LENIN IN AMERICA

This entry is not exactly on Leo Strauss (1899-1973), but perhaps more accurately on the peculiar history of neoconservatism in America. (For much more on Strauss, my entry The Posthumous Wild Adventures Of A Nice Jewish Thinker in the Tikkun Olam section will be posted later.)

Having talked already about the political esoterism of Leo Strauss and its far-reaching consequences for the new American century (I think that even the bravest political opportunists in Washington DC wouldn’t dare to talk about a new American millennium in this context), the time has come to probe into the shallow acid waters of the so-called neoconservative movement in America, which, I am afraid, has not quite given up ghost since the retirement of the body, which that wretched ghost used to officially possess last in the George W. Bush Administration.
I have studied the history, faith, and practice of the American neoconservative movement for a while, and it strikes me with its most curious parallel to the story of Marxism in Russia a century ago. The Russians, with Lenin’s inspired blessing, radicalized the relatively benign elder thinker Marx (not to be confused with the young radical thinker Marx of the Communist Manifesto period), blatantly ascribing to him an array of outrageously un-Marxian ideas, originating from Lenin himself, and rather successfully managed to pass them off as belonging to Karl Marx. By the same token, the neoconservatives may have ascribed some pretty outrageous ideas to the authorship of the relatively benign philosopher Leo Strauss, and proceeded to call Strauss the father of the neoconservative movement, whereas its real father may not have been Strauss at all, but the much more down to earth political activist and practical political thinker Irving Kristol, who is ironically being called “godfather” of the neoconservative movement, officiating the Strauss-Kristol nexus along exactly the same structural lines as the nexus Marx-Lenin had been made not so long before them. We will be talking about the Strauss-Kristol nexus a little later, but for now we are resuming the regular course of our discussion.
Let us now retrace the history of neoconservatism in America, both as a movement and as a term. The term itself was coined by the eminent American socialist, social critic, radio commentator, professor of political science at Queens College Michael Harrington, in reference to the critics of the American welfare reform. (His 1973 article in the Dissent Magazine had the title The Welfare State and its Neoconservative Critics.) Harrington used the new term pejoratively, describing the ideas of the liberal intellectuals who had rejected the dominant political direction taken by the Democratic Party at the time in favor of a new improved form of conservatism.
Ironically, although the term was first used pejoratively, it would be picked up and used, this time as an adequate description of the new movement, by its spiritual leader and explicit founder. Its distilled meaning, this time positively self-descriptive and unabashedly self-congratulatory, was proposed by none other than Irving Kristol, who was calling himself a true self-confessed neoconservative. Needless to say, Leo Strauss, never used this term and never described the fundamentals of the neoconservative ideology, as described by Irving Kristol and later ascribed to Strauss.
(Mea culpa, I am describing neoconservatism as an ideology, because to me it is clearly one, but, technically, Kristol insisted that it was not an ideology, but a persuasion, a way of thinking about politics, rather than a compendium of principles and axioms. It was classical, rather than romantic in temperament, and practical and anti-utopian in policy. In my view, this effort to "de-ideologize" neoconservatism is clearly disingenuous, and even an effort to brainwash the public, for which reason I now withdraw my mea culpa plea.)
Mind you, I do not deny that neoconservatism can be called a persuasion or a way of thinking about politics or whatever, none of which denies the fact that at the same time neoconservatism is an ideology.
The fact that Kristol was disingenuous in denying that neoconservatism is an ideology is revealed in his own admission, which is this: “What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.” (Wall Street Journal, September 11, 1975.) This observation, or rather philosophical credo, makes Kristol’s disingenuous definition of neoconservatism as a “persuasion” indistinguishable from the normal understanding of what is called “ideology.”

Apart from Irving Kristol, (whose son Bill Kristol has become one of the top leaders of the neoconservative revolution in America), another, this time totally odious political figure has been openly recognized as its major inspirer. Max Shachtman (1904-1972) was an American leftwing Communist intellectual who was expelled from the Party in 1928 and became one of the closest associates of Trotsky and the chief intellectual force behind the CLA, the Trotskyist Communist League of America (1928-1938) and its successor organizations SWP (Socialist Workers Party), ISL (Independent Socialist League), a reconstituted SP (Socialist Party), and eventually on Shachtman’s death, SDUSA (Social Democrats USA). Irving Kristol had acknowledged some indebtedness to Shachtman, and the Reaganite luminary UN Ambassador and senior Academic Jeane Kirkpatrick used to be a devoted Shachtmanite in her earlier years, and never, even in her later life, had repudiated this association.
There is actually a very good reason why none of the elder neoconservatives (who had all been influenced by Max Shachtman in some way) either deny or repudiate this association. Although Trotsky was an “anti-Stalinist,” he was not “anti-Soviet,” whereas Shachtman surely was, and he differed with Trotsky on the question of taking sides in the Russo-Finnish War of 1939, opting, unlike Trotsky, against the USSR. His Trotskyism graciously forgiven, it was this extreme anti-Sovietism of Shachtman, which had endeared him to the neoconservative crowd, who were all, strictly speaking, anti-Soviet cold war hawks, rather than anti-Communist hawks. This core distinction (anti-Sovietism, rather than anti-Communism!), I repeat, has defined the nature of American neoconservatism, and has made Shachtman’s otherwise radical Trotskyite transgressions palatable to the tastes of the future pillars of American neoconservatism.

…So far so good, but where does Leo Strauss fit into this. Apparently he does not. The neoconservative flirt with Trotskyism never was to his taste, at least insofar as his history of personal associations, written legacy, and public statements are concerned. On the other hand, of all neoconservative heroes, he is by far the most intellectual, the most academic, and the most philosophical in the classic sense of the word. Max Shachtman and Irving Kristol, in contrast, were both mostly political activists and ideologues. Thus, Leo Strauss, unlike the others, gives the neoconservatives a much higher level of intellectual legitimacy (as the only one, for instance, who ever talks about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, whereas the others talk about Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and contemporary politics). This, as it happens, is the main reason why the neoconservatives like to identify themselves with Strauss first and foremost, while their more immediate connections to Trotsky, Shachtman, and the mother of them all Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, have been most deliberately downplayed… But before we get to Lenin, though, let us examine the basic tenets of neoconservatism.

In terms of its ideas, neoconservatism has most visibility in foreign policy. Using the codeword "freedom," its stated purpose has been to defeat all opposition to American power in the world (which required the defeat of America’s main adversary of the cold war, the USSR, and its successor state Russia, with which task the Russians conveniently obliged in the 1990’s) and to establish America’s global hegemony (this second task turning into a debacle). It is quite obvious that, thus securing world power, the neoconservatives reasonably saw their control of the essential political institutions of the United States as an absolute must, and it is here that Lenin will shortly come into the picture.
In their domestic orientation, the neoconservatives enthusiastically identified themselves with neoliberalism, that is, the ideology of aggressive capitalism, founded on the concept of the free market. Attributing positive ethical value to capitalism (which certainly turns all Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism and such upside down), they saw free-enterprising capitalism as the embodiment of that freedom which they were anxious to impose on the rest of the world via the doctrine and practice of Globalism. This linkage makes perfect sense. Being the predominant economic power in the world and by far the richest one, global economic “freedom” means nothing less than America’s total hegemony. (By the very same token, “freedom” in any society divided into the rich and the poor, institutionally empowers the rich and disenfranchises the poor.)
Now, here we encounter an immediate contradiction. Economic freedom implies freedom from government restraints. But the neoconservative foreign policy emphasis requires exactly a very strong and very intrusive central government, that is bound to intrude into, and dominate, all American domestic institutions, including the nation’s economic activity. This contradiction appears irresolvable until we come to realize that political and economic power are virtually merged in the neoconservative winning scenario. The same people will be essentially holding power in the United States over both sectors with the obvious division of responsibilities between neoconservatism in foreign policy and neoliberalism in domestic and economic policies.
In order to have its way not just in Washington, but in the country at large, this neoconservative-neoliberal monolith must effectively take power over the country as a whole, subordinating all domestic policies to its joint agenda. This can be achieved by talking about politics on a massive scale, and by “persuasion” of the public, which results in a propaganda offensive and both extensive and intensive brainwashing of the public and by a virtual takeover of power over all three branches of the US Government: executive, legislative and judiciary. Certain signs of such a successful takeover are distinctly visible today: despite all the catastrophic debacles suffered by neoconservatism during the George W. Bush Administration, from 2001 to 2009, the neoconservative-neoliberal alliance is alive and quite active behind the Obama Administration (just as President George W. Bush himself had predicted, prophesying the dramatic change in Candidate Obama as soon as he would become President Obama), its rhetorical vocabulary slightly muted down, but its practices largely unabated, while its control over the US media has recently become even greater than before.

