Name: Stephen F. Cohen: In Memoriam - Antiwar.com Original
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Stephen F. Cohen: In Memoriam - Antiwar.com Original

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On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York Cityand we, the "dissident" community of Americans standing for peacewith Russia – and for peace with the world at large – lost a towering intellectualand skillful defender of our cause who enjoyed an audience of millions by hisweekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC Radio.A year ago, I reviewed his latest book, War With Russia? which drewupon the material of those programs and took this scholar turned journalistinto a new and highly accessible genre of oral readings in print.&nbsp; Thenarrative style may have been more relaxed, with simplified syntax, but thereasoning remained razor sharp. I urge those who are today paying tribute toSteve, to buy and read the book, which is his best legacy.From start to finish, Stephen F. Cohen was among America’s best historiansof his generation, putting aside the specific subject matter that he treated:Nikolai Bukharin, his dissertation topic and the material of his first and bestknown book; or, to put it more broadly, the history of Russia (USSR) in the20th century. He was one of the very rare cases of an historian deeplyattentive to historiography, to causality and to logic.&nbsp; I understood thiswhen I read a book of his from the mid-1980s in which he explained why Russian(Soviet) history was no longer attracting young students of quality:&nbsp; becausethere were no unanswered questions, because&nbsp; we smugly assumed that weknew about that country all that there was to know. That was when our expertcommunity told us with one voice that the USSR was entrapped in totalitarianismwithout any prospect for the overthrow of its oppressive regime.But my recollections of Steve also have a personal dimension going back sixyears or so when a casual email correspondence between us flowered into a jointproject that became the launch of the American Committee for East West Accord(ACEWA). This was a revival of a pro-détente association of academics and businesspeople that existed from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, when, following thecollapse of the Soviet Union and the removal of the Communist Party from power,the future of Russia in the family of nations we call the "international community"seemed assured and there appeared to be no further need for such an associationas ACEWA.I hasten to add that in the original ACEWA Steve and I were two ships thatpassed in the night.&nbsp; With his base in Princeton, he was a protégé of thedean of diplomats then in residence there, George Kennan, who was the leadinglight on the academic side of the ACEWA.&nbsp; I was on the business side ofthe association, which was led by Don Kendall, chairman of Pepsico and alsofor much of the 1970s chairman of the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council ofwhich I was also a member. &nbsp;I published pro-détente articles in their newsletterand published a lengthy piece on cooperation with the Soviet Union in agriculturaland food processing domains, my specialty at that time, in their collectionof essays by leaders in the U.S. business community entitled Common Sensein U.S.-Soviet Trade.The academic contingent had, as one might assume, a "progressive"coloration, while the business contingent had a Nixon Republican coloration.Indeed, in the mid-1980s these two sides split in their approach to the growingpeace movement in the US that was fed by opposition in the "thinking community"on university campuses to Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars agenda. Kendall shut thedoor at ACEWA to rabble rousing and the association did not rise to the occasion,so that its disbanding in the early ’90s went unnoticed.In the re-incorporated American Committee, I helped out by assuming the formalobligations of Treasurer and Secretary, and also became the group’s EuropeanCoordinator from my base in Brussels. At this point my communications with Stevewere almost daily and emotionally quite intense. This was a time when America’sexpert community on Russian affairs once again felt certain that it knew everythingthere was to know about the country, and most particularly about the nefarious"Putin regime." But whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, polite debateabout the USSR/Russia was entirely possible both behind closed doors and inpublic space, from the start of the Information Wars against Russia during theGeorge W. Bush administration following Putin’s speech at the Munich SecurityConference in February 2007, no voice questioning the official propaganda linein America was tolerated. Steve Cohen, who in the 1990s had been a welcome gueston US national television and a widely cited expert in print media suddenlyfound himself blacklisted and subjected to the worst of McCarthyite style, adhominem attacks.From my correspondence and several meetings with Steve at this time both inhis New York apartment and here in Brussels, when he and Katrina van der Heuvelcame to participate in a Round Table dedicated to relations with Russia at theBrussels Press Club that I arranged, I knew that Steve was deeply hurt by thesevitriolic attacks. He was at the time waging a difficult campaign to establisha fellowship in support of graduate studies in Russian affairs. It was touchand go, because of vicious opposition from some stalwarts of the professionto any fellowship that bore Steve’s name.&nbsp; Allow me to put the "i" on thisdispute: the opposition to Steve was led by experts in the Ukrainian and otherminority peoples sub-categories of the profession who were militantly opposednot just to him personally but to any purely objective, not to mention sympathetictreatment of Russian leadership in the territorial expanse of Eurasia. In theend, Steve and Katrina prevailed. The fellowships exist and, hopefully, willprovide sustenance to future studies when American attitudes towards Russiabecome less politicized.At all times and on all occasions, Steve Cohen was a voice of reason aboveall.&nbsp; The problem of our age is that we are now not only living in a post-factualworld, but in a post-logic world.&nbsp; The public reads day after day the mostoutrageous and illogical assertions about alleged Russian misdeeds posted byour most respected mainstream media including The New York Times andThe Washington Post. Almost no one dares to raise a hand and suggest thatthis reporting is propaganda and that the public is being brainwashed. Stevedid exactly that in War With Russia? in a brilliant and restrainedtext.Regrettably today we have no peace movement to speak of.&nbsp; Youth and our"progressive" elites are totally concerned over the fate of humanity in 30 or40 years’ time as a consequence of Global Warming and rising seas. That is theessence of the Green Movement. Almost no one outside our "dissident" communityis concerned about the possibility of Armageddon in say two years’ time dueto miscalculations and bad luck in our pursuing economic, informational andmilitary confrontation with Russia and China.&nbsp;I fear it will take only some force majeure development such as we had in 1962during the Cuban Missile Crisis to awaken the broad public to the risks to ourvery survival that we are incurring by ignoring the issues that Stephen F. Cohen,professor emeritus of Princeton and New York University was bringing to theairwaves week after week on his radio program.Gilbert Doctorow is a Brussels-based political analyst. His latest bookwas published in August 2017. Reprinted with permissionfrom .© Gilbert Doctorow, 2020&nbsp;

On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York Cityand we, the "dissident" community of Americans standing for peacewith Russia – and for peace with the world at large – lost a towering intellectualand skillful defender of our cause who enjoyed an audience of millions by hisweekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC Radio.A year ago, I reviewed his latest book, War With Russia? which drewupon the material of those programs and took this scholar turned journalistinto a new and highly accessible genre of oral readings in print.&nbsp; Thenarrative style may have...

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Stephen F. Cohen: In Memoriam - Antiwar.com Original

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