Michael Crichton On Environmentalism

Michael Crichton is a 6'9" polymath. He is a revisionist as well. Environmentalist, he is not. If this be (fair & balanced) emendation, so be it!

Remarks to the Commonwealth Club
by Michael Crichton
San Francisco
September 15, 2003

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let's examine some of those beliefs.

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?

And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.

How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.

There was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white man's invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does inbdeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.

More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on the planet.

In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.

And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you'll have infections and sickness and if you're not with somebody who knows what they're doing, you'll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won't experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.

The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It's all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it's uninformed talk. Farmers know what they're talking about. City people don't. It's all fantasy.

One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of people who die because they haven't the least knowledge of how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they can't conceive the real power of what we blithely call "the force of nature." They have seen the ocean. But they haven't been in it.

The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to be. They think all life experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits, they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.

But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it-and if you don't, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced.

Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross. It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it wasn't deep---maybe three feet at most. My guide set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back double time to get help, it'd still be at least three days before he could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. And in three days, I'd probably be dead from my injuries. So that was why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little slip could be deadly.

But let's return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn't ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn't fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don't get down on our knees and conserve every day?

Well, it's interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there---though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.

Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they're human. So what. Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction. It's a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.

With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.

So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.

I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.

I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.

Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.

I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.

There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.

First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth---that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.

The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.

How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There's a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren't true. It isn't that these "facts" are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all---what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.

This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.

Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better. That's not a good future for the human race. That's our past. So it's time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.

Thank you very much.

For over 30 years, Michael Crichton has written books that focus on a wide variety of subjects: science, murder, extra-terrestrial life forms and international politics, to name a few.

Copyright © 2003 Michael Crichton

Did Ronald Reagan Win The Cold War?

Diggins is one tough dude. He provides a masterful review of the Cold War and the mistakes of that time. We seem hellbent to repeat those mistakes, but the stakes are higher now. If this be (fair & balanced) geopolitical analysis, so be it.

[x The American Prospect]
The -Ism That Failed
Neoconservatism relies on a history in which it alone won the Cold War. But that's not what happened. As neocons lead us deeper into holy war, it's time for a history lesson.
by
John Patrick Diggins

The aftermath of the Iraq war will surely see U.S. foreign policy at the forefront of national debates for years to come. Conservatives will claim -- as they have been claiming for months -- that only they were sufficiently prescient about "the present danger" of Saddam Hussein. And liberals will again find themselves on the defensive.

Sound familiar? Back during the Cold War, neoconservative intellectuals flattered themselves in their conviction that they carried forward the anti-communist cause that liberals had dropped in the late 1970s and 1980s, and they ran with it as though they had recovered a fumble and headed toward the goal line to win the game and enjoy the glory. The monthly magazine Commentary has basked in that glory, enjoying more influence on recent government foreign policy than any other intellectual journal.

While Commentary influenced the Reagan administration, the newer Weekly Standard has had similar influence with the current Bush administration. But whereas Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz convinced readers that America was losing the struggle against the Soviet Union, Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol seeks to convince us that fundamentalism's days are numbered once Iraq is transformed as the first step in the democratization of the Middle East. One writer desired to see American military power prevail, the other its political ideals. Have either?

Let's look at the record. Commentary's persistent assumptions about communism -- who the ultimate enemy really was and why America was going to lose the struggle unless it took its advice -- did much to help create the perilous post-Cold War situation in which we now find ourselves. Kapital is gone now and the Koran has taken its place. But 20 years ago, Commentary dismissed "the Islamic revolution" as little more than a sideshow concealing the movement of the Soviet Union into the Mideast. Thus the fall of the shah in Iran in 1979 was alleged to be as ominous as the fall of the czar in Russia in 1917 -- not because it presaged a religious fundamentalism that one day would become America's mortal enemy but because it signaled the "prelude" to communism's inevitable march into the oil states. With the stakes so high, Commentary saw nothing wrong with America arming Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and establishing a covert alliance with the House of Saud, which would turn out to be the financial angel of al-Qaeda.

