The Anti-Communist Impulse (Michael Parenti)

The Anti-Communist Impulse
The men pictured on the cover, from top-to-bottom and left-to-right, are John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Karl Mundt, Harry S. Truman, James Forrestal, and Joseph McCarthy
Author	Michael Parenti
Publisher	Random House
First published	1969
Type	Book
Source	https://archive.org/details/anticommunistimp0000mich/mode/2up

The Anti-Communist Impulse is a book by Michael Parenti, published in 1969 by Random House.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Elizabeth Coleman, Jane Clark Seitz, John J. Simon, Gladdin Schrock, and Philip West for their helpful criticisms and suggestions. Sydney and Carola Lea proved invaluable allies throughout much of this effort and I appreciate their support.

I am also indebted to the Louis Rabinowitz Foundation for a research grant which liberated me for a summer of writing.

The most gentle and helpful critic of all was my wife, Susan, to whom I pay a special tribute.

The book is dedicated to the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., because of his open mind and open heart

Introduction

Critical thought strives to define the irrational character of the established rationality. HERBERT MARCUSE

To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon everything that makes up the universe... And this, in superior measure, is man's condition. TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Thousands of volumes have been written about the very ideology, history, and evils of communism, but not much about anti-communism. Yet anti-communism is the most powerful political force in the world. Endowed with an imposing ideology, and a set of vivid images and sacred dogmas, it commands the psychic and material resources of the most potent industrial-military arsenal in the history of mankind. Its forces are deployed on every continent, its influence is felt in every major region, and it is capable of acts which—when ascribed to the communists—are considered violent and venal. Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has. If America has an ideology, or a national purpose, it is anti-communism. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been expended, and hundreds of thousands of lives have been sacrificed on its behalf. It is time we gave closer scrutiny to the anti-communist impulse, its mainstays and effects, its polemics and policies.

Some ideologies have no "manifesto" or "bible" containing an explicit statement of belief. Some are so deeply rooted in the polity, so widely and imperceptibly diffused in a nation's political culture as to be rarely exposed to national confrontation. The most powerful ideologies are not those which prevail against all challengers, but those which are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear more like "the nature of things." We are repeatedly advised to guard against the dogmas of the right and of the left, but not a word of warning is extended about the dogmas of the middle since they are seldom perceived as dogmas.

Men rarely interact indirectly with their material milieu: between a man and the "objective" world there looms the symbolic environment, a configuration of images, values, conditioned perceptions, expectations, and unspoken assumptions filtering and even predetermining experience, and thereby becoming the "reality" we experience. All men live in a symbolic environment, "moderates" as well as "immoderates," "solid" conservatives, "responsible" liberals and "flaming" radicals. Are we then faced with the unhappy conclusion that the search for political truth involves little more than choosing from among a variety of equally illusionary symbolic configurations? Since reality produces a congestion of stimuli, comprehensible only if reduced to manageable images which necessarily introduce an element of distortion, and since these images are derived from the ongoing cultural-ideological environment, then what could possibly be "real" and what "false"? As David Hume suggested, the problem of what constitutes "reality" in our images can never be resolved since our images can only be compared with other images and never with reality.

But Kenneth Boulding has noted that even if the problem remains epistemologically unresolved, common sense and the necessities of everyday life oblige us to make judgements and to act as if our images were true. When doing this, we find that, at least for some purposes, rational mechanisms have their use and there exists processes for the detection of error, so that even if "naked reality" constantly eludes us, we hopefully can arrive at a closer approximation of the truth.

If someone cries, "The Communists are taking over in Egypt!", instead of bemoaning the elusiveness of reality and concluding that one can't ever really know what is happening in Egypt or, for that matter, anywhere else, we can ask the speaker to specify whom he has in mind when he refers to the "communists," and what observable characteristics need one possess in order to qualify for that category. We can require some operational description of the political conditions represented by the expression "taking over." If the speaker is unwilling to respond on this level and prefers only to reiterate his contention, we might still prevail upon him to explain why a "communist take-over in Egypt" (whatever that means, and assuming it is occurring) is cause for alarm. The conjectures he offers can then be subjected to the same search for specificity, clarity, and evidence.

