Make Civilization Great Again
"George Kennan said that most of what we do in Foreign Policy is designed to make ourselves feel good... If you take the trouble to read what everybody had written about the Intelligence Community since Allan Dulles [JFK's killer-ed.] was in charge, it certainly seems plausible that they are orchestrating quite a bit--and they have friends at MI-6 in London who are equally good at it."--Col. Douglas Macgregor - Russia Ukraine War Day 48 - YouTube
"I been Norman Mailered, Maxwell Taylored. I been John O'Hara'd, McNamara'd. I been Rolling Stoned and Beatled till I'm blind. I been Ayn Randed, nearly branded Communist, 'cause I'm left-handed."--Paul Simon, "A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission", 1966
"Even if Trump overcomes the Clinton crime machine, he will most likely face a ruling class unified against him. In America, we may have crossed the Rubicon in the 1990’s when it became clear that the ruling class could no longer police itself. Their inability to purge their ranks of the Clintons was a sign that the rot had reach a point where reform is no longer possible. That leaves popular revolt."--Z-Man, Aug. 2016
"Those showers in Washington last week? That wasn’t rain. That was Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, and the other architects of post-war American foreign policy looking down and weeping on us. Or worse. The heirs and custodians of their tradition never sounded so thick. In place of George Kennan’s 8000-word Long Telegram about the Soviet Union, the Obama administration’s consultant and its former State Department policy planning chief, Anne-Marie Slaughter, issued a forceful tweet about Libya. Citing (and, in his conduct, faithfully channeling) Douglas MacArthur, Obama’s defense secretary purposefully narrowed the president’s range of options, advising an audience of cadets at West Point, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Not to worry. Deputy National Security Adviser Benjamin Rhodes cautioned even against the temptation “to go out day after day with cathartic statements that make us feel good.” This as the president went out day after day with cathartic statements that didn’t make us feel good, but certainly testified to his own virtue and good intentions."--Lawrence F. Kaplan, Iraq, Vietnam, Bosnia, and Other Useless Analogies For Libya Today | The New Republic, March 16, 2011
"NATO is incapable of waging the kind of large-scale combat that Russia is waging today in Ukraine... The Regime Change that is going to take place is here at home. The Biden Administration will not survive Vladimir Putin."--former Intel Officer, Marine Corps and UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter: Ukraine/Russia update - a conversation with Scott Ritter - YouTube
"Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity."--Eric Hoffer, 'The True Believer'
Being called a nihilist means nothing to me. heh.
Mac Owens from 2001:
"The key to Mr. Reagan’s success as president is to be found in a famous 1953 essay by the British philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin. In that essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Sir Isaiah categorized writers, thinkers, and human beings in general according to the dictum of the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Ronald Reagan was clearly a hedgehog.
The one big thing that Mr. Reagan knew was that the United States was a fundamentally decent regime that constituted the only hope for freedom and prosperity in the modern world. He knew that the "idea" of America was undermined at home by a shift away from individual effort and liberty to reliance on the government and that it was undermined abroad by ideology of communism. The focus of his presidency was to unfetter America. The position of the United States today is a tribute to his success."
"To many people, President Reagan was a mystery. How did he know what to say? Who was handing him notes and whispering in his ear? Who was writing his speeches? Even some of his close aides were puzzled. I remember his national security advisor, Bud McFarlane, just a few months before Bud resigned, shaking his head and saying in bewilderment, "He knows so little and accomplishes so much."--Sec. George P. Schultz, forward to "Reagan in His Own Hand"
And now we have in our current "professorial" president, a "Reagan-in-Reverse": He knows so much and accomplishes so little. Except in destroying America. And I refer not to Pedobiden, but to our 4-term Acting Shadow President-for-Life.
"...[W]hen swearing in new ambassadors, I used to take them over to the big globe in the secretary of state's office and ask them to point out their country. Almost invariably they would rotate the globe and point to their post, wherever in the world. I would then tell them that when I made this request of Senator Mike Mansfield, then American ambassador to Japan, he spun the globe, put his finger on the United States, and said, "This is my country!""--Secretary of State George P. Schultz
And today, to a man, they all put their fingers on China or Iran. Or themselves. Or both. But it wasn't always thus.
It's hard to believe now, or even to remember, but once upon a time, long, long ago and far, far away, America once had a class of real statemen and women, patriots of both parties. These "Graybeards" weren't always right and didn't always agree, often clashing vehemently--but they loved their country.
