"What remains constant for me, during the last 15 years, has been the conviction that the cold war was a calamity for the entire world, and that it can be justified by no consideration of theory, nor by any supposed national interest"
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Browder’s sentence is built like a moral ledger entry, and that’s the point: he’s not reminiscing, he’s testifying. The first move is temporal. “What remains constant for me, during the last 15 years” frames his view as something stress-tested by events, not a slogan improvised for the moment. He’s claiming durability in a political world addicted to tactical pivots.
Then comes the central gambit: calling the Cold War “a calamity for the entire world” refuses the comforting U.S.-versus-U.S.S.R. scorekeeping that dominated mid-century rhetoric. “Calamity” is deliberately non-ideological language; it shifts the argument from who was right to what it cost. The subtext is that even “winning” can be a form of losing if the price is militarization, proxy wars, paranoia, and a permanent emergency mindset.
The sharpest knife is his double refusal: “no consideration of theory” and “nor by any supposed national interest.” Browder is anticipating two classic alibis. The first is ideological necessity (the Marxist or anti-Communist story that history demanded a showdown). The second is patriotic inevitability (the claim that security required escalation). By calling national interest “supposed,” he implies it’s often manufactured - a story elites tell to launder fear and power into consensus.
Context matters: Browder, a onetime leader of the Communist Party USA who later broke with its Moscow line and was politically marginalized, is speaking as someone who has watched grand theories curdle into discipline and punishment. The intent isn’t neutrality; it’s a plea to stop treating geopolitical conflict as an intellectual exercise. He’s trying to reintroduce shame into a debate that had learned to call itself realism.
Then comes the central gambit: calling the Cold War “a calamity for the entire world” refuses the comforting U.S.-versus-U.S.S.R. scorekeeping that dominated mid-century rhetoric. “Calamity” is deliberately non-ideological language; it shifts the argument from who was right to what it cost. The subtext is that even “winning” can be a form of losing if the price is militarization, proxy wars, paranoia, and a permanent emergency mindset.
The sharpest knife is his double refusal: “no consideration of theory” and “nor by any supposed national interest.” Browder is anticipating two classic alibis. The first is ideological necessity (the Marxist or anti-Communist story that history demanded a showdown). The second is patriotic inevitability (the claim that security required escalation). By calling national interest “supposed,” he implies it’s often manufactured - a story elites tell to launder fear and power into consensus.
Context matters: Browder, a onetime leader of the Communist Party USA who later broke with its Moscow line and was politically marginalized, is speaking as someone who has watched grand theories curdle into discipline and punishment. The intent isn’t neutrality; it’s a plea to stop treating geopolitical conflict as an intellectual exercise. He’s trying to reintroduce shame into a debate that had learned to call itself realism.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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