Alternatives to the H-Bomb

...The East-West culture division has become the context within which treason and heresy have been confused...

...For this program, however, the baggage of religious warfare would have to be dropped and the Russians treated as something less than transcendental offenders...

...Nor will the Western secular religion of civil liberty be able to serve the required revolutionary purpose...

...In a purely technological sense, the American nation is unprepared for preventive war precisely because of the H-bomb...

...As a consequence, an apathetic public opinion?apathetic in the sense that it is ready to accept the most extreme solutions—drives policy into corners out of which it will have no choice except to fight...

...Whole sets of nations are having their periods of self-determination squeezed tight between Western retreat and Communist occupation...

...He has contributed articles on social and literary questions to numerous scholarly periodicals, as well as such magazines as Partisan Review and Commentary...

...Thus, the cold war might grow a little colder, and the chances of drifting into peace might be increased...

...Aroused conscience" through "increased appetite in the Soviet world should be our aim," said Johnston, decrying the way cold-war pressure has turned the people of this country into "the world's foremost worry warts...

...But the colonial revolutions are neither liberal nor really nationalist...

...But it is also unquestionable that the revolution of our time is being conducted from above nations—and even from above classes—by a centrally-directed party system...

...In larger terms, the middle of the twentieth century is of a piece with all the centuries since the thirteenth, when the centrifugal forces at the breakup of the Roman empire ceased to be dominant...

...It is the liberal nationalist psychology, extending from Bentham through Woodrow Wilson and even into the mind of Mr...

...American cities are at least as vulnerable as the Russian...

...This is the Utopia into which the newly-arrived of the modern world seek to enter...

...American policy needs to be systematically unhitched from the last petty princeling, from the last defeated generalissimo, from exhausted and quarrelsome ruling cliques, from the political muftis who are farther in retreat before a radically secular intelligentsia than Washington realizes...

...Restlessness and phobic tensions, reactions to the vast changes in American political and cultural life, are dangerously high...

...J. Robert Oppenheimer lost in such a sinister and humiliating way: If an almost airtight continental defense system is not possible, then American striking power can only become more and more futile as a basis for negotiating with the Soviets...

...Civil-defense officials are figuring on 13 million casualties from those Russian planes that are bound to get through, and, despite the silence of the mass media, the American public will soon realize that it will take every bit as much as the Strategic Air Command dishes out...

...That the nationalist idea still has great power is unquestionable...

...Vietnam has been amputated, and the other Indo-Chinese states are unlikely to survive...

...Indeed, the crudity and vigor of this religion is clear not only in capitalist but in Marxist culture, where it is the ideal toward which Russian society officially strives...

...it has shifted to another and grosser dimension?space...

...It may be a crude vision, even slightly orgiastic, but it is what the impoverished and deprived rightly want...

...But the defeat which we would incur by employing the H-bomb is, if anything, far greater...

...On the contrary, they are peasant movements disciplined by cadres of intellectuals and trained by a great world power...

...It is foolish to treat our relations with Soviet Russia as a repetition of those with Germany and Italy...

...ALTERNATIVES TO THE H-BOMB World Revolution from Above By Philip Rieff Even if a decision against it had not been reached some time ago, the time for a preventive war (putting aside all moral objections to it) is practically over...

...A peaceful alternative within any secular framework cannot be developed so long as the enemy is treated as criminal, as outside the human community...

...Let us face the fact that we have nothing spiritual to offer except the neutralist-making ideal of the American nation and its unique and favorable destiny...

...This centripetal tendency has issued at this juncture in a world responsibility which the...

...Dulles cannot talk with Molotov or the Chinese without fear of being branded an appeaser or stupid, for the American sense of the guilefulness of our Oriental enemy has increased steadily and the last Soviet diplomat whose accents the West thought it understood was Maxim Litvinov...

...American nation has not yet learned to fully accept even in the familiar parts of Europe, to say nothing of the unpronounceable parts of Asia...

...This favored both decentralized and traditional hierarchical types of political institutions—of the sort which the United States is still unhappily defending...

...Neither the Asian nor the Western masses hunger after spiritual arms...

...But the struggle now is not, as it was in the nineteenth century, for historic legitimacy...

...To begin on such a road means a more imaginative extension of the Marshall Plan, of Point Four, of Bretton Woods, a freer exchange of intellectuals between the less advanced nations, where they are most important, and advanced nations like America, where the importance of the intellectual is almost officially resented...

