(4) October Revolution: world war, revolt in the global periphery in "the greatest political event" of the first half of the 20th century?

John Bellamy Foster, Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917–2017 Monthly Review 69:3 (July-August 2017) addresses the practical as well as mythical status that the October Revolution attained in the 20th century, writing from a left perspective in somewhat wooden prose.

It was imperialism — not in its generic sense, encompassing the whole history of colonialism — but in its connection to the monopoly stage of capitalism, as V. I. Lenin employed the term, that constituted the differentia specifica of twentieth-century capitalism, determining the conditions of both revolution and counterrevolution. Already by the late nineteenth century, the contest over colonies that had shaped much of European conflict since the seventeenth century had been replaced by a struggle of a qualitatively new kind: competition between nation-states and their corporations, not for imperial zones, but for actual global hegemony in an increasingly interconnected imperialist world system. Henceforth revolution and counterrevolution would be interrelated at the level of the system as a whole. All revolutionary waves, concentrated in the periphery where exploitation was most severe, since intensified by the extraction of surplus by the metropolitan powers, were revolts against imperialism, and were confronted by imperialist counterrevolution, organized by the core capitalist states. Complicating this was the fact that a privileged sector of the working class in the advanced capitalist states could be seen as benefitting [sic] indirectly from the drain of surplus from the periphery, giving rise to a “labor aristocracy,” a phenomenon first singled out Frederick Engels and later theorized by Lenin in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Still, in 1967, a half-century after October 1917 and a hundred years after Capital, it was not unreasonable to assume, amid the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution in China, that world revolution would gradually gain the upper hand, and that the revolutions that had occurred, not only in Russia, but also in China, Cuba, and elsewhere, were irreversible. [my emphasis]

After the fall of the Soviet Union, in much of the West a triumphalist view of the Cold War celebrated not just a reduction in a military threat but a supposed ideological and practical triumph of capitalism. This is what Francis Fukayama and others celebrated as "the end of history," a Hegelian phrase that meant something similar to Daniel Bell's "end of ideology" decades earlier.

Foster has an interesting observation about the influence of Nicholas Spykman on George Kennan's "containment" theory. Which, it's worth noting, is not exactly what the Truman Administration implemented. At least not in the predominant emphasis from Truman's and later administrations on military containment. Spykmanm  was the author of America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (1942) and The Geography of Peace (1944). Francis Sempa writes (Nicholas Spykman and the Struggle for the Asiatic Mediterranean The Diplomat 01/09/2015):

Spykman sketched a geopolitical map that identified the key geographic power centers of the world, including the “Heartland” of Eurasia (H.J. Mackinder’s term for the northern-central core of the Eurasian landmass), the Eurasian Rimland (the crescent-shaped territory abutting the Heartland, which included the countries of Western Europe, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and the Far East), and North America. In evaluating the power potentials of each key region, Spykman memorably wrote, “Who controls the rimland, rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”

Kennan himself wrote on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution (The Russian Revolution: Its Nature and Consequences Foreign Affairs 46:1 1967) that the world war was a major factor in the popular understanding of the October Revolution. He writes that "often obscured to Western vision events of the intervening years but basic to any of it, is the essential altruism of purpose that underlay this revolution." (my emphasis) Yes, this is the author of the containment theory speaking. And he makes it clear he's referring to the Bolshevik Revolution, not solely or even primarily of the February Revolution. He writes of the great social issue presented by the class structure of capitalism:

The outlook that inspired the Bolsheviki brought them finally to power was founded on an understandable desire to correct these anomalies [generated by industrialization under modern capitalism], to eliminate social and economic exploitation, to assure to the servant of the machine the comfort, security, dignity of status community of which the Industrial Revolution and of the capitalist system were conceived to have robbed him. The tensions and troubles of the intervening years should not cause us to forget that this was, measured against the circumstances then prevailing, a noble dream, supported by a great earnestness of purpose, and pursued by thousands and tens of thousands of people in Russia, including many of the Bolsheviki, with a selfless dedication that has few parallels in the history of our time. [my emphasis]

It was a big deal, to put it mildly.

