Third World Derangements
Jr, R. Emmett Tyrrell
tunistic gunslinger." Bad enough in and of themselves, such characterizations, taken out of Lebanon's bitter context of civil war and anarchy, were meant to convey the notion that Israel runs...
...The Soviet Union never made this mistake...
...The job was to turn them into Volvo-driving, concertgoing Swedes, i.e., Americans with taste...
...scribed himself as a loner in terms that people thought rather ridiculous at the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982"" 11...
...Nonetheless, when the time came for Dr...
...H . J . Kaplan KISSINGER II: HENRY KISSINGER AND YEARS OF UPHEAVAL Only the f a n a t i c s will deny it: K i s s i n g e r ' s account o f diplomatic life d u r i n g Watergate is a masterwork...
...Myrdal to compose the book's foreword, the cheerleader in him leapt to life: As the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, never ceases to stress, the problem facing the country.., is how to bring about a social and economic revolution by peaceful means...
...Once a Coca Cola vending machine or the golden arches of McDonald's have been raised above the bush, neither grubs nor caterpillars will 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 taste so savory...
...but the world never outgrows its need for lies...
...The very book put the lie to the blah...
...Practically every other land was heaved into the Third World, though the USSR and its principalities were given a somewhat hazy classification--sometimes they were of the Third, sometimes not...
...and his Third World colleagues were in bemused accord...
...It was a colossal delusion, mixing condescension in a stew of timorousness and boredom with our own culture...
...I n those magistral realms where the legendary transformation of the Third World is excogitated and monitored, is Dr...
...It sent out tanks or East European secret police or Cuban mercenaries, and hesto presto no resentment...
...Everything depends on whether and how they can be put together, the kind of task that our once and future Metternich, if his memoirs are to be believed, had a genius for solving...
...Yet ponder this: Sometime around the year 1960 A.D., someone slipped Dr...
...It is true that Israel has been losing the esteem of intellectuals and opinion-makers for at least ten years (support among the general public remains strong), but never has there been such a concentrated barrage of ill-feeling, not to say antagonism...
...They evangelized Uniworld and its balmy vision of a world culture...
...Some were no more capable of envisaging it than they were capable of mastering ancient Greek or performing the rumba...
...Kaplan has been a foreign service officer, a corporate executive, a writer, and an editor...
...The hope _9 . . reform . . . total remaking of social and economic relations.., carried out by the people themselves . . . a minimum of direction . . . without resort to compulsion . . . . reforms need THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 9 t o be planned . . . . the planning should be democratic . . . . the welfare of the masses . . . its supreme goal . . . . done by the people . . . expresses their desires, ambitions and needs . . . . compulsion is excluded . . . . Indian democratic planning.., initiating a social process . . . . the masses . . . become increasingly motivated . . . improving their lot as individuals . . . . improving society by co-operative endeavor...
...Here at the infant seat of world government, the diplomats of the Third World became the most effective and idealistic scofflaws ever heard of...
...Iadia, as Blossoms in the Dust made clear, would never become a land of instant Swedes...
...They suffer all the brummagem sentiments emanating therefrom, and return to jerl~water conftrmed in the belief that they have tasted the culture of Einstein and Beethoven...
...renders his scholarly findings on the origins of Third World statecraft and awaits the call from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...
...Fundamentally, the source of The Resentment is that question presciently raised by Sam Lewis and Joe Young in the title of their 1919 anthem, "How You Gonna Keep 'Era Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree...
...Blah, blah, blah...
...And this hostility has cut across party lines, coming from conservatives as well as liberals (though, as a matter of fact, the Democrats, assembled in Philadelphia, were the ones who expressed support for Israel, while nothing was heard from the Republicans...
...Throughout the Third World almost everyone takes pride in his ancient ghosts and goblins...
...Our tremendous power, on the other hand, has allowed us to delude ourselves about our own defensive activities, and so we imagine they are not as necessary as they are...
...The conception was nonsensical...
...moulding all her public l i f e . . . national down to . . . local level . . . . framework of democracy.., universal suffrage...
...But their wanton e n e r g i e s and voluminous egos would not leave them alone...
...It gained adherents...
