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.

CHAPTER TWO - The Demon Communist

Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself. ALDOUS HUXLEY Diabolism on the one side and divinity on the other still survive as basic factors in the process of political control. CHARLES E. MERRIAM

It is characteristic of the virtuous that they are prone to see demons, and of the godly that they frequently have a greater interest in the devil than in the deity. The virtuous are not merely tantalised by evil, they are in need of its presence. Were there no venal force there would be no opportunity to save the world or oneself, and no occasion for the organic violence that so often typifies righteous rage. The virtuous need the demonic because a role identity cannot find meaning except in association with complementary roles. For this reason the magistrate in Jean Genet's The Balcony begs the criminal not to mend his ways so that he himself may continue to exist as a magistrate; so the physician needs the sick, the teacher needs the student, the anti-Semite needs the Jew, the soldier needs the enemy, and the anti-communist needs the communist. The seemingly antithetical are often symbiotic. For most of us virtue would lose its meaning were sin abolished; thus, at times, the good is discovered by a process of defining and then negating the evil as in "Thou shalt not..." And to be against some kind of sin has frequently been sufficient grounds for a claim to some kind of virtue.

To a greater extent than they dare admit, the virtuous are intrigued by and vicariously addicted to evil; they find it stimulating and titillating. In the name of vigilance, sin becomes their preoccupation. It is no accident that those who make most vehement claim to the virtues of true Americanism, viz., the John Birchites, dwell most obsessively on the sins of communism, even to the extent of appropriating to themselves what are taken to be communist methods (conspiracy, unquestioning obedience to the leader, infiltration, use of front organisations, etc.). If communism were to disappear from the face of the earth, the Birchite would have to create new manifestations of it in his imagination—as indeed he frequently does—or else face a life emptied of much meaningful imperative.

If the impetus of one's life feeds on phobia derivatives, then the phobia, instead of being easily discarded, will be maintained at all costs. Arguments and evidence which demonstrate the groundless or exaggerated quality of such fear are not welcomed as sources of relief, but are resented as denials of one's deep psychic outlets, intrusions demanding a drastic reallocation of one's life impetus. Our fears and hatreds can become precious things, and rather than seeking liberation from them we often hold to the arguments which justify and intensify them. There evolves, to use Gordon Allport's phrase, a kind of "functional autonomy"; the very investment of vast amounts of psychic energy makes it extremely difficult for one to surrender the phobia. The fear creates its own momentum and eventually becomes its own motivation.

Most Americans seem to share this addictive fear of communism, and no sooner does one representation of the menace (the Russians) submerge than phobic feelings are cathected on to another (the Chinese). The fear has become too conditioned into us, too invested with meaning, too awesomely important to be deprived of its expression at a moment.

The Ideological Thread

A fear of this dimension tends to reify the feared object; communism becomes a political force divorced of the historical, national, ethnic, cultural, organisational, material, indeed, human, substances which give it form and identity.

What is this transcending and transubstantiating quality that transforms people into communists, and communists into demons, even as these demons battle each other across and within national boundaries, while often showing themselves eager for peaceful cooperative relations with ordinary mortals? The anti-communist's standard response is to classify as "outward appearances" those characteristics that do not fit the image of a nefarious adversary, reminding us that appearances are always deceiving and always outweighed by the "inner" characteristics which all communists have in common. For all their differences and conflicts, the communists allegedly share the same inner vision, the same ideology. Do they not consider themselves identified as communists, and is not this identity a function of their mutual dedication to Marxist-Leninist tenets?

The evidence of the preceding chapter might make us question whether commonly professed doctrinal axioms signify conspiratorial unison, and whether doctrine itself does not as often become a source of conflict as of cohesion. Professions of common ideology do not guarantee a common reading of the Marxist-Leninist text. The nature of political ideology is that it can frequently be ignored; and it is debatable and susceptible to varying interpretations when not ignored. It can be revised to best serve the interests of some communist leaders while conflicting with the predilections of others. Most often, doctrine is used by communist leaders to justify policies and legitimise actions, and its meaning is periodically reinterpreted accordingly.

Even if we were to grant the dubious proposition that ideology guides all communist actions and goals, we would still have to determine how and in what ways ideology is implemented; that is, we would still have to evaluate specific policies. We would then ascertain the unremarkable fact that, despite their common "Marxist-Leninist" label, different communist leaders, acting in response to diverging sets of priorities, arrive at conflicting policies, and are disinclined to sacrifice their immediate interests to the eschatological goal envisioned in certain passages of the sacred text.