Coming to the question of method, where Lenin finally gets into the picture, let us look at the curious array of neoconservative historical associations. I do not intend to join the ranks of those critics who implicitly identify neoconservatism with Trotskyism, by overstating their historical connection. Let me be clear, even the extreme anti-Sovietism of the neoconservatives, which highlights the influence of Max Shachtman, has no connection to Trotsky, who was an anti-Stalinist, but angrily quarreled with his American disciple over the latter’s excessive anti-Sovietism. The distinguishing features of neoconservatism are its underlying ideas, which have nothing to do with Trotskyism, but also its methods of achieving them which have everything to do… not so much with Trotsky as with his intellectually far superior comrade Lenin.
It was Lenin who developed and successfully introduced into practice the famous party principle, according to which it is possible to take power in a great country against overwhelming odds, as long as you have the instrument for such a takeover: a small, but absolutely committed body of disciples and comrades, bound by the tightest conspiratorial discipline, following a clear-cut set of rules, and, most importantly, armed with an effective ideology. This practice of creating a secret society within the United States, exactly along Lenin’s lines, and activating it for an effective power takeover has been explicitly attributed to the neoconservatives by their critics, which must always be taken with a grain of salt, but even on the face of it, judging from the words and actions of the neoconservatives themselves, it looks like this must exactly have been the case. In this light, the political theories of esoterism, conspiratorialism, and principled mendacity for a good cause, as forwarded by Leo Strauss, and allegedly gleaned by him from the Ancient Greeks and some later classics of political philosophy, become important pieces of a sinister jigsaw puzzle, which now fall into place, and reveal a very disturbing picture. In this case it is no longer important whether Strauss was the mastermind of the emerging neoconservative movement, or was merely used by the neoconservatives, exactly like Lenin had used Marx. After all, Leo Strauss died back in 1972, when America, despite all her faults and missteps, still was a very different country from what she has become in the last twenty to thirty years.

"ONLY AMERICANS CAN HURT AMERICA." EISENHOWER.

I Like Ike.
This phrase is the well-known 1952 slogan of the campaign to “draft” General Eisenhower (nicknamed Ike) into the Presidency of the United States. The play on this phrase however makes the point that I myself have always liked Ike, and so did every Soviet leader since... Stalin!

General Dwight David Eisenhower (“Ike”) was the Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe from 1944 to 1945, and after the end of World War II was appointed Military Governor of the American Occupation Zone in Germany (May-November 1945), followed by his appointment as the US Army Chief of Staff. His political position toward the USSR was favorable to the Russians. Convinced that they did not want another war and that a policy of friendship and partnership with Moscow was in American interest, he was however overruled by President Truman, and, with the introduction of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, he was obliged to toe the line. In 1948 he basically retired from active military service and became President of Columbia University (1948-1953), the position he retained even during his one-year stint (from April 1951 to May 1952) as the first Supreme Commander of NATO.
It was then, in late spring of 1952, that the Republican Party, out of office for twenty years, and out of glory since Teddy Roosevelt, found itself successful against the Democrats in their mutual bids to draft the likable “Ike” as the number one on their presidential ticket for the November 1952 national election. With Truman removing himself from contention, it was a landslide for Eisenhower whose running mate on the Republican ticket happened to be none other than Richard Nixon.
(In this civilian age, especially after the General Alexander Haig 1981 power scare and until fairly recently, one could have been surprised how eagerly a war general had been sought by both parties. Today, of course, after a series of never-serving (and even draft-dodging) American Presidents and Vice Presidents, there is a renewed nostalgia for a military man at the helm (expressed in an apparently unsuccessful attempt to “draft” General Petraeus to run for high public office, and thus the enthusiasm over General Ike ought not to cause too much surprise.)
General Eisenhower had previously never held an elected political office, but he was a very likable man and bona fide war hero in the age when all capable men had served in the military in World War II, and military service was an immediate badge of honor. No wonder then that Ike won a convincing victory. JFK after him would also count his heroic military service to his credit against Richard M. Nixon, who was of course also a WWII veteran (Lieutenant Commander), but whose exploits had been far less spectacular, and besides, he was not as likable as JFK. (Still Nixon lost by a very thin margin.)

Despite Vice President Nixon’s cold war belligerence (but look what happened to his anti-Sovietism when he had been elected president!) and the prevailing Zeitgeist of interventionism, “pactism,” and the practice of George Kennan’s containment in general, President Eisenhower was eager to continue his old course on better American-Soviet relations. In 1955, he attended the Geneva Summit of the Big Four (USA, USSR, UK and France), the purpose of which was “reduction of international tensions,” or détente, to use the more familiar word. In 1959, no doubt helped by the 1957 shock of the Sputnik launch, US-Soviet relations were well on the road to regular summitry with a prospect of a long-term constructive relationship thick in the air. In July of that year an American National Exhibition came to Moscow on a friendly display mission, headed by Vice President Nixon and culminating in the historic “Kitchen Debate.” Later that year, in September of 1959, Eisenhower had Nikita Khrushchev in America for a state visit, with the expectation of a return visit of the American President to Moscow.
Many good things might have been accomplished then and there, had President Eisenhower… not taken the personal responsibility, with a good soldier’s stubborn honesty, for the routine flight of an American U2 spy plane over the Soviet territory on May 1, 1960. The irony was that it was not the first such flight, but it was the first one which Soviet air defenses could finally shoot down after the introduction of the new surface-to-air missile capable of doing it. The American pilot Colonel Francis Gary Powers was no hero, he bailed out of the plane and was captured alive. The drama of the incident was about to evolve into a most unwelcome international scandal, since Khrushchev had intended to use it for propaganda only, expecting the president to deny any personal knowledge, not to mention personal involvement. When Eisenhower did the opposite, Khrushchev was furious that now he had no way of sweeping the whole unpleasantness under the rug, and his much sought prospect of better relationship with the United States had to wait until the next incumbent. Khrushchev indeed liked Ike, and desperately wanted to do personal summit business with him, so it was an enormous blow to him and to his best-laid plans.
Despite this unfortunate foreign policy setback, the Russians have always treated Eisenhower with greatest respect, and the U2 affair, with Eisenhower taking responsibility for it, may have slowed down the progress of US-Soviet relations, but, on the balance, had enhanced Ike’s positive image in Moscow, both at the time and in the historical perspective.

Aside from his persistent and honest efforts to improve U.S.-Soviet relations, in an unhealthy atmosphere of early cold war paranoia, bomb shelters and all, and to establish regular summitry with the worthy purpose of avoiding, or at least managing present and future superpower conflicts, President Eisenhower’s two-terms in office were marked by several other remarkable achievements. Perhaps the most significant, and surely, the most enduring among them was his authorization of the Interstate Highway System, under the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. Seldom had so much federal money been allocated for so worthy a cause. Ironically, Ike justified the colossal expenditure making clever use of the cold war demons, arguing that in the event of a superpower war, where major American cities would be at risk, elaborate means of citizen evacuation had to be available, and the Interstate Highway System was therefore an indispensable national priority.

