Bernard Baruch: We Need an International Law with Teeth

07 Wednesday May 2014

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9/11, A Choice between the Quick and the Dead, Bernard Baruch, Cold War, Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Einstein's Monsters, Fear, foreign policy, India, international relations, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Muhammad Atta, North Korea, Nuclear Weapons, Nukes, Pakistan, Pashtun, peace, politics, Soviet Union, War

“The basis of a sound foreign policy, in this new age, for all the nations here gathered, is that anything that happens, no matter where or how, which menaces the peace of the world, or the economic stability, concerns each and all of us…

Now, if ever, is the time to act for the common good. Public opinion supports a world movement toward security. If I read the signs aright, the peoples want a program not composed merely of pious thoughts but of enforceable sanctions — an international law with teeth in it…

Let this be anchored in our minds: Peace is never long preserved by weight of metal or by an armament race. Peace can be made tranquil and secure only by understanding and agreement fortified by sanctions. We must embrace international cooperation or international disintegration…

The solution will require apparent sacrifice in pride and in position, but better pain as the price of peace than death as the price of war.”

__________

From Bernard Baruch’s 1946 speech “A Choice between the Quick and the Dead”.

Though he would in the following year coin the term “Cold War”, Baruch concluded this speech with the ungrudging proposal that all nuclear weapons be placed — through a thirteen-step procedure — under some intergovernmental authority. You think that sounds idealistic? Yeah, me too. Or at least anachronistic, especially in a time when the international community flounders purposelessly, not only in its attempt to curb the annexation of Eastern Ukraine, but also in keeping track of a massive commercial airliner with 200 cell-phones on board. What would it possibly do with a couple thousand nuclear bombs?

Though the number of active nukes has shriveled to around 4,100 from a peak of 68,000 in 1985, Baruch’s point is a serious one, especially when our attention is drawn to the Korean Peninsula or the once-unified Pashtun region split between Pakistan and India. Neither of those two neighbors, nor the hermit kingdom of the Kim dynasty, is yet to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, even though they are armed with an estimated 200-plus total (though not all active) warheads.

As someone born in 1989, I’ve never felt the disquiet of a duck-and-cover drill. Nor did I spend geography week in Kindergarten as my mom did: ogling anxiously at the massive Soviet Union — a red Rorschach blot that provoked only ugly words. Fear. Danger. Enemy. Still, if we can form a post-9/11 position toward nuclear weapons, it must rest on the tension between the unfortunate fact and terrifying contingency which follow: The human animal’s technological progress is outpacing its moral progress; what happens when an apocalyptic ideology lays its hands on apocalypse-inducing weaponry? In other words: can there be any doubt that if Muhammad Atta had a nuclear bomb, he would have used it?

There are two additional paragraphs, supplied by Martin Amis in his suggestively titled Einstein’s Monsters (1987), which illuminate a critical generational difference in our attitudes towards the inevitability of living with nukes.

My father regards nuclear weapons as an unbudgeable given. They will always be necessary because the Soviets will always have them and the Soviets will always want to enslave the West. Arms agreements are no good because the Soviets will always cheat. Unilateral disarmament equals surrender. And anyway, it isn’t a case of “red or dead.” The communist world is itself nuclear-armed and deeply divided: so it’s a case of “red and dead.”

Well, dead, at any rate, is what this prescription seems to me to promise. Nuclear weapons, my father reminds me, have deterred war for forty years. I remind him that no global abattoir presided over the century-long peace that followed Napoleon’s discomfiture in 1815. And the trouble with deterrence is that it can’t last out the necessary time-span, which is roughly between now and the death of the sun.

Read on:

I describe how Baruch became the original “Wolf of Wall Street”
Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck riff on the evils of militarism
Andrew Bacevich connects the concept of ‘original sin’ to the prospect of future war

A Chekist on the Global Chessboard

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

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Anne Applebaum, Cheka, Chekist, China, Clement Attlee, Communism, current events, Danielle Crittenden, David Frum, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Gulag, Gulag: A History, Harry Truman, International Politics, Iraq, KGB, Leninism, Leon Trotsky, Leonid Brezhnev, Lev Kamenev, Neville Chamberlain, Nikita Khrushchev, North Korea, Police State, Russia, Russian History, Saddam Hussein, Secret Police, Soviet Union, Stalinism, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Torture, Totalitarianism, Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir Putin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Winston Churchill

Brian Lamb: Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you say [Putin] was a ‘Cheka’?

