In my last post I alluded to a few of the essays collected in The Bit Between My Teeth. To get the details right, I had to pull from the shelf my old paperback edition--$2.85 from the Noonday Press--with the yellowing, brittle pages. Before replacing it, I skimmed through the table of contents and soon found myself reading Wilson's review of George Kennan's Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin. In his review Wilson quotes in full the following passage from the first chapter, called "Conflict of the Two Worlds":
There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision on everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue. The contest comes to be viewed as having a final, apocalyptic quality. If we lose, all is lost; life will no longer be worth living; there will be nothing to be salvaged. If we win, then everything will be possible; all problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil--our enemy--will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied.
It's a mistake to think that the Bush follies are of a fresh new variety. His administration has only honored this stupid tradition identified by Kennan. It's bedeviled our foreign policy now for a long time.
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