If certain people have their way there will be war with Russia. Americans have no business contemplating such a thing. For that matter, there was no excuse for the Cold War. It was concocted from the recommendations of George Kennan. This is disturbing, considering that is not what he said. This concoction was done by a hysterical press and the ‘thinkers’ of RAND Corporation. Of course, neocons at RAND, and their purportedly enormous brains, are not working for Americans. They work their magic at the behest of the Air Force. Sadly, they were able to use the words of George Kennan to achieve their aims. The neocons erased George Kennan.
Kennan tried but never succeeded in living down his famous ‘X Article’ in which he said ominous things about the Soviet Union. When he talked about containment, he thought he was recommending the political containment of a political threat, not some ‘doctrine’ of perpetual military containment. More importantly, he thought containment should apply to the Americans as well.
The neocons’ idealistic and pretentious lack of genuine foreign policy
Kennan expressed concern about the ascendance in the United States of an ‘idealistic and pretentious lack of genuine foreign policy’ that focused on the American Dream. He thought the U.S. must put its own house in order first.
He argued that the Soviets were part of an historical tradition of the Third Rome, which although it is a rival religion, is still Byzantine. Strangely, he could already see similar totalitarian tendencies at work in the United States. The Americans had taken up a form of existence that does not recognize limits, a result of unconditional acceptance of the logic of the marketplace. This had led to the loss of a sense of what should not be done.
America’s monster: the indestructible myth
So instead of a political containment lasting for 10-15 years the doctrine was transformed into an ‘indestructible myth’:
“There emerged one of those great forbidding apparitions to the credence in which mass opinion is so easily swayed: a monster devoid of all humanity and of all rational motive, at once the embodiment and the caricature of evil, devoid of internal conflicts and problems of its own, intent only on bringing senseless destruction to the lives and hopes of others.”
The symptoms of our decay go beyond politics. They include ‘overpopulation, urbanization, hyper-intensity of communication, and destruction of the environment’. However, for Kennan the nuclear arms race was the clearest indication of spiritual decline. It was a ‘spiritual and philosophical derangement of the last order’, a madness, a death wish, a lack of faith, ‘wrong in the good old-fashioned meaning of the word’. Stefan Rossbach, GNOSTIC WARS: The Cold War in the Context of a History of Western Spirituality.