"Let us present the world outside our borders the face of a country that has learned to cope with crime and poverty and corruption, with drugs and pornography - let us prove ourselves capable of taking the great revolution of electronic communications in which we are all today embraced and turning it to the intellectual and spiritual elevation of our people in place of the enervation and debilitation and abuse of the intellect that television now so often inflicts upon them. Let us do these things, and others like them, and we will not need 27,000 nuclear warheads and a military budget of over $250 billion [ahem!] to make the influence of America felt in the world beyond our borders." [p. 179]
Unfortunately, one only needs to look at the ease with which "profoundly shallow" President Bush, Darth Cheney and the jingoistic neocons manipulated Americans into supporting their illegal, immoral war in Iraq, to see how little influence even the great and moral George Kennan has exerted over this God-forsaken United States.
Yet, even here, Mr. Kennan may again have the last word. In February 2003, just a month before Bush unleashed his evil war against Iraq, Kennan wrote the following letter to his nephew:
"I'm finishing this letter on the morning when, according to the press, the United Nations Security Council (weeping over the absence of the French) is supposed to take some action giving sanction to an early attack, almost exclusively by ourselves, on the present regime of Iraq. There is now not the slightest reason to doubt that this action will be undertaken at the earliest day, probably some three weeks off, when the military preparations are complete. What this is doing has already acted like a burning match to dynamite for the American media, particularly television, which immerses itself delightedly in what it already perceives as a new war. I take and extremely dark view of all of this, -- see it, in fact, the beginning of the end of anything like a normal life for all the rest of us…What is being done to our country today is surely something from which we will never be able to restore the sort of country you and I have known." [p. 187]
We should all applaud John Lukacs, not only for giving us such a fine character sketch of "the conscience of America," but also for courageously publishing Kennan's letter to his nephew, notwithstanding Kennan's request that it be destroyed. Lukacs knows, as does this reviewer, that thanks to Bush, Cheney and the despicable neocons, "we will never be able to restore the sort of country you and I have known." Still, we must try.
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