Despite the highly negative propaganda connotation of the term the Eisenhower Doctrine in the USSR, this negativity oddly never transferred to the person of Ike. On the contrary, Eisenhower was actually applauded for his historic warning regarding the American “military-industrial complex,” as quoted from his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961. If one can talk of Ike’s greatest legacy to America and the world (in the minds of the Russians), this is it, hands down.---

“…A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction... This conjunction of an immense military establishment and large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence--- economic, political, even spiritual--- is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.
“We recognize the imperative need for the development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Having revisited this iconic passage from President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the American nation, we can now move on to his numerous aphoristic statements which, put together, paint a wonderful picture of a great American patriot, a peace-loving soldier, a sharp excellent mind, and, above all, an admirable man. I am placing these selected quotes in several categories explicitly identified by their titles.---

A Soldier about War.

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

“Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.”

“If men can develop weapons which are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man’s intelligence and his comprehension would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.”

“Pessimism never won any battle.”

“There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”

“War settles nothing.”

“When people speak to you about a preventive war,--- you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, “I have come to hate war.”

A Statesman About Peace.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

“How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?”

“I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem--- and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?”

“I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

“The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in, and give it to them.”

“If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order.”

“In most communities it is illegal to cry “fire” in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered a serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?”

“This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”

“Although force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration, and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.”

“Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.”

An Honest Man About Himself.

“Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.”

“I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.”

“I thought it completely absurd to mention my name in the same breath as the presidency.”

“The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.”

A Free Man About Freedom.

“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

“History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.”

“If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care, and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.”

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”

“Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.”

“We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.”

“We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.” (!!!)

A Philosophizer About Everything.

“An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.”

“Don’t join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.”

“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”

“It is far more important to be able to hit the target than it is to haggle over who makes a weapon or who pulls a trigger.”

“Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.”

“Only strength can cooperate. Weakness can only beg.”

“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”

“The best morale exists when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it’s usually lousy.”

An American About America.

“An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame-Southern Methodist University game and doesn’t care who wins.”

“Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy.”

“Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

“I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.”

“I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we did not know it then.”

“The spirit of man is more important than mere physical strength, and the spiritual fiber of a nation than its wealth.”

“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.”

“Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.”

And now this:
“Only Americans can hurt America.”

With these profound and inspiring words of Ike I conclude this entry.

COLD WAR'S HOTTEST KITCHEN

For many historians and students of Truman, the defining event of his presidency is the dropping of the two atomic bombs (one uranium, the other plutonium) on Japan in August 1945. There have been several stated reasons for this: unwillingness to lose at least a million American troops in a bloody conventional assault on the country; a desire to show the Russians the might of the American muscle; and even a desire for revenge on Japan for Pearl Harbor, and for her inhumane treatment of American POW’s during the war.
These are all valid reasons, and I am not going to vainly speculate whether Japan might have surrendered on her own soon after the Russians entered the war in the Pacific (as is often alleged). But one key point needs to be made. It is a well-known fact that the atomic bomb affair had been kept secret from Truman prior to his sudden assumption of the presidency in April 1945, and even as President he still knew too little about it to be held accountable for a deliberate decision to unleash its little-understood horrors on the scale of mass destruction.
There was a further irony in this. Stalin actually knew more about these weapons than Truman did. And he also knew that by using the only two bombs in her possession at that time, America would now be bombless for at least a short while, and would not pose any atomic danger to the USSR, should a General Patton try to take this matter into his own hands.
But anyway, this is another story and it is being told elsewhere, for which reason I am not including it in the main body of this entry, considering that, surprising though it may seem, President Truman had really little to do with it.

The person of Harry S Truman (“S”-no dot! was his real given middle name, to please both grandparents, whose names did indeed start with an “S”), with the passage of time, appears increasingly intriguing. In spite of his ostensibly anti-Soviet stand and the essentially false premises of the famous Truman Doctrine (the events in Greece and Turkey had precious little, if anything at all, to do with Soviet expansionism), he was always held by the Soviet officials in an unexpectedly high regard. He was a well-respected adversary. (This is made all the more intelligible in the light of my two boxers metaphor: they are fierce competitors in the ring, but they know that they cannot live without each other, contributing to each other’s fame, glory, and even modus vivendi.) Truman’s domestic socialist leanings were even more pronounced than those of FDR, and the only reason why he is not presently recognized as a great social reformer is the fact that his reforms were, perhaps, too radical for their time, to make it through Congress. His personal integrity has been well established and was his distinctive trademark from early on, uncorrupted by his plunge into the Big-League Washington politics. Not the least among his glowing accomplishments was outstanding personal bravery, which he had amply demonstrated during his military service in World War I. Another great reason for his very high regard in Russia is, of course, the fact that, on FDR’s sudden demise, he splendidly took over the American Big-Three vacancy in Potsdam, whereas the other new face British Prime Minister Attlee’s “half-ration” never quite rubbed off on the otherwise extremely capable Mr. Attlee, hopelessly overshadowed and outclassed by his portly, cigar-smoking predecessor... (This note about the Truman and Attlee replacements  is not an expression of my personal view of course, but of those Russians who were present at Potsdam.)
Another irony of Harry Truman’s life is a certain parallel between his political fortunes and his final place in history. Chronically in trouble with both his fellow Democrats (both Northern and Southern!) and their Republican counterparts, he was given up for politically dead on more occasions than that famous ‘Dewey wins over Truman’ 1948 miracle, yet he did manage to survive and endure. Likewise, in the eyes of history, he was shamefully underrated, while in office, yet his overall presidential performance rating had soared on his leaving office, easily promoting him from the status of mediocrity to near-greatness, virtually overnight. Today his presidential rankings range from the high of #7 to the very high low of #11.

There will be much more said about him in my History section, of course, just as I have noted in the case of his great predecessor FDR. In both these cases, please refer to that section for more. The most conspicuous case among these, in President Truman’s time, even more conspicuous than the Containment Doctrine, developed for him by George Kennan, was the Korean War, a most fascinating subject, which remains misunderstood, the mystery to be hopefully lifted after my shockingly unorthodox explication in the previously posted entry under the title Stalin’s Korean Charade.

Another seminal event on the Truman Administration’s watch was the establishment of the State of Israel. It is therefore of no small significance that one of President Truman’s most controversial, though lesser known reflections, to the effect that “the Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgment (sic!) on world affairs” (as quoted by Washington Post on July 11, 2003, from Truman’s 1947 Diary), with the all too obvious implication that Jews ought not to be allowed participation in US foreign policy development, was made virtually on the eve of this historical act of an unprecedented empowerment of the world Jewry in the last three millennia, namely, the creation of the modern Medinat Yisroel. It, therefore, needs to be looked at within this context, even if the subject is most uncomfortable.
Quotations like the one above are customarily treated wholesale as hot potatoes, and hardly ever allowed to be analyzed in a thorough scholarly manner. It is not quite clear whether this remark, branded anti-Semitic by Truman’s Jewish critics (which may be accurate up to a certain point, but totally irrelevant to our discussion), refers to the alleged propensity of the American Jews to be more partial to the interests of Israel than being in keeping with the proper interests of the United States (which, strangely enough, used to be the candid opinion of several high ranking Soviet officials and political strategists who were ethnically Jewish themselves, yet were all staunch Soviet loyalists and detractors of the West), or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to suggest that Give ‘em Hell Harry, the valiant Cold Warrior, may have sensed, back in 1947, the potential danger of an Israel populated up to one third by recent émigrés from the USSR, and undoubtedly infiltrated by Stalin’s agents, eager to subvert American foreign policy by appealing to the Jewish element of Washington’s political establishment. (Which, of course, completes and concludes the above-mentioned Soviet argument, and indeed represents the original intent of Comrade Stalin behind his own vigorous effort in the creation of the State of Israel, even if in Stalin’s time that intent may not have borne the expected fruit right away…)
Needless to say, this sharp-edged but very important and understandably unexplored subject is being further explored in other appropriate sections.
And finally, for those who are not exactly history buffs, the title of this entry alludes to President Truman’s famous dictum: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!”

Truman Talk.
This small entry is devoted to Harry S Truman’s better or lesser-known quotations. As usual, I have chosen just a small selection of my favorites, starting with his good-natured attacks on the partisan hypocrisy of the Republicans. Nothing extraordinary here, but all these quotes are sentimentally reflecting the lost innocence of those “old days.”---

“A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants.”

“A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader.”