Years earlier, liberals, of course, saw nothing wrong with America shipping arms to Joseph Stalin during World War II. But that effort lasted only a few years, and it was Ambassador George Kennan who warned us of the Soviets' domineering aims as the war drew to a close. In the recent Mideast, however, America's misjudgments lasted for an entire decade with no sense of danger. We are living with the consequences of those decisions today.

On the intellectual cold war in America, Commentary took its stand as a unilateralist long before today's neoconservatives gave the word its cachet. Just as the Bolsheviks once believed that to defeat czarism one must extirpate Menshevism and the liberal Kadets, so, too, did the conservatives of our time believe that to defeat communism one must extirpate radicalism and the liberal democrats. Commentary convinced itself and its readers that in order to fight communism, it had to rid the country of progressive politics and expose its illusions in the name of the hardheaded realpolitik of conservatism. The proliferation of weapons would succeed where the patience of wisdom had failed. With such assumptions, Commentary emerges victorious in the annals of modern American history. It claims to have won without needing any friends on the left.

Why this assumption has caught on is curious. Was it not the compromising disposition of conservatism, from the prudence of Winston Churchill to the pecuniary politics of Henry Kissinger, that proved quite willing to accommodate itself to communism, both in Eastern Europe as an established "sphere of influence" (drawn by Churchill with a blue crayon) and in Asia as a land of economic opportunity? The American presidency remained almost as indifferent as the public when, in Hungary in 1956, the Red Army turned the Budapest uprising into a bloodbath, and when, in China in 1989, a young man stood alone and defiantly halted a tank in Tiananmen Square as others looked up to their jerry-rigged Statue of Liberty and sent desperate faxes to an America that shamefully averted its eyes. Struggling to be born behind the Iron Curtain and the Great Wall of China, freedom died as much from the failure of its friends as from the acts of its foes. World communism had nothing to fear from American conservatism.

In fact, the history of the Republican Party should serve as a cautionary tale of conservatism's limitations for statecraft. With Dwight Eisenhower, communism survived in Korea; with Richard Nixon, it prevailed in Vietnam. Gerald Ford assured the American people that Poland was a "free" country. Ronald Reagan withdrew from Lebanon after terrorists massacred about 400 American and French soldiers. And George Bush Senior had no objections when Chinese officials told him that in crushing the Tiananmen Square movement, they were simply doing what America had done against student demonstrators in the 1960s. The party that Commentary claims won the Cold War was actually the party of pullout and back off. And today The Weekly Standard looks to the party that refused to support democracy in China, and could not even bring it to our neighbor Haiti, as the very party that is ready and willing to establish it in Iraq.

Intellectually, the Cold War began in New York City at the Waldorf Hotel on March 26, 1949. A conference organized by, among others, Lillian Hellman brought communist cultural celebrities together to defend the U.S.S.R. The older, more liberal Commentary carried William Barrett's lively account of the affair. Those who bolted from the Stalinist-dominated conference and started the American Committee for Cultural Freedom included liberals, democratic socialists and even anarchists (Dwight Macdonald), with no conservatives in sight. Indeed, there was more true, gut-felt anti-communism among Italian American, Polish American, Irish American and Jewish American anarchists (Carlo Tresca, Aldino Felicani, Max Nomad, Dorothy Day, et al.) than within the entire Republican Party, some of whose leaders used the issue to win elections, only later to shake hands with communist leaders and open up trade relations. As early as 1920, it was the anarchists and the liberals, Emma Goldman and Bertrand Russell, who first perceived the treacheries of Leninist communism, and in the 1920s, Max Eastman of the old Masses helped translate Russian documents for The New Leader to publicize the plight of the opposition in Stalin's Russia and make available to Americans the writings of Boris Souvarine and Boris Nicolaevski. The valiant struggle against totalitarianism became synonymous with democratic liberalism and the anti-communist left.

