Polit-ique Internationale/A Touch of Crass
Taki
nauseating stereotype of a New Yorker who has become something of a one-man ad campaign for the Big Apple. Wherever it began, the upshot is that hordes of young Americans, convinced that New York...
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...To wit, why is it that our cousins the Brits seem at times to worry more about Washington's foreign policy than about the grand tour the Russkies periodically take to such romantic places as Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Kabul, not to mention that randy little capital Havana...
...Their last great victory was in Prague against flower children, and their tea is as undrinkable as their women are unbleepable...
...Ironically, both countries have wonderful diplomats...
...He'd made it...
...prospered or found contentment-on the banks of the Hudson, only that he had survived...
...These include political figures, businessmen, writers, journalists, government advisers and heads of TV and press...
...Finally, there is what James Brady calls the sagging upper British lip syndrome...
...But of course it isn't...
...democracy, upper-class buggery, and anti=lllrkish sentiments—after covering the Yom Kippur War for the leading Athens daily, Acropolis...
...Easy...
...One day a year or so ago I was standing with one of these new New Yorkers on the grimy front steps of his crumbling apartment building when he proudly nodded in the direction of a prostitute who was plying her wares not ten feet from us...
...By far the greatest successes of the Soviet disinformation campaign have been the peace organizations sprouting all over the sceptred isle...
...So I will do the next best thing and add my ten cents on a subject that is relevant to Peregrine's anti-Reaganism and anti-neoconism and also dear to my heart...
...Un peu trop, as the French say...
...Even before that, the Soviet Union was looked upon by leading Brit intellectuals as the most progressive society in the world, and countless of them paid groveling visits to the land of the Gulag...
...culture as basically philistine and vulgar, the purveyor of the filthy values of "Dallas" and "Dynasty," as op-posed to the Euro-Russian heritage of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky—and what do you get...
...They don't have those back home...
...This is not the case with the Soviet "diplomatic" corps...
...So imagine what lengths the Russkies must go to when in contact with bigger fish than Greek hacks, or how flattering they can get in the presence of big lasagnas of countries slightly more important than the Olive Republic of Grease...
...They are at the Center of the World, and the world is watching...
...There he became the organizer and first editor of the Cambridge Modern History...
...Included are such essays as "The History of Freedom in AntiquitY...
...To be sure, most of them sup-port themselves by working as waiters, secretaries, and the like, but even if they never actually get around to creating anything, they persist in considering themselves to be artists and feel no qualms about identifying themselves as such...
...In fact, the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the U.S...
...The last Englishman to win Wimbledon did it in 1935...
...That's our local hooker," he boasted...
...Mind you, the Soviets have also had help from the Blunts and Burgesses of today (most of whom, alas, one can-not name because of the ridiculous libel laws that seem to protect mostly the guilty nowadays) as well as fromself-publicists like Antonia Fraser and her husband Harold Pinter, both in the forefront of rallies that demand cruise missiles out of England...
...Which brings me to the point I'm trying to make...
...These movements have created a public mood against takingmeasures for defense that can only be compared to that of the thirties, when the Blunts and Burgesses of the period undermined the will of the free world to defend itself...
...Their other identifying characteristics are equally unmistakable...
...And our friendship survives to this day...
...Well, the Russians have never won Wimbledon, and their cars are even worse than those the Brits make...
...They would not get away with this back home, or even try to—but New York is different...
...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...Add to that the gut anti-Americanism among the old guard of the Conservative party—they see U.S...
...Not only did the two Russkies become my new best friends on the spot, I found myself sticking closer to them than that painted-up propagandist, Christabel Hitchens, sticks to rich...
...They refuse to live in Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx (in-deed, they make a point of boasting that they don't know their way around those dull Outer Boroughs...
...I've conquered New York," an immigrant from one of the loveliest towns in the Midwest told me recently—meaning not that he had...
...That move proved so successful that moderate members of the Labour party admit that many trade unions, the media, and their own party are heavily tainted...
...hber1yPns LibertyClassics SELECTED WRITINGS OF LORD ACTON VOLUME I ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF LIBERTY By John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton Edited by J. Rufus Fears Lord Acton was among the most significant figures in the intellectual life of Victorian England...
...Worsthorne, a man whose manners are so impeccable I would forgive him even if he tried to get me fired from my job (which he once did...
...There were American diplomats there too, but if memory serves, they were busy discussing a Dallas Cowboys football game the Armed Forces radio hadbroadcast that afternoon...
...The city's one big movie set to them...
...American diplomats go abroad to do a job, namely to advance the foreign-policy goals of whatever ad-ministration happens to be in power...
...In November 1973, I returned to my birthplace—as well as that of selective Taki Theodoracopulos is a European editor of the The American Spectator...
...House of Representatives has heard evidence in the past that the Soviet investment in propaganda is between $3 and $4 billion per annum...
...dollars...
...558 + xxx pages...
...watching them walk down its streets, one has the feeling that they spend each day imagining that a camera is on them, tracking their passage up Fifth Avenue, past the Plaza Hotel, into Central Park...
...Well, with all due respect, I think Mr...
...Most of these young immigrants come to New York boasting that they are artists of some kind—painters, poets, singers, musicians, dancers, ac-tors, novelists...
...A people that tend to see Soviet crimes as past mistakes, mistakes that are equated with American "crimes" in Vietnam, and who imagine that life under the Soviets would be no worse than it is today under American economic and cultural "domination...
...I call it the opposite of Schadenlfreude, or how one loser relates to another...