This was in the Land Before Time, before the Establishment was taken over by troll-like former Nazi-Art dealers, zombie Oligarchs, Money-grubbing Arkan-Grifters with their la Cozy Nostra Foundations, China's boot-licking lackeys and the World Economic Forum's boot-lacking lickees.
With the occasional pseudo-intellectual Shiite homosexual.
Today's Diplo-Dipshits are indifferent to America when not actively hostile. They oppose the very notion of the Nation-State in favor of their Globalist Scheme of One-World Government--with themselves in charge forever, natch.
They release Bio-Weapon viruses, then coerce injections of dangerous "vaccines" while pocketing billions. They wreck economies. They spy and they censor. They steal the Rights of all. They stunt, maim, kill and mutilate children and conduct Endless War for Unlimited Power. Their day is coming.
Let's instead examine the life of one whose day has already come and gone, the grayest of the Graybeards, George F. Kennan.
Wiki:
"George Frost Kennan (1904-2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men". During the late 1940s, his writings inspired the Truman Doctrine and the U.S. foreign policy of "containing" the Soviet Union. His "Long Telegram" from Moscow during 1946 and the subsequent 1947 article The Sources of Soviet Conduct argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be "contained" in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States. These texts provided justification for the Truman administration's new anti-Soviet policy. Kennan played a major role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, notably the Marshall Plan. Soon after his concepts had become U.S. policy, Kennan began to criticize the foreign policies that he had seemingly helped begin. Subsequently, prior to the end of 1948, Kennan became confident that positive dialogue could commence with the Soviet government. His proposals were discounted by the Truman administration and Kennan's influence was marginalized, particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949. Soon thereafter, U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more assertive and militaristic quality, causing Kennan to lament about what he believed was an abrogation of his previous assessments. In 1950, Kennan left the Department of State—except for a brief ambassadorial stint in Moscow and a longer one in Yugoslavia—and became a realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. He continued to analyze international affairs as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1956 until his death in 2005 at age 101."
What would George Kennan say about Ukraine? | The Hill
Seeing it vital to the recovery of Western Europe, Kennan was one of the architects of the Marshall Plan. But he was dead set against the development of two armed camps in Europe. He believed the only solution to the division of the continent was the ultimate withdrawal of both U.S. and Russian forces. ...
Retired Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Kennan’s former boss, charged that he “has never … grasped the realities of power relationships, but takes a rather mystical attitude toward them.” Mystical or not, Kennan maintained for decades that his original concept of containment had been distorted by hard-line anti-Communists and champions of the military industrial complex. “It was not containment that failed,” he wrote in his memoirs, “it was the intended follow-up,” political and psychological, “that never occurred.”
Kennan’s critique of a divided Europe survived even the fall of the Soviet Union. Writing in 1997 at age 92, he declared that expanding NATO to the east “ would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”
“Such a decision,” he went on, “may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations.”
Were he with us today, Kennan would undoubtedly say “I told you so.”
If Putin’s plans A, B and C all fail, though, I fear that he would be a cornered animal and he could opt for plan D — launching either chemical weapons or the first nuclear bomb since Nagasaki. That is a hard sentence to write, and an even worse one to contemplate. But to ignore it as a possibility would be naïve in the extreme.
But HERE is Thom Freidman 25 years ago, singing a very different tune after interviewing George Kennan:
New York Times
May 2, 1998
Foreign Affairs; Now a Word From X
by Thomas L. Friedman
His voice is a bit frail now, but the mind, even at age 94, is as sharp as ever. So when I reached George Kennan by phone to get his reaction to the Senate’s ratification of NATO expansion it was no surprise to find that the man who was the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of the great American statesmen of the 20th century was ready with an answer.
”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”
”What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ”X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ”I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
”And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,” said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”
One only wonders what future historians will say. If we are lucky they will say that NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic simply didn’t matter, because the vacuum it was supposed to fill had already been filled, only the Clinton team couldn’t see it. They will say that the forces of globalization integrating Europe, coupled with the new arms control agreements, proved to be so powerful that Russia, despite NATO expansion, moved ahead with democratization and Westernization, and was gradually drawn into a loosely unified Europe. If we are unlucky they will say, as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO now has to either expand all the way to Russia’s border, triggering a new cold war, or stop expanding after these three new countries and create a new dividing line through Europe.
But there is one thing future historians will surely remark upon, and that is the utter poverty of imagination that characterized U.S. foreign policy in the late 1990’s. They will note that one of the seminal events of this century took place between 1989 and 1992 — the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which had the capability, imperial intentions and ideology to truly threaten the entire free world. Thanks to Western resolve and the courage of Russian democrats, that Soviet Empire collapsed without a shot, spawning a democratic Russia, setting free the former Soviet republics and leading to unprecedented arms control agreements with the U.S.