Kennan continues, explaining how the unprecedented horrors of the Great War (First World War) provided an essential backdrop to popular foreign perceptions of the revolution:

In 1917 millions of people across the continent of Europe had been reduced to desperation by social distress or by the sufferings of the World War or by a combination of the two. One cannot understand the meaning of the Russian Revolution unless one recalls the vast thrill of excitement and anticipation that went through great portions of the world public as the news of this event reached them. Tsardom, in its helpless ineptness, had permitted itself to stand before the eyes of the world as the symbol of an obsolescent and oppressive feudalism. To many millions beyond Russia's borders the Russian Revolution appeared initially as a great breakthrough of hope. Here were boldness, grandeur of concept and elevation of purpose bursting through the empty crust of tradition and privilege in one of the most backward and miserable of European countries. Here was the first great attempt to defy the evils of modern industrialism by setting against it a political system founded on the dignity and social innocence of the common working man - dedicated to the realization of his needs, his dreams, his aspirations. [my emphasis]

He is explicit in saying that the revolution was pursued with "extreme harshness, ruthlessness and opportunism of method, as well as the vindictive hatred addressed to members of the propertied or privileged classes in Russia and elsewhere, by which the early Bolsheviki were inspired." It didn't happen by conventions of workers and peasants getting together and voting to have a new, harmonious society.

And yet, despite what Kennan calls the "conflict, violence, dictatorial method, the disenfranchisement and punishment of great masses of people" that had their place in the "promulgation and consolidation of the Revolution," he nevertheless argued that "one is obliged to concede to the Russian Revolution the status of the greatest political event of the present century," the 20th century,

There's a good argument to be made that Kennan seriously misread Soviet intentions in the postwar period as the Cold War developed. And he always believed that the Communist approach was misguided and responsible for a great deal of needless and unjust suffering. He also found Communism to be in conflict with his own Christian religious beliefs.

But he was a serious guy, one of the leading American experts on Russia of his time, and one of the leading figures in the "realist" foreign policy tradition. So what he had to say still commands attention. So when he was saying 50 years out from the October Revolution that it was the greatest political event of first 66 years of the 20th century, he wasn't just trying to turn a flowery phrase.

George Kennan on post-Soviet NATO expansion

A reminder that Tom Friedman once did some decent reporting: Foreign Affairs; Now a Word From X New York Times 05/02/2014.

In those days, he wasn't just talking to tech boosters and taxi drivers in various cities who happened to agree with his favorite slogan of the moment. He did an interview with Soviet expert George Kennan about the NATO expansion then under way. It's a reminder that current issues in Ukraine didn't just fall from the sky in 2014.

"I think it is the beginning of a new cold war," said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs." [my emphasis]

This is a question I have about today's position, also. I haven't updated myself on the positioning of forces in the eastern parts of NATO, though they have been reinforced some as part of the current diplomatic chess match over Ukraine. But there does seem to have been an assumption, especially risky in the case of the former Soviet Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, that we were taking on a military commitment that would never actually have to be taken that seriously.

"What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was," added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed "X," defined America's cold-war containment policy for 40 years. "I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime. [my emphasis]

This seems to be a chronic problem in US foreign policy: not thinking carefully about the allies we take on in given situations or crises, then dumping them without careful thought about the consequences. And the press doesn't help with its superficial, crisis-of-the-moment, how-will-it-affect-the-electoral-politics-of-the-moment obsessions.

It was important in 1998 and remains important today for the United States to have peaceful relations with Russia and especially to cooperate on further reduction of nuclear arms. That still needs to be the overriding consideration in bilateral relations.

"And Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia," said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. "It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong." [my emphasis]

The "bad reaction from Russia" was perhaps later in coming than Kennan may have expected, perhaps in part because of new chances for Russian cooperation with the West in the Global War on Terror and because of Germany and the EU having pursued closer economic ties with Russia over the years since.