The next set of quotes tells us something about Truman’s personal style, work ethics, and character, with a liberal sprinkling of good, often self-deprecating, and occasionally philosophical humor.---

“The buck stops here.”

“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

“I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

“It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow’s viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.”

“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”

“The reward of suffering is experience.”

“A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities; an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.”

“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”

“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.”

One particular thought of his on what it means to be a President, stands out so sharply that I want to quote it in isolation from all the rest.---

“When you get to be President, there are all those things,--the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes,--all those things. You have to remember it isn’t for you. It’s for the Presidency.”

All these sayings are of course exceptionally contemporary and topical as applied to our times.
The necessity for the public to be fully informed, which is a virtual impossibility in our age of propaganda victorious and triumphant:

"You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have all the facts, you cannot make proper judgments about what is going on.”

And, related to it, this thought on reading [need I say only good] books as the best education possible:

“Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought."

I think that even in this quite limited selection, Truman’s colorful personality comes through in an appealing way, and tells much more about the man than all history books put together can. In fact, he is one of the best authors of good aphoristic dicta among the American presidents, statesmen and politicians, in my view. And it is proper to close this selection with two particularly prescient adages which I might call Truman’s legacy to the present generation of Americans, quoted now without further comment.---

“America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.”

“When even one American who has done nothing wrong is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth,-- then all Americans are in peril.”

JUNE OF WAR

Seventy years ago today, and one hundred and ninety-nine years ago this coming Friday, two tragic events on an epic, even more than world-historical, scale shook Russia, and both dramatically changed the history of the world in their respective centuries. Both events started what would be known as Russia’s Fatherland Wars against the greatest superpowers of their time, who had the folly to become her overconfident invaders: Hitler’s Germany in 1941 and Napoleon’s France in 1812.
In each case, Russia had been badly underestimated, resulting in the crashing fall of both those giants, while Russia grew stronger each time, as a result of her ordeals, cured and rejuvenated by the elixir of immortality and invincibility, brewed from her heroic experiences and sustained by an unforgetful national memory.
The 22nd and the 24th of June are days of remembrance for Russia, but they should also serve as occasions for deep meditation for all those who are underestimating her in our time.

STALIN'S FAVORITE COMIC

Harpo Marx was undoubtedly a most outstanding comic, and I mean that he stood out among the Marx Brothers, as my previously posted entry Stalin, FDR, And Harpo Marx pointed out. But, understandably, he was not counted as Comrade Stalin’s favorite comic, as that distinction belonged to someone else: a homegrown talent, or, should I say, genius?


Arkady Isaakovich Raikin (1911-1987) was a household name in the USSR for half a century, as a towering genius of comedy and an endearing personality. Born in Riga, he lived most of his life in Leningrad, where he founded a theater of his own. Three years before his death, he moved to Moscow, where he opened the Satyricon Theater, now run by his son Konstantin Raikin. Some of his unforgettable characters and brilliant impersonations have survived in his radio and television appearances and in several movies, such as People and Mannequins (1974). In 1968 he became a People’s Artist of the USSR, the highest artistic title awarded in the Soviet Union, in 1980 he was awarded the country’s highest honor, the Lenin Prize, and in 1981 came his final recognition as a Hero of Socialist Labor.
Raikin was a master of gentle humor, found by him in everyday life, but he was also a great satirist, bravely making fun of Soviet bureaucracy, from top to bottom. Although his satire was always understated, it was even more poignant because of it, as his audiences could fill in the blanks by themselves, and they loved this kind of creative participation in Raikin’s skits and monologues. It goes without saying that satire was a tricky business in Soviet Russia, and many comics of lesser talent were not allowed what Raikin was. This is only another proof that genius in the USSR was allowed much greater extents of personal freedom than the run of the mill mediocrity.
Raikin’s recognition became universal and incontestable after Stalin ipse heard his performances and was so impressed that he invited Raikin to perform at his birthday party, where the guests were literally shocked by Raikin’s boldness, and all refrained from applauding the comic, when they saw that Stalin himself was not applauding. While everybody was stiff in tense apprehension of what was to follow, Stalin looked around bemusedly, then slowly raised a glass of wine and proposed a toast to Raikin’s best of health. After this charming entr’acte, came a roaring applause, as Stalin’s guests could let their deep emotion go, directed probably mostly toward Stalin’s grand gesture, but some of it trickling down to Raikin as well.

After this birthday party in the citadel of Soviet power, Arkady Raikin’s future career, and the extraordinary extent of artistic freedom allowed him, were positively assured.

STALIN, FDR, AND HARPO MARX

In the course of his long and illustrious career, Sherlock Holmes lost at least one case. So did Perry Mason, in his. I am wondering if the case related in this entry is an indication that Stalin really lost one to FDR here, but at any rate there is no question that FDR must have had a good laugh at the Soviet Union’s expense, and what resulted from his practical joke was not exactly the image that Russia wanted to project to the world at that time or later, when the stereotype of Jewish Bolshevism maintained by the majority of a not too Jewish-friendly world was definitely hurting Soviet interests.

In 1930 Stalin appointed the Jewish Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov (born Meir Wallach-Finkelstein) to the post of Narkomindel (Foreign Minister) of the USSR. Having already spent much of his life in Great Britain first as an exile, then as Soviet Ambassador there, Litvinov’s new challenge was to facilitate the resumption of diplomatic relations between Russia and America. The relations were restored in 1933, ‘not accidentally’ coinciding with the arrival of the new Roosevelt Administration.
Stalin’s reliance on Litvinov in this matter was well calculated. Stalin was convinced that the great capitalist powers of the West were completely dependent on Jewish capital, and perhaps even run by it, and therefore it would make perfect sense for him to rely on a talented Russian Jew in finding a common tongue with the string-pullers of Western, particularly American, capitalism. Roosevelt easily saw through Stalin’s ruse and hit back with a relish.
FDR’s ingenious practical joke played with a semi-straight face, was to pair the outstanding professional Soviet diplomat Litvinov with the very popular American comic Harpo Marx, whom he hastily “deputized” as a special “goodwill Ambassador to Russia.” The name Marx was certainly a decisive factor in FDR’s decision, but no less significant was the Jewish ethnic similitude of the two men’s physical appearance: the Soviet Minister’s and the American standup comedian’s. The two of them, on Harpo’s dare, even chanced to perform a comedy act on stage together, no doubt, to the greater glory of Soviet Bolshevism…
Don’t get it wrong, though. This was not just some one-time joke. It was going on and on, thoroughly mixed with some genuinely serious business, with Harpo actually playing a rather serious role in this earliest stage of US-Soviet relations, paying regular official visits to Moscow, passing messages, and very successfully “impersonating” the opposite number to an authentic Soviet Commissar. Stalin was not all too pleased by the game forced on him by FDR, but he was obliged to play along.

FDR was a worthy opponent of Stalin and Stalin respected him for that. Alas, they don’t make men like him in America anymore…

WAR AND PEACE OF FDR

War And Peace Of FDR.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt has always cut an extremely attractive figure to the Russians, partly due to his aristocratic appearance, background, and manners (the Russians admire aristocratic demeanor, and despise the petit-bourgeois), partly due to his curbing of rampant "ugly" capitalism and the introduction of socialistic concern toward "the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid," as manifested in his New Deal, partly due to his enlightened, but strong (no matter what anyone says to the contrary!) foreign policy, which included his prompt recognition of the Soviet Union in the first months of his presidency in 1933, partly for a host of other reasons, but finally, and mainly, for being part of that Big Three image of him-Churchill-and-Stalin, symbolizing Russia’s superpower acceptance by the Western world.
There are several eye-opening revelations about FDR in my No Way To Treat A Lady historical section, and particularly regarding his role in what was to become known as the case of the Atomic Espionage. But those stories belong there, and there they are to stay. The present entry is of a broader, non-specific nature.

