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.

CHAPTER THREE - America the Virtuous

It is a truth, which every man may see, if he will but look,—that all the channels of communication,—public and private, through the school-room, the pulpit, and the press,—are engrossed and occupied with this one idea, which all these forces are combined to disseminate:—that we the American people, are the most independent, intelligent, moral, and happy people on the face of the earth. An editorial in THE UNITED STATES JOURNAL, 18 October 1845 Nothing is more embarrassing in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, 1835

Since its inception, America has been imbued with a sense of its own historical uniqueness and God-given virtue. To trace all the antecedents that shaped our national self-image is to write a history of the nation itself. Instead we might delineate those components of the American belief system, those national myths, which tell us something about this country's habitual response to "alien" faiths, and something about the particular intensity of American anti-communism. In referring to our cherished beliefs as "national myths" one need not presume they are devoid of historical foundation, nor that they are frivolous cultural traits. "Myth," as the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski observed, "in fact, is not an idle rhapsody, not an aimless outpouring of vain imaginings, but a hard-working extremely important cultural force." If we don't define myth as the sacred tales which help enhance and codify belief, giving sanctity to the origins and destiny of a people, then the modern American is no more liberated from mythology than is the primitive Trobriander.

The Chosen People and the Perfect System

The image of America the Virtuous is rooted in the widely held myth of New World purity, and Old World corruption, a notion finding its earliest articulation in the seventeenth-century theocracy of Massachusetts Bay Colony. For the Puritan settlers, the Scriptural admonition to build a Zion in the virgin land took on a literal significance: "Know this is the place where the Lord will create a new Heaven, and a new Earth in new Churches, and a new Commonwealth together." Having lifted themselves and their children from the contaminations of the Old World, the Puritans faced the "howling wilderness" of America as might the Chosen People of Israel.

While Puritanism was itself too brittle and severe to survive intact, the idea that America was intended by God, History, or Destiny to occupy a special place in the world gathered strength as national consciousness took hold. "The hand of Divinity itself" shapes America's history, according to the youthful Hamilton. The truths that marshal the forces of independence are "self-evident," "the laws of Nature and Nature's God," wrote Jefferson in his Declaration. "There is still an option left to the United States," Washington believed. "Many hundred years must roll away," John Adams said, "before we shall be corrupted. Our pure, virtuous, public spirited, federative republic will last forever, govern the globe, and introduce the perfection of man."

Yet the Founding Fathers were realistic enough to acknowledge that angels do not govern men and even the virtuous have their vices. If the hand of God had offered the option, it was the hand of man that was to fashion the fulfillment by providing for "the necessity of auxiliary precautions." The future depended upon the institutional arrangements—the Constitution, the laws, the quality of policy and leadership—which would dilute and dissipate the aggrandising and corrupting human impulses.

A cautious document patched together by men who were conscious of individual and institutional imperfections, the Constitution nevertheless was to become an object of national devotion in the popular mind. The land, the people, and the Constitutional system all became part of something greater called the American Way of Life, something never explicitly defined because its existence has been so widely assumed to be a self-evident reality.

The Capitalist Culture and the American Dream

Cultural beliefs, e.g., the anti-radical, anti-socialist, anti-communist attitudes commonly shared by Americans, do not emerge full-blown from nowhere, nor do they circulate themselves like so many disembodied spirits. Beliefs must be propagated by human beings functioning within primary and institutional groups. In many instances the institutional agencies that transmit beliefs are heavily influenced by those interests which control the material resources necessary for social life. One cannot easily overestimate the extent to which the "haves" of society, successfully sanctify those beliefs which serve their interests, and stigmatise those which do not.

Throughout the industrial history of Europe and America, the propertied classes treated reformist demands as attacks upon civilisation itself. "Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy, is forthwith punished as an 'assault upon society' and is branded as 'socialism,'" wrote Karl Marx in 1852. Today convictions about the virtues of private enterprise and the evils of socialism and communism are so widely disseminated among Americans of all classes as to have developed an inertia of their own. However, such beliefs, even if they sometimes seem to be out of the air we breathe, have been quite consciously and strenuously propagated for several generations by the propertied interests in American society and by the institutional agencies over which these interests often exercised a substantial influence including the press, the professions, the public schools, the pulpit, the politicians, and the policymakers. Radical socialism was denied its legitimacy as a system of belief worthy of serious consideration, and the corporate economy was treated as an unalienable mainstay of American life.

A belief system and the institutional interests that support and are supported by it seek to identify themselves with other sacrosanct institutions and symbols. "The Free Enterprise System" became indelibly associated with the symbols of Nation, Democracy, Family, Church, and Order. There was a time in the late nineteenth century when one tycoon could lament the hostility felt by "the mass of people in this country" towards the corporations. And Theodore Roosevelt could win popular support with a flurry of "trust busting"; congressmen on the Nye Committee investigating the munitions industry in 1934, could denounce the "war profiteers" and Franklin Roosevelt could heap disdain on the "plutocrats." But regardless of the ebb and flow of public sentiment, the entrepreneurial culture was never seriously challenged by a competing American ethos. After World War II, even as talk of a "mixed economy" and a "welfare state" was becoming more respectable, the corporate economy came to enjoy as great a popularity as at any time in our history. Today, attacks upon "Free Enterprise" often are equated in the public mind with un-Americanism. Capitalism is treated as a necessary condition—sometimes even a sufficient cause—for political freedom, contraposed as the sole alternative to "communist tyranny." The National Association of Manufacturers' two-volume study of private enterprise observes: "Two... things have been of outstanding and dominating importance in our development: our system of representative democracy and our system of individual enterprise.... Inevitably and irrevocably the two go hand in hand."

By posing democratic capitalism and despotic socialism as the sole alternatives, the American ideology neglects the examples of democratic socialism (e.g. Israel, Sweden) and despotic capitalism (e.g. Spain, Portugal, South Africa, and most of Latin America). Capitalism is neither a sufficient cause for democracy nor a necessary condition. Capitalists have prospered under democratic and dictatorial political systems, and have lent wholehearted support to both, recognising in their practice, if not in their rhetoric, that there is no inevitable one-to-one relationship between an economic and a political system.

While American capitalism claims to be an expression of the universal natural drive for individual gain, it also presents itself as something unique in the world. It credits itself with having forged "the arsenal of democracy," the industrial-military machine that guards our frontiers in the struggle against communism, and it considers itself an essential part of the very desiderata to be defended. As one liberal Democrat from New York stated: "Unless one understands that the war in Vietnam is but another episode in the twenty-year-long series of confrontations between the two major powers on earth—democratic capitalism and oligarchical communism—one cannot understand what is happening anywhere in the modern world, much less in Vietnam."

The private enterprise system, it is said, creates equality of opportunity, rewards those who show capacity and initiative, justify relegates the parasitic and slothful to the bottom of the ladder, provides a national prosperity which is the envy of other lands, safeguards (through unspecified means) personal civil liberties and political freedom, promises continued progress in the endless proliferation of goods and services, and has made America the great, free, and beautiful nation it is. The extent to which ordinary Americans have internalised this credo is demonstrated by the Lynds who in their study of Middletown noted the tendency of workers during the depression to assume personal responsibility for their unemployment. Although they knew "times were bad," workingmen felt the system was less at fault than the individual exercising his talents in the marketplace. In his New Haven study, Robert Lane describes the workingmen he interviewed in 1957 as being plagued by money anxieties, engaged in a ceaseless striving for more income and more consumption. Yet economic egalitarianism, such as socialism or communism were believed to offer, found no place in their view of life. Income equality, Lane discovered, threatened to rob them of the goals that gave meaning to life ("getting ahead," "getting more"), obliterating the standards of class and status whereby they placed themselves in society and saw order and security in the world. Convinced that each person, rich or poor, pretty much got what he deserved, they considered the present system to be the best of all worlds.

The attitudes of these workingmen towards prosperity and the corporate economy were similar in many respects to what might be expected of the managerial elite. The same has been true of the American labour movement which over the decades has opposed radical programmes, giving wholehearted support to the private enterprise system, while concentrating on bread-and-butter issues and the entertainment of middle-class consumption styles. Like the business, political, military, and educational leaders, organised labour dedicated itself to the American anti-communist orthodoxy.

One might say there is indeed a "classless" society in America—in the sense that practically all Americans adhere to the entrepreneurial creed, and are dedicated to the acquisitive individualism of the competitive marketplace, and to the race for a better place at the status-consumption trough. Individual solutions are given to social problems, and national progress is calibrated by the piling up of goods, services, and income. America is the place where the Dream is always coming true. The choice, according to one business firm's advertisement, is quite clear:

If every Communist knew what every sane person in a capitalist country knows—the high standard of living which capitalism makes possible, the pride of individual accomplishment, the satisfaction of knowing you can go as far as your own abilities and ambition will take you, the security of justice, the joy of knowing your son can go even farther than you have gone... if every Communist knew the facts about capitalism, there wouldn't be any communists.

The Godly and the Ungodly

In some lands, such as Italy, many people who call themselves "communists" are also church-goers. In many Western European countries a new dialogue and mutual respect seem to be developing between Marxists and Christians. Even in Eastern European nations the communist governments have been willing to reach some kind of accommodation with the Church, and Soviet leader Gromyko has enjoyed an amicable audience with the Pope. In North Vietnam, according to various European and American observers, Catholics and Buddhists worship freely and openly. Despite these various signs, a quotation from Marx or Lenin is usually sufficient to establish the argument that communists are the implacable enemies of religion. Americans, in contrast, are the avowed boosters of religion. Whether or not they are devout practitioners, there is wide agreement among them that religion is a good and necessary thing.

There is no established Church in the United States, but as Will Herberg notes, religion per se, as represented by the major faiths, is so closely identified with the patriotic process as to have become a kind of unofficial establishment. Like capitalism, religion has attached itself to potent symbols beyond its own sphere. "Religion and democracy go hand in hand," said Vice President Barkley. "Religious faith remains in my opinion, our greatest national resource," asserted Adlai Stevenson, who went on to describe Americans as "the ordinary guardians" of a creed reaching back to the Old Testament Prophets. The particular denomination an American chooses is of no great public concern since the marriage of church and state is a nonsectarian one, leading the various faiths to the same God and the same Americanism.

What we have in America is the religion of nationalism and the nationalisation of religion. Over a century ago, the prophetic Tocqueville wrote:

Among almost all the Christian nations of our days, Catholic as well as Protestant, religion is in danger of falling into the hands of government.... [Rulers] divert to their own use the influence of the priesthood; they make them their own ministers, often their own servants, and by this alliance with religion they reach the inner depths of the soul of man.

Today the priestly-ministerial-rabbinical triumvirate has become an essential prop for presidential inaugurations, political party conventions, Congressional sessions, Thanksgiving Day dedications (a national not a religious holiday), and a host of other patriotic convocations. A variety of interfaith organisations exist to "fight communism" and aid "the victims of Red tyranny." On the eve of the 1964 elections, leaders of four faiths (including the Greek Orthodox) issued appeals urging voters to go to the polls to "protect their American heritage" and fulfill a "sacred obligation."

As the lines between political and religious belief blurred, a nonbeliever faced the charge of "un-Americanism." Richard Nixon once went so far as to suggest that atheists be disqualified from Presidential office. The American Legion, not the churches, launched the first "Back to God" campaign in 1955, on which occasion President Eisenhower submitted the following remarkable observation: "Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism. Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life." Faith, then, was not only conducive to patriotism, it became a necessary condition.

Furthermore, it was argued, America needed religion for the same reason it needed massive armies, vital leadership, viable institutions, growing industry, creative science, excellent schools, healthy children, good transportation—in order to win the cold war. The communists were successful because, in the words of John Foster Dulles, "As a nation, although still religious... we can no longer generate a spiritual power which will flow throughout the world.... We have no message to send to captive peoples to keep their faith and hope alive." Whether American cold-warriors were really concerned about the souls of men in Asia and Africa or, for that matter, the condition of their own souls, is a question we need not consider here. More important was that America and God fought side by side. "What is our battle against communism if it is not a fight between anti-God and a belief in the Almighty?" pondered Eisenhower. "Communists know this. They have to eliminate God from their system. When God comes in, communism has to go." But the image of a two-fisted Yankee-Doodle God joining Uncle Sam in a Big-Two Alliance against a common foe, while enough to offend the sensibilities of even an atheist, did not sufficiently assuage popular anxieties about the outcome of the contest.

The Vigilante Spirit

Americans long have lived in fear of being contaminated by some alien ideological disease. Jefferson spoke for most of his contemporaries when he envisioned America as "a home for the oppressed" while at the same time describing the newcomers as "a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mob," ready either to support despotic rulers or "imbibe principles of extreme licentiousness."

For the wellborn of the Federalist era, Jacobinism loomed as the worst of the Old World conspiracies, preaching "treasonable or secret machinations against the government," and reaching those who corrupt our opinion... the most dangerous of all enemies." Throughout much of the nineteenth century, nativists treated the influx of illiterate, indigent Irish peasants as part of a "papal conspiracy" and "Popish plot" to undermine the Republic. The hysteria of the Know-Nothing, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant crusade was eventually superseded by a more general alarm over "foreign radicalism." The Immigration Act of 1903 was the first in a series of repressive governmental measures against the foreign born that continue to this day and have included such things as Palmer raids, alien surveillance, arrest without warrant, detention without hearing, executive hearings often without right to counsel, no provision for due deliberation, and no safeguards against error, prejudice, and summary deportation. On the more "positive" side, there emerged a host of federal, state, and local chauvinistic "educational" programmes for the propagation of something called "100 percent Americanism" among the foreign stock.

The traditionally conservative immigrant, fearful of authority, oriented to the confines of his ethnic community, longing for security and modest gain, was hardly suitable material for subversion or revolution. Nevertheless, from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the McCarran-Walter legislature of 1954, we have most often assumed the existence of an innate affinity between the alien and the radical. If every alien was not necessarily a radical, certainly every radical was in some way alien, that is, un-American, even if he came from old-stock antecedents, as was most often the case.

It should be evident by now that the anti-communist impulse did not emerge suddenly in the postwar years as a defensive reaction to the "Soviet challenge"; it has been with us for many decades. In 1919 the emerging spectre of Bolshevism sent a shudder throughout the bourgeois world. Having few investments in Russia, American capitalists suffered no noticeable deprivation at the hands of the Bolsheviks, but they saw the Soviet revolution as representing a socio-political order which fundamentally challenged their own system. For this reason the business community could support American participation in armed intervention against the Bolshevik revolutionaries while later displaying something of a benign indifference to the emerging insanity of Nazi Germany. Unlike the Soviets, Hitler did not appear to be attacking the institutions of profit and property.

In 1919 and the years following, the American plutocracy, the press, the pulpit, the university, the President, the Congress, and other established agencies of society set about alerting the populace to the menace that loomed. Senate committee investigations produced witnesses who gave harrowing accounts of conditions in Russia; Robert Murray describes it well:

These witnesses declared that the Red Army was composed mainly of criminals, that the Russian revolution had been conducted largely by former East-Side New York Jews, that Bolshevism was the anti-Christ, and that a stronger policy of allied intervention was necessary. Ambassador [David R.] Francis reiterated before the committee his belief that Lenin was merely a tool of the Germans and further maintained that the Bolsheviki were killing everybody "who wears a white collar or who is educated and who is not a Bolshevik...." Anti-Bolshevik testimony was played up in the columns of the nation's newspapers and once again the reading public was feed on highly coloured tales of free love, nationalisation of women, bloody massacres, and brutal atrocities. Stories were circulated that the victims of the Bolshevik madmen customarily has been roasted to death in furnaces, scalded with live steam, torn to pieces on racks, or hacked to bits with axes. Newspaper editors never tired of referring to the Russian Reds as "assassins and madmen," "human scum," "crime-mad," and "beasts." Russia was a place, some said, where maniacs stalked raving through the streets, and the populace fought with dogs for carrion.... Newspapers climaxed this sensational reporting with gigantic headlines: "RED PERIL HERE," "PLAN BLOODY REVOLUTION," and "WANT WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT OVERTURNED."

Domestic labour disputes were treated as symptomatic of an impending Bolshevik takeover. The Philadelphia Public Ledger greeted the Boston police strike with the observation: "Bolshevism in the United States is no longer a spectre." Headlines in The Wall Street Journal cried: "Lenin and Trotsky are in their way." Coolidge's military expedition into Nicaragua and other interventions in Latin America were justified largely as safeguards against communist uprisings. (Coolidge's actions moved Senator Borah to comment: "The specter of Russian Bolshevist activity in Latin America was conjured but refused to walk.")

