Before the 20th century, the military might of a country had corresponded to its degree of socio-political development.
In the 20th century that interconnection was gone. A country could have military might and yet be a slave state, which made it even more dangerous. But the perception of such dangerous societies by the democratic West has been bizarre.
Walter Duranty, a British newspaper correspondent at the Western front of World War I, became, in 1920, the Moscow correspondent of The New York Times, and in 1935 he published a 348-page book boldly entitled “I Write As I Please.”
Let me quote just one sentence from this book (Page 340): “Looking backward over the fourteen years I have spent in Russia, I cannot escape the conclusion that this period has been a heroic chapter in the life of Humanity.”
The paragraph, eulogizing Stalin’s Russia, is more than one page long, and at the end of it we learn that “Stalin and his associates have carried with them the strongest and most intelligent elements of the Russian people, and have created a national unity and enthusiasm which the Trarist Empire never knew.”
Duranty’s reports from Moscow were a string of such eulogies. But in 1939, when Stalin signed a treaty with Hitler in the hope to divide the world between them, Duranty had to retire into obscurity and poverty.
However, Hitler attacked Stalin’s Russia in 1941. The Yalta Conference (February 1945) was held by Russia, Britain and the United States as their war against Hitler’s Germany was nearing its end.
In my “Commentary” article of August 1974, I quoted Churchill’s speech in the British parliament after some members of it said that Stalin was occupying Eastern Europe instead of liberating it.
Churchill’s speech was much like Duranty’s reports except that he was more aggressive (Page 39): “Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honorable friendship and equity with the Western democracies. . . . I feel also that their word is their bond. I know of no government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet government. I decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith.”
Fairly soon, it became undeniable that Stalin was turning the countries of Eastern Europe into his satrapies, and Churchill made a speech on the subject in the United States, whereupon he acquired the reputation of being the first to expose Stalin’s Eastern Europe villainy.
In the same issue of “Commentary,” I described how Golda Meir, when she was the Israeli ambassador in Stalin’s Russia in 1948-49, drew up lists of those Soviet Jews who wished to volunteer to participate in the Israeli War of Independence, but Stalin’s secret police arrested the volunteers and sent them to Stalin’s concentration camps.
For my exposure of her naïveté, Mrs. Meir sued me for $3 million and “Commentary” for as much, and threatened to sue Harper & Row, which had just published my book. Fortunately, courts in New York permit litigants to litigate pro se — without a lawyer. I litigated pro se, and ere long Mrs. Meir was compelled to flee with her lawyers since what she called my “slander” was spread by the media as the count hearing proceeded.
A typical hybrid of modern science and technology with a slave state was Germany of 1933 to 1945. Had Hitler launched a world war after his nuclear project had developed nuclear bombs, the world would have been enslaved by him.
Some fantasies of the democratic countries concerning slave states were negative, not positive. According to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1950, Stalin could conquer the United States via Americans; that is, through those connected in some ways with communism and hence acting or prone to act as his agents.
A powerful theory — except that neither McCarthy nor any other Westerner seemed to realize that already in the late 1930s Stalin began to move the ideology away from communism to Russian nationalism. Moreover, in 1950 and up to his death in 1953, some people in Russia knew that he was preparing to convert the country to Byzantine Christianity (he had studied in the seminary to become a Christian Orthodox priest) with himself as the emperor-god. Hence, he was preparing the deportation of Jews.
Now, McCarthy persecuted those Americans who had some connections with communism, the teaching of the Jew Marx, an atheist and a utopian who imagined himself to be a rational scientist, able to create a paradise on earth for the poor.
But up to his death, Stalin instilled in the United States the fear as conqueror, who will use American communists as his agents. Stalin’s death in 1953 meant the fall of McCarthy, who died at the age of 49, four years after Stalin’s death at the age of 74, when Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin was read to all Soviet employees.
Nowadays, the most dangerous slave state with modern science and technology for the production of weapons is the dictatorship of China.
Its population of 1.3 billion people makes it possible to train several times more scientists and technologists for the production of the latest super weapons than does the United States.
Such a large population also enables China to make billions of dollars from the slave labor of hundreds of millions of state slaves, which money can be used for the acquisition of science and technology for the development of post-nuclear super weapons as well as the employment for the same purpose of individuals of genius from all over the world.
What is the perception of the free world?
In the 1960s it was still fear and hostility. But though in 2000, the dictatorship of China began to torture to death those “guilty” of private gymnastic exercises; that is, surpassed in cruelty all the previous slave states, the free world’s attitude to the dictatorship of China assumed today’s degree of friendship, trade, and “scientific and technological cooperation,” in which Chinese scientific and technological espionage is inevitable and legitimate.
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You can e-mail me at navlev@cloud9.net.
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