COMMENT
659
Unfortunately the chief weaknesses exist for the peoples who
already lie in the grip of Communism and who know what a Com–
munist regime is really like but who are held down so tightly by the
police that they can do nothing about it. Nevertheless these people
constitute a danger to the enemy behind his lines. Czechoslovakia, a
country which had a middle class and strong traditions of liberty,
is probably the most fertile field for Western propaganda. But so far
very little has been done and time is running out, for the Communists
are rapidly liquidating those elements of the population that carry
the liberal traditions, and the younger generation coming to maturity
may very soon have no notion at all of Western values. Here, Amer–
ica's T-bomb may very well prove a dud so long as the Communists
are in a position to document their lies to produce some mass credulity.
Instead, the West will have to work upon all the sources of emotion-–
nationalistic, local, humanitarian and religious* feelings- that still
attach the Czech to his
huma~ity
of the past. But propaganda also
*
It is perhaps worth noting that this does not in the least commit me to
either side of the controversy in our last issue between Messrs. Van den Haag and
Hook on the subject of organized religion. My discussion has nothing to do with
such ambitious questions as the necessity of myth, the will to believe, etc. I simply
note the fact that as the ordinary man becomes detached from church member–
ship he loses one more barrier between himself and the featureless masses, the
human ciphers which totalitarian dictators need as their material. But I place
no exclusive emphasis upon church membership (and note that I do not speak
of
the
Church); the point would hold also of membership, say, in a democratic
trade union with some patriotic attachment to its country that is, of membership
in
any group that fostered the feeling of being an individual person and a citizen,
rather than the mass feeling of anonymity. My view here is that of Schumpeter
(Capitalism, Democracy, and Socialism):
capitalist civilization declines, not
through failure in economic performance, but through undermining the institu–
tions that shore up its society. Or, more starkly: Capitalism defeats itself through
the excess of its own rationality by destroying the non-rational emotions that
attach men to their social group. I am pretty sure that Hook knows that
the American soldiers in Korea are not fighting because they have traversed
his rational arguments about Communism ; they fight out of certain
feelingJ–
of patriotism, corps loyalty, and perhaps also hatred of Communism, of which
by the way they may know very little beyond what is contained in phrases like
"Godless Russia."
It may also be worth emphasizing that the appeal to religious freedom should
be only one of the weapons in this battle. Good use can also be made of non–
Communist radical groups. A friend of mine suggested, in jest, to an American
official that the U.S. ought to give a million dollars to David Rousset's R .D.R.
movement in France. The suggestion was a very practical one, though never taken
seriously. Groups for which the words "socialism" and "revolution" still have
tremendous emotional charges might be useful allies in detaching members from
the C.P., who may discover that they can find such emotional outlets in an organ–
ization that is not tied to the Kremlin.
