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A NEW KIND OF WAR
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just Stalin, not even just the Communist Party. And neither Stalin nor the
Communist Party were big enough to make it possible for the Soviet
Union to escape history. They are foolish in many ways; they suffer
from a monomaniacal concentration on power which almost equals our
American obsession with profits and high living, but they have not
escaped the modem history of industrialism and industrialization, bureau–
cracy and bureaucratization, scientists and scientism. They are no more
and no less human in these weird new circumstances than we. We
are no more nor less than they--each is just farther along different roads.
Viewing the Soviet-American confrontation without paranoia, it
is clear that the impasse must be met and can only be resolved as a
matter of domestic American politics. Unfortunately, in America noth–
ing important happens except in a crisis, and it is up to our leaders
to indicate the existence of the current one in all its immensity. Walt
W. Rostow is exceptionally perceptive about this aspect of the cold war:
The heart of the Soviet challenge lies, then, in presenting us
with a situation where our interests may be eroded away,
without palpable crisis, to a point where a traditional con–
vulsive American response will no longer suffice. Our concep–
tions and methods of allocation to the public sector are inap–
propriate to a world caught up in a technological arms race
and a slow grinding struggle for power and ideological con–
ception in the underdeveloped areas. It is not the Soviet growth
rate we need fear but a mode of American allocation which
tends to imprison us at a level of public outlays determined
by our arbitrary response to the last major crisis.
We all have to think about
conditions
as they come into being,
because it is the essence of the new world that we believe in conditions
as determining existence, including spiritual existence,
if
any. This so–
called scientific idea is practically all the baggage we are taking with
us on our terror-ridden and terribly human journey from the old
Christian world through this present existential desert into the new
proletarian land of plenty. And let's think now, because later is too late.
What I say is, why don't we "go to war" for a decade or two?
If
we don't, we will lose the world-probably including ourselves, since
we are part of it-to Communism.
If
we are not to lose, then we must
go to this new war eventually.
If
we do so sooner rather than later,
we have a better chance of winning-of preserving our freedoms in the
process. It's that simple.
It's a
new
kind of war.
