Disciplined Zealots:

...For the West there are only the two alternatives of "victory or defeat...

...Meyer seeks to generalize his own experience and to formulate the general principles that govern Communist indoctrination...

...The premise which leads Frank Meyer, an editor of the National Review, to this conclusion is that the essential fact about the Communist movement is the Communist man—the cadre organization man, the hard-core professional revolutionary...

...While this is an extremely useful lesson for people who still think of Communists merely as occupying the most extreme position in a continuous political spectrum, it is not the whole truth...

...The comparative examination of motivation patterns in hard-core Communists from different cultures and time periods—early Soviet Bolsheviks, contemporary European, American or Asian party activists—remains to be done...

...As a means of conveying to an outsider what it feels like to be moulded into a Communist cadre man, Meyer's impersonal, rather abstract writing is less effective than the first person narrative used by Arthur Koestler or by Wolfgang Leonhard in his absorbing Child of the Revolution...

...One mark of its success, he argues, is that so few thoroughly seasoned Communists have ever quit the movement...

...Reviewed by Colette Blackmoore Former member of UPI's Moscow Bureau, now a free-lance writer If the reader accepts the premise of this book, then he cannot escape its conclusion: that in dealing with Communism "there is no recourse in compromise, reasonableness [or] peaceful coexistence...

...Although the book, one in the Clinton Rossiter series on Communism in American Life, does not add much that is new to the literature of this field, it is a useful reminder that at the heart of the Communist movement there is a nucleus of disciplined zealots who must be understood on their own terms...

...Meyer convincingly describes how the Communist training process, with its intense, artificially created pressures, is designed to remake the human personality into a new image —an experience which seems almost incredible for those who have not, like Meyer, undergone it...

...Finally, a word about the style of the book...

...Thus, the alternatives for Western policy are not as starkly simple as Meyer implies...

...In this he is only moderately successful, for the book does not gain enough in broad social insights to be worth its loss in vividness and direct evidence...

...How this man becomes profoundly different from other men is the theme of the book...

...He asserts that in the moulding of a Communist, background factors of nation, culture and time are relatively unimportant: "A common secular and messianic quasi-religion inspires the Communist everywhere and from the beginning of the Communist movement till this day...

...Two principal qualifications come to mind at the outset...

...Its strength, however, depends upon the ability to move other and larger groups with different formations: the party rank-and-file, the non-party collaborators and the neutralists, pacifists, nationalists and other mass elements whose motivations are entirely different from the professional revolutionary...

...Granted the fanatic, determined, unlimited ambition of the cadre...

...This is by no means self-evident, and is not convincingly demonstrated...

...Like so many politically satisfying simplifications about the Communists, Meyer's premise needs to be set into a larger, more complex and more balanced setting if it is to serve as a reliable guide to action...

...First, Meyer claims to be portraying a universal Communist cadre type...

...The mass base on which the Communists depend for their strength is made up of people who have not been subjected to what Meyer calls Communist "psychosurgery...

...The cadres may be beyond persuasion, but it lies within the capacity of Western policy to influence the environment in which they operate...

...Second, there is much to understand about the Communist movement besides its hard-core cadre personality type...