Remembering Jim Burnham
October 11, 2001
Lately
Ive been referring often to James Burnham, the Cold War thinker, who died
in 1984. I worked with Jim as he insisted I call him, despite
my veneration from 1972 to 1978, when a stroke forced him to retire from
the staff of Bill Buckleys National Review.
Today I disagree with much that Burnham said.
Yet my regard for him has grown deeper than ever.
Burnham hated Communism and loved freedom
with all his heart. But what really mattered was that he also loved the one and
hated the other with all his head. He was the most deeply purposeful, undistracted
man I ever met.
He was a quiet gentleman, trained in
philosophy, who had been a Communist of the Trotskyite, anti-Stalinist school. He
broke with Communism because he was more anti-Stalinist than Trotsky himself
(whom Stalin had had murdered in 1940). He became anti-Communist in an
impersonal way, because he decided that Communism was dangerous nonsense.
Much as I admired Jim, it took me many years
to understand him. He never denounced Communism as evil, never waved the flag to
show his patriotism. If he were here today, he wouldnt be shouting about
what a horrible man Osama bin Laden is; he would be quietly figuring out effective
ways to cope with him. He fought by thinking. He was a professed
Machiavellian, a realist about power.
Burnham saw Communism as the mortal enemy
of the freedoms he cherished. As a student of power, he knew Communism had to
be fought with intelligence, not raw emotion. He was the first to urge a U.S.
boycott of the Olympic games, which eventually dealt the Soviet Union a severe
propaganda blow.
Having been a Communist, he knew why some
men embraced Communism, and his hatred of it was strengthened by his empathy
for it. Some mistook this empathy for sympathy and suspected him of being
pro-Communist. But it was really the empathy of a
detective for a criminal, the ability to imagine the viewpoint of the enemy he
must defeat just as a good chessplayer must be able to understand his
opponents moves.
Burnhams unemotional style and dry
humor could give naive people the wrong impression. He could hate Communism
while entertaining a cool admiration for Stalin as a master of power. George
Orwell, misreading Burnham for a time, thought this admiration was
power-worship, but it was purely technical. (Orwell later came to appreciate
Burnham and wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four under his influence.)
Stalin knew how to gull Franklin Roosevelt
and other liberals who were deluded by humanitarian slogans. In Jims most
characteristic phrase, Stalin knew what he was doing; Roosevelt
didnt.
Many conservatives saw Roosevelt as a purely
cynical politician; Burnham saw him as a man who, for all his cynicism, too often
meant what he said and took pretty words at face value mistakes Stalin
never made. In the field of action and power, Stalin was completely
Roosevelts master. Stalin had Roosevelt eating out of his hand.
Burnham knew it was a fatal mistake to
underestimate your enemy. And its a normal mistake. When we damn our
enemies as evil, we tend to assume that they see themselves as we
see them a basic failure of empathy and understanding. If you want to
defeat bin Laden, you must begin by grasping that he doesnt hate
freedom and democracy; he sees his struggle in
entirely different terms.
Burnhams genius lay in his ability to
entertain his enemys perspective. If your enemy is a Communist, you must
learn to think like a Communist. If he is a Muslim, you must learn to think like a
Muslim. If he is a vegetarian, you must learn to think like a vegetarian. In essence,
having enemies at all requires you to cultivate a sense of irony not only
about your enemies, but about yourself and your allies.
Jim enjoyed a good laugh, but his usual mode
of humor was the wry smile. He would have appreciated the irony of the deplorable
fact that, in the present atmosphere, his style of thinking would be unwelcome at
National Review, once the only magazine where his heterodox
realism could find an outlet.
Jim Burnham loved this country in his own
quiet way with his mind. Today we could use some of his Machiavellian
patriotism.
Joseph Sobran
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