Word: moynihan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...INTO THIS crisis comes Daniel Patrick Moynihan with gung-ho junior officer's rhetoric couched in references to Yeats and Locke. On the one hand he claims, we are the world's greatest democracy in terms of liberties and affluence--"find its equal," he has written. But Americans are also in a dangerous time, paralyzed by failure of nerve; we are threatened with our foreign policy "elites" making "an accommodation to totalitarianism without precedent in our history." Perhaps Nixon made his peace with Mao and Brezhnev, and detente was the order of election year 1972--but this has changed; Moynihan...
...misconceptions Moynihan has foisted on an anomic public desperately wanting to believe in an American "purpose" are incredible. He claimed last October 3 at an AFL-CIO convention, that Israel is hated by the third world because it is a democracy. Moynihan did not mention the question of Palestinian refugees, the economic inequities visited on underdeveloped nations by Israel's chief backer, U.S. policy in Chile and Indo-China or the consistent support of the American government for South Africa and Rhodesia. Moynihan's reason for third world hostility toward this country sounds like something from the American right...
Since assuming the ambassadorship to the United Nations, Moynihan has discarded the sophisticated--and more moderate--husk of his polemic, leaving the simplistic fruit intact. In an article in the March, 1975 Commentary Moynihan classed the underdeveloped nations as a true third force in world politics: They were democratic socialist, in line with a West European colonial experience. He described these nations as by and large anti-American and redistributionist (rather than production-oriented, since he says socialism cannot be productive. Here Moynihan forgets the Soviet Union, which is unusual if only because it seems to dominate all his other...
...WASN'T NECESSARY to be a Harvard Professor of Government to develop this analysis. Moynihan's suggested methods for implementation, also spelled out in the Commentary article, possibly impressed Kissinger; at any rate, Kissinger reportedly hired Moynihan on the basis of the piece. Moynihan there proposed to aggressively defend the U.S. from third world attack, centering on Great Achievements of international liberalism--like the multinational corporation, he wrote--and blaming third world government for their own economic troubles and lack of freedoms. We should chide those in Africa and Asia, Moynihan wrote, reminding them in a tried-and-true American...
...apparently growing that every word the delegate from say, Burundi, was speaking was dictated from Moscow. This has come to be his present stance, one which it would be wrong to take as something paralleling Kissinger's foreign policy, which is more flexible, but no less conservative in basis. Moynihan's practice, at the UN and in the media, made and makes a difference to American foreign policy, only to the extent that it restores popular confidence in an aggressive American imperium. The Moynihan blasts at third world despots were never designed to win over the underdeveloped countries...