Capitol Ideas /The Soviet Sphere of Influenza
Bethell, Tom
"Capitol Ideas /The Soviet Sphere of Influenza" of international relations and of those who practice international relations. Our President, the one who was once given to saying " If I ever lie to you, don't vote for me," could serve...
...Far from moving to the right, America has been moving steadily to the left for the past ten years at least...
...If you don't believe me, keep an eye on the younger generation of Kennedys now making their way into the world...
...This brings me to the other issue that I had hoped to discuss: What attracts intellectuals to socialism...
...The Soviet-dominated lands have indeed been laid low by the invading microbial armies, but somehow the disease never quite "took," by some miracle...
...If his grandchildren do anything other than dissipate it, I shall be much surprised...
...Now he implies there is a new seriousness in his foreign policy...
...On the other hand, capital...
...Where, one wonders, have our own expensively educated St...
...Capitalism, a system based on voluntary transactions, mercilessly exposes "the lack of need for the products and services offered by intellectuals, which are often quite simply not good enough to be attractive to voluntary choice...
...But I am rapidly running out of space and so must leave it also for another time...
...Navrozov then made the comment that by contrast the U.S...
...It is, of course, one of the great questions posed by the twentieth century...
...Our President, the one who was once given to saying " I f I ever lie to you, don't vote for me," could serve the commonweal well by asking his aides to stop lying about this ignominious pratfall...
...Beckmann, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, who came to the U.S...
...If you haven't seen Chronides, it's worth a look because it is such a refreshing change from the normal diet of humanist cellulose...
...But let me conclude by saying that Petr Beckmann has devoted one of his " d i f f e r e n t drummer" booklets to a discussion of precisely this subject...
...Someone in the audience asked a question about a counter-demonstration that "provided the necessary movement, but still was not covered by the press...
...And a final point...
...institutions (who use these articles as press releases, if I'm not mistaken...
...Anything that moves then comes sharply into focus...
...According to Marxist and subsequent analysis, capitalism is supposed to result in a class system, meaning a society separated into layers that are difficult to bridge...
...So I was pleased to be able to hear him speak at a recent conference held in Washington by Accuracy In Media...
...Let me quote a paragraph from a recent article about Eastern Europe by George Schopflin in the London Times: Communist parties are ostensibly committed to social equality and to advancing the interests of the proletariat...
...Hence, their denigration of the mechanism of mobility: the market...
...This month I wanted to say something about my favorite Slavs (come to think of it, I'm not sure that is the right word, and now I worry that I might be hauled up before some Ethnic Tribunal...
...ism is nearly always supported by those with the prospect of benefitting from it...
...I should have said a left-wing frog...
...It is perfectly true that the rapid onset of the egalitarian illness has by Tom B e t h e l l summoned forth from the body politic a number of antibodies, but it would be a great mistake to interpret the appearance of antibodies as a sign of national health...
...This disease, called egalitarianism (a virulent strain of the more general disorder, socialism) is currently galloping across the American continent, north and south, at a fearful speed...
...I recommend this excellent newsletter to anyone interested in the (crucial) connection between energy problems and market forces, a connection which many government officials, politicians, anti-business lobbyists, and journalists have not understood (or have pretended not to), which is the main reason why we've ended up with an energy crisis...
...I find myself much in agreement with such Slavs and Russian emigr6s as I occasionally meet...
...W e l l , I won't go on about this right now...
...But, as Dr Walter Connor demonstrates in his book, Soczalism, Politics and Equality (Columbia University Press), since then eastern Europe has become so rigidly stratified that the chances of someone from the peasantry or the working class moving into the intelligentsia are virtually nil...
...Socialist systems, on the other hand, turn out to have precisely the social rigidity that the Marxists profess to despise...
...Is it not about time for him to dismiss the aforementioned Machiavellis...
...in a word, ailing, like the Ayatollah...
...They correctly perceive that capitalism is the most effective of all social elevators...
...plunging headlong into the statist quagmire...
...I was also pleased to meet Leopold Tyrmand at the conference...
...In their first decade of rule, the parties did, in fact, effect a great social transformation as they promoted a new generation of intellectuals, officeholders and managers...
...This journal, primarily a compilation of book reviews, is sometimes marred by an excessive flailing away at the idiocies of liberalism, when a more indirect approach might be more effective...
...Eventually he took up residence in Illinois, and currently he is the editor of an interesting, even controversial, publication called Chronicles o f Culture...
...They often have quite original minds and, needless to say, are a refreshing contrast to our own wilted weeds, homegrown at St...
...At any rate, I am sure that Lev Navrozov won't object if I describe him as a Caucasian, since he came to the U.S...
...The nation's sports fans will be grateful...
...I'm afraid the problem is that our local flora are "coming down with something...
...Tyrmand came to this country from Poland in the 1960s and for a brief, heady moment after he arrived wrote for the New Yorker, before that once-admirable journal went soft in the head (caught the egalitarian flu, one is inclined to say...
...news media's vision of the world was similar to that of a frog...
