Presswatch/A Tyranny of Experts
O'Sullivan, John
........................................................................................................................................................................... PRESSWATCH A TYRANNY OF...
...I quote: "Defaults by Britain account for much of the foreign policy trouble John O'Sullivan is the editorial page editor of the New York Post and a columnist for the Times of London...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986...
...she is even, late in the day, reducing taxes...
...Well, there it is...
...And in the American imagination, Britain occupied much the same position...
...617.00 `4949...
...i' 4619...
...But let us concede the impulsiveness for the sake of argument...
...It is surely significant that "he appeared `happy' until he saw the smoke stack of his Soviet vessel" (the psychiatrist's unpleasantly lofty quotation marks...
...Let me concede to Mr...
...officials...
...that he had been 829...
...Urri...
...oa Charles oi•Qrrtlquti a hrc.orporatea a century of tm.7earch...
...If you want the Editors' Choice, do nothing—the book will come automatically...
...Still, it is a little hard to be reproached for irresponsible scuttling by the very people who packed our trunks, booked the airline tickets, and assured us that we'd be far better off in a home...
...Anti-colonialism was an important strand of U.S...
...19.93/ 613.95 Wilma shows Members' Price...
...Book shipments will be charged to your account at low Members' Prices, plus postage and packing...
...tends to stimulate American journalists to windy sociological reflections on British society, the British class system, the decline of British power, and other such topics on which they (a) draw their evidence principally from "Masterpiece Theatre," and consequently (b) get everything wrong...
...I shall remember this little account when next the Times uses"insensitivity" as a word of abuse...
...All the world loves a left-wing lord...
...He is a member of an unfashionable op-pressed minority, the Ukrainians, who like the Miskito Indians have the bad taste to be persecuted by the vanguard of the future...
...Yet, as Mr...
...This dishonest phrase creeps insidiously into reporters' prose more and more...
...But it struck a chord with me...
...Take any 3 for 99't each...
...Almost everyone in the American press is spelling Medvid's surname in its Ukrainian form, "Medvid...
...It is Mr...
...He sees the British aristocracy as having rented itself out to the Reagan Ad-ministration as moral-cum-symbolic justification for the new cruder aristocracy of wealth celebrated by supply-side economics...
...Let me further concede that, because of mistaken domestic policies (of which more later), this contraction has been more rapid and extensive than population and resources alone dictated...
...No, Conquest did not cite himself...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 25 carried back to the ship kicking, struggling, and making gestures (hand drawn across throat) to indicate that an unpleasant fate awaited him there...
...One is a psychological disposition, the other a matter of conscious reflection...
...and that Soviet officials were present at all times in his later interviews with U.S...
...If you want another book, or no book at all, return the card by the date specified...
...Furthermore, it was U.S...
...But the first point to make about that withdrawal is that, with the exception of the precipitate scuttle from Men, it was a well-managed one...
...That being so, his defection has to be some additional evidence of this character trait...
...Thatcher gives credibility to an altogether more combative form of conservatism...
...that during the weekend when he was back aboard, his wrists were slashed, either by himself or by somebody else...
...Kraft's second point, however, which is most original and which explains his passionate irritation with the Britain of "Chuck and Di...
...So no one is likely to make a fuss over these airily suggested possibilities...
...sati.00/sls.so tfw'1+~arsof the cetzs GCRI47ta) tieRf...
...The Post reporter doubtless found this "strident or bellicose or maybe just plain damn insensitive...
...In those pre-Thatcher days, they represented the two sides of the British character as seen by Americans...
...But then he isn't found to be suffering from it...
...Or, I will buy four more selections within the next two years, not including my choices aboue...
...PRESSWATCH A TYRANNY OF EXPERTS by John O'Sullivan An I unduly fastidious...
...To the desperate young man, it must have seemed that he was facing an alliance of bureaucrats...
...The arrival of British royals in the U.S...
...Nothing in the psychiatrist's report suggests that Medvid was welcomed in that way...
...World revolution was the very last thing on the Kremlin's mind...
...Thus the report becomes an exercise in circular logic in which the defection explains the impulsiveness and the impulsiveness accounts for the defection...
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...Kraft realizes, Britain no longer embodies these same political values...
...At first reading, this seems a willfully eccentric viewpoint...
