THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
27
will to resist Communist aggression. Communists, however,
will
use
all other means to bring us down, subversion, economic competition,
corruption, and diplomatic offensives to disrupt the unity of the
NATO powers.
If
we meet these challenges in a spirit of reciprocity
and carry the ideological offensive to them, we need have no fear of
the outcome. Their stupidity (opposition to the Marshall Plan, the
treatment of Tito, Pasternak, the brutal scorn of world opinion,
Khrushchev at the U.N. etc,) is on our side. The very existence of a
strong, free, and open society outside the borders of the Soviet
Union will always be a discomfort to the Soviet regime and a source
of infection to those of its people who have not lost their love of
freedom. Since we have renounced preventive war as a means of
defence, which is as it should be, our best hope is that in time the
people of the Communist world themselves will win their freedom,
and a viable world community be established. Until then, ours can
unly be militairly a holding action-as we strengthen democratic
society both for our own sakes and for the sake of men everywhere
and find ways to bring the message of freedom to the minds and
hearts of all the peoples of the world.
IRVING HOWE
This is my third or fourth
PR
symposium, and each time
I wonder what use there can be in compressing into a few hundred
words my responses to questions that would require many pages
to answer decently. The purpose of such symposia, however, is not to
have anyone develop ideas in depth; it is to register shifts of intel–
lectual opinion and temper. So, with a kind of comic despair at the
hopelessness of the attempt, here are a few remarks:
1) What can one mean by winning or losing the cold war?
It is not as if so complex an historical development were undertaken
by plan or intent, with a set of clear goals that would allow us to
measure the extent to which they have been realized. The cold war
began as a result of a great many interlocking causes, such as na–
tional interests asserted and threatened, imperial ambitions among
