The Left's Vocabulary-Victory Through Word-Power
Conquest, Robert
Robert Conquest The Left's Vocabulary-Victory Through Word-Power A guide to useful Communist-coined phrases and slogans. Among the delusions which pervade the political, media, and academic...
...Second, the Western populations comprise a world of public opinion of some importance to Soviet leaders, since they eventually hope to make use of it...
...Once again, the war would have been inevitable but for the existence of the non-Communist world...
...That it actually kills fewer people than Soviet nuclear weapons, even tactical ones, is ignored...
...His vote was little over one-third of the whole, and constitutionally inadequate...
...In it we see a wicked U.S.A., with corrupt, atrocity-prone allies, brandishing neutron bombs, overthrowing with the help of the CIA democratically-elected Red governments, surrender to whom on a world scale would at least bring peace...
...Needless to say, the overthrow of the Allende regime, like so much else, has been explained very simply as the work of the CIA...
...The scandals of N'krumah's Ghana, however, were reported only after his removal, when it emerged that the millions of dollars left in the local treasury by the departing British had disappeared...
...The key word here is clearly "reported...
...Nevertheless, it is true that for a generation abominable acts have been committed all over the world...
...They have strafed children and old folks, burned houses, seized cattle...raped and killed our women" (Cambodian Chairman Khieu Samphan...
...Perhaps with the recent fighting between Communist Vietnam and Communist Cambodia, and between Communist Vietnam and Communist China, the proof is now sufficient...
...But, either way, we are left with a strange picture of the world created in the minds of many by these simple little touches...
...For such reports, however impressive, may be quite without value, especially if provided by the well-organized purveyors of a mil-lenarian ideology dedicated in principle to the idea that political advantage to their side is the highest moral criterion, taking automatic precedence over truth and such things...
...Every indication is that a..fully Communist world would be one of frightful conflicts...
...The minor scandals of Kenya-no more, perhaps, than the natural peripheral imperfections of an otherwise fairly sound economy-are subject to immediate scrutiny by the Western press...
...First, to attack China with the West intact would carry obvious strategic risks...
...This Communist view might be taken to heart by certain Westerners-especially the point that CIA mania usually proceeds from agents of the Soviiet clandestine services...
...Borba, the official Yugoslav Communist Party organ, commented at length (October 31, 1967) about an anti-CIA scare there: "Among all the information and stories circulating the country, especially recently, there are many which insist that many of our problems and difficulties are either inspired, or directly created by CIA's activity...
...Just as (in Kipling's words) there are more things told than are true, there are more things true than are told...
...Too objective...
...The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 did not lead to fighting either, because the Czechs did not resist...
...However, when the sources and objectives of this kind of 'confidential' information are studied more closely, and when we analyse them more thoroughly, it will not be difficult for us to find that the CIA obsession' is being spread and encouraged in pur country by the vestiges of the class enemy, by the reactionary, and especially, the bureaucratic and now powerless forces, which oppose both the reform, and the decisions of the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee as well as our development in general [that is to say, by the agents of the Soviet Union...
...Atrocity" is another powerful stimulus...
...Hit them hard...
...He was in fact severely censured by the Congress majority, with the Supreme Court's sanction, for breaching the Constitution...
...In a Communist world, where public opinion need no longer be taken into account, such a sanction would not apply...
...Among the delusions which pervade the political, media, and academic classes when it comes to foreign affairs are what can only be described as verbal automatisms: those shibboleths of liberal orthodoxy purveying falsehood as truth...
...As elsewhere, the relative accessibility of information has something to do with this delusion...
...As he was to tell Regis Debray later, he never had any intention of keeping this promise...
...For example, in January 1978 two rival Communist regimes issued the following statements, castigating not the wicked imperialists, but each other: "They have perpetrated utterly inhuman crimes-raping, tearing fetuses from mothers' wombs, disemboweling adults and burning children alive" (Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong...
...It is perfectly well known from which circles, from which sides they stem...
...It is easy enough to identify them and see their inteft-tions...
...Of course, in these cases the purpose is to arouse such a high level of moral indignation that no argument on the merits of the case is required...
