HY 150 BISK
THE END OF THE PRESENT AND THE BEGINNING OF THE FUTURE
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskfuture.htm

The crucial goal of all my courses is to create an environment where you, as the student, can begin to feel comfortable taking responsibility for your own education


I VALUE MY HONOR AS A PRECIOUS PART OF WHO I AM. WHEN I SIGN MY NAME, OTHERS MAY KNOW THAT THE WORK CONTAINED THEREIN IS MY OWN. I WILL NOT GIVE OR RECEIVE UNAUTHORIZED AID ON CLASS REQUIREMENTS, NOR WILL I TOLERATE OTHERS TO DO SO.


McNEILL
THE HUMAN COMMUNITY

CHAPTER 26
THOUGHT AND CULTURE 1914 TO THE PRESENT
Rise of Popular Culture (685)
The Impact of the Mass Media (685)
Effects of American Media (687)
Standardization of Language (689)
The Sciences (690)
Advances in Physics (690)
Computers and Their Applications (690)
Earth Sciences (691)
Molecular Biology (693)
Advances in the Social Sciences (693)
New Perspectives in Social Science and History (693)
The Double Helix (694)
Music, Art, and Literature (696)
New Genres of Old Forms (699)
Religion and Philosophy (699)
Church and Society (700)
Judaism (700)
Islam (701)
Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto (701)
Conclusion (703)
Bibliography (704)

IS THE WAR BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION OVER?
adapted from
Dr. Norman F. Hall and Lucia K. B. Hall
The Humanist, May/June 1986

MIT Conference Seems to Reconcile Science and Religion
The CBS television news report "For Our Times," covered a two-week conference on "Faith, Science and the Future" held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a few years ago.  It left the viewer feeling that the long conflict between science and religion is at an end. Hundreds of scientists and theologians gathered to discuss issues of science and ethics.

They advanced from the assumption that science and religion were two nonconflicting bodies of knowledge, equally valuable and complementary paths leading toward a supreme understanding of the world and our place in it. . The participants blamed the conflicts of the past on excessive zeal and misunderstanding by both sides. They assumed that peaceful coexistence and syncretism are possible as long as each concedes to the other’s authority in their separate worlds of knowledge: that of matter and facts for science and that of the spirit and values for religion.

The Reality of Contradiction
Let us be blunt. While it may appear open-minded, modest, and comforting to many, this conciliatory view is nonsense. At their deepest philosophical levels science and religion diametrically oppose each other. And, because the two worldviews make claims to the same intellectual territory—that of the origin of the universe and humankind’s relationship to it—conflict is inevitable.

The Religious Worldview
It is possible, of course, to define a nonsupernatural "religious" worldview that is not in conflict with science.

But in all of its traditional Western forms, the supernatural religious worldview assumes that "forces" or beings transcend the material world.  They designed and created the universe and its inhabitants.  Religion postulates a material world reflecting a mysterious plan originating in these forces or beings, a plan which is knowable by humans only when that these forces have revealed them to an exclusive few. These few strongly discourage criticizing or questioning any part of this plan, especially on questions of morals or ethics.

Scientific Worldview
Science, on the other hand, assumes there are no transcendent, immaterial forces.  Further, all forces existing in the universe behave in an ultimately objective or random fashion. Only human effort in a dynamic process of inquiry—science—can reveal the nature of these forces. Science assumes the universe as a whole is neutral to human concerns and is open to all questions, even those about human ethical relationships. Such an universe does not come to us with easy answers; we must come to it and be prepared to work hard.

Scientific Method
To understand how we make scientific observations, let’s follow a hypothetical scientist into her laboratory. Suppose this scientist’s task is to measure the amount of protein in a biological fluid—a common procedure in research laboratories, hospitals, and school science classes. The scientist will carefully measure out into test tubes both several known volumes of the fluid and several different volumes of a "standard" solution she has prepared by dissolving a weighed quantity of pure protein. The scientist will add water to bring all the tubes to the same volume and then add a reagent, which reacts with protein to produce a blue color. After the solutions in all the test tubes have reacted for a specified period, the scientist will measure the intensity of the blue color with a spectrophotometer. By comparing the color intensity of the unknown solutions, she will be able to calculate how much standard protein she needs to produce the same color reaction as the unknown.  This, the scientist will conclude, is the amount of protein in the unknown sample.

What our hypothetical scientist has done is to perform a controlled experiment. She must report it honestly and completely, including a description or a reference to the method. She must also be able to say, to the best of her knowledge and belief, that she has controlled all variables that could have affected the reported result. In our example, she may use a water bath to maintain a constant temperature.  She has to measure accurately the volumes of the unknown solution and standard solution, and she has to consider random variables such as measurement errors or perhaps proteinaceous dust from the surrounding air. This is the essence of the scientific method.

Incompatibility of the Scientific Method and Religion
Clearly, such a controlled experiment would be impossible if scientists must entertain the possibility that something exists that can affect the color in the test tubes but which she can never control. Anything that a scientist cannot hold constant and cannot measure by physical means, cannot be said to act randomly. But that is exactly what the religious, supernatural worldview requires. Untestable, unmeasureable, and nonrandom events are commonplace in all supernatural religions and pseudosciences.

This fundamental incompatibility between the supernaturalism of traditional religion and the experimental method of science has been, nevertheless, remarkably easy to dismiss. Over the past three centuries, people have welcomed the findings of science for their practical value. They have treated the method, however, with suspicion and scorn. They blame the method for revealing the material workings of more and more of the mysteries of life which used to inspire religious awe. From the view of the religious believer, it seems the goal of science is to push belief in the supernatural to more and more remote redoubts until it disappears.

The Assertion of Naturalism vs. the Postulate of Design
This is not, and cannot be, the goal of science. Rather, a nonmysterious, understandable, material universe is the basic assumption behind all of science. Scientists do not chart their progress with ghost-busting in mind. Naturalism or material monism is not so much the product of scientific research as it is its starting point. For science to work, scientists must assume the universe plays fair, cannot consciously deceive, does not play favorites, does not permit miracles, and allow no arcane or spiritual knowledge open only to a few. Only by assuming materialist monism can the scientist trust the universe. The scientist assumes that although its workings are blind and random, it is for this he can depend on them.  The scientist assumes that what he learns to some degree, at least, reflects reality.

As evolution is the unifying theory for biology, so naturalism is the unifying theory for all of science. In his book Chance and Necessity, biochemist Jacques Monod called this basic assumption "the postulate of objectivity." It assumes the universe as a whole is dispassionate of, indifferent to, and unswayed by human concerns and beliefs about its nature. Its inverse—in which the universe is passionately involved in, partial to, and swayed by human concerns and beliefs—is the basic assumption underlying the supernatural, religious worldview. We call it the "postulate of design." The postulate of a purposefully designed universe, as we have seen, destroys any meaning we might hope to find in the experimental method of science.

The Individual Scientist and the Comforts of Spiritualism
But in so doing, it also insures that it will never be incompatible with any of the findings of science. This ability of the supernatural view to adjust itself to any finite set of facts has, ironically, made it seem easy to accept both the findings of science and the consolations of spiritualism. Scientists, as human beings, are susceptible to the temptations of these comforts. Some believe a supernatural world lies just beyond their controlled experiments, although they usually feel that it is even more obvious in fields other than their own. However, we need not reject their results. As long as they are honest—reporting not only their conclusions but also their methods and reasoning—such nonmaterialist scientists can still contribute to the progress of science in their own fields of study.

Embracing the Lie
The issue at stake here is whether our worldview is to possess consistency and integrity. Science has worked so well and has been so successful that it is difficult, if not impossible, to live in the modern world while rejecting its findings. But by accepting those findings as a free bounty—while rejecting the hard assumptions and hard work that made them possible—the supernaturalist embraces a lie.

Naturalistic System of Ethics
Many claim that science can say nothing about values and ethics because it can only tell us what is—not what ought to be. But once again, this is a case of trying to divorce the findings from the method of science. Properly understood, science tells us not only what is but also how we must behave if we are to understand what is. Science has succeeded as a cooperative human effort by asserting the belief that we can understand the universe only through the values of integrity and truth-telling. In the process, it has become a system of values, and it has provided humankind with a language that transcends cultural boundaries and connects us in a satisfying way to all the observable universe. It has the potential for humans to use as the basis for a workable and deeply satisfying ethical system. Indeed, we must use it so if we are to accept its findings without self-deceit.

A naturalistic system of ethics is not likely to be popular, however, until science can overcome public attitudes of ignorance and hostility. In response to a recent San Diego Union story outlining developments in cosmological theory, a reader fiercely objected.  He wrote, "God is in control of the universe. The sooner these so-called scientists realize this, they will not need to invent hocus-pocus ‘dark or unseen matter’ as a man-made explanation instead of acknowledging the true source of all things, the all-powerful omnipotent, omnipresent God, the creator."

He’s right, of course. Accept the supernatural and the hard work of making and testing theories becomes a pointless enterprise, as do all human-made explanations and meaning. But if we allow such myths to limit the scope and uses of science, we will do so to our own peril and shame.

The cosmologist Steven Weinberg has said that, even if science manages to trace the materialist explanation back to the first ten-billionth of a second of the existence of the universe, we still don’t know what started the clock." It may be that we shall never know," he wrote, "just as we may never learn the ultimate laws of nature. But I wouldn’t bet on it."

Thank you, Professor Weinberg. We needed that.

Fourth of July Celebrates Core Values of Western Civilization
Edwin A. Locke
Professor of Management at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Senior Writer for the Ayn Rand Institute
Marina del Rey, CA
Florida Times-Union, July 4, 1998

Why should we celebrate the Fourth of July: Because America—as the greatest product of Western civilization—is the greatest country in the world. But it cannot remain great unless we understand the causes of its greatness.

In this age of diversity-worship, many believe it axiomatic that all cultures and countries are equal. Western culture, many say, is in no way superior to that of any other, not even to tribes of cannibals. To deny the equality of all cultures, claim the intellectuals, is to be guilty of the most heinous of intellectual sins: "ethnocentrism." It is to flout the "sacred" (and false) principle of cultural relativism. I disagree with the relativists—absolutely.

There are three fundamental respects in which Western culture is objectively the best. The core values and achievements of Western civilization—the values that made America great—are:

1. Reason. The Greeks were the first to identify philosophically that humanity gains knowledge through reason and logic as opposed to mysticism (faith, tradition, revelation, dogma). It would take two millennia, including a Dark Ages and a Renaissance, before humans would realize the full implications of Greek thought. The rule of reason reached its zenith in the West in the 18th century—the Age of Enlightenment. "For the first time in modern history," writes one philosopher, "an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture." America is the epitome of Enlightenment thought.

