The Wild Beasts Are Real
Residents gather in the courtyard of an apartment building destroyed in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, March 28, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
By Peter J. Travers
March 29, 2022 6:30 AM
A statement from the chairman of National Review Institute
A beguiling aspect of the American character is our pragmatic optimism that individual freedom and equality under law can open broad vistas of justice and prosperity. They can, and they do. Yet, as we continue, swathed in safety and wealth, to unpeel the ever-thinner layers of those principles, we are drawn toward self-absorption. Americans are, as Whittaker Chambers wrote to William F. Buckley Jr. in 1954, temperamentally disinclined to notice that “the wild beasts are real.” Periodically, Chambers famously wrote, “History hits us with a freight train,” and shatters our naïve reverie.
One month after the bloody czar Putin invaded a neighboring country for the atavistic purpose of subjugation, people around the world remain aghast and ask, “What can we do?” National Review has been asking that question of Americans and of the free world for 66 years, during which we have made some suggestions.
In the chaos of a violent moment, our scope of action is narrow. Our capacity to defend the Ukrainian people in real time is limited chiefly to the provision by our nation and its allies of lethal instruments to those who bear the brunt of the vicious assault. Individually, we can help provide the means to ameliorate the suffering of the noncombatants and the refugees. Though not comprehensive, this support is invaluable, and each of us is called to help as we may be able. It is a testament to the prosperity and goodness of democratic capitalism that many proficient organizations have arisen to provide succor to the helpless and the injured. Among this noble host are these venerable enterprises performing heroic service to Ukrainians:
The International Rescue Committee (www.rescue.org)
The International Committee of the Red Cross (www.icrc.org)
Doctors without Borders (www.doctorswithoutborders.org)
Episcopal Relief and Development (www.episcopalrelief.org)
Catholic Relief Services (www.crs.org)There are many others that can be found at www.charitynavigator.org. Our first response should be to share our resources with those on the scene who are providing essential help. And then, what?
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As a free people, we must come together in prayer and understanding, the former sustaining the latter. Chiefly, we must let go of the indulgences of provincialism. President Lincoln told Americans 160 years ago what this crisis is about. It is a perennial question in human affairs, Lincoln reminded us, whether “any nation” dedicated to human liberty and freedom “can long endure.” We need not parse the circumstances unique to each historical case to understand that every struggle to resist despotic conquest implicates the interests of free people. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” wrote John Donne, because surely “it tolls for thee.”
National Review was conceived in no small part to present — indeed to insist upon — a more resolute opposition to totalitarianism. A founding purpose of National Review was to forge the rhetorical tools, and to promote the ideas, with which to confront autocratic tyranny in whatever guise it might appear. In 1991, National Review Institute was founded to take the mission of National Review beyond the pages of the magazine; since then, the work of NRI Fellows, along with an array of NRI events and programs, has advanced that purpose. From the start, William F. Buckley Jr. embraced President Lincoln’s challenge: Resistance to “gangster statesmen” (the wonderfully apt phrase of NR contributor Paul Johnson) and to their supporting ideologies of human bondage was the great test of self-government. Manifestly, this insight is even more true today, in the age of instant global connectivity.
Early contributors to National Review, such as Max Eastman, James Burnham, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Dos Passos, and, especially, Whittaker Chambers, had painful encounters with communism — searing experiences that brooked no illusion about the seriousness of this test for America. The compendium of National Review journalism expressing a trenchant hostility to despotism is legendary. I will note only a few examples.
In our August 1, 1956, issue, National Review published the text of a letter written by Ukrainian political prisoners, in pencil on cloth, that had been smuggled out of a Soviet concentration camp. The inconceivably brave Ukrainian patriots addressed their letter to the “entire civilized world” and asked for the world’s support for “Ukrainian sovereignty.” The prisoners stated that “Ukraine has always been cruelly enslaved by Russia” and demanded that “all Russian nationals . . . be required to leave Ukrainian territory.”
Our journalism and commentary were unstinting in outrage at the Russian suffocation of Eastern Europe. In our September 10, 1968, issue, James Burnham decried the crushing of the Prague Spring, calling the Soviet empire a “prisonhouse of nations.”
In 1968, Robert Conquest, a frequent contributor to National Review, published The Great Terror, his monumental study of Stalin’s purges and mass murders in the 1930s. Not surprisingly, fellow-travelers on the left criticized Conquest either from a wish to disbelieve the Soviet horrors or from an ideological sympathy that compelled extenuation of them. In The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), Conquest demonstrated that the “terror-famine” engineered by Stalin as a policy of national obliteration killed as many as 5 million Ukrainians. National Review was there to defend and amplify this historic scholarship in essays and book reviews, until full validation was stamped on Conquest’s work by KGB files released in the 1990s.