In speaking of "evidence" we acknowledge that the elimination of error is accompanied mainly by feedback. From our present images of the world we derive certain expectations (images of the future) which if not fulfilled result—or should result—in a readjustment of our images. In 1956 to 1957 after the Suez crisis, some political leaders, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, actually did believe that Egypt and most of the Arab world were succumbing to Soviet domination, a view that did not enjoy the feedback of subsequent events. Either their image of the future was incorrectly drawn from their image of the present or the image of the present was false all along; that much we can say.

But the problem is more complicated, for in international politics, as elsewhere, our perceptions and images are not merely reflections of the exterior world, they help create it and are a substantive part of it. As Stanley Hoffmann noted, "Reality is in considerable part the product of a conflict of wills, of a context of active perceptions competing for the privilege of defining reality." To the extent that any specific set of "active perceptions," such as those manufactured by the anti-communist mentality, are persuasive, they become a self-perpetuating force, to be treated not only as more or less distorted images but as creators and actual components of political reality.

This book is a critical examination of the kind of political reality which the anti-communist impulse has constructed; it is an inquiry into the imagery, theory, and practice of an American orthodoxy. In the chapters to follow I attempt to give an overview of the origins, the development, the cultural predispositions, and the domestic and overseas manifestations of American anti-communism. The larger portion of these pages is devoted to American anti-communism's international policies, the repercussions of which weigh most heavily on matters of war, peace, and human survival. My hope is that this book will help others entertain new images and new realities, of the kind that might bring us to a saner and less tragic political world.

To some readers, my efforts might appear "one-sided." But if it is true that "we need to hear all sides and not just one," then all the more reason why the evidence, ideas, and criticisms usually ignored or misread by the anti-communist ideologue deserve the extended coverage accorded them in this book. Moreover, unlike some Washington policymakers, I give serious critical attention to the arguments and interpretations of those who differ with me. That is my major purpose in writing this book.

It is not demanded of the reader that he accept my biases but that he reflect upon his own. How seldom we bother to explore in some critical fashion the fundamental preconceptions that shape our view of political life. How frequently, as if by instinct, we respond to certain cues and incantations. Our opinions shelter and support us; it is an excruciating effort to submit them to reappraisal. Yet if we are to maintain some pretense at being rational creatures we must risk the discomfiture that comes with questioning the unquestionable, and try to transcend our tendencies towards mental self-confinement.

Until a few years ago I was an anti-communist liberal who believed in the necessity of "maintaining our commitments against the forces of communism." Troublesome questions arose in my mind but these were usually vanquished by my deeply conditioned reactions to fearful images of "the cold-war struggle," and "communist aggression." Vietnam was for me, as for many other Americans, a crucible for my anti-communist beliefs. I began reading about the Vietnam war still convinced that "aggression" had to be stopped. The more I studied the problem, the more I found myself questioning not only our involvement in that conflict but also the whole train of attitudes and events that brought us to it. Eventually I found I could no longer consider myself an adherent of the anti-communism preached and practised by American liberals and conservatives. To be sure, it is still my conviction that communist rulers have shown themselves as adept as anyone in the arts of suppressing political dissent and exercising autocratic power; one need only think of the purge trials of the 1930s, Hungary of 1956, and Czechoslovakia of 1968. And let us agree at the onset that we despise and deplore labour camps, press censorship, oligarchic rule, and the exercise of any power that violates human dignity whether it be found in Spain, Portugal, Paraguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, South Korea, Pakistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia (to name a few of the countries to whom we have given aid), or in South Africa, Rhodesia, the Soviet Union, China, Bulgaria, in Mississippi or Chicago. But if we really are against those uses of power which violate the human spirit, then it is not enough to say we are against communism, but that we are against injustice, exploitative privilege, and despotism wherever it may be found.

It is our very commitment to human freedom and dignity that should cause us to view American anti-communism with alarm. Most disturbing to me are the many things the anti-communist does in the name of "freedom." At home we have suffered patriotic hooliganism, collective self-delusion, the propagation of political orthodoxy, the imprisonment of dissenters, and the emergence of a gargantuan military establishment that devours the national treasure in the face of worsening domestic ills. Abroad, anti-communism has brought us armaments races, nuclear terror, the strengthening of oppressive autocracies, counter-revolutionary reactionism, the death and maiming of American boys, and the slaughter of far-off unoffending peoples.