The term New Deal, characterizing his Administration, is far more inclusive than it would imply as a purely technical term. In its larger sense, this term becomes a metaphor for the FDR phenomenon as such.
A remarkable case of bipartisan unity, he was a Democrat, related to the Republican Teddy Roosevelt, and married to the latter’s niece. (Here is a nice trivia riddle: what was Eleanor Roosevelt’s maiden name?!) He also represents a healthy reminder of what America used to be, and, hopefully, could still be, given the right circumstances: a nation of individuals and leaders standing for their own personal beliefs, rather than for the agendas of their handlers.
Although FDR retains a consistent fan club among high-placed ethnic Russians, this is by no means the case among the Russian Jews, who, as I have had several occasions to mention, are not fond of him, blaming the Western Allies of Stalin for failing, due to their selfish reasons, to open the Second Front in 1942, and thus becoming indirectly responsible as enablers of Hitler’s Holocaust. Even so, they are not as vituperative in denouncing him as they are in denouncing Churchill, for the remarkably peculiar reason of denying FDR the necessary perceptiveness and sophistication of a “European” real-politiker. Thus, he is getting a relatively easy pass on his transgressions, but only as a person, without affording a similar absolution to the American political establishment, which is presumed collectively guilty of all mortal sins. Churchill on the other hand, is allowed no such excuse.

In my evaluation, FDR certainly stands out as one of America’s greatest Presidents. The “neoconservative” and pre-neoconservative rants about him being a dupe, and Harry Hopkins being no less than a Soviet agent of influence (!!!), are all preposterous and unworthy of a refutal in this entry. Refuting them in their historical context, which I am doing in the History section, is a different matter, and there it is most appropriate.

Regarding FDR, there are facts that have always been in the public eye, which are fascinating enough even without our recourse to the secrets of history. His legacy can be divided into four quadrants: two, foreign and domestic, timed to the initial period of formal peace, enjoyed by his Administration, and the other two, also foreign and domestic, related to the official state of war, in which America found herself by the force of the circumstances. The reader may have noticed, however, that in my title “war” comes before “peace,” and the famous title of Tolstoy’s novel is not the only reason. In fact, it would be ridiculous to talk of the period between 1933 and 1941 (or even between 1933 and 1939) as a time of “peace,” as FDR’s ascent to power in America coincided with Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, thus making any talk of “peace” after 1933 kind of incongruous. (Stalin, for one, knew already in 1926 that there would be no peace with Hitler, and he had actively started  preparing for the imminent war long before FDR became president.)
It does not mean however that we are not allowed to use the above-stated four practical quadrants in putting our entry together in an organized fashion, and the rest of this entry will consist of such four quadrants and a short conclusion.

The most important foreign policy achievement of the Roosevelt Administration during the early period was the diplomatic recognition of the USSR. The latter’s existence being a fait accompli, there was no nationally sustainable interest for the United States to keep ignoring the elephant in the room. To keep pretending that the elephant did not exist would have been as silly and counterproductive as the Prohibition, and it is for this reason that I am qualifying President Roosevelt’s recognition of the USSR as perhaps the greatest triumph of common sense on a par with the Twenty-First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

His second biggest foreign policy initiative was the Good Neighbor Policy, revising the U.S. position toward Latin America. Since the earliest years of America’s independence, reiterated in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, Latin America had been seen as America’s rightful sphere of influence. I find, however, that up to a point the doctrine had been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it strove to defend American interests in the New World, but on the other hand, by implication it restricted the zone of those interests to the New World. For this reason, I regard FDR’s “withdrawal” from a number of places in Latin America not as a retreat, but as his laying a subtle foundation for a more assertive American role in global affairs from now on. Look at it this way: by the turn of the twentieth century, the essence of the Monroe Doctrine had already received an implicit recognition from the rest of the world, but by the same token the rest of world did not want America outside the Americas. (It was hardly a coincidence that the actual acquisition of Puerto Rico and the virtual acquisition of Cuba in the Spanish-American war of 1898 had gone fairly painlessly, whereas the military acquisition of the Philippines half-a-world away had turned into a horrific bloody mess.)
In the spirit of this ingeniously understated renunciation of the Monroe Doctrine, the American forces were now withdrawn from Haiti and the new treaties with Cuba and Panama ended their status as protectorates of the United States. (Needless to stay, their dependence on the United States did not stop. Typically, between 1943 and 1952, when the USSR was maintaining “diplomatic relations” with pre-Castro Cuba, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States [Gromyko] also served as Soviet Ambassador to Cuba without as much as setting foot on Cuban soil… Some independence, indeed!) In December 1933, FDR signed the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, relinquishing America’s previously indisputable right to intervene in the affairs of Latin American countries.
What all this amounted to, I repeat, because it is so important to understand, was not letting Latin America go her own way, but an implicit lifting of regionalist restrictions on American foreign policy. Paradoxically, it was this Good Neighbor Policy of the Roosevelt Administration that made America a global superpower!

The second quadrant of our schema covers FDR’s New Deal policies. It goes without saying that FDR was trying to fight the ills of the Great Depression mostly with socialist weapons, but although much of his socialist initiative was eventually assimilated into the American socio-economic system, he was unable to perform a miracle to get rid of the "money-changer" mentality that had emerged to characterize the American capitalist system by the time of his First Inaugural Address (see my illuminating entry FDR And The Villains Of The Great Depression, which follows next in this posting), on March 4, 1933, when he famously attacked the ethics of capitalism, which he saw as the main cause of the economic crisis that devastated the capitalist world, and in particular the United States.

During the war, even before America entered it after Pearl Harbor, she became an “Arsenal of Democracy” as Roosevelt called it, supporting the Allies with military supplies, and expanding the Lend-Lease Program to include the Russians as soon as the USSR joined the war in June 1941. In domestic policies, a large military buildup conducted by the Roosevelt Administration guaranteed virtually full employment of the workforce, and thus did away with the last vestiges of the Great Depression.

There were major sources of controversy, such as the internment of first-generation Japanese, German, and Italian Americans, and the suspectedly excessive rapprochement with the USSR on the part of FDR himself, but especially on the part of his closest adviser Harry Lloyd Hopkins (1890-1946) and of his Vice President Henry Agard Wallace (1888-1965). It is, however, ridiculous and factually false to suspect these prominent members of the Roosevelt Administration (including FDR himself) of a particular pro-Soviet bias, as, had it been so, the Second Front in Europe would have been opened already in 1941, or at least by the summer of 1942, and not when it actually happened two years later, in the summer of 1944, when the Soviet Union was already winning the war on its own.

And finally, a bonus futuristic dimension to FDR’s policies. I am talking of the Atlantic Charter, discussed by him with Churchill in Argentina, in 1941. In this discussion of the future post-war world, the plan for the United Nations and a host of other international organizations and mechanisms began to materialize, ready to be implemented in 1945, when the war was finally over, the Allies coming out victorious.

FDR And The Villains Of The Great Depression.
There are some historical truths, which, considering the recurrence of world events, have been transformed to become eternal truths, whose relevance for all time has been established beyond doubt. Yet most such truths being uncomfortable and politically incorrect, they tend to be conveniently retired into oblivion, despite the fact that their serviceability does not subside, but on the contrary increases with the progress of time.
The current global economic depression is admittedly the worst since the Great Depression of the 1920’s to 1930’s. It is therefore tremendously instructive to go back to the bleak era eighty years ago and try to learn some lessons for the troubled times of today.
In this respect, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Inaugural Address to the nation on March 4, 1933, is an eye-opener of the first magnitude. In it FDR clearly identifies the culprits of the crisis and emphasizes its ethical, rather than natural origin. Here is a key excerpt from that immensely important document that reads as if a very brave man has written it today:

"…A host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.
"Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts, compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure and abdicated. The practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.
"True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit, by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision, the people perish.
"The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
"Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they have cost us, if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto, but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.
"Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of the pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business, which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Thus, small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live."

There can be nothing added to this astonishing invective against capitalist greed, except for me to note that the whole section Capitalism And Christianity: A Contradiction In Terms of my book, devoted to a discussion of the merits and demerits of capitalism, is greatly honored by its inclusion here.

FDR Speaks.
There are many well-known or lesser-known aphoristic sayings belonging or attributed to FDR, which have left me lukewarm. On the other hand, there are those which I find engaging and most interesting. Here is just such a collection.
I am organizing these sayings in two categories. The first category is non-thematic.---

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. (First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1933.)