2. Individual Rights. An indispensable achievement leading to the Enlightenment was the recognition of the concept of individual rights. John Locke showed that individuals do not exist to serve governments, but rather that governments exist to protect individuals. The individual, said Locke, has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness. This was the founding philosophy of America. (America made a disastrous error by tolerating slavery, which originated elsewhere, but it was too incongruent with America's core principles of reason and rights to endure. In the name of those principles, Americans corrected their error.)

3. Reason and Science and Technology. The triumph of reason and rights made possible the full development and application of science and technology and, finally, modern industrial society. Once man's mind was freed from the tyranny of religious dogma, and man's productive capacity was freed form the tyranny of state control, scientific and technological progress followed in several interdependent steps. Men began to understand the laws of nature. They invented machinery. They engaged in large-scale production, that is, the creation of wealth. This wealth, in turn, financed and motivated further invention and production. As a result, automobiles replaced horse-and-buggies, steel rails replaced wagon tracks, and electricity replaced candles.

At last, after millennia of struggle, man became the master of his environment. The result of these core achievements was an increase in freedom, wealth, health, comfort, and life expectancy unprecedented in the history of the world. These Western achievements were greatest in the United States of America, which implemented the principles of reason and rights most consistently.

In contrast, it was precisely in Third-World countries which did not embrace reason, rights, and technology where people suffer most from both natural and man-made disasters (famine, poverty, illness, dictatorship) and where life expectancy is lowest. Romantics say that primitives live "in harmony with nature," but in reality, they are simply victims of the vicissitudes of nature—if some dictator does not kill them first.

The greatness of America is not an "ethnocentric" prejudice; it is an objective fact. We base this assessment on the only proper standard for judging a culture or a society: the degree to which its core values are pro- or anti-life.

Pro-life cultures recognize and respect man's nature as a rational being who must discover and create the conditions that his survival and happiness require—which means that they promote reason, rights (freedom), and technological progress.

Despite its undeniable triumphs, America is by no means secure. Its core principles are under attack form every direction. Religious zealots want to undermine the separation of church and state.  Its own intellectuals denounce reason in the name of skepticism, rights in the name of special entitlements, and progress in the name of environmentalism. We are heading rapidly toward destroying our core values and the dead end of nihilism.

We must assert proudly the core values and achievements of the West and America and defend them to the death. Our lives depend on them.

"Two Years Later, a Thousand Years Ago," New York Times, September 11, 2003
Robert Wright

Among the ideas that seemed to collapse with the twin towers two years ago was a view of globalization as a kind of manifest destiny. Unlike the 19th-century version of manifest destiny, this vision didn't involve expanding America's borders. Rather, America's values—notably economic and political liberty would spread beyond those borders, covering the planet. And this time around America's mission didn't have the widely assumed blessing of God. But it had the next best thing: the force of history. Some saw globalization as a nearly inevitable climax of the human story—destiny of a secular sort. In some versions of this scenario, like neoconservative ones, tough American guidance might be needed—coercing China, say, toward democracy. In other versions, international economic competition would do the coercing. After all, microelectronics was making free markets a more essential ingredient in prosperity, and free markets work best with free minds. As some libertarians saw things, all you had to do was end trade barriers and then sit back and enjoy the show.

Some show. As commentators started noting around Sept. 12, 2001, the terrorists had turned the tools of globalization—cell phones, e-mail, international banking—against the system. What's more, their grievances had grown partly out of globalization, with its jarringly modern values. It started to seem as if globalization, far from being a benign outcome of history, had carried the seeds of its own destruction all along.

Two years later, that view is still defensible. Though the United States has been free from serious terrorism, anti-American terrorist networks are intact—and the war in Iraq has given them both a new rallying cry and conveniently located targets. Further, Islamist terrorism is assuming more global form; one can imagine a chain of attacks setting off a worldwide economic tailspin. With biotechnology and nuclear materials emphatically not under control, out-and-out collapse in some future decade is possible.

Still, viewed against the backdrop of history, the case for a kind of manifest destiny is stronger than ever. In this version, America's mission is different from the ones libertarians and neoconservatives have in mind—passive role model or aggressive evangelizer, respectively. It is in some ways a grander mission, carrying a deep and subtle moral challenge. Indeed, the challenge is so deep, and so natural an outgrowth of history, that the idea of destiny in some nonsecular sense isn't beyond the pale. In any event, September 11, 2001, shows the challenge in painfully vivid form.

Globalization dates from prehistory, when the technologically driven expansion of commerce began. People used early advances in transportation—roads, wheels, boats—to make deals—when not using them to fight wars. So too with information technology. Writing seems to have evolved in Mesopotamia as a recorder of debts. Later, in the form of contracts, it would lubricate long-distance trade.

Human nature grounds all this. People instinctively play nonzero-sum games—games, like economic exchange, in which both players can win. And technological advance lets them play more complex games over longer distances. Therefore globalization.

What makes globalization precarious is that nonzero-sum relationships typically have a downside: both players can lose as well as win. Their fortunes are correlated, their fates partly shared, for better or worse. As a web of commerce expands and thickens, this interdependence deepens. The ancient world saw prosperity spread but also saw vast downturns—like collapse across the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 B.C.

One reason trouble can spread so broadly is that it often uses the economic system's conduits of transportation or communication. Raiders exploiting shipping lanes abetted the collapse of 1200 BC. In the Middle Ages, the bubonic plague moved from city to city along avenues of commerce. Today a bioweapon could spread death globally the same way. Beaming appeals around the world from Osama bin Laden and images of civilian casualties in Iraq or Gaza, support for terrorism proliferates via the same satellites that convey stock prices.

One way to protect an expanding realm of interdependence is through expanded governance. The Roman Empire, in its heyday, kept vast trade routes secure. But governance needn't come in the form of a full-fledged state. In the late Middle Ages, merchants in German cities formed the Hanseatic League to repel pirates and brigands.

Today the globalization of commerce, and of threats to it, has created the rudiments of international governance, from the World Health Organization to arrangements for policing nuclear weapons. Global governance sounds radical, but it's just history marching on—commerce making the world safe for itself. In light of 9/11, there is room for improvement. For starters, we need more routine and forceful means of policing the world's nuclear materials and, more challenging still, its biotechnology infrastructure. This will involve rethinking national sovereignty—for example, accepting visits from international inspectors in exchange for the reassuring knowledge that they visit other countries, too. But we have little choice. The aftermath of the Iraq war suggests that even a superpower can't afford to invade every country that may have illicit weapons. History's expansion of commerce has entailed the growth not just of governance, but of morality. Doing business with people, even at a distance, usually involves acknowledging their humanity. This may not sound like a major moral breakthrough. But prehistoric life featured frequent hostility among groups, with violence justified by the moral devaluation, even dehumanization, of the victims. And recorded history is replete with such bigotry. We often take for granted the modern idea that people of all races and religions are morally equal, but viewed against the human past, it is almost bizarre.

Can we root moral enlightenment in crass self-interest as mediated by the nonzero-sum logic of expanding economic interdependence? That would explain why an ethos of ethnic and religious tolerance is most common in highly globalized nations like the United States. And it would help explain why, in contrast, open hatred of Christians or Jews exists in some Muslim countries that aren't deeply, organically integrated into the global economy. Some favor a different explanation, blaming belligerent passages in the Koran for radical Islam's intolerance. But during the Middle Ages, when Islamic civilization was at the forefront of globalization, and coexistence with Christians and Jews made economic sense, Islamic scholars devised the necessary doctrines of tolerance. Muslims can read Scripture selectively when conditions warrant, just as many cosmopolitan Christians and Jews are profitably unaware of the jihads advocated in Deuteronomy.

Globalization, then, might eventually dampen the appeal of radical Islam, especially if economic liberty brings political liberty. In a world of economically intertwined free-market democracies, more Muslim elites will rub elbows with nonMuslims in business class.  Further, more young Muslims will have nonlethal outlets for their energies thanks to new avenues for political activism and economic ambition. Sounds great—and, in fact, it's a prospect that many, including some hawks in promoting war with Iraq, have hopefully invoked. But before deciding how to get from here to there, we might ponder one of history's lessons: bursts of technological progress can bring great instability.

A particularly unsettling parallel with the current moment lies in a previous revolution in information technology, the coming of the movable-type printing press to Europe in the 15th century. When sending information gets cheaper, groups that lack power can gain it. Within weeks of Martin Luther's unveiling his 95 Theses in 1517, German printers in several cities took it on themselves to sell copies. An amorphous and largely silent interest group—people disenchanted with the Roman Catholic Church—crystallized and found its voice. Protest was now feasible. (Therefore, the term Protestant.)

The ensuing erosion of central authority went beyond the church. The "wars of religion" that ravaged Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries were about politics, too, and by their end the Hapsburgs, not just the pope, had lost possessions. If Europe's powers had adjusted more gracefully to the decentralizing force of print, they might have avoided much bloodshed.

Today, similarly, new information technologies allow previously amorphous or powerless groups to coalesce and orchestrate activities, from peaceful lobbying to terrorist slaughter. And the revolution is young. As the Internet goes broadband, Osama bin Laden's potent recruiting videos will get more accessible—viewable on demand from more and more parts of the world. Other terrorist televangelists may spring up, too. As in the age of print, far-flung discontent will grow more powerful—often through peaceful means, but sometimes not.

Paradoxically, the increasing volatility of intense discontent puts Americans in a more nonzero-sum relationship with the world's discontented peoples. If, for example, unhappy Muslims overseas grow more unhappy and resentful, that's good for Osama bin Laden and therefore bad for America. If they grow more secure and satisfied, that's good for America. This is history's drift: technology correlating the fortunes of ever-more-distant people, enmeshing humanity in a web of shared fate.

The architects of America's national security policy at once grasp this cross-cultural interdependence and don't. They see that prosperous and free Muslim nations are good for America. But they don't see that the logic behind this goal counsels against pursuing it crudely with primary reliance on force and intimidation. They don't appreciate how easily, amid modern technology, resentment and hatred metastasize. Witness their planning for postwar Iraq, with spectacular inattention to keeping Iraqis safe, content and well-informed.

Nor do they seem aware, as they focus tightly on state sponsors of terrorism, that technology lets terrorists operate with less and less state support. Anarchic states—like the ones that may now be emerging in Iraq and Afghanistan—could soon be as big a problem as hostile states. Grasping the new challenge of terrorism doesn't render the problem simple or undermine President Bush's entire terrorism strategy. Obviously, we can't grow so concerned with grassroots opinion that we give in to specific terrorist demands. And sometimes we may have to use force in ways that, in the short run, inflame anti-Americanism. And so on.

