Real War (36 page)

Mussolini's description of fascism reads like a charter for communism.

The strength of Soviet totalitarianism is that the government can concert its efforts in every field: military, economic, propaganda, scientific, education. A pluralistic free society cannot do this. Most of its economic decisions are made in the marketplace, its education system goes its own way, its press is free. Our government can subsidize certain kinds of scientific research, and thus, for example, speed the development of selected new weapons or new technologies, but the great bulk of our research is directed by the private sector for private purposes.

The corresponding weakness of the Soviet system is that this central, bureaucratic control stifles creativity and limits incentive. Our freer system provides incentive and encourages creativity, and thus we
produce
more: more goods, more ideas, more innovations. They
concentrate
their more limited production in those areas they believe will best serve their central purposes.

Just as Stalin exported butter by the ton and grain by the shipload while millions of peasants died of starvation, today's Soviet Union can, in effect, strip the shirts from its workers' backs in order to build more and bigger missiles. In cold military terms this is one of its great advantages, for it enables the
Soviet leaders to spend on their military more than twice the percentage of GNP that the United States does. They can tell their workers where to work, for what hours, at what pay, and they have no fear of strikes.

As a result of our different systems, marshaling the nation's will is a more difficult task in the West. But it also is more important. In the Soviet Union the state speaks and the people obey. In the West the people speak with a cacophony of voices and go their own ways. Soviet leaders command. Western leaders must lead.

•  •  •

In America, the spirit is there, if only the spark can be found to light it. As Churchill once said, “We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”

America's greatest strength in this global contest is America itself—our people, our land, our system, our culture, our tradition, our reputation. American history is full of archetypal heroes: the stony Vermont farmer, the Pennsylvania coal miner, the Southern gentleman farmer, the Texas oilman, the Las Vegas gambler, the California gold miner, the Oregon lumberjack—the list is extensive. Cowboys, robber barons, pioneers, traders, roughnecks, and horse thieves—all share a common trait that is cherished in American folklore: individuality. We have always prized and encouraged the individual. The acceptance of individual differences has been our hallmark.

Americans also are a generous people. We have shown ourselves willing to help others anywhere on the globe. We have extended aid and encouraged development in the rest of the world, because we have been conditioned by our history to see good in growth. We want independent, self-reliant neighbors and prosperous trading partners, nations joined with us in the sort of common interest that benefits us all. This is why the United States has friends and allies, while the Soviet Union has subjects and satellites.

From George Washington's Neutrality Proclamation through the Monroe Doctrine and the Marshall Plan runs an American impulse that disdains war and instead seeks to spread freedom and prosperity. We have a natural respect for the individuality
of others, and a concern for their well-being. These instincts make for a constructive foreign policy, one that commands the genuine respect of other nations—
if
we also show the resolve required of a great power.

And there, precisely, in that “if,” lies our greatest potential weakness, and the greatest danger to the West. There is no question that if there is to be an arms race, we can win it. There is no question that if there is to be an economic race, we can win it. There is no question that if there is to be a contest for the “hearts and minds” of the world's people, we can win it. But there is a question whether we can win the contest we are actually going to be engaged in: a test of will and determination between ourselves and the most powerfully armed aggressive power the world has ever known.

•  •  •

William F. Buckley, Jr., once remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. This reflects a shrewdly perceptive analysis of American strengths and weaknesses. The people as a whole often lack sophistication, but they have a good, gut common sense, and when necessary they can draw on an enormous reservoir of courage and will. But too many of America's intellectual and cultural elite have shown themselves to be brilliant, creative, trendy, gullible, smug, and blind in one eye: they tend to see bad only on the Right, not on the Left. Extremely sophisticated about ideas in the abstract, they can be extremely simplistic and naïve about the realities of the actual global conflict we find ourselves engaged in. “War” is “bad,” “peace” is “good,” and posturing with words is everything.

The nation's immediate problem is that while the common man fights America's wars, the intellectual elite sets its agenda. Today, whether the West lives or dies is in the hands of its new power elite: those who set the terms of public debate, who manipulate the symbols, who decide whether nations or leaders will be depicted on 100 million television sets as “good” or “bad.” This power elite sets the limits of the possible for Presidents and Congress. It molds the impressions that move the nation, or that mire it.

America lost in Vietnam because this power elite persistently
depicted first Diem and then Thieu as corrupt and dictatorial and the war therefore as not worth fighting—ignoring how much worse the alternative would be. The Shah of Iran and President Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua met the same fate, with the United States greasing the skids for their downfall. While still our U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young nominated the Ayatollah Khomeini for sainthood and praised Cuban troops as providing “stability” in Africa. Television romanticizes revolutionaries, thus greatly increasing the chances that Soviet-backed revolutionary wars can be waged successfully—just as the New York
Times'
romanticizing of Fidel Castro two decades ago was a major factor in legitimating his revolution and securing his victory.

This complex of attitudes is nothing new. Reinhold Niebuhr once pointed out that communism was more dangerous to the West than the naked fascism of the Nazis, because “Russia comes to every nation, which it intends to subjugate, as a ‘liberator' from ‘fascist' and ‘imperialist' oppression. . . . A corrupted ideal may be more potent than a frank defiance of all ideal values. The proof of that higher potency is given by the fact that Russia's ‘fifth columns' in the Western world are composed not of the miserable traitors who constituted the Nazidominated ‘Bund,' nor yet of mere Communist party hacks. They contain thousands of misguided idealists who still think that Russia is the midwife of an ideal society, about to be born.” Communism's greater subtlety would not make it more dangerous than Nazism if the leaders of Western thought were more discerning.