And what was America’s response? It was to expand the NATO cold-war alliance against Russia and bring it closer to Russia’s borders.
Yes, tell your children, and your children’s children, that you lived in the age of Bill Clinton and William Cohen, the age of Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger, the age of Trent Lott and Joe Lieberman, and you too were present at the creation of the post-cold-war order, when these foreign policy Titans put their heads together and produced . . . a mouse.
We are in the age of midgets. The only good news is that we got here in one piece because there was another age — one of great statesmen who had both imagination and courage.
As he said goodbye to me on the phone, Mr. Kennan added just one more thing: ”This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.”".......
More Kennan quotes:
"The best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian."
"There are certain sad appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of these recent wars. One of them is that suffering does not always make men better. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than governments; that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent. These people take refuge in the pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas — complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemma, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur."--American Diplomacy (1951), World War I
I write to say that in the idea of the three American states' ultimate independence, whether separately or in union, I see nothing fanciful. [Such] are at present the dominating trends in the U. S. that I see no other means of ultimate preservation of cultural and societal values that will not only be endangered but eventually destroyed by an endlessly prolonged association with the remainder of what is now the U. S. A."--1993 letter to Thomas Naylor, on the secession of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont
"The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning."
"The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been."
"I shall always remember you-slyly, touchingly, but with great shouting and confusion-pumping hot water into our sleeping car in the frosty darkness of a December morning in order that we might not know, in order that we might never realize, to how primitive a land we had come."
"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.“--Foreword to 'The Pathology of Power'" by Norman Cousins, 1987
"We should dispense with the aspiration to 'be liked' or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague — and for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.“ --Far East Memo, 1948
"Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before … In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.“--"George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq", History News Network, September 2002
"I am like a person who has placed poison in one of two glasses before a person he loves—and looks back upon his act with horror and incredulity—but still does not know from which glass the person will drink.“--April, 1951
"There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue. The contest comes to be viewed as having a final, apocalyptic quality. If we lose, all is lost; life will no longer be worth living; there will be nothing to be salvaged. If we win, then everything will be possible; all our problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil--our enemy--will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied.“-- "Russia and the West under Lenin",1960
"One sometimes feels a guest of one's time and not a member of its household."
"A democracy is peace-loving. It does not like to go to war. It is slow to rise to provocation. When it has once been provoked to the point where it must grasp the sword, it does not easily forgive its adversary for having produced this situation. The fact of the provocation then becomes itself the issue. Democracy fights in anger — it fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it — to teach that power a lesson it will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. Such a war must be carried to the bitter end. This is true enough, and, if nations could afford to operate in the moral climate of individual ethics, it would be understandable and acceptable. But I sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath — in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat. You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have seen whether he could have prevented some of these situations from arising instead of proceeding from an undiscriminating indifference to a holy wrath equally undiscriminating."--American Diplomacy (1951), World War I
“Our country should not be asked, and should not ask of itself, to shoulder the main burden of determining the political realities in any other country…”
"Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue.... Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping. -KENNAN"--George Kennan's "Long Telegram" (gwu.edu)
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| JFK and Ike |
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| Thatcher, Weinberger, Kirkpatrick |
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| Acheson, Harriman, Truman, Marshall |
Adlai Stevenson
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| Clare Boothe Luce in Cairo, June 1942 |
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| Just because. "Not long after the award ceremony, President Reagan spoke on the phone with Barry Goldwater, the man he campaigned for so long ago. Talk turned to a favorite topic, that of the Kennedy brothers, whom Goldwater knew well and esteemed. Goldwater asked Reagan if he thought Robert Kennedy could have been elected. President Reagan responded by saying: “Who knows, but I’ll tell you one thing. He’d have made one helluva president.”" |
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| Here, Sec. Schultz listens in stunned disbelief as Joe Biden explains his plan to one day become China's Colonial Governor of America and Groomer-in-Chief, when he will propose free chemical castrations and double mastectomies for little boys and girls. |
| Notes |
As Mr. Kennan noted, our American democracy "is slow to rise to provocation. When it has once been provoked to the point where it must grasp the sword, it does not easily forgive its adversary for having produced this situation. The fact of the provocation then becomes itself the issue."
That applies to enemies foreign as well as domestic. Or whatever unholy mix of the two satan has installed in the Putrid Swamp of Sewer City.
Their day is coming, he said, undiplomatically.
-KEENAN
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