Convinced that communism is the greatest menace ever to beset mankind, and reenforced in that belief by demonic stereotypes, moral double standards, and enormous military power. American anti-communists find license to commit any number of heinous actions in order to counter the "menace"; thereby they perpetrate greater human miseries and dangers than the ones they allegedly seek to eradicate and they become the very evil they profess to combat. To maintain this tragic self-delusion, anti-communists embrace a vision of the world that reduces all events to the same self-fulfilling interpretations and, by the nature of its premises, denies the existence of disconfirming evidence. The success of anti-communism is to be measured by the tortured reality it has done so much to create.

In this book I shall amplify on these statements and attempt to demonstrate their validity. it is somewhat difficult for me to admit that this study has led me to conclusions refuting much of the cold-war political science I had been teaching for over a dozen years. But a truth delayed is better than a truth betrayed; the reappraisal has been a sometimes painful but frequently liberating experience—of which this book is the visible product. The reader is invited to share in the experience.

CHAPTER ONE - The Conflicting Communisms

All around him Innocent heard so-called Christians bewailing the fact that Mahomet had defeated Christ, and to this Pope it seemed that the Church itself was in danger of dissolution. It was little consolation to him that the Moslem world wars was also suffering from a desperate stage of disunity. HENRY TREECE, The Crusades

Not all fears are phobias; some are reactions to real dangers and therefore functional to survival. To what extent is America's fear of communism a reaction to reality, and to what extent is it a phobic response? Our task is to put our anti-communist presumptions to the test of evidence and analysis.

THE COMMUNIST WORLD TIDE

Without doing too much injustice to its various expressions I might state the central proposition of American anti-communism as follows: There exists a conspiratorial movement known as international communism which is dedicated to the relentless extension of its earthly domain. Edmund Burke's description of events in the late eighteenth century would readily serve the present anti-communist mentality if one simply substituted the word "communism" for "Jacobinism."

It is not the cause of nation against nation; but as you will observe the cause of mankind against those who have projected the subversion of the order of things, under which our part of the world has so long flourished... If I conceive rightly of the spirit of the present combination, it is not at war with France, but with Jacobinism.... We are at war with a principle, and with an example, of which there is no shutting out by fortresses or excluding by territorial limits. No lines of demarcation can bound the Jacobin empire.

One standard representation of the present-day anti-communist view is furnished by a Director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Georgetown University, Arleigh Burke. Compare his words with those of the earlier Burke.

The contemporary struggle... is not a conventional struggle based solely, or even principally, on military force. It is a total effort at annihilation of our way of life... the true enemy is not the Russian or Chinese people.... Beyond territorial conquest, the Sino-Soviet Communist leaders aim at conquering men's minds and souls and bending them to a new faith.... Our habit of thinking in terms of national boundaries has resulted in disastrous losses. We have been unwilling to intervene in the domestic affairs of foreign countries upon which the Communists seek to impose their power. Wherever Communists fight non-Communists, conflict ceases to be domestic.... It matters little that the Communist armies were not composed of Russian and Chinese, but of indigenous peoples. For these natives were Communists, hence members of an international movement.

Among our top policymakers, we find former Secretary of State Dean Rusk observing that through "'wars of liberation' supported by Moscow as well as Peiping [Peking]," the communists seek control of all Asia, Africa, and Latin America, "thus encircling and strangling the Atlantic world." The image of a worldwide communist conspiracy was affirmed by Hubert Humphrey who said in a speech in Detroit in the autumn of 1965 that "the international Communist movement organised and masterminded" the peace demonstrations. In a letter to this writer, Humphrey elaborated further:

The Hate America campaign was ordered by the Communist leadership of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. It was actively sponsored and supported by Communist China. The international Communist apparatus was at work to inspire, coordinate, and direct protests and demonstrations in many countries. Here, as elsewhere, the majority of the demonstrators were not Communists. The Communists have never had a majority in any movement. In fact, they don't want one. They do not believe in majority rule.