That was then. Four decades later, when Norman Podhoretz edited Commentary, he took the magazine away from the zany liberal radicalism of the '60s and, in the late '70s, liberalism became the problem -- not only the wimpy liberalism of Jimmy Carter but liberalism itself, going all the way back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and World War II. The failure of nerve to resist communist expansion, Podhoretz insisted, had its origins in America's "acquiescence" to the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe toward the end of the war against Adolf Hitler. The Cold War may have begun in 1947 with Harry Truman and containment and the Marshall Plan, but "up until this point the Russians had enjoyed a free hand. They had been permitted to occupy most of Eastern Europe and to begin installing puppet regimes in one after another of the countries of the regions."

Podhoretz and sociologist Robert Nisbet claimed that FDR allowed such developments against the advice of Churchill. But in the essay "Neoconservative History," first published in The New York Review of Books and later reprinted in his A Present of Things Past, Theodore Draper insisted that "there is nothing, I repeat nothing" in the voluminous FDR-Churchill correspondence to support such a charge.

Podhoretz came to anti-communism rather late -- so late, in fact, that one would never know that the same editor who criticized liberals for opposing the war in Vietnam actually opposed it himself in a 1967 Commentary-sponsored symposium on "Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited." Even the fiercely anti-communist philosopher Sidney Hook -- Commentary's great intellectual hero of the 20th century -- acknowledged that America should not have gone to war in Vietnam, though he shrank from advocating withdrawal (a strange position for the pragmatist, who believes that when experience proves the errors of one's ways, something else must be tried).

If Hook was Commentary's hero, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was its villain. In his contribution to "Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited," the historian used the term "obsessive" to describe those who had absorbed themselves in anti-communism long after the communists in America had lost all influence in trade unions, government and higher education. Schlesinger himself had been a staunch anti-Stalinist, but that proved insufficient to the enraged Hilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion, who defended Hook while going after Schlesinger as an apostate to the cause to which Commentary had belatedly dedicated itself.

Commentary was always more comfortable with communism alive than dead, and Podhoretz thus singled out Schlesinger as one who left the trenches before the war had really begun. "In the 40s and 50s, when the Soviet Union was very much weaker than the United States," wrote Podhoretz in 1980, "Schlesinger expressed great anxiety over the Soviet threat; yet now, when the Soviet Union is as at least as powerful as we are and by any objective standards constitutes a greater threat, he keeps telling us how beleaguered and toothless the Russians have become."

The Soviet Union in the 1940s was "very much weaker than the United States"? Again, facts matter. This was the very Leviathan that had conquered the Wehrmacht on the eastern front, moved into the entire land mass from the Baltic to the Balkans, liquidated the Polish intelligentsia, crushed Czechoslovakian democracy, enjoyed broad support within Western European communist parties and the heroic mystique of anti-fascism -- and, unlike America, made no gesture at demobilizing its militaristic posture at war's end. If the Soviets were "very much weaker," why did the West need the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the Congress for Cultural Freedom? When Schlesinger took on communism, it was still regarded as popular in some sections of America and of the world -- championed by Hellman, Paul Robeson and Jean-Paul Sartre. By the time Commentary came so late to the issue -- indeed, after the anti-Semitic "Doctor's Plot," Nikita Khrushchev's "Crimes of Stalin" speech, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Sino-Soviet split, Afghanistan, the Gulag -- the Soviet Union was little more than a faceless bureaucracy wheezing its death rattle. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was another who saw communism's "terminal contradictions" (Bill Bradley's phrase invoked at a recent Moynihan memorial). Even Reagan recognized, in his second term, that Russia was nearing its end and urged Mikhail Gorbachev to join him in beginning disarmament and ignoring their respective bureaucracies. But to some it was better to be wrong with Hook, Kramer and Podhoretz than right with Schlesinger, Moynihan and Reagan.