The ad hoc legislative inquisitions in the 1920s and 1930s eventually led to the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938. After World War II, anti-communist activities reached new proportions. Government employees and private citizens—from physicists to prize fighters—had their personal lives and opinions scrutinised by legislative committees, government security boards, the FBI, and sometimes the local police. Millions were required to sign loyalty oaths. Prosecutions under the Smith Act, state sedition trials, and contempt proceedings during the 1950s, followed by prosecutions against peace advocates in the 1960s, gave America a growing number of political prisoners. A Democratic-controlled Congress overwhelmingly passed the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 which, among other things, authorised the construction of concentration camps for purposes of interning without trial or hearing all suspected "subversives" should either the president or Congress declare a "national emergency." Of the six camps built in 1952 several have been maintained on a stand-by basis ready for instant use; other detention sites are available for immediate "activation."

In the 1960s some of the more hysterical expressions of vigilantism diminished markedly but anti-communism showed no signs of disappearing as a politically repressive force. The Medicare Law passed by the liberal Eighty-ninth Congress as part of the Great Society Program contained a clause (later rescinded) denying hospital benefits to persons required to register under the McCarran Act. The same liberal Attorney-General Katzenbach, who had previously suggested that Congress repeal the registration features of the McCarran Act, initiated formal proceedings to require the DuBois Clubs to register as a communist front. Soon after, a DuBois Club meeting place was bombed in San Francisco, and members of a Brooklyn DuBois Club were attacked and beaten by neighbourhood hoodlums, then arrested by the police while the assailants skipped away untouched by the law. In numerous peace demonstrations throughout the nation marchers were assaulted while police offered little protection and made no arrests. When the Des Moines school board suspended five junior and senior high school students for wearing black armbands to school as an expression of mourning for persons killed in Vietnam and in support of a Christmas truce, it was reported that school authorities

...encouraged physical retaliation against the wearers. One student said that the football coach... had encouraged students in a gym class to chant "Beat the Vietcong" during calisthenics.... The coach said earlier that the students had chanted this spontaneously and had been "provoking their Americanism." The student said the coach had asked two boys who refused to shout the slogans to stand and called them "pinkos or Communists." Armband wearers and sympathisers have also reported being struck and kicked since the dispute arose. [They protested that] those who had resorted to violence and have thus allowed the ruffian element to determine educational policies."

High school students in Cleveland, Nyack, and Merrick, Long Island, and elsewhere were also expelled for expressing their disagreement with governmental policy by wearing black armbands. In various communities local patriotic groups carried out vigilante actions against bookdealers, artists, folksingers, unpopular speakers, PTA organisations, and even groceries selling imported Polish foods. One might also recall such events as the "peace party raids" in New York by police and building authorities, the harassment of the anti-war clergymen by their congregations, the expulsion of Julian Bond from the Georgian legislature for his pacifist remarks on Vietnam, the court martial of scores of military personnel for their espousals of anti-war views and their refusal to cooperate in the war, the prosecution of 3,169 young men in the years 1965–67 for their unwillingness to obey the call to serve in the anti-communist Vietnam war, the voluntary exile of several thousand others, the reclassification or forced induction of thousands who either burnt or handed in their draft cards, and the convictions against Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., and others for having conspired to counsel and abet noncooperation with the draft.

The 1958 study by Lazarsfeld and Thielens on conformity in higher education provides some sobering data about the academic world. Of the 165 colleges and universities surveyed, 102 reported instances of faculty members being fired for heterodox political views; there were numerous instances involving undercover classroom surveillance of teachers by students, requests from the FBI for reports on students, the reluctance of many faculty to become advisors to unpopular student political groups, the unwillingness of teachers to voice unpopular views, and their tendency to advise students to keep such opinions to themselves.

On many college campuses the fearful hush of the 1950s were replaced in the next decade by open demonstrations against the Vietnam war. But almost all college administrations still cooperated with FBI investigators to seeking information on students applying for government positions. At Duke University a student admitted that he spied on campus war protesters for the FBI. At the State University of New York in Brockport, faculty members reported that the FBI sought to recruit them to inform on colleagues who took part in anti-war demonstrations, and that five professors took the job. The president of Brigham Young University admitted that the university recruited a ring of students in 1966 to spy on liberal professors, six of whom were forced to resign. At institutions throughout the country, from the University of Connecticut to the University of Florida, professors were denied contracts because of their political activities. At Temple University a group of anti-war protesters were surrounded by a mob of 400 fellow-students who, chanting "Kill the Cong," threw tomatoes and eggs, tore signs, and kicked and pummelled the demonstrators. At the University of New Mexico a mob of students and town residents stoned and attacked a small group of SDS peace demonstrators. Four students at Cornell University were placed on probation for distributing literature favouring the NLF in 1965. At the secondary school level, scores of teachers were denied contract renewals because of their critical utterances against the Vietnam war. Educational authorities, frequently at the instigation of private vigilante groups, continued to scrutinise school libraries, course reading lists, and classroom discussions for purposes of weeding out titles and teachers savouring of political heterodoxy.

There has been a tendency to discount anti-communist vigilantism as something representative of an earlier McCarthyite period. Yet almost all the items cited above refer to recent practices; many of the actions initiated at the federal level came a decade after the demise of Senator Joseph McCarthy and were the doings of a "liberal" Johnson Administration or a "liberal" Eighty-ninth Congress. One difference between the 1950s and the 1960s was that in the earlier period it was necessary to develop the legal and administrative instruments of repression whereas since then the apparatus has been available for immediate reactivation.

To summarise thus far: historically intolerant of dissent, fearful of contamination, and addicted to the values and myths propagated by the propertied classes, Americans (not surprisingly) see communism—or their stereotyped image of communism—as the diabolic antithesis of everything they have been taught to esteem. The communists are despotic, we are democratic; they are collectivistic, we are individualistic; they have a controlled economy, we have free enterprise; they are "extreme," we are moderate; they are godless, we are God's children; they are alien, we are Americans; they are evil, we are virtuous.

Many foreigners have speculated about America's seemingly obsessive anti-communism. Trygve Lie once wondered why the strongest nation in the world was so terrified of a communist takeover at home and abroad while his own little Norway, close to the Soviet border and with a native communist party substantially larger than the CPUSA, betrayed none of the same phobia. Here we might offer a conjecture: the Norwegians, like any other people, must think well of themselves, but they are not as burdened as are the Americans by a sense of being God's unique gift to mankind, the bastion of Freedom, a Nation endowed with "Our Most Perfect System," etc. Possessed of no very special illusion of virtue, the Norwegians live without the preoccupation of falling prey to a very special evil. Believing that our nation occupies a unique and enviable position in a world of want and degradation, Americans tend to greet contemporary revolutionary ferment not with empathy but with the conviction that such political upheavals are the actual or potential thrusts of a global enemy who menaces the American Way of Life.

More thoughtful Americans are beginning to recognise the wisdom of Senator Fulbright's remark: "...We are not God's chosen savior of mankind but only one of mankind's more successful and fortunate branches, endowed by our Creator with about the same capacity for good and evil, no more or less, than the rest of humanity." But for too many of our compatriots in high and humble station, such modest counsel remains unheeded.

CHAPTER FOUR - Anti-Communism as an American Way of Life

Whether arguments command ascent or not depends less upon the logic that conveys them than upon the climate of opinion in which they are sustained. CARL BECKER

In 1949, Professor Conyers Read, in his presidential address to the American Historical Association, argued that "dispassionate behaviourism" and "the liberal neutral attitude" in research violated the "social responsibilities of the historian." For "total war whether it be hot or cold enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part. The historian is no freer from his obligation than the physicist." The following year the succeeding AHA president, Samuel Eliot Morison, complained that isolationist historians like Charles Beard had left the younger generation "spiritually unprepared for the war they had to fight." In a similar view, a scholar of American diplomatic history, Samuel F. Bemis, once told his colleagues that when American foreign policy is suffering sustained attack from abroad, scholars should not contribute to the work of the nation's enemies. But an examination of what goes on in most American schools should reassure Professors Read, Morison, and Bemis. Fredelle Maynard, a teacher who read 2,000 essays written by high school seniors taking the College Board English Achievement Test in 1967, concluded:

About Vietnam, the students are deeply troubled and not terribly well informed. Still, they support Administration policy and deplore the excesses of university student protests.

Communism is the great bugaboo. If we pull out of Asia, the communists will take over; whenever we relax our vigilance in any area—dress, morality, politics, religious faith—the communists are waiting.

Seldom is there any indication of historical or philosophical understanding; references to communism take the form of easy journalistic cliches (the Red Menace, the Iron Curtain). Few students mention fascism, although individual papers are sometimes fascistic in tone.

A textbook published in 1963 and used today in at least one Long Island high school treats young readers to pronouncements such as:

The Communists do not care about peace.... The communists hope that the man in the street will think that Communists could not possibly be preparing for war when they talk so much and so beautifully about peace....

People who say one thing and believe another are called hypocrites. Communists are among the greatest hypocrites in history....

...The years since World War II have given more than enough evidence of the determination of the Soviet Union to destroy the United States and all that it stands for....

It should be recognised, of course, that the great danger from Communists in the United States does not come from those who openly belong to the party. Rather, the most dangerous Communists are those who long ago dropped from sight or perhaps were never even in the party's records. These (and probably others sent to this country by the USSR) are awaiting the day when they will be given the order to destroy the dams and bridges and factories and military bases of the United States. In the meantime they will try to live as quietly as possible. They do not want to attract attention, which they will certainly get if they joined the party....

The Chinese Communists... are willing to take the risk of atomic war because China is a backward, underfed nation of almost 700,000,000 people.... Of course, tens of millions of the Chinese people would be killed in such a war—but this does not particularly bother the Chinese Communist leaders.

When the student leaves school he is treated to a daily fare of mass media anti-communism, thrilling to network television series portraying devilish communist conspirators and spies, and he will read editorials and reports in his daily newspaper which support his preconceived anti-communist notions of the world. Should he have the rare opportunity of enjoying a direct confrontation with the object of his anxiety it might prove most edifying. During the first decade of the cold war, trips to the Soviet Union were frequently the occasion for acute surprise. Harold Berman records that of the dozens of American tourists he encountered in Moscow from 1955 to 1957 (when such travel was still relatively uncommon) including editors, scholars, specialists in Soviet affairs and Congressmen, all found conditions much better than they had expected. "Many of them said, half in despair and half in jest, 'What am I going to say when I get back to the United States?'" Soviet travel restrictions and Soviet suspicion of foreigners contributed to Western misconceptions but the distortions in American journalism bear an important share of the responsibility. Note this incident, recounted by Berman:

Two years ago, an American newspaper correspondent in Moscow wrote an account of the May Day parade in which he described people singing and dancing in the streets and enjoying themselves thoroughly. His newspaper published the account, but at the same time it ran an editorial in which it portrayed an embittered Russian people forced by their hated government to demonstrate in favor of a revolution which they did not want. The correspondent, in recounting this to me, said that he thereupon wrote a letter to his editor in which he said, "I was there—I saw it—they were not bitter, they were happy, they were having a good time." The editorial writer wrote back, in effect, that they may have appeared happy, but that actually they could not have been happy, in view of the evils of the system under which they live.

Foreign visitors, bringing the perspective of the outsider, have frequently remarked upon the anti-communist orthodoxy of American mass media. Foreign journalists who were Fellows of The World Press Institute in 1965 concluded their on-the-job experience with major American publications, with the following observations:

[Mr. Thorndike of Peru]: I have found a kind of gentle pressure, let's call it that. One is all right as long as he agrees with the American point of view, which I have found is often a biased approach to national and international issues. There is a certain patriotism in the American press. Bad things must always have been provoked by Communists, and sometimes patriotism is equated with anti-communism. This is a simple, black-white approach, with no half-tones or shadows. It reflects a lack of knowledge of the issues, because one usually has a simple answer for a question he doesn't understand.

[Mr. Rongnoni of Italy]: A newspaper editor will censor himself no matter how well-educated he is because he knows he has to say more or less what the owner of the paper wants him to say. One difference between the American press and the Italian press is that Italy has eight kinds of newspapers ranging from black to grey to red, and so Italian readers get a wider scope and a number of different ideas and approaches. In the United States, on the other hand, the colour is always grey. Almost all the publishers in the United States have a grey way of thinking, and so the editors and reporters have to write in this direction.

[Mr. Doyon of France]: There is a great moral fear in this country of being a traitor to the American code. Except for a few weekly magazines, no one in the press would try to take a public position different from that of the leading newspaper owners and political men here. It would be considered un-American, or Communistic, or unpatriotic. What small publisher in a small town, who is usually badly informed anyway, will try to take an unpopular attitude? He can't. He's a prisoner of the system.

Since 1963 with the US–USSR détente, it has become respectable to consider the Soviets as something other than demonic, but mass media anti-communism did not change its fundamental tone; it readily discovered new villains in China and Vietnam without ever quite discarding the old ones. The scholarly "experts," the Sovietologists and Kremlinologists from the various universities, have been as active as the ordinary journalists in propagating anti-communist stereotypes. Many of them are either Eastern European émigrés—e.g., Zbigniew Brzezinski—or ex-communists—e.g., Bertram Wolfe—who were intensely anti-Soviet well before they decided to become Soviet specialists. What is most impressive about them is how frequently they have been proven wrong. With a few notable exceptions most of them insisted that no meaningful changes were forthcoming after Stalin's demise. For a number of crucial years most of them refused to consider the Sino-Soviet split as anything more than a "family quarrel." Many today are still reluctant to recognise or attach any significance to the liberalising transitions within Soviet society. Before visiting Moscow in 1967, the writer Stanley Kunitz sought the advice of such experts:

...My friends among the Sovietologists, on whose linguistic finesse and rarefied special knowledge I had often leaned in the course of my translation of Russian poetry, told me precisely what to expect. As an official guest of the Soviet Union... I would be subject to constant surveillance; I would be permitted to see only those writers who were in the pocket of the bureaucracy; I would have no opportunity for private conversations or meetings; my audiences would be hand-picked and scanty—they might be nonexistent; I would be heckled and harassed about Vietnam. My informants turned out to be wrong, dead wrong, on every count.

During his year at Moscow University, George Feiffer was approached by Russian students who borrowed works by American Sovietologists from his bookcase.

The students were fascinated at first: the books provided a Realpolitik analysis—as well as information about the party hierarchy—which they had never seen. But soon they became bored. Finally they commiserated with me. "You're as bad off as we: you can learn almost nothing meaningful from our books about Soviet politics, and from the looks of these, yours aren't much better. This obsession with the verxhuska (ruling clique) conspiracy and intrigue. And this anti-Soviet overtone everywhere. Your writers hate our 'regime' so much on our behalf that they can't see the woods for the trees.

Yet, together with the mountains of rubbish, there are some excellent accounts of recent Russian history and Soviet daily life (and a fewer number on China). But these rarely enjoy a mass audience, and many of the readers they do reach, as Berman observes, "simply reject, subconsciously, those images which conflict with their preconceptions." Perception is a subtly evaluative process capable of superimposing an interpretation which denies the data's face value and reaffirms our habitual view of the subject. To discard the internalised psychic mechanism of censorship is especially difficult when the atmosphere of the anti-communist faith.

Anti-communism has been the yardstick for allocating priorities in countless other areas of American life. "It has got so," regretted James Reston, "you can't get money for a school or road from Congress without arguing that failure to build them will mean the triumph of communism...." Proponents of federal aid to education pointed to the necessity of "keeping up with the Russians," an argument especially effective in the post-Sputnik days. The enormous highway programmes of the 1950s were justified in part by the necessity to expand the "vital links" of a nation facing the potential emergencies of cold and hot wars. On the grounds of cold-war necessity, liberal educators advocated more study programmes on communism and Russia; linguistic and area specialists pleaded for more extensive language training; public officials called for the training of more scientists; free trade advocates pushed for closer economic relations with other Western nations; editors pressured for free travel to communist lands which were under State Department ban; shipping and airline interests demanded and received substantial subsidies; physical educators called for "physical fitness" programmes for America's youths. Civil rights advocates argued that a nation in competition with communism for the loyalty of the coloured two-thirds of mankind could not afford to practise racism at home (an argument that reduced the ethic of brotherhood to an anti-communist expediency).

More generally it was proclaimed that the building of a "better America" in all domestic areas meant a "stronger America," a fortifying of the material and inspirational arsenal of the Free World. (In the first Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960 both candidates argued the importance of domestic well-being in just those cold-war terms.) "...The existence of Russia as our Grand Competitor seems to have become the main reason in America for thinking seriously about anything," complained David Bazelon, and to demonstrate his point, he went on to plead for serious thinking about the American economy "or else we will surely forsake the promise of the future and also fail in the cold war...." It remained for Averell Harriman, former Ambassador to the USSR, to suggest that American dynamism was actually beholden to "the communist challenge." More than once he observed that we Americans, instead of complaining, should be thankful for the existence of the Soviet Union for it stimulated us to new achievements and prevented us from becoming complacent and slothful. Thus do our fears become our virtues.

