The Saturday "Arts & Ideas" section of the New York Times fetches up today with an admiring profile of Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, who says, "I feel absolute about nuclear weapons. I feel they are evil objects." The article runs under the headline, "Champion of Human Survival Tries to Awaken Academics to a Nuclear Menace." The Times says Dr. Lifton is "distressed by the ho-hum attitude toward a threat to human survival." Dr. Lifton's center, the Times reports without even a hint of a smile, "sponsors programs on nuclear weapons, racial violence, the psychology of fundamentalism and animal rights."
No matter what Dr. Lifton and the Times say, nuclear weapons aren't "evil objects." In the right hands, they can be tools to expand freedom and spread democracy. If Israel didn't have nuclear weapons to defend itself, the Jews there would probably all be dead. (Which makes it all the more galling that Dr. Lifton cites his own Jewish background and the Holocaust as the inspiration for his own work. If the Jews had had a nuclear weapon with which to defend themselves against the Nazis, would it have been, to Dr. Lifton, absolutely an evil object? ) If America hadn't deployed nuclear missiles so aggressively against the Soviet Union during the Reagan years, the evil Soviet Communist empire might still be in existence and might still be brutally repressing its own people.
The best the Times can muster as a skeptical voice in this article is the MIT professor Theodore Postol, who has criticized the Clinton administration for being too tough on Russia and who has been a determined opponent of national missile defense. He must be what the Times considers a hard-liner, because he says, "If Attila the Hun is coming through, it's not a matter of being moral. It's kill or be killed." That's right, but it doesn't go quite far enough. If you are America and the Soviets are coming through or you are the Jews and the Nazis are coming through, it is a matter of being moral. The moral thing to do is for the good guys to kill the bad guys.
Anyway, the Times article on Dr. Lifton has a certain time-capsule-like element to it, as if instead of the year 2000 it were 1985 and the left were still confused about the moral nature of the confrontation with the Soviet Union -- and the possibility of victory for America in that confrontation. There are plenty of persons on the left who realized after the Cold War ended, and even some who realized while it was still going on,that the war was winnable and that the menace wasn't nuclear weapons but the very totalitarian nature of the Soviet Communist regime. But the Times article today shows no evidence of any such coming to terms with history; it's as if the themes and ideas and words in today's newspaper were transported magically through the last 15 years untainted by any historical developments.
'Tendonitis': An article in the business section of today's New York Times discusses new ergonomics rules that the Clinton administration is imposing on American businesses. The article refers to workplace injuries like "tendonitis." There's no such thing as "tendonitis"; the inflammation of a tendon is properly known and spelled either as "tendinitis" or "tenonitis."