...This renders rather far-fetched the claims of those who say that Afghanistan will be the Soviets' Vietnam ("Vietnam" is here understood to mean the turning of public opinion against the government through the arousal of conscience...
...That is why the Soviet Empire, for all its horrors, strikes me as being basically in better health than the West...
...h is above all the cultivated disdain for " t r a d e " among the educated classes that is responsible for the U.S...
...Tyrmand, by then suspected of pro-Americanism, was in a manner of speaking banished from the Eastern (Liberal) Seaboard (much as Russian dissidents are sent to Gorky...
...from Czechoslovakia in 1963...
...I didn't have time to go into it fully...
...This has not been noticed because conservative opinion has been effectively labelled as "ideology," whereas left-wing opinion now marches about the land in the guise of reasonableness, status quo, and conventional wisdom...
...C A P I T 0 L I D E A S THE SOVIET SPHERE OF INFLUENZA An unexpected bonus deriving from the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, not to mention the oppression of the Russians themselves, has been the westward migration of s6me of the residents of these count r i e s - t h o s e who were f o r t u n a t e enough to escape--and a cbrresponding shot in the arm for intelligent opinion here...
...Yes, well this is a more complicated business," Navrozov said...
...The upper classes understand this, too, which is why they are perennially so scornful (read: apprehensive) of the upwardly mobile...
...Grottlesex weeds been while Dr...
...Beckmann has been getting off the boat and going through the laborious business of acquainting himself with a new continent...
...I'll sa,r a fuller discussion of the subject for the future...
...How extraordinary, really, that such a task should devolve upon an immigrant Czech engineer...
...What would " t h e s t o r y " have been, anyway-"New Hill in Omsk...
...Hence the intellectuals' preference for a system under which people can be coerced into paying for things that they neither want nor need...
...Petr _9 Published bimonthly by the Rockford College Institute, Rockford, Illinois...
...The great weakness of capitalism, evidently, is that it does not inspire the allegiance of those who have benefitted from it (by inheriting money, being sent to the best schools...
...This is because they have grasped the basic truth: money doesn't mind who spends it...
...This is because, despite the advantages of inherited wealth and privilege that cap!talism undoubtedly confers, the human psyche is constituted in such a way that the retention of shch privilege through more than a generation or so is an extremely difficult matter...
...They need some movement, some sensation...
...As a result, they are now "inoculated" against its further ravages...
...6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1980...
...He is described sometimes as a "dissident Soviet writer," although he might object to that use of "Soviet...
...The world is a kind of a blur as long as everything is still," he said...
...Finally, it was my rare pleasure to meet at the same gathering Dr...
...But I have much enjoyed several of Navrozov's articles in magazines such as Commentary...
...Meanwhile, it occurs to me that Ben Wattenberg and others roosting comfortably at centrist think tanks could do us all a great favor by stanching the flow of those articles and commentaries which, by saying that America is "moving to the right," play into the hands of the National Education Association, Ralph Nader, Americans for Democratic Action, and other left-wing Tom Betbell is The American Spectat o r ' s Washington columnist and Washington editor o f Harper's...
...The authorities simply came in the middle of the night, bulldozed a great mound of earth over the crashed plane, and turfed it over and sprinkled water on the sod--all before the citizens were up and about the next day...
...But the truth is that capitalism is the most socially fluid of all systems...
...Here we encounter the widely ignored paradox of class...
...Grottlesex...
...Over and over again, with respect to different sources of energy, Beckmann spells out the economic determinants of energy supply...
...As I came in, Navrozov was telling a story about an airliner that THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1980 5 crashed near his home in the Soviet Union...
...several years ago from Russia (perhaps somewhere near the Caucasus Mountains...
...His conclusion strikes me as being the simple truth, and I have never seen it so well expressed...
...Beckmann puts out (independent of the university) an excellent monthly newsletter called Access to Energy, which he describes as being "pro-science, pro-technology, pro-free enterprise...
...How about dismissing some of those who made such a hash of it in years past...
...He is also the author of The Education of Lev Navrozov, a book I have not so much as glimpsed in any bookstore, new or secondhand...
...So now they (I sense) are on the road back to health...
...We, on the other hand, have only just begun to feel" the first flush of fever...
...They are a reaction to illness...
...But on the whole Tyrmand and his contributors do a good job of examining the cultural assumptions and--iI4ases underlying current writing...
...By contrast the Eastern Europeans have already been exposed to the germ and either resisted it or caught a mild case of the illness...
...They, of course, are the ones who have been doing their best to suspend the operation of market forces in the realm of energy...
...Nothing appeared in the paper, of course...
...He must be the only writer in America capable of writing about such topics as SALT verification and CIA estimates of Soviet military strength in such a way as to be not only readable but actually funny...
...Their grandfather at least had the drive to accumulate a fortune...
...Last summer he dismissed his four most competent cabinet members to demonstrate a new seriousness in his domestic policy...
Vol. 13 • April 1980 • No. 4
