THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
65
defeat
in
the cold war itself
is
sometimes interpreted as a kind of
game of profit and loss on an ideological balance sheet with hardly
a glance at the human race itself, whose fate may hang in the
balance.
2. There is a kind of unwittingly shared agreement between
many Americans and Communists on many vital issues. Both tend
to identify radical social reform with Communism. Indeed, not a
few nationalist leaders of former colonial countries, on being called
Communists and treated like Communists by Americans, may in fact
conclude that that's what they will have to be if they must choose.
Beginning as non-Communists in search of some versions of freedom
but not willing to be anti-Communists, they may be drawn into the
Communist bloc from lack of any other place to turn. Both Com–
munist and American reactionaries tend to see the world as polarized
between two sharply opposed camps, whereas it is in the interest of
the whole world, as well as of the nuclear powers, to encourage the
development of as many variants of socialism as possible. Unfortu–
nately many American public and private men do not even under–
stand that there are many variants of "capitalism" but regard the
mixed economy of the United States as capitalist in some conven–
tional sense. A similar stereotyping blinds them to the actual existence
of a number of forms of Communism: in the USSR, in Poland, in
China, in Yugoslavia, perhaps in Cuba.
If
every movement of radical
social change or even of protest is interpreted as Communist, then
the growing domestic hysteria that we are "losing the cold war" is
bound to increase. This hysteria will certainly produce Administra–
tion policies that are alternately truculent and conciliatory, leading
in
the latter case to right-wing charges of "appeasement" and in
the former perhaps to the increased power of Khrushchev's domestic
and Chinese enemies to undermine his policy of "peaceful coexist–
ence." Or more accurately, the inconsistencies in our policy make it
difficult-it would never be easy-for the Soviet leaders to under–
stand our intentions and to act in ways less threatening and dangerous
to peace.
I believe that the present Administration took office with hope
of making a change: while in the Senate, President Kennedy had
identified himself with Indian and Algerian hopes, and neither he
nor his immediate advisors were inclined to lump all "un-American"
