Dr. Robert Hickson 18 December 2012 Feast of the Expectation of Mary

Honor in Foreign Policy

After some recent historical writing on Vietnam and its strategic milieu during the years 1962-

1965, I became, perhaps for the first time, much more deeply aware of the presence or absence of

Honor in the conduct of modern Foreign Policy. This was moreso the case when I also recalled some of

the earlier immemorial insights about the place of honor as a moral power in history and strategy,

specifically as they are to be found in the trenchant writings of James Burnham (1905-1987).

In Burnham’s 1967 collection of strategic and cultural essays, entitled The War We Are In, he

repeated in his introductory chapter what he had first published in 1947, twenty years before: “The

Third World War began in April 1944.”1 And he then proceeded to give “the defining incident”2—a

mutiny of part of the Greek Navy in Alexandria, Egypt, incited by the Greek Communist Party—and its

altogether subversive implications. That is to say, the Third World War was understood to have begun

before the Second World War was officially terminated. Moreover, Burnham argued,

In a more basic sense what began in the spring of 1944 was not so much a “new” Third World War as a new phase in a continuing war that started in November 1917, with the Bolshevik conquest of power in Russia, that might indeed be dated most significantly from Lenin’s organization of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903: the protracted war of the communist enterprise for a monopoly of world power. On the coordinates of this long-term scale, the protracted war is seen as the dominant theme of twentieth-century history, with the major phases fairly well marked, though overlapping.3

That Protracted War was what Burnham saw taking place in the Twentieth Century, or in what

Yuri Slezkine later specifically proclaimed to be “the Jewish Century,” which was itself only an aspect

of a longer epoch, “the Jewish Age.” Professor Slezkine even begins his candid book with the

1 James Burnham, The War We Are In (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1967), p. 9.2 Ibid.3 Ibid., p. 11. On the same page, Burnham clearly presents the phases of the protracted war, “from the formation and

training of the cadres of the revolutionary army (1903-1917)” onward to “the seizure of the initial base, or beachhead (1917)” and beyond, up to 1944—and, by the end of the book, up to 1967.

1

following forceful (and oft-repeated) words:

The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century....Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.4

By way of further contrast of perspectives, we may also consider a memorable passage about

the grave moral effects of World War I, taken from a book by Professor Theodore Ropp, the Austrian

and later-American Military Historian. It will lead us further into our deeper considerations of Honor,

even in the coming Revolutionary Warfare in the proclaimed “Jewish Century.” In Theodore Ropp’s

learned book, War in the Modern World,5 he speaks about “the great journalist, C.E. Montague, who at

forty-seven dyed his grey hair to enlist as a private [in World War I],” but soon regrettably came to see,

in his very great disenchantment, that the cumulative and pervasive “attitudes of mingled horror and

disgust might make it far more difficult to preserve the peace which had been [apparently] won [in

1918] with such suffering.”6 But now we come to C.E. Montague’s own unforgettable words, published

in 1922, reminding us—dare we say it?—also of our situation today, perhaps even in Europe now:

Civilization itself...wears a strange new air of precariousness. Even before the war a series of melancholy public misadventures had gone some way to awake the disquieting notion that civilization, the whole ordered, fruitful joint action of a nation, a continent, or the whole world, was only a bluff. When the world is at peace and fares well, the party of order and decency, justice and mercy and self-control, is really bluffing a much larger party of egoism and greed that would bully and grab it if it dared....The bad men are not held down by force; they are only bluffed by the pretense of it. They have got the tip now....The plain man , so far as I know him, is neither aghast nor gleeful at this revelation. For the most part he looks somewhat listlessly on....A sense of moral horror does not come easily when you have supped full of horrors on most of the days of three or four years [on the battlefields of 1914-1918]....Some new god, or devil, of course, may enter at any time into this disfurnished soul. Genius in some leader might either possess it with an anarchic passion...to smash all the old institutions or fire it with a new craving to lift itself clear of the wrack...For either a St. Francis or a Lenin there is a wide field to till, but of pretty stiff clay.7

4 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, New Jersey and Oxford, England: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 1.5 Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World (New York: Collier Books—Macmillan Publishing Company, 1962, which is

a “New, Revised Edition” of the original Duke University Book first published in 1959), 414 pages.6 Ibid., p. 273.7 Ibid., pp. 273-274. Theodore Ropp is here quoting from Montague’s own 1922 book, entitled Disenchantment, pp. 195-

197. With such “a wide field to till,” we are also reminded of Christ’s lengthy and explained “parable of the Sower,” especially the intimate connection between the cultivation of the soil and the cultivation of the soul. (Also with Grace.)