I've written before about how former German Chancellor Schröder (SPD) has financial reason for being friendly to Russia. That means we should keep that in mind, but not that it requires us to disregard what he says about the situation in Ukraine. And that doesn't mean that his SPD critics on that point should necessarily be considered as speaking from pure concern for intellectual integrity. (Daniel Friedrich Sturm, "Gerhard Schröder hat sich kaufen lassen" Die Welt 30.04.14)

Since he is experienced as Chancellor and does have close ties to German and Russian business circles, it's worth paying attention to what he says. In an interview reported in Gerhard Schrcder verteidigt Feier mit Wladimir Putin Die Welt 11.05.2014, Schröder addressed the subject:

Ebenfalls warnte Schröder Deutschland und den Westen in dem Interview davor, in der Ukraine-Krise weitere Sanktionen gegen Russland zu verhängen. "Man sollte jetzt weniger über Sanktionen sprechen, sondern auch über russische Sicherheitsinteressen", sagte Schröder.

Eine Nato-Mitgliedschaft der Ukraine etwa sei "für Russland nicht akzeptabel. Ich höre stattdessen immer nur, der Westen müsste Russland und Putin isolieren", kritisierte der SPD-Politiker.

Ausgangpunkt für die Krise sieht Schröder im Agieren der Europäischen Union. "Der grundlegende Fehler lag in der EU-Assoziierungspolitik", sagte Schröder. "Die EU hat ignoriert, dass die Ukraine ein kulturell tief gespaltenes Land ist."

Schon immer hätten sich die Menschen im Süden und Osten der Ukraine eher nach Russland hin orientiert, und der Westen eher zur EU, sagte Schröder: "Über eine Assoziierung hätte man reden können, aber zeitgleich mit Russland! Das ,Entweder oder' – also entweder Assoziierung mit der EU oder Zollunion mit Russland – war der Anfangsfehler."

[In any case, Schröder warned Germany and the West in the interview against placing further sanctions against Russia in the Ukraine crisis. "One should now speak less about sanctions but rather speak more about Russian security interests," said Schröder.

For instance, NATO membership for Ukraine would be "for Russia unacceptable. I'm always hearing instead, the West must isolate Russia and Putin," criticized the SPD politician.

Schröder sees the beginning of the crisis in actions of the European union. "The basic mistake lay in the EU association policy," said Schröder. "One could have discussed an association, but at the same time with Russia! The 'either-or' - that is, either association with the EU or a tariff union with Russia - was the beginning mistake."]

Tags: george kennan, gerhard schröder, ukraine

The sixties: George Kennan vs. the hippies

George Kennan, who puzzled over protesting students in 1968

George Kennan is best known as one of the leading advocates of the "realist" school of foreign-policy thought and as the author of the containment strategy adopted by the Truman administration against the Soviet Union. He quickly became disturbed by the over-emphasis on military means in the application of the containment policy. He became a leading advocate for nuclear arms control agreements and was an early critic of the Vietnam War.

So I was surprised when I picked up a book called Democracy and the Student Left (1968), which contains the text of a speech he gave which was printed as an article in the New York Times Magazine of 01/21/1968; responses from students and professors to the article; and a longer essay by Kennan responding to the letters and expanding his comments.

What surprised me was that Kennan's views from the speech on the "student left" and more generally on the New Left and youth movements of that time in the US came off like any crotchety-minded conservative dismayed and perplexed over why he had to take notice of these funny-dressed hippies and rowdy students who were so presumptuous as to think they had a right to be concerned about public affairs. I didn't expect Kennan to be jumping for joy over student protests. But I didn't expect to see such shallow, knee-jerk reactions from him either. Here's one sample from what I'd like to think he later found an embarrassing piece of writing:

One cannot, therefore, on looking at these young people in all the glory of their defiant rags and hairdos, always just say, with tears in one's eyes: "There goes a tragically wayward youth, striving romantically to document his rebellion against the hypocrisies of the age." One has sometimes to say, and not without indignation: "There goes a perverted and willful and stony-hearted youth by whose destructiveness we are all, in the end, to be damaged and diminished."

