Zbigniew Brzezinski Quotes
Though 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, as we shall see, a blessing in disguise.
Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technotronic Era. Viking Press, 1970.
Harriman at that time was the United States Ambassador to Russia and one of President Roosevelt’s closest advisers. There were those who claimed that the Roosevelt administration was very naïve about the potential danger of Stalin. This statement as well as others like it, show that the administration was not so naïve and ignorant.
Despite the fact that many Americans saw communists and socialists as of the same ilk, socialists were very suspicious of communists—especially the “party discipline” and the lack of individual freedom, while the communists saw the socialists as just another form of fascism and attacked it violently. Later, the party line against socialists softened as Cold War communist strategy solicited assistance from the socialist, unaligned nations.
Russia suffered enormous casualties in WWII where over 20 million Russians were killed. None the less, at the end of the war Europe was devastated with no viable economy. The fascist states and the democracies were all devastated. But Russia was still functioning. Instead of crediting the enormous Russian land mass, the success of the Russian Army, and the enormous amount of aid that the U. S. had provided, Stalin concluded that the reason was the Soviet Communist System.
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. As a scholar, Brzezinski belonged to the realist school of international relations, standing in the geopolitical tradition of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman. Brzezinski was the primary organizer of The Trilateral Commission.