The history of Christianity demonstrates that ideology seldom guarantees frictionless cohesion or concerted action among a vast plurality of interests, loyalties, and animosities. Even during that one grandiose international military effort of the Middle Ages, the Crusades, "there was almost as much strife between the Christians who went on them as there was fighting between Christians and infidels." The religious wars of the post-Reformation era clearly demonstrated the prosperity of men to slaughter each other in the name of the Prince of Peace and the One True God of Love. The heretic is always more hated than the infidel. Something similar may be said of the various communists. Stalin excommunicated Tito, reclassifying him an apostate of the Word; the USSR and Albania pronounced damnation on each other for being enemies of the working class; the Rumanians sacrificed their form of national communism by treating it as an expression of the self-directed spirit of the nation's proletariat and therefore a sacred representation of Marxist internationalism; Moscow and Peking accused each other of heretical violations of revolutionary tenets, etc. All this does not mean that doctrine is merely window dressing; legitimacy of rule is the most serious concern for any leadership group and since doctrine supports legitimacy, it is treated seriously. What it does mean is that ideology can breed conflict as readily as it can promise unity.

There are other tempting comparisons between Christianity and communism. Christianity, too, was an ideology that cut across national boundaries, and like communism, it suffered its worst schisms and decline under the competing demands of the nation-state. Devotion to the nation became a far more commanding emotion than loyalty to Rome. Today it is the Rumanian Communist Ceaușescu who heaps scorn on those party theoreticians who "have been trying to lend credence to the idea that nations are an outdated social category." The earlier national schisms (Titoism and Maoism) have opened opportunities for further pluralities and the promise of a conflictless world seems no more at hand today than in the days before Bolshevism.

Words vs. Words: The Diabolic Blueprint

Americans fear that the communist texts contain a "blueprint for world conquest." Now there is no gainsaying that communist writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would provide an ample number of predictions about the eventual global victory of communism. However these same Marxist writers are often quite explicit on the point that revolutions cannot be exported but must come from the political consciousness and sacrifices of the various peoples of the world. This was as true of Marx as of Lenin and is as true of Lin Biao.

What many cold-war theoreticians fail to do is distinguish between prediction, on the one hand, and intent and action, on the other; thus, classic Marxist-Leninist predictions are treated as statements of intent directing all present-day communist actions. Yet it is one thing to show that a person believes history is moving inevitably on a particular course and quite another to demonstrate that this presumption directs his present energies and that other goals such as national prestige, international peace, domestic prosperity, and personal security have lesser meaning to him. With much insight, Robert Daniels observes:

...The American outlook... cannot grasp the possibility of communist ideas becoming mere doctrinal comforters which do not guide action to any significant degree. Americans themselves, like practically everyone else, may be guilty on this score: stock phrases like "freedom" and "democracy" sustain the sense of American self-righteousness but may be conveniently overlooked when practical business or foreign policy decisions have to be made... To keep one's own ideology intact, it is easier to believe in the consistency of the other side's as well. [Italics added.]

The propensity to use some quotation from a communist source as prima facie evidence that communists are conspiring to destroy us is no better exemplified than in the treatment accorded Khrushchev's "we will bury you" statement. In 1959 during a visit to the United States, the Soviet leader was requested at a press conference to speak to this point:

Mr. Lawrence: A number of questions reflect a great interest in another remark once attributed to you, Mr. Khrushchev, to a diplomat at a reception, that you would bury us.

If you didn't say it, say so, and if you did say it, could you explain what you meant?

Premier Khrushchev: ...I believe I did use that expression once, and if I did, I will try to explain why and what it means. To put it more precisely, the expression I used was distorted, and on purpose, because what was meant was not the physical burial of any people but the question of the historical force of development....

At one time the most widespread system of society in the world was feudalism. Then capitalism took its place. Why was that? Because capitalism was a more progressive kind of system than was feudalism... We believe that Karl Marx, Engels and Lenin gave scientific proof of the fact that the system, the social system of socialism would take the place of capitalism.

We believe in that... and that is why I said that looking at the matter from the historical point of view, socialism, communism, would take the place of capitalism and capitalism thereby would be, so to speak, buried...

I personally am convinced that communism will be victorious, as a system of society which provides better possibilities for the development of a country's productive forces; which enables every person to develop his capacities best; and insures full freedom of a person in that society. Many of you will not agree with that, but that means that I cannot agree with you either.