Rusk concurred in this view, observing in April 1967 that "the worldwide Communist apparatus is working very hard" in the demonstrations.

FROM MONOLITHIC TO POLYCENTRIC

An examination of present-day evidence suggests that what is called "communism" in different parts of the world is a series of movements and governments that place their own interests ahead of any self-sacrificing dedication to global revolutions allegedly directed by Moscow or Peking. This alternate view gives serious consideration to the pluralistic actualities developing in and between communist nations. It suggests that leaders of communist states entertain desires similar to those of leaders of non-communist states, including the pursuit of a secure domestic rule, noninterference from outside powers, and an unwillingness to see one's own national interests sacrificed to the ambitions of some other nation.

The tendency to give top priority to national self-interest has been most clearly demonstrated by the Soviet Union. Since its earliest days the Soviet Union has demonstrated its readiness to protect its own interests at the expense of overseas communist movements. As the USSR entered into normal trade and diplomatic relations with foreign nations, the contradiction between Moscow as the headquarters of a movement seeking to overthrow governments, and Moscow as the capital of a Russian state seeking advantageous relations with these same governments became more and more apparent.

The contradiction was never a troublesome one for Stalin, for history records his repeated readiness to jettison entering into accords with bourgeois and reactionary leaders in order to maximise some immediate or long-range Soviet interest. his alliance with Hitler—to the shock and dismay of foreign communist ideologues—his aloofness towards Mao, indeed, his reluctance to offer recognition to the Chinese Communist Party while seeking stabilised relations with Chiang after the war, and his willingness to urge restraint upon French, Italian, Yugoslav, and Greek Communists in order to placate the West and secure his own position in Poland might be cited as cases in point. In 1927, Stalin instructed the fraternal parties: "A revolutionary is one who is ready to protect, to defend the USSR without reservation, without qualification, openly and honestly... for the USSR is the first proletarian, revolutionary state in the world, a state which is building socialism." The Comintern membership vow read: "Each party desirous of affiliating to the Communist International should be obliged to render every possible assistance to the Soviet Republics in their struggle against all counter-revolutionary forces."

The post-Stalin leadership showed a similar propensity to put Soviet interests ahead of international revolutionary sacrifice. The great bulk of Soviet foreign aid has gone not to communist revolutionaries but to the established governments of various Asian and African states. Khrushchev strenuously courted national leaders, plied them with gifts and long-term credit, and usually ignored the communist oppositions in their respective lands. His successors publicly praised and feted de Gaulle in 1967 while the French Communists prepared to wage an election campaign against the General. The Soviet Union, to quote The New York Times of 31 October 1966, "finds its national interest more commanding than old fraternal obligations to the world proletariat."

Communist international cohesion depended largely on the weakness of the non-Russian parties. But once other communist leaders fought their way to power at the head of indigenous national movements, then the Moscow-imposed unity began to crumble. At the very time Truman and Acheson were describing the world in apocalyptic bipolar images, Moscow's domination was being successfully challenged by Tito. Years later, the de-Stalinisation campaign conducted by Khrushchev and his almost deferential courting of the Yugoslavs implied a clear if belated justification of Tito's earlier defiance of Stalin. The lesson was not lost upon the other Eastern European nations. Yugoslavia had dramatically demonstrated that socialism and subservience to the USSR were not necessarily coterminous conditions.

Lacking sufficient mass support among their own peoples, the other Eastern European communist leaders looked to Soviet power to bolster their rule. But such support came at a price, including disadvantageous trade treaties with the USSR and the apting of Stalinist political and economic arrangements to the neglect of many domestic needs and nationalist sensibilities. This reliance on the Kremlin further limited the Eastern European leaders' own political legitimacy and popularity at home, which, in turn, made them all the more dependent on Moscow. A reversal of the cycle was in order.