2

These framing words, deftly chosen by Professor Ropp, will lead us a little further into the

reflections on Honor by James Burnham, who is, like C.E. Montague, no sentimentalist, but, rather, a

very realistic and courageous man of high intelligence and eloquence, and with a full human heart.

Since 1964, when, as a new Second Lieutenant, I first read James Burnham’s then just-

published Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism, I have greatly

admired him, and his sobering, deep insights invariably presented in a manly form of lucid English

prose. He had once been a Trotskyite and knew well, from the inside, the toxins of a Great Ideology

and its web of deceits and dialectic linguistic manipulations. He was especially aware of “the Language

Weapon,” and of the Deceptive Idealistic Veils of False Rhetoric. He also therefore knew the

importance of continually combating the Lie and fostering Trust. He knew the secular, practical

importance of forming and keeping trust in Strategic Alliances. “Pactum Serva!” as the Latin once put

it: “Keep Covenant.” Keep your promises, keep, especially, your Vows in the even deeper things of life,

and not only in those binding and irreversible promises to God.

A reflective mind, even one with my own callowness in 1964, would not only at once see the

depth of James Burnham’s words, but it would also further appreciate Joseph Sobran’s own personal

words of witness about James Burnham. For, he knew Burnham quite closely and respectfully, for

almost fifteen years, from 1972-1987. Even after Joe left the magazine in 1993 under wounding

circumstances (six years after Burnham’s death), Joe always affectionately told me—and at least five

times—that James Burnham was the “moral core” of National Review. This is a high tribute coming

from Joe Sobran himself about such a very different kind of philosophic and strategic thinker from

himself, and who was a reticently cultured and highly disciplined, moral character, as well—with no

attractions to anarchy!

Moreover, if one also now reads in Joe’s recently published, posthumous collection of his

selected National Review articles from 1974-1991, especially what he wrote briefly on James Burnham

(pp. 97-99), on 11 September, soon after Burnham’s death on 28 July 1987, one may likewise glimpse

Burnham’s unexpected moral intensity and rare outburst of indignation, for example when the “U.S.

was withdrawing recognition from Rhodesia” and doing it with an uncalled-for and dishonorable dose

of oleaginous diplomatic language, as well. In view of such a combined provocation of event and

language, Burnham’s sudden words (and very rare resort of profanity) were especially stunning to Joe.

3

It was also apparently the case one other time, when other unctuous words were publicly simpered

forth about the need for more “social democracy” in Vietnam. But, returning to the “Rhodesian

situation,” Burnham unexpectedly said to Sobran: “Sometimes in this world you have to throw your

friends to the wolves. But you don’t have to talk a lot of shit about democracy while you do it.”8

With this rare profanity in mind, Joe even explicitly said: “Jim Burnham was so refined and

restrained that I nearly fainted the first (of two) times I ever heard him use a vulgar word.” 9 As

mentioned above, the other time was likely when he was mightily provoked by a comparable hypocrisy

and dishonor concerning our desertion of the Vietnamese people, but only after a deceitfully

euphemistic “Vietnamization” and, then, only after a “face-saving” and perfidiously “Decent Interval.”

What James Burnham so memorably said to Joe Sobran on that first occasion of indignant

intensity, in person, also reminded me, though much more significantly and fully, of James Burnham’s

earlier, very self-revealing words, in writing, about Honor in the struggle against communism,

especially about Honor in relation to Foreign Policy. This passage comes from one of Burnham’s

earlier books, published some few years after World War II and yet before the shameful and

momentous events of 1956 in Suez and in Hungary and also in Indonesia, and it is a passage that

nonetheless should be savored in full.

