Fools and idiots
Fools for Communism
In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union — the cream of American academia — in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. “The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government,” Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. “We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system.”
Barely six years later, the Soviet empire began falling apart. By 1991 it had vanished from the face of the earth. Did Professor Byrnes call a press conference to offer an apology for the collective stupidity of his colleagues, or for his part in recording it? Did he edit a new work titled Gosh, We Didn’t Know Our Ass From Our Elbow? Hardly. Being part of the American chattering class means never having to say you’re sorry.
Journalism, academia, policy wonkery: They all maintain well-oiled Orwellian memory holes, into which errors vanish without a trace. Stern pronouncements are hurled down like thunderbolts from Zeus, and, like Zeus, their authors are totally unaccountable to mere human beings. Time’s Strobe Talbott decreed in 1982 that it was “wishful thinking to predict that international Communism some day will either self-destruct or so exhaust itself in internecine conflict that other nations will no longer be threatened.” A Wall Street analyst who misjudged a stock so badly would find himself living under a bridge, if not sharing a cell with Martha Stewart. But Talbott instead became Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, where he could apply his perspicacious geopolitical perceptual powers to Osama bin Laden.
One of the most striking revelations in the exposure of the Jayson Blair disaster at The New York Times was his fabrication of an entire visit to the West Virginia farm of POW Jessica Lynch’s family, including detailed descriptions of rivers and cattle herds that did not exist. Lynch’s parents read the story, laughed at the ludicrous falsehoods, but made no attempt to correct them. It never occurred to them that there was any point. Anybody who reads papers or watches television news knows how rare corrections are.
Glenn Garvin
Reason Online
Useful idiots
The collapse of Europe's Christian monarchies in the aftermath of the Enlightenment resulted in at least three distinct solutions to the problem of how to organize society in a post-Christian world. One, which ultimately won approval in most Western nations, stressed the freedom of the individual, and gave rise to institutions that favored it, both politically (democracy) and economically (the free-market economy, or capitalism). Another, drawing on atavistic impulses allegedly resident in particular societies, and fueled by the Romantic rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism, resulted in the totalitarian regimes we know as “fascist”: Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and their imitators.
The third, insisting on its strictly scientific origins, professed to have discovered “the laws of history,” under which capitalism (defined as the exploitation of workers by those owning the means of production) would be overthrown by the workers and replaced by a state which would itself control the means of production. This “socialist” state would then plan the national economy scientifically, on the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
It would be foolish to underestimate the appeal of this third solution to the modern mind. The Enlightenment's central achievement, after all, had been to replace faith with reason—to make mankind, with the aid of science, the arbiter of its own destiny. Socialism, as described above, seemed to many a 19th- and 20th-century mind nothing more than the application of this technique to the problem of economics on a national scale.
A century on, we have learned better. The challenge posed by the fascist nations was faced and disposed of in the first half of the 20th century. The second half was consumed in a decisive struggle between the heirs of the Enlightenment's two competing traditions: the tradition of freedom, and the tradition of state power, which, it soon transpired, inevitably resulted in the enslavement of the people the state purported to serve.
But it should not be surprising that many people in the Western world have always found it difficult to condemn Communism quite as wholeheartedly as they condemned fascism. Communism, and socialism more generally, at least assertedly appealed to science for their justification. Perhaps (many thought) their totalitarian tendencies were not inevitable but simply the result of circumstances.
In addition, and even worse, a good many intellectuals in the West were simply blind to the negative aspects of Communism. In the 1920s and 1930s they had become convinced that Communism was actually superior to Western societies, and no amount of evidence to the contrary — even eyewitness evidence — could change their minds. World War II, in which Britain and the United States became the military allies of “good old Joe,” briefly made this mindset even easier to maintain, and the outbreak of the Cold War between the former allies found these people silently (or in some cases quite vocally) sympathetic to the Communist cause. As a result, the world's free societies were forced to wage the Cold War with far less than the wholehearted support of many liberal and leftist intellectuals. In one way or another, and to one degree or another, they effectively supported the policies and purposes of the Soviet Union.
Lenin reputedly referred to these Western intellectual defenders of Communism as “useful idiots,” and this is the sobriquet Mona Charen confers on them in the title of her book chronicling their statements and activities. As a reference source, it will be absolutely invaluable to scholars for generations to come. For the rest of us, it provides a sharp reminder of just how stubbornly many liberals resisted this country's efforts to contain, and ultimately defeat, the deadly threat of international Communism.
William Rusher
The Claremont Institute
Attached is a picture of Mike McNaughton who stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan Christmas 2002. President Bush came to visit the wounded in the hospital and told Mike that when he could run a mile they would go run together. True to his word President Bush called Mike every month to see how he was doing. Well, last week they went on a one mile run. Not something you'll see in the news but seeing the President taking the time to say thank you to the wounded and give hope was one of the greatest/best things I have seen in my life.