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given, of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

There is nothing I love as much as a good fight. (Spoken like a true Roosevelt!)

When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.

The second category contains sayings arranged by their themes, as becomes clear from my short comments. The first group flirts with socialism, while obliquely, or occasionally directly, attacking capitalist ideology. For the strongest outburst of Roosevelt’s anti-capitalist invective, see my entry FDR and The Villains of the Great Depression, where the quoted passage from his First Inaugural Address is too long to be included in this entry. Need I also mention his multiple signature references to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” which sound awfully Karl Marx-friendly, although Marx himself might have found this reference not going far enough? Anyway, here are some shorter and vaguer ones, which still go in the same direction:

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.


The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off. (Hard-nosed competition with no holds barred, and “compassion” being the dirtiest word in the lexicon, whereas “cooperation” being a euphemism for “conspiracy” of the rich against the poor, have been the trademarks of capitalism. Thus by putting limits on competition and calling for genuine cooperation, FDR indirectly advocates anti-capitalist thinking. Even if this quote be taken as a global policy statement, the economic undercurrents in it are still defining its core meaning.)

The following two quotes are essentially idealistic pronouncements, and idealism of this nature is inimical to capitalist mentality:

A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air, and giving fresh strength to our people.


Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

Moving on now to the category of religion, we can notice right away that our very first “religious” quote is a borderline case of economics versus religion, thus falling into the category of Capitalism vs. Christianity.

Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion.


The other one is very much in tune with my own thoughts on religious tolerance.


Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion.

The next mini-category deals with education.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education. (Needless to say, I subscribe to this general view, but do we understand in this case what “education” means and implies?)

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize. (This is certainly true, but there are two strong caveats here. One, that it is not enough to throw money at education, unless that education is worth throwing money at. The multiple-choice system is clearly defective, and rather than further strengthening it with money, it ought to be discarded in the first place. And secondly, education has to be free and aimed at supporting special talent, rather than special disabilities.)

And lastly, FDR’s quip about accidents in politics, which sounds a lot like Stalin’s aphorism on the same subject. Did one of them borrow from the other, or did they just think alike?

“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” (Compare this to Stalin’s similar adage: “In world affairs, no single event which has serious political consequences can be said to have happened by accident.”)
This last FDR/Stalin twin quip is eminently worthy to become the sparkling closer for this entry.

IMPERIALISM BENIGN AND BESPECTACLED

Imperialism Benign And Bespectacled.
Woodrow Wilson was an important President in the world-historical sense, and, as the reader knows, this is the sense which interests me the most.
Born to parents of Scottish descent, his father was a Presbyterian minister, and his mother was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, which fact is credited for his characteristic piousness and academism. Another of the names given to him was that of an idealist, which he never denied, but instead, capitalized on. "Sometimes people call me an idealist," he said about himself (in his Address at Sioux Falls, on September 8th, 1919). "Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world."
To be sure, this attitude of “draping himself in the American flag” was a particular trait of his, throughout all his life, for which his political opponent Teddy Roosevelt, not without a reason, called him a rhetorician and an able hypocrite. "Wilson is a very adroit and able (but not forceful) hypocrite," he wrote in a 1916 letter, and in a speech given in the same year, he thus elaborated on his criticism: "He has made our statesmanship a thing of empty elocution. He has covered his fear of standing for the right behind a veil of rhetorical phrases. He has wrapped the true heart of the nation in a spangled shroud of rhetoric."
Some other notable criticisms of him include the famous passage in Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, iii, 1920: "It was harder to de-bamboozle this old Presbyterian than it had been to bamboozle him, for the former involved his belief in and respect for himself."
The famous American journalist and rather notorious Soviet sympathizer (“I’ve seen the future and it works”) Lincoln Steffens gave Wilson a very interesting, although rather pretentious, characterization: "He is the most perfect example we have produced of the culture, which has failed and is dying out." (From a letter written in 1919.) I disagree with the concluding portion of this assessment, as the special brand of idealism Wilson represented is very much alive, if not altogether well, in modern America, with its pro-democracy thrust. There is another word for the Wilsonian brand of idealism, which is imperialism, in its American manifestation.
This is exactly as I see Woodrow Wilson, that is, as the epitome of a glorified version of American imperial chauvinism, exemplified by his presumptuous words "The world must be made safe for democracy," from his Address to Congress, on April 2nd, 1917. There is far more than idealism in these words, and to explain this, I am turning now to one particular, highly reputable person, whom I intend to be quoting quite frequently in the future, but on this very first occasion, just to state my disagreement with him. Bertrand Russell makes a brief comment on Wilson, citing Hobbes, in his discussion of Hobbesian covenant (The History of Western Philosophy, p. 551). “'Covenants without the sword are but words.' (President Wilson unfortunately forgot this.)" I am not impressed with Russell’s comment here, as I believe that in President Wilson’s case, the issue is not simply his “forgetfulness” (I realize that Russell must be using this word sarcastically, but, seeing that he does not go farther than this, I am holding him to it!), but his distinctly American imperial arrogance, recently resurfacing in the principles of foreign policy, conducted by President George W. Bush toward all countries against whom he had not gone to war. Ironically, another loud bell is rung here when we compare the neoconservative use of the word “freedom” with the Wilsonian concept of “new freedom.” Here is how this concept is explained in the Concise Dictionary of American History (Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1962: I am deliberately preferring older editions of such reference works, as being untainted by all sorts of questionable modern reinterpretations.)---
“New Freedom is a term generally accepted as descriptive of the political and economic philosophy underlying the domestic policies of President Wilson at the opening of his first administration. The more significant utterances of Wilson in the campaign of 1912 were published under the above title early in 1913. They constituted an earnest plea for a more humanitarian spirit in government and business, political reforms that would restore government to the people and break the power of selfish and privileged minorities. The growth of corporate power had, he argued, rendered obsolete many traditional concepts of American democracy. Government must have not merely a negative, but a positive, program and use its power 'to cheer and inspirit our people with the sure prospects of social justice and due reward, with the vision of the open gates of opportunity for all.'”
In my rendition of the famous but  unattributable phrase: The road to hell is littered with good intentions. It is very ironic that instead of developing this Wilsonian concept of New Freedom along the naturally implied socialist lines (the bigger government imposing humanitarian fairness on the society which it governs), the evolution of this concept led the way, even in Wilson’s time, to the American government trying to impose these principles not on its own society, but on the rest of the world. Hence, here, in Wilson’s New Freedom already, we can find the noxious seeds of modern American neoconservatism, with its imperial prescription for the New American Twenty-First Century. Well, President Woodrow Wilson’s imperial prescription was, presumably, for the New American Twentieth Century, and we know how the rest of that century had turned out…

