ART WITHOUT VISA

...Burnham's chief prescription for going on the offensive, could be effectively carried on by the Departments of Commerce and Labor...

...Burnham seems to feel that anyone who is against Communism, including, for example, the French fat cats who sedulously Ivoid paying income taxes and who chiefly subiize the De Gaullist movement, must be a useI'Ul ally...

...and so that (to quote the brilliant State Department planner George Kennan) our allies will be given a "sense of military security," thus toughening their "fiber of political resistance...

...Political-subversive warfare" can only be part of a greater whole...

...He argues further that if we exploit this vulnerability with determination, the Soviet power can actually bo destroyed, and wUhin a limited period ol time...

...STEWART ALSOP and his brother Joeeph sre among Amerlca'a moot influential newsmen...

...It was on a recent trip through Asia that the present writer began, like Mr...

...BURNHAM PROPOSES is simple—perhaps too simple...

...the promotion and support of internal resistance within the Soviet sphere—to weaken the structure of Soviet power, just as the Kremlin has used similar means to Weaken the structure of Western power...

...This is the point which Mr...

...and will in the end be lost, by those who remain permanently on the defensive...

...and less visibly and dramatically, all around the Soviet periphery and in the Western hemisphere...

...Their column appeara In the New York Hin-old Trlhunt and 134 other from coast to coast, with a combined circulation of millions...

...Burnham argues and such phenomena as Tltelsm and the VlaasoT army ttroagly support his thesis—that the Soviet structure of power is eseentlally vulnerable...

...The three thousand men in Malaya have their counterparts in China (where they have already won...

...On orders from the Kremlin, a few thousand Communists have taken to the Malayan jungles...

...Burnham has said bluntly and clearly certain things which have previously been said weakly or obscurely or not at all...

...This effort has cost the British the equivalent of several hundreds of millions of dollars...

...He argues that we must use every means, open and covert—a massive propaganda attack...

...Yet a single man can do the job, in peace as well as in war, with a couple of pounds of plastic explosive and a percussion cap as simple as a child's toy...

...The man with the plastic explosive is a chief instrument of Soviet expansion—whether he takes the form of a guerrilla in Indo-China, or an agent throwing acid bombs in the streets of New Delhi, or a Marseilles dock worker, or a scientist in the British atomic energy project, or a Communist leader of an American labor union...

...The non-Comniunist world has been consistently on the defenaive...

...Unlike the planners in the Kremlin (who are now engaged in a rearmament effort greater than Hitler's) he therefore lays little emphasis on conventional military power as a component in going over to the offensive in the cold war...

...e » FOR MR...

...For another, he leaves the impression that the Western effort to "win the cold war" must be concentrated almost exclusively on "political-subversive warfare...

...We must also meet the challenge of Soviet rearmament, so that Western military power can act as a permanent deterrent to Soviet aggression...

...And in pointing out, with great force and clarity, that the Kremlin's monopoly on "politicalnsubversive warfare" must be broken, Mr...

...a conscious effort to weaken and destroy the Communist hold on the world labor movement...

...And he lays even less emphasis on the effort to place the non-Communist world on a sound economic and poltical footing...

...To do this will mean a very great strain on American resources...

...Indeed, it must be said at the outset that there are some things in this often brilliant book which seem doctrinaire, or inaccurate...

...he collaborated with Thomaa Braden on Sub Rom: The OSS and Amtrtemn Eaplonoo...

...Yet consider what the guerrilla war ordered by the Kremlin has accomplished...

...Kmvimwd by SriWAAT ALSOP JAMES BURNHAM'S The Coming Defeat o/ Communism is an immensely valuable book...

...Conventional war-lime methods require a huge investment in bombers to knock out a single railway train...

...Malaya makes a convenient example...

...For almost everywhere in Asia, the Soviet-Communist power is on the offensive —with guns...

...Tins is not to say that Mr...