The moment came in the autumn of 1956 when the Polish Communist leadership, faced with what amounted to a popular revolt, turned to its own people in defiance of the Kremlin and rallied around the communist-nationalist Gomułka, the man whom Stalin once tried to kill. The Polish leadership promulgated a far-reaching series of reforms, exposed the shocking economic situation which Stalinist rule had brought them to, and announced their intention to deal, henceforth, with the USSR on a close but equal footing. Without abandoning the principle of collectivisation, the Gomułka party did little actual collectivising, so that most of the land in Poland is still owned privately by peasants. The Polish regime also implicitly accepted "the profound Catholic allegiance of the masses and the intelligentsia's ties with Western culture."

The revolution in Hungary followed immediately after the Polish-Soviet confrontation. From the Kremlin's view, it had all the markings of a Western roll-back of communist rule in Europe, and it drove the Russians to taking the murderously repressive action they dared not attempt in Poland. Yet János Kádár proceeded in the following years to win popular support among the Hungarian people by instituting some of the same reforms for which the revolution had been fought. Western political democracy has not been achieved in Hungary, but the police terror is gone; there is greater individual freedom in the creative arts; material conditions have improved; and the Kádár leadership is professedly anti-Stalinist.

At about the time of the Polish and Hungarian upheavals, Palmiro Togliatti, head of the faction-ridden Italian Communist Party, asserted the need to discover a "national path to socialism." In 1961, the Italian Communists issued a resolution rejecting the "centralised direction" of the various communist parties, and calling for "a context of full independence of individual parties." A short time later they were extending warm invitations to the Catholic Church to join in the mutual task of reversing "the course of contemporary international events."

The Kremlin found itself dealing with a changed world and reacted accordingly. As early as 1956 the Soviet Twentieth Party Congress announced the doctrine of "many paths to socialism," and by 1961, Khrushchev could be heard saying: "It would be incorrect to evolve a certain model and adhere to it in mutual relations with other socialist countries. It would be an error to condemn as renegades all those who do not fit that model." By 1966, Leonid Brezhnev went even further: "The Soviet Communist Party is opposed to any trends toward hegemony in the communist movement."

It remained for Rumania to provide one of the most dramatic thrusts towards polycentrism. Refusing to choose sides in the Sino-Soviet split, and rebuffing Moscow's pressures for closer economic integration while simultaneously inviting investments from Western capitalists, the Rumanian Party leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, in a declaration in May 1966, called for "the defence of national unity and the independence and sovereignty of the homeland." He denounced the "erroneous thesis" which resulted from "the Comintern's practice of issuing directives that disregarded the concrete conditions in our country and gave tactical orientations and instructions that did not correspond to the economic, social, political, and national conditions in Rumania." Ceaușescu added that "Rumania is developing relations of collaboration with all countries regardless of social system." He called for the liquidation of all foreign bases and the withdrawal of troops from the territories of other states. The existence of military blocs, he said, was "one of the barriers in the path of collaboration" and "an anachronism incompatible with... independence and national sovereignty... and normal relations among states."

That Ceaușescu sounded like de Gaulle was no accident. The mutual threat posed by the NATO and Warsaw Pact blocs tended to keep smaller nations dependent on either the United States or the USSR. As France used the new pluralism in Eastern Europe (e.g., Rumania) as an argument against NATO and American hegemony, Rumania pointed to the new Western pluralism (e.g., France) as an argument against the Warsaw bloc and Soviet hegemony. French and Rumanian policies became deescalation mirror images of each other, each strengthening the other's bid for autonomy in international affairs. The mutual admiration which Rumanian leaders and de Gaulle expressed for each other should have come as no surprise.

The opening to the West initiated by Poland and Rumania was followed by other communist countries. Bulgarian leaders soon paid their first official visit to a Western capital (Paris) and several of the Eastern European nations considered new trade relations with and diplomatic recognition of West Germany. Meanwhile, East Germany, long considered the most abject of Moscow's satellites, began moving towards economic and political autonomy, in what Welles Hangen describes as "the muted revolution."