The Call to Arms

Foremost among our anti-communist achievements has been the growth of a vast "military-industrial complex" whose impact, Eisenhower warned, "is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal Government." The armed services presently compose the strongest lobby in Washington, exerting more influence over Congress than that body exerts over the Defense Department. The military has entered the mainstream of American life, spending millions of dollars on public relations to propagandise its needs and glorify its role. The leading beneficiaries of armaments contracts, the large corporations, help nurture cold-war predilections with skillful lobbying of governmental agencies and mass advertising stressing the sacred task of keeping America strong. "Few developments," writes one student of the armed services, "more dramatically symbolised the new status of the military in the postwar decade than the close association which they developed with the business elite of American society." As a result of this new partnership, enormous portions of American purchasing power have been siphoned off by the government through taxation and channeled into the major corporations, with the ten largest companies receiving almost two-fifths of the total contracts for weapons productions, thereby further centralising corporate wealth.

"An immense industrial empire has developed," Cochran notes, "whose sole customer is the government, and whose operations are risk-free." The government uses the taxpayer's money to undertake or subsidise the risk of capital for private industries in war technology, in atomic energy, aerospace, electronics, and computer development. "Thus public tax coffers absorb the risks our mythology more glamorously assigns to the private entrepreneur.... Socialism for the rich, at the poor man's expense: it is the American version of Marx." By 1968 corporate profits on defence contracts were running at approximately 4-5 billion dollars a year.

The influence of our military state is nowhere more heavily felt than in the academic community. It would be difficult to find a major institution of higher education in America that does not make some allocation in space, building funds, and maintenance to programmes financed by the Pentagon or some other cold-war agency, and which, in turn, did not draw anywhere upwards to 80 percent of its annual budget from these same government sources. "These schools must maintain their governmental research projects or face bankruptcy," Edward Greer concludes. At least ninety universities and colleges are actively researching such problems as counterinsurgency weaponry, combat communications, troop deployment, command-control systems, defoliation techniques, topographical and climatic factors salient for counterinsurgency efforts, internal security and anti-riot strategies, population relocation and control methods, seismic and magnetic detection systems. At least fifty-six universities and colleges are engaged in research on chemical and biological warfare. "Academic scientists," observes Cathy McAffee, "are finding it increasingly difficult to pursue their careers without contributing to [defence] work. Not only do they depend on government contracts for support, but often they must become involved in defence projects merely to gain access to the information and equipment they need for research."

A growing number of social scientists are joining in programmes financed by the federal cold-war apparatus, including psychological, sociological, economic, and political studies devoted to counterrevolutionary techniques and the manipulation of opinion at home and abroad. In hundreds of conferences and thousands of brochures, articles and books written by members of the intellectual community who are directly or indirectly in the pay of the government, cold-war propaganda is lent an aura of academic objectivity, complete with statistical and sociological embellishments. Casting a shadow on their own integrity as scholars and teachers, such intellectuals transmit to an unsuspecting public the official view of reality and the Pentagon's sense of its own indispensability and dedication to perpetual anti-communist struggle.

Testifying before the Rooney Congressional subcommittee, USIA official Reed Harris described his agency's book development programme as one "under which we can have books written to our own specifications, books that would not otherwise be put out, especially those books that have strong anti-communist content, and follow other themes that are particularly useful for our purposes. Under the book development programme, we control the thing from the very idea down to the final edited manuscript." But no public acknowledgement is ever made of the agency's connection with the book. Another USIA official testified that the agency tried to enlist "outside" writers of stature not closely associated with the government: "This results in greater credibility." There is strong evidence that some of the money channelled to writers and publishers by USIA and other agencies may actually have come from the CIA. Praeger admitted publicly to publishing "fifteen or sixteen" books at the CIA's behest.

The proliferation of Pentagon-financed "independent" corporations such as RAND and the Hudson Institute, the "think-tanks" that solve technical and logistical military problems for a fee, testifies to the growing role played by the nonmilitary man. The armed services, progressively less able to provide the brainpower for all its needs, simply buys up such human resources from the universities, corporations, and planning institutions. "What this means," Jules Henry points out, "is not so much that the military are being pushed out of the war, but that the civilians are being sucked into it...." It comes as a staggering realisation that over two-thirds of all the technical research in America is being consumed by the military.

Millions of other Americans who make their living either directly or indirectly from the Pentagon's billions have committed themselves to the armaments race. "Just about every district and every state, and every labour union, and every store owner is getting a cut out of present expenditures in the name of 'defence,'" observed Congressman J. L. Witten of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. The protests from Congressmen—who themselves were usually responding to fierce constituency pressures—over the closing of a handful obsolete military bases and two Navy yards in 1965 was one demonstration of the grassroots civilian economic dependency on Pentagon funds. Defence spending has been twice as important as private investment in expanding the American economy since 1948. Taking into account the multiplier effect of a dollar spent, and the network of subsidiary services which indirectly feed on the defence dollar, possibly a fifth of all economic activity in America has been dependent on war expenditures.

From three-fourths to four-fifths of every federal budget consists of military allocations not including the $20 billion a year to pay for past wars, viz., interest on the national debt, veterans benefits, etc. The Pentagon commands more personnel and money than all other government departments, agencies and bureaus combined. Despite ex-Secretary McNamara's much publicised reorganisation of the Defense Department, the military budget increased by as much as 33 percent during his first five years, and during the sixth year alone the Vietnam expenditures came to almost another $30 billion. In the two decades following the Truman Doctrine close to nine hundred billion dollars was expended for past, present, and future wars.

As early as 1960 the Pentagon owned more than thirty-two million acres of land in the United States and 2.6 million acres in foreign countries—larger than the combined areas of Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont and New Hampshire. The United States built an overseas military empire that dwarfed all previous ones; it was the only nation that had military bases on every inhabited continent and a fleet on every open sea; its nuclear armed bombers flew thousands of miles from its own skies over foreign territories frequently close to communist borders; it trained, equipped, and financed the military forces of many other nations. "Arms and military equipment," Forbes magazine noted, "are one of the US major export items. Without them, few defense companies would be earning the kind of money they do." In the period from 1953 to 1967 the United States sold or gave other nations over $35 billion in military assistance, thereby establishing itself as the greatest producer and supplier of instruments of violence.

If we define "military state" as any polity which devotes the major portion of its public resources to purposes of war, then America is a military state, the strongest military power in the history of mankind. Our leaders proudly proclaim that fact. Given the more limited technological bases at their command, none of the communist states can make such a claim. Contrary to the conventional view, a democracy is as capable of becoming a militaristic power as is a dictatorship. The political system of a nation is of less importance in determining its capacity for violence than is the level of its industry and wealth and the intensity of its anxiety about domestic and foreign enemies.

Power as Cause and Effect

It was not the military that manufactured anti-communism, but anti-communism that built the military state. The military state, then, is a symptom of anti-communism, but symptoms have a way of generating their own subsequent effects. An effect can be discernible only as a change in the environment; if there is no observable change then we say there is no effect. But anything which represents a change in the environment becomes a source of subsequent reactive adjustments; that is, it tends to generate new effects thus becoming a cause in itself. To say that the military-industrial complex is merely a "symptom" is to arbitrarily cut off the chain of causality and to declare prematurely that all the important effects have been counted. But the military establishment now maximises the very conditions that gave it rise, and by developing into a powerful lobby and national institution, commanding the talent, energy and income of the commonweal, manipulating many symbols and images of public life, the military has created new constituencies and supporting interests.

To say, then, that power is a "neutral" value having a potential for right or wrong depending upon how it is employed, is to overlook the fact that power may generate its own propensities and imperatives. A power that has evolved into gargantuan proportions is not prone to let it go at that. It was Tocqueville who observed in classic understatement that the patience and tolerance of men in the presence of obstacles does not increase with the consciousness of their own strength. Today the armed forces make claims on national priorities, resources and loyalties that were undreamt of in an earlier part of this century.

The very immensity of the military's presence tends to convince us of its necessity and importance. It is in the nature of ordinary mortals, such as the Americans are, to find growing evidence of a menace in the very precautions taken against it. This is one of the effects of power. The imposing presence of the military establishment seems to confirm our worst fears about the communist devil. The same is true of all anti-communist actions and commitments. When does "communist subversion" seem more threatening than when men preoccupy themselves with loyalty oaths and inquisitions? When does an atomic attack seem more imminent than when millions are engaged in the grotesque charade of civil defence? When do the Russians or Chinese seem more menacing than when our war leaders call for still more defence weapons and more armed interventions? The greater the precautions, the more self-evident seems the danger and the further removed the question of whether the menace is commensurate with the kind of response made to it. A nation armed to the teeth for the apocalyptic onslaught begins to see a world of apocalyptic options (e.g., "better dead than Red"). The future is constricted, and alternatives are limited by the very instruments intended to maximise our manoeuvrability. Power is bought at a price, and great power comes dearly.

CHAPTER FIVE - The Liberal and Conservative Orthodoxy

I fancy a number of people all over the Western World still think of themselves as liberals, but are in essence no such thing. In their hearts they believe that their society won't (and shouldn't) change much, that Communism is the enemy absolute, and that the only tasks open to men of good will are to fight the Cold War with one hand and perform minor benevolent activities with the other. That is a tenable attitude, but it is one of people who have given up the intellectual struggle. C. P. SNOW In the doctrinal sense, we in America also have in certain respects a one-party system; for the two parties are ideologically undistinguishable; their pronouncements form one integral body of banality and platitude; whoever does not care to work within their common framework is also condemned, like the non-party person in Russia, to political passivity—to an internal emigration. GEORGE F. KENNAN

In his study of Southern politics V. O. Key observed how segregationist politicians outdid each other in their racist pronouncements, each accusing his opponent of being insufficiently dedicated to the white man's cause. The only issue all Southern politicians agreed upon was the one they spent most of their campaign time debating. It seems that when a particular orthodoxy begins to monopolise the universe of discourse, interdicting all alternative beliefs, those who compete for power must do so within the boundaries of htat orthodoxy. It is in the nature of a competitor that he advantageously differentiate himself from his rivals, but since rivals also assume orthodox postures then the best he can do is insist that his own expression of orthodoxy is somehow more wholehearted, more pure, indeed, more orthodox than his opponents'.

This interminable reiteration of an already accepted belief by all competitors feeds the obsessional qualities of the belief. As orthodoxy magnifies itself into monomania, anxieties about heterodoxy increase rather than decrease. The air is filled with charges and countercharges that one or another leader is insufficiently dedicated, or is even "treasonous" to the sacred cause. Obsessional orthodoxy raises an undefined impossible standard which no person can claim to emulate flawlessly, and even the inquisitor might find himself hauled before the tribunal to account for the sincerity of his conviction. One ignores the charge of heterodox impurity only at the risk of one's political or even biological life; one's only recourse is to show that his way is not heresy but is actually a more effective defence of the orthodoxy than the opposing way, thereby helping to place orthodoxy that much more above challenge.

For at least twenty years liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, have been outdoing each other in making strenuous claims to anti-communist orthodoxy, with each side presenting its own brand of anti-communism as the more effective way of combatting the evil. Thus liberals repeatedly argued that, at a time when Americans should have been attentive to the real menace of Soviet imperialism, McCarthyism crippled the morale of the very personnel needed to execute the diplomatic, military and propaganda tasks of the cold war. The Tass and Pravda repeatedly attacked the Wisconsin Senator as a "fascist" and a "madman" was further evidence to the liberal that Joseph McCarthy was supplying grist for the communist propaganda mill, and was playing right into the hands of the Soviets who allegedly rejoiced over the havoc he caused at home and among our allies abroad. The liberals did not seriously consider the possibility that the Soviets, like the liberals themselves, were intimidated by the emerging spectre of extremist anti-communist power in America. If McCarthy were hurting America, as the liberals said, then the Soviets must have been actually delighted even as they gave every appearance of being apprehensive.

McCarthy's attack against the Voice of America was criticised by liberals not because it represented an extreme expression of an already irrational anti-communism, but because it allegedly impaired the efficiency of the American cold-war struggle. "The net effect," said the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in a gingerly critique of the Senator, "...has been to frustrate the very possibility of the United States embarking on a programme of psychological warfare against world communism." From the same anti-communist premise liberals criticised the loyalty-security programme, contending (accurately) that it failed to unearth any Communist Party members in government, while undermining the morale of government employees, thereby hurting the United States rather than the communists. Nevertheless, it was the liberals under the leadership of Harry Truman who initiated the first loyalty-programme surveillance of two-and-a-half-million government employees, at which time Truman is reported to have said: "Well, that should take the Communist smear off the Democratic Party."

Liberals argued that the non-communist affidavits and loyalty oaths were an indignity which "loyal Americans" were made to suffer, while the communists, being of unscrupulous nature, would sign any oath and mouth any lie, apparently without fear of subsequent investigations and perjury indictments. (In fact, the American Communist Party was as vehemently opposed to the oaths as was anyone.) Liberals like Adlai Stevenson argued in 1952 that ferreting out communists in the government was a job for "a highly professional, nonpolitical intelligence agency," specifically the FBI, a remark which seemed to accept the truth of McCarthy's accusation that subversives had infiltrated the government. While Eisenhower charged the Democrats with being indifferent to the problem of communist subversion, Stevenson—not to be outdone—accused the Republicans of underestimating the communist threat, pointing out that the struggle against communism in America was "an infinitely tougher and harder battle than most of the Republican leaders have ever admitted or evidently even understood."

As early as 1919, Senator Albert Beveridge had argued that repressive measures against radicals were wrong because "attempts to smother thought by force only make converts to the very doctrines thus sought to be destroyed." Four decades later many liberals were entertaining a similar view: repression only attracted more people to the forbidden cause; communism can best be defeated by exposure in the free market of ideas. At other times, it was argued that repression would only force the Party to dig deeply underground, thereby making it more difficult to control—and thus more lethal. The communist should be allowed his freedom because only then could he be exposed and defeated. During the 1950s few liberals argued that the communist should enjoy full protection under the First Amendment as part of his inherent right as a human being and as an American. Most liberals defended academic freedom for non-communists only. Some liberals such as Leslie Fiedler, Diana Trilling, Sidney Hook and others wholeheartedly succumbed to the anti-communist impulse and spent a good portion of their time calling their fellow liberals "dupes" for having been in some way insufficiently alerted to the Red Menace. Some, such as Hubert Humphrey (from his first anti-communist crusade in the ADA, to his later sponsorship of the Communist Control Act, to his more recent support of Johnson's foreign policy), built their careers around "fighting Communism at home and abroad" in imitation of less liberal politicians.

Either out of conviction or fear, the liberal adopted the basic rhetoric of anti-communism. The McCarthy inquisitor and his victim had one thing in common (to the lasting disadvantage of the latter): both built their arguments on anti-communist orthodoxy. When liberals like James Wechsler and Owen Lattimore were brought before McCarthy's committee they justly defended themselves as free Americans exercising their Constitutional rights. But not content to rest their cases there, they took pains to demonstrate their orthodoxy by quoting selections from their past anti-communist writings and citing occasions when communists had attacked them. Wechsler referred to his anti-communist newspaper editorials and his past battles with communists in the Newspaper Guild. Lattimore's Ordeal by Slander, an account of his confrontation with McCarthy, is replete with anti-communist, cold-war admonitions. Appearing before the McCarthy committee, he felt compelled to quote "criticisms of my books in Russian and American [communist] publications," as proof of his anti-communism. Another China expert, John K. Fairbank, defending himself against the McCarthy witchhunt, observed: "In Washington I was 'identified'... as part of a 'hard inner core' of an alleged pro-communist conspiracy. In Peking I have been cited as an 'imperialist spy' and 'the number-one cultural secret-agent of American imperialism' et cetera." One might pity the journalist or scholar who had never been attacked by the communists or—worse still—had actually won a favourable word from the communist press. By essaying to live up to the anti-communist standards set by the inquisitor, the liberal victims inadvertently helped intensify the very aura of unchallengeable orthodoxy which gave McCarthy his strength.

Over the years, liberals also fell into the habit of using their anti-communist foreign policies as evidence of their anti-communism at home. Thus Lattimore, when defending himself before McCarthy, argued that he had always tried "as emphatically as I could to warn the people of this nation that the communist threat in China and other countries of the Far East is very real indeed." And Harry Truman, referring to his commitments to Greece and Turkey, observed "All over the world, voices of approval made themselves heard, while Communists and their fellow-travelers struck out at me savagely." It seems never to have occurred to liberals that their constant emphasis on the "far greater menace" of the USSR and their advocacy of a wholesale cold-war effort abroad exacerbated the very public anxieties which bred witchhunting at home.

Even today many liberals do not raise any questions about anti-communism's presumptions and goals but concentrate their criticism on anti-communist tactics. In 1967, Dwight Macdonald criticised the witchhunting of the 1950s and the Vietnam war of the 1960s on the grounds that such policies played right into the communists' hands. "The principal results [of Senator Joseph McCarthy's attacks] were to give publicity to an expiring CPUSA... and, by the absurdity and unfairness of his accusations, to gain sympathy for Communism." Macdonald's argument becomes all the more interesting when applied to Vietnam: Johnson's policy was deplorable chiefly because "our President's genocidal crusade in Vietnam makes the enemy look good, relatively." Less subtle minds oppose the genocidal crusade because it is genocidal, but Macdonald is primarily interested in demonstrating the superior resourcefulness of his own anti-communism: "As an old Commie fighter, I rate Johnson about as, I imagine, old Indian-fighters voted General Custer: rash, hot-headed, vain and alarmingly ignorant of the nature of the enemy."