Commentary's second villain was John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal economist who would return glowing from Russia as though he had been swept away by the Bolshoi Ballet. Confident that Russia's collectivized economy would prove efficient and productive, he was misguided, to be sure; but perhaps no more so than Henry Ford, who in the 1930s decided to invest in Stalin's Russia for similar reasons; or the J. P. Morgan Company, which invested in fascist Italy; or the clients of Henry A. Kissinger & Associates, who invest in contemporary communist China with their eyes as wide open as their checkbooks. After all, it was not simply liberal intellectuals but Wall Street brokers who demanded that the United States recognize the Soviet Union in 1933 -- the same forces demanding today the right to do business with Fidel Castro's Cuba. All capitalism corrupts, but consumer capitalism corrupts consummately.

Whatever the behavior of capitalism, communism expands irresistibly and liberalism retreats inevitably. Such was the thesis of Podhoretz's momentous essay "The Present Danger" (1980), published as a book and widely influential during the Reagan administration, where several Commentary contributors became advisers. The text evolved from the thinking of the Committee on the Present Danger, formed in the '70s by political and labor leaders, neocon intellectuals and CIA officials, all convinced that the Soviet Union was massively arming for an ultimate showdown.

In Commentary, American liberals are depicted standing before the Russian menace the way Thomas Carlyle depicted old regime aristocrats standing before the French commune: dumb, inert, squeamish about power, guilty in the face of history. We cannot explain the French Revolution, Carlyle instructed, we can only follow the surging specter moving with the force of nature, "like an Angel of Death." So, too, are we advised in the opening lines of "The Present Danger." We are not to ask patiently for the meaning of events but to respond fearfully to the drama itself:

On November 4, 1979, the day the American embassy in Teheran was seized and the hostages were taken, one period in American history ended; and less than two months later, on December 25, when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, another period began. The past being easier to read than the present, we can describe the nature of the age now over with greater assurance than the one into which we are at this very moment just setting a hesitant and uncertain foot. Yet even to recognize whence we have come, let alone whither we are going, will require an effort to clear our minds of the cant that prevented an earlier understanding of the terrible troubles into which we were heading. I propose that we start, then, by renouncing the general idea that before Iran and Afghanistan we have moved from 'cold war' to 'détente' and that the old political struggle between 'East' and 'West' was yielding in importance to a new economic conflict between 'North' and 'South.'

Podhoretz was convinced that the shocking events in Iran and Afghanistan represented "the final collapse of an American resolve to resist the forward surge of Soviet imperialism." As late as 1999, he remained convinced that in the '70s the Soviet Union "began taking advantage of the post-Vietnam demoralization of the United States to resume its expansionist thrust." Earlier he warned that America must realize it is entering into a new era, one in which "we would be forbidden to speak its name aloud: the Finlandization of America."

The phrase may carry little meaning to a younger generation today, but a quarter-century ago, Commentary and its conservative readers saw it as containing such profound truth about geopolitics that it was repeated as a mantra. In late 1939, Russia went to war against Finland, a Nazi-leaning country that fought valiantly but, after seeing that the war was hopeless, settled for a compromised status under the Soviet behemoth. Rarely has a metaphor about the fate of a country been so manipulated in a combination of wordplay and spectral evidence. The phrase, remember, did not refer to Europe but to the United States, and its author implied that American political leaders were turning pacifist in order to win elections at any cost, peace at any price. "There is no need to go on filling in the details," Podhoretz added, after coming close to accusing liberals of betraying their country. Finlandization! Was America going to lose the Cold War internally, state by state, or globally, first Angola and then Alabama?

