Post By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

[September 23, 2009] Updated September 9, 2015 with a shocking epilogue]

Back in 1985, I wrote an article on Brzezinski for The Intercollegiate Review.  Before citing some of the more relevant passages of that article, it should be borne in mind that Brzezinski, a political scientist, served as President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. One does not have to read Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid to know that Carter is an anti-Semite.  Brzezinski has earned the same reputation.

Not only has Brzezinski publicly defended the anti-Semitic canard that the relationship between America and Israel is the result of Jewish pressure, but he also signed a letter demanding dialogue with Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction. It behooves us to understand the mentality of Obama’s [former] Middle East adviser.

Long before he became Mr. Carter’s national security adviser, Brzezinski rejected what he and most political scientists term the “black-and-white” image of the American and Soviet political systems.  “This image,” he says, “is held by traditional anti-Communists.”  Brzezinski thus affirmed he is not quite an anti-Communist.  In fact, he deplores anti-Communism as “a relic of the Cold War, of the age of ideology.”

Not only did Brzezinski reject the “black-and-white” image of the American and Soviet forms of government, he rejects the very notion of good and bad regimes!  Brzezinski is simply a moral or cultural (or historical) relativist, and relativism has certainly modulated Barack Obama’s mentality.

The influence of political scientists like Brzezinski is wide and deep. His relativism prompts him to negotiate with and appease terrorist regimes.  With Brzezinski as his adviser, Obama will be more disposed to appease Iran and betray America’s allies, above all Israel.

Since Brzezinski is a relativist, he denies the existence of objective or trans-historical standards for determining whether the way of life of one nation, group, or individual is morally superior to that of another.  (The members of the UN General Assembly must be pleased to hear this, despite the UN’s notorious record of condemning Israel without having ever condemned an Islamic state.)

Brzezinski’s relativism also makes him a “weather-vane” political scientist.  He turns with the winds of power. Working in a pluralistic and egalitarian country like America – a secular society – he conveniently adopts tolerance as his operational principle on the one hand, and equality as his primary value on the other.  He is quite at home with the moral equivalency that has shaped US foreign policy toward Israel and Islamic dictatorships.

Brzezinski views history through the lens of Marxism, which, despite its atheism, has much in common with Islam.  Both Communism and Islam are universalistic ideologies that reject the idea of the nation-state.  Both do not regard adherence to treaties between nations as obligatory.  Both Communism and Islam are militaristic and expansionist creeds that do not recognize international borders. Brzezinski’s globalism is evident in Jimmy Carter.  Under Brzezinski’s influence, Carter lowered the defense budget and pursued a soft line toward the Soviet Union. Obama is pursuing a very soft line toward Islam.

As a crypto-Marxist, Brzezinski deplores the nation-state. His book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, declares that “With the splitting and eclipse of Christianity man began to worship a new deity: the nation.  The nation became a mystical object claiming man’s love and loyalty.  The nation-state along with the doctrine of national sovereignty fragmented humanity.  It could not provide a rational framework within which the relations between nations could develop.”  Brzezinski sees the nation-state as having only partly increased man’s social consciousness and only partially alleviated the human condition.

“That is why Marxism,” he contends, “represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision.”  Marxism, he says, “was the most powerful doctrine for generating a universal and secular human consciousness.” Embodied in the Soviet Union, however, Communism became the dogma of a party and, under Stalin, “was wedded to Russian nationalism.”

Although Brzezinski poses as a humanist, he makes a most inhumane statement by saying that: “although Stalinism may have been a needless tragedy, for both the Russian people and Communism as an ideal, there is the intellectually tantalizing possibility that for the world at large it was … a blessing in disguise.”!!! Brzezinski could as readily say: “Yes, Muslims slaughtered more than 200 million people, but Islam brought hundreds of Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist communities under a single universal vision, that of the Quran”!!!

Brzezinski, a self-professed secularist, is an internationalist whose moral relativism contradicts the moral law or natural rights doctrine of America’s Declaration of Independence. His relativism and internationalism contradict the teachings of the America’s Founding Fathers, who endowed the United States with a national identity and character, as that which animated Abraham Lincoln.  To put it more bluntly: Brzezinski’s political mentality, like that of countless other American academics, is anti-American. An Obama-Brzezinski axis has revolutionary significance. It may accelerate the de-Americanization and decline of the United States [as I warned six years ago.]

Epilogue September 10, 2015:

Obama’s nuke deal with Iran is the offspring of Brzezinski’s mentality.