His historically informed words especially touch upon the moral factors involved in true

“political warfare”—i.e., in classical POLWAR, which Burnham always recommended and understood

so well. His additionally stunning words come from one of his lesser-known books from the early

1950s, and it is entitled Containment or Liberation?—An Inquiry into the Aims of United States

Foreign Policy, and, specifically, from pages 211-213, in full, only a part of which is in the following

portion ( with the emphatic word “honor” in Burnham’s own original italics):

The American foreign policy of the anti-Nazi epoch, which has carried over into the early anti-communist age, has another characteristic that bears on the possibility of effective political warfare. The policy has been conducted without honor. There are some who say that honor in politics went out with feudalism, and breathed its last when faithless Louis XI beat the chivalric Charles of Burgundy. Surely there has been a post-Renaissance honor that lasted, if with deviations, well into the 19th century, and has not yet wholly

8 Joseph Sobran, Joseph Sobran: The National Review Years—Articles from 1974 to 1991 (Vienna, Virginia: FGF Books, 2012), p. 97.

9 Ibid.

4

disappeared from the world. The recent directors of American foreign policy do not seem to recognize any claims of honor.... [Burnham next gives several trenchant examples in support of his contention, on pages 211-213, and then concludes with these summary words:] Machiavelli insisted that “states are not run by prayer-books,” and I do not wish to pretend that a modern government in the complex modern world can act like a Don Quixote on the bright field of honor. But honor still has place in the relations among human beings. You can buy agents, but not friends or allies or comrades; and when you buy you always risk being outbid. If the United States is to succeed in political warfare against Soviet communism, it must have friends who are firm under all circumstances, even the blackest, who are ready to go through to the end. Surely a man of honor is most likely to find such friends. If we do not ourselves honor our own words, who will honor them?10

After myself recently re-reading Marguerite Higgins’ own honest and courageously honorable

book, Our Vietnam Nightmare (1965), written only some twelve years after Burnham’s above words

(and just nine years after the gravely divisive events of 1956 in Hungary), I would now also poignantly

ask: What Honor did we show in Vietnam, even from the outset? After we made them dependent

on our technology, we even cut that off.

We now know, from other sources, what James Burnham thought of all of this dishonorable

desertion and indifference and pusillanimity of a weakened will, and also of some of its likely long-

range consequences. But, even without these further confirmations, we would now probably know what

would likely be in his noble heart—even if he kept his usual patience. For example, in his own 16

January 1962 National Review Regular Column, entitled “The Third World War,” Burnham had earlier

written with terseness, but with honor, the following sentence: “Vietnam’s poor President Diem has

practically got to abdicate before we will allow him to fight the communist guerrillas.”11 (A year

and ten months later, President Diem would be dead, treacherously assassinated, with one of his

brothers. Then, in the subsequent absence of a true moral-political legitimacy and a better National

Leader, much disorder was to follow and to metastasize factionally (and often malodorously) in South

Vietnam, up until the end on 30 April 1975 when the communist military columns conquered the

country and victoriously entered Saigon.)

10 James Burnham, Containment or Liberation? – An Inquiry into the Aims of the United States Foreign Policy (New York: The John Day Company, 1952, 1953), pages 211, 213 – italicized emphasis in the original, my bold emphasis is added.)

11 James Burnham, The War We Are In: The Last Decade and the Next (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1967), p. 79. On page 15 he said: “I have been writing for National Review, since it began publication in November 1955, a regular column under the title ‘The Third World War.’ This has been a kind of notebook of running commentary on the events, problems, methods and prospects of the war we are in.” He later changed the name of his regular column to “The Protracted Conflict.”

5

By way of strategic anticipation for what he saw would later likely transpire in Southeast Asia

—“in the Revolt on the Mekong” (in Ho Chi Minh’s own strategic phrase)—Burnham had wisely said:

A significant period of the irregular history of the Third World War came to an end and a new period opened up not long after I started my notebook [i.e., in November 1955, with the first issue of National Review]. This turning point was marked by two dramatic episodes that took place, in part, simultaneously, in the autumn of 1956: the aborted revolt in eastern Europe that swelled up in East Germany and Poland and reached its climax in Hungary; and the aborted Anglo-French invasion of the Suez isthmus (to which the Israeli invasion of the Sinai desert was an incidental appendage.) By their outcome these two episodes summarized the net geopolitical results of the preceding period and foreshadowed certain of the trends that were to prevail in the period to follow.12

