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George Frost Kennan war ein US-amerikanischer Historiker und Diplomat. Sein Name ist verbunden mit dem Marshallplan sowie der Containment-Politik in der Zeit des Kalten Krieges.

Er studierte an der Princeton University und später an der Universität Berlin. Zwischen 1926 und 1961 arbeitete er für das Außenministerium der Vereinigten Staaten, u. a. in Moskau, Berlin, Prag, Lissabon und London. Von 1947 bis 1949 war George F. Kennan im US-Außenministerium als Planungschef tätig.

1957 erhielt er den Pulitzer-Preis, 1976 den Pour le Mérite und 1982 den Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. Februar 1904 – 17. März 2005
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George F. Kennan: Zitate auf Englisch

“There will be no room, here, for the smug myopia which views American civilization as the final solution to all world problems; which recommends our institutions for universal adoption and turns away with contempt from the serious study of the institutions of peoples whose civilizations may seem to us to be materially less advanced.”

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George F. Kennan

As quoted in Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (1989) by Anders Stephanson, p. 160

“There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue. The contest comes to be viewed as having a final, apocalyptic quality. If we lose, all is lost; life will no longer be worth living; there will be nothing to be salvaged. If we win, then everything will be possible; all our problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil--our enemy--will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied.”

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George F. Kennan

From Russia and the West under Lenin by George Kennan (1960)

“My own position is somewhere in between. I am not sure that the economic arguments for an early step toward real union are very compelling. I have deep feelings, however, about the political necessity of creating in Western Europe an international framework which would bridge national sovereignties to such a degree as to give a different aspect to the German question by providing a home for the German people other than the national home and thus lifting German horizons beyond those national limits with which the Germans have shown themselves so incapable of coping.”

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George F. Kennan

October 17-21, 1949
The Kennan Diaries

“We must be very careful when we speak of exercising "leadership" in Asia. We are deceiving ourselves and others when we pretend to have answers to the problems, which agitate many of these Asiatic peoples. Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction…
In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to 'be liked' or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague — and for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

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George F. Kennan

VII. Far East
Memo PPS23 (1948)

“Surely one of the reasons for our continued failures throughout these areas [Asia and the Middle East] has been our inability to understand how profound, how irrational, and how erratic has been the reaction generally of the respective peoples to the ideas and impulses that have come to them from the West in recent decades. This applies particularly to the intellectuals who play so prominent a part in political leadership and in the molding of public opinion. To ascertain the reasons for the intensely anti-American attitudes manifested by these people would be to delve deeply into psychological reactions and the origins of various forms of neuroses. I have thoughts about these matters, but will not take up your time with them here.
Only one thing I would emphasize. The respective reactions are obviously emotional and subconscious, and not likely to be altered by any attempts on our part to meet them by any verbal appeal to rational processes.”

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George F. Kennan

January 23, 1952
The Kennan Diaries

“The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.”

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George F. Kennan

As quoted in The New York Times (27 May 1984)

“The dilemma is this: We all know that this aid cannot materially affect the course of events of China. We are obliged to put the bill before Congress by virtue of our past commitments and of the pressures that exist in favor of aid to China.”

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George F. Kennan

January 27, 1948
The Kennan Diaries

“At one time, I was an actor in the conduct of foreign policy. I became convinced that I was accomplishing nothing in that capacity, that the problems were deeper, that the answer lay in a direct approach to the public and in an effort to explain to the public what it was really about. Today, even that seems futile. Myths and errors are being established in the public mind more rapidly than they can be broken down. The mass media are too much for us. There is nothing that can be done about it. To correct this, you would have to educate the educators. I must say that I have lost all confidence in the freedom of the mass media. The fact of the matter is that in this country McCarthyism has already won, in the sense of making impossible the conduct of an intelligent foreign policy.”

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George F. Kennan

April 17, 1951
The Kennan Diaries

“Whenever you have a possibility of going in two ways, either for peace or for war, for peaceful methods of for military methods, in the present age there is a strong prejudice for the peaceful ones. War seldom ever leads to good results.”

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George F. Kennan

As quoted in "George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq" at History News Network (26 September 2002)

“Fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship.”

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George F. Kennan

On postwar accords regarding Eastern Europe, as quoted in The Wise Men (1986) by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas

“I have never been any good at training children or dogs; that is why I am no good at training myself.”

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George F. Kennan

April 6, 1951
The Kennan Diaries

“Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before … In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”

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George F. Kennan

As quoted in "George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq" at History News Network (26 September 2002) http://hnn.us/articles/997.html

“A guest of one's time and not a member of its household.”

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George F. Kennan

Referring to himself, as quoted in Political Realism in American Thought (1977) by John W. Coffey, p. 26

“The best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian.”

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George F. Kennan

Quelle: As quoted in US-Soviet Relations : The First 50 Years WNET TV {17 April 1984)

“Russia, Russia — unwashed, backward, appealing Russia, so ashamed of your own backwardness, so orientally determined to conceal it from us by clever deceit. So sensitive and so suspicious in the face of the wicked, civilized west. I shall always remember you — slyly, touchingly, but with great shouting and confusion — pumping hot water into our sleeping car in the frosty darkness of a December morning in order that we might not know, in order that we might never realize, to how primitive a land we had come.”

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George F. Kennan

Written about an incident where hot water was pumped from a switch engine on the next track into a diplomats sleeping-car; as quoted in George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy (1988) by David Allan Mayers, p. 30

“I am like a person who has placed poison in one of two glasses before a person he loves—and looks back upon his act with horror and incredulity—but still does not know from which glass the person will drink.”

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George F. Kennan

Princeton, April 2, 1951
The Kennan Diaries

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