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Remembering Jim Burnham


October 11, 2001

Lately I’ve 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 Buckley’s 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 wouldn’t 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 opponent’s moves.

Burnham’s 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.)

[Breaker quote: The 
Machiavellian patriotStalin knew how to gull Franklin Roosevelt and other liberals who were deluded by humanitarian slogans. In Jim’s most characteristic phrase, Stalin “knew what he was doing”; Roosevelt didn’t.

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 Roosevelt’s master. Stalin had Roosevelt eating out of his hand.

Burnham knew it was a fatal mistake to underestimate your enemy. And it’s 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 doesn’t hate “freedom” and “democracy”; he sees his struggle in entirely different terms.

Burnham’s genius lay in his ability to entertain his enemy’s 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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