An Open Letter to Zbigniew Brzezinski
Beichman, Arnold
"An Open Letter to Zbigniew Brzezinski" - Things look up a little on the last full day of the Con- ference. Individuals, usually more interesting, and more moderate, outside their respective caucuses than within, have had some chance to...
...For a moment I thought you might be reviving that old nostrum about the "convergence" of the two political systems, something which you and your colleague, Professor Samuel Huntington,effectively disposed of 15 years ago in your joint book Political Power: USA/USSR...
...El Arnold Beichman An Open Letter to Zbigniew Brzezinski Dear Dr...
...A woman rises, shaking with fury, and informs him that she does not consider this funny...
...How can it be so filled with termites and death-watch beetles, gnawing away at the national heart of oak, while at the same time masquerading as moralists...
...As for their fellow-travelers among the columnists, send them a can of Raid...
...Brzezinski: In the New York Times of 19 October 1977, I read a summary of a speech you made before a group of Washington journalists...
...Or Hitler...
...What has gone wrong with this country...
...He'll tell them to keep a special copy for me...
...some seek to disassociate themselves from the hard-core revolutionaries...
...Particularly offensive is his irreverence...
...Instead we are, by virtue of our acceptance of a Danforth Fellowship and our decision to enter the academic profession, members of the Establishment...
...There are "competitive elements" among the U.S., France, Britain, Japan, and Canada but you would not feel impelled to say about that rivalry what you have said about the USSR...
...There has been much talent here, but it has not appeared openly...
...The speakers do improve somewhat toward the end of the Conference...
...Who, among this group of alleged future teachers, will choose to nurture them...
...supply planes en route to Israel during the Yom Kippur war...
...Agonizing reappraisals about our relations with Iran, Korea, Brazil, and Argentina are now being made...
...64-65, which published an admittedly incomplete list of these Gulag institutions...
...I found this passage of your speech quite disturbing because it seemed to me that you felt driven to exonerate the most powerful dictatorship in the world by portraying it as—what?—a victim of such abstractions as "deeply rooted historical forces" or "philosophical pressures...
...those of the other, by the sword...
...The message has been that individuals are beleaguered, but infinitely precious entities...
...So Tocqueville wrote in 1835...
...Un-American is entirely too weak a way of putting it...
...I think that this is a proposition with which conservatives could agree, because the argument is phrased in what might be called the "permissive mood...
...and the USSR would exist even if the Politburo consisted Arnold Beichman is associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and author of Nine Lies About America...
...President Carter's campaign on human rights becomes meaningless if you believe that evil is to be excluded as a factor in judging international relationships, for as Coral Bell has written, "both means and ends in foreign policy are eligible for moral scrutiny and moral judgment...
...solely of virtuous men...
...One admits freely that the only politics she considers seriously are those of the Middle Ages...
...So it is time to tell those ghastly Senators, such as Frank Church Tom Bethell is Washington editor for Harper's and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...
...For example, however much Israel might have been anti-colonial, could it have helped Mozambique or Angola in their struggle against Portuguese colonialism in 1973, when Portugal was the only NATO country which permitted refueling of U.S...
...the conquests of the one are therefore gained by the ploughshare...
...Judge Parker, get off the bench...
...You then went on and I quote from the Times: The competitive elements are there not because of evil men or because of evil designs but because of deeply rooted historical forces, philosophical pressures, geopolitical considerations, divergent political systems and different values...
...and the USSR...
...Freedom...Servitude...Have the two countries so changed in 143 years that they are indistinguishable from each other in terms of their rulers, their codes of domestic and international conduct and behavior...
...This leaves me peculiarly saddened...
...If only—they sigh so hypocritically—if only Helms had refused to answer the questions put to him by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...If only—one feels—they had said what they really meant: We were denied another tasty meal, another chance to drag the flag through the mud...
...Then he was ordered out of France...
...There is still surprisingly little scholarly discourse—virtually none—but there also appears to be some embarrassment about the overblown rhetoric that has flown so freely...
...The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided exertions and common sense of the citizens...
...He was ordered out of Britain for maintaining contacts with foreign intelligence agents...
...Either way, the stage is left clear for the extremists, and very few dissenting voices are heard...
...When you exculpate the Soviet Union, you exculpate a country where, as you know, at least 500 prisons, prison camps, and "psychiatric" jails hold political dissidents, totalling as many as 1.5 million prisoners...
...Because of the stigma of "McCarthyism," there is a widespread reluctance to state the obvious about America today: There is an ugly stain of anti-Americanism spreading across the landscape...
...There was a disturbing determinism in your words, as if the Soviet leaders are in the grip of forces over which they have no control and are exploited by some design which demands of them its fulfillment no matter at what price...
...In the same way, Archibald Cox argued for the University of California, a university ought to be "free...to take into account the fact that a qualified applicant is black, Chicano, Asian or native American in order to increase the number of qualified members of those minority groups...
...And I hope you will not pay much attention to Senator Frank Church's demand that we should end a "petulant and self-defeating policy" towards Cuba, which I hope is not merely in the grip of "philosophical pressures...
...Is all the world's evil in Pretoria...
...It's just a matter of "divergent political systems and different values...
...Liberals, arguing against Bakke, say something like this: Why shouldn't race be used as a criterion of admission to universities...
...Helms was then further lectured on the New York Times Op-Ed page by Dick Clark, the trendy senator from Iowa...
