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R. H. S. CROSSMAN
with consistent firmness against Communism, because he dimly feels
that in so doing he will somehow be wounding himself." The liberal
conscience, in fact,
is
wide open
to
Communist blackmail. "He is al–
ways looking for the enemy on the Right, whereas in reality all the
major challenges which now bear crucially on our survival come from
the Left."
The conclusion to which
Suicide of the West
leads us is not
unexpected. The United States- and with it the whole Western Al–
liance-is threatened by a world-wide conspiracy which unites the
liberal American professor on his campus, the Labour politician in
Westminster, and the Communist in the Kremlin. It is this secret
alliance of the overt enemy outside and the "enemy within the gate"
which enabled Stalin to be the effective victor of World War II, and
which since 1956 has subjected the West to a disastrous series of de–
feats. Final Communist victory can only be averted by the revival of
a Radical Right determined to liquidate liberalism at home, and talk
to Communism abroad in the only language it understands.
Mr. Burnham tells us practically nothing about the policies which
this Radical Right would pursue if it ever achieved power. By logical
deduction, however, we can conclude that on the home front it would
restore traditional disciplines in education, crush crime by a return
to harsh retributive punishments; substitute nineteenth-century laissez
faire for Keynesian economics, and put an end
to
the "provocative
egalitarianism" of civil rights legislation. About foreign policy there
are only the vaguest hints. We learn that it would be necessary to re–
introduce the "tragic dimension" into our picture of the good life.
"Except for mercenaries, saints and neurotics, no one is willing to
sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the
abstract, the United Nations and a ten percent rise in Social Security
payments."
When I read these sentences, my mind jerked back to my job as
Director of Psychological Warfare in World War II. Automatically,
I translated Mr. Burnham's words into German and- hey presto-–
here was an abstract of two central doctrines from
M ein Kampf.
Adolf Hitler
too
saw his country "poisoned" by liberal ideology, and
enrolled thousands of business men and white-collar workers in the
S.A. by persuading them to join the Right against a secret conspiracy
between the liberal politicians of the Weimar Establi'shment and the
Communists in the Kremlin. In his classical chapter on the technique
of propaganda, he explains that in democratic politics the defeat of
the adversary is achieved not by an appeal to reason or by putting