What is to be done? Let us each of us live under the system which we prefer, you under capitalism, and we will continue to build under communism.

All that is not progressive will die away someday, because if capitalism, the capitalist society, is a better form of society and gives better opportunities to develop a country's productive forces, then certainly it will win.... [This is followed by statements concerning the productive accomplishments of the Soviet Union which Khrushchev offered as proof of the viability and success of the socialist system.]

Here we have a prediction about the course of history and not a statement of aggressive intent. But why should we believe Khrushchev's denials of belligerent intent? Are not communist words designed to put us off our guard by lulling us into a false sense of security? And have not communists elsewhere confessed to their aggrandising plot in what Dean Rusk describes as "the aggressor's openly proclaimed intentions"? But which is it to be? Do communist words mean nothing or do they mean everything? Are communist utterances filled with duplicity and subterfuge or do they openly confess nefarious intent? Many cold-war theorists would have it both ways, placing no faith in Khrushchev's words when he speaks at length to give the full import of his original comment, but giving credence to those utterances which can be taken out of context and freely embellished with nightmarish implications as with the "we will bury you" slogan. Thus, the people who warn us against relying on the words of communists frequently build their own anti-communist brief on out-of-date or out-of-context words from Lenin, Khrushchev, or Lin Biao. And by methods not readily discernible, some anti-communists appear to know exactly when a communist is speaking with lethal mendacity and when with childlike candour.

Words and Actions: Elastic Applications

In assessing the relationship between the communists' words and their actions, American "cold-warriors" utilise the mechanisms of selective perception described above. When the communists' utterances are moderate, we discount these as mere words and point to their seemingly hostile actions. Hence, when the communists plea for coexistence and peaceful negotiation of disputes, the anti-communist tends to discount this as verbiage, and points to their ostensibly antagonistic behaviour (e.g. Soviet missiles, Warsaw Pact, Hungary, Berlin blockade). When communist actions are restrained and conciliatory (e.g., the Austrian peace treaty, cuts in military budgets, nuclear test-ban treaty, concessions on underground tests, the cultivation of friendly political and economic relations with non-communist nations, etc.) we are advised not to lose sight of their hostile words. Thus at times we are reminded that "actions speak louder than words" while on other occasions we are asked to believe that "words speak louder than actions."

A forced consistency in the anti-communist argument is achieved by postulating, a priori, the existence of an unrelenting communist hostility and then dismissing all peaceful and conciliatory communist expressions and actions as merely "tactical." But to discount peaceful actions and expressions as "tactical" is to imply that they are not a measure of real behaviour. Yet what political leaders do as "tactics" is, after all, what they do; it is how they behave, and is much of what they are. A group's unwillingness to negotiate, compromise, and cooperate is usually taken as evidence of its extremism and antagonism. Surely the presence of a willingness to make concessions and reconcile differences with other groups should be indicative of the converse.

Any action and its opposite is treated by the anti-communist as evidence of the same inexorable demonic intent. If the communists act belligerently, this demonstrates their wickedness; and if they act moderately, even threatening to become downright friendly, this, in turn, proves their duplicity, mendacity, and again, their wickedness. Thus for many years a Soviet challenge in Berlin was immediately taken as evidence of aggression, but the withdrawal of the challenge was not received as an indication of a desire for peaceful reconciliation but as a shifty ploy designed to throw us off balance. For many years, the shrill anti-Americanism of Soviet propaganda supposedly signified aggressive war-like intent, but in the post-Stalin era when Moscow began calling for friendly relations with the United States, contending that there were no differences between the two great powers which could not be negotiated, then American observers, such as the Sovietologist Frederick Barghoorn, saw this move as a Soviet attempt to "pose" as the champions of peace thereby "neatly turning the propaganda tables." Soviet pleas for negotiation, trade, and disarmament were little more than "gambits," "shrewd moves," "maneuvres." In 1960, when Castro bitterly accused the United States of planning a Cuban invasion, we saw this as a representation of his slandering hostility (even though his accusation proved quite accurate soon after, in the Bay of Pigs invasion.) Three years later, when Castro made repeated overtures for peaceful and normal relations with the United States, we spurned all such offers either as "gestures" designed to induce us to lower our guard or as attempts by Castro "to get himself off the hook." But if we justify our own hostility towards Cuba on the grounds that Cuba is hostile towards us, then what becomes the justification when Cuba seeks a rapprochement?

