Out of Control. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1993 by Jacob Heilbrunn

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a busy man. Between "traveling, consulting, speaking, and teaching ," he required the help of no fewer than six research assistants to extrude his latest book, Out of Control. It reflects the pace of his life--harried, rushed, and at the mercy of deadlines.

At least one deadline is self-imposed. Brzezinski must hurry because the end is drawing nigh. The looming catastrophe--not environmental, but moral and political--renders lengthy research and contemplation a frivolous luxury. The outcome is a farrago of half-baked analyses which suggests an author, much like the world he seeks to describe, careening out of control.

His aim is ambitious. Each of his three theses-the significance of the failure of totalitarianism, the emerging geopolitical order, and the future of American foreign policy--might require a book of its own. Brzezinski himself declares in his introduction that Out of Control provides the capstone to his earlier books, Between Two Ages, Game Plan, and The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Where those works concentrated on policy prescriptions, Brzezinski now seeks to provide a sweeping philosophical grounding for American foreign policy.

Unfortunately, the sober tone and lucid prose of his previous works are scarcely in evidence. Brzezinski's philosophy, such as it is, consists largely of tirades against American sexual license and self-indulgence. His fulminations come closer to those of a crank than a geostrategist. Indeed, one of the most peculiar parts of Brzezinski's new book is his somersault from geostrategy to morality. In Game Plan, Brzezinski applies the terms "imperial system" and "empire" equally to the Soviet Union and the United States, thus stressing the fact that the confrontation between the two superpowers was morally neutral in character. (In an interview with National Interest in 1986, Brzezinski dismissed the belief that the United States stood for freedom as "a very American view.") There is something paradoxical about jumping from soft-pedaling the ideological character of the struggle between the superpowers to excoriating Americans for their lack of morality once the conflict has concluded. Finally, his book does in fact degenerate into foreign policy prescriptions that pack all the punch of a musty Foreign Affairs article. There is more foam than beer in this brew.

To be sure, Brzezinski's passages on the demise of communism form some of the soundest in his book, but they do not get much beyond the obvious. Calling the twentieth century the age of "megadeath," Brzezinski estimates that some 87 million people have died violent deaths in its course. He correctly assigns the lion's share of the blame for the century's catastrophes to the quartet of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, and he observes that the sheer number of lives consumed in the name of secular utopias makes communism "the most costly human failure in all of history."

Evil personalities alone could not have accomplished such devastation without the ideas and ideals which these dictators appropriated and transformed into deadly instruments. Embarking on a Cook's tour of political theory, Brzezinski traces a direct line from the French of 1789 to the Bolsheviks in 1917. At the same time, he draws an explicit parallel between Lenin and Hitler, arguing that both were bent on class warfare. The result is confusion. Lenin's universalist ideals are incompatible with the racist ideology at the core of Hitler's program. A byproduct of this facile analogizing is the effacement of what was distinctive about Hitler's aims. Where Lenin and the Bolsheviks sought to eliminate classes and sculpt a new proletarian man, the Nazis directed their efforts at annihilating the Jews and "honorary Jews," such as Gypsies, as a race. Brzezinski's style in this section also suffers the effects of slapdash theorizing. Take his comment that Stalin's and Hitler's "schemes quite literally verged on the lunatic,'' or that Hitler's Mein Kampf and Alfred Rosenberg's Race and Race History "justifiably raised serious questions regarding the sanity of the respective author." They did not "verge" on; they were lunatic.

The skill with which Lenin and Hitler manipulated their followers leads Brzezinski to fear that Russian, African, and Asian masses are similarly vulnerable today, and that a replay of the first half century is at hand. Yet in contrast to 1941, America in 1993 is incapable of coming to the rescue because it is rotting from within. Dubbing America a "permissive cornucopia," Brzezinksi warns that the erosion in moral standards arising from a preoccupation with material and sensual self-gratification is sapping the United States' ability to assume world leadership in the vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet empire. The principal agent of destruction? ... television. Moral corruption and cultural decadence are being beamed not only to Americans, but to the world:

With audiences around the world increasingly glued to television sets, there is nothing comparable, either in the era of enforced religious orthodoxy or even at the highpoint of totalitarian indoctrination, to the cultural and philosophical conditioning that television exercises on the viewers.