...It would take a State Department official to conclude from this evidence that Medvid's initial attempts to defect were ambiguous in character and that his later decision to return to the Soviet Union was truly voluntary...
...If you want to know the effect that this produces in Brits, just think how you felt when you last heard an Englishman attempting to imitate an American accent...
...Everywhere I went, on every radio talk show and at every lecture, I was asked about two institutions which American audiences clearly considered quintessentially British: the monarchy and the National Health Service...
...No such evidenceis presented...
...They persisted in believing over his protests that, once all the facts had been laid before him, he would have voted happily for Adlai Stevenson...
...He had not calculated that in advance...
...I may return the books within three weeks at your expense and owe nothing...
...stt#tmat Om oa Reweave Cee's Gallant General, by Cary OaflagAer...
...over Star Wars...
...This country had to pick up the British baton in Northern Asia, the South Pacific, the Indian sub-continent, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean...
...On this occasion, however, the reporter's luck was out...
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...In short, she is following a domestic policy that is in broad outline similar to the Reagan Ad-ministration's approach—and where she differs, as in insisting on a tighter budgetary stance, she is slightly more conservative...
...that he had tried to escape not once, but twice...
...And the Kennedy Administration pushed for more rapid British decolonization in Africa...
...He went back to his ship...
...But it contains real meat to chew on...
...While we are on the subject of experts, a phrase that might usefully be expunged from serious journalism is the obnoxious: "But experts say...
...The principal argument used to support this is that Medvid jumped ship, sought asylum, and is now saying he wants to return...
...Really up-to-the-minute Soviet apparatchiks regarded the whole thing as frightfully old hat, almost comic really...
...We guarantee postage...
...This functions in his report largely as a piece of scientific flim-flam which, by being considered and rejected, testifies to his clinical reasonableness...
...And so on...
...policy for most of the relevant period to push Britain into retreating from its traditional spheres of interest even faster...
...My dear, the noise—and the people...
...The British handed over power peacefully to (initially) stable governments and in the process won several major guerrilla wars—in the Malayan and Kenyan emergencies and against the Indone-sians in Malaysia...
...But Mr...
...I know only that, despite my firm monarchist sympathies, I found it difficult to join full-heartedly in the euphoric celebrations over the arrival of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, when, on the very same day, the Marshal Konev was sailing into the Gulf of Mexico, transporting Miroslav Medvid to the Gulag under U.S...
...Eventually, the State Department sought to soothe matters by releasing a document which is the nearest thing to divine revelation that the modern world can boast—the psychiatrist's report...
...The capture of power...
...In those days, we had to let anybody and everybody in...
...that he had—contrary to the first official lies—requested asylum from his Ukrainian interpreter...
...He examined two hypotheses: that when Medvid jumped into the Mississippi and sought political asylum in the U.S., he was suffering from bipolar disorder or manic depressive illness, or that he was simply immature and impulsive...
...It was also a bipartisan policy...
...We borrow prestige from an aristocracy we can buy...
...Very neat...
...The first—that British power has declined since 1945—is incontestable...
...Simple logic is at fault here on two points...
...All water under the bridge, chaps, and no hard feelings on our side...
...He advances two main arguments...
...And what about the New York Times' in-sensitivity to ethnic pride...
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...Plainly, he did not begin to regret his impulsive decision until he realized he was about to be handed back...
...i12.8kA?/3i et1'(1 57.76...
...Kraft's annoyance is therefore perfectly understandable...
...Now he had good reason to think that the Americans did not want him...
...has encouraged the flashing of money in diamonds, furs and stretch limos...
...To draw serious clinical conclusions in these circumstances would be absurd...
...Even as late as the Nixon presidency, Disraeli was prayed in aid by Daniel Moynihan to persuade the President that the Family Assistance Plan was the proper Tory thing to do...
...Greece illustrates the point neatly...
...she is cutting public spending...
...In those days—and they were not so long ago—the English aristocracy was rented to provide moral-cum-symbolic support for the liberal innovations of John F. Kennedy and Camelot...
...It was almost impossible for an English conservative to convince his American hosts that he actually sympathized with the opinions of American conservatives...
...Psychiatrists may use that kind of argument, but philosophers frown upon it...
...experienced by the U.S...
...Conquest duly fired off a letter to the editor pointing out that there was nothing like an expert consensus on the Soviet Union's intentions for world revolution...