One of the things which “the east European Affair proved” was that

The Western powers in general and the United States specifically were not prepared to aid an opposition inside the communist zone by direct or indirect military means, or to furnish any significant quantity of personnel, weapons, supplies or diplomatic assistance to the opposition struggle. This demonstrated—most importantly to the communist leaders—that there was no substance left in the “policy of liberation” which had figured in the Eisenhower-Dulles rhetoric during the 1952 campaign and had lingered in some pronouncements during President Eisenhower’s first term. Actually, a policy of liberation had been ruled out on principle, in favor of the policy of containment, as early as the spring of 1950, when President Truman approved National Security Council document NSC-68. But it was the Hungarian revolt that clarified and defined what abandonment (or, at any rate, indefinite postponement) of a perspective of liberation meant in practice. Moscow, Peking and the global communist movement knew, by virtue of the Hungarian affair, that they were guaranteed against outside interference within their household. Within the communist zone they could handle domestic matters in their own fashion, without risking anything worse than a routine moralistic scolding. “The Imperialists”—so Hungary proved—had swallowed a doctrine cooked up for them by the dialecticians: the doctrine of “the two zones.”13

When James Burnham’s original 1964 book, Suicide of the West, was republished some ten

years later, in 1975, Burnham made no revisions and only added an “Afterward” of eight pages, written

in December of 1974 from his home in Kent, Connecticut.14 In this Afterward, Burnham said, in part:

12 Ibid., p. 15.13 Ibid.—my emphasis added. The reader is encouraged to read, especially, the remaining pages of this important and formative Chapter I—“The Decade Past,” pp. 16-26, where, in many other cases, “as in the earlier case of Hungary, the reaction was confined as usual to moral indignation.” (p. 16) Such was the limited sense of honor then. And it appeared to Burnham as a further weakening of the will of the West.14 James Burnham, Suicide of the West (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1975), pp. 313-320.

6

Let us briefly consider four major incidents of the past decade [1964-1974] that manifest the weakening of Western will: the Vietnam war; detente; the spread of terrorism; the Arabs’ oil war.15

Concerning the second symptom, he showed how much further the West had moved from the

Doctrine of Liberation to the Doctrine of Containment and then on to the even softer Doctrine of

Detente: “The Western shift from containment—itself by no means a strategy of conspicuous strength

—to detente amounts merely a softening of will to resist communism.”16

As part of the larger loss of a sense of responsibility and honor, Burnham recalls us to his

book’s main argument in his acute “analysis of liberalism as an ideology of decline”:

The earlier liberalism...was a positive militant ideology [John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill]....Contemporary liberalism is substantially the reverse in historical thrust. It is specifically, I argue in this book, the ideology of Western suicide—of “the decline of the West”. It expresses the weakening of the West’s will to survive that was already discernible to a thoughtful eye fifteen years ago [in 1960], and is now obvious to every clerk in the U.N. Bureaucracy. We are living through an epoch in which Western civilization and its member-states, led by the United States, are in fact suffering one after another setback and defeat. Liberal ideology ‘universalizes’ these defeats, removes their sting, and transforms them into scenes from a Morality Play in which Equality, Justice, Peace, Internationalism, and the Environment triumph over Greed, Racism, Pollution, Aggression, and Privilege. Thus liberalism reconciles Westerners to the defeats and decline, and enables them to see the defeats not only as morally justified but even, in many cases, as victories for higher ideals and for “humanity”.17

In conclusion, I have also thought that these combined and cumulative words—the acute and

honor-nourishing insights of James Burnham—would now mean much more to us, especially in our

current context of Foreign and Military Policy and given the New Forms and Methods of Impersonal

and Anonymous Warfare. For, they appear to evade a forthright accountability and seem to desire (as

with usury itself) to remove all risk—and thereby all manly honor.

Moreover, for some of us, it is likewise so, and often enough today, to see a weakening of the

will to survive within the Catholic Church itself, especially by way of certain deliquescent and softly

invertebrate or pusillanimous, new policies (or sometimes even implicit doctrines), as well as practices

15 Ibid., p. 315.16 Ibid., p. 317.17 Ibid., p. 315.

7

and equivocal forms of diplomacy—even papal diplomacy): namely, in its accent on “inculturation,” or

in its suggestion of an effective “cultural or historical relativism,” and in its often promiscuous

ecumenism (or “detente”?) which seems to be a “syncretism” or a disorderly, irrational “fusionism.” 18

That is to say, an ecumenism of “convergence” as distinct from an ecumenism loyally seeking, under

Grace, a non-Catholic’s “conversion.” (That is to say, a conversion to the unique Catholic Faith.)