Amazing that an intellectual of Kennan's stature would have such a clueless reaction to events of that time. "Tragically wayward youth" who are also "perverted and willful and stony-hearted"? Good grief! No wonder there was a student revolt!

I'm not familiar at all with Kennan's family biography. But there are several mentions in the initial essay and in the longer follow-up to his own family. Along with the seemingly uncharacteristic emotionality of his words, I couldn't help but wonder if he had experienced some of these conflicts very close to home. In the second essay, he comments in a footnote about one letter-writer who had rather bizarrely suggested that he stage a nervous breakdown in from of his kids. In one of the only flashes of humor in this book, he comments, "I cannot believe, actually, that my own children are so unaware of my own awareness of my faults that they would be greatly enlightened by such a spectacle, however much they might enjoy it for its unexpected dramatic aspects."

In his speech and Times article, he was already quite alarmed about the state of American civil society, and that was well before most of the events of 1968. He wrote, "Not since the civil conflict of a century ago has this country, as I see it, been in such great danger", making it clear that he was referring mostly to internal conflicts in the US.

Knowing that Kennan was a very religious Christian, I was surprised most of all at the position he took in the speech on civil disobedience:

If you accept a democratic system, this means that you are prepared to put up with those of its workings, legislative or administrative, with which you do not agree as well as with those that meet with your concurrence. This willingness to accept, in principle, the workings of a system based on the will of the majority, even when you yourself are in the minority, is simply the essence of democracy. Without it there could be no system of representative self-government at all. When you attempt to alter the workings of the system by means of violence or civil disobedience, this, it seems to me, can have only one of two implications: either you do not believe in democracy at all and consider that society ought to be governed by enlightened minorities such as the one to which you, of course, belong; or you consider that the present system is so imperfect that it is not truly representative, that it no longer serves adequately as a vehicle for the will of the majority, and that this leaves to the unsatisfied no adequate means of self-expression other than the primitive one of calling attention to themselves and their emotions by mass demonstrations and mass defiance of established authority. It is surely the latter of these two implications which we must read from the overwhelming majority of the demonstrations that have recently taken place. ...

People should bear in mind that if this - namely noise, violence and lawlessness - is the way they are going to put their case, then many of us who are no happier than they are about some of the policies that arouse their indignation will have no choice but to place ourselves on the other side of the barricades. (my emphasis)

This kind of thing is virtually indistinguishable from the early-stage "culture war" narrative that was already developing around "the sixties". Even rock-ribbed reactionaries would usually make some vague pretence that they were concerned about the evils of society but just put off by the rowdy tactics they saw. In the Deep South, such language was routinely applied to even the most orderly and peaceful civil rights activities. If black Southerners had just been more patient, you see, things would have gotten better on their own, sometime around the time that Hell freezes over. But they were making things worse by demonstrating and such.

He went on to make it clear that he was including the kind of Ghandian civil disobedience that was such a crucial part of the American civil rights movement:

These observations reflect a serious doubt whether civil disobedience has any place in a democratic society. But there is one objection I know will be offered to this view. Some people, who accept our political system, believe that they have a right to disregard it and to violate the laws that have flowed from it so long as they are prepared, as a matter of conscience, to accept the penalties established for such behavior.