Still, only if we see the growing power of grassroots sentiment will we give due attention to the subject that hawks so despise: "root causes." With hatred becoming Public Enemy No. 1, a successful war on terrorism demands an understanding of how so much of the world has come to dislike America. When people who are born with the same human nature as you and I grow up to commit suicide bombings—or applaud them—there must be a reason. And it's at least conceivable that American policy or rhetoric needlessly encourages their fanaticism.

Putting yourself in the shoes of people who do things you find abhorrent may be the hardest moral exercise there is. But it would be easier to excuse Americans who refuse to try if they didn't spend so much time indicting Islamic radicals for the same refusal. Somebody has to go first, and if nobody does we're all in trouble. Even if we dawdle, and make no progress on either the moral or governmental fronts—fail to move toward a global norm of tolerance and toward sound global governance—history will eventually concentrate our minds. A nuclear explosion, or epic bioterrorism, will lead even some hardened unilateralists to embrace arms control and other multilateral actions.

But it would be nice to avoid the million deaths. Besides, if we wait until an American city is erased, by then hatred of America will be broad and deep. One can imagine national and global policing regimes that could keep us fairly secure even then, but they would be severe, with expanded monitoring of everyday life and shrinking civil liberties. In other words, the age-old trade-off between security and liberty increasingly involves a third variable: antipathy.

The less hatred there is in the world, the more security we can have without sacrificing personal freedom. Assuming we like our liberty, we have little choice but to take an earnest interest in the situations of distant and seemingly strange peoples, working to elevate their welfare, exploring their discontent as a step toward expanding their moral horizons.  In the process, we expand our own. Global governance without global moral progress could be unpleasant. As the world's most powerful nation, and one of the world's most ethnically and religiously diverse nations, America is a natural leader of this moral revolution. America is also well-positioned to lead in shaping a judicious form of global governance.

This role wasn't inevitable. But for a few quirks of history, some other nation might be on top at this moment of challenge. What was more or less inevitable, in my view, is the challenge itself. All along, technological evolution has been moving our species toward this nonzero-sum moment, when our welfare crucially correlates with the welfare of the other, and our freedom depends on the sympathetic comprehension of the other.

That history has driven us toward moral enlightenment—and then left the final choice to us, with momentous stakes—is scary but inspiring. Some, indeed, may see this as evidence of the higher purpose that many assumed in the 19th century. But a religious motivation isn't necessary. Simple self-interest will do. That's the beauty of the thing.

Robert Wright, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, is author or The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.

Adapted from:
John Lukacs
"The End of the Twentieth Century: Historical Reflections on a Misunderstood Epoch."
Harper’s (Jan. 1993).

I. ON THE LENGTH OF CENTURIES
Seventy-Five Years
The twentieth century was a short century, lasting seventy-five years—from 1914 to 1989. Its two main events were the two world wars, both enormous mountain ranges that dominated its entire landscape. The Russian Revolution, the atomic bomb, the end of the colonial empires, the establishment of Communist states, the dominion of the two world superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—the division of Europe and of Germany.  These all resulted from the two world wars, in whose shadow we have been living. Until now.

Length of Other Centuries
The nineteenth century lasted ninety-nine years, from 1815 to 1914—from the end of Napoleon’s wars to the start of the First World War. The eighteenth century lasted 126 years, from the beginning of the world wars between England and France (the American War of Independence was a part of these wars) until their end at Waterloo. The seventeenth century lasted 101 years.  It began with England destroying  the Spanish Armada in 1588—the formation of a united France was one important outcome of Spain’s defeat. It ended in 1689, the year after the Glorious Revolution in England, when the main threat to England became France rather than Spain.

The Word "Century"
Then, three hundred years ago, few knew the word "century." The Oxford English Dictionary notes its first usage, in English, in 1626. Before the middle of the seventeenth century, "century" meant a Roman military unit of one hundred men. Then it picked up another meaning, that of one hundred years.

New Historical Consciousness
That was one of the symptoms of the beginning of our modern historical consciousness. Another of its symptoms was the creation of the terms "ancient" and "modern." The three historical ages, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, became accepted notions three hundred years ago. So, in 1689, some people thought the Middle Ages were over, though no one thought then that the world order of the seventeenth century had ended. In 1815, too, no one knew the end of the Atlantic world wars between England and France had come. Everyone, both enemies and sympathizers of the French Revolution, feared the prospect of great revolutions erupting again. There were revolutions after 1815, but the entire history of the nineteenth century inflicted no world wars. Its exceptional prosperity and progress were due largely to that.

The Twentieth Century Is Over
We know the twentieth century is over. We know this, because of the evolution of our historical consciousness—which is something different from a widespread knowledge of history. That evolution may be the most essential ingredient of the history of our minds.

The twentieth century will end officially on the last day of the year 2000. But the true turning points (and turning points are different from milestones) in the lives of civilizations, of nations, of individuals, do not coincide with the decimal calendar. Also, history is not of one piece; the turning points are not absolute. Many violent symptoms of the cracking up of the Edwardian or Victorian order were present before 1914. Many of the habits, physical and mental, of the Middle Ages lived on after the seventeenth century. The end of the twentieth century is not yet completed. The shadows of the two world wars have not yet disappeared. But they are retreating. They no longer dominate the historical landscape. That is why, by-and-large, the twentieth century is over.

II. ON THE BOLSHEVIK AND THE PRESBYTERIAN
Lenin vs. Wilson
I was born in 1924, ten days after Lenin had died and three days before Woodrow Wilson would die. The ideas, indeed the personalities, of these ephemeral protagonists of the early twentieth century belonged to the nineteenth. In 1914, when the twentieth century opened, their views of the world were already outdated. That their ideals seemed to triumph for a short time when they seemed to be two different and opposite architects of a new world, was not inconsequential; but they did not matter much in the long run. To think that the world could be made safe for democracy (or, more precisely, that democracy would make the world safe) was a shortsighted and self-serving idea. So too was that of international Communism. That is obvious in the 1990s, at the end of the twentieth century; but it was already evident in 1914, at its very beginning.

Triumph of National over Class Identities
In 1914, Marxism suffered a huge blow from which it never recovered. Marx and his followers and successors, including Lenin, believed that classes were more important realities than nations; that the economic motive determined what people thought and believed. The opposite was true. In 1914, a German workingman had more in common with a German factory owner than with a French workingman. The same was true of French or British or American workingmen and their managers. In 1914, international Socialism melted away at once in the heat of nationalist enthusiasms, especially in Germany. But already two years before that, the young Mussolini—a man of the twentieth century—had discovered that he was an Italian first and a Socialist only second. There was a Communist revolution in Russia in 1917, but what Lenin achieved was not an international revolution. To the contrary, it was Russia’s withdrawal from Europe. To survive the civil war in Russia, Lenin had to let international Communism go by the board. After World War II, Communist states were erected in Eastern Europe, but not because of revolutions or because of the popular appeal of Communism. The Russians could put them there because of the national triumph of Russia over Germany, which resulted in the Russian occupation of most of Eastern Europe.

Wilson’s Failures
In 1914, Wilson too thought that the outbreak of the war in Europe was a reactionary event, a result of the outdated political and social order of the Old World. He was wrong: the carnage of that war became terrible because of nationalism and democracy. It was no longer a war between traditional armies of traditional states. Entire nations were rushing at each other, fighting to the end, making any compromise peace impossible. After the war, most of his countrymen rejected Wilson. Years before his death he was, like Lenin, a broken man, and his War to End All Wars and his League of Nations proved to be the sorriest of failures.

National Self-Determination—The Truly Revolutionary Movement
Yet—such is the irony of history—the ideas of this pale, Presbyterian, professor-president were more revolutionary than those of the Bolshevik radical from the middle Volga region. Wilson’s propagation of the idea of national self-determination helped to destroy entire empires in 1918. Seventy-five years later, that idea of national self-determination is destroying some of the very states that Wilson helped to create: Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, for example. It has also destroyed the structure of the Soviet Union, that inheritor of the old Russian empire. Communism is dead, but national self-determination is much alive.

This means—contrary to those who see the history of the twentieth century as governed by the Cold War—we are witnessing not only the end of Europe’s division that all had tacitly accepted at Yalta in 1945. We are beginning to witness changes in Europe’s political geography that statesmen had set up in 1919 at Versailles.

III. ON HITLER, THE CENTURY’S RADICAL
Mass Nationalism—The Main Political/Social Phenomenon
Nationalism, mass nationalism, was the main political and social phenomenon of the twentieth century. Its most radical incarnation was Hitler, whose unwillingness to compromise, ideas, and determination to carry out those ideas were more unyielding and radical than any other famous revolutionary leader, including Lenin, Stalin, or Mao.

Nazism/Hitlerism Still Lives
Consider but this single, disturbing evidence: at the end of this century there are almost no believing Communists anywhere.  Not many even in the lands of the Soviet Union, where the remnant party men are merely nationalist bureaucrats. Yet there are Nazis still, admirers of Hitler, not only the remnants of an old generation but new adherents, young men and women, some open, others tight-lipped, in many countries of the world.

We must not exaggerate their numbers or their influence. Still: if the mountain ranges dominating the landscape of the twentieth century were the two world wars, 1940-41 was the highest point of those mountain ranges. It was then that Hitler came near to winning the Second World War—nearer than Germany had come in 1914 or in 1918. If he had done so, with what consequences! In a way, much of the twentieth century before 1940-41 led up to Hitler. And so much of the rest of the century, from 1941 on, has been the result of the Second World War that he alone had begun and had dominated until its end.

IV. ON THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR
The Division of Europe
When Hitler died, the Allies carried out Europe’s division. The upheaval at the end of the war was enormous, but there was nothing revolutionary about that division. The Russians occupied and controlled the eastern half (actually, one third) of Europe and of Germany. In Western and Southern Europe, and in western Germany, the Anglo-American presence (after 1947 more-and-more American, less-and-less Anglo) helped to restore, or to establish, liberal and democratic governments. During the next forty-five years of the Cold War, there would not be a single pro-Communist country in Western Europe. Nor would we see a single anti-Communist country in Eastern Europe, except for Greece, which in 1944 the British and not the Russians liberated.

Mutual Misunderstandings
Why, then, the Cold War at all? Because of a mutual—or, more precisely, reciprocal—misunderstanding. Soon after 1945, the Americans came to fear that Stalin, having brutally forced Communist governments on Eastern Europe, was ready to push Communism farther into Western Europe. Conversely, Stalin feared that the Americans, having settled themselves in Western and Southern Europe, were ready to challenge his rule in Eastern Europe. Both sides were wrong. The crude unscrupulousness of the Russians and their Communist satellites—their obsessive propaganda and the brutality of their behavior—contributed decisively to American perceptions. The ideological appeal of anti-Communism mistakenly concentrated on Communism rather than on Russian national interests. It did not recognize that precisely because of the weakness of the Communist appeal, the iron curtain could not last.