Woodrow Wilson And The Great War.
President Wilson was known as a peace-loving man, and during the first four-plus years of his Presidency, including three years of World War I, he would be living up to his reputation. But then things changed.
As with everything else in history, there have been great misconceptions about exactly how America entered the Great War in Europe and why. The name of the British ocean liner the Lusitania is unfalteringly brought up whenever the main reason of President Wilson’s abandonment of his nation’s neutrality pledge is given by a host of lightweight American historians, yet surely the connection between the two events is hard to find, and even harder to acknowledge.
It is true that on May 7, 1915, the ill-fated British ship was indeed sunk by a German torpedo and among at least 1200 passengers killed were 128 Americans. But it is also true that almost two years would pass before the United States would finally declare a war on Germany. Two years is long enough a stretch, to cast doubt on the feasibility of any such connection.
The fact is that the Americans didn’t want to join the European war, and the Germans did not want it either, as the German Embassy in Washington kept buying paid advertisements in American newspapers, advising the public to avoid sailing on British ships in the Atlantic. Those who would not heed this warning, did so at their own peril, as the Lusitania incident clearly demonstrated.
The British claimed that the Lusitania had been a strictly civilian ship, and its sinking was an act of German barbarism. The Germans insisted that the ship had carried significant military cargo (using the passengers as what today we call a human shield) and was thus a legitimate target. Indeed, it was later found out that there was a large store of war munitions carried by the Lusitania, and it was as a result of their explosion when hit by a German torpedo, that the ship sank.
President Wilson reacted to the sinking of the Lusitania by demanding reparations from Germany for every dead American passenger, plus a pledge not to sink passenger ships. Germany paid the reparations and did not mind making the required pledge, as long as it was understood that the sunk ship had clearly been used for militarily purposes by the British. It was clear to any objective mind that the last thing Germany wanted in this affair was a war with the United States, and the reverse had to be true as well. But there were not too many objective minds regarding the war at that time. Lusitania or no Lusitania, there were those who were bent on joining the war no matter what and those who were bent on staying out of it no matter what. Our old never-say-die friend William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of State in Wilson’s administration, was a war hawk and resigned from his post in protest over his boss’s inadequate reaction. The President himself, however, appeared sufficiently satisfied with the German response to his demarche. Moreover, during his successful reelection campaign the next year, his trump card slogan was “He Kept Us out of War.” It all changed after that, soon after the start of Wilson’s second term, and here is how the popular historian Kenneth C. Davis explains the change.---
"The stated reasons for America’s involvement were freedom of the seas and the preservation of democracy. But neither side in this war had a monopoly on illegal naval warfare. Nor was the democratic ideology so powerful among America’s allies that Wilson thought he should fight to maintain it as far back as 1914.
In his favor Wilson tried admirably to restrain both sides and mediate a peace. But as in almost every other war America has fought, powerful forces in industry, banking and commerce cynically thought that war was healthy. And if the world was going to be divvied up after the fighting was over, America might as well get its fair share of the spoils."

Ironically, the victorious end of the Great War did not bring much wanted satisfaction for President Wilson. His cherished brainchild, The League of Nations, although temporarily imposed on Europe, was snubbed by the United States Senate which refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. Soon thereafter in September 1919 Wilson suffered a stroke, which was carefully concealed from the American public. Although several staged pictures and even live appearances of him were produced, his condition was unquestionably debilitating and would later become the principal case for arguing and adopting the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, dealing with the question of orderly succession whenever the President or Vice President becomes unable to perform his functions.

The Red Scare.
Before Joseph Raymond McCarthy, was Alexander Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General of the United States in the Woodrow Wilson Administration. The infamous “red scare,” which lasted for several decades, starts with him.
Let us remember that it was the time of the rise of Italian Fascism and Russian Bolshevism which were both somehow fused together into the “red” specter of Marx’s and Lenin’s Communism. In fact, it was mostly the Bolshevik victory in Russia, which was beginning to generate a considerable domestic Communist following, boisterously publicized by a host of European Comintern agitators and their local sympathizers. A lot of Americans felt extremely uncomfortable with this particular Zeitgeist.
Ironically, Palmer was by no means a paragon of Conservative Republicanism. A Quaker and a Democrat, he found himself on the progressive wing of his party. When the newly elected President Wilson offered him the post of Secretary of War, Palmer declined, citing his pacifist Quaker beliefs. The post of Attorney General was much more to his liking, and although it was offered to him rather belatedly, in 1919, he was most happy to accept it.
One of Palmer’s first acts in office was the release of some 10,000 German aliens taken into US government custody during the Great War. On other occasions he showed such reluctance to go after the radicals that he was questioned by the US Senate as to the reasons of his inactivity.
It all changed when radical danger struck close to Palmer’s own home. Following a series of assassination attempts against him and his family, Palmer became a different man. The hard-hitting series of effective anti-Radical raids he conducted in November 1919 and January 1920 became known as the Palmer Raids. Thousands of suspects were arrested and tagged for deportation. However only five hundred were in fact deported, as the United States Department of Labor, officially responsible for these deportations, protested against Palmer’s zealous and visibly biased pursuit of his new anti-Radical agenda, and dismissed most of his cases. At the end of the short-lived frenzy, just like it would be in Joe McCarthy’s case, the Congress and the President both sharply rebuked Palmer, and the public and the press blamed him for… the ineffectiveness of his own witch hunt.
His zeal thus having been checked, Palmer ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for President in 1920. Then rather surprisingly he mellowed again. In the last days of the Wilson Administration he asked the President to pardon one of the most conspicuous and ideologically dangerous American radicals to date: the jailed leader of the Socialist Party of America, one of the greatest admirers of Lenin and of Bolshevism, Eugene Debs. But this time it was the ailing Wilson’s turn to get tough, for an understandable reason, and Palmer’s bizarre, almost random petition was denied…

Strange times, strange people, strange actions! But, you know, they were somehow better than what we are having today. Then, one could certainly disagree with the things that were done, but at least they made some sense. Today, nothing does.

ROOSEVELTIANA: WORLD DOMINATION AS A GOOD THING

The Bull Moose.
On the rocks to the north of the Custer State Park in South Dakota, the American sculptor John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum chose the site of his magnum opus, completed in the last year of his life, in 1941, to become known as the Mount Rushmore National Monument. The four familiar faces, carved in granite by the sculptor himself, and finished after his death by his son Lincoln Borglum, are those of America’s greatest Presidents up until then: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
All my special deference to the Founding Presidents notwithstanding, I have no quarrel whatsoever with the choice of these four to represent America’s greatness from the outlook of the first century-and-a-half of her history. As a matter of fact, the only two among the later Presidents, worthy of being placed alongside these giants are FDR (in his own right), and JFK, who, despite the shortness of his office, represents the true Schubertian symbol of what the American future had hoped to be. (See my entry  titled Assassination Of An American Dream, and for the explanation of my Schubertian allusion see another entry: But Yet Far Fairer Hopes.)
But the focus of this entry is not all of the above, but just one of them,--- the Bull Moose, and, yes, also the greatest of all Teddy Bears.

Compared in public affection to Andrew Jackson and in colorfulness to Abraham Lincoln, he had to overcome great odds in his ascent to historical greatness; he was an asthmatic child with very poor eyesight (his bad need of glasses was discovered only at the age of thirteen, although his wealthy parents should have known better and should have given him better attention and care on that account). He was a self-made man, despite the handicap of being born rich (in our day and age, when money and power go hand-in-hand, it sounds a bit ridiculous to call any wealthy person a self-made man) not only by virtue of his uncompromising hard work at Harvard and his subsequent political career, where he would meet some strong resistance to his rise from all corners, but, quite literally, through his daily rigorous work on reconstituting his physical body, from a frail weakling to the athletic and vigorous "bull moose."
The thrilling details of his eccentric life are all too well documented, and there would be no need to rehash them here, necessarily in a hurry. But, both as a personality and in terms of his career and life achievement, Teddy Roosevelt rests in eternity as a marvelous adornment to the benign and admirable image projected to the world by the United States at her best. Often strongly criticized by contemporaries, and, in retrospect, for the large difference between his moralistic rhetoric and political expedience in practicality, he is also seen as an impulsive bully in his treatment of smaller nations, while an overly cautious “half-loafer” (to use his own expression) in his approach to America’s (and his own) peers. But all this, even if most likely true, fades in contrast to the sheer virility and enormity of spirit, embodied by America’s twenty-sixth President, explorer, author, soldier, and an authentic original, whose legend unfettered by minutia lives on as a reminder of what is best about the nation he represents.
Today, unraveling the dirty mess of American foreign policy, one is strongly reminded of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous words capsulating the key principle of great-power conduct in world affairs: “Speak softly but carry a big stick.” Ironically, it is commonly believed that TR himself did not practice what he preached. This is, in fact, the typical misconception, when a big stick is being mistaken for loud words. What a difference this normal Rooseveltian situation makes with today’s practice of loud words (We won’t allow this!, we won’t allow that!, etc.), as contrasted to the actual impotence of Washington, insofar as the deeds are concerned.
I shall further explain what I mean in my next entry World Domination As A Good Thing.

