The American Century

has been the 20th century. But it need not necessarily have so turned out. A junior official in the American embassy in Moscow was struck by how Stalin had addressed an assembly at the Bolshoi and pointed out that capitalism would fail whilst communism would triumph. Eventually, he was shown to be wrong.

However, it struck the junior official in the US embassy that this was not certain and he wrote back to various State Department officials expressing his reservations. There was no response.

In the meantime he attended a show trial where 17 communist party officials were sentenced to death through their confessions achieved by torture.

And so he had to write to America in a manner which demanded he be read. This entailed a 5,000 word telegram over the coded communication system and would therefore have to be read. It was and changed American foreign policy.

Incidentally it was not until 1995 (I was born in 1946) that I realised that the principal purpose of language is to empower the user and that truth dissemination is merely a subsidiary purpose. This of course means that the judiciary must be kept apart from politicians since the latter always regard their objectives as more important.

Written by Simon Cawkwell, August 2026