The Long And The Short Of Ideology
Mark Steyn's weekly column in the Orange County Register is both a history lesson and a commentary on where the west - and particularly the United States - is failing to grasp that lesson from history. Steyn recalls the famous "Long Telegram" sent by George Kennan, a US diplomat in Moscow, to the State Department. The telegram laid out the coming Cold War struggle with almost eerie accuracy. It also gave, in broad terms, what was necessary to defeat Soviet intentions - a healthy vigorous society with a clear ideology. That, explains Steyn, is what we have lost.
Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter in the last years of the Cold War, posed an interesting question the other day. He noted that on Feb. 22, 1946, a mere six months after the end of World War II, George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, sent his famous 5,000-word telegram that laid out the stakes of the Cold War and the nature of the enemy, and that that "Long Telegram" in essence shaped the way America thought about the conflict all the way up to the fall of the Berlin Wall four decades later. And what Mr. Robinson wondered was this:
"Here we are today, more than six years after 9/11. Does anyone believe a new 'Long Telegram' has yet been written? And accepted throughout the senior levels of the government?"
Answer: No.
Because, if it had, you'd hear it echoed in public – just as the Long Telegram provided the underpinning of the Truman Doctrine a year later. Kennan himself had differences with Truman and successive presidents over what he regarded as their misinterpretation, but, granted all that, most of what turned up over the next 40 years – the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war, Soviet subversion in Africa and Europe, Grenada and Afghanistan – is consistent with the conflict as laid out by one relatively minor State Department functionary decades earlier.
Why can't we do that today?
Well, one reason is we're not really comfortable with ideology, either ours or anybody else's. Insofar as we have an ideology it's a belief in the virtues of "multiculturalism," "tolerance," "celebrate diversity" – a bumper-sticker ideology that is, in effect, an anti-ideology which explicitly rejects the very idea of drawing distinctions between your beliefs and anybody else's.
It is a fairly bleak column. But you really should read this one, it is an important one, I think. Because he hits on what ideology is being successfully employed right now. It isn't Starbucks:
As I wrote in my book, the most successful example of globalization is not Starbucks or McDonald's but Wahhabism, an obscure backwater variant of Islam practiced by a few Bedouin deadbeats that Saudi oil wealth has now exported to every corner of the Earth – to Waziristan, Indonesia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Toronto, Portland, Dearborn and Falls Church. You can live on the other side of the planet and, when Starbucks opens up in town, you might acquire a taste for a decaf latte, but that's it. Otherwise, life goes on. By contrast, when the Saudi-funded preachers hung out their shingles on every Main Street in the West, they radicalized a significant chunk of young European Muslims. They transformed not just their beverage habits, but the way they look at the societies in which they live.
That is a frightening observation. At the moment, the west and the US is quite short on ideas and ideology. The resultant vacuum is being filled.
Side note: I can't remember if I ever read the entire Long Telegram before or only excerpts. I almost think the latter because in reading it today, two things jumped out at me that I think I would have remembered:
(f) It must be borne in mind that capitalist world is not all bad. In addition to hopelessly reactionary and bourgeois elements, it includes (1) certain wholly enlightened and positive elements united in acceptable communistic parties and (2) certain other elements (now described for tactical reasons as progressive or democratic) whose reactions, aspirations and activities happen to be "objectively" favorable to interests of USSR. These last must be encouraged and utilized for Soviet purposes.
(g) Among negative elements of bourgeois-capitalist society, most dangerous of all are those whom Lenin called false friends of the people, namely moderate-socialist or social-democratic leaders (in other words, non-Communist left-wing). These are more dangerous than out-and-out reactionaries, for latter at least march under their true colors, whereas moderate left-wing leaders confuse people by employing devices of socialism to serve interests of reactionary capital.
Interesting, isn't it?
Civilization | Gaius Sunday, 14 October , 2007
By bird dog, Sunday, 14 October , 2007 @ 7:13 am
Bravo. Great find, great post.
By feeblemind, Sunday, 14 October , 2007 @ 8:06 am
Another strong piece by Steyn. He is always a good read.