Alternatives to the H-Bomb

...A positive plan for progressive self-government is necessary...

...Since we are in no position to deal with Mao's strong government by war, without paying a prohibitive price, we must coexist with it and hence negotiate with it...

...Granting that such disarmament is not immediately attainable, our crusade for it would enormously strengthen our position in a skeptical world, and hence our security...

...No nation today can start what we would call preventive (and the Communists aggressive) war without turning it into World War III...

...World government in the immediate future is neither possible nor desirable except to the degree that nations may set it up out of an overpowering desire for effective supervision of agreements on disarmament...

...Even the discontented under Communist rule don't want "liberation" at the cost of atomic ruin...

...It is not the utterly miserable who make revolutions...

...We Americans tend to be great moralists...

...of course, an illusion that all that is necessary in the fight against Communism is an adequate economic plan for industrially backward regions...

...Recognition—which is not an accolade to virtue...

...But even that is a risk not to be undertaken without careful consideration of all factors and without the moral backing of the non-Communist world...

...Universal disarmament requires a strengthened UN which may be the root of the World government which Lewis Mumford—and I as well—would desire...

...It by no means follows from today's intransigence that disarmament, simply on the basis of mankind's will to survive, will be unattainable in the next generation...

...Nevertheless, discontent can greatly weaken a dictatorship short of full-scale revolt in the heartland...

...The moral backing of those sections of the free world which will not or cannot do much militarily is important, too...

...It is equally unrealistic to believe that we can save the world by preventive war or the threat of it...

...You do not solve the problems of Africa, for instance, simply by denouncing colonialism...

...I am in the unpopular American minority which believes that we have done positive harm to the cause of successfully combating Communism without war by our never-never attitude toward the recognition of Communist China...

...We have more chance of influencing more Russians if their dictators cannot, with considerable justice, hold us Americans up as warmongers who threaten genocide of the people under Communist rule—whose friends we claim to be—by the use of the H-bomb and other instruments of mass destruction...

...Our long-range hope must lie either in the overthrow of Communist regimes from within or in their profound modification by evolution...

...Yet, in 1648 the Treaty of Westphalia—not in itself a good answer to Europe's problems—did mark an end of religious wars...

...You do not deal with the poverty of Asia, Latin America or Africa by boasting of the wealth of the United States, advising other people to copy it, and then giving them meager handouts of money and technical assistance...

...Mumford that the immediate postwar years could have been used to advance a high degree of world government...

...Therefore, we will have nothing to do with those who have any dealings with Communists, and by our intransigence we threaten any workable alliance...

...In the satellite countries, it flared out into open and spontaneous revolts a year ago—revolts which the West could not or would not use to its advantage...

...hence their attitude toward effective disarmament...

...might well be a price which would help end aggressive war in Asia...

...Neither can we win freedom for mankind by war...

...As far back as 1951, Moshe Pijade told me in Belgrade that the Yugoslavs' hope of escape from Stalin's power lay in the fact that he would want to use, not Russians, but the soldiers of the satellite states, whose loyalty he could not trust should they meet with even one or two decisive reverses at the hands of the Yugoslavs...

...Their main tactic has been the tactic of dividing the Western world and exploiting Asian hatred of the imperialism of which the nations we call democratic were long such successful practitioners...

...A factor which sorely impedes the American search for a substitute for war or appeasement is, on one hand, the widespread misunderstanding of Communism and, on the other, our lack of crusading zeal for democracy...

...But the basis of those treaties can only be mutual interest—in survival, let us say, or the possibility of conflict without war...

...I choose as my text his statement: "In terms of the 'possible,' we have only two courses open: suicide by appeasement or suicide by 'war.'" I accept this statement in terms of Mr...

...Among the future contributors are W. Averell Harriman, Senator John F. Kennedy, Chester Bowles, Denis Healey (MP), Reinhold Niebuhr, Edward Crankshaw, James Burnham and Salvador de Madariaga...

...Admitting all that Mr...

...It is one thing to make it plain that we Americans would stand and fight rather than submit to Communist imperialism...

...He is the author of A Socialist's Faith as well as The Test of Freedom, which was published last spring by the Norton Company...

...Our immediate hope of escaping World War III lies largely in convincing the Communist leaders that the risk of war in this terrible age of atom and hydrogen bombs is greater than the possible gain...

...But Mr...

...In Europe, I have some hopes for what MendesFrance may do, but I doubt whether we will get an EDC and European Army that will be an adequate solution to the European problem...

...For years, I have argued that its economy is far more accurately described as state capitalism than as socialism...

...Neither Stalin nor his successors belong to the category of swashbucklers who do not count the costs of their action...

...A great many liberals and conservatives join McCarthyists in seeing in Communism, as practiced in Russia, the natural and inevitable result of a collectivist economy undertaken, at least nominally, in the interests of the masses...

...The fulminations of Congressmen are doing us incalculable harm in escaping suicide by war or appeasement...

...The problems of human relations are not so simple that they can be absolutely controlled by moralistic, or allegedly moralistic, hatred...

...But first let me insist that there cannot be permanent peace in the world, given the universal triumph of Communism through appeasement...

...This is no easy formula to apply...

...We must look for better alternatives...

...It is...

...World war will be atomic war...

...Without external pressure to hold together the Communist hierarchs, the struggle for power so grimly evident today in Russia and other Communist countries would soon soak the earth in blood...

...Neither man nor democracy can live by bread alone...

...In the light of history, it is entirely conceivable that a secular religion like Communism may be greatly changed by the march of time and events...