...India...
...They had no real vision of a better world and would have better served mankind had they remained at home, emptying bourbon bottles and reading the Marxist mumbo jumbo to the cat...
...Twenty more years of experience stamped the lie on the blab...
...The adepts of Uniworld had lost their relish for the culture of the West, but they were contemptuous of the t r a d i t i o n a l values to be found with the primitives...
...But what about us, here...
...So we chastise allied states for behaving morally--what else is the defense of one's country?--and close our eyes to the continuing violence practiced by states over which we have little or no corltrol...
...immerse them in the choicest grease--it will do no good...
...The corruptions of the foul West are known to every informed rickshaw puller, every bazaar entrepreneur...
...Certainly not all Third Worlders are mediocrities...
...What might the Zambian Aristotle say, and when would an Aeschylus pop up in Burundi...
...Apparently the allure of America's trashy pop culture is too much for them...
...In the Third World, too, there is the proverbial rat race--sometimes dominated by real rats...
...One colonial power in particular became the focal point of The Resentment, to wit: the United States, oppressor of Puerto Rico and matrix of foreign aid, technical assistance, health services, Peace Corps, and uppity women...
...In 1980, Cuba amassed 5,888 unpaid parking violations, with one diplomatically immune Cuban personally accounting for 651...
...Surrounding the legend of the Third World, there has always been a lot of whoop-whoop, and if I cite the Swede Myrdal it is only because his preachments were spermatic, and, I suppose, because his bubbly prelude to Blossoms in the Dust superbly illustrates how oblivious the early adepts of Uniworld were to reality...
...They immure themselves in their dormitory rooms...
...Myrdal a manuscript, Blossoms in the R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...This is a truism, with a sniff of Harvard about it, but the self-serving purpose is hardly achieved if the events are twisted, the reasoning specious, the style (the man himself, as Buffon observed) inauthentic...
...While there have been, to be sure, comments and reports refuting some of the points of view I have cited, the dominant tone has been one of begrudging the Israelis their success, or else it has been openly hostile to them...
...We have developed, as Dorothy Powers said of the British before World War lI, " a determined refusal to believe in the possibility of evil...
...The adepts of Uniworld could never decide the specifics of their truths...
...Conflict keeps creating new facts, but even after apparently decisive military action, these are variously per' L i t t l e , Brown and Co., $24.95...
...The rewards were bundles of gold Rolex watches and foreign aid plus ample supplies of military hardware...
...The ambivalence of the great endeavor was there from the start and grew more a p p a r e n t . E p i t h e t s changed...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Some obviously are men of sound character and high intelligence, but all the second-raters suffer from The Confusion whether they study at Harvard or Slippery Rock...
...Withal, the agents of Christian endeavor were driven by a bright vision of mission and truth...
...This they did with relish and their terrorists became a threat to the peace of all mankind...
...They visit Disneyland and Miami Beach...
...Myrdal but from Shiva Naipaul, reviewing the Third World politics of the Cooperative Socialist Republic of Guyana twenty years later...
...I do not want to be misperceived...
...So tight was the hold of I n d i a ' s holy men, castes, and ignoramuses, that the place might not even rise to the level of a West Virginia until the turn of the century...
...Untrammeled by colonial holdings and heady with the fumes of idiot idealism, Americans at the end of World War II could always be counted on to throw their enormous weight behind the notion that there were developed and undeveloped worlds...
...Myrdal is an esteemed visionary, an early adept ofUniworld, a patron and mentor to that amazing r e p o s i t o r y of v i r t u e - - t h e Third World...
...it would be everybody over there by the open pits and start the machine guns...
...As the United States has lost confidence in its role in the world, and the role of its own power in particular, it has also become skeptical about the use of power by others...
...Perhaps we should consider ourselves fortunate that this is so, yet the fact remains that we tend to ignore r e a l i t i e s which, however unpleasant, need to be faced honestly...
...Then they were on the run...
...The p r u d e n t adept of Uniworld would never say...
...It has yet to occur to the diplomats that Third Worldism seems "to hint at a kind of universal mental retardation...