I am sorry; I cannot agree. The violation of law is not, in the moral and philosophic sense, a privilege that lies offered for sale with a given price tag, like an object in a supermarket, available to anyone who has the price and is willing to pay for it. It is not like the privilege of breaking crockery in a tent at the county fair for a quarter a shot. Respect for the law is not an obligation which is exhausted or obliterated by willingness to accept the penalty for breaking it. (my emphasis)

I'm still gobsmacked to see Kennan writing like this. It's impossible to believe that he wasn't aware in some way or another that democratic societies were precisely the environment in which civil disobedience was the most likely to be effective. Because there were voting publics involved who could respond favorably to acts of courage on the part of protesters willing to be arrested and negatively to excesses on the part of the authorities. Those fire hoses turned on peaceful demonstrators in Alabama changed a lot of white voters minds about the benevolence of the segregation system practiced in the Deep South.

Civil disobedience actions of that kind were not so much of an option in National Socialist Germany and Soviet Russia, which Kennan knew well from firsthand experience as a resident diplomat in both places.

Not only would Kennan's position have meant the tactics used by Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement or Ghandi in the Indian independence movement not have been possible. It also means that in situation like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, one of the most notorious pieces of legislation in American history, that citizens would have had no choice but to obediently do everything in their power to help returned escaped human property back to their slavemasters. The Underground Railroad that helped so many to reach freedom and kept the hope of final liberation from slavery alive could never have functioned as it did. Civil disobedience is a serious thing. But so are some of the ills that persisted for far too long.

The letters reproduced in the book don't include all the ones he received. But it's clear that his correspondents took issue with quite a lot about his Times article. A recent UC-Berkeley graduate named David Lee wrote:

Many of Kennan's criticisms of the hippies and New Left have also been made repeatedly by people like myself, offspring of the "Establishment but alienated from the status quo. I agree with his criticisms but I can add only that any man who is not angry and not militant about changing America either does not know or does not care about the brutality perpetrated every day upon the streets of America under the cloak of "freedom" and "democracy."

His letter cited the situation in the African-American Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn.

Nicholas MacDonald of Harvard challenged Kennan's attitude in the following passage, which he introduces with the fundamentalist-sounding comment, "But it is science that has become man's worst enemy." (!!!) It's clear in the context he is referring to the application of science to weaponry and other less than humane projects:

And why should anyone wait while more evidence (people killed, cities bombed, troops increased, nuclear war threatened - in Vietnam - and black people humiliated, killed, and oppressed here, at home) is collected. There is plenty of evidence NOW. We do not have the luxury of waiting, in our monastic cells, studying the speeches of LBJ; people die, as time passes, and we study - not to mention that the world could come to an end while we study. It is the Victorian cry of a long-lost century: WAIT - detach yourself, take on the nun's garment, forget the world - WAIT, until you are married.

He's got a point. More recently, we've been through years of that already with the Iraq War: things are improving, The Terrorists are in their "last throes" (Cheney), a tipping point here, a turning point there, the next six months will be decisive, The Surge is working, the Iraqi troops are being trained, violence is down and that's a good sign, violence is up and that's a good sign, and on and on and on. Patience is not always a virtue. Congress has been far too patient on starting to put an end to US military involvement in Iraq.

Barbara Bernstein and Susan Brown of Barnard gave a good statement of something that I think gets lost a lot today in discussions of antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s. Today, in 2008, a large majority of the public is against the Iraq War, and that's been the case for years. That was not the case with the Vietnam War in 1967 and 1968, although when the 1968 Tet Offensive completely blew the credibility of the lying generals and administration officials who had been talking about how great things were going and how we were defeating the Communists all over the place and yadda, yadda. When you're in the minority opinion, a big part of the point of protesting is to shake people up enough to make them think about the problem at hand in a new way. Bernstein and Brown wrote:

The government and the establishment would like us to demonstrate and protest - quietly, that is, so as not to make any threatening vibrations. But we are demonstrating, and intend to demonstrate, in a way that the government can neither applaud nor fail to notice. We want to cause discomfort among the apathetic because we want to cause change. The biggest struggle is to shock people like Mr. Kennan out of their smugness.

I had much the same reaction to reading Kennan's Times article here 40 years later! And my reaction comes with the experience of knowing that I've needed to be shaken out of apathy and passivity at times myself.