The trend towards liberalisation received a shocking setback, however, in Czechoslovakia in 1968. When the Czech press began to assume a pronounced anti-Russian tone and the Czech government began to revamp and liberalise its leadership and its operational methods, Moscow viewed such developments as the first signs of a "capitalist" roll-back and, more specifically, a symptom of German revanchism. In August 1968, the Soviets occupied Czechoslovakia, an action which evoked the strongest renunciations from communist leaders throughout the world, including the Chinese, who branded the invasion a "shameless act" reminiscent of Hitler's conquest. The Rumanians and Yugoslavs mobilised their troops and made known their readiness to fight any intrusion into their territories.

The Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia was motivated by much the same kind of siege psychology and self-righteous presumption that had sent the United States into Vietnam. Sounding like Washington foreign-policy apologists, Pravda editorialists argued that there was a need to defend the frontiers of the communist world against an implacable enemy; that tiny Czechoslovakia was imperiled by imperialists, German revanchists, and internal "subversive" elements; that "loyal" Czechs had requested intervention; and that many Czechs had expressed gratitude for the Soviet action. It remained for Senator George McGovern to point out that American foreign policy "has helped to establish the claim of large nations to intervene in small nations... You cannot justify intervention in Vietnam on the grounds that our security is threatened by a government 10,000 miles away without inviting the Russians to intervene because they feel threatened by a government on their own border."

Meanwhile the Russians, having suffered under the opprobrium of most of the communist and non-communist world, soon found themselves in the unenviable position of occupying a country they could not rule. A total military success threatened to become something of a political failure as the Russians could not find a puppet government able to command even an appearance of popular support. In the shadow of Soviet guns, Czech leaders declared that there would be no return to the "police-state era" and that democratic reforms would continue although criticisms of other Warsaw Pact nations would b e forbidden. At the time of this writing it was reported that much "soul-searching on the part of the Kremlin leadership" had convinced them that "a more conciliatory attitude was in order." Yet there was no indication that Soviet troops would be withdrawn in the immediate future, and no guarantee that the Czech press would manage to preserve its freedom.

FROM POLYCENTRISM TO MULTI-LATERAL ANTAGONISM

When the independence of a small country, A, is menaced by a larger one, B, it will seek to align itself with another large nation, C, which for reasons of its own shares an antagonism towards B. Such had been the age-old methods of balance-of-power politics. That the nations all happen to be communist states does not seem to alter the pattern. Thus, Albania (A) has been resentful of Yugoslavian dominance from a time predating communist rule, and when Albanian Communists achieved power in close dependence on Yugoslavia (B), they found nothing much had altered the traditional imbalance between the two countries. Enver Hoxha and his followers saw the Tito-Stalin schism as the opportunity to set themselves free from Belgrade by liquidating their pro-Yugoslav Party rivals—with Soviet support. Thus Hoxha's fidelity to the USSR (C) can be seen more as a means of warding off Tito's influence than as an expression of dedication to Moscow. A, in fear of B, held close to C.

However, once Khrushchev began denouncing Stalin and cultivating amicable relations with Tito, Hoxha saw the re-emerging spectre of Yugoslavian control. With B and C now on friendly terms, A is once more vulnerable to B. A then does what small nations usually do if the possibility presents itself; it seeks out another large nation, D, which might share an antagonism towards both B and C—in this case, China. That the Albanians moved towards China out of a newly-found ideological dedication to Maoism seems less likely than that they sought economic opportunities along with political and psychological support in the face of a Moscow-Belgrade rapprochement. As The New York Times reported on 31 October 1966:

To say that Albania had merely exchanged masters would be an oversimplification. However much Albania may appear to be serving Peking's interests and however much she may be economically dependent and ideologically close, for the first time in her history she has a protector whose distance is safe and who could therefore neither menace nor restrain her in choosing political and economic alternatives. Should national interest require, the Albanians are free to make such a choice.

A significant point for us to remember is that this classic re-enactment of balance-of-power politics took place entirely within the confines of the "communist world."

The spectacle of communists denouncing other communists may be witnessed in almost any part of the world. More than once, Fidel Castro voiced his differences with both Moscow and Peking. In September 1966, after ridding Cuba of Chinese aid missions and denouncing Peking for interference in Cuba's internal affairs, he lashed out against pro-Soviet Cuban Communists for opposing the independent course of the Cuban revolution. Labelling them "calculating," "servile," and "domesticating" men, and recalling that they once considered his guerrilla war against Batista as the action of "crazy adventurers," Castro went on to denounce the communist old guard for "being offended when we say we are making our own revolution as if it were a sin or sacrilege." In similar terms he has been openly antagonistic towards many of the communist parties of Latin America.