Inherent Weakness of the Communist Regime in Russia
There is one more and important element. It involves some of the original perceptions of the Cold War’s duration. In 1945, Roosevelt and the American government thought that the military situation at the end of the war would be temporary. They hoped that after the withdrawal of the occupying armies from most of Europe, Stalin would be satisfied with the presence of pro-Russian, though not necessarily Communist, governments in Eastern Europe. That was not what Stalin wanted. He understood the weakness of the Communist appeal outside the Soviet Union.  This explains why he preferred to have the states of Eastern Europe ruled by people whose inferior character was such that they were abjectly subservient to him. Few Americans were aware of this inherent weakness, though Churchill was. As early as New Year’s Day in 1953, when Stalin still lived and Cold War tensions were peaking, Churchill predicted that the world, by the 1980s, would see Eastern Europe free of Communism. Churchill’s prediction was astonishingly precise. But long before the 1980s, the original character and conditions of the Cold War had drastically changed, even though most people were either unable or unwilling to recognize it.

V. ON THE END OF THE COLD WAR
Communist Russia’s Poor Digestion
How did the Cold War come to an end? Since 1956—perhaps even after 1953—it had been winding down. Yet few in the West and especially the United States understood the digestive problems of the Russians. From the Russians’ bad table manners, people assumed that their appetite was insatiable, whereas the opposite was true: their digestion was poor. And this condition reflected not only the excessive size of their sphere, it reflected the essence of Communism itself. All over Europe, including Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the remnant belief in Communism was evaporating until, in the 1980s, the realities of that evaporation became so obvious that even a Ronald Reagan could no longer ignore them.

Evaporation of Communist Legitimacy
In Western Europe, the Communist parties shrank year after year. In countries such as Italy and Spain, they became small-bourgeois capitalist parties, Communist in name only. The same happened in Eastern Europe. There a class of party members still formed the governments, but true Communist (or even Marxist) believers among them existed no longer. They were a new class of functionaries and bureaucrats, interested in nothing other than keeping their own power—for which, in a crisis, their only guarantee seemed to be the power of the Soviet Union. Some of them, like Ceausescu in Romania, became extreme nationalists. That helped their popularity, at least for a while. By 1985-86, it became obvious that while the United States no longer challenged their legitimacy, the Eastern European Communist leaders could not count on the unequivocal support of Moscow even when they were in trouble. In 1989, all of them gave up their power without risking, let alone firing, a shot. The only exception was Romania, where there was some—not much—fighting, because the security services of the Ceausescu tribe were large. They consisted not of Communists but of nationalist thugs serving the national dictator.)

Evaporation of Russian Communist Legitimacy
Much of this was true of the Soviet Union too, where, during the decaying Brezhnev rule, it was increasingly obvious that the most corrupt and inefficient element in the government was the party itself. There, the last believing Communists had dwindled to a small minority by the time Gorbachev appeared. His most ominous opponents were not former rock-ribbed Communists but Russian and non-Russian nationalists, military men, and ideological nationalists, bitter as they witnessed the demolition not of Communist ideology but of the external and internal bulwarks of the Soviet state.

It is with in mind that we ought to consider the real nature of the occasional crises that punctuated Russian-American relations after 1956—hiccups in the digestion, delaying the winding down of the Cold War.

1. In 1960, the Russians shot down an American spy plane, the U-2. They shot it down, however, over their own country, after having tolerated the crisscrossing flights of American spy planes over the Soviet Union for years.

2. In 1961, came the Berlin Wall. They built it, however, to contain, not to expand, and to keep tens of thousands of East Germans from filtering through to the West.

3. In 1962, came the Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis arose because the Russians had to do something for Castro.  They had been unwilling to guarantee him against an American invasion, which seemed to be more-and-more within John Kennedy’s plans. The evolution of the crisis showed that nothing was further from the Kremlin’s purposes than to risk a war with the United States over Cuba.

4. In 1968, Brezhnev sent troops into Czechoslovakia: but he did this only after he had become sure that the Czechs would not fight and that the Americans would not react. He overcame his reluctance to act when he began to worry that the disappearance of Communism in Czechoslovakia might spill over to its neighbors, including the Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union.

5. In 1979, the Russians moved troops into Afghanistan, where one nominally Communist tribal chieftain had murdered another nominally Communist tribal chieftain. They moved in also because they—wrongly—feared that Jimmy Carter was about to invade the neighboring state of Iran.

6. Brezhnev’s military advisers built a large Russian war naval fleet. But the presence of that fleet meant little or nothing in the Mediterranean. It was the American Sixth fleet that patrolled the Persian Gulf and the Lebanese coast, landing Marines there in 1982, 6,000 miles from Norfolk and only a few hundred miles from the state frontiers of the Soviet Union. The powerful Russian fleet stood by at a respectful distance, doing nothing at all.

The Experts Had It Wrong—And Bad Consequences
I wish not to be misunderstood. A bully, when feeling threatened, will act aggressively; he does not cease being a bully. The leaders of the Soviet Union were neither modest nor pacifist. But they made their most startling acts of intervention for purposes that were defensive. They had more troubles of their own than people suspected or were willing to admit and their appetite for more foreign expansion and conquest was satiable. With all the technological and analytical information at their disposal, people in charge of the enormous bureaucratic labyrinths in Washington with experts, and, increasingly, intellectuals in high government positions, did not see these things clearly enough. Worse. When people do not see something, this often means that they do not wish to see it—a condition that may be comfortable and profitable to them. That was true of many of our presidents during the Cold War, from Eisenhower to Reagan. It was true of popular political figures from Joe McCarthy to Oliver North. It was true of experts such as Henry Kissinger, who began his grand public career by touting the existence of a—as we now know, nonexistent—Missile Gap. Thus, the Cold War lasted longer than it should have, and the United States became transformed into the very military-industrial state Eisenhower had spoken of in one of his last public speeches. The result being that, while inarguably the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, we may debate whether the United States has won it.

VI. ON THE NATURE OF THE (SO-CALLED) THIRD WORLD REVOLUTIONS
"Communist" Expansion
One of the main reasons for the continuation of the Cold War—indeed, for some of its bloodiest episodes—was the unexpected appearance of Communist regimes in unexpected places around the globe. Until 1960, every Communist government, except for Yugoslavia and Albania, was a neighbor of either the Soviet Union or China—or, like East Germany, occupied by the Soviet army. From 1960 on, beginning with Cuba, Communist or pro-Communist governments came into being in the oddest places: Ethiopia, Angola, Suriname, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Grenada. Some of these soon devolved into blood-encrusted tribal tyrannies—some of them were bloody tribal tyrannies from the beginning.

Americans Misunderstood the Nature of Third-World Revolutions
Their self-invented "Communist" label confirmed the American belief that the titanic struggle of democracy versus Communism marked entire history of the twentieth century. Yet the Soviet Union had nothing to do with these "Communist" revolutions. Unlike the Russian-imposed Communist governments in Eastern Europe, these revolutions or coups were spontaneous, surprising Moscow as well as Washington. Often they were not even the results of local Communist agitation, local Communist parties, or local Communist revolutionaries. Fidel Castro, for example, did not even know or say that he was a Communist until well after he had marched into Havana. He was a "Communist" because he was anti-American, not the reverse. Had he arisen twenty years earlier when the enemies of the United States were Germany and Italy, Castro would have surely declared himself a "Fascist." Among other things, he was a great admirer of General Franco, at whose death in 1975 he declared three days of national mourning in Cuba.

Soviet Support for Third-World Revolutions
The leaders of the Soviet Union felt compelled to help most of these new-fangled allies—for a while. Yet, their relationship with the United States held priority over their relations with their faraway supplicants. Russia did want to set up important Soviet bases in the Western Hemisphere or in Africa. During the last ten years, most of these "Marxist" governments gave up, except for in Cuba, whose supreme leader had had his bitterest disappointments with the Soviet Union well before the 1980s.

Again, the Triumph of Nationalist Over Proletarian Revolution
Nearly two centuries ago, the American Revolution, that revolutionary example sufficiently inspired some people in South America to declare their own independence from the distant and weak Spanish motherland. One hundred and sixty years later, few people in Washington recognized that the one common element in most of the revolutionary movements sputtering in the Third World was a tribal hatred of foreign, especially white, power. That this hatred was, usually, as unjustified as it was shortsighted is another matter. But I must mention it here, because it proves again that the ideas and the appeal of anti-colonialism—more precisely, tribal nationalism—have been more enduring than the idea of the proletarian revolution of the international working class. For two hundred years at least, the main agent of anti-colonialism has been the United States rather than Russia—in the twentieth century Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt rather than Lenin and Stalin.

VII. ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ANTI-COMMUNISM
Popularity of Anti-Communism
"The insane fear of socialism throws the bourgeoisie headlong into the arms of despotism." Tocqueville wrote that in 1852, four years after he stood up against the socialist workers and the radical revolutionaries in the streets of Paris. A century later, anti-Communism was not restricted to the bourgeoisie. Often it was most popular among the workers themselves, especially in the United States. (Marx ignored not only the nationalism of the proletariat, but also their addiction to respectability. Mussolini and Hitler and an endless host of demagogues could not have come to power without the popular appeal of anti-Communism. It is foolish to think that the mainspring of anti-Communism is the concern of people for their financial security. It has been far more popular and emotional than that.

Bravery and Opportunism
The psychology of anti-Communism is complex and has not yet received the attention it deserves. A dedication to truthfulness, a measure of honesty, and, yes, bravery have been present in almost every private (or, rarely, public) expression of opposition where Communists or their representatives have been in power. Where they have not been in power, a self-identification with anti-Communism has suggested self-satisfaction.  Its source has often been the wish for respectability, the wish to assert that one belongs within the mainstream of public opinion and within the authentic national community. I have seen plenty of opportunistic Communist fellow travelers in my life and not only in the twilight years of 1945-46 in Hungary, where I was born. I have, alas, seen even more opportunistic anti-Communists in the United States, many former leftists.