...The common denominator that unites peaceniks, certain trade unionists on the take, and the Soviets' media and Parliamentary stooges is, needless to say, anti-Americanism...
...Mind you, when I say the Brits I don't mean Mr...
...Adding to that, a large segment of the British elite continue to perceive the Soviet Union as their wartime ally who stood fast against Hitler while America dilly-dallied about entering the war...
...All Soviet diplomats, and I mean all, have strict instructions when abroad to proselytize and infiltrate the media of the country they're in, and to try to infiltrate the key centers of power...
...The Brits lost India and are soon to lose Hong Kong...
...They used to win at cricket but now even Indians beat them, not to mention the West Indians...
...They sport T-shirts that say "Welcome to New York—Now Go Home...
...They perceive New York's dirty streets, dangerous subways, and armies of street people not as real problems but as colorful fantasy problems, like the nasty apple trees, evil monkeys, and sleep-inducing poppies that Dorothy encountered on her trek down the Yellow Brick Road...
...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...
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...They residein sections of the city that used to be known as slums but have now turned into high-rent districts because these onetime out-of-towners are willing—nay, eager—to live there, among the chic New York rats and cockroaches, the chic muggers and pushers, the chic falling plaster and smell of urine in the hallway...
...LibertyClassics is publishing a three volume series of Selected Writings of Lord Acton under the editorship of Professor J. Rufus Fears...
...It's not the real world to them but is, rather, an Emerald City, a Fairyland, a place to live out their dreams...
...Sometimes all seven atonce...
...It manages to infect and corrupt British life, yet no less than the leading stalwart of British conservatism, Peregrine Worsthorne himself, has dismissed such fears of conspiracy as poppycock, and has written that people are not such gullible fools as some of us from the right might think...
...P104 Indianapolis, IN 46250 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986...
...Forward, index...
...They used to make the best cars in the world but now make some of the worst...
...The overall effect of this virulent but extremely subtle anti-Americanism is enormous...
...It is the presence of the imaginary camera, one senses, that gives their lives meaning...
...Two Russians were among the first to arrive, the cultural attache and the third secretary of the consular section...
...Washington hostesses...
...The first volume contains material related to three of Acton's leading interests: the history of liberty, the particular contribution made by England and America to the course of liberty, and the effect on liberty of contemporary European political developments...
...As some of us realize, Lenny has done a hell of a job...
...Is it any wonder, then, that Uncle Sam's foreign policy is as suspect among well-meaning Brits as, say, a midnight knock on the door is among Muscovites...
...Wherever it began, the upshot is that hordes of young Americans, convinced that New York is The Only Place To Be, have swarmed into town, their determination to Make It There pathetically imprinted on their faces...
...The thug who runs this small-budget operation is a beaming Russkie by the name of Leonid ("Call me Lenny") Zamyatin, and his task is rather simple...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...Such wiles have not been lost on the Brits...
...The History of Freedom in Christianity and "The Puritan Revolution...
...Lady Antonia leads those rallies from the front, fanning herself with a copy of Vogue magazine and sipping Perrier with a twist of lemon if it's hot...
...A TOUCH OF CRASS by Taki To add my two bits to what Peregrine Worsthorne and his critics had to say in the pages of TAS about Anglo-American relations would be a bit like trying to sell a publisher yet another collection of Virginia Woolf's letters...
...Compare this with the kind of moolah Uncle Sam spends in order to win friends and influence people—and cry...
...The publisher gave a party in my honor, and invited some of the Athens-based foreign diplomats...
...Worsthorne is as wrong on this as Neville Chamberlain once was about Munich...
...Now as one Chinese stamp collector told another, "Philately will get you everywhere," and I must admit that I was awfully flattered...
...His enormous erudition won him the admiration of Gladstone and led to his election to the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge...
...They laugh at tourists...
...Furthermore—and this is most important—as early as 1950, the Communist party of Great Britain understood that as a result of its lack of popular support, it would change its strategy from trying to obtain Parliamentary representation to in-filtrating the centers of power—including Parliament...
...And you should see their stamps...
...It is to discredit or to promote—according to the needs of Soviet THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 29 strategy—ideas, plans, countries, and individuals...
...He was chain-smoking, was pale and nervous and tired, was living in a horribly overpriced East Village loft in what looked from the outside like an abandoned building—but, hell, he was still here...
...They hang on their walls a copy of that New Yorker poster depicting a Manhattanite's view of America, with everything west of the Hudson exceedingly vague...
...Acton's famous aphorism "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" may be juxtaposed with another Acton line "the development of liberty is the soul of history...:' Acton wrote many essays, reviews and letters which reflect his great learning and his deep concern with liberty as the central concept for the understanding of history...
...Their umbrella is the Unilateral Disarmament Movement, a group that includes among its members countless well-meaning souls who have fallen for the Russian line the way rich adventurers used to fall for Babs Hutton...
...There was certainly no philately from the American corner for the greatest Greek writer since Homer...
...Oh, I almost forgot...
...They drink instant tea whereas they once drank the tea their flunkies planted for them...
...And speaking of manners, here's a story about Soviet manners as opposed to American ones...
...The Russians...
...Such a good job, in fact, that Andrei Sakharov himself wrote that "People in the West have been bought by Soviet agencies in the most . . . direct sense of the word...
...As soon as my host finished introducing us the two began praising the guest of honor, calling my prose immortal and going so far as to compare my dispatches from the Arab-Israeli war with those of that blind Greek who reported the Greco Trojan conflict long ago in the Iliad...
Vol. 19 • March 1986 • No. 3