...this fatherland ideal is the weakest part of Soviet appeals and we must not try to ape it...

...American policy-makers will again have to face the crucial argument which Dr...

...For the only alternative to the H-bomb is to abandon the policy of supporting the decentralized and ossified hierarchical structures of the lands over which contention still rages?and to adopt a policy of a centripetal character...

...Unless American policy realizes the necessity of recruiting and supporting a technical and administrative intelligentsia, with the aim of industrializing agrarian economies and secularizing antique cultures, it cannot carry out its natural revolutionary relation to the Eastern world...

...But, if the reactionary alternative is too low to maintain peace, the liberal counterpart is too high...

...America has the capacity not only to fulfil but to create desire...

...Eastern religion does not seriously attract the articulate leading classes any more than do the corresponding religions in the West...

...One cannot simply lump together Communist and fascist regimes, and the fact that Soviet Russia is a totalitarian state is no reason for treating past errors (i.e., appeasement) as negative truths by which to organize present strategy (i.e., immediate retaliation, prefaced by no talk except tough...

...With the world falsely divided into an Eastern revolutionary one and a Western liberal one, the Russians as an Oriental power have managed to take over the rising national sentiments of the peasant peoples of Asia, while the West inches forward with the established, rotting shadow governments...

...Thus, the H-bomb is still being proposed, not out of arrogance or overweening confidence in pure power but as something with which to write a period to the present defeats of American foreign policy...

...It is paradoxical that, as preventive war becomes an obsolete idea, the belief grows that only unconditional surrender or internal revolution can really save the peace...

...It is not simply the natural reluctance of American strategists to have their own cities bombed that tabled (we hope permanently) the proposals for a preventive war, but also the nightmare certainty of Russian power in the allied capitals...

...Sooner or later, the same objections will paralyze the policy of retaliation, which is already in question...

...Panic an irreligious and politically innocent people with a call to political religion and you get an anti-politics, a situation compounded of apathy and conformity that makes compromise and diplomatic flexibility more and more difficult...

...Only an honest declaration of ends more immediate than faith would blow up a wind at least equal to the Kremlin's...

...Other contributors thus far have been Hans Kohn, Norman Thomas, Denis Healey, Chester Bowles, Reinhold Niebuhr, William I. Nichols, Salvador de Madariaga, Eric Hoffer and James Burnham...

...The alternative to the Communist revolution from above is another sort of revolution from above, controlled by native cadres representing the revolutionary aims of Washington and London...

...Since it is from Moscow that the permanent revolution in the peasant cultures of the world is now being led, the alternative, aside from the H-bomb, can only be a world system of welfare states, modestly supervised from Washington and London...

...America lacks an official mystique comparable to the Russian one...

...Dulles, which depends upon the idea that the pursuit by each nation of its self-determination is compatible with peace—indeed, that this pursuit is the basis of any peaceful world order...

...America does not yet play its properly revolutionary role in the world...

...Imperialist nations have a long history of responsibility and find this aspect less frightful, but the anti-imperialist mind of America finds this responsibility that comes with power very difficult...

...Drilled into the American mind now is the futility of any idea of a modus vivendi with the Soviets...

...Against Russia, the one great principle America has to offer, and around which it can organize devoted cadres, is the pleasure-principle—a plenitude within which the freedom of choice can range as far as the inner eye can see...

...The breakup of the British Empire has left no such centrifugal possibility, as it turns out, for we and the Russians have stepped into the vacuum as a centripetal force...

...The messianic tactic, no matter how moderately conceived, will not win us the required converts...

...In a fantasy version of the West at bay, discipline becomes divisive paranoia at home, and the security drive to protect the precious freedoms of our country and our culture stifles the American capacity for discussion and review...

...Thus, our failure is not primarily strategic but theoretical, involving the most cherished preconceptions of American politics...

...In the majority of cases, less spiritualized than Mr...

...It is substantially the point made with superb comic wit by David Riesman in his famous essay, "The Nylon War...

...But, in the first two years of the Eisenhower Administration, power has been less and less linked to responsibility, the domestic intelligentsia has been fired from Government, and the foreign intelligentsia—which will continue to direct the post-Marxist revolutions—proclaims its hostility even after being brought here for a year to learn to love us...

...By massive governmental investment and rational administration, America can help create that ultimate good of the modern world into which the peasant and colored masses want to break—the world of goods...