...But it also requires understanding of the meaning and value of freedom...

...The best economic plan would be one administered through the UN, because the UN can be made to embody the idea of cooperation, as distinct from patronage...

...Mumford is a thousand times right in insisting that Leninist-Stalinist Communism long ago acquired a political nature which justified Silone in calling it "Red fascism...

...But we will not get far with any economic plan without an abatement of immediate political tensions...

...Their success in that tactic probably makes them disinclined to risk war...

...Successful revolt is difficult almost to the point of impossibility inside the heartland of the Soviet Union so long as the regime can maintain effective monopolistic control of agencies of communication, and of vital cadres in the military and the police...

...Recognition under certain conditions would not be a matter of suicidal appeasement...

...It's high time that "agonizing reappraisal" should begin...

...Eisenhower and Churchill, in their final statement at Washington, kept faith in this idea alive...

...We Americans are neither omnipotent nor omniscient...

...We hate Communism, although not always for the right reasons...

...There is no basis today for mutual confidence, even to the limited degree in which it has ever existed between nations...

...It would also serve here at home as a corrective of the anti-democratic tendencies inherent in every arms race...

...The Soviet dictators believe the opposite...

...Obviously, a great part of our hope for an alternative to suicide by appeasement or war lies in the development of a propaganda for democracy by word and deed which somehow or other can penetrate even an Iron Curtain and add strength to the forces of change which can never be completely crushed, even by the Kremlin...

...This is the third article in the New Leader symposium on "Alternatives to the H-Bomb," which was launched in our June 28 issue by Lewis Mumford and continued last week by Hans Kohn...

...We especially commend his contribution to Socialists in Europe and Asia...

...We will have to be more successful in showing what Communism really means to people under its yoke...

...We will have to be far more successful in proving that, under non-Communist regimes, peoples can achieve national independence and make progress in a cooperative world in raising their living standards...

...Stalin himself, who was less shrewd than Molotov or Chou En-lai, took great pains to fool Asians and, to a lesser extent, Europeans into the belief that he was a friend of peace and we its foes...

...Mumford's use of the word "possible" and join him in the search for alternatives...

...Eisenhower and Dulles, who from time to time have said and done some excellent things, have spoiled the effect of their virtue by talk, unmatched by action, about "unleashing Chiang Kai-shek" and a "new look" in military policy dependent largely on our capacity for "i??tant and massive retaliation...

...So it was with crusading Islam...

...And that is the suicide of civilization if not of the human race...

...The principal hope of the world is the achievement of universal controlled disarmament as the first great step toward peace with freedom...

...There might be political justification for saying, under some circumstances, "Cross this line and we'll fight...

...This process requires a rebirth of mutual confidence among nations which have been more or less united in the struggle against Communism...

...If it is, whatever else may have been done, I should expect the arms race and its accompanying hates and fears to result in World War III...

...It becomes, then, absolutely essential for us to carry on an infinitely better ideological campaig against Communism and for democracy than we have heretofore undertaken...

...That is vitally important, but one must always remember that the first effect of more food to the oppressed and the discontented is to give them energy to demand still better conditions...

...One of the disquieting things about our country is the growth of a belief that, in a world without war or the threat of war, Communism would defeat democracy...

...He would have been a bold optimist who in 1647 would predict that the Catholic and Protestant churches, without formal change in their theology, could stop fighting over possession of the road to heaven...

...An alternative to war or suicide requires a cooperative plan for improving agriculture, developing industrialization and inducing voluntary birth control...

...It is the tragic truth that the inherent nature of Communist ethics concerning the positive duty of the movement and its members to do whatever is necessary to win universal power makes it impossible to seek an alternative to suicide by appeasement or by war merely through national treaties and a kind of lasting division of the world into rival camps...

...It is another and indefensible thing to talk of beginning a preventive war...

...The nation that threatens large-scale war, preventive or otherwise, will consolidate the moral opinion of mankind against it...

...I am thoroughly persuaded that we fight Communism better with Russia in the UN than out of it, and the same might be true of Communist China, especially given our allies' attitude toward her and the fact that there are latent differences between Peking and Moscow which might be better exploited if Russia were not China's only spokesman and defender in the UN...

...It lies, therefore, not only in our own military strength, but in the degree to which we have the backing of the non-Communist world...

...Norman Thomas (cut at left) was six times the Socialist candidate for President of the United States and has had the satisfaction of seeing many of his original platform planks become the law of the land...

...So it was with the Christian sects...

...Mumford says about the H-bomb, it is completely unrealistic to believe that the nations will honestly and effectively ban atomic weapons and keep up a conventional-arms race in which the Communist nations already have such an advantage in manpower...

...There must be treaties of some sort with Communist nations if we do not choose war...

...All these very difficult and immediate problems could be better handled if we were really crusading for universal disarmament, down to a police level, under proper controls...

...It is true that Communism as a secular religion still has an appeal to the masses as promising earthly salvation through economic channels...

...But, given the nature of Communism and Roosevelt's mistaken appeasement of Stalin which so greatly strengthened the Communist position, I do not agree with Mr...

...We cannot make over our allies, to say nothing of the neutrals, by fiat...

...Peoples on the way up must be given a vision of a better life that includes meat and raiment but also offers more than these necessities if we are to resist the purely materialist appeal of a crusading Communism...

...The fact that the British were too precipitate in recognizing Mao, or that we ourselves made mistakes at an earlier date in dealing with the Chinese Communists, does not justify our present attitude...