...And on the Russian-Chinese border, a series of minor armed clashes led to a full-scale battle on the Ussuri in 1969...
...Then there is a myth which is perhaps the most cherished of all: that Alleride's was a "democratically elected" government...
...Another typical error of left-leaning well-wishers in the West is to imagine that'' corruption'' is particularly inherent in , the more "open," capitalistically inclined states of the Third World and that states with high moral pretensions, progressive ideologies, and charismatic leaders are comparatively immune...
...I have only scratched the surface of this vocabulary of vacuous-ness, "Monopoly Capitalism," for example, has gone uncelebrated here...
...The idea of the bomb's sinister implications is falsely put about and accepted because it is all somehow very capitalist, people's lives being readily expendable arid property sacrosanct...
...Yet the worst crimes are not due to greed...
...Arthur Koestler describes how Willy Muenzenberg (himself later to be killed by the NKVD) organized the Communist propaganda operation in the West in the 1930s, together with Otto Katz (also later executed) and Koestler himself...
...In 1956 the first inter-Communist war actually took place, in Hungary...
...And yet now we read in the Washington Post of Hanoi broadcasts, and even a special directive by the Communist Party's Central Committee Secretariat, talking of massive "embezzlement, bribery, unlawful practices," not only in the conquered South but in Hanoi, Haiphong, and the Red River area in the North as well, often under the protection of "ranking, influential officials...
...A government headed by the Hungarian Communist Party was overthrown by troops of the Soviet Communist Party...
...Usually Muenzenberg, the Comintern's genius of propaganda, was not content with falsifications as such...
...In 1944 a Soviet army comiiiander told.Milovan Djilas that "when Communism triumphed in the whole world, wars would then take on a final bitterness...
...The reason Stalin could not afford a long campaign was political-the existence of the West, of the "Capitalist*' world...
...Bribery and other forms of corruption are endemic to the Soviet Union...
...It is also true that for those areas in the grip of radical social or racial ideologies, such acts are not merely emergency measures directed against immediate and dangerous political enemies, but part of a vast scheme of oppression directed against whole strata of the population...
...Many of these, of a rather cerebral and complex variety, flourish among the foreign policy establishment, especially regarding the Soviet Union and the intentions and' motivations of its leaders...
...Yet the worst of these atrocities go unacknowledged...
...The election was thrown to the Congress, and the Christian Democrats only gave Allende their vote on receiving a guarantee that he would act constitutionally...
...and of their sole desire being equal influence in the world with the U.S., so that (presumably) they have strained their economy to the bursting point in order to have the world made up of alternate Communist and non-Communist countries...
...Because it has taken 30 years for the truth about the Stalin Terror to become generally accepted in the West, more recent regimes based on the same principles presumably can count on a similarly prolonged period of grace, so long as their denials are suitably phrased...
...People nowadays tend to form their opinions of a foreign state largely on the basis of the number of atrocities reported of it...
...Thus we have the kind of complicated double-talk now heard around Washington about the Russians feeling more secure if they have military superiority, and this being a good thing...
...More seriously, it is now evident that for several years thereafter the USSR was on the brink of a "preventive"- and nuclear-war with China...
...Nevertheless, a surprisingly large amount had gone for, among other things, Mercedes for the liberator's mistresses...
...It is of course a hoary tradition for propagandists to condemn weapons they don't have: One recalls the Allies' condemnation of German submarine warfare in the First World War...
...One can think of other weapons which kill people and do little harm to buildings-bullets, for instance...
...And of course corruption without totalitarian terror is not as bad as corruption with it...
...Though this idea was "strange" to Djilas then, he came to agree that "various sects would undertake the reckless destruction of the human race for the sake of its greater 'happiness.' " Indeed, within four or five years, the first inter-Communist war reached an advanced planning stage...
...Auschwitz was a nonprofit-making enterprise...
...There are many people in Southeast Asia who hoped that, whatever its faults, a Communist regime would at least mean peace of a sort, and who are now, after all, both Red and dead...
...Needless to say, this was not an independent initiative: The operational plan for the invasion had been prepared on Stalin's orders by General Shtemenko (later Chief of Staff of the Warsaw Pact...