At about this time, the Japanese Communist Party voiced opposition to interference in its internal affairs by other communist parties and gave indications that it no longer considered itself aligned with Peking. Soon after, North Korea's rulers declared their own autonomy in a declaration entitled "Let Us Defend Independency," which stated in part that "Communists should always do their own thinking and act independently, maintaining their own identity. They should not dance to the tune of others." The statement criticised "flunkeys" of foreign powers who, returning to North Korea from wartime exile in the USSR or China "unconditionally worshipped anything belonging to the big powers and were preoccupied with imitating others in everything."

The age-old territorial and national-minorities disputes which have plagued countries throughout history also afflict the communist states, as exemplified by the deteriorating relations between Rumania and Hungary in regard to the Transylvania issue. Similarly, the Macedonian dispute has strained Yugoslavian-Bulgarian relations for more than a half century, with the Bulgarians contending that the territory under Tito's rule is really a part of historic Bulgaria. Bulgaria went so far as to send embassy officials (who were followed by Yugoslav secret police) to Yugoslav Macedonia to "study the conditions for the establishment of a separate Macedonia Socialist republic under Bulgarian guidance." Meanwhile, Ceașescu and Tito were reported to have clashed over the question of Rumanian and Yugoslav ethnic minorities in their respective countries.

Dwarfing all other disputes was the antagonism between the Soviet Union and China. The Soviet Union's long-standing assumption that it alone was the leading communist nation, its refusal to share atomic arms with China, its test-ban treaty with Washington which in effect called for a permanent closing of membership in the "atomic club," its unwillingness to give serious consideration to Chinese territorial claims, its neutrality in the Sino-Indian border dispute (followed by Soviet military shipments to India), its tendency to give more generous aid to small non-communist nations than to China, and its unwillingness to support the Chinese campaign to win Taiwan (even going so far as to suggest that Peking might consider a two-Chinas solution)—all this was sufficient to convince the Chinese that the Russians were more interested in thwarting than in assisting them. The Soviet tendency was to see the Chinese as "ungrateful" for the Russian aid rendered them, unduly competitive, and filled with an excessive national pride that seemed inexplicably to find its expression in hostility towards the USSR. Enough has been written on this subject without our having to recount the ideological, historical, territorial, and nationalistic differences that nurtured the conflict. The Russians eventually seemed to view the Chinese with far greater hostility than they did the Americans. "There is," George Feiffer writes after much first-hand observation in the USSR, "no sorrow in Moscow that the Sino-Soviet axis has collapsed, and no feeling of loss over the damage to international proletarianism. On the contrary, Russians never cared for international proletarianism—not, anyway, with the Chinese.... Russians do not like China. They feel that the Chinese are more natural enemies than natural friends. They would welcome a complete break, especially if it were accompanied by further rapprochement with the West."

To say that the animosity between the two nations represented a competition for leadership within the communist camp is to assume (a) that one can speak of a "communist camp" and (b) that the camp is begging for such leadership. But an impressive fact about the schism was how unsuccessful both the Chinese and the Russians were in rallying a following to their respective sides. The Chinese seemed unable to count on anyone—not even the North Korean and Japanese parties. The Soviet attempt in the autumn of 1966 to call a conference of the world's communist parties to deal with China ended in a fiasco.

The British Communists have been advocating complete freedom of religion, artistic expression, and scientific research, and supporting the thesis that a nation needs diverse democratic parties "including those that do not accept or oppose the advance of socialism." In much the same spirit the Swedish Communist leader, Hagberg, announced that his party was looking forward to the day when it would be fused with the ruling Social Democrats because the latter were a "sound working class party." Earlier, Togliatti had declared that the Italian Communist Party was not interested in the propagation of dogma, nor in the victory of communism as such but in the creation of a new kind of national and international society built with the assistance of "men of goodwill wherever they might be found." Through much of Western Europe it was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the communists from the other parliamentary socialist parties.

