Consequent upon the end of the WWI, the interregnum in Russian Poland and the rise of Nazis thereafter in Germany, most of the Jews had to leave that part of Europe in an attempt to escape persecution; incarceration and torture in concentration camps and gallows of the extermination camps. Many of that ilk, once on the run to save lives, happened to be the persons of indomitable impact on the world at large. The lot is known as the emigrant Jews. Two of the lot—Albert Einstein and Henry Kissinger—are household names now. But there were others too—though less known—whose intellectual prowess was not less impeccable. Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of them, died last Sunday (May 26 this year). Jacob Bronowski died on August 22, 1974. Both the emigrants were men of Jewish Polish heritage—the former was destined to be the emigrant to the US and the later to the UK. Both scholars par excellence, unorthodox and visionary in their academic pursuits, having age long advocacy in common for intellectual agility and unrestrained freedom of inquiry in their respective domains of knowledge. Zbigniew Brzezinski — a prolific writer and widely acclaimed expert in the fields of global politics, security and foreign policy— authored over two dozens of books, and articles running into hundreds, on the issues of global politics, security, foreign policy and political systems. Jacob Bronowski, primarily mathematician, wrote several books on poetry, art, philosophy and human history exposing that the dichotomy between human arts and sciences is unintelligible, absurd and meaningless. Both strived for casting knowledge and power in novel, unique and unorthodox moulds in their own way.
For many, the death of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had served as National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, might have been a great loss to the fields of the diplomacy, security and strategy of world politics, but for me the world stands deprived of a political scientist of exceptional vision and acumen.
His book ‘The Grand Failure: Birth and Death of Communism in 20th Century’ is a wonderful critique of Marxist ideology and its inherent contradictions. For him, the most fundamental flaw is that Communism is a hierarchical control mechanism, a form of totalitarianism in which political stability is achieved at the expense of economic wellbeing and if economic stability is gained it is always at the expense of political stability, one eroding the other to cause a paradoxical situation in which chasm between the two remains unbridgeable forever.
Other books like ‘Out of Control’, ‘Second Chance’ and Chessboard, though overlapping, are rife with frank, open, honest and pragmatic critique of the US foreign policy, wars, socio-political doctrines and grand narratives—used to prop up the whole stock of the US policies— without losing sight of human freedoms and liberties and the morality embedded within. For example, he said, that the US, immediately after the breakup of Soviet Union was in a unique position to help transform Russia into a real democracy. The opportunity was missed as there was no engagement policy for the states falling from Soviet orbit. Similarly, in his view, the US should have engaged the Arab world and help transform them after the first war with Saddam Hussain following peace, order and harmony, as sine qua nons of the engagement policy. It is stated that Obama Administration followed Brzezinski’s advice, with a little modification and adjustment, whereby Iran was engaged in nuclear talks, designed to gradually move towards total rapprochement between the two states.