Even though Mussolini's definition of fascism was a perfect description of Soviet communism, fascism has been identified as right-wing and therefore “bad,” while communism has been identified as left-wing and therefore, if not actually “good,” at least to be viewed in a sympathetic light that points up its promise while obscuring its crudities.

•  •  •

The forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the 1930s was one of the most monumental atrocities of human history, in many ways the model for the genocidal tragedy of Cambodia in our own time. Families were torn apart, peasants were slaughtered for trying to hold onto a pig or a cow; millions,
their few possessions confiscated, were packed into cattle cars and sent to die in the frozen wastelands of Siberia. Children, orphaned or separated from their parents, wandered the countryside starving and homeless. But in the West the leaders of intellectual fashion were so infatuated with the romance of revolution that they closed their eyes to its gore and saw only its glory. Thus George Bernard Shaw, in the midst of the horror, could tell a press conference in Moscow that he was “more than ever convinced” that capitalist countries “must adopt Russia's methods,” and write in his hotel guest book, “There is not a more interesting country in the world today to visit than Soviet Russia, and I find travelling there perfectly safe and pleasant. . . . Tomorrow I leave this land of hope and return to our Western countries of despair.”

Reflecting on his days as a Moscow correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian
during the Stalin era,
Malcolm Muggeridge recently recalled “the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. And they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-god museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy.” It was this, he said, that “touched off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that Western man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin.”

William Pfaff of
The New Yorker
notes that those “who believed in Russian Communism, and went enthusiastically to Moscow a half-century ago to see what they wanted to see, and no more, were not negligible men. They included John Reed, Bernard Shaw, André Gide (for a time), Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Julian Huxley.” More recently, he argues, “With Stalin dead and the Soviet Union discredited as a society of reform, the communisms of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh assumed the function of ‘Beau Ideal' for a new generation of European and American idealists.” These people “see in the political character and accomplishments of other countries what they need to see. . . . For admiring foreigners, Vietnam and China were too often countries that existed mostly in their heads. Since they were imaginary countries, they were preserved
from the corrosion of existence, the wear of life. Faith in them could remain; they could be stubbornly believed societies of justice, warm human cooperation, mutual support, simple honesty, truth-telling.”

A comparable blindness in one eye exists with regard to Africa. Long before his fall the brutalities of Uganda's Idi Amin were revealed beyond the capacity of any apologist to pretend they were anything but the most savage sort of butchery on a vast scale. Yet the hypocrisy of those African leaders who elected him president of the Organization of African Unity while hurling moral thunderbolts at the West was ignored. Harvard students demanded boycotts of the Republic of South Africa, not of Uganda or communist-dominated Mozambique. In South Africa blacks are consigned to certain areas and forbidden certain forms of fraternization; in Uganda the heads of black Ugandans were beaten in with hammers, their legs were chopped off, and they were forced to eat the flesh of their fellow prisoners before they too were put to death. But fashionable outrage is directed against apartheid, not against savagery.

Longshoreman-philosopher
Eric Hoffer has commented:

One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation. The intellectuals who idolized Stalin while he was purging millions and stifling the least stirring of freedom have not been discredited. They are still holding forth on every topic under the sun and are listened to with deference. . . . The metaphysical grammarian Noam Chomsky, who went to Hanoi to worship there at the altar of human rights and democracy, was not discredited and silenced when the humanitarian communists staged their nightmare in South Vietnam and Cambodia.

There is none so blind as he who will not see—and this has been the condition of much of America's intellectual establishment through much of this century. Unfortunately, as
Hugh Seton-Watson points out, “Nothing can defend a society from itself if its upper 100,000 men and women, both the decision makers and those who help to mold the thinking of the decision makers, are resolved to capitulate.”

Too many of those who should be most jealously preserving and defending what America represents have instead been
paralyzed by a misplaced sense of guilt, which has led them to abandon faith in our own civilization. As
Commentary
editor
Norman Podhoretz has put it, “The forces that have prevented both the strengthening of our military power and the energizing of our economic capacity seem to be based on the continuing conviction of many that the kind of society and civilization we have are not worth maintaining—neither worth defending by military means nor perpetuating by economic means.”

If America loses World War III, it will be because of the failure of its leadership class. In particular, it will be because of the attention, the celebrity, and the legitimacy given to the “trendies”—those overglamorized dilettantes who posture in the latest idea, mount the fashionable protests, and are slobbered over by the news media, whose creation they essentially are. The attention given them and their “causes” romanticizes the trivial and trivializes the serious. It reduces public discussion to the level of a cartoon strip. Whatever the latest cause they embrace—whether antiwar, antinuclear, antimilitary, antibusiness—it is almost invariably one that works against the interest of the United States in the context of World War III.

These trendies are ready with an opinion at the drop of a microphone, and their opinions are treated as news—not because they are authorities, but because they are celebrities. Their minds are impervious to argument, and their arguments are impervious to fact. Posture is all. Some see their posturing as a conspiracy, and suspect that it is directed from Moscow. But this misses the point. It is not a conspiracy, but a conformity. If it were a conspiracy, it would be easier to deal with. The trendies are an army of the gullible, steering by the star of fashion, drawn to the sound of applause. They call themselves “liberal” because “liberalism” is in fashion; but they have lost touch with the classic spirit of liberalism. As Michael Novak points out, “The liberal spirit believes in the potent energy of the individual spirit. It believes in a free economy in a free polity. . . . Liberals must begin to strengthen the mediating institutions of society which alone, as social organisms, can check the power of the state.”