If, on the domestic front, liberals were defensive, taking their cues and tailoring their rhetoric to the conservative attack, in foreign affairs—being of more activist interventionist leanings and in control of the White House—they usually held the initiative. Just as conservatives alerted liberals to the "internal threat," so might it be said that liberals alerted conservatives to the "overseas menace." Opposing communism abroad entailed involvements with European nations, billions of dollars in armaments and aid, a growing federal budget, deficit spending and Big Government—all offensive to conservative predilections. "My own feeling," commented Senator Robert Taft on Truman's overseas commitments, "is that this policy... unless restrained, can only lead to arbitrary and totalitarian government at home, as foreign affairs comes more and more to dominate our domestic activities..." Taft opposed United States participation in NATO because involvement was "more likely to incite Russia to war than to deter it from war," and he was against the Truman intervention in Korea on the grounds that we had no vital interests in the country.

Conservatives such as Senators George Malone and Harry Byrd maintained—not without accuracy—that large outlays of foreign aid were usually wasted by incompetent and corrupt recipients, rarely reaching the people most in need of help and usually earning us more resentment than popularity abroad. The best way to fight communism was to keep America self-sufficient and strong. Some ultra-conservatives went further: to pour good American dollars down foreign "ratholes," was just the thing the communists wanted to see; knowing that we in our instinctual anti-communism would advocate anything they opposed, the communists, according to this theory, perpetrated a decoy attack on foreign aid in order to encourage us to dissipate our treasure. Conservatives could conjure up occasional anxieties about inflation, insolvency, gargantuan government, "Uncle Sap," parasitic foreigners, etc., but the liberals always had Joseph Stalin, and in congressional debate after debate, fiscal conservatism proved no match for the big-spending interventionist liberal forces abetted by the dread spectre of a Stalinist world victory.

So it came to pass that each side succumbed to the more activist and more fearful anti-communist rhetoric of the other. Just as liberal policymakers learnt to live with, and eventually utilise loyalty oaths, internal security laws, and Justice Department investigations, so did conservatives become supporters of overseas security pacts, armed intervention and huge military budgets. In foreign affairs, conservatives eventually became more militantly activist than liberals, accusing the latter of "no-win" and "faint-hearted" policies.

On occasion American liberals fought the good fight. Many of them opposed Dulles' inclination to view Mao as Satan and Chiang as the Archangel, and advocated recognition of Peking and UN membership for China. Many raised their voices against nuclear contamination of the atmosphere and against the macabre charade of civil defence. Some even thought we were excessively rigid in our dealings with the Soviets. (Some moderate conservatives might also take credit, notably President Eisenhower who with his immense personal prestige and good will convinced Americans that peaceful negotiations with the Soviets was not tantamount to appeasement.) But regardless of the flashes of sanity they injected into US foreign policy, liberals need to be reminded of the extent to which they found themselves propagating the phobic militaristic anti-communism of the postwar era. Having accepted without debate the axiom that communism was a relentless, diabolic, conspiratorial force dedicated to our destruction, they found themselves the prisoners of their own premise and were soon supporting as necessary evils policies which did violence to their best liberal instincts. Thus liberal Presidents were among the most active proponents of huge military outlays, and liberal Congressman fairly consistently supported the growing armaments allocations, voting with congressional majorities so overwhelming as to approach unanimity.

Much has been written about the plight of leftist intellectuals in Europe and America who continued supporting the Soviet line at such cost to their own integrity and humanistic principles. Little has been said about the self-compromises and deceits which the American liberals have swallowed in violation of their own values. Sidney Lens aptly sums up the liberal's predicament:

In rhetoric the pragmatic liberal has doubts about militarism as a means of "containing communism," but indeed he finds a modus vivendi with the rightist and the conservative. He too votes for $50 billion defense budgets... he utters little protest when American troops land in Lebanon to "protect American interests" against a revolution in Iraq, and he says nothing wrong in shipping troops to Thailand as a measure against civil war in Laos. He is silent when the CIA finances and guides rightist revolts against sovereign regimes in Guatemala and Iran. Though he hates dictatorships, he finds it expedient to continue relations with Fascist Spain, apartheid-ist South Africa, and the dozen other tyrannies that are called part of the "free world." He votes continued aid to Paraguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, South Viet Nam, Pakistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, though their regimes are reactionary or have come to power through illegal coup d'etats or rigged elections... Where communism is concerned the rules are suspended. We are in a permanent war.

Several conclusions emerge from the foregoing pages. First, it should be clear by now that a preoccupation with anti-communism has not been the exclusive expression of any fringe group. The Birchites, McCarthyites, and Goldwaterites were no more responsible for our anti-communist policies in the world than they were for electing the various Presidents who fashioned such policies. While some conservatives argued for more drastic military measures in Korea, Cuba (Bay of Pigs), and Vietnam, it was the liberals, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, who perpetrated the actual interventionist deeds. Second, throughout the history of the cold war, as liberals and conservatives tried to outdo each other in their antagonism toward something called "communism," their obsessional pursuit seemed to carry its own justification, allowing no opportunity for debate, and no investigation of the presumptions underlying the anti-communist impulse. A chronic, often mindless, anti-communist stance became the sine qua non of legitimacy and survival in American political life.

We discover that one-party states are not the only ones that successfully smother challenges to the political value system. Orthodoxy may be the operational reality even in a political system that believes it is maintaining a wide-open democratic dialogue. On the issue of anti-communism, the American political system has rarely been able to confront fundamental images, or serve as an instrument of creative discourse, or even engage in public discussion of heterodox alternatives. The two-party competition which supposedly is to provide for democratic heterodoxy, in fact, has generated a competition for orthodoxy. In politics, as in economics, competition is rarely a certain safeguard against monopoly and seldom a guarantee that the competitors will produce commodities which offer the consumer a substantive choice.

The American political system, rather than performing with the explorative virtues that are the peculiar genius of the democratic process, has, on the issue of communism at least, propagated the most unthinking and irrational slogans and dogmas. No orthodoxy could ask for a more consummate victory. And while we need not cease condemning the agencies of thought-control in Russia, China and elsewhere, we also might begin to show concern for the poverty and paralysis of our own political life and thought.

CHAPTER SIX - Virtue Faces the World

Would some power the gift to give us,

To see ourselves as others see us. ROBERT BURNS

The wicked are wicked no doubt, and they go astray and they fall and they come by their deserts; but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do? WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

To understand our policy toward communists and revolutionaries, and toward the world in general, we need to appreciate the messianic image we have of ourselves and the extent to which we portray American international behaviour as a succession of righteous acts. What follows is neither a comprehensive history of American foreign policy nor an unearthing of new historical facts, but an attempt to show that the picture Americans have of their own international behaviour is coloured by a presumption of virtue rarely justified by historical actualities, and that this presumption when put into operation leads to effects varying widely from the professed intent. This self-serving image of national virtue, while markedly pronounced in our history, is hardly unique to America; but America is unique in the magnitude of its powers, and our national illusions—unlike those of smaller nations—represent a force of great moment for the well-being and survival of all humanity.

The history of the United States has been one of territorial, commercial, and military expansion. This statement alone would jar many American readers, yet how else does a nation emerge from an obscure settlement of thirteen coastal enclaves into the world's greatest power except by expansionism? Here we are faced with an American success story that craves explanation: in a ruthless unsavoury world how do the virtuous manage to be so successful? Or, to put the question another way, how do the successful manage to remain so virtuous?

As our common reading of history would have it, expansion was accomplished by a process of natural accretion: westward settlement, land purchases, defensive wars, reluctant acquisition of spheres of influence, commitments to defend a weaker people, the protection of overseas properties and nationals, the enforcement of treaty agreements—such were the innocent, almost accidental, growing pains whereby the virtuous allegedly became powerful while keeping their virtue intact. Unlike any other nation in history, the United States apparently developed a mighty empire while never being sullied by imperialistic practices. If imperialism is admitted, it is most often described as a kind of momentary lapse occurring sometime between the Spanish-American War and Theodore Roosevelt's "big stick" policy.

In reality, from the very beginning of its history, the nation suffered quite overtly from expansionist pangs. As early as 1787, John Adams concluded that the young republic was "destined" to extend its rule over the entire northern part of the hemisphere, and anticipated such expansion as "a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind." In 1801 Jefferson, having seen that "the American people was a chosen people... gifted with superior wisdom and strength," and understanding that "God led our forefathers, as Israel of old," dreamt of a United States encompassing the entire Western Hemisphere. Convinced that "God and destiny had so dictated" that Canada be part of the United States, Americans coveted the Northern British Provinces for half a century. And only after armed invasion met with dismal failure did we eventually reconcile ourselves to the idea of a northern border.

In the South we "rounded out" our boundary by forcing Spain to cede the Floridas. Although it is still "repeated ad nauseam in the school texts that the United States 'purchased' the Floridas for the sum of $5,000,000," a closer study of history would reveal that after a series of insurrections and territorial incursions, the United States acquired de facto control of the Floridas and, in the treaty of 1819 promised to make satisfaction for the claims of Spanish citizens up to the sum of five million dollars should such claims be considered valid by a US Commission. No purchase occurred and no money changed hands. In this way did America realise Gouverneur Morris' earlier assertion that Florida is "joined to us by the hand of the Almighty."

At about this time our crimes against the Indian nations were gathering momentum. Some of the most poignant and most neglected passages of Tocqueville's Democracy in America give contemporary accounts of the heart-breaking mistreatment of the American Indians. In 1832 Americans knew what they have known ever since—those few who cared to look—that the Indian nations were being systematically obliterated, their treaties violated, their lands expropriated and their populations decimated by white America. Many violations are still perpetrated upon the surviving remnants of the Indian nations, from the Seneca tribe in New York State to the Nisqually and Puyallup in Washington State. Yet for most Americans the Indian remains little more than a vaguely amusing caricature or a marauding savage. By Hollywood's magical treatment of history, genocide became cowboy heroism, aggression became covered-wagon doggedness, and the roles of victim and victimiser, massacred and massacrer, were reversed. At the same time, as Commager observes, American history texts contrasted our allegedly enlightened policy toward the Indians with the brutal practices of the Spaniards, "conveniently overlooking the elementary fact that the Indians survived in Mexico and South America but not in the United States."

As overlooked in America's picture of its own history is the shameless aggression perpetrated against a feeble Mexican regime in 1846. Few of us were taught that the provocative advance of Taylor's army to the Rio Grande and an American blockade of that river instigated the first armed clash, a battle fought on the south side of the river. Van Alstyne's account is revealing:

This successful manoeuvring of the Mexicans into firing the first shot worked out extremely well for President Polk. The date of the battle was April 24; the date on which news of it arrived in Washington was May 9; an entry in Polk's private diary under May 8, the day preceding, reveals that the President had already made up his mind to go to war. With an air of injured innocence Polk wrote, with apparent sincerity, of his "duty" to "act with promptness and energy"; but still he and his cabinet were ludicrously anxious that the Mexicans commit the first hostility. When the good news finally arrived, he had his cabinet all assembled within the hour, and with their blessing he was now able to tell Congress that Mexico "has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil... war exists, and notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico...."

It was Congressman Abraham Lincoln who aptly characterised Polk's story as "the sheerest deception."

Expansionist appetites were not quite satiated by the acquisition of Texas and the California territory (the richest part of all of Mexico); for a time, the whole of Mexico was coveted. Until 1847, the Mexicans had been considered a shiftless, incorrigible people worthy of being trounced in war and shunned in peace. Soon after, however, almost every publication in America, pro-slavery and abolitionist, Whig and Democrat, was speculating about whether annexation might not be the means whereby America, as the Almighty's agent, could spread moral regeneration. The New York Sun believed that "Providence had willed the war" to "unite and exalt both nations." Expansionists observed that the Mexicans seemed to "deprecate nothing so much as the withdrawal of our army, and the restoration of Mexican authority." Expansionism, as Carl Schurz critically described it, was anchored in the belief that "this republic, being charged with the mission of bearing the banner of freedom over the whole civilised world, could transform any country, inhabited by any kind of population, into something like itself simply by extending over it the magical charm of its institutions."

The Spanish-American War is another monumental example of that alchemy which transforms national egoism into international altruism, and jingoism into divine mandate. Impelled by filibusters and arms salesmen, and a populace shocked by yellow-journalistic accounts of Spanish atrocities in Cuba, the American government moved peremptorily toward intervention. The specific textbook justification for entering hostilities was the mysterious sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbour. In truth, there has never been any evidence that might implicate the Spaniards. Spanish authorities had begged us not to dispatch the battleship to Havana for fear it might precipitate some serious incident. "The Spanish government," Kennan notes, "did everything in its power to mitigate the effects of the catastrophe, welcomed investigation, and eventually offered to submit the whole question of responsibility to international arbitration—an offer we never accepted." Soon after, the Spanish Crown gave clear indication of its desire to meet our demands, including an armistice in Cuba and the early implementation of a system of autonomy. Yet such offers were spurned in the American press as "procrastinations." Congress by now was hysterically clamouring for war. As one newsman described the scene in the House: "...Members rushed up and down the aisles like madmen, exchanging hot words, with clenched fists and set teeth; excitement was at fever heat. Not for years has such a scene occurred." Congress passed a resolution, tantamount to a declaration of war, calling for the immediate withdrawal of all Spanish authority from Cuba, and directing the President to use force to secure that objective. Thus began what Theodore Roosevelt described as "the most absolutely righteous war" of the century. He branded as "impertinent" any European leader "whether Pope, Kaiser, Czar or President" who proffered a less flattering evaluation of American actions—and many European leaders did.

America, from all announced intentions, was fighting to free Cuba, not the Philippines. Yet American forces swiftly wrested the Philippines from the Spanish Crown. The question immediately arose as to what was to be done with the islands. Admiral Dewey had described the natives as more capable of self-government than the Cubans, but as the great economic and strategic value of that territory became apparent, less was said about native capacity for self-rule. McKinley told how he pondered the question through many a sleepless night, finally falling on his knees to beseech "Almighty God for light and guidance," at which moment he was blessed with the revelation that

...there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly...

Unfortunately the Filipinos were not put to rest by this vision, and their response to McKinley's decision offers a lesson that is particularly salient today. The Filipino guerrillas led by Aguinaldo, having been engaged in a protracted war for national liberation against the Spanish colonial rulers, saw the American occupation as a continuation of that same struggle. Commanding overwhelming military power, the American generals were optimistic about crushing the insurgent forces. But even as they assured the McKinley Administration that they were winning, they requested more men and arms. After some hesitation, the requests were fulfilled because, as the President proclaimed, they were fighting for "the world's best civilisation." A war that began as a minor distraction soon became a major intervention. With 20,000 men already under his command, General Otis assured McKinley that 30,000 would do the job. When anti-war critics in the United States began demanding withdrawal from the islands, McKinley denounced them as "the prophets of evil." General Otis requested 40,000 men.

American forces found their superior equipment ineffective against a hostile populace. No matter how many guerrillas were killed, Aguinaldo found replacements. We drove them from the villages only to have them return the moment we left. General Otis asked for 50,000 men; his view was that most Filipinos knew we were "liberators." He granted that many of them had been "intoxicated by the cry for independence and self-government," but he believed the terrorism of Aguinaldo's guerrillas had disillusioned them. Otis later requested 60,000 troops. He was now convinced that once he destroyed the Filipino main force, and secured the major population centres, the rest would be an easy matter of mopping up scattered armed bands. The main force did dissolve and became an even worse problem when operating as widely dispersed units. This was the beginning of the bloodiest phase of the war. General Lawton, Otis' commander, called for 100,000 men. mcKinley denounced the war critics as "misguided."

Eventually the American military, now led by General Arthur MacArthur (the father of Douglas), adopted a new strategy based on the assumption that our enemy was the people, issuing a proclamation renouncing "precise observance of the laws of war." Among other things, MacArthur permitted his men to torture prisoners, civilians included. Unfriendly villages were burnt down and surviving inhabitants put in concentration camps. Only a few years earlier, when the Spanish General Valeriano Weyler was doing the same in Cuba, Americans had called him "Butcher Weyler." But MacArthur was hailed as a hero for he did succeed in crushing the rebellion. The Americans lost many times more men than in the war against Spain. The toll of Filipino victims including civilians was tragically high. Throughout the bloody struggle militant American patriots who a few years before had never heard of the Philippines, steadfastly insisted that maintaining an American presence in the islands was essential for the sake of national honour and national prestige, for the future security of our nation, to protect the Philippines from falling under the domination of some foreign power, namely Germany, Japan, or Great Britain, and to bring the blessings of civilisation and freedom to less fortunate peoples. It was Woodrow Wilson who, in retrospect, decided that the Spanish-American War "awakened us to our real relationship to the rest of mankind," that is, "our peculiar duty" to teach colonial peoples "order and self control" and to "impart on them, if it be possible... the drill and habit of law and obedience which we long ago got out of... English history."

