by “Dictatorships and Double Standards” Revisited
[Via Eunomia]
The emissary’s recommendations are presented in the context of a growing clamor for American disengagement on grounds that continued involvement confirms our status as an agent of imperialism, racism, and reaction; is inconsistent with support for human rights; alienates us from the “forces of democracy”; and threatens to put the U.S. once more on the side of history’s “losers.” This chorus is supplemented daily by interviews with returning missionaries and “reasonable” rebels.
As the situation worsens, the President assures the world that the U.S. desires only that the “people choose their own form of government”; he blocks delivery of all arms to the government and undertakes negotiations to establish a “broadly based” coalition headed by a “moderate” critic of the regime who, once elevated, will move quickly to seek a “political” settlement to the conflict. ~Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards”
Does this sound familiar? The moves that Kirkpatrick was attacking in late 1979 as disastrous are the very moves that administration critics are urging Obama to make.
Kirkpatrick went on:
In either case, the U.S. will have been led by its own misunderstanding of the situation to assist actively in deposing an erstwhile friend and ally and installing a government hostile to American interests and policies in the world. At best we will have lost access to friendly territory….And everywhere our friends will have noted that the U.S. cannot be counted on in times of difficulty and our enemies will have observed that American support provides no security against the forward march of history.
It can’t be stressed enough that many of the people faulting the Obama administration for not doing enough to undermine Mubarak and other authoritarian allied rulers are the same people who insist that he has been betraying and undermining allies for the last two years. Of course, Obama hasn’t been betraying any U.S. allies, and the administration still seems to understand that encouraging Mubarak’s downfall would be and would be seen as a strategic blow and humiliation for the United States. Americans should want to get out of the business of empire and power projection in the Near East, but there is no way that having a client government overthrown or actively encouraging its overthrow does anything but harm legitimate U.S. interests along with harming misguided hegemonist policies. If the U.S. didn’t insist on having a huge role in the region and meddling in its affairs, we wouldn’t need an alliance system that leads us to support such authoritarian governments, but very few of the people urging the administration to help wreck a major alliance want the U.S. to disentangle itself from the Near East
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While Daniel and I disagree on many domestic issues, his views on foreign issues often overlap mine. This piece about what Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote over 30 years ago really puts things in perspective. We seem to be having the exact same arguments with little if any progress over the last generation towards any solutions. One step forward, one step back can never be progress.
In Volume One – Reason in Common Sense – of the Life of Reason – which we can read because of what copyright used to be – George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Here it is in context, which provides an interesting examination not only of individuals but of society:
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.
We can not move forward unless we know where we are moving forward from. Look especially at the last part:
Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.
This seems to capture the current moment in American life precisely. Few seem to remember what happened just last week. There is little context, just a reaction to what is happening right now. Instead of grafting new habits onto old, many have an instinctive reaction to most things. There is little readaptation, just a continual reintroduction of the same policies and arguments seen last year, or five years ago, or 30 years ago.
When we were a nation on the plane of manhood and true progress, we reacted to the threat of a Sputnik moment by creating the single greatest effort in the history of man – we not only put a man on the moon but returned him to Earth. That too us twelve years.
The reaction of our nation then to the need for ‘plasticity and fertile adaptation’ suggested by the President was a monumental effort whose consequences we are still feeling 50 years later.
Today, we can not even repeat that effort, much less forge ahead to new ones.
Today, we have political leaders who view that sort of effort as a path for national collapse. They see most any government program as inefficient and wasteful. They feel that we should instead focus our efforts on things that worked in the past, like the Spudnut Shop in Richland, Washington.
Their reaction to the need for ‘plasticity and fertile adaptation’ suggested by the President is to return to a mode of life that started over 60 years ago – when the Spudnet Shop in Richland, Washington was first opened.
What is truly ironic here is that Richland, Washington was essentially created by the US Army for the Manhattan Project. In 1948, when the Spudnut shop opened, the Army was the landlord for all that lived there, who were working on extracting plutonium for bombs. That was then the only reason for the place to exist – a large government project of exactly the sort derided currently.
The Federal government did not turn over ownership to private hands until 1957. Richland today still requires the huge government effort at Hanford to sustain itself. Without this continuing effort, the Spudnut Shop would have closed long ago – as did many of the almost 350 former Spudnut Shops in the past. Yes, this is one of the last shops of a failing enterprise. Another ironic image.
The Spudnut Shop only exists because of a previous huge government effort, one that was a previous generation’s response a ‘Sputnik moment‘.
The reaction of our nation then to the need for ‘plasticity and fertile adaptation’ suggested by the President was a monumental effort whose consequences we are still feeling almost 70 years later - the creation of one of the most destructive weapons of all time.
Two Presidents pushed us to find solutions to some tremendous challenges. We responded then – demonstrating the level of our control over the world by creating two of the pinnacle tools in history. When a third President now pushes us to find solutions to some tremendous challenges, the response is an instinctive reflex for simpler times where the only level of control over the world was figuring out where to sit in the Spudnut Shop.
Sometime since 1970, we passed from the stage of true progress to the stage of old age. The metaphor of the Spudnut Shop is supremely apt to demonstrate this.
The use of the Spudnut Shop displays such an inattentiveness to conditions, to historic details. It forgets where we came from, making it easier to just stop moving. In an attempt to denigrate present and past government efforts, the instinctive reaction is use the repetitive example of hard-working Americans, without even seeing that the existence of this wonderful business relied on the success of an earlier massive government effort of the type now being derided.
The irony would be sweet if it was also not such an egregious example of what stage America appears to now find itself. We act more and more as though we are in the state of old age, not the stage of progress.
We move forward and back, with really little movement at all. We seem to be unable to understand the past, with leaders who simply can not recognize that their memory of the past simply does not fit the facts and provides little real understanding of their rhetoric.
Santayana wrote several other important phrases in the same book that seem relevant: The highest form of vanity is love of fame; Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim; and, Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
The first two are amply filled by many of our politicians – no matter what their political strip – who seem hell-bent on providing happiness for themselves, leaving the rest of us a ‘mad and lamentable’ existence.
The Tunisians and Egyptians. are demonstrating where this leads just as but two earlier examples also demonstrate – the Poles and French. When a new “generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons” comes to power, perhaps we can again return to a path of progress.
Mankind will move forward. I hope that, as in the past, we are pulling them. However, if we follow the path charted by some, we will have to be pulled.
