This intro is going to be a bit longer (and more controversial) so fasten your seat belts.
By the late 1970s I was still left-liberal politically. I did not like Richard Nixon. I supported Jack Kennedy and the “Great Society” of Lyndon Johnson. I emphatically supported the civil rights laws of 1964 that liberated African-Americans from a sea of prejudice, as well as the earlier Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954) that declared segregated schools unconstitutional. And indeed I support today laws and executive decrees that will give equal rights and privileges to homosexuals in the services and in civilian pursuits.
While I was never an activist, I did work a bit for Jimmy Carter. I got a press pass when he was running for President and flew on his campaign plane along with high profile newsmen like Sam Donaldson and Ed Bradley. I had a personal interview with Carter and then made a sound-filmstrip called “How To Get Elected President.” It was a huge flop. Sold maybe 5 copies! I don’t blame Carter for that. It was not one of my better efforts.
I confess this now because it was about that time that I began to be disillusioned with left-liberal democratic views and by the time Ronald Reagan come onto the stage, I had been converted to a more free-market libertarian, unapologetic pro-American, point of view. Many people are not aware that Reagan himself began his political career as a liberal democrat. He was also a strong union supporter and was president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Part of my change in political views was due to the heavy amount of reading I was doing then in history, science-society issues and politics. Much of this reading was at odds with the views I had held since college at Antioch. Some of my change was no doubt a reaction against the “new left” that grew powerful in the Vietnam years and after. This “new left,” it seemed to me, was and is not progressive at all. Often they seem to sponsor a rejection of science and technology; promote an irrational fear of nuclear power and genetic engineering; encourage a general disgust with modernity; condemn out of hand “corporate America”; mock middle-class values and life-styles; glorify primitive ways of life (see the new hit movie AVATAR), and make environmentalism into a virtual new religion. (As an aside here, note how many of these dubious directions resemble Radical Islamic complaints about the “Great Satan America.”)
Maybe it was my growing up experience in WW2 but I also could not stomach the extreme anti-American fulminations of people like Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Noah Chomsky, Allen Ginsberg, et al. To say that Ginsberg’s famous poem “Howl” was not a favorite of mine would be an understatement. When he wrote that first line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” I could have forgiven him if he meant folks like Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. I don’t think he did.
Part of my change was also due to the increased radicalization I began to see in the environmental movement. I always have considered myself an environmentalist and still do. Like most every thinking person, I want to see our air, earth and water in a non-polluted healthy state. I want to protect wilderness and save endangered species. The very first production of Hawkhill was in fact an environmentalist poem called SPACESHIP EARTH. I stand by its facts and sentiments.
I don’t really know how it happened but by the 80s and 90s environmentalism began to take on the spirit of a radical new religion. While environmental activists, like communists before them, claim to be “scientific,” I (along with many scientists!) do not always see it that way. Much of the time they seem to me to be competing to see who can scream loudest that pollution is at an all time high getting worse day by day, that natural resources are disappearing so fast it makes your head swim and that populations are exploding so much that soon, as Paul Ehrlich solemnly pronounced in 1967 “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” And it is all the fault of greedy corporations and hedonistic consumers.
Does no one have the guts to say “the emperor has no clothes”? Yes, we have some problems with pollution and resources and population but these problems are manageable, are being managed and the environment today is much healthier than it was fifty years ago, a hundred times healthier than it was a hundred years ago! And we have managed this without destroying the goose that lays the golden eggs – that is, the system of free market capitalism that both new left and many environmental radicals love to hate.
Part of my change in views was also probably due to personal contacts and interviews with left-liberal scientists on the one hand and with more libertarian conservative scientists on the other. In these interviews I began to see the left-liberals lacked reasonable evidence-based answers to important science and society issues like climate change, resource depletion, pollution, environmental protection, genetic engineering, biotechnology and population growth. I’m talking about interviews with people like Jimmy Carter, Howard Odum, Eugene Odum, Amory Lovins, Stephen Schneider, Thomas Lovejoy and Jeremy Rifkin. In contrast I also interviewed experts with more conservative, contrarian and libertarian leaning views who it seemed to me did have evidence-based answers to some of these same problems. Scientists like Richard Lindzen, Bernard Cohen, Richard Burgess, Ken Zweibel, Marion Clawson, Sally Ride, Bruce Ames and the late economist Julian Simon. The contrast was between these two groups was often striking.
Part 6: Detente:
The next president to be elected after Richard Nixon (Gerald Ford, vice-president under Nixon served as President after Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal) was a relatively unknown peanut-farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter. Carter was elected on a pledge to “cool” the cold war and he tried to do just that. He claimed that “anti-Communists” were exaggerating the threats and in the end were harmful to the long term interests of the U.S. and the western world. “We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism,” he said in an address at Notre Dame University in 1977, “which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that that’s being changed. … Now I believe in détente with the Soviet Union.”
After Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes in 1956 the Soviet Union did seem to many observers to be mellowing. Some called it a “thaw” in the cold war. The Soviets were apparently no longer sending such massive numbers of prisoners to slave-labor camps. If anything the communists under Mao Zedong in China, however, were accelerating their campaigns of terror and bloodshed. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” in 1958 to 1961 cost many millions of Chinese citizens their lives. And then in 1966 to 1976 Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” brought still more chaos, misery and death. Some scholars claim the total death toll in China surpassed 60 million from these disastrous utopian campaigns. Sixty million! (And in America I knew personally fellow travelers who were still defending Mao as a great improvement over Chiang Kai-shek.)
New gulags were also being established in Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. (In Cuba, for instance, we can give credit to Castro for advances in literacy and health care, but even today one quarter of adult men are in the active military and thousands of men and women are in political prisons, including men whose only crime is being homosexual.)
A theory of détente had been championed first by President Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. It was later adopted and expanded by President Carter. Détente was also a favorite theory of many intellectuals in the US and Western Europe. In the Soviet Union it was called “peaceful coexistence.” (As with most everything in the Soviet Union this was of course a whopping lie. They never really gave up their utopian goal of making the whole world a communist paradise. Just as Stalin had preached a “common front” when it suited his purposes, peaceful coexistence for the Soviets was a way to calm the imperialists while they worked assiduously to destroy them. As Lenin once said “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them!”)
The basic idea of détente was that we should try to understand and live with two systems in the modern world, communist dictatorships and free-market democracies. Each was felt to be legitimate and each could and would live side by side for the foreseeable future.
The “détente” theory was severely strained by Soviet actions in the late 20th century in East Germany, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, and in Afghanistan. In East Germany in 1961 the communists built an ugly wall to separate East Berlin from West Berlin and prevent citizens of the communist side from fleeing to the freedom side. In 1964 a freedom threat in Hungary sent Soviet tanks into Budapest to suppress any deviations from communist dogma. In 1968 Czech reformers were threatening to replace the communist government with a democratic one. The Soviets felt threatened again and sent Soviet tanks into the Czech capital to violently put down the “Prague Spring.”
In 1979 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in a futile effort to support their communist allies who were then in power. (In the case of Afghanistan the U.S. supported Muslim insurgents with critical arms and supplies that helped lead the Taliban come to power. This support came back to haunt us in the 21st century when some of the same Muslim fighters, like Osama bin Laden, attacked the U.S. on 9/11.)
And finally in Poland in 1980 an increasingly powerful trade union movement, Solidarity, was seen as a mortal threat, so the Soviets ordered the subservient Communist government to squash it with any means necessary including military might.
Throughout all of these late 20th century events many experts in the U.S. were still supporting détente. Steven Cohen, for instance, a leading Russian scholar at Princeton University, wrote in the late 1970s that “there was no alternative to détente.” As it turned out, there was an alternative. That of our next President, Ronald Reagan.
Stay tuned for Part 7: “We Win, They Lose.”
In the meantime you might want to read the following review in School Library Journal of Part 1 of our best-selling series DEMOCRACY IN WORLD HISTORY.
Democracy in the Ancient World (Democracy in World History Series). video or DVD. color. 26 min. (closed captioned). with tchr’s. guide. Hawkhill Assocs. 2006. video, ISBN 1-55979-169-1: $89; DVD, ISBN 1-55979-170-5: $109.
Gr 7 Up–As the initial component of a six-part series that covers the development of democratic societies from early man to the current day, this program establishes a strong foundation for those studying the topic from both societal as well as political perspectives. This segment covers the evolution of political structures throughout the world from tribal societies through the period just before the Renaissance. A nicely balanced combination of still photography, live-action video, clear graphics, and a crisp narration offers an excellent summary of the development of democracy. Too often this philosophical basis of governmental structure is overlooked in favor of more routine examination of its organization. Particularly noteworthy as well is the inclusion of contributions and conflicts from non-Western cultures and the dramatic role that religion has played in the development of democracy. The DVD version includes an interactive component of guided questions (aligned with National Standards) for either a class or individual students to undertake after viewing the program; incorrect responses result in references to particular portions of the presentation where the correct answer may be found. A mastery quiz is included on the DVD as well as in printed format.–Dwain Thomas, Lake Park High School, Roselle, IL
Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President
P.S. Once gain, don’t forget our huge 2010 sale: 70% discount on all DVD programs. 90% discount on all VHS tapes. See our web site: www.hawkhill.com