The American empire that burgeoned in the Pacific with the acquisition of Samoa, Hawaii, and the Philippines, subsequently depended less upon direct territorial acquisition than on commercial control and expansion. Business interests, hitherto somewhat indifferent to the opportunities in the Far East, now called for their share of the new markets. Avoiding all references to "Providence" and "our duty to mankind," Mark Hanna asserted with refreshing candour: "If it is commercialism to want the possession of a strategic point giving the American people an opportunity to maintain a foothold in the markets of that great Eastern country [China], for God's sake let us have commercialism." The Open Door Policy proclaimed in 1899 can be seen as a diplomatic incarnation of this new interest; its "equal commercial opportunity" clauses provided the wedge whereby late-coming American interests could enter into the "spheres of influence" carved out by other European nations.

The Open Door Policy was motivated largely by the crassest materialistic concern: it made little impression upon the other powers and was abandoned in a few years by the United States itself, when discriminating trade conditions were promulgated in the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Yet it was received in this country as a resounding victory for American diplomacy, and a defeat for European avarice. Secretary Hay was hailed as a great statesman, and as Kennan notes, "A myth was established which was destined to flourish in American thinking for at least a half-century"; specifically that, in the face of European imperialism, the United States had altruistically and successfully re-established the "integrity of China." If one measures the actual effects of our China policy it becomes clear that the myth had little basis in fact and that the Chinese had slight cause for rejoicing over American interest in their destiny.

For most Americans, the new markets, the expansion of national power and glory, and the uninvited attempts to "uplift the backward peoples" were part of the same divine task. The ebullient Senator Beveridge appropriately weaved together the predominant themes of God, Gold, and Glory:

We will not repudiate our duty... We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the civilisation of the world... We will move forward to our work... with gratitude... and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His Chosen People, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world... The Pacific is our ocean... Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus?... China is our natural customer.... the power that rules the Pacific... is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic.

By the turn of the century, direct annexation of territories was no longer the most expedient way of enjoying the fruits of empire. As our experiences in Cuba and Latin America were to demonstrate, a great power could own much of the wealth, exploit the labour and resources, and control the internal and international policies of neighbouring land without troubling itself with de jure possession. The first move toward establishing a preponderate interest in Latin America came with the promulgation in 1823 of the Monroe Doctrine, which declared an end to further European colonisation and intervention in the New World, and pronounced all such interferences a threat to the peace and security of the United States. Americans of that day (and Americans ever since) treated the Doctrine as an exhilarating example of a young republic's magnanimous defence of weaker sister republics against Old World despotism. In fact the Continental powers, distrustful enough of one another, had little interest in direct political intervention, and any potential impulses in that direction were discouraged not by an American ukase, but by the presence of the powerful British fleet.

More importantly the significance of the Monroe Doctrine for American interests is to be ascertained in what was left unsaid. Secretary of State Adams and President Monroe had been reluctant to issue a joint pronouncement with Great Britain less out of a feeling of national pride and more because of an unwillingness to accept the British proviso that neither the United States nor Great Britain would appropriate any part of Spanish America. With Texas, California, and Cuba still in Spanish hands such a pledge would have been a renunciation of all future American expansion. What the Monroe Doctrine implied, in effect, was that the United States would be the sole political and colonising power in the New World and that the Western Hemisphere was to be an American sphere of influence.

Our subsequent hemispheric policies made it evident that we had no intention of practising the restraint we preached to European powers. A year after the Doctrine's promulgation, Adams informed South American liberator Simón Bolívar that the Doctrine "must not be interpreted as authorisation for the weak to be insolent with the strong." It was Bolívar who as early as 1829 mournfully and prophetically forecast the next hundred years: "The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague [Latin] America with misery in the name of liberty."

Forceful intervention into Latin America began as far back as 1854 when an American warship bombarded a Nicaraguan port; three years later the operation was repeated and marines were landed (in retaliation for the Nicaraguan failure to pay heavy indemnities for the wounding of an American citizen). The following year Nicaragua was forced to sign a treaty granting the United States free passage and free intervention as we saw fit. This was followed by intervention in Honduras in 1860 and occupation of Samana Bay in Santo Domingo in 1871. The ensuing decades saw the growing dominance of United States commercial interests throughout Latin America along with increasing applications of military and political intervention. The forceful acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone by Theodore Roosevelt ("I took the Canal and let Congress debate") was but one of some sixty United States interventions in the first three decades of this century. Here is a far from exhaustive selection: United States troops in Cuba, 1898–1902; Cuba transformed into a quasi-protectorate under the Platt Amendment 1901, troops in Cuba 1906–1909, 1917–1922; custom house control in the Dominican Republic in 1905 to protect investments and maintain debt payments, a financial supervision extending until 1941, and troops in 1913 and again in 1916–24; a military occupation to "restore order" in Haiti from 1914 to 1941, with marines shooting over 2,000 Haitians who resisted "pacification"; military occupation of Nicaragua 1909–10, 1912–25, financial supervision from 1911 to 1924, large-scale military operations in 1927 (Coolidge's "private war") and occupation until 1933; the bombardment and capture of Vera Cruz with considerable loss of Mexican lives in 1914. In other areas, occasional warships, threats, one-sided treaties, and financial pressures made marine landings unnecessary.

It was the most morally impelled of our Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, who once said: "I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men," and who then proceeded to intervene most frequently and quite brutally into Latin American affairs. "We are the friends of Constitutional government in America," Wilson announced before the Vera Cruz expedition; "we are more than its friends, we are its champions because in no other way can our neighbours... work out their own development in peace and liberty." With less lyricism, the much-decorated Major General Smedley Butler of the Marine Corps presented a different vision of good-neighbourly assistance: "I helped make Mexico... safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903." There were those who saw no contradiction between Wilson's professions and General Smedley's statement—including Woodrow Wilson himself. In their view, to bring the energetic blessings of capitalism to Latin America was as much a part of the nation's sacred mission as was disseminating Christianity and constitutionalism.

Whatever the various reasons for intervention (protecting American nationals or investment interests, safeguarding the Canal Zone, staving off European intervention, revenging insults to the flag, restoring order, safeguarding or teaching democracy, etc.), each venture rested on the presumption that the United States had the moral right to police an area as huge as a hemisphere. In almost every case, intervention came over the strenuous protests of the native governments and went far beyond what international jurists considered the limits of interposition. But America had assigned itself—at the request of no other power in the hemisphere—the role of an "international police force" (to use Theodore Roosevelt's description); and whereas Monroe had originally intervened not to stop revolutionary disorder but to prevent others from stopping it, the United States now became the self-appointed guardian against popular insurgencies.

The eve of World War I found American power predominant in the Western Hemisphere and substantial in the Pacific basin. The United States was not merely Mistress of the Caribbean, she had become something of a balance of power in the world. It was at this point in history that leadership was assumed by a man who embodied the American messianic tradition. Americans had always preferred to think of their actions as reflecting man's nobler impulses, but it remained for Woodrow Wilson actually to step onto the world stage to proclaim the American mission to all mankind.

To Wilson, as to most Americans, the World War in its early years was something to be avoided. "America," he noted, "did not at first see the full meaning of the war. It looked like a natural raking out of the pent-up jealousies and rivalries of the complicated politics of Europe." Our policy consisted of an insistent defence of what we considered to be our neutral rights, punctuated by intermittent pleas that the European powers end the unprincipled bloodletting. Few Americans are aware that our neutrality was something less than pure; large-scale American assistance to the Allies, coupled with American acquiescence in the British blockade, drove the Germans to the desperate measure of unrestricted submarine warfare. In a war in which supplies and matériel were of the greatest necessity, the disadvantages either side might suffer, were they to honour Wilson's strictures, seemed greater than the risk of American intervention. In the confiscation of American property the Allies were more persistent violators than the Germans, but it was the Germans who were taking American lives at sea; while the British had their blockade, the Kaiser had the submarine as his only countermeasure.

The reasons for our entrance into the War are still debated, but what is significant is that once having decided upon hostilities, America changed its definition of the War itself. The very virtue which had kept us in splendid neutrality now required us, in the historically pathetic phrase, "to make the world safe for democracy," the first task in such a momentous endeavour being a total victory over "Prussian militarism." The Wilsonian vision, anticipating the transformation of Europe into so many mirror images of American Constitutionalism, called for a new world order free of secret treaties, punitive indemnities, minority oppressions, and policed by a League of Nations. The transcendent fervour of Wilson's convictions seemed to free him from any sense of how such policies could be implemented in the face of the enormous complexities and chaos of the European situation. At Versailles, according to John Maynard Keynes, who was a British official, Wilson evinced only the most ill-formed and vague notions of how a new European order might be built. The story of his ensuing defeat and disillusionment needs no retelling, but there is a dimension to the picture which should not be overlooked. It is common to characterise Woodrow Wilson as a prophet who eventually found himself without honour in his own country, a tragi-heroic figure figure possessed by a vision for all men which few took seriously. Actually, Wilson's illusions were something more than personal. His belief that America was, in its origins, institutions, history, and international conduct, God's chosen nation was something few Americans doubted. That his people preferred normalcy and isolation to the League of Nations does not mean they for one moment rejected the Wilsonian image of a uniquely virtuous America, but that they chose an expression of this virtue other than the one Wilson thrust forth; just as he had once changed the national expression from virtuous neutrality to righteous intervention, so now did they revert to noninvolvement. America's presumed moral superiority could be expressed either as a desire to abandon other nations to their follies, or a desire to rescue them. The American populace chose the first course, the Wilsonian interventionists the second. But all operated under the same presumption that those aspirations and claims put forth by other nations which conflicted with America's picture of the world were not really worthy of patient tolerance and respectful recognition.

Such was the nature of America's encounter with the world. Military intervention halfway across the world in Manilla or Château-Thierry one day, then splendid isolation the next; repugnance for the "meaningless squabbles" of other nations, followed by a holy crusade against the bloodthirsty Hun, followed again by a return to normalcy; from absolute neutrality, to absolute war, to absolute withdrawal. But whatever course chosen, it was always the path of the righteous.

There is something left unsaid concerning the isolationist-interventionist struggle. If, after World War I, the popular attitude strongly favoured withdrawal from international involvement, can the same really be said of America's political and industrial leadership, including those who vanquished Wilson's League? If isolationism is defined as opposition to any involvement in international events, then the United States was never really isolationist. The anti-Wilsonians opposed the League's collective security system as an arrangement which placed international constraints and obligations upon American sovereign action. America's task, as far as Lodge, Hughes, and Hoover were concerned, was to extend its own economic empire throughout the world, and the League was neither necessary nor desirable for that purpose. "Let us make it our policy," Lodge advised, "that what we shall do and when we shall do it shall be determined by us." At no time did the "isolationists" seriously counsel an ostrich-like withdrawal from world involvement, nor were they any more indifferent than Wilson to the revolutionary upheavals that might threaten overseas expansion.

If the Lodge and Wilson factions were divided on methods (i.e., the League), they were in accord on the diagnosis: the liberal capitalist world was facing a broad revolutionary challenge which had to be met. From the beginning Wilson and most of his opponents shared a phobia of Bolshevism. That far-off revolutionaries in Petrograd and Moscow presented no immediate threat to American overseas investments was less important than that they challenged the "natural order" of things. "The Bolsheviks," Secretary Lansing told a concurrent Wilson, "are wanting in international virtue." They sought "to make the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominate the earth" and "to overthrow all existing governments and establish on the ruins a despotism of the proletariat in every country." Their appeal was to "a class which does not have property but hopes to obtain a share by process of government rather than by individual enterprise. This is of course a direct threat at existing social order in all countries." The danger was that it "may well appeal to the average man, who will not perceive the fundamental errors." The goal was to see that "social order and governmental stability are... maintained."

The Bolshevik leaders, caught between German invaders in the west and an expansionist Japan in the east, made repeated overtures for friendly relations with the United States, but Wilson remained adamant in ideology and action. "I don't think you need fear of any consequences of our dealing with the Bolsheviki," he wrote a US Senator in 1918, "because we do not intend to deal with them." Nightmarish imaginings of what the Bolsheviks might someday do to the world were soon treated as descriptions of what they were actually doing, thereby providing the justification for American and Allied military intervention in the Soviet Union—an intervention which, Williams estimates, prolonged and intensified the Civil War, seriously damaged the Russian economy, and brought a loss in human and material costs beyond anything caused by the Revolution itself.

Forgetting his dedication to the principle of self-determination, Wilson told the British leaders that he supported intervention even "against the wishes of the Russian people knowing it was eventually for their good..." Thus did he initiate the strategy of permanent counterrevolution and help lay the ideological and policy foundations for the cold war to come.

While a few influential Americans opposed intervention on the belief that the Bolsheviks were willing to do business with the United States and were able to retain power in their own country, the great bulk of our political leaders closed ranks behind Wilson. "Communist Russia," Herbert Hoover said, speaking also for the President, "was a specter which wandered into the Versailles Peace Conference almost daily." Faced with a communist revolution in Hungary, Wilson and Hoover—despite their differences over the League—were able to work effectively together, manipulating food supplies and sending military aid to counterrevolutionaries.

What has been said of Pope Pius XII, that he displayed only tepid opposition to Nazism because of his preoccupation with Bolshevism and that he even considered the Germans a potential bulwark against Soviet Russia, might certainly be said of many Western policymakers during and after World War I. It was Secretary Lansing who noted that Absolutism and Bolshevism were two great threats in the modern world, but Bolshevism was "the greatest evil since it is destructive of law and order." The ambiguities of British and French policy in the Spanish Civil War, the Western vacillations toward Hitler's prewar expansionist demands, the unwillingness of Western leaders to join the Soviets in any pact against Nazi Germany, and the United States' refusal to sign a nonaggression pact with the USSR and China against the Japanese militarists—all suggest that the Western capitalist leaders were ultimately more concerned with the Bolshevik spectre than with the fascist threat. Mussolini's advent to power was hailed in the American press in the 1920s as a healthy stabilising antidote to Italy's problems, and Hitler's rise was not viewed as any great danger to world peace. The American preoccupation was with the communist international conspiracy.

The American reaction to Axis aggression was mixed. Some of those in circles close to Roosevelt saw Japan and Germany as potential dangers to American trade routes, overseas markets, and raw material areas. In 1940, as in 1914, large segments of the American populace defined the conflict as "none of our affair." Some corporate and political leaders, fearing the revolutionary upheavals that come in the aftermath of war, believed that America should concentrate on building an impregnable economic empire in the Western Hemisphere while allowing the belligerents to exhaust themselves. "The role of this great Republic," asserted Senator Harry Truman in 1939, "is to save civilisation; we must keep out of the war." However, once Pearl Harbor resolved the question, we committed ourselves to a vision of victory which promised a total solution to the problems of war and peace. The United States emerged from World War II determined not to make "the same mistakes" again, dedicated to some untested idea of collective security and global interventionism, and convinced that "Destiny has thrusted upon a reluctant nation" the burdens of world leadership. The threat this time was said to be Soviet Communism, and the stakes were the nation and all of civilisation itself. If Wilsonian globalism lost the battle of the League, it had won the war of American minds in the generation after Munich.

CHAPTER SEVEN - The Holy Crusade: Some Myths of Origin

For the American a war is not a war unless it is a crusade. SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON

The preceding chapter suggests that a nation which believes the mythology of its past at such expense to historical truth will not be inclined to free itself from self-righteous illusions about its more recent actions—especially since today's events act upon us with an urgency that makes dispassionate assessment all the more difficult. Would, for instance, the reader who is prepared to admit that long ago we were unfair and aggressive toward Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Filipinos, Nicaraguans, etc., be as ready to concede that more recently we have been self-deluding, unfair, and aggressive in our dealings with Russians, Cubans, and Chinese? Nowhere is America's predilection to see virtue in its actions more evident than in the kind of thinking that brought us to the cold war. Let us examine the cold-war mentality, proposition by proposition.

"They Started It"

To most Americans, the Soviet Union was guilty of perpetrating the cold war. The sociologist Daniel Bell concluded: "I supported containment, as a policy of the American government, in the late 1940s and the 1950s... because the Soviet Union was aggressively expansionist." Mose Harvey, a Senior Member of the Policy Planning Council of the United States State Department, and a "Soviet specialist," described the origins of the holy crusade in these words: "The Soviets had chosen to, as it were, declare war on us—much to our surprise. We had little choice but to concentrate on the various threats they thrusted before us."

