The Times had some excerpts from the long telegram.
Originally posted by George Kennan:
We must see that our public is educated to realities of Russian situation. I cannot over-emphasize importance of this. Press cannot do this alone. It must be done mainly by government, which is necessarily more experienced and better informed on practical problems involved. In this we need not be deterred by [ugliness?] of picture. I am convinced that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people. There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown.
We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And unless we do, Russians certainly will.
The thing to be feared.
Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. [T]he greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.
mswas
March 23, 2005, 8:53pm
22
Paraphrase: We must be confident in our own inherent superiority, lest we be overcome by the inferior lusts of a baser enemy.
He sounds like a standard colonialist. He seems less distasteful than most, but there are some real issues I have with just this post alone. For instance his insistance of reliance upon the government for information. While he is accurate in his assessment that the government will know better than we, it is this idea that led to a lot of the Government’s lies over the past 50 years.
Erek