The justification comes in that elastic evaluative process which enables the anti-communist demonologist to perceive all events and conditions as examples of the devil's doings. Other illustrations of this a-priorism may be given. When the Soviet economy faltered, this was taken as evidence of the innate undesirability and failure of a communist state to build the good life. When the economy surged forwards this was treated as evidence of fearful communist power. If the Soviets closed their borders to Western visitors (out of suspicion and fear of espionage and subversion) this was proof of their antagonism; and for almost twenty years the "Iron Curtain" served as the convenient symbol of the Red Menace. When the Russians opened their borders to Western visitors in the post-Stalin era and sought wider exchanges, this was taken as signifying dangerous strength and confidence; the Soviets were seeking a new propaganda advantage.

For a while it was even assumed among some American writers that the many inconsistencies in Soviet policy were part of the Kremlin's deliberate design. Confronted with a conflicting array of stimuli, the reacting adversary (i.e., the United States) would suffer immense confusions. By the application of Pavlovian stimulus-response theory to foreign policy, the Soviets supposedly were intended to unhinge us. That Soviet policy inconsistencies resulted from the same confusions, trials, and errors, internal internationalism and agonising transitions that beset all policymakers was an idea not seriously entertained during the first twenty years of the cold war.

In sum, demonological thought has the capacity to reduce all things, X and the opposite of X, to the same conclusion: economic failures or economic successes, closed borders or open borders, a reluctance to negotiate or a willingness to negotiate, blustering rhetoric or friendly rhetoric, hard consistencies or confused inconsistencies—whatever the communists may do and say, or not do and not say, becomes evidence to support our fearful imagery.

Inhuman, Subhuman, Superhuman

A major supposition of the demon theory is that communists are not encumbered by ordinary human emotions. The devil, after all, is neither lout nor weakling, but infinitely resourceful, persuasive, and purposeful. He is the devil, as Bishop Emrich once noted, because he moves with all these virtues in the wrong direction: "The Devil, says traditional Christian thought with profound insight, is a fallen angel." Throughout history, whether his guise be that of Jacobin, Jew, or Bolshevik, the devil has been endowed with exceptional guise, daring, and stamina. We have been reminded that the communists are "not like other people," that they place little value on human life (including their own), that they operate by diabolic rules and rites of their own, that they have mastered sinister "appeals" and "forces" against which we must be alerted and armed.

The virtuous, despite their arrogance, frequently feel inferior to the wiles of the wicked. In all their puritan anxiety and secret self-doubt, they cannot free themselves from the suspicion that, in a wicked world, evil genius possesses the best methods for achieving success. We Americans nurse an inveterate dread that we are handicapped in any confrontation with the communists by the inhibitions imposed upon us by our innate goodness. Believing we lack the fanatical diabolic secret powers of the demon, yet envious of such powers, we begin to overcompensate for the imagined disadvantage. Thus, when confronted with evidence that communist appeals are much more effective in winning allegiance and support in certain Vietnamese villages than our own best efforts at psychological warfare, we have been known to redress the balance by bombing the contested villages out of existence.

The communist's demonic resourcefulness seems to defy the ordinary laws of political action. If we are to believe Hubert Humphrey, the communists do not need or even want the normal advantages of majority support and the strength of numbers. Confronted with the fact that our Santo Domingo intervention had attempted to prevent a communist takeover in a country where communists were not noticeably present, Eric Sevareid fashioned this superhuman image:

...Their lack of numbers is their strength. It was because they were few that President President Bosch had not bothered to deal severely with them. It was because they were few that they could do much of their work undetected... [and] could act with rapidity when the explosion came. It was because they were few that foreign opinion makers could make the Americans seem ridiculous and give us a propaganda defeat.