...Revolution from above ought not to be confused with the policy, still established in the most important quarters of American Government and opinion, of counter-revolution from above...

...Russian strength increases, and our defense against atom-carrying flotillas continues to depend mainly on interceptor planes and somewhat outdated anti-aircraft batteries...

...This is the eleventh article in the series launched by Lewis Mumford in our June 28 issue...

...United States policy needs to act on this fact and develop that modest imperial capacity by which mighty nations preserve themselves a while...

...The present political division of the world into East and West, insofar as it has also become a mental and moral division, can never lead to peace...

...To search, in a liberal spirit, for a greater democratic faith with which to meet the secular religious tide rolling out of the mysterious East is equally futile if less immediately dangerous...

...The really modern religion has its mundane paradise: a centralized state, administered by a rational and just bureaucracy...

...The incorporation of the scientific and intellectual communities into the political-party orbit is a dreadful sign of the fragmentation affecting that group in modern society which ought to carry distinctively international aspirations...

...Among these preconceptions supporting United States policy, none has become flimsier than that of underwriting any and all national sovereignties...

...The alternative to H-bombing needs not only more strategic sobriety but also less ideological bluff...

...What makes the Communist-led nationalist revolutions different from previous nationalisms is that the old political apparatus tended to emphasize time: certain legitimizing connections with the past...

...But in a world, including the Communist, in which the fetishism of commodities is the highest and lowest religion, America has a distinct ideological advantage...

...A conscious Ecole Polytechnique sort of training program, aiming to create technicians and administrators, might provide the basis for parties to carry out the Washington line, as against those parties carrying out the Moscow line...

...Chambers's, the results have been more than frightening...

...It is by elaborating its superior sense of well-being, more than by any exportable faith and/or freedom, that America can achieve a propaganda that is neither hypocritical nor ineffective...

...They have not been conducted over a long period of time by middle classes seeking to free themselves from arbitrary decisions by a central authority...

...I agree with Eric Johnston's fine subversive advice offered recently (June 10) in an address to the fortieth convention of the National Association of Direct Selling Companies in New York, urging a campaign to force Russia to raise her living standard at the expense of her war potential...

...There is no need for our educated classes to embarrass themselves advertising "Western civilization" to balance the Marxist capture of words like "people...

...This we might call, in honor of one of its more celebrated exponents, the Whittaker Chambers hypothesis—although in this case the Rome is still inward, the totalitarian apparatus still in the realm of spirit and abstraction...

...Theory—when it is so powerful as to be taken for granted—does indeed organize practice, and American practical politics marches on preconceptions held over from another, milder age...

...The furor of faith drummed up to support quite uncertain policies has trapped and rigidified these policies...

...American industry and our skilled populations would need years to disperse in anything like the degree necessary to meet hydrogen warfare, and such a directed reorganization of industry and social classes is even less likely under a Republican administration than before...

...Few in America can yet conceive of carrying through the bombing of Paris, Frankfurt, Brussels and the other great cities of the West after Russian occupation...

...That movement is unalterably toward the centralization of power...

...As a solution for the steady failure of American diplomacy, the H-bomb grows less effective with each passing day...

...Too suddenly sophisticated by the revelation of Soviet Communism as a secular religion—a sort of Mohammedanism without manners—America is experiencing pressures to develop a faith of her own which have proved extremely dangerous...

...But international aspirations may rest as well on a superior sense of well-being as on a messianic doctrine...

...The 1933-45 period is not a complete guide to the 1950s...

...To institute this sort of policy correctly, the American Government needs to recognize that democracy—in the patient sense in which we use the word cannot operate to check the revolutionary movement all over the world...

...The practical identity between the doctrine of preventive war and that of "instant massive retaliation" is next to be realized...

...But, as a result of the sporting American belief that the only good defense is a good offense, this country is weaker now than at any time in the history of the cold war...

...In our national anxiety to find a spiritual armory against the "third Rome," the language of religious warfare has been revived, "crusades" suggested, the second Rome treated as an archive of political ideologies out of which (with certain modifications) one can be fished for present use...

...With this inherited doctrine, American policy at its best tries to appear as the liberal nationalist champion against the "imperialism" of the Communist movement directed from Moscow...

...Space means centralization and systems of government radically different in their hierarchical character...

...Philip Rieff is a member of the Department of Social Relations at Brandeis University...

...In its basest version, this mood of the defense of Western culture is the one which Senator McCarthy has expressed for the relatively uncultured in America...