From The Cold War (John Lewis Gaddis, 2005) pp46-7
Victory in World War II brought no sense of security, therefore, to the victors. Neither the United States, nor Great Britain, nor the Soviet Union at the end of 1950 could regard the lives and treasure they had expended in defeating Germany and Japan as having made them safer: the members of the Grand Alliance were now Cold War adversaries. Interests had turned out not to be compatible; ideologies remained at least as polarizing as they had been before the war; fears of surprise attack continued to haunt military establishments in Washington, London, and Moscow. A contest that began over the fate of postwar Europe had now spread to Asia. Stalin’s dictatorship remained as harsh – and as reliant on purges – as it had always been; but with the onset of McCarthyism in the United States and with irrefutable evidence that espionage had taken place on both sides of the Atlantic, it was not at all clear that the western democracies themselves could retain the tolerance for dissent and the respect for civil liberties that distinguished them from the dictators, whether of the fascist or the communist variety.
“The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us,” Kennan told students at the National War College in 1947. “It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down. . . . If confidence and security were to disappear, don’t think that he would not be waiting to take their place.” This warning from the founder of containment – that the enemy to be contained might as easily lie within the beneficiaries of freedom as among its enemies – showed how pervasive fear had become in a postwar international order for which there had been so much hope. It helps to explain why Orwell’s 1984, when it appeared in 1949, became an instant literary triumph.
Orwell’s vision, however, did at least assume a future, however bleak it might be. Kennan, by early 1950, was worrying that there might not be a future. In a top-secret memorandum prepared for, but ignored by, the Truman administration, he pointed out that the use of force had historically been “a means to an end other than warfare, . . . an end which at least did not negate the principle of life itself.” Atomic and hydrogen bombs, however, did not have this quality:
They reach backward beyond the frontiers of western civilization, to the concepts of warfare which were once familiar to the Asiatic hordes. They cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary. They fail to take into account the ultimate responsibility of men for one another, and even for each other’s errors and mistakes. They imply the admission that man not only can be but is his own worst and most terrible enemy. The lesson, Kennan insisted, was a Shakespearean one:
Power into will, will into appetite
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey
And last eat himself up.
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