DOKTOR BIRKENAU

In the wake of Watergate, the newly-reestablished, in the limelight of the Brezhnev-Nixon summitry, Soviet respect for the American presidency had precipitously plummeted. It already badly suffered under Gerald Ford, to which the rather miserable 1975 Vladivostok Summit had been a witness, but it certainly reached a particularly low point during the Jimmy Carter Presidency, thanks in large part to the special credentials of President Carter’s National Security Advisor Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski. Of Polish birth, and virulently anti-Russian, Dr. Brzezinski could hardly pass off as Moscow’s Nietzschean “noble enemy,” and his grotesque bias was matched by an even more hostile Soviet reciprocation. (I have always suspected, though, that the Russians were rather disingenuous in their negativity toward Dr. Brzezinski. It is much easier to control a predictable ideologue than a cool and calculating political artist, and I would say that Dr. Brzezinski’s easy predictability must have suited Moscow just fine.)

Not just in retrospect, but as a matter of normal principle, no policy, whether foreign or domestic, ought to be entrusted to a bigot. With all his human decency and a desire to do the best he could, President Carter’s judgment must be called into question, and his incompetence for the job really stands out in this matter of his National Security Advisor. But, to be fair to him, his later successor in the Oval Office George W. Bush fared even worse, and showed a far greater depth of personal incompetence by allowing bigoted ideologues of the neoconservative movement to take America hostage on his watch…

As for Dr. Brzezinski, having left office, and particularly after his anti-Russian dream had come true with the collapse of the USSR, he somehow acquired more balance in his judgments, and these days he can even pass off as an elderly statesman. But this is all too late, three decades too late, to be precise, and the harm of his erstwhile bigotry had already been done then and there…

Curiously, a very popular nickname for him in the Kremlin was “Doktor Birkenau,” which was a clever (if I may say so myself!) play on the original Polish name of Oswiecim-Brzezinka, translated by the Germans as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Very conspicuously, Dr. Brzezinski’s last name is technically impeccably translated into German as “von Birkenau,” hence the biting sarcasm. Not that he deserved it vis-à-vis Nazi Germany, although he was not untouched by a whiff of that traditional Polish anti-Semitism which gives an additional shade of meaning to such a nickname, if one is prepared to go that far, but the fact that the name would become so popular in Moscow’s high places reflected a high level of ill-will toward the man directly, rather than toward the Jimmy Carter Presidency per se, which never merited such an elevated level of personal animosity.

Even more curiously, if you haven’t guessed it yet, the source of the nickname Doktor Birkenau happened to be none other than… your humble servant.