Negative Results of American Anti-Communism
The ideology of anti-Communism contributed to the protracted nature of the Cold War. The identification of anti-Communism with American patriotism did, on occasion, damage traditional American liberties, and it contributed powerfully to establishing the American military-industrial state. The obsession with Communism obscured the main condition of the Cold War, which had little to do with Communism. That condition was the presence of Russian armed power where it did not belong. And now, when the Cold War is over, the temptations of many of these questionable patriots persist. Unappeased by the Russian withdrawals, they go on with their propaganda to promote the dissolution of the traditional Russian state proper. They try to convince themselves and others that it is the prime interest—and task—of the United States to propagate and impose its system of government and philosophy on most of the world, including Russia, half a globe away

VIII. ON THE DISSOLUTION OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
The Problems Surrounding the Dissolution of Empire: Spain
The historical consequences of the retreat and dissolution of empires are enormous and last through centuries. The bankruptcy and decay of the Spanish empire led to the great Atlantic world wars between France and England. The emergence of the United States was a part of that vast chapter of history. The eighteenth-century world wars between England and France lasted 126 years. The decline and decay of the Spanish empire lasted more than 300 years, from the defeat of the Armada in 1588 to the Spanish-American War in 1898. Eventually the United States inherited much of the Spanish empire, reaching as far as the Philippines—from which it is retreating now, as it will one day retreat from Puerto Rico.

The Problems Surrounding the Dissolution of Empire: The Ottomans
On the other edge of Europe the retreat and dissolution of the Turkish empire lasted from about 1683 to 1923. This Turkish retreat led, among other things, to the outbreak of the First World War. In the Balkans, the Russians and the Austrians (and by 1914 even the Germans in Turkey) were asserting their interests. Their support of their satellites led to many conflicts and small wars, threats of greater wars, and assassinations such as that of the Austrian archduke and heir in 1914. Farther east, the end of the Turkish empire led to many of the rational and irrational struggles that typify the Near East even now. (Were the Turks still in charge of Mesopotamia, were the Spanish still in charge of Cuba, were the British still in charge of India wouldn’t we be better off? And wouldn’t their subject peoples be better off? Now that is a historian’s nostalgia.).

The Problems Surrounding the Dissolution of Empire: Russia
And now has come the dissolution of the Russian empire. It may be irreversible. What tremendous consequences may follow?

Among the ruins of the former Soviet Union various states and statelets arose, including even some nationalities whose consciousness of their separate and distinct nationality is recent and who had never formed a national state, indeed any state, before. Others (Armenia and Georgia, for example) feed their minds and aspirations from long, and historically often dubious, memories of their medieval or even earlier "kingdoms," which they equate with "independence" and "statehood."

One great question is that of the Ukrainians. I find it difficult to believe that their sovereignty will ultimately be acceptable to the Russians, that the Russians will let them go entirely. There is the involved problem of millions of Russians living within Ukraine, as is the case also in the Baltic states.

Yugoslavia
This mixture of nationalities is the main question in Yugoslavia too.  Were there no Serbs living within "Croatia," there would be no Yugoslav civil war now. One ought to berate the Serbs because of their violent nationalism. We ought to scold the Croats, too, not only because of some of their misdeeds during World War II but also because it was they who wanted a Yugoslavia in 1918, just as the Slovaks wanted a Czechoslovakia then. (Both had been better off during the Hapsburg Empire.)

Weak Leadership
So many various new states and statelets arise before our eyes. This reflects the spontaneous desires of their peoples. But their promoters are ambitious politician-chieftains. While the impulse of nationalism, the wish for one’s own independent national state, is one of the results of Romanticism—and we are all romantics now—its promoters are political practitioners of power. Attracted by their prospective emoluments, they feed their personal vanities and dine on the perquisites of high state officialdom—the obeisances and comforts suddenly at their behest, bloated staffs, salutations, official travel.

IX. ON THE CULTURAL WEAKNESS OF RUSSIAN COMMUNISM
What If the Communist Revolution Had Happened in Germany?
If at the end of World War I—the beginning of the twentieth century—Communism had come to power in Germany, not in Russia, its influence would have been immeasurably greater. Russia and things Russian had no prestige, no attraction among Russia’s neighbors. In Russia, the Communist revolution succeeded; outside Russia it failed. Many of the social conditions of the peasantry and workers of the Baltic region and Poland were not much different from those in Russia. Yet anti-Communists in all of these countries in 1918-20 routed the local Communists even when supported by the Red Russian armed forces. The opposite was true of Germany and things German. The German cultural influence was large, even among those European nations fighting against Germany in the First World War. That cultural prestige, including the German system of education, was so great that anything new and revolutionary in Germany—probably including an eventual German Communist regime—ambitious people, radicals, revolutionaries, intellectuals would have copied, whether consciously or unconsciously. That is, after all, what happened with Hitler and German National Socialism. They had plenty of adherents and emulators in other countries, where, occasionally, they could come to power without the presence of German armed force. The Russians could not count on this, even after their great military triumph in 1945.

On the Other Hand. . .
Had a Communist system arisen in Germany, some of its achievements would probably have been impressive, especially for the workers in an industrial state. A Communist Germany would have been even more avant-garde than was Weimar Germany. Yet the fatal flaws and stupidities of Marxism—its materialism, its atheism, and, most of all, its shallow and insubstantial internationalism—would have weighed it down in the end.

X. THE END OF A DIVIDED GERMANY
The End of World War II
The Russian-American division of Germany, at the center of Europe, is over. Its key date was April 25, 1945, when advancing units of the American and Russian armies met in the middle of Europe, along the Elbe River near the German town of Torgau. On the banks of that river, which carried the flooded wreckage of spring and war, American and Russian soldiers, fired with sentiments of friendship and plenty of drink, celebrated late into the night. That celebration foreshaddowed a huge pro-American celebration in Moscow two weeks later. Among the soldiers of the Fifty-Eighth Russian Guards Division there may have been some whose home was Vladivostok, who came to the middle of Europe from the shores of the western Pacific. Possibly among the soldiers of the US. Sixty-Ninth Infantry Division there were some whose home was Seattle or San Francisco. They, too, had come to conquer halfway around the world. Their meeting took place not only in the middle of Germany but in the middle of European history. Torgau is about midway between Wittenberg, where Luther’s fire of great revolutions started, and Leipzig, where Napoleon’s course of great victories ended. Less than fifty years have passed since then. Now the Russians are going, and the Americans will be going soon.

"Europeanism" vs. Another German-Dominated Europe?
Sooner or later, Americans will have to make another choice, one having nothing to do with whether those already useless American garrisons and bases remain in Europe. In a few years, we will see whether "Europe" becomes more "European" or more-and-more German-dominated. That is, will the still largely powerless "European" institutions develop enough to assume a more definite character and capable of inspiring genuine loyalties? Or will German participation in those institutions in Brussels or Strasbourg be only formal compared with an increasing reassertion of the primacy of German national and political interests? In the event of the latter—which, I think, is the more probable—the United States and the American people may face a choice between Germany and Britain.

America’s "Radical Nationalists"
That choice will reflect something deeper than strategic calculations. It will have emotional, cultural, and ethnic elements as in 1914-17 and 1939-41. Then, a decisive element was the presence and influence of a largely Anglo-Saxon, upper-class American elite, whose presence and influence have weakened greatly during the second half of the twentieth century. A reflection of that was the confrontation in the 1992 Republican Party primaries between the weak, unconvincing, and unconvinced representative of that former elite, George Bush, and the "America Firster," Pat Buchanan. Contrary to the accepted ideas—and to his own assertions—Buchanan is not really an isolationist. Consider a significant example—that this so-called isolationist strong favors American recognition of and support for Croatia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. But many of the America Firsters in 1940 were not really isolationists either. They bitterly opposed Roosevelt and those Republicans who wished to engage the United States against the German Third Reich on the British side. In 1940, Hitler correctly called these Americans "radical nationalists." In that year, the Anglophile internationalists among the Republicans were stronger than the radical nationalists. They engineered the nomination of the anti-Fascist Wendell Willkie. In 1992, Buchanan was not the Republican nominee, but he and the nationalists may try to gain control of the Republican Party in the wake of George Bush’s defeat. If that happens, their success will resound among the nationalists in many parts of the world, especially in Central and Eastern Europe.

XI. ABOUT GERMAN NATIONALISM
Are the Germans immune to the revival of their nationalism? Yes and no. Yes, because most Germans reject the Hitlerite past not merely out of political calculation. No, because that rejection is not necessarily identical with a rejection of German nationalism. In the event of the surge of a populist nationalist party, people such as Kohl and others of his party will likely seek some kind of compromise. That is, to adopt some of the rhetoric and some of the politics of the new nationalists of a younger generation. Again, there will be more to that temptation than political calculation. The official rejection of the Hitler era will not stop. Nor will the cultivation of good German relations with Israel.

But the time may come when at least some German memories of the Third Reich and the Second World War will undergo a deeply felt revision, which will be more than a quarrel among historians. For, as Kierkegaard once said, “we live forward but we can think only backward”—and there is an inseparable connection between memory and knowledge, between a view of the past and a view of the future, between thinking and living.

XII. ON THE EUROPES, EAST AND WEST
Misunderstanding to the Situation in Eastern Europe
The prevalent view of Eastern Europe in the West is wrong. According to this view, the deep crisis in Eastern Europe is economic—its nations’ uneven progress toward liberal democracy is a result. By and large—there are deep differences between, say Albania and Hungary or, say, Serbia and Poland—the opposite of that idea rings true. The great and enduring problems are political, not economic. They involve the lust for power, not money. But then, this has been true of mankind since Adam and Eve, and misunderstood by Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

The Material Situation in Eastern Europe
The material problems (I prefer the word "material" to "economic") are serious. The universally accepted idea is that they result from forty-five years of Communist mismanagement. There is much truth to that, but it is not the entire truth. The material conditions in the lives of most Eastern European peoples are less different from those of Western Europe than they were forty-five years ago. In every Eastern European country, most were peasants forty-five years ago, whereas there is no country in Eastern Europe today, with the possible exception of Albania, where more than a minority are engaged in agriculture. All over Eastern Europe, people to whom such things were beyond the dreams of avarice forty-five years ago now possess their own automobiles, refrigerators, and television sets, with electricity at their disposal.

Communist Regimes Delayed Material Advance
This brings me to the anomalies and contradictions in all economic "facts" or, rather, in the categories defined by economists, which have scant relevance to the realities of everyday life, including its material realities. In the Soviet bloc, only the Poles did not collectivize agriculture, and agriculture in Poland is now worse off than in almost any other Eastern European country. Romania is the only Eastern European country that wholly paid its foreign debts, and material and financial conditions are worse in Romania than anywhere else in Eastern Europe. In Hungary material conditions are visibly improving, and the Hungarian national currency is now close to Western standards of international convertibility, meaning worldwide acceptance. Yet, opinion polls show that Hungarians are among the most pessimistic peoples of Eastern Europe.