...After the wireless has been installed and the TVs are in place, news from godless and gorgeous America will wobble every swarthy mullah, every fuliginous patriot, and all the caudillos of Patagonia...
...But all this depended on The Confusion and The Resentment...
...Gunnar Myrdal often thought of as one honey of a c h e e r l e a d e r ? I think not...
...The Confusion can be observed right here in America where it addles the brains of all the mediocre graduate students sent by Third World governments to make off with the American magic...
...The f i r s t volume, White House Years, was published in 1979...
...The immense stocks of ammunition which they found in South Lebanon could leave no doubts in their minds (if any were left) about what would happen if the PLO ever got inside a town in the Galilee...
...For once these dolts have spent a quarter of a century or so gaining their M.A.'s in telecommunications and other such pud courses, once they have tired of clipping magazine lingerie ads for their salacious scrapbooks, of plying blonde coeds with coffee in student unions and learning how to masticate chewing gum without swallowing it, all will return home to take up lofty positions in the" local establishment or to be beaten to death in Utopia's dungeons...
...He lists his present occupatioa as grandfatber...
...I do believe them...
...They meditate solitarily on TV's pish-posh and radio's simian sound...
...Nair interviewed Indians from all walks of life, that she might "assess the impact of development upon the individuals and communities involved...
...A highly regarded foreign correspondent wrote in the International Herald Tribune that the Israelis were engaged in " a chain of murders" that would please Hitler, and a IVall Street Journal columnist, knowingly or not taking up this obscene theme, said that Prime Minister Begin had in mind a "final solution" for the Palestinians...
...Others opposed it violently...
...He seemed to thump for material improvement without materialists, America without Americans...
...All extol the timeless rhythms of their antique cultures...
...The words are not from the 1960s encomiums of Dr...
...The laugh is that our State Department still dreams of participating in the dance of statecraft with these goons...
...Israel, particularly since 1967, has been a reminder of a reality that, in many respects, we have sought to avoid--namely, that the world is violent and that if the free nations do not meet violence forthrightly they will lose their freedoms and perhaps all else as well...
...that had introduced pants and shoes...
...Would Papua ever develop an Athens or a Rome...
...This is the man who once, in an interview with an Italian journalist, de...
...One of Kissinger's critics, unconsciously mimicking the tone and style of his text, remarks that no statesman ever writes memoirs to denigrate his own role...
...The national defense is discussed but, to put the matter simply, it is not a family matter the way it is in Israel...
...There would be no leaflets telling the people to get outside while the armed men fought it out...
...Bad enough in and of themselves, such characterizations, taken out of Lebanon's bitter context of civil war and anarchy, were meant to convey the notion that Israel runs a crime syndicate in Lebanon...
...Add to these seminal experiences their attendance at a few afternoon classes where their siestas are disturbed by the occasional rough shouts of an anti-American prof and their minds will forever be abuzz with The Confusion and The Resentment...
...It is the chronicle of Kasum Nair's year-long trek through the podunks of the great Indian subcontinent, undertaken at a time a) when hope swelled for turning primitive environs into societies on the Western order and b) just before the Western order took on many of the customs of those primitive environs...
...Whether a village eminence has a wife as strong as a water buffalo or a dozen nubile daughters to sell, there will still be days when he secretly sighs beneath the burning sun and dreams of discoing like mad in nocturnal Manhattan...
...Dust...
...ceived, ambiguous, impermanent...
...As for The Confusion, it is something altogether more subtle and singular...
...Thus something like two-thirds of the human race could be counted on by the profs of economic development to be staunchly "undeveloped...
...Pained reports from the scholars of economic development emblazoned the lie...
...The undeveloped world became the under-developed world, then the developing world, then the lesser developed world, and so on...
...hers is thus an appalling narrative, peopled by a congeries of dim souls not one of whom really shared Dr...
...Thus they could bravely b u t c h e r each other...
...THIRD WORLD DERANGEMENTS Seven years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan parlayed a Commentary magazine foreign policy essay into a high diplomatic post, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...But from the United States there came foreign aid, and The Resentment enlarged, receiving its most eloquent articulation at the United Nations where the Third World governments expressed their pain and frustration by abominating Israel and amassing parking violations...
