dagblog - Comments for "BARBARIANS AT THE GATE"

"Never in the history of the

Rootman — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 12:55:56 +0000

In reply to Austin, the MacLeish essay is

"Never in the history of the world was one people as completely dominated, intellectually and morally, by another as the people of the United States by the people of Russia in the four years from 1946 through 1949. American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic politics were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it. American political controversy was controversy sung to the Russian tune; left-wing movements attacked right-wing movements not on American issues but on Russian issues, and right-wing movements replied with the same arguments turned round about. All this took place not in a time of national weakness or decay but precisely at the moment when the United States, having engineered a tremendous triumph and fought its way to a brilliant victory in the greatest of all wars, had reached the highest point of world power ever achieved by a single state."

Austin, the MacLeish essay is

Rootman — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 12:45:09 +0000

In reply to Back when I was but a mere

Austin, the MacLeish essay is "Conquest of America" in a 1949 Atlantic magazine, volume 184(2) August.

That thought is right out of

Richard Day — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 01:34:41 +0000

In reply to Back when I was but a mere

That thought is right out of some structural anthro text.

yin-yang

I still cant get over our forefathers made us US. ha

Back when I was but a mere

Austin Train — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 01:03:18 +0000

In reply to BARBARIANS AT THE GATE

Back when I was but a mere photo major, one of my instructors distributed a handout to the class. It was not about photography, it was a reprint of an essay by Archibald MacLeish from the 1950's.

MacLeish opined, in his wonderful prose, on how the US needed the specter of international communism. How after the Second World War, we needed an enemy, and the Russians were all that was left.

So we spent decades defining the US as a polar opposite to those damnable Russkies. Whatever they favored, we opposed, and if they disliked it, we were for it in the strongest possible way.

And his prescience was revealed when, late in the article, he offered a look at the future. He predicted that if Russia ever stopped being out polar-opposite enemy, we'd have some real trouble on hand because we had no idea of who we were, only who we were not. We were not those damned pesky Commies, and if they ever stopped being our enemy, we'd need a new one posthaste, so we could continue to define ourselves purely in terms of what we were (are) not.

Dude was bang-on right, and the only thing that frustrates me (who am I kidding, lots of things frustrate me) is a complete inability of The Google to find that article. I just don't think it's out there, and I wish it was.