Podhoretz assumed that Iran and Afghanistan were connected, that they represented a second and more dangerous phase of the Cold War and exposed the delusions of those who believed in détente. He even warned readers that they must not be misled by the "Orwellian inversions at which Soviet propaganda has always been so adept," the technique of concealing imperialist ambitions in the language of emancipation. Ironically, George Orwell also warned against the very rhetoric invoked in "The Present Danger" thesis in an earlier essay he wrote, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham." The American Cold Warrior, Orwell noted, tries to hypnotize the reader by building up a "picture of terrifying, irresistible power" in a world where everything is "expanding, contracting, decaying, dissolving, toppling, crumbling, crystallizing, and, in general, behaving in an unstable and melodramatic way." "The Present Danger," too, transfixed some readers with the rhetoric of the irresistible in a narrative whose success in literary persuasion need not bother with the demands of historical proof, just as today Iraq was to have posed an imminent danger with its weapons of massive destruction and al-Qaeda terrorists on every street corner.

But Podhoretz never tried to explain -- or understand -- why Iran and Afghanistan had happened. In fact, what happened in those nations had little to do with the alleged thrust of Soviet imperialism. Indeed, in 1946, U.S. foreign policy compelled Russia to withdraw from Iran, and in 1979, Iran was hardly inviting back the Russians to return as liberators. As for Afghanistan, Podhoretz indulged in the descriptive fallacy of simply narrating what happened without explaining why and leaving the rest to our imaginations. He felt no need to explain the possible reasons for the Soviet invasion. So one would never know that the Soviet Union was not only frustrated about the factionalism that befell its party in Afghanistan, but also that Islamic fundamentalists had killed numerous Afghan communists in a bloody jihad. The fundamentalists were prompted to do so when young Afghan women dared to leave behind their chador, burqa and veil and go off to school to learn to think for themselves. Commentary couldn't have cared less what the Afghans were fighting for; all that mattered was whom they were fighting against. For all its prating of Western values, Commentary sided with the Islamic East in Afghanistan.

Similar misperceptions ruled the neocons' response to Angola. One would think that the aftermath of Vietnam, the longest war in America's history, might have caused Cold War intellectuals to reconsider their premises about the Munich analogy and all those falling dominoes that not only failed to fall but had communists fighting one another in Cambodia. Yet in Commentary the war continued as an ontological necessity. "No sooner had Vietnam fallen than Soviet proxies in the form of Cuban troops appeared in Angola," wrote Podhoretz.

But were Cuban troops Soviet proxies? The latest archival research, in Johns Hopkins University professor Piero Gleijeses' Conflicting Missions, suggests the opposite. When, on Aug. 15, 1975, Castro sent a message to Leonid Brezhnev asking to support the introduction of Cuban troops, Moscow balked, fearing that such a move "would hurt détente and offend most African countries." Likewise, William Colby, the CIA director at the time, told the National Security Council that then-Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin desired deeply to go before the Congress of the Communist Party with assurances of "significant progress" in Soviet-American relations. "A meeting with Ford, the Politburo hoped, would produce a SALT agreement. Clearly, Castro and Brezhnev were on different wavelengths," Gleijeses writes.

Ironically, in Angola the CIA covertly financed the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which behaved as the Bolsheviks had in 1917 by refusing to allow an election of a constituent assembly. "It was the U.S.-backed FNLA that had violated the Alvor power-sharing agreement of March 1974 in a daring bid to seize total control of the state apparatus," writes the diplomatic historian William R. Keylor in A World of Nations. "The first foreign combat forces to enter Angola were the Zairean units that invaded in July 1975 in support of the FNLA with the tacit support of Washington. ... The United States began to complain about foreign interference in the Angolan Civil War only after the tide had turned against the faction it had been covertly backing since the beginning of the conflict." The Marxist regime in Angola continued to do business with American oil firms and did not allow Russia to obtain naval or air bases or any other strategic advantages. But Washington and Commentary worried that the Soviet Union would use Angola and its Cuban "surrogates" to support liberation movements elsewhere in the Third World. And the Ford administration, Keylor writes, "chose to interpret the political outcome of the Angolan Civil War in the worst possible light."