It follows, as Theodore Draper ironically observed, that the more communists there are, the more likely they are to be dealt with severely, to be detected in their work, to act less rapidly, and to make it difficult for the Americans to appear ridiculous. By that logic, it should be our goal to increase the number of communists in order to deprive them of their devilish tactical strength. The communists are both "titan and beast," superhuman but also subhuman. To justify our own momentous and murderous power we need not just any old enemy but, as W. H. Ferry reminds us, "one who is sinister, conspiring, terroristic, atheistic, power-hungry, monolithic, anti-human, and inhuman. To quote Senator Fulbright:

Man's capacity for decent behaviour seems to vary directly with his perception of others as individual humans with human motive, and feelings, whereas his capacity for barbarous behaviour seems to increase with his perception of an adversary in abstract terms. This is the only explanation I can think of for the fact that the very same good and decent citizens who would never fail to feed a hungry child or comfort a sick friend or drop a coin in the church collection basket can celebrate the number of Viet Cong killed in a particular week or battle, talk of "making a desert" of North Vietnam or of "bombing it back into the Stone Age" despite the fact that most, almost all, of the victims would be innocent peasants and workers, and can contemplate with equanimity, or even advocate, the use of nuclear weapons against the "hordes of Chinese coolies." I feel sure that this apparent insensitivity to the incineration of thousands of millions of our fellow human beings is not the result of feelings of savage inhumanity towards foreigners; it is the result of not thinking of them as humans at all but rather as the embodiment of doctrines that we consider evil.

How difficult it would be to maintain our immense psychic and material investment in the global crusade against communism if the object of it all were just another group of mortals not all that different from ourselves, impelled more or less by the same life needs, desires, and feelings.

It is the practice of cold-war scholars to emphasise that communist nations are cast from the same totalitarian mold as Nazi Germany; thus the various communisms are reduced to one ominous monolithic image, and even more significantly, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany are treated as archetypal equivalents. References to certain similarities such as the one-party system, the secret police, a controlled press, and a "totalistic" ideology become sufficient reason to impute all the sins, evils, and terrors of the Nazi system to the various communist systems, albeit with a few minor qualifications.

In this fashion the demonologist makes his task easier, for who would challenge his crusade if in fact communism is but another variation of Nazism? Who would challenge Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk when they equate wars of liberation in Southeast Asia with Nazi aggression in Europe, arguing that any "retreat" in Vietnam would be another Munich, another prelude to world war? Yet we might question the validity of their particular historical extrapolations, and consider the possibility that the differences between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia or Communist China from the standpoint of international well-being far outweigh the similarities. It is, after all, not a matter of indifference to us that Brezhnev and his technocrats, rather than Hitler and his lunatics, preside over the Kremlin's nuclear missiles, not a small matter that Soviet goals seem directed towards achieving stabilised relations abroad and prosperity at home, rather unlike the glorified Nazi goals of war, conquest, and master-race barbarism. More than appearances separate the Soviet faith in science, education, and collective social betterment from the Nazi faith in Volk mysticism, psychotic sadism, and genocide. Khrushchev's assertion that socialism is "ballet and borscht" is not to be compared with the Nazi obsession with blood and bullets. While the Third Reich strove for autarky as a necessary economic condition for the war to come, the USSR has continually sought wider and closer cultural, economic, and political relations with other nations. Can one seriously equate the caution of Soviet foreign policy—putting aside whatever else may be said about it—with the apocalyptic violence that impelled and captivated Hitler?

More specifically, can one imagine the Nazis making an outright gift of 200,000 tons of wheat to famine-ridden India as did Moscow in December 1966? To those who would argue that this very willingness to bear gifts is what makes the communists even more dangerous than the Nazis, a rebuttal has been offered on the previous pages: our understanding and evaluation of a nation should be derived in large part from how it behaves. Therefore, if the Soviets aid India, there seems a strong reason to conclude that they are not bending every effort to subverting and taking over the New Delhi government, rather they are behaving sympathetically and helpfully towards a non-communist nation. Likewise, the Soviet effort at mediating the Kashmir war in the autumn of 1965, leading to the cease-fire agreement signed at Tashkent, seems to demonstrate Moscow's desire to maintain peaceful and stabilised relations along her southern frontier. If the Soviets thrive on chaos, ruin, and the weakness of others, as cold-war theorists insist, then they give every indication of working against their own purposes by bringing Pakistan and India to the conference table. Only by disregarding actions of this sort can the demonologist identify Soviet Russia with Nazi Germany, equating grain shipments, technical aid missions and peace mediations with Hitlerian war.

