures . . . purely internal Afghan development
. . . .

Sobran concludes that, "There's hardly a sentence in this book that couldn't have been picked up on the narrow frequency band between
The New
York
Times
and the Institute for Policy Studies."

All of which says more about the American intellectual establishment than it does about the Soviet Union.

George Orwell said this about the language of Soviet Stalinists:

 
"As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of
words
chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of
phrases
tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. It consists of gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug."
 

Humbug or no, the war of words is serious. Any time you're tempted to think it isn't, contrast again the relative balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1945 and today. It is Only by self-paralysis that the West has allowed the very idea of a republican form of government to be endangered by an economic disaster area like the Soviet Union.

Jeane Kirkpatrick recognized just how serious it all was:

 
By calling "autonomous" that which is powerless, "federated" that which is unitary, "democratic" that which is schismatic, "popular" that which is imposed by terror, "peaceful" that which incites war—in brief, by systematically corrupting language to obscure reality—the Communists have made inroads into our sense of political reality. Language is, after all, the only medium in which we can think. It is exceedingly difficult to eliminate all the traditional connotations of words—to associate words like "For a lasting peace and a People's Democracy" with neither peace nor popular movements nor democracy.
 

Having recognized the problem, we still have to figure out what to do about it.

The first thing is to reject the easy solution of abandoning the virtues of the republic. Not that I wouldn't greatly prefer an American tyranny to any other, but really it's no good becoming like the enemy in order to avoid being conquered by him. Eric Hoffer puts it this way:

 "Stalin's assertion that 'no ruling class has managed without its own intelligentsia' applies of course to a totalitarian regime. A society that can afford freedom can also manage without a kept intelligentsia: it is vigorous enough to endure ceaseless harassment by the most articulate and perhaps most gifted segment of the population. Such harassment is the 'eternal vigilance' which we are told is the price of liberty. In a free society internal tensions are not the signs of brewing anarchy but the symptoms of vigor—the elements of a self-generating dynamism."

What Hoffer is saying is that we must be true to our own principles. We must act like free people.

On the other hand, we don't have to be serious about nonsense. We don't have to pretend to be horrified because the President once referred to the Soviet Union as "the evil empire." Why shouldn't he do that? The Soviet Union certainly is an empire under any rational definition of the word, and it's pretty hard to view the slave camps as anything but evil. It's also a pretty tame thing to say compared to what they daily say about the United States.

We don't have to pretend we're in the presence of genius every time someone tries to tell us that international relations are complex. We particularly don't have to act as if someone foolish enough not to see the differences between the U.S. republic and the Soviet empire is wiser than we are.

The first threat to the republic is not so much the Soviet Empire as our unwillingness to see it as a threat; in particular, the willingness of the intellectual class to see the internal crisis as worse than the external enemy.

In the long run they may be right, although I suspect not for the right reasons.