Thanks to Blind Pig records for the loan of their logo. Much as I like Blues music, it’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about a different kind of blind pig – intellectuals. People like Richard Perle, quoted in Richard Rhodes’ recent book, Arsenals of Folly, as saying, “Getting rid of all the world’s nuclear weapons is the worst thing that could happen.” This was heard by Secy. of State George Schultz during the Regan-Gorby meeting in Iceland near the end of the cold war.
So what planet was Richard Perle living on? Same one he’s still on, I guess. He is the master of “threat inflation” and was instrumental in selling the snake oil that Saddam Hussein was ready to nuke the USA. Obviously, he found Iraq a useful demon after his favorite evil empire went to the dustbin of history. On the run up to the end of the Cold War, he desperately tried to derail Reagan from his path of disarming. [Rhodes' book has made me feel a grudging smidgen of admiration for Reagonzo, despite his attachment to urban legends, steal-for-the-rich economics, cold war Contra law breaking, and the biggest arms buildup in US history. He felt Gorby wanted to get rid of the nuclear menace, the insanity of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), and he took him up on it. His advisers, such as Perle, were mostly against it.] What sort of twisted thinking motivated Perle’s outrageous statement?
Well, of course, if the nuclear menace went away, so would the need for “experts” on arms control like him. So would his political club that he had wielded so well with his mentor, Senator Scoop Jackson, liberal shill for the defense industry. Nevertheless, one must wonder and quail before a mind, supposedly intelligent, that could take nuclear holocaust so in stride. That is, not recoil in absolute horror from the prospect. The human beings of the world have to be grateful that those political leaders who would actually have had to press the button, did recoil: Kruschev, JFK, Reagan, Gorby, and others. There were close calls, but none wanted to get to that point.
Rhodes, no fan of Reagan, relates that he was deeply shaken by the TV movie, The Day After. Movies, he understood. Kissinger deplored the effect of the movie, and such popular expressions of anti-nuke horror such as the 1,000,000 strong march in NYC, as introducing irrational fear to the negotiations. (And he wasn’t nearly as much of a nutcase as Perle. After all, he was for detente.) All of them knew, as Perle apparently did not, that it would be a catastrophe, perhaps The End.
This is the state to which some intellectuals bring themselves.