When dwelling upon the subhuman qualities of the communist, special attention is usually given to the abuses and crimes perpetrated within the communist nations. There is no denying that Stalin sent hundreds of thousands to labour camps, and that hundreds among the Party leadership, the military, the arts, and sciences were executed on the suspicion of political deviancy. Nor can it be denied that ideological heterodoxy and freedom to challenge the legitimacy of Party rule in open political competition are still alien to the Soviet system. What we might question is the image of a totally terrorised, enslaved nation; the evidence we have indicates that the Stalinist terror was felt principally among the ruling echelons, and the higher one went into the decision-making structure, the more real and immediate the dangers. Among the masses, however, Stalin enjoyed a devotional support not to be expected from an antagonised terrorised populace. His death brought no joyful dancing in the streets; rather, according to the anti-Stalinist poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko: "A sort of general paralysis came over the country. Trained to believe that they were all in Stalin's care, people were lost and bewildered without him. All Russia wept." This same populace, as even the American press noted, greeted Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's crimes with scepticism and incredulity.

For many years anti-communist writers claimed that at any one time, anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five million Soviet citizens were suffering the horrors of slave labour camps, with millions perishing over the years only to be replaced by millions more. By such statistics, the sum total of people incarcerated in the labour camps over a twenty-five-year period would have consisted of an astonishing proportion of the Soviet population; the support and supervision of labour camps would have been Russia's single largest enterprise. That the USSR could have maintained this kind of prison population during normal times, let alone during an era of rapid industrialisation, total war, and re-industrialisation, and that Stalin could have maintained such popular devotion among the masses while so decimating their ranks is, to say the least, highly questionable.

When the Soviet Union was not being defended as a paradise on earth by a handful of American Communists, it was being depicted by the anti-communists as a land of unmitigated terror and misery. The years of misrepresentation still make a balanced view of Soviet society difficult to attain. Without pretending that the civil arrangements and material conditions of the USSR equal those found in certain more prosperous and liberal locales within the Western democracies, we might note the salutary developments of the post-Stalin era, viz., a marked improvement in working conditions, a small but visible mitigation of the more glaring inequities in salaries and income, new and substantial capital investments in housing, recreational facilities, and consumer goods, the abolition of all school and university fees, and the continuation of relatively generous pension benefits and vigorous medical and health programmes which were already a feature of Stalin's era.

Reforms in Soviet law include the elimination of certain categories of crime, for instance, abortion, absenteeism, and the wartime restriction on quitting one's job without permission; the right to consul prior to trial has been extended along with new procedural safeguards in evaluating evidence and confessions. In the area of political crimes even more notable reforms have been instituted: the secret police have been downgraded and deprived of the power to investigate crimes under their own special rules without Procuracy supervision; the laws permitting persons to be tried secretly, in absentia or without counsel have been repealed; Vyshinsky's doctrine that the accused must prove his innocence in cases of counterrevolutionary crimes has been replaced by a new Soviet code which places the burden of proof on the prosecutor; innocent associations with others who are planning an illegal act no longer constitute a crime; the law on "counterrevolutionary crimes" is now somewhat less nebulous; the crime of "terrorist acts" has been restricted to murder or serious injury of an official with intent to overthrow or weaken Soviet authority; 1957 saw the completion of a thorough re-examination of all cases of individuals previously convicted as counterrevolutionaries and the release from labour camps and full rehabilitation of the overwhelming majority of such persons. "The Soviet citizen, "Professor Harold J. Berman of the Harvard Law School concludes, "is now protected against police terror, false charges, and faked trials to a far greater extent than ever before in Soviet history."

Transitions in leadership are now possible without bloody purges and executions, as witnessed by the peaceable disposition of Khrushchev. Contacts with Western travellers and Western ideas are increasing. Generally a new ease, affluence, and self-confidence are visible in Soviet society, and along with this, critical voices can be heard within governmental, artistic, and intellectual circles. Nevertheless, there is no gainsaying that bureaucratic authoritarianism still pervades many crucial aspects of oficial and intellectual life. There persists a Party vigilance against those "alien ideologies" that "defame" the Soviet system, as exemplified in the official condemnation of Yevtushenko, and the trial of Daniel and Siniavsky, and the 1968 trial of four young writers.

Having observed these autocratic features in a communist society which might well deserve the appellation of "evil," we need not then presume that the men who govern the system are incapable of acting as—and therefore, incapable of being treated as—ordinary mortals. The trouble with the demonological position is that it is based on a false conception of evil; it does not allow that the same leader who perpetrated the bloody purges of the 1930s also instituted one of the most advanced health and medical care programmes in the industrial world, and that the same men who forcefully suppressed a popular revolution in Hungary and occupied Czechoslovakia also instituted humanising reforms in the political-judicial process and substantial improvements in consumer conditions at home.