The presumption is that the United States was innocent of any hostile predisposition toward Russia. Were that true, it would have represented a most dramatic reversal of a long-standing anti-Soviet stance. Anti-communist propaganda was muffled during the wartime alliance and in many instances replaced by praise for the heroism and sacrifices of the Russian people. But for most Americans, and certainly for American leaders, the anti-Soviet attitude that emerged after the war was a resumption of views which had been conventional before 1941. Even before the end of hostilities, as opinion studies showed, large segments of the American public remained "dubious about the prospects of building the peace together with Russia." Well before America's entry into the war, the ambivalent attitude of many American leaders was expressed by Senator Harry Truman: "If we see that Germany is winning the war we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances." Senator Robert A. Taft was more decisive: "The victory of Communism would be far more dangerous to the United States than a victory of Fascism."

It was Harry Truman who succeeded to the Presidency before the war's end, and no reading of his opinions and actions would uphold the view that the United States was motivated by a sincere intention to extend friendly cooperation, only to be taken by surprise by Russian aggressiveness. If Truman brought anything to the White House it was an urgency shared by Harriman, Vandenberg, Byrnes, and others "to get tough" with the Kremlin. "Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language, another war is in the making," he concluded as early as 1945. Soon after taking office, he asserted to one visitor "that the Russians would soon be put in their places" and that the United States would then "take the lead in running the world in the way that the world ought to be run..." On the eve of the first atomic test—before Potsdam and long before the alleged "Soviet betrayals"—Truman's first thoughts were of the Russians, not the Japanese: "If it explodes, as I think it will, I'll certainly have a hammer on those boys." His Secretary of State, James Byrnes, told one scientist that the bomb was needed to "make Russia more manageable in Europe." In the Oppenheimer hearings of 1954 the head of the Manhattan Project, General Grove, testified: "...There was never—from about two weeks from the time I took charge of the project—any illustration on my part but that Russia was the enemy and that the project was concluded on that basis... Of course, that was reported to the President." As Bert Cochran notes, such are the contingencies of international politics that a monster bomb, developed by European refugees to defeat Hitler, was dropped instead on two Japanese cities, and was, even before it was tested, seriously considered as a weapon to brandish against our Russian ally.

Long before the wartime alliance had begun to disintegrate, the Truman entourage was convinced that amicable postwar dealings with the Soviet Union were neither possible nor desirable, and that compromise—which is the essence of diplomacy—was tantamount to self-defeat or sellout. Senator Vandenberg, considered one of the architects of our bi-partisan cold-war policy, rejoiced over President Truman's early bluster: "This is the best news in months. FDR's appeasement of Russia is over." He and Harriman frequently stressed the necessity to avoid any compromise with the Soviets. Truman himself, again in 1945, wrote: "I do not think we should play compromise any longer."

It became clear, as early as 1945–46, that the only way the two nations could arrive at a settlement of issues was for the Soviets to capitulate to every American demand concerning spheres of influence, Poland, German reparations, etc. Anything short of this would necessitate some kind of compromise, and compromise was now ruled out as wrong policy. It was this kind of mentality that moved Walter Lippmann to observe: "The history of diplomacy is the history of relations among rival powers which did not enjoy political intimacy and did not respond to appeals to common purposes. Nevertheless, there have been settlements... [T]o think that rival and unfriendly powers cannot be brought to a settlement is to forget what diplomacy is about."

Truman and his advisors were proudly on record as being antagonistic to the Soviet Union well before those postwar events which allegedly precipitated the cold war. Here, the cold-war ideologue might argue: if, in fact, the Truman Administration anticipated and prepared for a struggle with the USSR long before the actual disruption of the wartime alliance, then that Administration should be congratulated for its foresight because, indeed, such a conflict did evolve. This view sees Truman's actions and attitudes as merely anticipating realities that were destined to emerge; it assumes that American diplomacy had no share in creating these very realities. What is overlooked is the probability that Truman's own belligerent, uncompromising, and ungracious approach was a major factor in actualising the struggle and in preventing the kind of accommodation between the United States and the Soviet Union that is just beginning to emerge today.

"We Prepared for Peace, They Prepared for War"

It is widely accepted by most writers that the early postwar era found the United States engaged in full-scale demobilisation while, in contrast, the Soviets retained their massive armed forces. "There was, in fact, a period of such rapid withdrawal of American forces abroad," claim Arora and Lasswell, "that communist forces were given a new lease on life in many countries." It is not clear where the rapid United States withdrawal took place: certainly not from West Germany, France, Italy, or Japan. It is true that Western forces were not kept anywhere at wartime strength, but the same holds for the Red Army. The USSR demobilised three-fourths of its armed forces, reducing them to 25 percent of the 1945 figure compared to the United States reduction to 13 percent. Keeping in mind that the Soviets had a long and potentially hostile frontier, while the United States had atomic bombs and no hostile frontier, the 1948 Soviet forces, numbering 2.9 million, were not excessive to the American 1.5 million.

Furthermore, American reductions were counterbalanced by continued production of A-bombs and long-range B-29s, planned production of B-36s, a $13 billion allocation for the War and Navy departments and the establishment of overseas air bases—all this in 1946, the year of "demobilisation." (Within three years there were 400 American long-range bomber bases ringing the Soviet perimetre.) American air carrier fleets controlled the seas and the sky above, whereas the Soviets had a rather meagre navy and no strategic long-range air force. It was this situation in 1946 that caused Henry Wallace to observe:

These facts rather make it appear either (1) that we are preparing ourselves to win the war which we regard as inevitable or (2) that we are trying to build up a predominance of force to intimidate the rest of mankind. How would it look to us if Russia had the atomic bomb and we did not, if Russia had 10,000 mile bombers and air bases within 1,000 miles of our coastlines, and we did not...?

Not long after Wallace publicly raised these questions, Truman asked for his resignation. More in keeping with the President's tastes were the views enunciated by a Texas Congressman, Lyndon Johnson (on behalf of American defence and the rising Texas aircraft industry): "No matter what else we have of offensive or defensive weapons, without superior air power America is a bound and throttled giant, impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife."

One might argue that America, being essentially an air-sea power in contrast to Soviet land power, had to maintain elaborate striking forces as a means of guarding against a Russian sweep across Western Europe. (This contention at least discards the myth about America's "total post-war disarmament.") What is missing, however, is any evidence that Stalin had entertained such plans or that the Soviets were capable and willing, to embark once more upon full-scale war. By conservative estimates the Russians had lost between fifteen and twenty million citizens in World War II; fifteen large cities either completely or substantially destroyed; six million buildings obliterated, depriving twenty-five million people of shelter; 31,850 miles of main highway, 90,000 bridges, 10,000 power stations, 3,000 oil wells, and 127,000 schools, colleges, and libraries destroyed; 98,000 collective farms sacked and hundreds of millions of livestock slaughtered—the list could be extended. In contrast the United States had within its own boundaries three-fourths of the world's invested capital and two-thirds of its industrial capacity. That the exhausted, mutilated, nearly mortally wounded Soviet Union of 1946–47, with a military force that had been reduced by 75 percent, and a population that longed passionately for peace after having suffered untold death and destruction, was about to embark upon aggressive war across Europe should seem highly questionable even to the nonexpert.

"The Russians Were Uncompromising, Deceitful, Treacherous, etc...."

For over two decades it has been the American interpretation that Russian postwar diplomacy consisted principally of betrayal and bad faith. Looking back from the year 1962, Adlai Stevenson could tell the UN Security Council: "The record is clear; treaties, agreements, pledges and the morals of international relations were never an obstacle to the Soviet Union under Stalin." That may or may not be true. There is no gainsaying that Stalin played power politics at the "Big Three" conferences—as did Churchill and Roosevelt. The agreements reached by the three leaders were based on a mutual recognition of military actualities and spheres of influence rather than on any self-sacrificing dedication to building a new world. Concessions were made on both sides—itself an observation that may come as a surprise to those American readers who believed we were "sold down the river" at Yalta. Indeed, since most of the agreements came in the areas occupied by Soviet forces, one might concur with Secretary of State Stettinius (who accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta) that "the Soviet Union made more concessions to the [West] than were made to the Soviet Union," and that "as a result of the military situation, it was not a question of what Great Britain and the United States would permit Rusia to do in Poland, but what the two countries could persuade the Soviet Union to accept."

The image of Stalin as a deceitful, uncompromising revolutionary hatching his plot for world domination at Teheran and Yalta seems less plausible than the one of Stalin as the cautious nationalistic leader, aware of the extent—but also of the limitations—of his own power, sometimes able to press for an advantage yet capable of making concessions, frequently distrustful of Western intentions yet continually hopeful of cooperative action, sometimes ambiguous yet most often keeping his word. His goal was the securing of agreements that would protect immediate Soviet interests. His method was not ideological challenge but traditional diplomacy.

Nor, in any case, were his diplomatic successes very impressive. He failed to obtain oil rights in northern Iran while American oil companies moved back into that country in full force. At the insistence of the Western powers, Stalin reluctantly accepted the inclusion of France in the Control Commission for Germany. At their insistence, he finally agreed at Yalta to enter the war against Japan in three months—which he did, three months to the day, while at the same time trading American predominance in China and Japan for temporary economic and strategic rights in Manchuria. The Russians, not without first stripping the factories, voluntarily withdrew from Manchuria in full obedience to the treaty agreements. It would have been impossible for any power to have dislodged them and in fact they easily could have used the excuse that withdrawal would have transformed Manchuria into a battleground for the Chinese civil war, causing the Russian railway to suffer—as indeed happened.

Aware that the USSR would be a minority in the United Nations, and mindful of the way the League of Nations had pilloried Russia during the Russo-Finnish war of 1939 ("the same League that had never lifted a finger against Hitler and never done anything against any act of aggression"), Stalin held out for a strong veto system and somewhat outlandishly requested sixteen votes in the UN (one for each of the Soviet republics). Instead of sixteen, he setted for three, and then, in the spirit of quid pro quo, he negated his gain by agreeing that the United States should also have three votes in the UN, a right of which the US never availed itself.

The image, given wide circulation in the American press, of an uncooperative, surly Soviet delegation bent on stalling or wrecking postwar conferences is not an accurate representation of Soviet behaviour in the early days of negotiation. At the founding session of the United Nations in San Francisco, for instance, the atmosphere was quite amicable until a serious clash developed between the United States and the USSR over the admission of Argentina. At Yalta, Roosevelt had twice promised Stalin that Argentina, the refuge of the fascist movement in the Western Hemisphere, would not be supported by the United States for admission into the UN. But at San Francisco, the Truman-Vandenberg policymakers were of a different mind. Armed with sufficient Latin American votes to defeat Molotov's request to postpone the question ("...for a few days for further study.... This is the only request made by the Soviet delegation") the United States succeeded in pushing through the admission of Argentina. But whatever the discords at San Francisco, James Reston was able to write at that time: "The Conference record shows, the delegates note, ten concessions by Russia which have contributed greatly to the liberalising of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals." And the conservative Arthur Krock could write that the USSR had conducted herself "as a great power and a generally cooperative one on the task at hand."

Russian intransigence and hostility, it has been commonly argued, defeated all efforts at peacetime international control of atomic energy. The famous Baruch Plan, proposed by the United States in 1946, was allegedly such an effort. It was hailed by Americans as a solution designed to forestall the proliferation of atomic weapons by harnessing all atomic industry for the benefit of mankind. Sidney Hook describes it as an "offer by the United States to surrender its monopoly of atomic bombs to an international authority..."

A closer inspection of the Baruch proposal leaves us with a quite different picture: an international atomic commission (with the United States controlling a majority vote) was to have absolute ownership over all atomic research, raw materials, and industries throughout the world. This would necessitate unlimited surveys of Russian soil and industry, and the surrender of sovereign control of all Soviet atomic development to an international authority. Meanwhile the United States would go on manufacturing atomic bombs until satisfied, at some unspecified time, that total control had been established and all other conceivable risks to her security had been removed; we then would convert our existing stock to peaceful uses "subject, of course, to our constitutional processes," and share United States information and technology with the international authority. It was a simple matter of giving the Americans all the guarantees and the Russians all the risks. However, there was one danger: what if Moscow, in a fit of masochism, accepted the proposal? It was freely predicted that the Senate then would refuse to ratify the agreement; neither the Congress nor the military were interested in international controls, no matter how loopholed and lopsided.

"We Had To Stop Soviet-Inspired Revolution"

The accusation that the Soviet Union started the cold war in 1945–46 by fermenting revolutionary agitation throughout Europe, seems at odds with the strikingly restrained course chosen by Moscow. Stalin generally took an unenthusiastic view of revolutionary prospects in Western Europe. If anything he seemed more interested in stabilising his relations with the Western powers, securing German reparations and American aid, establishing a buffer zone of friendly states in Eastern Europe, and keeping Germany prostrate. Taking pains not to antagonise his allies, he urged the Italian Communists to make peace with the House of Savoy, and he himself, in 1944, went so far as to recognise the Italian government of Marshal Badoglio, much to the dismay of the Italian left. He prevailed upon the French and Italian Communists, the strongest parties in their respective nations, to disarm their partisan and worker cadres, and give full support to, and accept minor positions in, postwar bourgeois governments, positions "from which they could not hope to seize power either now or later and from which they were eventually to be ousted, almost without effort by the other parties."

Elsewhere, Stalin's actions showed the same conservatism. In keeping with the Stalin-Churchill bargain of making Yugoslavia a "fifty-fifty" Anglo-Soviet sphere of influence, he strenuously demanded of Tito that he support the Yugoslavian monarchy, and ordered him to bring King Peter's exiled government to Belgrade. Tito refused to comply. Similarly, Stalin urged Mao Tse-tung to accept a subordinate position in the Chiang Kai-shek government. At Potsdam he went so far as to disavow the Chinese Communists, asserting that the Kuomintang was the only political force capable of ruling China. But unlike the French and Italian Communists, and more like Tito, Mao flatly refused, declaring that ultimately he would win all of China. These instances lend little support to the contention that Stalin precipitated the cold war by moving "inexorably along the prescribed path" in a direct revolutionary challenge to the West.

"The Russians Seized Control of Eastern Europe"

This proposition has the merit of bringing us closer to the real issues that led to the cold war. In 1945 the Truman Administration wanted the Russians to relinquish the control and influence the Red Army had won in the war against Hitler. Years later the Republicans, led by John Foster Dulles, were to demand a "roll-back" in Eastern Europe. "Few now realise how unoriginal the demand was," Gar Alperovitz noted, "for a 'roll-back' effort—without its latter day label—was, in fact, at the centre of Harry Truman's first postwar policy. The President, we now know, made this effort in a spurt of confidence derived from the new atomic bomb." In refusing to accede to American demands, the Soviets cannot be accused of "breaking their agreements." "The general sense of the Yalta accords—which were in any case quite vague—was to assign to the Soviet Union a controlling influence in Eastern Europe." To Stalin this meant nothing less than Eastern European governments that were not hostile to Soviet Russia. Enjoying a nuclear monopoly, American policymakers tried to take back what they had conceded at Yalta.

The significant fact is that it was not the "Soviet challenge" to the Western position in Europe that led to the first serious conflicts. That the Soviet Union simply would not "come to terms" in the Balkans, by acquiescing to American demands in a manner prescribed by Truman was taken as evidence of Russian antagonism. Truman's decision to intervene and engage American prestige in Eastern Europe failed in any material way to reduce Soviet hegemony and extend American influence in that region. If anything it may well have had the effect of hardening Soviet policies. For it is not at all certain that in 1945–46 Stalin intended to establish absolute communist control in the Eastern nations. As Deutscher observes:

Communist propagandists there spoke a nationalist and even clerical language. King Michael of Rumania was left on his throne; and he was even awarded one of the highest Russian military orders for his part in the coup in the consequence of which Rumania had broken away from Germany. The Soviet generals and the local Communist leaders did honor to the Greek Orthodox clergy in the Balkan countries. In Poland they courted the Roman Catholic clergy. There was no talk yet of socialization of industry. Only overdue land reforms were initiated.

In Hungary, and in the Russian zone of Austria in 1945, the Communists were swamped in Soviet-sponsored free elections. In the latter country, the Soviets eventually signed a peace treaty, withdrew their troops, and a Western-style democratic government pledged to neutrality emerged for the entire country. In Czechoslovakia, the Red Army pulled out in late 1945, and a democratic government was instituted acceptable to both Russia and the United States. If the Russians were laying plans for an iron-clad communist control of Eastern Europe, they most certainly were making it difficult for themselves by sponsoring free elections, accepting coalition and non-communist regimes, and withdrawing Russian military forces. In fact, it seems the Soviets were preparing to countenance democratic and even non-socialist regimes along their borders as long as such governments did not oppose the Kremlin on matters of foreign policy and defence. Finland was the model for such border states, as was Czechoslovakia, before the coup of 1948. Shulman sums it up this way:

It is by no means evident that the Soviet Union had begun its process of consolidation in Eastern Europe with a clear design in mind for proceeding toward the creation of what came to be called "People's Democracies." A large degree of improvisation seems to have been involved, which represented not so much the opening of a new revolutionary advance in an immediate sense, but the securing of what were regarded as the fruits of victory, and the bulwarking of its security.