...and that they understand...
...They had no idea whether they were bringing the word to the heathens or the heathens were there to edify them...
...Was life in the Zambian bush superior to life in Scarsdale...
...They may make it a little e a s i e r for American politicians determined to find fault with them, but the substance of Israeli d e f e n s e policy would not change under a Labor government_9 What has been far more u p s e t t i n g to many American observers than the vagaries of p e r s o n a l i t i e s has been the robust willingness of Israel to use force to defend itself--its existence, to be exact...
...We now have twothirds of the Gospel according to Henry, and while there is still no sign that anyone has organized a church it is obvious that the News he brings is from On High, the reasoning is compelling, and the style does honor to our culture...
...If they ever laid hands on nuclear weapons, they might even become a threat to the planet...
...that, in fine, had brought modernity to peoples who a p p a r e n t l y wanted to wait and see what their own indigenous Bronze Ages might be like...
...The developed world included North America, Western Europe, Japan, and South Africa...
...Myrdal's faith in Uniworld...
...All that really has existed have been the proponents of the blah, but as the blah spread the ill-assorted peoples of the non-Western world were agglutinated into the "Third World," held together by but two common bonds: The Confusion and The Resentment...
...Years of Upheaval," the second volume of his memoirs, reminds us.that diplomacy in the old-fashioned sense can still play a significant role, even in an age of implacable ideologies...
...He is presantly at work on a study of liberal enthusiasms...
...Where their ancestors had once sent missionaries abundant with Christian zeal they now sent social workers intent on getting the hell back to nature...
...People on every.rung of the Third World ladder want to know more, and this creates problems...
...Year after year the Uniworld blah was to grow more meretricious, prehensile, and brutal...
...Now it is certain that the Israelis, who themselves have been debating quite energetically the merits and tactics of the campaign, may be forgiven if they sometimes seem to shrug t h e i r shoulders in frustration in response to questions put to them in the media capitals of the West...
...Israel has had no alternative to defending itself actively, no choice but to carry the battle to its enemies...
...No one really knew what to call it or what to do with it, probably because it has never really existed...
...E a r l y this summer when the battle for Stanley was drawing to a close and the Israelis were tightening their noose around Beirut and the Russians belatedly beginning to growl, I had visions of Henry Kissinger rocketing around the globe again, from Moscow to Peking to Cairo...
...is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator and a syndicated columnist...
...The author is an honest woman...
...H.J...
...If the truth be known, it was not dreamers from the old world but Americans who in the main confected the Third World...
...The Resentment was of course resentment for the erstwhile colonial powers that had wiped out cholera and cannibalism...
...There are, it is true, the personalities of Begin and Sharon: They are said to be abrasive and bad publicity for their nation_9 And their temperaments are supposed to be of a piece with Israel's post-1967 character, rough-riding, arrogant, and expansionist_9 Yet these are the men (among others) who gave back the e n t i r e Sinai...
...Sociologist, anthropologist, professor of economic development, and Swede~ Dr...
...Not even Nigeria (4,016) surpassed the Cubans, though based on the number of cars in t h e i r missions Angola was probably the preeminent delegation of scofflaws with 227 tickets per car, followed by the illustrious Cubans with 190, and Senegal with 163...
...Yes, it is true...
...Forty-year-old graduate students from American universities were suddenly the most powerful Metternichs in post-Pahlavi Iran...
...But t h e - b l a h endured...
...All these cultural splendors had been obviated when the colonial powers barged in with their quacks and their pettifoggers...
...Yet word of Uncle Sam's Gomorrah remains diverting...
...Watching them brood pays a double dividend, instructing us deeply in The Confusion and also giving us a familiarity with many of the future eminentoes of these far-off lands...
...Let him hear of the folkways and mores observed in Hollywood, California and the grim sonorities of the Prophet will never curl his hair quite so tightly again...
...Naipaul and his brother Shiva have become its most authoritative chroniclers, and from a careful reading of their works the student of Third World anthropology sees that The Confusion is that uneasiness that hits every yahoo in jerkwater once word of America spreads to his dusty burg...
Vol. 15 • September 1982 • No. 9
