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1 INTRODUCTION At the onset of the Cold War, Palmiro Togliatti and George F. Kennan shared a particular vision of America. The leader of the fastest growing Communist Party in the West and the architect of America’s containment strategy against Soviet Communism, from their opposite points of view, nurtured a similar pessimism about the U.S. role as leader of the Western world.1 Togliatti’s indictment of the United States was occasioned in May 1947 by former Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles’s press statements that the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) was an insurrectionary party funded by the Soviet Union.These declarations coincided with the political crisis that a few days later led Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi—allegedly under pressure from Washington—to expel the PCI from the government’s national coalition , which had been in place since the last year of the war. The general secretary’s response to Sumner Welles was an emblematic editorial in the 20 May issue of the party’s daily L’Unità, titled “Ma come sono cretini!” (“What Idiots They Are!”). It was a clever retelling of the old dichotomy between mature, wise, committed, refined Europe and young, crass, hedonistic, naive America—dangerously naive at that, for its stupidity was now matched by its power and arrogance. Only in America, Togliatti wrote, “could a party buy prestige and influence with money”; and, no doubt, Washington treated Italy like “a territory inhabited by competing tribes, instead of parties that naturally emerged from its national traditions.” This should not have surprised any European, since at heart, the Americans were still “slaveholders,” who now wished to buy entire nations the same way. They also did so, Togliatti judged, because “they [were] not intelligent” and “lacked historical experience and mental finesse.” Americans were like “the majority of their films, with all their luxury, their technology, the legs and all the rest of those beautiful actresses”; after watching them for a while, one was “overwhelmed with irritation and boredom, realizing that it [was] only a dehumanized exhibition, a mechanical repetition of gestures and situations deprived of the spontaneous vibrating of souls and things.”2 Previous foreign rulers had dominated the country, and at times had even influenced its national identity, but not its very soul and intellectual resourcefulness . Italy, the Communists averred, was now engaged in a double resistance: to defend the country’s national sovereignty and national intelligence against, in Togliatti’s words, the “massive wave of plain idiocy” of the Yankee invader. 2 INTRODUCTION Two years later, Kennan’s judgment of America’s world leadership was equally scathing. As director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and still revered for having masterminded containment, he was highly influential at the White House. He was, however, an iconoclast, where the “icon” was modern America as an acquisitive society characterized by its mass phenomena in production, consumption, and culture. His intellectual background associated him with the organicist conservatism dating back to Edmund Burke’s condemnation of the French Revolution, a legacy that continued through thinkers such as Ferdinand Tönnies, Oswald Spengler, Max Weber, Henry and Brooks Adams, and Walter Lippmann. They all abhorred the relentless rationalization that subordinated every aspect of life, the logic of material achievements and money making, turning most of the qualitative into quantitative, and transforming the “organic” community into a mechanized , atomized society of passive consumers.3 Conscious of his position as a policy maker and defender of the system, Kennan for the time being expressed his insightful critique only within small circles. His letter to a staff member from 17 October 1949 offers a fine example of his agonizing reflections . While Kennan would not have given credit to any communist indictment, he nevertheless took the cue for his own critique of American society and foreign policy from his reflections on the communist adversaries. He did so often with regard to his area of expertise, the Soviet Union. In this case he focused his thoughts on Western Communism. He acknowledged that its strongest drive was emotional, nationalist, and intellectual: the “desire to win appreciation, attention and power [was a] much more important component of Communism than desire to better a material condition.” The point was not how many followers communism could thus obtain. Kennan believed (rather incorrectly with regard to Italy and France) that it was a “movement” without “popular appeal” in advanced countries. But since it was a development not only imported from Moscow but also deeply rooted in...

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