World Domination As A Good Thing.
Continuing with my apologia of Teddy Roosevelt the bully, I move that there is nothing wrong with being a smart bully who bullies for a good cause and is successful in what he does. Paraphrasing Maxwell Smart, one who bullies for niceness, and is not perceived as bullying for evil.
No one in his right mind would condemn a lion for hunting and killing his prey. It is kind of sanctimonious to criticize predators for following their natural instincts. It is only when our lion starts having big problems catching small rabbits that he becomes an object of ridicule and condemnation… for bringing shame to his family name for such unnatural incompetence.
Which brings me to a disagreement on one particular point with Noam Chomsky, whom I otherwise admire as a fine specimen of the rare breed of geniuses.

In his criticism of American foreign policy, Noam Chomsky makes the compelling case that throughout the Cold War Washington’s main objective was not the containment of the Soviet Union, but the projection of the American power around the world, with all that this implied. Thus, to an even greater extent than it was fighting the threat of global Communism posed by Russia, America was determined to suppress any kind of regional, or even local nationalist threat to its worldwide interests, or what Chomsky calls “the threat of a good example.”
One of the key things superpowers do, he argues, is trying to organize the world according to the interests of their establishment, using military and economic means. The overall framework of US foreign policy can be explained by the domestic dominance of US business interests and a drive to secure the state-capitalist (see my important clarification of different uses of this term in the Contradiction section) system more generally. These interests set the political agenda and economic goals, aiming primarily at US economic dominance.
Although the general framework of foreign policy planning can be explained on economic grounds, it does not explain every intervention. He concludes that a significant part of American foreign policy is based on stemming the “threat of a good example.” This so-called threat refers to the possibility that a country could successfully develop outside the American managed global system, thus offering a model for other nations, including countries, in which the United States has strong economic interests. This, he says, has prompted the United States to repeatedly intervene, to quell “independent development, regardless of ideology” in all regions of the world where she has little economic or safety interests. In one of his most well-known works, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky argues that this particular explanation accounts for the American interventions in Guatemala, Laos, Nicaragua, and Grenada (the list should go on, and on, and on, of course, as history keeps updating it), countries, which pose little or no military threat to the United States, and have few economic resources that could be exploited by American business interests.
How did this apply to the war in Vietnam?
According to Chomsky, the principal aim of the US policy was the destruction of the nationalist movements in the Vietnamese peasantry. In particular, he argued that US attacks were not in defense of South Vietnam against the North, but began directly in the early 1960’s, and were mostly aimed then at South Vietnam. He agreed with the view of orthodox historians that the US government was concerned about the possibility of a “domino effect” in South-East Asia, but not all that much concerned with the spread of communism and Soviet expansionism, but rather with such nationalist movements that would not be pliant to US interests.

Now, here comes my main argument of this important entry, which is as follows: I am willing to agree with Chomsky’s analysis of Washington’s intentions, which makes very good sense to me, but I disagree with his extremely negative assessment of them, as if they were some kind of monstrous anomaly, rather than a fairly sensible and consistent real-political behavior of a global superpower.
World domination is a good thing for somebody who can afford it, and who can conduct its implementation sensibly and ethically, which may be too much to be desired in real life, but at least not all that objectionable as a general principle. (I pray that my quasi-Voltairian touch of irony is not completely lost on the reader.) I am certain that the United States’ general conception of foreign policy throughout the cold war, despite the numerous cases of misjudgment and sheer stupidity, was a valid expression of her superpower status... End of that story.
In the light of the current collapse of American foreign policy, and of the American overall standing in the world, it becomes clear, at least to me, that it is much better for a superpower to pursue policies that can be disliked as much as the others want, as long as they are recognized as a legitimate manifestation of the said superpower’s national interest. The trouble with the current state of affaires is that Washington’s stubborn preoccupation with the neoconservative ideology has shifted this nation’s focus from the global American interest to a narrow regional obsession of a bunch of ideologues at the expense of virtually everything else, including the potentially irreparable damage done to this nation’s own backyard in Latin America through years of unconscionable neglect and of taking for granted what has always been far from obvious.
“Tis better to be vile than vile-esteemed,” opens a Shakespearean sonnet. To which I might add that perhaps the most sickening and ridiculous type of villain is the impotent villain, compensating for his impotence by loud barrages of flatulent demagoguery... Alas, poor Yorick! We all know him, Horatio…

Arrogance And Humility.
Whatever I said before about world domination being a good thing was unmistakably ironic, but it was also true. There is nothing unnatural in a superpower’s Wille zur Macht. And what is “natural” cannot be all that wrong! It is only when Power behaves stupidly that the unnaturalness of the combination of healthy might and obnoxious stupidity comes through and distorts the normal picture.
Teddy Roosevelt was never shy to project power. In many instances he acted as an unapologetic aggressor, and nobody should bear a grudge against him, because he never acted stupidly. This and the short next entry are designed to clarify the point of my last entry that world domination is a natural desire of a superpower, and when this desire is perceived as wrong by the world, something must be wrong and unnatural in that superpower’s projection of its otherwise legitimate will.
TR’s “Speak softly, but carry a big stick” is not about pulling punches, but about appearing humble, while “hitting hard.”
America must always exercise humility, which is the sugar coating on the bitter pill of a nation’s strength, if she wants the world to swallow that pill. Arrogant posturing is the self-defense of the weak, and it is unbecoming a great nation.
I may be contradicted by someone pointing out to me that Teddy Roosevelt was an arrogant man, in which case we may be disagreeing on the nature of his arrogance. Unlike today’s leaders of America, he was never humiliated, and he never acted stupidly. My next entry further clarifies what I mean.

Humiliation Of The Strong.
As I said before, Teddy Roosevelt had the right to be arrogant as long as he exercised his arrogance smartly. In all his foreign policy endeavors, he never found himself humiliated, either by his strong opponents or his weak quarry. This is something that cannot be said of his recent heirs in the White House. “Speak softly, but carry a big stick” may be mostly a figure of speech, but it is a priceless bequeathal to Washington’s officials in charge of American foreign policy, which so far they have failed to benefit from. One of the most hurtful downsides of this failure to be “humble” is currently pointed up by the world’s reaction to the ear-piercingly shrill talk pouring out of America’s foreign policy loudspeakers. Apparently, the sorry memory of the eight years of the George W. Bush Presidency has been a lesson wasted, if not on Mr. Obama personally, who is, indeed, a soft-spoken man by nature, then on the majority of the United States Congress, and on the foreign policy team of President Obama’s Administration. (Secretary Hillary Clinton and Ambassador Susan Rice are two very conspicuous examples.)
We want this and this!!! We won’t allow this and this!!! Washington shrieks in the voice strongly reminding that of the former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice… but, as before, with her, nobody seems to listen, or shake in their boots.
It is so terribly humiliating, when a great superpower tells others, “I want this!” …and does not get it.

Teddy Dixit.
Teddy Roosevelt is an exceedingly appealing person to me. I think that today his sheer energy and positive concept of “strenuous life” might have saved America from her current downslide, but alas, today’s America, preoccupied with trivial pursuits, taking her eyes off the stars and her feet off terra firma, wouldn’t even have wanted him, just like Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor did not want Jesus Christ in his theocracy.

I am closing this Rooseveltian cluster now with a personal selection of TR’s aphorisms, unsorted by subject and without any superfluous comment. I trust the reader will enjoy them the more, the longer he or she dwells on each and every one of these gems. Observe how relevant they all are to our time, a whole century later.---

A man who’s never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.


A man good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have.


A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.


Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance to the people and acknowledging no responsibility.


Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.


Courtesy is as much a mark of a gentleman as courage.


Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.


Do not hit at all, if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft.


Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.


Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.


Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.


Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.


Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.


I am a part of everything that I have read.


I am only an average man, but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man.


I care not what others think of what I do, but I care a lot about what I think of what I do! That is character!


I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.


I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart, and that is softness of head.


I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.


If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman. If Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.


In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing and the worst thing you can do is nothing.


It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.


It is essential that there should be an organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes, and therefore labor must organize.


Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.


No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.


No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.


There is a homely adage which runs, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”


The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on the same level as the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.


The first requisite of a good citizen in this Republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight.


The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.


There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.


There can be no 50-50 Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 per cent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.