This, then, was "The Present Danger" mentality, which did much to lead America into making the dangerous decision to arm the Afghan resistance, the mujahideen, with handheld heat-seeking missiles that were devastatingly effective against Soviet helicopters and aircraft. The missiles were sent against the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and after Gorbachev had made known his intention to withdraw Russian troops from Afghanistan. Whether they were also deadly against American troops in Somalia we can't be sure. But we do know, thanks to Mary Anne Weaver's Pakistan: In The Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan, that the mujahideen sold to Iran many of the very Stingers that America had given the resistance to fight Russia.

So there was a connection between Afghanistan and Iran after all. They were the first deadly expressions of Muslim fundamentalism's challenge to the West. They were not "The Present Danger" that America would immediately have to face but the future danger; not a communism that was on the wane but a fundamentalism that was on the rise. And, at the neoconservatives' urging, America chose as allies creatures from the caves who would prove that they were "freedom fighters" by detonating a Buddhist temple.

Podhoretz's thesis found support in Jeane Kirkpatrick's "Dictatorships and Double Standards," published in Commentary in November 1979. The essay provided much of the rationale for Cold War policy and led President Reagan to appoint Kirkpatrick ambassador to the United Nations. Kirkpatrick put the ideologies of liberalism and Marxism on trial by questioning what might be called the "fetishism of the following," the idea that what comes next in history is always and everywhere preferable to what went before.

The Carter administration had allowed the fall of the shah in Iran and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, assuming the forces of opposition, whether Islamic or socialist, to be progressive. But America should have supported the shah and Somoza, Kirkpatrick instructed, for they represented traditional autocracies that allowed a modicum of freedom, whereas communist totalitarianism can neither be challenged nor changed.

Kirkpatrick advanced three arguments -- relating to Latin America, Russia and the Mideast. All proved unfounded. In Nicaragua, the Sandanistas did postpone elections while the Reagan administration supported their opponents, the Contras. But when elections were held, the cocky Marxists, assuming they had a basis in "the people," were shocked to find that they had lost and had to have their own false consciousness examined as they peacefully, though begrudgingly, relinquished power. The victory of the publisher Violetta Chamorro over the revolutionary Daniel Ortega demonstrated that liberalism was not entirely helpless in the face of communism.

Nor did totalitarianism prove to be so permanent a phenomenon. Kirkpatrick's thesis came to be called the "doctrine of irreversibility": Once totalitarianism takes hold there is no turning back and no way out. In January 1989, Commentary published Jean-Francois Revel's "Is Communism Reversible?" To those few who seemed hopeful, the French author remained downright skeptical. "Despite what so many in the West appear to regard as an extremely easy process," he wrote, "we cannot name a single completed instance of Communist reversibility." The current editor of Commentary, Neal Kozodoy, has attempted to rescue the magazine from its embarrassment by claiming its writers predicted only that Russia was not reformable. Yet Revel, just 10 months before the Berlin Wall fell, made it clear that the regime could neither be reformed nor ended without its leaders committing "hari-kari."

In the Middle East, the Kirkpatrick analysis has offered no guidance whatsoever because it proved to be bereft of all standards. So worried was Commentary that Iran might turn out to be a "prelude" to a communist takeover, and so worried was the Reagan administration that Iran would become the leading power in the Persian Gulf, that America decided to support Iraq as a means of protecting Saudi Arabia and other oil resources. It was then believed that Saddam Hussein was the rational autocrat and the Ayatollah Khomenei the totalitarian fanatic.

George W. Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, where he embraced Hussein and, together with Bush Senior, secretly supplied the dictator with whatever he asked for in his fight against the Kurds and other opponents. A National Security Directive of Nov. 26, 1983, aided the counterinsurgency campaign, called Anfal, with money and materials (anthrax, botulinum toxin) with which Iraq was able to develop and use chemical weapons, resulting in the systematic slaughter of 100,000 people. When stories of the atrocities reached the press and the world reacted in horror, the U.S. Department of State launched an "Iran, too" gambit, claiming that both sides used poison gas. "It was a horrible mistake," observed Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm. "My fellow CIA analysts and I were warning at the time that Saddam Hussein was a very nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department."

