Loyalties

by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151547483
• ISBN13: 9780151547487
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A short but interesting book

In this book, published in 1984, Moynihan discusses three issues. The first of these is about the nuclear arms race. What if one fears a massive attack on one's nuclear missiles? Does one launch those missiles before they can be destroyed? The next issue is on the Communist theory of racism. The most obvious example is the Soviet use of Somalia to introduce a preposterous resolution into the United Nations that Zionism was a form of racism. This resolution did indeed pass in 1975. As Moynihan says, this resolution was actually a fall-back alternative, used only when an attempt to simply expel Israel from the United Nations failed. Moynihan points out that while we were outfoxed, we were not passive about it. We said that we would not submit to a totalitarian lie. Moynihan then explains that we did this because as one of the oldest governments in the world, "we had learned the importance of elemental truth-telling and the appalling cost of official lies." When Moynihan published this book, in 1984, only eight nations on the whole planet had avoided having "their form of government changed by force" since 1914, namely the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, South Africa, and Sweden. Moynihan then discusses a very important vote made by the United States in the United Nations Security Council, on March 1, 1980. Our vote was in favor of finding "Israel in 'flagrant violation' of the Fourth Geneva Convention." We did not merely fail to use our veto; we voted for this nonsense. This vote certainly did not help Carter in his re-election bid, as later in the month, Kennedy defeated him soundly in New York. Still, what in the world convinced Donald McHenry and Cyrus Vance to come up with such a stupid idea? Moynihan surmises that our diplomats had the idea that if the United States were on the "right" side of history, it would get support from most other nations. Since we were not getting that support, these diplomats decided that we were still not on the "right" side of history, so we came up with this disastrous support for pure nonsense. Moynihan finishes this chapter with what I consider prophetic words: "At the risk of being considered an alarmist, I would again argue that a sustained ideological struggle is under way in the world. The forces of liberalism are under incessant attack - an attack that the West somehow avoids knowing about. The phase during which this assault was directed almost exclusively at Zionism and at Israel as a metaphor for democracy is now about over. A more general case against democracy is being made." I also think that, in hindsight, while Moynihan was right put some of the blame for the US vote in 1980 at the UN on Carter himself, he may have understated the degree to which Carter was part of the problem. The final chapter of the book deals with the value of international law, and Moynihan uses the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an example of a violation of that law. Here