Material Conditions in Eastern Europe Will Improve
This twentieth century is now over; and as we move into the twenty-first, Western and Eastern Europe will become more alike, as far as material conditions go. Foreign investments in Eastern Europe will assist in bringing this about. But—again, contrary to accepted ideas—they will not matter much in the long run for several reasons, one of them being that all foreign investors in Eastern Europe want to gather their profits in the short run. Their present advantage is the still low cost of labor in Eastern Europe, which, however, will rise, sooner rather than later.

Capitalism in Eastern Europe?
All over the world, people tend to confuse international finance with economics. The former is—at least in the foreseeable future—truly international, with money flowing freely across frontiers. But capital has become increasingly abstract, and the more abstract money becomes, the less durable it is. Economics, on the other hand—in its proper, old, original meaning—refers to the husbanding of one’s household assets. To believe that Slovaks or Bulgarians have now "entered" or "reentered" the capitalist phase of their historical development is nonsense. Capitalism has grown slowly, with difficulty, in Western Europe during three hundred years, coming to its full development in the nineteenth century. That was the result of particular social, political, religious, and intellectual conditions that hardly existed in Eastern Europe then, as they do not exist now. Capitalism as well as parliamentary liberalism were nineteenth-century phenomena with little relevance to the twenty-first century, with its current material realities obscured by an outdated vocabulary of economists.

XIII. ON THE QUESTION OF EASTERN EUROPEAN NATIONALISM
Nationalism, Religion, and Tyranny of the Majority
The main political reality in Eastern Europe is nationalism. The principal factor of the two world wars of the twentieth century was nationalism; and both of these wars broke out in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe nationalism is the only popular religion, by which I mean the only religion that still possesses a functional rhetoric. When I say to an American nationalist that being a good American will not necessarily get one into heaven, he may be startled but he will understand and presumably even agree. When I say to a Hungarian nationalist that just because someone is a good Hungarian he will not necessarily get into heaven, he is startled and may find it difficult to agree. Populist nationalism, as distinct from the now almost extinct variety of the liberal nationalisms of the nineteenth century, is a modern and democratic phenomenon. Populist nationalists are self-conscious rather than self-confident, extroverted, essentially aggressive, and humorless, suspicious of other people within the same nation who do not seem to agree with some of their populist and nationalist ideology. Hence they assign them to the status of minorities, suggesting—and at times emphasizing—that such minorities do not and cannot belong within the authentic body of the national people. This is, of course, another manifestation of the potential tyranny of a majority—which, as Tocqueville observed, is the great danger of democratic societies in democratic times.

Anachronistic/Inappropriate Political Systems
When in 1931, the king of Spain abdicated and politicians proclaimed a liberal parliamentary republic, Mussolini said, "this was going back to oil lamps in the age of electricity." He was right. Parliamentary liberalism belonged to the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. Indeed, in Spain it soon degenerated to a sorry mess, and after five years to civil war. But then came the Second World War and the death of Hitler and Mussolini, reviving the prestige of Communism (which is now gone) and of American-type democracy, which is not gone yet. For that we must be thankful. It is because of the prestige of the West that populist nationalism and the tyranny of majorities in Eastern Europe will constrain themselves, within certain limits, for a foreseeable time. But this does not mean that parliamentary liberalism—including the habits of dialogue, compromise, and sense of community—is, or will be, the dominant political reality in Eastern Europe. Parliamentary liberalism, like capitalism, in the nineteenth century was the result not only of certain ideas but of a particular structure of society. That society was semi-aristocratic and bourgeois—bourgeois and not merely middle class—a class with a patrician tinge, a class from which most of its administrators, governors, professionals, and parliamentary representatives came. Such societies, especially in Eastern Europe, do not now exist.

XIV. ON THE VARIETIES OF NATIONALISM
Diverse Natures of Nationalisms
There is no first-rate book about the history of nationalism—there are only a few usable books about its ingredients. There are reasons for this. One is that nationalism differs from country to country more than internationalism or socialism do—that is why histories of the right are more interesting than those of the left. This is not simply attributable to the different national characteristics of different peoples. Those characteristics, by themselves, have changed through history. Slovak nationalism differs from American nationalism, Latvian nationalism differs from Swedish nationalism, not only because Slovaks and Americans and others are different but because the nationalism of the former is newer than that of the latter. An overall history of nationalism must necessarily advance chapter by chapter, dealing with one country after another, which makes for dull reading. And while national feelings may be and indeed often are old, nationalism as a political force is new. The simple Slovak peasant of two hundred years ago may be the ancestor of the half-baked Slovak nationalist intellectual of the twentieth century. Yet, their circumstances and their characters, including not only the subjects but the functioning of their minds, are different.

Dominance of Nationalism
To think that nationalism is a reactionary phenomenon is a grave error. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the most powerful political force in the world remains nationalism. So it was in the beginning of the twentieth century, leading to the two world wars. That, too, should make those who think that the confrontation of democracy and Communism dominated this century think twice. Neither the strength of classes nor a struggle of ideas marked the twentieth century. Rather the struggle of nations dominated. Here and there it seems that wars among races might now succeed the wars of nations; but that awful prospect has not yet crystallized worldwide, and one hopes that it won’t.

XV. ON THE WITHERING AWAY OF THE STATE
Primacy of the State
Above all other political matters, even in World War II, stood the relations of states. It was still a war fought chiefly by states, not by classes and not even by ideologies. It was a war fought by Germany and Poland and France and Britain and Italy and Russia and the United States and Japan; not by democracy and Communism and Fascism. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, de Gaulle, Roosevelt, and Chiang were statesmen first. They subordinated their philosophical and political preferences to what they thought were the interests of their states.

State Interests Triumph Over Ideological Interest in the USSR
That primacy of state interests appears significantly in the history of the Soviet Union, a state that millions still consider to have been a party state, dedicated first and foremost to the utopian cause of world revolution. Stalin’s real interest was security, not revolution; territory, nor ideology. This tyrant cared not a fig for Communists abroad. Their activities in the interests of the Soviet Union, including espionage, were merely fringe benefits, secondary and unworthy of prime consideration. At times it was hardly more than a lunatic-fringe benefit, sometimes it was more than that; but Stalin knew that no one could pull the rug from under Hitler (or Churchill) by tugging at the fringe. In 1921, Lenin went through tortuous motions to isolate the handful of Americans who had gone to Russia to distribute large amounts of food during a famine. In 1941, Stalin asked Churchill to send British divisions to Russia under their own commanders. If the price for the survival of his state was the presence of foreign imperialist armies on its land with all the prospects of capitalist contamination, so be it.

Such were the facts of life. By 1939, the official Soviet vocabulary reflected this. Terms such as "state matters," "state relations," and "state interests" became sacrosanct, in a stiff parvenu sense. When Stalin or Molotov employed them, everyone instantly recognized that these were the matters of highest importance, while references to the class struggle or to the cause of the revolution belonged to an older category of Communist pieties.

Nation and State
Thus, during the Second World War, the authority of the state remained unquestionable and enormous. But during the last fifty years, there has come a gradual, though often hardly visible, change everywhere. This may be because the unquestionable and unquestioned respect for the sovereignty of states is essentially monarchic and aristocratic, surviving into the democratic age. In a democratic world, on the other hand, people will identify, or confuse, the nation with the state, and that unquestionable and unquestioned respect for the primary principle of the state will diminish.

Withering Away of Party and State in Russia
We have seen that in the Soviet Union the opposite of Marx’s dictum happened. The people questioned Communist rule, but the state did not wither away—quite the contrary. Thirty years after Stalin, another phenomenon became plain. The party, because of its corruption, began to wither. Andropov and Gorbachev saw this. To reform the country, they wished to curtail and reduce the power of a corrupt and corroding party apparatus. Gorbachev’s historical merits were, and remain, great. Yet he not just failed to recognize the democratic and nationalist dangers to the authority of the state.  He also failed to see the extent to which seventy years of association with the party had undermined the state’s authority. Therefore the final irony, a revelation of Lenin’s dogmatic shortsightedness: the collapse of the Communist party preceding that of the state; the party withering away, and dragging the state with it.

Even now, the monumental problem of the former Russian empire is not what kind of government will emerge there. It is, rather, what kind of state? That is the main problem for the peoples not only of the former Soviet Union but of our world at large, and not just because of the nuclear weapons scattered across their vast territories.

XVI. ON THE END OF EUROPEAN STATES
Is the State Doomed?
The present devolution in Europe is without precedent in its history. Fifty or more years after the end of the European state system, the functioning, the authority, perhaps the very existence of the modern state that emerged in Europe five hundred years ago are weakening.

Supranational Europeanism?
In Western Europe, there is the movement toward an international or a supranational—they are not the same—bureaucratic organization. There is a common market, a European parliament, a European supreme court of sorts, a coordination of various economic, social, and financial regulations, including an agreement for creating a common Western European currency by the end of the chronological century. But the most important matter is missing. A common market will not a state make. There is no European state and there are few signs that in the foreseeable future there will be one.

The states making up the present European "community" have agreed to give up some of the attributes of their sovereignty to this vague pudding of a Western European, and largely economic, community. The pudding, however, remains shapeless. For one essential thing—there is no authority, no instrument to enforce these agreements, laws, and regulations if one or another of the member states were to reject or refuse to abide by them. As long as the principle and practice of popular sovereignty are unquestioned and unquestionable, this possibility exists and will always exist, because every democratic government now depends on the will of its people expressed by its elected majorities.

The Future of Western Europe?
Something new and probably unexpected will emerge in Western Europe during the next few decades. What this will be I do not know. I do know that if something like a united European state comes about, the nature, character, and limits of its sovereignty—as defined, for instance, by its frontiers and by its army—will differ from the past and from what people imagine.

The Future of Eastern Europe?
Meanwhile in East-Central Europe, in the Caucasus, and elsewhere, the sizzle and clamor of tribal wars have arisen. The response of the Western powers and states is as ridiculous as it is fretful. They instantly "recognize" the "independence," that is, the sovereign statehood, of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Azerbaijan, as if that were a step in the right direction—which usually it isn’t. It exacerbates problems, because recognition, once given, is difficult to withdraw. Recognition means approval, which is why in the past statesmen tendered it only after much deliberation and experience. Recognition was thereby an important instrument of influence, which is hardly the case now. At the same time, the European "community," or the Council of Europe, cannot exert authority over the civil war in Yugoslavia just as the Russian government proved incapable of exerting authority over the tribal wars in the Caucasus. The thought occurs to me that perhaps this may work itself out for the relative best. Perhaps a new generation of Serbs, Croats, and others may someday recognize some of the benefits of their interdependence as they look at the smoking rubble of their destroyed villages and towns.  Perhaps they will see that the destruction came about because of tales told by nationalist idiots, full of sound and fury, fighting for an "independence" signifying nothing.

