WALTER LAQUEUR
1948-20°3:
Some Reflections
C
OUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY
(what would have happened if ... )
has its uses but, for obvious reasons, it has almost always been
applied to political, seldom to cultural and intellectual, history–
genius is of no country nor is stupidity. The zeitgeist comes and goes,
often for no obvious reason, and accident plays a considerable role. For
the last thirty years large segments of the American intelligentsia and of
academe have been convinced that-with some notable exceptions–
U.S . foreign policy has been wrong, and this went for Democratic
administrations as well as for Republican.
Broadly speaking, patriotism has been out of fashion.
It
may not be
an obvious political option in the twenty-first century but nor is its
opposite, hatred of one's own country. In Europe, on the other hand,
there has been a resurgence of nationalism accompanied by anti–
Americanism and anti-anti-terrorism-more in Germany than in
Britain, more in Italy than in Eastern Europe.
Is it all the result of the arrogance of power, as Senator Fulbright put
it many years ago and as it is echoed to this day? But America is not
really that powerful, and, in any case, the complaints of America's over–
bearing attitude have been accompanied for an even longer period by
predictions of its imperial overreach and decline. Some one hundred and
fifty years ago a great Russian poet wrote that Russia could not be ratio–
nally understood (Tiutchev's "Umom Rossii ne poniat ..."). In truth,
America is at least as difficult to understand as Russia, probably more
so, especially by foreigners; perhaps the whole world has become more
difficult to understand. The other day more than
3,5.00
students came
to listen to Mr. Noam Chomsky in the city of Gbteborg, Sweden. A
combined appearance of Marx, Freud, and Einstein would not have
attracted a crowd of this size.
It
is a phenomenon that ought to be stud–
ied just as the Children's Crusade was .
Walter Laqueur's most recent book is
Generation Exodus.