PLURALISM FROM WITHIN

Having recognised the cacophonies among the various communisms, we might observe that within any one communist nation or party there are conflicting social forces. The prevailing notion is that communist state exercise uniform "totalitarian" control over life in their respective countries. Some writers argue that by virtue of its "omnipotence," the communist state indefinitely can prevent any development toward a freer society. The non-communist reactionary regimes, then, are still preferable to "communist totalitarianism" because they at least might evolve into something better than they are today, whereas no country has ever emerged from communism having once "succumbed" to it.

In response to this view, it can first be suggested that there has been little time, as cultures go, to observe change. Most communist governments have been in power for less than a few decades. The Soviet revolution was a scant fifty years ago. Second, the existing communist societies have indeed been undergoing deep-seated and dramatic transitions, including increasing economic and material well-being, higher levels of education, greater areas of popular political involvement and expanding freedom in the arts. If we discard our preconceived image of the communist state as an immense monolith, an immutable, all-powerful totalitarian machine, we can observe that communist leaders, like political leaders everywhere, seem to devote a great deal of energy to the essential task of maintaining popularity and power by mediating competing factional forces and accommodating widespread social demands. Like leaders elsewhere, they sometimes find themselves confronted with popular fermentations and eruptions that send them rushing forward to catch up with those they are supposedly leading. "All-powerful" party rulers are suddenly deposed; new voices, new demands, and new programmes emerge; yesterday's political sins become today's political virtues, and vice versa. Conflict seems to be an inescapable part of any modern social system, including a communist one.

Democratic expressions (as defined by conventional Western standards) are becoming more pronounced in communist countries. In Yugoslavia, the premier of the Slovenia Republic was defeated on a parliamentary vote, refused to reconsider, and was ousted by the legislature, which proceeded to elect a new government. Yugoslavs, according to one New York Times observer, are enjoying an increasingly "greater degree of freedom to dissent, to practice religion, to travel outside the country and to enjoy a press of considerable diversity." In the Soviet Union, two Russian political scientists, writing in a scholarly journal, urged that their country's legislative bodies begin exercising the full power conferred on them by law.

The developments within the "communist world" are often startling and uneven. At any one time one can witness significant transformations toward more open and pluralistic social arrangements along with sporadic regressions reminiscent of the Stalinist era. But if anything can be said about the "communist world" it is that it does not exist as a monolithic unchanging entity.

Communism was once feared and hated because it allegedly represented a unified global conspiracy dedicated to our obliteration. Having realised that the "communist world" is riddled with conflict, many anti-communists now assert that "competing" communists are just as dangerous as formerly "conspiring" ones. Many devils are at least as bad as one since all of them are motivated by essentially the same evil intent. In our imaginations "communism" becomes a kind of contaminating reified "force" which infuses itself into diverse and incongruous political forms. The communist may be a Rumanian leader openly denouncing Soviet policy, a Cuban attacking Peking, a Russian or a Chinese castigating one another; whether he be a well-fed bureaucrat in Warsaw or a half-starved seventeen-year-old fighting the foreign invader in the Vietnam jungle, a Dominican student taking up arms for constitutional rule or a French intellectual making an agonising reappraisal, a Huk guerrilla fighting for land reform, a Bolivian tin miner, a factory worker in Turin, a journalist in Chile, or a schoolteacher in Minneapolis—but such communists, once so labelled, represent the same evil in varied guises. As with any stereotype, the word "communist" imposes a false categorical uniformity upon a whole host of human beings who often share little common identity with each other, and who in the infinite variety of their social, historical, national, and personal experiences are frequently in conflict with or indifferent to each other.

It is a curious "satanic force" which so strenuously works against itself the way communist organisations, and nations frequently do. Heated old-fashioned territorial disputes, complaints about unfair trade and treaty agreements, market competitions, differences in historical experience and in cultural taste and development, memories of past national rivalries, age-old ethnic and racial animosities, suspicions of being disadvantaged and misused—in short, all the substantive and psychic conflicts that have plagued nations throughout history arise among the communist countries and parties.