Over several decades, National Review devoted countless pages and pixels to the profound witness of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the spiritual darkness of communist absolutism and its inevitable gulag. In our January 18, 1974, issue, we anointed him “the man of the year, the man of any year.” National Review was there to rebuke the Republican president who, fearful of incurring Soviet displeasure, refused to meet Solzhenitsyn after his dramatic expulsion from Russia in 1974. We were also there to rebuke the succeeding president for his feckless dismissal of Solzhenitsyn’s magisterial “Warning to the West” speech at Harvard in 1978.
National Review covered the legerdemain used by Stalin and then again by Putin to fuel their rise to absolute power. In The Great Terror, Conquest showed how Stalin had surreptitiously arranged for the murder of Sergei Kirov, the Communist Party boss of Leningrad, in 1934, thereby eliminating a rival and providing a pretext for a subsequent wave of terror, which solidified his hold on power in the wake of the Ukrainian genocide. In our cover story of August 15, 2016, we reviewed a similar “false flag” atrocity by which Putin leapt to power. Our story presented overwhelming evidence that apartment bombings in three Russian cities in 1999, which killed 300 Russians, were carried out by the Russian Federal Security Service under the direction of Vladimir Putin. Putin blamed the murders on Chechen rebels, and initiated the Second Chechen war, razing its capital Grozny through indiscriminate bombardment. Shortly thereafter, Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin upon the latter’s “unexpected” resignation.
Through the decades of the Cold War and thereafter, National Review set forth those great principles of American foreign policy that remain the cornerstone of resistance to — and prevention of — totalitarian aggression. In James Burnham’s “The Protracted Conflict” columns, in Bill’s many eviscerations of strategic weakness, and in the writings of numerous strategic thinkers and NRI Fellows, who assessed the modalities of blunting despotic expansion, National Review delineated that set of principles. To wit:
(1) America does not range the world in search of monsters to destroy but recognizes that parochial insularity is a hazardous indulgence, unworthy of a great and free nation.
(2) American foreign policy must press our values, but as we allow our moral values to inform our national interest, we soberly recognize that these are not the same thing.
(3) America must invest to maintain unparalleled military power, and we must express an unsentimental willingness to use it.
(4) Peace is the fruit of an assiduous cultivation of alliances based on democratic values, of which NATO is the crown jewel.
(5) Negotiation, based on realism and principle, can foster peace, but appeasement invites war.
(6) International trade is a potent force for prosperity; America should wield it as an inducement to draw nations toward our values, while recognizing that our national security takes precedence over commercial interests.
(7) The containment of gangster states, without devastating war, is possible, but requires a protracted and steadfast national commitment.
Accompanying these principles must be a rejection of the impulse to temporize about the dangers that confront us and a rejection of the bizarre deprecation of our nation and civilization. America is, whether we like it or not, the indispensable good nation: far and away the greatest power and moral influence — in human history — on behalf of justice and the peaceful conduct of nation-states. If our political culture is not clear on that point, it will inevitably weaken America’s resolve to prepare for, and to lead, the defense of freedom.
When I was but a child too many years ago, a previous Russian dictator blustered and fulminated against the United States, even threatening “to bury” us in a nuclear war. Bill wrote in fierce denunciation of that earlier blood-soaked Russian tyrant:
In the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature. Khrushchev is not aware that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us. . . . In the end, we will bury him.Today, Khrushchev’s daughter condemns Russian brutality as a university professor in New York. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, brought her children to the same church in Princeton that I now attend; she was a subscriber and donor to National Review and said that it “was her favorite magazine.” Russia’s one-dimensional economy is half the size of California’s, and just crashed. The Russian army is a blundering cavalcade of conscripted prisoners. The free world is united.
So, again, what can we do about the latest ravage of Ukraine?
Today, we can offer up our treasure to those worthy men and women who are engaged on the front lines of suffering and displacement. We can encourage our newly enlivened representatives in Congress to support copious provision of war matériel to the Ukrainian heroes.
Tomorrow, we must renew our personal commitment to an informed understanding that braces an implacably anti-totalitarian American foreign policy. Learn the history. Grasp the principles. Debate the particulars. Gird your loins in preparation for the wild beasts, for they are indeed real.
This is where National Review and National Review Institute stand. Join us as we elucidate principles, assess risks, identify opportunities, formulate arguments, and extoll the bravery of intrepid heroes. Join us as we galvanize public-spirited citizens, and their representatives, to draw once again upon those ultimate resources of human decency that Bill identified as our unconquerable redoubt. This is the stake that National Review hammered into the ground 66 years ago. You will always find us at this post, to which we welcome all who know that freedom must be defended in every generation and on many fields.