SOCIALISM AND COLD WAR
709
has been obtained by two methods. (1) A mass demand for profit–
able but inessential consumer goods and luxuries has been stimu–
lated by extravagantly expensive mass
adver~ising
and satisfied at
the cost of the public services, but at a satisfactory rate of profit to
private industry. (2) The commercialized media of mass communi–
cation have been systematically used to dope the critical faculties
which would normally have been stimulated by the improvement
of popular education since 1945. By the continued application of
these methods it may well be possible to keep the British people
complacently apathetic, while the social and moral sinews of the
national organism are rapidly weakened by fatty degeneration.
What will finally confront us as a result of this decline will not
be a return of the mass unemployment of the 1930's but a shrinking
of the frontiers of democracy as the world balance of power shifts
and the uncommitted peoples of Asia and Africa accept the eco–
nomic aid and political leadership of the Communists in the
modernization of their communities.
If
the Kremlin were manned
by Cold Warriors determined to overrun the West by a display of
aggressive brinkmanship, the decline of Western power which we
are now witnessing might well result in a series of international
crises.
In terms of military strength, it
is
now within the capacity of
the Russian and Chinese Communists to force a showdown on such
issues as Berlin, Persia and Formosa and to confront the Western
powers with a choice between nuclear
suic~e
and a series of
Munich-type surrenders.
Committed to the defense of a whole series
of positions which have been rendered indefensible now that we
have been overtaken in the nuclear arms race, we could do little to
protest if the Russians were barbaric enough to call our bluff-by
proceeding to mop up three key positions which we now hold only
by the tolerance of Mr. Khrushchev in West Berlin, Quemoy and
Teheran. By signing a peace treaty with the East Germans, instigat–
ing a revolution in Persia or providing the Chinese with nuclear
weapons, the Russians could now make each of these positions un–
tenable.
No one can exclude the possibility of a series of surrenders of
this kind. Nevertheless, I am not convinced that this is the main
danger which the West now faces. It seems to me probable that the
Communists have taken our measure fairly accurately. Unlike Stalin,