...Of fs.dern lRoarsUYbSL, b y. , onard8haplro...
...And knowing what awaited him back on the ship unless he played the Soviet game, he would be determined not to make a third try at defecting unless the U.S...
...Fortunately, this ploy now and then runs up against an actual expert...
...Even the Washington Post began to devote large stories to Medvid's plight...
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...There would have been no responsibilities to handover to 'Duman in 1948 if Churchill had not ignored Roosevelt's anti-colonialist suspicions four years earlier and intervened in Athens to prevent a Communist takeover...
...Rachel Flick in my own newspaper, kept the issue (and perhaps Medvid) alive...
...wart...
...From these strictures, I must exempt Joseph Kraft's syndicated column "The Perils of Overrating Britain" which ran in, among other newspapers, the New York Post...
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...The Soviet Union was a stuffy, conservative, status quo power...
...And again...
...in the postwar period...
...His little rebuke was read by an actual expert on the Soviet Union, Robert Conquest, the British author of what is the standard work on Stalin's purges, The Great Terror...
...in resisting foolish and counterproductive sanctions against South Africa...
...Britain thus combined the most powerful political passions of the twentieth century—socialism and snobbery...
...He is acceptable everywhere—in clubs socially and in pubs ideologically...
...We then come to the thesis, which the psychiatrist eventually adopts, that Medvid is immature and impulsive...
...If that isn't impulsive, what is...
...I recall an example of four years ago, shortly after President Reagan took office...
...If you should receive an unwanted book because you had less than 10 days to decide, you may return It and pay nothing...
...In a classic example of the double bluff, the expert he quoted taking the Reaganite line was Andrei Gromyko...
...Even if the timing of Medvid's defection was prompted by impulse, the defection itself might still be a matter of firm conviction...
...But the efforts of a few conservative journalists, notably Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Washington Times and health service, of course, represented the collectivist inevitabilities them-selves...
...No one should miss reading it...
...What the experts said was, of course, extremely familiar...
...The `special relationship' consists of living off . . . the aristocracy of Britain...
...Eisenhower successfully sought to replace Britain and France in the Middle East...
...Britain was the first nation to sign an agreement with the US...
...Thus he writes: "The Reagan Administration...
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...Soviet intimidation—and threats against Medvid's parents...
...A .f'ullUei pose-•wlnairrg history of slavery and antislavery...
...that when U.S...
...I disagree with much of Mr...
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...They gave prominence to such points as that Medvid had made careful preparations to escape, such as wrapping his identity documents in plastic against the river...
...Kraft that the contraction of British power was inevitable after 1945 for the reason that an island of 56 million people cannot sustain a world role when superpowers with continental resources and populations of several hundred millions are in the ring...
...Roosevelt pressed Churchill to withdraw from India...
...And the evidence—his careful protection of the identity documents, for instance—suggests that he had thought much about the mat-ter...
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...It is a memorably slimy document...
...foreign policy outside Europe until the mid-sixties when the U.S...
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...A non-impulsive defector, he maintains, would have calculated these risks in advance...
...As a result, his case attracted little attention at first in the heavyweight liberal press, who doubt-less saw him as an embarrassing throw-back to the Cold War...
...But the psychiatrist had no such qualms...
...Her foreign policy, despite occasional lapses like Grenada, is even more scandalously aligned with Reaganism...
...No mention is made of whether or not he spoke in his native language...
...So just after quoting Reagan, he slammed down hard with: "Experts say, however...
...officials made it very clear that this time he would be welcome stateside...
...officials boarded the ship, they found him drugged and nauseated (William Safire in the New York Times added the information that bugged telephone calls indicated the Soviet embassy had ordered the ship's captain to drug him...
...There gradually assembled a heterogeneous alliance of Senator Jesse Helms, the Ukrainian lobby, and the press...
...alone in Western Europe, it has given notice of withdrawal from UNESCO...
...Medvid's defection is explained in the report as a result of his impulsiveness...
...Since it is Ukrainian, the likelihood is that he did not...
...The monarchy represented aristocratic Britain as seen on "Masterpiece Theatre," a land of stylish but socially responsible grandees who had accommodated gracefully to the collectivist inevitabilities of the modern world...