...Is there no relationship between the Gulag on the one hand and the particular quality of "the competitive elements" between the U.S...
...He is, vociferously...
...and for all I know there may even be a university somewhere that enrolls brains (thus putting higher learning before anything else...
...It will be allowed, even protected...
...instead one had to excavate for it in private conversations and unguarded moments...
...Individuals, usually more interesting, and more moderate, outside their respective caucuses than within, have had some chance to talk between "Education for What," "Education for the Future," and "Constraints and Prospects for the Future of Education...
...he even has the gall to speak humorously of the upheavals of the sixties...
...Or attribute to "deeply rooted historical forces," the Katyn Forest genocide...
...Why, I can read Hayek in the public library any time...
...The Justice Department responded by saying that if the traitor returned to the United States, he would not be prosecuted under the Espionage Act...
...Several members of the Left Caucus apologize to me about the note-taking incident...
...here seems to be an unnoticed paradox associated T with the Allan Bakke case, recently argued before the Supreme Court...
...He is not, despite his record as a progressive educator, well received...
...It will, he assures me, be humanistic and nonhierarchical...
...Tom Bethell Capitol Ideas Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee wrote a book fingering CIA agents abroad...
...Certainly there are plenty of Danforth Fellows who do not consider themselves revolutionaries...
...Could you exonerate Josef Stalin in the same fashion...
...I can understand that in matters of foreign policy, morality can sometimes be a matter of priorities...
...Or, if only he had testified in secret session (as though there weren't a hundred other termites lurking in the bureaucratic woodwork, ready to leak such testimony to the press...
...He shines with energy and commitment...
...that university enrolls blacks, Chicanos, etc...
...I allude to the Russians and the Americans....The American struggles against the natural obstacles which oppose him...
...The accepted creed of the Conference has been that individuals are insignificant in comparison with the collective...
...construing its purpose by reference to a currently fashionable theory of social justice...
...Many lose their confidence in the face of all this political activism, and wonder if maybe their particular moral and ethical concerns are rather paltry in comparison to, say, those of a Marxist-Leninist feminist...
...That is, universities may use race as a criterion...
...Let me paraphrase what you said in a way that Ambassador Andrew Young might understand: The competitive elements are there in South Africa between the whites and non-whites not because of evil men or because of evil designs but because of deeply rooted historical forces, philosophical pressures, geopolitical considerations, divergent political systems and different values...
...But the apolitical Fellows keep their concerns to themselves...
...to him the vision appears real...
...There the silliness reigns undisturbed...
...He was fined $2,000 and told by U.S...
...the Russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm: the principal instrument of the former is freedom...
...and the USSR...
...For example, Frank Newman, president of the University of Rhode Island, tries valiantly to make the Fellows face reality...
...of the latter, servitude...
...Others announce that politics are below them...
...the adversaries of the Russian are men: the former combats the wilderness and savage life...
...I refer you to the 16 The American Spectator January 1978 Economist, 2 April 1977, pp...
...they will think of other things...
...Come the revolution, he will be the first to go...
...This is never done during group meetings, though, or during the question periods after lectures...
...This university, let us say, chooses to enroll jocks (thus building a winning team, keeping the money flowing in from the alumni...
...It is reassuring, in the end, to see the caucuses splinter into individuals at O'Hare...
...yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe...
...But can this really be the issue...
...Why do you feel it necessary to exonerate Brezhnev and his Politburo from a burden of evil...
...Freedom of thought...
...It is not the permissive "may" but the coercive "must" that conservatives fear...
...the latter, civilization with all its weapons and its arts...
...and Dick Clark, who have had so much fun in front of TV cameras at the expense of their country: Get yourselves a one-way ticket to Cuba...
...Your statement implies that the "competitive elements" between the U.S...
...District Court Judge Barrington Parker, "You stand before this court in disgrace and shame...
...The most distressful implication of your speech is that you equate the U.S...
...Here with me on the last evening of the Conference is Antonio, a real live Arab/Chicano Marxist revolutionary...
...You were dealing with Soviet-American relations which, you said, "will continue to be for a long time both cooperative and competitive...
...The Zbigniew Brzezinski I knew at Columbia University in the 1960s knew all about evil men and evil designs...
...Or blame the post-Stalin seizure of Czechoslovakia, the slaughter in Hungary, the suppression of the East German workers' revolution in 1953 on "philosophical pressures" rather than on evil men and evil designs...
...But I have not heard any statement that their violations of human rights can be excused because of "deeply rooted historical forces...
...Having said as much, however, one immediately realizes that it is not may but must that the anti-Bakke forces have in mind...
...He tells me tales of the imminent revolution, and of the world to be...
...We are no longer, he informs us, if we ever were, members of the oppressed masses...
...Schools already may take into account such matters as whether applicants are the sons or daughters of alumni, whether they are good athletes, whether their parents have given money to the school, and so on...
...There are no evil men and evil designs in the Kremlin and there are no evil men and evil designs in Washington, D.C...
...Religion...
...All the unpleasantness just happened...
...Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same...
...Let me end this letter with a passage from Tocqueville's Democracy in America, part of which you quoted in your coauthored book: There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world, which seem to tend toward the same end, although they started from different points...
...Can any libertarian disagree with such a system...
...He replies, "I'll be damned if I can't joke about it...
...Former CIA director Richard Helms refused to renege on his oath of office by revealing the extent of CIA "involvement" in Chile...
...This is surely the The American Spectator January 1978 17...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