The issue which most rankled the Americans and was to become the focus of anti-communist slogans about "Soviet betrayal" was that of "free elections" and "non-interference" in Poland. Stalin refused to accept the Western-sponsored anti-Russian Polish exile group in London, described by Deutscher as "a motley coalition of half-Conservative peasants, moderate Socialists, and of people who could not by any criterion, 'Eastern' or 'Western,' be labelled democrats." Determined that Poland, which had twice been the corridor for a German invasion into Russia, should have a pro-Soviet government, and convinced that the West had agreed to his having a free hand in that area, Stalin installed his own Lublin group, an act that was eventually followed by the suppression of political opposition and the rigged elections of 1947.

Whatever the legitimacy of the Soviet interest in Poland, there is no moral justification for the arrests, executions, and other acts of political tyranny perpetrated in that land. But the West's insistence that Stalin introduce democracy, Western-style, into Poland, while laudatory in itself, was accompanied by no compelling urge to practise the same in its own spheres of influence. Instead, the United States and Great Britain supported dictatorships in Greece, Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, and Kuomintang China. In Greece, British troops re-established a proto-fascist monarchist regime, committing more interventionist acts of violence, murder, and political suppression than the communists were finding necessary to commit in Poland.

"Noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations" became the shibboleth that challenged Soviet predominance in Warsaw, yet throughout the War every power had interfered in the domestic affairs of every country in which it had established a military presence. The idea of joint "Big-Three" consultations in all occupied zones was never honoured in practice. As one writer notes:

In fact, East and West kept each other at arm's length. When the Anglo-American forces conquered Italy, they ran things to suit themselves and kept Russia out of their counsels. When Russia overran Rumania and Hungary, she followed the identical procedure. Stalin, whose thinking was heavily weighted with the Old World power notions and condottieri predilections, assumed this was the tacit agreement. It seemed to him a piece of churlishness and bad faith for the Westerners to make a moral issue of Poland after he had scrupulously carried out his part of the bargain in turning over Greece to Britain, in telling the communists of Yugoslavia and China to accept subordinate positions in coalition governments, and in giving his allies a free hand in France, Italy, and Belgium.

The Soviet Union, in the early postwar days, was a nation greatly concerned with its own industrial reconstruction, determined to be recognised and treated as a great power, and still hopeful of economic aid, trade, and stabilised relations with her former allies. In 1945, Izvestia emphasised the necessity of resolving issues by negotiation while achieving economic cooperation with the West. Stalin's view of the future was decidedly optimistic: If given the peaceful opportunity to develop inside Russia, communism would appeal to more and more countries throughout the world, especially in the underdeveloped areas. As late as 1952 in a major policy statement entitled Economic Problems of Socialism, Stalin castigated those within his party who anticipated war with the West. While he himself was, by that time, convinced that the capitalist powers posed a great danger to Soviet security, he believed that as long as Moscow could maintain its strength, the West would be discouraged from attacking. Furthermore, he predicted that the capitalist countries, unable to solve the immense irrationalities of their socioeconomic systems, faced with chronic overproduction, unemployment, and competition for markets—made all the more intensive by the loss of colonial possessions—would eventually come into severe conflict with one another. With all apparent seriousness, Stalin predicted that the next major war would involve capitalist nation against capitalist nation in classic competition for markets. The Kremlin's task, then, was to secure its western frontier, continue to build up its economy and its defences, avoid adventuristic policies abroad, and let Marxist-Leninist history take its course.

This caution and conservatism, bred of an ideologically optimistic worldview, was nothing new to Soviet diplomacy. Since its inception, the USSR had learnt the necessities of restraint in foreign policy. This is not to say, however, that the Russians were incapable of fear and anxiety in regard to the West. Since the days of Allied interventionism, the Soviet mentality had been beset by fears of "capitalist encirclement." "Wall Street conspirators," "bourgeois subversion," and—after the war—"German militaristic re-emergence." Aware of her own past and present vulnerabilities, suspicious that she would once more become the target of a Western conspiracy that threatened encirclement and debilitation, convinced of the growing hostility of the most powerful nation in the world, the only one possessing an atomic bomb, the Soviet Union began to see sinister intent in almost every American move. Soviet diplomacy after 1947 was to become increasingly peremptory, testy, and rigid, so as to develop into something of a mirror image of our own, while Soviet publications began to match the American press in propagating hostile, fearsome, cold-war stereotypes.

The point made here is that nothing in our own actions was designed to assuage the Russians' worst convictions. American cold-war diplomats condemned the USSR for a break-up of the wartime alliance, even as they themselves, from the very beginning, entertained no thought of continuing that alliance. They castigated Moscow for its allegedly uncompromising ways even as they themselves renounced compromise as a method of diplomacy. After the war, they began accusing the Soviet Union of bad faith while they, during the war, had come to the conclusion that the cultivation of trust would be a waste of time. They deplored Soviet "belligerency" while they prided themselves on their own "get-tough" approach. They denounced Soviet militarism while they encircled Russian territory with nuclear air bases. They denounced Soviet oppression in Poland, and themselves supported tyrannical oppression in Greece and other countries. They accused the Russians of trying to dislodge them from Western Europe as they sought to "roll-back" the Soviets from Eastern Europe. They operated on the assumption that peace and cooperation could emerge only when the Soviets "learnt" to cooperate, and then defined "cooperation" as capitulation to American terms.

Years later some cold war theorists were to argue that our "tough" policy in Europe brought about a "mellowing" of Soviet behaviour: confronted with a United States military build-up which prevented them from devouring all of Europe, the Soviets gave up their invasion plans, resigned themselves to reality, and eventually became more moderate in their attitudes toward the West. This theory presumes the very thing which might be severely questioned: were the Soviets operating with intent to conquer Western Europe? We might note, as did Fred Warner Neal, that we armed ourselves against what we imagined to be an impending Soviet invasion and when that imagined invasion never came, we considered this a validation of what we did to prevent it. The theory also assumes other questions which will be dealt with in the next chapter: does toughness from one side induce mellowness from the other? And was the Soviet militancy of the late 1940s and 1950s a cause or an effect of American belligerency, or was it both?

CHAPTER EIGHT - Sacred Doctrine and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The evil which you fear becomes a certainty by what you do. GOETHE If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. W. I. THOMAS

Not sharing Russia's view of her own security needs, Truman sought by various pronouncements and pressures to dislodge the Soviets from their position in Eastern Europe. When it became evident that this objective could not be achieved, the United States shifted to a policy of "containing" Soviet power. The "roll-back" policy had been based on the assumption that the Russians were seeking to entrench themselves in Eastern Europe; now "containment" was predicated on the idea that they were trying to extend their power throughout all of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, etc. American policy was defined in ostensibly more defensive terms only by envisioning Soviet policy in more offensive ones. By shifting from the complaint that "the Russians won't get out of Poland" to the indictment that "the Russians want to take over everywhere," American leaders could define any political upheaval outside the Soviet sphere as a projection of Moscow's power, and thereby could justify any American intervention as an attempt to contain that power. Thus the more defensive we became, the more aggressively interventionist we acted.

The "Doctrine"

The first momentous pronouncement of the escalated crusade came in 1947 when President Truman, responding to Great Britain's inability to continue her expedition in Greece and her aid to Turkey, went before Congress to request military and economic assistance for those two countries and to announce "the Truman Doctrine." To get the measure approved it was necessary, in the words of Senator Vandenberg, "to scare the hell out of the country," and Truman, finding his ideological proclivities reenforced by political necessity, did just that. He proclaimed that every nation faced a choice between two ways of life:

One way of life is based on the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty.... The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression... and the suppression of personal freedoms....

The "free peoples" of Greece and Turkey, as Truman called them, had chosen the democratic way, and the United States was committing itself to defend their right to self-determination. The 1947 Greek and Turkish governments were, in fact, reactionary regimes, characterised by economic privilege for the few and grinding poverty for the many, stringent press censorship, police terror, and suppression of most forms of political opposition. The same could be said of most of the "Free World" of 1947 including Spain, Portugal, most of Latin America and the Western colonial empires in Asia and Africa.

The Truman Doctrine did not receive unanimous acclaim when promulgated. American commentators such as George F. Kennan, Walter Lippmann, and Marquis Childs, along with a substantial number of diplomats and observers from non-communist nations voiced opposition to the tone and specific proposals of the new credo. A Gallup poll indicated that 55 percent of the American people disapproved of Truman's having by-passed the United Nations. In time, the Doctrine came to enjoy something of the hallowed aura associated with the Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door Policy while suffering from much of the same simplistic self-righteousness.

The cold warrior might argue: "Even if the inspirational rhetoric about 'two ways of life' did not coincide with reality, the United States could not afford to pick and choose its allies. The Truman Doctrine's real intent was to contain Soviet aggrandisement, and this necessitated bolstering even those reactionary regimes that did not live up to the usual democratic standards." But was the civil war in Greece a manifestation of Soviet aggrandisement? If Stalin's own private reactions are any indication, it would seem that the Kremlin was not involved. In his Conversations with Stalin, Tito's erstwhile lieutenant Milovan Djilas quotes the Russian leader as urging the Yugoslavs in 1947 and again in 1948 to cease aiding the Greek uprising and put an end to the insurgency "as quickly as possible." He made similar remonstrances to the Bulgarians. While Truman was convinced that in Greece he was fighting the Kremlin by proxy, in fact Stalin was opposed to the venture.

The results of the American "success" in Greece should go unnoted. When the Americans replaced the British, the massive military repressions continued. The right-wing Greek army employed to crush the social revolution was larger than the one the Germans had needed to conquer all Greece. Over 100,000 Greek citizens fled into exile in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Western Europe. Many other thousands were killed and thousands more were interned in camps and prisons. Despite the billions in American aid over the next twenty years, Greece still was as far as ever from any kind of substantial economic betterment. Some 400 families owned most of the wealth and land, while the great mass of Greeks, especially those in the rural areas, continued to live in abject poverty.

The Truman Doctrine was not merely a response to the Greek situation, it was the expression of a long-standing messianic anti-communist antagonism that went looking for a situation. As early as the London Conference of Foreign Ministers in September of 1945, Truman had decided to proclaim an ideological crusade against Russia and a division of the world between the Free and the Enslaved. "He made up his mind then that, when a fitting opportunity arose and one which Congress and the people would recognise as such, he would proclaim the new doctrine," wrote Arthur Krock in The New York Times. "On several occasions he thought the time had come, but some of his important advisors talked him out of it." The British withdrawal from Greece provided the event for his "long held purpose."

From "Toughness" to Madness

The Soviet reaction to the Truman Doctrine was not long in coming: the Soviet press, in apocalyptic language akin to Truman's, asked the world to choose between people's democracies and imperialist aggression. While the Americans prepared for intervention in Greece, the Russians proceeded to slam down on Hungary, arresting democratic leaders in Budapest. That same year of 1947 saw the Marshall Plan implemented, soon to be followed by the West's unilaterally scrapping the Potsdam disabilities and uniting its own zones into a West-oriented Germany. The Russians were now convinced that the United States was setting about to construct an anti-Soviet bloc in Western Europe and, worst of all, a bloc which would incorporate a militarily revived Germany, an obsessional Soviet fear. Vyshinsky voiced the Soviet view:

As is now clear, the Marshall Plan constitutes in essence merely a variant of the Truman Doctrine adapted to the conditions of post-war Europe.... An important feature of this Plan is the attempt to confront the countries of Eastern Europe with a bloc of Western European States including Western Germany. The intention is to make use of Western Germany and German heavy industry as one of the most important economic bases for American expansion in Europe, in disregard of the national interests of the countries which suffered from German aggression.

Throughout the postwar years, the political arrangements in Europe revealed a kind of "fearful symmetry." The Western nations, under the presence of victorious Allied armies, had been organising as bourgeois governments, with the communists given weak cabinet positions within the ruling coalitions. The Eastern nations, under the presence of the Red Army, were constituted as predominantly communist or left-socialist governments with non-communists similarly accorded relatively unimportant cabinet positions. After promulgation of the Truman Doctrine, under pressure from Washington, the communists were ejected from the French and Italian governments and subsequently the non-communists were ousted from the Eastern European governments. Political factions even remotely inimical to Soviet interests were crushed and the already cooperative Czechoslovakian democracy was overthrown in a bloodless coup, thereby lending substance to the western nightmare of communist subversion. The effect of the Truman Doctrine and NATO was precisely to hasten the Stalinisation of Eastern Europe. In Moscow, the "hard line" was now clearly the order of the day. Stalin's lieutenant, Zhdanov, called for unity in the Eastern camp and a regrouping of all communist parties within the Cominform to confront the Western "menace." In 1948 Dean Acheson became Secretary of State and from the beginning he placed little faith in reaching an accommodation with the Soviet Union. His view, in perfect accord with Truman's, was that the Russians understood and respected only "situations of strength." That Acheson was attacked during the McCarthy era by the right-wing GOP as being "soft on Communism" led many liberals to crediting him with a flexibility and moderation in policy he never possessed. An investigation of the Secretary's mentality reveals an interesting repository of apocalyptic images. Speaking of the "Communist Menace," he said:

...We are faced with a threat not only to our country but to the civilisation in which we live and to the whole physical environment in which that civilisation can exist....

It is our country, with its belief in freedom and tolerance, its great productive power, its tremendous vitality, which stands between the Kremlin and dominion over the entire world. We must not forget that it is we, the American people, who have been picked out as the principle target of the Soviet Communists....

We must use every means we know to communicate the value of freedom to the four corners of the earth.... And this doctrine of freedom will carry conviction because it comes not out of the Government alone but out of the hearts and souls of the people of the United States. Because it is the authentic voice of America, freedom will ring around the world....

[A] real and present threat of aggression stands in the way of every attempt at understanding with the Soviet Union. For it has been wisely said that there can be no greater disagreement than when someone wants to eliminate your existence altogether.

Convinced that the Kremlin wanted to obliterate him and his fellow Americans in order to establish its dominion over the entire world, Acheson set about with proclaimed toughness to establish the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a coordinated military force in Germany (thereby fully realising Vyshinsky's fears of a remilitarised Germany in an anti-Soviet bloc). At the same time, every American show of force was now being matched by the Soviets. The unilateral creation of a West German Government was countered by a Soviet blockade on Berlin. American rearmament of West Germany was followed by (a more limited) Soviet rearmament of East Germany. The NATO Pact was answered by the Soviet-sponsored Warsaw Pact. In 1950, Truman ordered work begun on a hydrogen bomb; soon afterwards, the Russians undertook a similar project. The spiral continued upward. In 1954, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, enunciated the sensational doctrine of "massive retaliation." If confronted by any local revolutionary turmoil which we deemed a communist aggression, rather than engage in costly land wars we might choose to strike the original source of the aggression, presumably Moscow, with any means at our disposal. Dulles was not peculiarly alone in his thermonuclear visions; other voices in Congress and the nation were calling for a "final showdown" with Moscow. A year earlier Senator Lyndon Johnson had urged:

We should announce, I believe, that any act of aggression, anywhere, by any Communist forces, will be regarded as an act of aggression by the Soviet Union.... If anywhere in the world—by any means, open or concealed—Communism trespasses upon the soil of the free world, we should unleash all the power at our command upon the vitals of the Soviet Union. That is the policy we should build toward.

When embraced and proclaimed by Dulles, the "massive retaliation" thesis caused a shudder of apprehension throughout the world and brought a round of criticism from domestic dissenters. Yet to most Americans, as Cochran notes, "this all-or-nothing strategy... fed our self-righteous hunger for playing the world umpire. And it promised to save money. A bigger bang for the buck! Who could resist it?" Certainly not the Russians. In 1953 they exploded a highly advanced thermonuclear device and within half a year after Dulles' proclamation they unveiled their first long-range and medium jet bombers. "Massive retaliation" had become a two-way street.

In October 1953 the first tactical atomic weapons began arriving in Europe to become part of NATO's striking power amidst prognostications from American military commanders that in any confrontation with the Red Army such weapons would be used with devastating effect. The reaction was not long in coming: the Red Army which had fallen substantially behind the American forces in quality of equipment began a full-scale modernisation including the introduction of new tactical atomic weapons. "Tactical deterrence" like "massive retaliation" was nobody's monopoly.

Military escalation went hand-in-hand with rigid diplomacy. By 1956, forty-two nations were aligned in mutual defence pacts with the United States. A nation which had fought wars to defend its right to be neutral now had a Secretary of State, Dulles, who announced that "the principle of neutrality... has increasingly become an obsolete conception and, except under exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception." Senator Lyndon Johnson ruled out the possibility of there being any negotiable middle ground: "...There is a very clear conclusion we can all draw. There are only two alternatives to winning the cold war—hot war or slavery." By the 1950s most of our Western allies including the early cold-war architect, Winston Churchill, were questioning this rigid American stance. "I am of the opinion," Churchill said, "that we ought to have a try for peaceful co-existence, a real good try.... I am rather inclined to think... that they [the Soviets] will not throw away such an opportunity." While President Eisenhower reintroduced the word "peace" into American policy, defining it as a worthy objective which did not of necessity entail a "sellout," his Secretary of State continued to show contempt toward all overtures for negotiation. Thus Dulles rejected Churchill's 1953 proposal for a summit conference, contending that such a meeting would be a de facto recognition of the status quo in Europe; instead he talked of liberating Eastern Europe by a revolutionary "roll-back" of communism. America, by his view, should not negotiate with murderers, but should place its reliance on "positions of strength," specified a rearmed Germany and a superior thermonuclear striking capacity.