...It appears that high officials are also making money for letting refugees out, at eight thousand dollars per family, and that corrupt bureaucrats succeed in having their accusers jailed instead of themselves...
...The fact that a fair amount of information is now available on the sufferings of the opposition in the USSR suggests that the present Soviet regime is perhaps less repressive than, say, that of North Korea...
...Hammer it into their heads...
...There follows a list of misdeeds-including arson, labor strikes,, subversion, and political schism-for which the CIA was allegedly responsible...
...Condemnation of the neutron bomb for "killing people without harming property" is quite pervasive...
...At the same time, Soviet troops moved on the Polish capital...
...True, much of it had been spent on useless investments like jet liners...
...Tito's signing of the Balkan Pact (in 1954), the military defense alliance with the anti-Communist states of Greece and Turkey, shows that he understood this point...
...It was not...
...Only when leading Soviet marshals concluded that such an invasion might lead to a protracted engagement along the lines of the disastrous Finnish war of 1939-1940 did Stalin abandon the plan...
...They thus wish to bring confusion arid distrust among the citizens and members of the League of Communists...
...But the Russians were clearly prepared to crush them if they had...
...He used to criticize Katz and Koestler: "He would pick up a few sheets of the typescript, scan through them, and shout at me: Too weak...
...There is a certain irony in reading these statements, however true, after the Vietnam war, with its outpouring of anti-American atrocity propaganda, much of which is now proved to have been invented in Hanoi and fed directly to Western "peace" activists...
...Third World countries are not necessarily as corrupt as Vietnam...
...At is not only on "atrocities" proper that hostile propaganda machinery is efficient...
...In the case of the neutron bomb, however, we simply have not conducted the kind of counteroffensive propaganda battle needed to establish the relevant ..truth...
...Not so...
...Make the world gasp with horror...
...Anti-Western demonology has made so much of the CIA that perhaps an analysis by a Belgrade newspaper will carry more weight than the mere presentation of obvious facts...
...Make them wake up.' " We can be reasonably sure today that many of the allegations fed to our press by totalitarian party machines are equally spurious, although when directed at one another it is difficult to say...
...So is its real purpose: to kill tank crews...
...For while the non-Communist states exist, they exercise a restraining influence...
...Tell the world how they run over their prisoners with tanks, how they pour petrol over them and burn them alive...
...A certain amount of corruption is no dsubt inevitable: The West is not exempt...
...There is, however, a whole set of simpler sillinesses, equally pernicious, and well worth talking about for a change, if only because they quite evidently help to form opinions among a fair proportion of the population...
...Hit them...
...The thirst for atrocities is, as always, satisfied by a large corps of pushers...
...The loser, in terms of Western opinion, is not the state that commits the most atrocities so much as the one whose enemies have the best propaganda machine...
...In fact, totalitarian regimes are particularly prone toward corruption since they have no principle of regulating, right out in the open, the economic forces, but prefer suppression in favor of an impossible, and as far as it does go inefficient, administrative solution...
...This is even true within the Communist bloc...
...of the best sort of "containment" being to allow them to take over countries here and there which may well give them trouble...
...When Koestler was captured by the Nationalists in Spain, Katz devised fictitious stories about his ill-treatment in prison, thereby arousing a great campaign to secure his release, supported by Conservative M.P.'s in Britain and others...
...And all without having to think-what a relief in these difficult days...
...Here, a compromise was reached only because of the clear determination of the Poles, with an army much larger than that of Hungary, to fight even if it produced a European war...
...The British fellow traveller, Konni Zilliacus, tells us in his memoirs, on the authority of the Stalinist Czech Vice-Premier Fierlinger, that by 1948 the Hungarian dictator Rakosi was ready to invade Yugoslavia...
...Similarly, it was a common notion among liberal circles in the United States that the Communists in Hanoi-unlike the various regimes in Saigon-were free of corruption...
...For want of effective rebuttal, a host of other sloganeering simplicities abound...
...Take "better-Red-than-dead," the argument that surrendering to Communism at least means peace...
...For, in general, the more easily a malpractice can be re ported, the less repressive is the regime...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