Furthermore, the self-proclaimed progressive elements of the Church, at least, appear to reject

or avoid the clear traditional understanding of the Popes that “religious pluralism leads to religious

indifferentism” and hence to the slothful (or tepid) loss of Catholic “integrity” and “loyal love,” to

include our persevering “fidelity of honor.” Would that we may have trustworthy Honor also in

Ecclesiastical Foreign Policy and in a Papal Diplomacy (private and public) that strengthens, not

sabotages, the Faith. For, Honor is an indispensable Moral Factor also in the interior Spiritual Combat,

as well as in the sacrificial challenges of open and covert Religious Warfare.

CODA

Helpfully defining what he means by the Concept and Psychological Reality of “Ideology”

and its own often-unexpected Precariousness, James Burnham wrote:

In doctrine liberalism is an ideology, not science and not rational philosophy. An ideology is a normative commitment posing as science or as universally valid philosophy. An ideology cannot be refuted by evidence or rational analysis: so long as the commitment holds, it is invulnerable. It is only when inner doubts arise about the content of the commitment that the ideology begins to crumble or, sometimes very suddenly, evaporate.19

18 Lest we defectively “read history backwards” (H.Belloc) and without “an understanding heart” or a vivid “moral imagination, let us at least try to understand how it appeared to faithful French Catholics at the time, when, for example, Leo XIII called for the French to “Rally to Democracy,” which also seemed to be a sort of “Ralliement to the Revolution,” i.e., to “the still ongoing French Revolution.” Moreover, what were the moral and spiritual effects on French Catholics and their families when Pius XI formally condemned Charles Maurras’ “Action Francaise”? How did the faithful Mexican Cristeros, who were attempting more fully to implement Pius XI’s December 1925 Encyclical, QUAS PRIMAS (On Christ the King), look upon the acts of commission and seeming acts of omission from Rome, and from the condescending Catholic Hierarchy in the United States? After the Spanish Civil War and Pius XI’s March 1937 DIVINI REDEMPTORIS (On Atheistic Communism), how did it appear to the faithful Catholics in eastern and central Europe, when Pius XII, after 22 June 1941, permitted the collaboration with the Soviet Union against Germany: even after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviets’ subsequent and deceitful, late-September 1939 attack on Poland and then on the Baltic Republics and even against little Finland (in November, 1939)? Then, in the Aftermath of World War II, how did the Papal Policy of “Ostpolitik” appear to the faithful Catholics of the eastern parts of Europe, not just to Cardinal Mindszenty, all of whom had been effectively handed over to “the Soviet Zone”? More examples could be given, which would at least enhance our compassion—as we sought more deeply to understand the Divine Providence.

19 Ibid., p. 314—my emphasis added.

8

And, if such an Ideology thus crumbles or suddenly evaporates, then what—especially if one

then is only left with a “Disfurnished Soul”?20 Despair? Presumption? Revolt? Or a Deeper Recovery

and Restitution?

For, what we have is Nature, a Wounded Nature; what we need is Grace: the Gift of Divine

Grace, as with the humble Saint Francis himself, and as distinct from the dark, flagitious Genius of

Lenin and his True Successors and their Willing Executioners, as they performed so efficiently their

revolutionary tasks in the proclaimed “Jewish Century” and beyond.

For, as Yuri Slezkine himself said about his own candidly Confessional book: “The book ends

at the end of the Jewish Century—but not at the end of the Jewish Age.”21

But we are of a different Confession, and hope to make it a truly Catholic Age; and we pray to

remain loyal to the end, sub Gratia Divina and with the further-undeserved Gift of Final Perseverance.

We even believe, moreover, that Our Lady of Fatima wanted us to understand that one of her

implicitly foretold, devastating “Errors of Russia” is “Organized Naturalism” itself, which is

intrinsically bereft of Grace; and still today is very subversive and intimately destructive, as James

Burnham also very clearly saw, in at least one of its Revolutionary Dialectical Forms: i.e., in the

Doctrines and Practices of “DIAMAT,” or, in other words, in the World View of “Historical and

Dialectical Materialism.”

And Burnham saw this manifoldly corrosive “solvent” of Life, even before he finally himself

returned towards the end of his life (and much more fully strengthened) to his earlier, and once-

cherished, Catholic Faith. Deo Gratias. For, he was for us—and still is—an important witness to truth.

--FINIS-- © 2012 Robert D. Hickson

20 Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World, p. 274.21 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 3.

9