XVII. ON THE GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN STATE
Weak National Police in the USA
During the last fifty years, the power of the American state has risen beyond almost all American traditions and previous practices. Because of the Constitution and the older inclinations of American democracy, the clandestine and police powers of the national government, unlike in Europe, had been weak. Indeed, for a long time they were almost nonexistent. The presidential Secret Service came into being only in 1901; the FBI, in its present form, in 1924; the CIA in 1947. However, it took only a few years for the modern FBI and CIA to become quite popular. By 1940, J. Edgar Hoover was the most powerful policeman in the United States. He held great political influence, which he used on occasion rather freely and without compunction. Still, his influence on the course of the American ship of state was small. But by 1955, Allen Dulles was one of the chief officers, if not the chief pilot, on the bridge of that enormous American ship. Neither "national" nor "security" was a venerated patriotic American term one hundred years ago. But during the second half of the twentieth century "national security," including its institutions, became an unassailable term. The national security establishment and the CIA became principal, and not merely secondary, instruments of the state. Those instruments of the American state—its defense establishments, its armaments and their contractors, its foreign intelligence and information services, with its domestic governmental agencies—have grown enormous. At the same time, they have become ever more inefficient and vulnerable, mostly because of their bureaucratic and politicized character.

Dissolving of Oppressive Bureaucracies
At the end of the twentieth century, almost everywhere, we see overextended and heavily bureaucratic governments.  They vacillate atop societies whose cohesion is visibly lessening, with the former cement of civility, morals, common sense, and law and order dissolving. The size of the state increases with the decrease of its authority, because of the decreasing respect and the decreasing efficiency of its powers.

XVIII. ON THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
Military Power
The twentieth century was the American century. Shortly before its chronological beginning, the American people and their politicians decided that the United States must become a world power. They were no longer content with being the greatest power in the Americas. In 1898, the United States conquered Cuba and Puerto Rico and leaped across the Pacific. That was an isolated prelude to the First World War, but a prelude nonetheless. In 1917, the United States, allied with Britain and France, entered the First World War and helped to defeat Germany. Fewer than twenty-five years later, the United States, allied with Britain and Russia, entered the Second World War and helped to conquer Germany, while conquering Japan almost alone. In 1945, the American flag, flying on American warships, ruled the seas from Tokyo Bay to the Bosporus. There followed the confrontation with Russia over the spoils of the Second World War. Here and there, the leaders of the Soviet Union felt constrained to mitigate that confrontation, until in the 1980s they decided to abandon it altogether, giving up their European conquests.

Non-Military Sources of Power
The twentieth century was the American century not only because of the overwhelming power of the United States but also because of the overwhelming influence and prestige of things American. The American dollar became the universal standard of currency throughout the world. Many of the most valuable objects of European art and many of the greatest European artists came across the Atlantic to the United States. American universities became global centers of research and study. In the farthest corners of the globe people copied American customs, American practices, American music, and American popular culture. As early as 1925, millions of people in Europe knew the names and faces of American movie stars while they knew not the name of their own prime minister. Much of this is still going on. Yet many of these movements—movements of power, of prestige, of presence—no longer carry the same force.

The 21st Century as American’s Century?
It seems that the twenty-first century will not be an American century. We must not think that the decline of American power came about only because of the decline of its once predominant ethnic component. The decline was probably preordained because of the decline of the age of superpowers, of super-states. For more than one hundred years after the establishing the United States, most Americans saw themselves as representing something that was the opposite of the Old World and its sins. After about one hundred years, this vision gradually transformed: the United States came to be seen as the advanced model of the Old World . . . and perhaps of the entire world. Neither of these visions is meaningful any longer. Will the American people have the inner strength to consolidate, and to sustain, the belief that their civilization is different not from the so-called Old World but from the so-called Third World, and not merely its advanced model? At the beginning of the third century of American independence, this is—or, rather, this ought to be—the question.

Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership
Review by G. John Ikenberry, who is the Peter F. Krogh professor of geopolitics and global justice at Georgetown University and a trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. New York Times, Mar. 30, 2004

Old Foreign Policy Debate
The United States is in the midst of a great debate about national security. The last great debate was in the 1940's as American officials struggled to cope with the insecurities generated by postwar Soviet power and global Communism. That era's search for security transformed the American relationship with the world, yielding a global system of alliances, doctrines of containment and deterrence and commitments to multilateral cooperation.

New Foreign Policy Debate: President Bush’s Position
A half-century later, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, painfully revealed a post-cold-war world menaced by new threats, and the Bush administration moved quickly to articulate a new vision of national security organized around:
1. Pre-emption.
2. Coalitions of the willing.
3. The unfettered use of American military power.

New Foreign Policy Debate: The Democratic Position
While critics have vigorously faulted the administration for its unilateralism and a rush to war in Iraq, they have offered only glimmerings of an alternative national security vision. Until now. The debate is now fully joined with The Choice by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the single most lucid and systematic statement of America's 21st-century security challenges yet to appear. For those troubled by President Bush's ''war on terrorism'' approach to national security, the flag of the opposition has finally and firmly been planted. Together, this new book by the distinguished scholar-diplomat and the Bush administration's 2002 national security strategy define the parameters of the establishment debate on national security.

Role of Internationalism vs. Nationalism
Mr. Brzezinski says that American national security is profoundly tied to international security, and so the country's security is increasingly in the hands of others, severing the old link between national sovereignty and national security. In this new era, the United States must be willing to work with other democracies to reduce the ''convulsive and percolating strife'' that lies behind today's global violence and terrorism. Accordingly, Mr. Brzezinski argues that Washington must use this moment of unrivaled American power to build an ''increasingly formalized global community of shared interest'' that can provide a long-term basis for global peace and security. If the slogan of the Bush administration is ''America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people,'' Mr. Brzezinski's slogan might be ''America will never be able to defend the security of its people without the help of others.''

Common Assumptions of Brzezinski and Bush
His critique of the Bush administration's approach is understated but hard-hitting, and it is effective precisely because he accepts two key White House assumptions.

1. Mr. Brzezinski agrees that American power is indispensable in providing the framework for global order.

2. Mr. Brzezinski also accepts the administration's view that the United States faces radically new security problems in which the threats are coming not from established great powers but from illiberal states, backward societies, and aggrieved peoples. Globalization and the growing ease of communication and transport project American ideas and society into the world but also provide tools for the weak to organize and hit back.

Where Brzezinski Disagrees with Bush
But Mr. Brzezinski parts company with President Bush in three fundamental respects.

1. First, he argues that the ''war on terrorism'' is not an adequate or unifying mission for American foreign policy. Terrorism is a tactic—and so to declare war on terrorism is equivalent to Franklin D. Roosevelt's declaring war on blitzkrieg. The Bush administration's ''theological approach'' to terrorism, in which we are in a struggle between good and evil and others are either with us or against us, is too abstract, politically unsustainable, and inevitably leads to scare-mongering. It is also an inadequate diagnosis of the problem and, in the end, other countries whose cooperation we need won't sign on to it.

2. Second, Mr. Brzezinski argues that an adequate approach to terrorism must focus on the historical and political context in which violence is generated. Lurking behind every terrorist act is a political problem. A ''careful political strategy is needed in order to weaken the complex political and cultural forces that give rise to terrorism,'' he says. ''What creates them has to be politically undercut.'' The American reluctance to confront the sources of Islamic radicalism, rooted in the modern history of the Middle East, is in Mr. Brzezinski's view a dangerous form of denial. To simply say that terrorists hate freedom is to miss the impulses that underlie their actions.

3. Perhaps most important, he argues that the Bush administration's arrogation of the unilateral right to define threats and use force has squandered American moral authority—the country's most prized asset. ''America's global military credibility has never been higher, yet its global political credibility has never been lower,'' he says. Ultimately, American power is enhanced if it is legitimate, and this means that Washington must concert its power with other states and exercise consensual leadership.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Brzezinski’s Critique
1. Mr. Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, began his career as a scholar of Soviet power and geopolitics, so it is not surprising that he is most penetrating in his discussion of the character and limits of American power. He is less illuminating in his depiction of how consensual hegemony or an American-led concert of great powers might operate.
2. He also finds himself bumping up against the same problem that confounds Republican hard-liners. Both sides agree that American security is enhanced by the enlargement of ''zones of global stability,'' best pursued by reducing the misery and injustice that cause political violence and by promoting human rights and democracy. But the problem is the sheer intractability of this challenge.

The Final Question
In the end Mr. Brzezinski poses but does not really answer the essential question: Can a democratic superpower, rendered vulnerable by hidden and uncertain threats, advance its security by strengthening and binding itself to the world, or will it lash out in a way that leaves itself isolated? The good news is that the last time the United States had a grand debate on national security, it did ultimately act in its enlightened self-interest.

Adapted from:
Terrorized by 'War on Terror'
How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Washington Post
Sunday, March 25, 2007; Page B01

The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has undermined our ability to confront effectively the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare—political intimidation by killing unarmed non-combatants.

But the little secret here may be that its sponsors deliberately (or instinctively) calculated the phrase’s vagueness. Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emerging culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public for the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The notion that "a nation at war" does not change its commander in chief in midstream mobilized support for President Bush in the 2004 elections. By the mobilizing appeal of being "at war," the administration channeled the sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger.

To justify the "war on terror," the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier U.S. struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism, even though Germany and Russia were first-rate military powers, which al-Qaeda is not, the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran. Such war would then plunge America into a protracted conflict spanning Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and perhaps also Pakistan.

The culture of fear is like a genie let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own—and can become demoralizing. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor. Nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could begin abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours. Now divided, we are uncertain and potentially susceptible to panic if terrorists again attack in the United States itself.

That is the result of five years of almost continuous national brainwashing on the subject of terror.  This is unlike the more muted reactions of several other nations (Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, to mention just a few) that also have suffered painful terrorist acts. In his latest justification for his war in Iraq, President Bush even claims absurdly that he has to continue waging it lest al-Qaeda cross the Atlantic to launch a war of terror here in the United States.

 Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, necessarily engage in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on presenting credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation.

That America has become insecure and more paranoid is hardly debatable. A recent study reported that in 2003, Congress identified 160 sites as potentially important national targets for would-be terrorists. With lobbyists weighing in, by the end of that year the list had grown to 1,849; by the end of 2004, to 28,360; by 2005, to 77,769. The national database of possible targets now has some 300,000 items in it, including the Sears Tower in Chicago and an Illinois Apple and Pork Festival.