Is it really possible that Joseph Stalin, a cruel despot who ordered hundreds of thousands of people suspected of political opposition sent to labour camps... without even the pretense of a fair trial, at the same time established a system of law and justice designed to operate fairly and objectively in nonpolitical cases? It is not only possible: it is a fact. But why should it appear strange?

It appears strange only to those who insist that the adversary, in his every important movement and motive, is capable of only wrong deeds. Yet history is replete with examples of ruling groups simultaneously executing the most morally incompatible actions.

But if and when the anti-communist admits there may be positive features in the Soviet system, he then usually reintroduces the "tactical" argument. For instance, Bertram Wolfe dismisses the welfare feature of the Soviet system as an expediency adopted by the totalitarian state in order to maximise its power: a literate, healthy population is, after all, a necessary condition for increased industrialisation. Hence, what is considered "welfare" is actually an instrument of "power." One, however, might just as easily argue it the other way around. Given the Soviet dream of building the supposedly one true happy, productive, cooperative, and peaceful socialist society, it might be that what is considered "power" is actually an instrument of "welfare." For years, Wolfe and others argued that Soviet leaders pursued power to the constant and deliberate detriment of welfare; now confronted with the fact that the USSR spends proportionately more on health, education, and welfare than do highly industrialised Western nations, they dismiss this as an expediency of power. First, the Soviets supposedly used power to neglect welfare; now it seems they use welfare to maintain power.

The communist system is evil either because it shows no concern for the welfare of its citizenry, or because it does show a concern but only for an imputed evil purpose. There are, then, no set of observable conditions which can put the anti-communist presumption to an empirical test. Indeed, we are not dealing with an empirical proposition. The fact remains that the Soviet government has chosen to give a reasonably high priority to social welfare, and this datum cannot be dismissed if we allow that one way of judging behaviour is to observe actual behaviour, and one way of judging a system's priorities and policies is to look at its actual priorities and policies.

The Non Sequitur

Even if it is finally agreed that there are liberalising tendencies in the Soviet Union and other communist nations, the anti-communist might argue that the mitigation of the more glaring evils in Russia's domestic life does not guarantee virtue in its international life; it is, after all, Moscow's international behaviour that can affect our own well-being and survival, and there is no one-to-one relation between international and domestic actions.

But that is exactly the point. If we cannot presume virtue in Soviet foreign policy by merely pointing to reforms in Russian domestic life, likewise we cannot presume evil in Soviet foreign policy by dwelling upon the internal autocratic features of the Soviet system. Often the anti-communist alludes to real or imagined domestic ills within the communist nations as a means of justifying his own antagonism towards those nations, pointing to the internal crimes of Stalinism as prima facie evidence of Soviet aggression abroad (and at the same time assuming that anyone who sees Soviet policy as a defensive reaction to our own cold-war crusade in therefore obliged to be an apologist for all features of Soviet society).

Great Britain offered perhaps the best approximation of a political democracy in the twentieth century and throughout much of the nineteenth, but this says little about the ruthless exploitations and oppressions of her imperial rule in Ireland, India, and Africa. Domestic rule in Franco's Spain features some of the worst economic, social, and political abuses to be found in a Western nation, yet Spain's relations with other sovereign states have been inoffensive and, one might even say, respectable. Neither the historic, criminal indifference to racial minorities, nor the belated, half-hearted attention more recently directed to that issue, damn or justify American postwar policies towards the Soviet Union.

Much of the discussion about communist countries rests upon this non sequitur. That we see a nation as possessing certain domestic virtues along with its vices, or vices along with its virtues does not necessarily tell us how to relate to it in the field of foreign policy, for its actions abroad may be dangerous to our security or not, conciliatory and moderate or abrasive and antagonistic, irrespective of how its social life might suit our tastes.

If the reason we oppose communist governments is that they are despotic, then why do we not pursue a hostile policy towards the many non-communist autocracies? Here the cold-war theoretician might reply that the non-communist dictatorships, whatever we might think of their social institutions, do not threaten our own peace and security. The question, then, is: Do the communist nation-states threaten our peace and security? and not, Are they undemocratic in their domestic arrangements? Thus we return to the contentions about international conspiracy, ideology, intent, and action that have claimed our attention in this and the preceding chapters. Some answers have already been suggested, but we will further investigate other facts and fictions about the "communist threat." Before doing so, we might pause to consider the historical, cultural, and political context in which anti-communism has flourished.