I was relieved to see that Kennan, in his much longer "Mr. Kennan Replies" essay, at least partially redeemed himself. He takes up the question of civil disobedience again, particularly with reference to Henry David Thoreau's famous essay on the topic, which several writers had commended to him. A big part of his criticism has to do with the individualistic nature of Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience. Kennan at least makes more thoughtful and sensible comments on civil disobedience in the longer essay, though I certainly don't find it convincing on the larger subject. He has a point, though, about Thoreau's individualism in that connection.

Kennan seems to have caught a glimmer of one of the more poignant aspects of his position in his Times piece. He himself was a critic of the Vietnam War. But he somehow couldn't connect his own position, as a scholar and former diplomat used to more orderly ways of asserting his opinions, with young antiwar protesters with their long hair and such. He grumped that many of his correspondents over the article had a "dangerously oversimplified view of a complex situation". Again, the old-as-the-hills argument: you people who want to change what's going own just don't understand the complexity of matters as we, your betters, do. He writes:

For those who may not know it (numbers of people appear not to; several even wrote me that instead of criticizing the students I should get out and oppose the war), I was long an opponent of the policies that brought us to the Vietnam involvement; I made my views public on a number of occasions in ways (including five hours on national TV on one occasion alone) that could scarcely have been more emphatic without defeating their own effectiveness. I continue to regard the war as one devoid of favorable prospects, highly dangerous to world peace, and dreadfully adverse in its effects on our domestic life and world position.

Oh, yes, preserving one's "effectiveness". A lot of Democrats, including many who should have known better, preserved their "effectiveness" by voting for the Iraq War resolution of 2002. Look where that got us.

Kennan seemed to be unaware of the emerging environmental movement among young activists (the essays are specifically focused on the student movement), though in early 1968 it wasn't as prominent as it was to quickly become in the following years. But he himself was very much aware of the issue. Noting toward the end of the second essay that he agreed that ending the Vietnam War was "a prerequisite to almost anything constructive that one can think of in our [national] life" and that nuclear weapons were an "apocalyptic" danger, he proceeded to discuss other issues "that cast no less threatening a cloud over the future of our society":

There is first the question of what is happening, physically, to the natural environment necessary not only to sustain life in this country but to give it healthfulness and meaning. This is a question not just of our own once so magnificent continent, which we are treating with the blind destructiveness of the army ant; it is a question of the purity and life-sustaining quality of the seas and the global atmosphere within which this continent, and we with it, has its existence. How long can man go on over-populating this planet, destroying its topsoils, slashing off its forests, exhausting its supplies of fresh water, tearing away at its mineral resources, consuming its oxygen with a wild proliferation of machines, making sewers of its rivers and seas, producing industrial poisons of the most deadly sort and distributing them liberally into its atmosphere, its streams and its ocean beds, disregarding and destroying the ecology of its plant and insect life ? Not much longer, I suspect. I may not witness the beginning of the disaster on a serious scale. But many of the students who have written me will. And let us not forget that much of the damage that has already been done is irreparable in terms of the insight and effort of any single generation. It takes eight hundred years to produce a climax forest. It will take more than that, presumably, to return the poisoned, deadened waters of Lake Michigan, on the shores of which I was born, to the level of plant and fish life and natural healthfulness that they had at the time of my birth. And even to begin to reverse this process will require a human society far more conscious of its obligation to the continuity of life, and not just the possibilities for life's immediate enjoyment, than anything we see before us today, or have seen in the past. To make it this way will require a vast process of education, which has scarcely yet begun.

Not all of this damage, of course, could be combated or remedied just within the framework of our continent alone. But much of it could be. As the world's greatest industrial nation, as the possessor of the largest single component of its industrial machinery, also as its most wasteful and industrially dirty society, and finally, as the world's foremost nuclear power and one which has yet to give any very satisfactory explanation of the manner in which it disposes of its nuclear wastes, we have a very special responsibility here.