Anne Applebaum: Putin was a member of the secret police, which was later called the KGB. And the old name — the Leninist era name — for the KGB is the Cheka. And Putin has described himself as a ‘Chekist,’ which is an old fashioned word for secret policeman.

Brian Lamb: What does that mean to you?

Anne Applebaum: The first time I heard him say it, it filled me with horror. It’s like somebody saying, “I was a Brownshirt.” It has very, very unpleasant connotations.

Brian Lamb: Why do you think he says it?

Anne Applebaum: He says it because it gives him an aura of invincibility. ‘We were the people behind the scenes who were running the old Soviet Union.’ The term still commands a certain amount of respect in Russia. A poll was done recently which showed that some 60 or 70 percent of Russians still think Lenin was a great man who contributed to their country. So he’s echoing a respect for the Russian Revolution.

Brian Lamb: I read a story in The New York Times about Saddam Hussein which read just like [accounts of the Soviet Gulag] — the enemies lists that they had, the kind of people they put away, the torturing that went on. How much of this is still going on around the world?

Anne Applebaum: I would say a great deal. The Stalinist regime — and later the Krushchevite and Brezhnevite regimes in the Soviet Union — actually spread their techniques, and they taught people around the world how to run police states. I have no doubt that, through the East Germans, Saddam Hussein’s police state was probably set up with Russian or Soviet advice.

It is not an accident that so many of these systems share so much in common; there was a set of techniques, they were deliberately spread. The Soviet camp was exported to China; the Chinese exported it to North Korea. The North Korean Gulag that exists today sounds, from what little we know about it, very much like Stalin’s Gulag.

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From Anne Applebaum’s 2003 interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, discussing her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag: A History.

I sometimes think it all boils down to names. We had Roosevelt (Dutch for “rose garden”) then Truman (Old English: “honest man”); Chamberlain (“servant of a bed chamber”) then Churchill (“church’s hill”) and Attlee (“from the meadow”).

They had Stalin (“man of steel”) and his henchmen: Kamenev (“man of stone”), Molotov (“hammer”), Lenin (“from the River Lena”) — and Trotsky (The name on one of young Lev Bronstein’s fake passports, which wound up catching on).

Putin, though he mysteriously lacks a single antecedent family member who shares his surname, lays claim to a strangely appropriate etymology: “on his way”, “on his path”.

In the next few weeks, I’ll post more on this topic as well as excerpts from Applebaum’s book, which as far as I can tell is now considered the preeminent history of the Soviet prison and slave labor system (a Google search for “gulag book” displays it first, above Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago). Gulag concludes with a clear-eyed rumination on the post-Soviet psyche, especially as it is expressed by today’s Russians and enacted in the 20th century atavisms of their largely popular Chekist-in-Chief. Writing in her epilogue a decade ago, Applebaum observed,

[T]en years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, the country that has inherited the Soviet Union’s diplomatic and foreign policies, its embassies, its debts, and its seat at the United Nations, continues to act as if it has not inherited the Soviet Union’s history. Russia does not have a national museum dedicated to the history of repression. Nor does Russia have a national place of mourning, a monument which officially recognizes the suffering of victims and their families…

Many Russians experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a profound blow to their personal pride. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel—but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad. It is too painful, like speaking ill of the dead.

Unlike most attempts at mass psychoanalysis, these considerations are hardly trivial, especially as we attempt to internalize what is happening in Ukraine and perhaps anticipate the Chekist’s next move.

On a brighter note: I recommend not only Applebaum’s substantial book, but also her columns, which are printed in The Washington Post. Along with Danielle Crittenden (wife of conservative political commentator David Frum), she has also published a cook book on Polish comfort food — and though I can’t speak to its merits, I can say that when juxtaposed with her work on the famines of Stalinism makes her probably the most versatile author I’ve cited on this blog. (Below: Applebaum and Crittenden; below that, Applebaum with her sons and husband, Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.)