[Peace-discuss] The late George Kennan, the real George Kennan

[David Green]

Quote from George Kennan’s Obiturary in the NY Times
today:

Mr. Kennan's best-known legacy was this postwar policy
of containment, "a strategy that held up awfully
well," said Mr. Gaddis.
But Mr. Kennan was deeply dismayed when the policy was
associated with the immense build-up in conventional
arms and nuclear weapons that characterized the cold
war from the 1950's onward. His views were always more
complex than the interpretation others gave them, as
he argued repeatedly in his writings. He came to
deplore the growing belligerence toward Moscow that
gripped Washington by the early 1950's, setting the
stage for anti-Communist witch hunts that severely
dented the American foreign service. 



Quote from Red Hunting in the Promised Land:
Anticommunism and the Making of America by Joel Kovel
(1994), p. 46-47:

By treating Soviet Russia as mentally ill, Kennan may
have thought he was elevating the discourse beyond the
confines of crude moralization. However, he succeeded
only in shifting the terms of moralization in an
insidiously modern direction. After all, it matters
little what names one gives to the essence of badness
so long as one established that this essence
exists—that there is something so different about the
other as to place him in another moral universe.
Whether the flaw is dressed in ethical or psychiatric
terms, “we” do not have to recognize common human
values with “them.” Kennan is quite explicit about
this radical splitting, closing his Long Telegram with
the sententious idea that we “must have the courage
and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and
conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest
danger that can befall us in coping with this problem
of Soviet communism is that we shall allow ourselves
to become like those with whom we are coping.” The
irony is that by denying mutuality between the two
sides, the telegram succeeds remarkably in displaying
those very flaws which it imputes to the adversary.
That is, the Long Telegram is like a mirror; despite
Kennan’s pious warning, indeed, as a result of the
basic logic of moral splitting he advances, it becomes
what it beholds. Like the image of the Soviet
adversary, the Long Telegram denies the objective
truth to meet its inner needs; while the policy it
proposes (all the while denying it does so) is to be
the endless intervention and subversion imputed to the
Russians. . . .What is one to do with this Russian
monster save got to war, if not hotly, then through
global militarization? There is also an ominous
prefiguration of the great inquisition known as
McCarthyism . . .the thinking of “Wise Man” George F.
Kennan and that of the fanatic J. Edgar Hoover
converge to one inquisitorial point. . . . it was just
shortly after the Long Telegram (1947) produced its
electrifying effect on foreign policy that Hoover
reversed himself and began working actively with HUAC
. . .