I see in the preoccupations and behavior of our governmental leaders very little recognition of all this. The paltry million or two dollars they devote to the study and treatment of these problems is as nothing compared to what is spent on the Vietnam conflict alone. One wonders whether men have gone mad, to spend such tremendous sums on what they consider to be the military defense of a country which is so extensively destroying the prerequisites of its own life from within. (my emphasis)

It really puzzles me how a guy that could make this kind of concerned, sweeping criticism, that was far from widespread in 1968, could fail to see sympathetic aspects in the student and youth movements of that time that connected with this very concern.

Among his other long-term concerns, he includes race relations (more on that below), the negative effects of advertising, the excessive use of cars, and the need for some kind of regional governments between the states and the federal government.

But I can't say very much for his views of racial problems in the US. Based on the positions he takes in his longer essay, the most charitable thing to say is that he didn't seem to have a particularly well-informed view on the matter. This, for instance, is just downright embarrassing:

Nor is there any evidence [in his correspondents' letters] of a recognition that the Negro has had any part in the creation of his own problem, or is to have any part in its solution. The idea that he could improve his situation in any degree, either by his own effort or by his electoral action, appears to be strange to this cast of thought. He is seen only as the helpless ward of public authority. One gains from the reading of these letters the impression that in the view of their writers, the American Negro is to be held to no standards — that all qualities on his part, whether laziness, dishonesty, irresponsibility and violence of behavior or their opposites, are to be rewarded alike.

Yes, it sounds like Rush Limbaugh. You can't really dress that one up. And, unfortunately, there's more along that line. So even when he gets around to recongizing that something like white racism exists, it's kind of painful to read that what he really appreciates about "the American Negro" is ... good manners:

I say these things with great reluctance, because I know they will be distorted and interpreted as evidence of an outlook I do not really entertain. I yield to none in my admiration for many of the qualities I see in the American Negro. Aside from the distinction of his contributions to music and the drama and humor, he has an exceptionally high sensitivity to people and situations. He has a gift for casual social intercourse that many of us could envy, and one made all the more impressive by the respect and solicitude for the dignity of the other person that underlie it. When not upset by painful racial reactions or demoralized by the various strains and artificialities of urban life, he tends, accordingly, to have better natural manners than a great many American whites. To anyone who believes, as I do, in the overriding importance of good form as an essential of civilized living, these are formidable qualities; and our country, in my opinion, would be distinctly poorer without them. I am perfectly willing, furthermore, to recognize that the responsibility for the present situation of the American Negro is considerably greater on the part of the white community than it is on his. (my emphasis)

He even managed to echo - let's assume it was unintentional - Southern "states rights" defenders of segregation when he wondered at the oddity of a "student in Maine" who felt some sense of responsibility "for the customs and conditions that prevail in Amite, Mississippi." And who went on to assume that if those "fail to crrespond to what he, from his vantage point at a distance of two thousand miles, finds proper and acceptable, it is his business to act personally - not, mind you, through his elected representatives, but directly and in person - to set things to rights". Kennan just seems to have not had much understanding or knowledge about the civil rights movement as it actually unfolded in the decade or more preceding his essay. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that he was more than a little limited in his views by the institutional racism that was very much present then and is still with us today.

But to close with one of Kennan's more enlightened observations, he has some interesting things to say in connection with military conscription and the real issues of duties and obligations to the community involved, even when draftees are being required to fight in a misguided and even immoral war. While I don't fully share his view on draft resistance in the context of that time, this observation does shed some real light on a point that generated a lot of genuine concern and misunderstanding, aside from the cynical ways politicians like George Wallace and Richard Nixon exploited and twisted them:

The fact remains that the present student attitude toward obligations of military service stands in stark and almost dangerous contrast to concepts that prevailed up until quite recently among the majority of our people. To many older people it is almost bound to appear as a provocation offered to some of their most deeply held feelings. Many will question whether the emergence in so short a time of so drastically altered a concept of the relation of the individual to the state does not spell a fundamental change in the very nature of American national feeling. (my emphasis)

