The Washington-Moscow Axis

Is there such a thing as a Washington-Moscow axis? On the one hand there are undeniable East-West tensions. In the past forty years these have sometimes led to local wars, “proxy wars,” and clashes between nations belonging to one or the other camp. There have also been two genuine engagements between American forces and countries belonging to the Red empire: Korea and Vietnam. But this is only one side of the coin.

There is another. The democratic ideas of the French Revolution, so despised by the Founding Fathers, have, since 1828, deeply affected the American political climate. Walter Lippmann told us that “Jacobinism becomes the popular political creed of American democracy.” At the same time, Communism is, to a large extent, another one of the consequences of these democratic ideas. As a result, there is a definite, if ephemeral, relationship between “democratism,” which has strongly affected the American mentality, and Communism. This was evident during World War II and its aftermath—until the problematic honeymoon between the U.S. and the USSR came to an end—and it went beyond Henry Wallace’s dream of a “Century of the Common Man.” There is a leftist vein in Anglo-American history that goes back to Thomas Paine, to England’s Levelers and Diggers, even to Wat Tyler, John Ball, and the Lollards. No wonder the great flirtation between Washington and Moscow had an ideological foundation and a certain popular appeal.

EK

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Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

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Is there such a thing as a Washington-Moscow axis? On the one hand there are undeniable East-West tensions. In the past forty years these have sometimes led to local wars, “proxy wars,” and clashes between nations belonging to one or the other camp. There have also been two genuine engagements between American forces and countries belonging to the Red empire: Korea and Vietnam. But this is only one side of the coin.

There is another. The democratic ideas of the French Revolution, so despised by the Founding Fathers, have, since 1828, deeply affected the American political climate. Walter Lippmann told us that “Jacobinism becomes the popular political creed of American democracy.” At the same time, Communism is, to a large extent, another one of the consequences of these democratic ideas. As a result, there is a definite, if ephemeral, relationship between “democratism,” which has strongly affected the American mentality, and Communism. This was evident during World War II and its aftermath—until the problematic honeymoon between the U.S. and the USSR came to an end—and it went beyond Henry Wallace’s dream of a “Century of the Common Man.” There is a leftist vein in Anglo-American history that goes back to Thomas Paine, to England’s Levelers and Diggers, even to Wat Tyler, John Ball, and the Lollards. No wonder the great flirtation between Washington and Moscow had an ideological foundation and a certain popular appeal.