Russian history has always seemed tragic to me. But those of us who were once under the spell of totalitarianism's savage power came to see it as more decrepit than dangerous, and we felt for the fate of a Russian people stuck with communism the way America had once been stuck with slavery. But did Commentary not see the stories that were all over the press? A Russian nuclear sub breaking apart beneath the sea, Chernobyl spewing radiation for hundreds of miles, alcoholism and the demoralization of labor, a military barely receiving pay, ethnic unrest in Georgia and elsewhere, the repression of intellectuals and the defection of cultural heroes, a command economy that refused to be commanded.

The neoconservatives would have us believe that the fall of communism was a result of realpolitik and that America emerged victorious because it had the wealth with which to develop sophisticated weapons, especially "Star Wars." But why should that program have made a difference when Reagan assured Gorbachev again and again that it had no offensive capacity? According to Anatoly Dobrynin in his memoir, In Confidence, U.S. military spending was far less crucial than Reagan's coming to realize the importance of establishing good relations with Russia, a move that enabled Gorbachev to embark upon "new thinking" (novoe mishleniye) and launch his reforms. Reagan himself, in his autobiography, An American Life, writes of changing his mind about the "evil empire" upon visiting Moscow for a summit in May 1988. The Soviet citizens, he wrote, were "indistinguishable from people I had seen all my life on the countless streets in America." While Reagan was changing his mind, that of the neoconservative intellectual remained as fixed as an irrefutable error. As late as 1990, the historian Richard Pipes told Commentary's readers that the Soviet Union may not be breaking up but cracking down. Reagan's willingness to negotiate with Russia, meanwhile, sounds pretty much like what liberals had been advocating all along.

Liberals should take pride in the end of the Cold War. Commentary was reluctant to acknowledge the Eastern European forces of freedom that courageously took to the streets to overthrow communism, in part because the surprising phenomenon represented the three great antagonists of conservatism: the youth culture, the intellectuals of the '60s generation and the laboring classes that still favored Solidarity over individualism. American neoconservatives like William J. Bennett are haunted by the crisis of authority at home and see knowledge threatened by skepticism everywhere. In Why We Fight, Bennett claims that we are in Iraq to take a stand for truth and to rescue "moral clarity" from the quicksand of liberal "pseudosophisticated relativism." But in Eastern Europe, intellectuals took a stand for courage without certainty. "For my generation, the road to freedom began in 1968," recalls the historian Adam Michnik, who wrote of the members of the Solidarity union movement in his Letters From Prison. The playwright Vaclav Havel, associated with Charter 77 and the Prague Spring, took his bearings from the metaphysical anxieties of Martin Heidegger and the existential meditations of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Against totalitarianism such writers stood for skepticism, irony, uncertainty, and a refusal to believe in and yield to an authority that prefers to possess truth rather than pursue it. Soviet communism ended the way American liberalism began: "Resist much; obey little," as Walt Whitman wrote.

The older "Present Danger" thesis and the "Double Standards" analysis rested easily with power politics and autocratic regimes. The position of The Weekly Standard, in contrast, aspires to Wilsonian democratic idealism in American diplomacy. A noble purpose, to be sure. But with Iraq in mind, its editors should heed Max Weber's warning that while morality may be about intentions, politics is inescapably about consequences, especially unintended consequences. Recall that Lyndon Johnson thought America could bring democracy to the Mekong Delta. One can only wonder whether our younger neoconservatives risk coming dangerously close to reversing T. S. Eliot's definition of "the greatest treason" by doing the wrong deed for the right reason.

John Patrick Diggins is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate School of the University of New York. He is the author of Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy and The Promise of Pragmatism.

Copyright © 2003 by The American Prospect, Inc.