Letter to America

Concerned that a needed international perspective is missing from the debate over US foreign policy, The Nation asked a number of distinguished foreign writers and thinkers to share their reflections. This is the third in that series.
   --The Editors

The entire edition of The Nation of January 24, 1981, consisted of "A Letter to America" written by the historian and peace activist E.P. Thompson. "I first crossed the Atlantic from England when I was a child of 5, in 1929," wrote Thompson. "What bothers me now, as a frequent visitor to the States, is that the Atlantic seems to be growing wider, even though it now takes only some six hours to cross.... There are times when Europe and America appear to have drifted beyond range of communication."

Thompson thought this drift was immensely dangerous; he feared a nuclear war. He described the manichean worldview of the American establishment and drew a comparison with the Lord of the Rings, where "confused liberal hobbits" are rescued from evil by Gandalf-like figures such as Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. He described the way three decades of deterrence, of mutual fear, mystery and state-endorsed stagnant hostility, have backed up into our culture and ideology, numbing language and values. He talked about the strength of military-industrial interests, the use of euphemisms to mask the reality of nuclear war and the way in which defense intellectuals purveyed crazy theories like "pre-emptive deterrence."

In that "Letter to America," Thompson was making the case for a new peace movement that would unite East and West. He was one of the few people at that time to foresee what might happen as a result of the pressures for democratization within Eastern Europe. He argued that the Soviet Union was a threat to its own people, not to the West, and that the system of deterrence helped to sustain and legitimize military-industrial rule in the East. He insisted that the campaign for nuclear disarmament was also a struggle for democracy.

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