The Kennan Diaries by George F. Kennan

Author:George F. Kennan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-12-19T05:00:00+00:00

Princeton, January 8

Our friends from the under developed areas have us boxed in, ideologically speaking, to a position where we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. We are charged with imperialism, but, it seems, on further examination, we cannot help being imperialistic whether we wish to be or not. Thus if we attempt not to push other people around, we can be blamed for not using our influence in the right direction. What, then, I find myself asking, could we do to divest ourselves of this tremendous load of sinfulness which the non-European world (and even partly the European) insists we bear? Blow ourselves all up with the atomic bomb? But then there would be complaints about the radioactive fallout, and we would obviously be to blame for the sudden cessation of benefits to which the rest of the world has become accustomed. Plainly, the U.S., no matter what it does, is not to be without guilt. I see no answer, therefore, but to admit quite frankly that we are villains and proceed to play the part with great gusto, warning everyone that nothing good is to be expected of us, so that when the complaints come in, we can say: “Why, what did you expect of us?” Perhaps in this way we could eventually come to rival in popularity our friends the Russians, who have succeeded in establishing in peoples’ minds the thesis that they are monsters, and now reap a rich harvest of astounded gratitude and praise every time they act with anything resembling normal courtesy.

I have now started my Volume II.39 The study and writing of history is marked by the fact that one’s own life, in contemporary terms, is very eventless and dull. One is a lackluster companion to one’s contemporaries. The present is merely a necessity: to be an historian one has to live in some age other than the one about which one writes. It is a nuisance, because all ages other than the one about which one writes are relatively uninteresting. One is, in other words, a reluctant and not very welcome guest of another time, unwelcome because no age forgives anyone for not being primarily interested in it during his lifetime. Each generation is egocentric and thinks that history revolves around it and its experiences.

January 9

Ice storm again last night for the second time in a fortnight. Looked out the window first thing in the morning and observed with regret that the unctuous city fathers already had sand strewn along the street. In such encounters between the elements and the automobile my sympathies are always with the elements. I wish the ice would stay good and smooth and slippery for days. Let them slither and struggle, I say to myself, until they comprehend what a frivolity they have committed in selling their habits and their souls to the automobile. Anyone with any real humility and taste for life would have known better.

January 21

Three weeks ago, I became a professor here,40 with what amounts to security for life.

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