Mr. Barnett is generally one of the featured speakers at these seminars. He speaks effectively, arousing his audience to an awareness of the Soviets as an ugly menace to freedom and decency in the world. He makes his audience squirm with anxiety about how America is losing the cold war on all fronts, and makes them burn with desire to reverse this trend. But when it comes to suggesting what can be done about the terrible situation, Mr. Barnett seems only to recommend that more and more people listen to more and more speakers like him in order to become angrier at the Soviets and more disturbed about American losses–so that we can continue the same policies we have, but do a better job with them.
Mr. Barnett never criticizes the basic internationalist policy of entwining the affairs of America with those of other nations, because Mr. Barnett, like all other internationalists, takes it for granted that America can no longer defend herself, without "allies," whom we must buy with foreign aid. He does imply that our present network of permanent, entangling alliances is not working well; but he never hints that we should abandon this disastrous policy and return to the traditional American policy of benign neutrality and no-permanent-involvement, which offers the only possible hope for our peace and security. Rather, Mr. Barnett would just like us to conduct our internationalist policy in such a way as to avoid the disaster which our internationalist policy is building for us.
Mr. Barnett's recommendations on how to fight communism on the domestic front also trail off, generally, into contradictions and confusion. For example, in his speech to the "Strategy Seminar" arranged by the Institute for American Strategy and sponsored by the Fulton County Medical Society in Atlanta, Georgia, June, 1961, Mr. Barnett urged all citizens to inform themselves about the communist threat and become educated on its aims so that they will be capable of combatting communist propaganda. But, Mr. Barnett said, citizens are "silly" who concern themselves with trying to find communists and fellow-travelers in the PTA!
In a speech to reserve officers at the War College in July, 1961, Mr. Barnett denounced "crackpots" who hunt "pinkos" in local colleges. He said the theory that internal subversion is the chief danger to the United States is fallacious–and is harmful, because it has great popular appeal. Belief in this theory, Mr. Barnett said, makes people mistakenly feel that they "don't have to think about ... strengthening NATO, or improving foreign aid management, or volunteering for the Peace Corps, or anything else that might require sacrifice."
Mr. Barnett, who speaks persuasively as an expert on fighting communism, apparently does not know that the real work of the communist conspiracy is not performed by the shabby people who staff the official apparatus of the communist party, but is done by well-intentioned people (in the PTA and similar organizations) who have been brainwashed with communist ideas. Communists (whom Mr. Barnett hates and fears) did not do the tremendous job of causing the United States to abandon her traditional policies of freedom and independence for the internationalist policies which are dragging us into one-world socialism. The most distinguished and respected Americans of our time, in the Council on Foreign Relations (of which Mr. Barnett is a member) did this job.
It is interesting to note that the principal book offered for sale and recommended for reading at Mr. Barnett's, "Strategy Seminars" is American Strategy For The Nuclear Age. The first chapter in the book, entitled "Basic Aims of United States Foreign Policy," is a reprint of a Council on Foreign Relations report, compiled by a CFR meeting in 1959, attended by such well-known internationalist "liberals" as Frank Altschul, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Adolf A. Berle, Jr., Robert Blum, Robert R. Bowie, John Cowles, Arthur H. Dean, Thomas K. Finletter, William C. Foster, W. Averell Harriman, Philip C. Jessup, Joseph E. Johnson, Henry R. Luce, I. I. Rabi, Herman B. Wells, Henry M. Wriston.
COMMISSION ON NATIONAL GOALS
On December 6, 1960, President Eisenhower presented, to President-elect Kennedy, a report by the President's Commission on National Goals, a group of "distinguished" Americans whom President Eisenhower had appointed 11 months before to find out what America's national purpose should be.
The national purpose of this nation should be exactly what it was during the first 125 years of our national life: to stand as proof that free men can govern themselves; to blaze a trail toward freedom, a trail which all people, if they wish, can follow or guide themselves by, without any meddling from us.