What surprised me was his comment on how much of the attitude of young people of that time against the draft, which appeared to the more traditional-minded to be insufficiently patriotic, cowardly or treasonous, might well be a legitimate and healthy reaction to this:

I wonder whether this attitude is not in part a predictable reaction to the silly cultivation of the externals of an exaggerated hurrah-patriotism that has come over our schools in the past twenty years: the oaths and songs and flaggings and renderings of the National Anthem on any and all occasions. These things are, unless I am much mistaken, relics of the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940's and early 1950's, when the pious and frequent performance of such ritualistic manifestations of love of country became a means of self-defense before the aroused bodies of super-patriots who swept through libraries, schools and colleges, their nostrils quivering for the smell of Communist treason. Many of the students would say, of course, that it is not the country itself but the "establishment" they are rebelling against — not the nation but the reactionary and oppressive policies to which the nation has allowed itself to be committed — that what they are doing reflects not lack of any love of country but rather a shame of country which the very love for it has induced. And in this there would be much truth.

Go, dude! Kennan may have had an irrationally negative reaction to hippie hair and clothing styles. But I'm pretty sure he wasn't the kind of guy to judge a politician's "character" by whether or not he wears a flag pin in his coat lapel. To take an example at random.

Sadly, the superpatriots we have with us always.

Tags: 1968, george kennan, racism, sixties

The end of the Vietnam War

George Kennan

George Kennan, the famous American diplomat, expert on the Soviet Union and original author of the "containment" strategy, wrote a few paragraphs for the New York Review of Books in its issue of 06/12/1975 giving his thoughts on the end of the Vietnam War. He wrote:

The lessons of Vietnam are few and plain: not to be hypnotized by the word "communism" and not to mess into other people's civil wars where there is no substantial American strategic interest at stake.

Kennan was one of the leading proponents of the "realist" school of foreign policy. Whoever promoted that name for their particular viewpoint had good marketing instincts, because I would hope that all foreign policy experts would try to be realistic. But we know very well from recent experience that not off of them are.

In line with his Realist outlook, he hoped that the US would take a more realistic, pragmatic and informed view of other nations. For instance, recognizing that the USSR and China were "national rather than communist great powers", by which he presumably meant that they recognized national interests distinct from their ideologies.

On today's hotspot for the US, he wrote, "In the Middle East we should be concerned to establish for the first time a power of independent decision—vis-à-vis both parties; for without that we can play no useful and constructive role at all."

Both parties, in this case, I take to mean Israel on the one hand and the Arab states on the other. It's almost nostalgic to think how simple things looked for American policy in the Middle East then. Of course, in reality, it was devilishly complicated then, too, but still...

Kennan wanted to see a significant reduction of American military commitments abroad:

Elsewhere, there can indeed be an extensive curtailment of American involvement. We need have little fear of the establishment of pseudocommunist regimes in Third World countries. They may be unfortunate for the inhabitants; they need not be for us. They have the advantage that their anti-Americanism is declared, not concealed; and they offer less provocation to our inane impulse to involve ourselves everywhere, to dispense arms and largesse, and try to be loved. (my emphasis)

I suppose we can safely say that Cheney and Bush have done away with the "trying to be loved" business.

And, as he did for much of the last couple of decades of his life or longer, he stressed the importance of environmental problems:

Besides the strategic problems, our main international tasks lie in the environmental field: the curtailment of the inexcusable misuse of the oceans, the bringing of ourselves and others to desist from the mad production of atomic wastes for which we have no safe means of disposal, the frank confrontation, generally, with the abuse modern industrialization and urbanization are inflicting on the usefulness of the earth as a seat of human living. It is here that there lie our greatest possibilities for leadership and for usefulness to ourselves and others in the aftermath of Vietnam. (my emphasis)

Tags: george kennan, vietnam war