But as our armaments increased, so did our apprehensions about a Soviet attack. As our weapons grew more menacing, we ourselves felt more menaced. In most instances our fear was of an imaginary rather than actual military situation. As early as 1947, military spokesmen like Generals Spaatz and Groves gave vivid testimony on the horrors and the immediacy of a Russian nuclear attack; this was two years before the Soviets had even tested an atomic bomb, and several years before they had developed anything resembling a strategic long-range air fleet. Similarly, in 1956, military leaders, corporation lobbyists, publicists, and their Congressional allies alerted the American people to a dangerous "bomber gap." Only after massive allocations were made to the Air Force was it acknowledged that no such gap had ever existed and that the Soviets had no more than 15 to 200 long-range bombers against our force of 680 B-52s and B-58s (not including the British and NATO air forces).

The "missile gap" scare followed the same disreputable course. Two years after the Soviets tested a long-range missile, the experts, assisted by the military-industrial lobby and by the 1960 Democratic campaign speeches of Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, were predicting a disastrous defence vulnerability. Liberal Democratic Senator Henry Jackson announced that "we and our free-world partners may soon face the threat of ballistic blackmail." Only after the military budget was swollen to a $50 billion peacetime level was it revealed that we had exaggerated the Russian missile threat by thirty times. Rather than the four-to-one lead predicted for 1962, the USSR had built only about 50 ICBMs, approximately as many as—or somewhat less than—we already possessed. The New York Times summarised the situation:

"The same forces and the same Congressional and journalistic mouthpieces who manufactured an alleged bomber gap in the 1950's sponsored, and indeed invented, the alleged missile gap in the 1960's. Today... the 'missile gap' has vanished; the quantitative advantage, if any, is on the side of the United States."

Although the Russians did not embark upon maximum production of intercontinental missiles, and although the "missile gap" was nothing more than a fabrication, the United States entered upon a massive programme designed to furnish us with 1,770 Atlas, Titan, Minuteman, and Polaris missiles in addition to our B-52 and B-58 bomber fleets.

In 1955, the Soviet Union signed an Austrian peace treaty and withdrew its army from that nation. Western cold-war theorists have never satisfactorily explained this event except to argue that the Russians, doing nothing from the goodness of their hearts, agreed to a treaty because they had no vital interests in maintaining a military presence in Austria. But if Soviet policy were dedicated to the relentless extension of communist power in Europe, Moscow's willingness to withdraw from Austria, leaving that country free to adopt a Western-style democratic system, would seem to have defeated the Kremlin's own expansionist goals. If, however, we entertain the possibility that Russia's primary interest was not aggrandisement but security on its western frontier, then the disengagement of Western and Russian troops and the emergence of a united but neutral and disarmed Austria was an understandable, indeed a desirable, Soviet policy objective.

Soon after the Austrian treaty, the Soviets cut their forces. In 1960, Khrushchev announced a further one-third reduction in military manpower along with substantial reductions in the armaments budget. During the 1960s, however, NATO continued its build-up, increasing by 45 percent the number of combat-ready divisions and tripling its missile forces. NATO striking power and nuclear capacity was superior to that of the Warsaw Pact armies, but this no more assuaged American anxieties than did American superiority in nuclear stockpile, bombers, and ICBMs. American officials continued to stress the necessity of strengthening the "NATO shield" against possible Soviet attack.

The explosions of American hydrogen bombs were followed by a detonation of a Soviet "monster" bomb; the development of an American nuclear submarine fleet equipped with underwater launching devices was eventually succeeded by similar Soviet accomplishments including a Polaris-type missile. The American civil defence programme was followed—but only after some years lag—by a less elaborate Soviet civil defence programme. (The Russians, perhaps because of their experiences in the last war, remained more convinced than we that civilian populations could not be saved in a hydrogen conflict.) Upon his accession to the Presidency, John Kennedy immediately added $6.5 billion to Eisenhower's last military budget. The following fiscal year, his own military and space budget showed a 50 percent increase over Eisenhower's. By 1965, the United States could hurl a 23,000 megaton load at the Russians, and they a 10,000 megaton load at America; each side was now measuring how many times it could "overkill" the other.

The signing of the nuclear test-ban treaty in 1963 and the subsequent United States–Soviet "détente" led many to suppose that the arms race had levelled off. More likely, the race was conducted with somewhat less fanfare. That Moscow and Washington were no longer indulging in the kind of sabre-rattling bellicosity that characterised the earlier antagonism did not mean that armaments research, production, and proliferation had diminished. Two years after the test ban, the United States and then the USSR utilised the treaty loophole to explode massive underground bombs. In the first half of 1966, the United States increased the number of its nuclear warheads in Western Europe—mostly in West Germany—by 20 percent, from 5,000 to 6,000, causing one writer to observe that "the cold-war confrontation in Europe, in fact, appears to have acquired its own computer-fed momentum." The Vietnam war instigated even greater efforts in military logistics and weapons development.

In a repetition of the "bomber gap" and "missile gap" campaigns of earlier years, familiar voices warned in 1967 of a newly developing "anti-ballistic missile gap." It was reported that the Russians were building an ABM defence system around Moscow, and we had better embark upon a $30 billion ABM system of our own. The United States had already started a multibillion dollar programme to outfit our missiles with multiple warheads and other devices to penetrate any anticipation of the U.S. decision to build an ABM system and were expected to have sophisticated multiple warheads by 1972 or so. Most defence experts, including Secretary McNamara, admitted that a foolproof ABM system was an impossibility; nevertheless, the Administration laid plans for a $5 billion "thin" ABM system which, while useless against a Russian attack, would allegedly deter the Chinese. Our "second-strike" retaliatory capability remained as a superabundant deterrent against any first attack by the Soviet Union but oddly enough was not considered a sufficient defence against a vastly weaker China. What seemed most evident was that the ABM system was a $5 billion "sop" to the military-industrial complex and a kind of insurance against the charge—chronically made by the opposing political party—that the party in power was "neglecting our defense needs."

The East-West "détente" did not bring any noticeable rapprochement on other important military matters. The 1963 Soviet offer to reduce its forces in Eastern Europe if the West did likewise was a proposal the United States did not see fit to negotiate. Premier Kosygin's proposal in February 1966, calling for a joint pledge not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states which have no nuclear weapons on their territory received a cold response from Washington. The United States also steadfastly refused to sign any mutual agreement pledging the signatories not to be the first to employ nuclear weapons.

We can at this point summarise the East-West military confrontation with the following propositions:

The very attempt by the United States to gain a military advantage by stupendous investments in new weapons seems to have induced the Soviets to augment their own military efforts at least enough to provide a "deterrence capability," one which, if not as powerful as ours, can cause enough destruction so as to make us refrain from any attack. In short, every new weapons "gain" tends to spur the other side to renewed efforts which eventually negate the anticipated advantage of the original investment.

In an effort to construct defences against each other, Washington and Moscow have perpetrated a strategic military revolution in which offensive weapons have achieved an alarming advantage over defensive ones. For even if the defender could obliterate 90 to 95 percent of the attacker's missiles, the remaining nuclear rockets would cause tens of millions dead on each side. Both sides could destroy the main industrial and population centres of the other, no matter who struck first.

The consequences of all this is that "military power is no longer an accurate measure of national security." Both the United States and the Soviet Union grow ever more powerful and less secure with the development of each new weapon. The very quest for security has maximised insecurity, and the growing insecurity only further spurs each side to greater quests for the nonexistent ultimate deterrent.

Mirror Images and Mutual Nightmares

By now the rhetoric of the armaments race should be discernible to us. First, we set the premise that some particular country is committed to an inexorable aggression which can only be thwarted by American counterforce. This is the fundamental axiom of containment policy whether applied to Russia, China, or tiny Cuba. As in any axiom, no proof is required.

Next, we greatly exaggerate the adversary's military capabilities, forgetting that most of the measures taken by the Soviets were subsequent to, and in response to, our own superior military growth. This does not prevent us from stressing the necessity of "keeping up with the Russians" even if, all the while, we are well ahead of them. While our military precocity does not necessarily prove us to be the real aggressors, neither does it lend support to the widely accepted notion of a hard-pressed defensive America reacting to an aggressive Soviet Union.

Finally, having taken note of our opponent's military capacity we then argue intention from capability; that is, if he has the capability to destroy us, it must be because he has the intention. (Had the Soviet leaders adopted that line of reasoning, throughout the 1950s and 1960s they could have argued, simply by pointing to the superior and ever-growing American nuclear stockpile and striking capacity, that the United States was preparing for preventive war. Indeed, some Soviet military leaders were of that opinion.) In sum, we postulate the existence of a Soviet aggression which must be contained by a growing American military might, then we point to the growing Soviet military capability as evidence of Soviet aggression.

In so many words, the cold-war theoreticians have argued that Russian militarism is one of the major causes of the East-West conflict while American militarism is merely one of the major effects. American actions are seen as purely defensive reactions, a view that can be maintained only by overlooking the actual sequence of events in the armaments race, and by assuming that the United States operates on the world scene primarily as a dependent variable in response to the actions of other powers. Even if we believe that this is so, we must recall that other powers are similarly reacting in response to, and in anticipation of, American power and policy. American actions are never merely an effect, they are also a cause. By the sheer weight of its presence, the United States generates responses, often negative ones, from other countries.

It seems to have escaped us that the adversary may be reacting defensively toward us even when we are reacting defensively toward him. He sees our power and actions not as justifiable security measures, but as manifestations of aggressive intent. With each side making the same assumptions about the other, we arrive at what the psychologists Ralph K. White and Charles E. Osgood have referred to as the "mirror-image" in American-Soviet relations. Each side labours under the following presumptions:

(a) A refusal to believe that the other side is motivated by fear of our side ("What could they have to fear from us?"), a position that can be maintained only because of:

(b) A mutual belief that the other side has the same picture of us that we have of ourselves ("Not only do we know we don't want war, but they don't want war. They know we are peace-loving, trustworthy, devoid of aggressive intent, etc."). Their very unwillingness to admit to this opinion is taken as evidence of shameless duplicity.

(c) A mutual belief that the other side has the same picture of itself that we have of them. ("Not only do they know we are virtuous, but they know they are deceptive, aggressive, ill-intentioned, evil, etc. Of course they would not admit it, but show us a devil who does not know he is a devil.")

(d) In view of the above suppositions, the antagonism shown by the other side is seen as motivated by aggressive intent rather than defensive fear. And aggression can be deterred only by instilling into the aggressor a respect for one's own power. Thus each side feels compelled to remind the other of its own military capacity and potential belligerency, while simultaneously professing its devotion to peace, an incongruity which appears as little more than hypocrisy in the eyes of the opponent.

Concessions, we come to believe, will be taken by the opponent as a sign of weakness, "a lack of firmness," an invitation to him to take advantage of us. At the same time our unwillingness to make concessions increases his intransigence, thus allowing us to castigate him for his reluctance to cooperate toward building peace. All policy is reduced thereby to one belligerent and impoverished posture: "strengthen the forces of freedom."

At a certain point in the antagonism, perhaps at an early stage, it becomes difficult to tell which side is acting and which is reacting. What we are confronted with is one of the most common and troublesome phenomena of human relations: the self-fulfilling prophecy. Convinced we are facing a mortal enemy, we begin to treat him like one, and he soon becomes one. A false, or partly false, definition of the situation evokes a behaviour that tends to make the initially false representation come true. Every hostile action generates a response from the adversary which seems to justify the original action and to call for further "toughness." "The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy," Robert Merton notes, "perpetuates a reign of error."

According to Washington policymakers, many of whom have been less than clear and consistent on this point, communists can be divided into those who believe in revolution by peaceful gradual transition and those who advocate violent upheavals. The latter are presumably more threatening and more evil than the former. If we are to strengthen the hand of the moderates, the argument goes, then we must be tough and unyielding in our military ventures, thereby demonstrating to the militant, hardline communists that their policy of violent activism will not work. In short, to encourage the communists to pursue a peaceful, moderate, and trusting path we must ourselves use violence and toughness in Vietnam and elsewhere. Were we then to become "soft" as former State Department official William Bundy argued, this would "be an encouragement to the hardliners in Peking."

One could more easily and sensibly argue the other way around: since it is the moderate communists who argue in the councils of their respective governments that the United States is basically a reasonable, nonaggressive nation with whom peaceful co-existence is possible, and it is the hardline "Stalinist" factions that insist we are violent, militaristic, uncompromising imperialists who want to rule or ruin, it would seem that our murderous toughness in Vietnam and our eagerness to play the world's policeman in a never-ending series of global interventions support the hardline communist view of us and weaken the position of the moderates. The hawks in one country always fortify the position of the hawks in the opposing country by perpetrating actions which actualise and seemingly justify aggressive images. The Soviet generals, in their struggles for greater military allocations, had no more persuasive ally than the Pentagon. Whether the hardline neo-Stalinists or the more conciliatory moderates win out in Moscow will be determined "more readily in Washington than in Moscow," according to former New York Times Moscow correspondent Harrison Salisbury. "Sober-minded Soviet officials made no secret of their concern that the rise in international tensions, stemming from Vietnam, was producing reactionary results within the Soviet Establishment."

The presumption that the other side will become more pliant if we are more belligerent is ironically characterised by Isaac Deutscher in this manner:

Of course in order to preserve peace in the world you have to be tough: you mustn't appease the Russians, you mustn't appease communism. There is much talk in America just now about the 'hawks' and the 'doves,' and our policy-makers assume, of course, that the hawks and doves are bred only here in the West. The Russians, apparently, don't have those breeds of birds. Certainly, if we in the West send out our ferocious hawks in sufficiently great numbers the Russians will, of course, send out their doves to meet them. And the Chinese will presumably do the same.

There is no reason to think the Russians or Chinese are any more capable than we of facing external threats with either obsequiousness or fearless indifference. Belligerency breeds belligerency, intransigence invites intransigence, threat leads to counterthreat, and the antagonists find themselves at the edge of an abyss.

It has been the custom of American leaders to insist that we "are ready anytime" for conciliation as soon as the other side makes the reassuring moves; when we have proof that they are acting in good faith then we will respond in kind. What constitutes "proof," however, is hard to determine, for there have been numerous significant occasions over the years when friendly communist overtures have not been recognised as such by Washington and have been treated as nothing more than ploys. Furthermore, it is not clear why we need assume that the other side has the exclusive capacity to initiate a rapprochement. Apparently we can make no move toward peace unless we have the reassurance of substantive concessions from them, but they are capable of extending trust and friendship right into the mouths of our guns without the benefit of encouraging initiatives from us. Underlying this logic is the familiar presumption that they must take every pain to demonstrate they are not evil while we need not exert ourselves to confirm the already self-evident quality of our virtue.

Almost as an article of faith we have contended that US postwar policy was a response to the "Soviet challenge." In these pages I have tried to demonstrate that Soviet behaviour can just as readily be understood as a reaction to the "American challenge." If it is true that we are not merely reacting to others and that our own policies have a profound effect on communist nations, we might consider the possibility that restraint will encourage restraint, moderation will invite moderation and conciliatory overtures, nonintervention and gradual disarmament will bring similar responses from the other side. Just as the hawks of one nation create self-fulfilling situations that bolster the hawk position in the opposing country, so it may be with doves. The cold-war cycle can gradually be reversed as those in one land who support rapprochement and de-escalation reinforce the policies of softliners on the other side by offering cooperative reassurances in word and deed.

To argue that such a policy is chimerical because communists in their unmitigating hostility would never respond in kind, is to forget that a gradual accommodation by a process of "mutual example" already was underway between the United States and the USSR by 1963. Not only did the Soviets respond favourably to the opportunity for better relations, they initiated most of the earlier moves. Nor did President John Kennedy's positive, if belated, response to Khrushchev's repeated overtures for an East-West détente become the occasion for Soviet treachery or renewed militancy. The softer, saner United States line only further strengthened the moderate faction in Moscow. The subsequent American intervention in Southeast Asia deterred this process of rapprochement. Our self-professed "firmness" in Vietnam, rather than silencing the Kremlin hawks, has tended to lend persuasiveness to the urgings of the militant, anti-US faction. By 1968, the Russians were sending substantial military aid to North Vietnam, repeatedly attacking United States Vietnam policy, showing a greater reluctance to engage in closer relations with Washington, and forcefully intervening in Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, the United States was not preoccupied with newer and supposedly deadlier communist demons in the Far East, and was once more placing its faith in toughness, rigidity, and violence.