...These men, almost all of Chinese descent, are ill-armed, frequently cowardly, and by common consent, incompetent...

...Burnham is a brilliant polemicist, and like all polemicists (and most disillusioned Marxists) he tends to overstate his case...

...Burnham, to doubt that a defensive polk:y of containment couU suffice...

...The mental picture evoked of the timid bureaucrats of these departments subsidizing agents or arranging the assassination of inconvenient Communist labor leaders is wonderfully laughable...

...In IMS...

...The British have been forced to arm, put into the field, and supply some 90,000 British and' Malayan troops, a ratio of about thirty to one...

...WHAT MR...

...Moreover, Mr...

...Its chief vajue lies simply in the fact that Mr...

...This has been accomplished, moreover, despite the fact that the great majority of the native' Malays are active British allies...

...the active employaient in the offensive of the exiles and escapees from the Soviet sphere...

...And Vrars cannot be won...

...far more is required if the Kremlin is to be confronted with the kind of power situation which will lead to a reversal of Soviet policy...

...And although the guerrilla effort promotes the vital interests of the Kremlin, it has been undertaken wholly without any dangerous commitment by the Kremlin, and thus wholly without risk to the Kremlin...

...YET ALTHOUGH it is possible to quarrel with Mr...

...And we must strain our resources even further, by making a determined effort, perhaps lasting for a generation, to maintain the nonCommunist world on a functioning economic basis...

...we cannot win the cold war with agents, or guerrillas, or propaganda, or clandestine methods, alone...

...The most important thing he has to say boils down to this: Th« Soviet Union has been carrying on a determined offensive by every means, including armed force, since before the war ended...

...For one thing he tends to under-emphasize the fact that in the world Communist movement the Kremlin already has a disciplined army dedicated to the one end of "politkal-subvsrsive warfare," while we have no such army...

...Yet such methods can help greatly to bring about this situation...

...in Greece (where they have at least been defeated at a cost to the United States alone of more than $5,000 per man...

...Burnham renders a major service...

...The nationalist movement in Indonesia, for example, far from being Communist, has in fact stood the chief emissaries from Moscow up against a wall and shot them—hardly an act j^jkulated to endear the Indonesian leaders to TOe Kremlin...

...in India and the Middle East...

...Consider one more example of the extraordinary cheapness and effectiveness of the monopoly which the Kremlin now enjoys...

...He proposes that the Western world,, led by the United States, go over to the offensive by using the same sort of rrtethods which the Kremlin has so massively employed...

...It does not seem likely to this writer that the Soviet structure of power can actually be destroyed if the Western confederation is limited to similar methods in a counter-offensive against the Kremlin...

...As long as the Kremlin has a virtual monopoly of such instruments of power as the Communist guerrillas in the Malayan jungle, the Kremlin's world will have an immense, an ultimately unchallengeable advantage over the non-Communist world...

...Again, one finds such suggestions as that "political-subversive warfare," Mr...

...in Indo-China and Burma (where they are winning...

...The alakes in tha cold war are the highest in history...

...The Coming Defeat of Communism remains an immensely .valuable book...

...Yet, such carping aside...

...There are probably less than three thousand of them left alive...

...Burnham's emphasis and with some of his facts and conclusions, there can be no quarrel with his basic thesis...

...BURNHAM points out clearly •«omething which has never been thoroughly rasped in this still-prosperous, still-complacent .-«flhtry — the real nature of the offensive weapons which the Soviet Union commands, and the extraordinary advantage which the Soviet monopoly of these weapons gives to the Soviet power...

...More important, the guerillas, incompetent though they may be, have interfered sufficiently with the production of dollar-earning tin and rubber actually to imperil the economy of the sterling area and the recovery of Britain as a great power...

...Stewart Alsop himself has long been an expert on subversive warfare...

...Burnham hammers home in his oddly titled book...

...Burnham's prescription for going on the offensive is beyond criticism...