Monday, June 4, 2018

In "Article X," did Keenan seem even handed? Did he exaggerate?

The "X Article," originally titled The Sources of Soviet Misconduct, was written by America diplomat George Kennan, who wrote under the pseudonym "X." The context of the document (published in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1947) was the Cold War, which Kennan saw as a call to acton for the United States to assume supremacy in the free, capitalistic world.
He identified capitalism as a "menace" to the Soviet Union. Kennan was convinced that the United States needed to aggressively combat the Soviet Union and the communism it espoused. Divided into four parts, Kennan assertively but tactfully claimed that the Soviet Union was fundamentally antagonistic to the free world. He claims,

there is ample evidence that the stress laid in Moscow on the menace confronting Soviet society from the world outside its borders is founded not in the realities of foreign antagonism but in the necessity of explaining away the maintenance of dictatorial authority at home.

The beauty of Kenna's prose is in his clarity (though he avoids especially exaggerated language where he might have employed it) of his invitation to Americans to exert themselves in defense of the spread of socialism. It is biased only insofar as it obviously endorses capitalism over socialism.
http://www.historyguide.org/Europe/Kennan.html

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