Last week in Washington, on my way to visit a journalistic office, I had to pass through one of the absurd "security checks" that have proliferated in almost all privately owned office buildings in this capital and New York City. A uniformed guard required me to fill out a form, show an I.D. and in this case explain in writing the purpose of my visit. Would a visiting terrorist indicate in writing that his purpose is "to blow up the building"? Would the guard be able to arrest such a self-confessing, would-be suicide bomber? To make matters more absurd, large department stores, with their crowds of shoppers, do not have any comparable procedures. Nor do concert halls or movie theaters. Yet such "security" procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality.

Government at every level has stimulated the paranoia. Consider, for example, the electronic billboards over interstate highways urging motorists to "Report Suspicious Activity" (drivers in turbans?). Some mass media have made their own contribution. The cable channels and some print media have found that horror scenarios attract audiences, while terror "experts" as "consultants" provide authenticity for the apocalyptic visions fed to the American public. Hence the proliferation of programs with bearded "terrorists" as the central villains. Their general effect is to reinforce the sense of the unknown but lurking danger said to threaten increasingly the lives of all Americans.

The entertainment industry has also jumped into the act. So the TV serials and films in which the evil characters have recognizable Arab features, sometimes highlighted by religious gestures that exploit public anxiety and stimulate Islamophobia. Artists too often render Arab facial stereotypes, especially in newspaper cartoons, in ways sadly reminiscent of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaigns. Lately, even some college student organizations have become involved in such propagation, apparently oblivious to the menacing connection between stimulating racial and religious hatreds and unleashing the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust.

The atmosphere fostered by the "war on terror" has encouraged legal and political harassment of Arab Americans, generally loyal Americans, for conduct that has not been unique to them. A case in point is the reported harassment of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its efforts to emulate, not very successfully, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Some House Republicans recently described CAIR members as "terrorist apologists," whom they wanted to ban from using a Capitol meeting room for a panel discussion.

Social discrimination, for example toward Muslim air travelers, has also been its unintended byproduct. Not surprisingly, animus toward the United States even among Muslims otherwise not particularly concerned with the Middle East has intensified, while America's reputation as a leader in fostering constructive interracial and interreligious relations has suffered egregiously.

The record is even more troubling in the general area of civil rights. The culture of fear has bred intolerance and suspicion of foreigners.  The country has adopted legal procedures that undermine fundamental notions of justice.  Legal changes of diluted if not undone “innocent until proven guilty,” with some—even U.S. citizens— incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without effective and prompt access to due process. There is no known, hard evidence that such excess has prevented significant acts of terrorism, and convictions for would-be terrorists have been few and far between. Someday Americans will be as ashamed of this record as they now have become of the earlier instances in U.S. history of panic by the many prompting intolerance against the few.

Meanwhile, the "war on terror" has gravely damaged the United States internationally. For Muslims, the similarity between the rough treatment of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military and of the Palestinians by the Israelis has prompted a widespread sense of hostility toward the United States in general. It's not the "war on terror" that angers Muslims watching the news on television; it's the victimization of Arab civilians. And the resentment has expanded beyond Muslims. A recent BBC poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries sought respondents' assessments of the role of states in international affairs. The poll’s respondents ranked Israel, Iran, and the United States as the states with "the most negative influence on the world." Alas, for some that is the new axis of evil!

The events of 9/11 could have resulted in a global solidarity against extremism and terrorism. A global alliance of moderates, including Muslims, deliberately extirpating specific terrorist networks and ending political conflicts that spawn terrorism would have been more productive than a demagogically proclaimed and largely solitary U.S. "war on terror" against "Islamo-Fascism." Only a confidently determined and reasonable America can promote genuine international security which then leaves no political space for terrorism.

Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, "Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia"? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which we cannot deny, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, is the author most recently of Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower (Basic Books).

5 Myths About Terrorism

By Alan B. Krueger

Tuesday, September 11, 07; 12:00 AM

Six years after 9/11, all too many Americans still have only a vague idea of what does—and doesn't—motivate terrorists. It doesn't help that many politicians exploit the anxiety that terrorism evokes to promote their own agendas. Here are five key urban legends:

1. Terrorism is a random act carried out by irrational people who hate our way of life.

If only it were that simple. In fact, geopolitical grievances, not blind hatred typically motivates terrorists. The agendas of individual terrorist groups vary, but their tactical goal is always more or less the same: to sow fear and confusion by deliberately targeting civilians to intimidate a country into changing its policies and ways.

So political calculations are key here. Terrorists, for example, are more likely to target citizens of countries that occupy other countries. In addition, wealthy democracies are more likely to be the targets of terrorist strikes than are totalitarian regimes, which suggests that terrorists deliberately strike countries that are susceptible to public pressure.

Another reason not to see terrorist attacks as random: They're often timed to occur when they can have maximum impact, such as the eve of pivotal elections. In Israel, for example, attacks by Palestinian terrorist groups bent on sabotaging peace talks are more frequent before elections when left-wing governments hold power. The terrorists hope to push Israeli voters in a more hawkish direction, according to research by Claude Berrebi of the Rand Corporation and Esteban F. Klor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

There's even a cold logic to the time of day that terrorists pick for their attacks, which also suggests a rhythm that's far from random. My analysis of U.S. government data from the National Counterterrorism Center reveals that terrorists are most likely to strike in the morning -- in time to enter the day's news cycle.

2. Terrorists are no different than ordinary criminals.

Wrong. Criminals tend to be poor and uneducated. But terrorists generally come from families with above-average means and educations. For example, Jitka Maleckova of the Russell Sage Foundation and I studied members of the military wing of the radical Shiite group, Hezbollah. Those killed in action in the 1980s and early 1990s were better educated and were less likely to be poor than were their Lebanese compatriots. Other researchers have found similar results for other terrorist groups. People who join terrorist organizations often have legitimate, well-paying jobs, unlike common criminals.

3. Terrorists are likely to cross into the United States from Mexico.

This is a favorite chestnut of some activists and politicians keen to tighten immigration and build a fence on the Mexican border. But the historical record doesn't bear it out. Of course, the past may not be a good predictor of the future, but terrorists have rarely crossed into the United States from Mexico. In a recent Nixon Center study of 373 Islamist terrorists, Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke concluded: "Despite widespread alarms raised over terrorist infiltration from Mexico, we found no terrorist presence in Mexico and no terrorists who entered the U.S. from Mexico." By contrast, the authors found "a sizable terrorist presence in Canada and a few Canadian-based terrorists who have entered the U.S." For example, authorities caught Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian terrorist who tried to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in December 1999, trying to cross the border from Canada into Washington state.

4. Muslims perpetrate most terrorism.

Wrong. No religion has a monopoly on terrorism. Every major religious faith has had followers involved in terrorism. Sri Lanka, for instance, has grappled for decades with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist group. The Tigers pioneered suicide bombing as a terrorist tactic and hopes to create a homeland for the country's mostly Tamil minority, who are largely Hindu. Although radical Islamic terrorists are the worry du jour because of 9/11 and Iraq, the data show that the predominant religion of a country is a poor predictor of whether its people will become involved in terrorism.

After all, it was not long ago that homegrown villains such as Timothy McVeigh and the so-called Unabomber were the most notorious terrorists. That makes sense; most terrorist incidents are local, motivated by local concerns and carried out by natives. Even international terrorist events tend to be local affairs, most frequently carried out by local militants who target foreigners who happen to be in their country. (Just think of last week's foiled plot to attack U.S. targets in Germany.) This suggests that the likelihood of attack by homegrown terrorists is far greater than the threat of another 9/11-style attack by foreigners.

5. Terrorism never succeeds.

If terrorism didn't work, it would be far more rare than it now is. Sometimes terrorists do achieve their goals, which is why others continue to try the tactic.

Of course, it's not always easy to determine what the terrorists' objectives are, but sometimes their goals are clear. Consider the devastating commuter-rail bombings in Madrid in March 05, three days before Spain held congressional elections. The Islamic radicals who set off the bombs reportedly hoped to change the Spanish government. It worked. A new study by Jose Garcia Matalvo, an economist at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, compared absentee ballots cast before the bombings with votes cast after them on a province-by-province level. His work convincingly shows that the shock of the bombings led the Socialist Party to defeat the incumbent conservative government. On assuming power, the Socialist Party immediately withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq.

Alan B. Krueger is the Bendheim professor of economics and public policy at Princeton University and the author of "What Makes a Terrorist."

Adapted from:
“666 and All That: Bible Prophecy, American Fundamentalism, and Contemporary World Trends”
Presented to the Florida Conference of Historians
March 2005
Paul S. Boyer
University of Wisconsin, Madison

In 2001, a movie called Left Behind featured such events as “the Rapture,” the rise of the Antichrist, and Armageddon, which mystified many reviewers. The New York Times called it “a futuristic global thriller…, in the … style of a 1970s ... disaster movie.” In fact, the Left Behind movie and the fictional series on which it was based are only the tip of a large iceberg of Bible prophecy belief in contemporary American culture. Preached in thousands of churches, proclaimed by mass-marketed paperbacks and TV evangelists, these beliefs thrive at all levels of society, helping shape the political culture. In the 2000 election, George W. Bush’s most committed supporters included such prophecy gurus as Jerry Falwell; Pat Robertson; and James Hagee, pastor of a 16,000-member church in San Antonio and author of From Daniel to Doomsday: The Countdown has Begun. Millions of Americans read Bible prophecy not as a spiritual allegory or as a source of images that have inspired great art, but as a detailed roadmap to coming events.

In this essay I would like to provide some historical context, look at how prophecy popularizers have interpreted key events since World War II, and offer some reflections on the larger implications of this worldview.

The Bible-prophecy beliefs that pervade contemporary America find their roots in ancient Mesopotamian myths of cosmic struggle between order and chaos, light and darkness, good and evil. These myths underlay the literary genre known as Apocalyptic that flourished in Second-Temple Judaism and early Christianity. (The Greek word “apocalypse” simply means the unveiling of hidden knowledge.) Apocalyptic elements appear in the biblical books of Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, the Gospels, Revelation, and elsewhere. The early Church Fathers discouraged apocalyptic fervor, but it flourished in medieval Europe, preached by wandering prophets and reformist priests and represented in cathedral sculpture, tapestries, stained-glass windows, mystery plays, illuminated manuscripts, and the visions of Hildegard of Bingen. In the Reformation, pamphlets and woodcuts portrayed both the Pope and Martin Luther as the Antichrist. Seventeenth-century Puritans were steeped in apocalyptic speculation. Some in New England saw America as t