...The Washington Posts man took it upon himself to issue a "correction" of some anti-Soviet remarks made by the President, who had declared in a press conference that the Soviet Union was bent on spreading Communist revolution around the world...
...Clearly he has changed his mind...
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...Kraft's analysis and suspect that it was in part an understandably jaundiced reaction to all the hoopla and cap-throwing of the royal visit...
...viewed reluctantly and which forced American administrations willy-nilly to pick up the pieces...
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...What this nastily ingenious argument omits is that Medvid, having sought asylum, had been twice handed back by American officials since he had first jumped into the Mississippi...
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...They would not have changed his mind subsequently...
...And it promotes the rubbing of shoulders with the Prince and Princess of Wales...
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...But we were greeted even more warmly by the Eastern liberal establishment because we had apparently demonstrated that left-wing politics were perfectly compatible with good dinner parties and the preservation of a cultural elite...
...it supported Reagan in op-position to the Law of the Sea convention...
...itself discovered the difficulties of dealing with the Third World and the advantage of having a surrogate in places like the Gulf and Belize...
...Visiting Brits in those days were welcome in conservative circles as transatlantic cousins...
...There may also have been a less creditable motive for my lack of proper enthusiasm...
...and it has actually been more courageous than the U.S...
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...The 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 .. . It looks like being a White Christmas for Miroslav Medvid, who will be arriving in the Gulag about that time...
...They looked him in the eye...
...Kraft goes overboard in presenting this decline as something which the US...
...Medvid is singularly unfortunate...
...There is no evidence cited to suggest that Medvid might be suffering from this (or any other mental) disorder...
...It was run by old men in badly cut suits...
...The Immigration Service and State Department .. . tried to set things straight...
...The pressure mounted...
...Some years ago when I was employed by the London Daily Telegraph, I embarked on a lecture tour of the United States...
...They landed few disasters in the American Iapcompare the British withdrawal from Malaya, Malaysia, and Singapore with the French record in Indochina in terms of consequences for the US.—and that last little colonial war against Indonesia, about which Washington was unenthusiastic, had important favor-able geopolitical consequences since it was one of the factors that brought about the coup against Sukarno and placed Indonesia firmly in the Western camp...
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...In its misuse of psychiatric concepts for political purposes, it has eerie echoes of the Soviet Union's exploitation of psychiatry against the dissidents...
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...For the only time in his life, the phrase "the two superpowers" would have had real meaning for him...
...There is still no necessary opposition, as the psychiatrist seems to think, between impulsiveness and strong beliefs...
...Ironically, he may well have Prince Charles, a rather liberal young man, on his side...
...In short, it is a device to uphold the pose of neutrality which liberal journalism affects while enabling the journalist to get the liberal message across nonetheless...
...What, then, changed Medvid's mind...
...But at least one prominent and authoritative expert shared President Reagan's view...
...Our books are always equal to the publishers' editions, never "economy" reprints, and avail-able at savings of $3, $4, $5, or more, off bookstore prices...
...Thatcher is selling off state industries galore...
...His defection was thus inspired not by deeply rooted political convictions but by a sudden impulsive gesture—in the report's words: "Grabbing for the glitter and gusto...
...He rejects the bipolar disorder thesis...
...But since State Department officials were handling the case, these were the judgments made...
...In short, Britain no longer represents the principle of graceful aristocratic retreat in politics which naturally endeared it to American liberals...
...I turned to the editorial in the New York Times to see how they treated the handling of Medvid...
...Its function is to contradict the opinion of whoever is being reported and to allow the reporter to express his own views without seeming to do so...
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...Only the Times persists in using the Russian "Medved...
...And, finally, prompted by "the power of facts," the British did indeed withdraw from large areas of the globe and handed over their former responsibilities to the U.S., beginning with Greece in 1948...
...The psychiatrist concedes that there were such threats but goes on to argue that Medvid's yielding to them is further proof of his impulsiveness...
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...The experts, whether named or anonymous, thus play the role of dummy to the reporter's ventriloquist...
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...It offered a really original view of the Anglo-American special relationship and of its present significance in American life and culture...
...To start with, the shrink saw Medvid for only two short interviews in an especially stressful and extraordinary period in the young sailor's life...
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...But the establishment press tumbled to the fact that there was a story here with, yes, unanswered questions...
Vol. 19 • January 1986 • No. 1
