Escape from Reality:

...He is misrepresenting himself as well as those who disagree with him...

...Even one life lost in a needless struggle is one too many...

...This is the precise opposite of Fromm's contentions...

...A humanism worthy of man must above all be intelligent about questions of politics and morals...

...Nuclear weapons may never be used in war...

...This was the crucial point of my article...

...But it should put us on guard against easy prophecy...

...Although contemptuous of the theoretical principles of pacifism, he is pinning great hopes on it and on the prospect that the movement for unilateral disarmament will spread...

...Serious political debate cannot be conducted on the assumption that difference with one's position is ipso facto evidence either of treason or of insanity...

...But there is a profound difference between healthy, intelligent fear and hysterical fear...

...It is like asking a man how many of his children he is prepared to turn over to a sadist to be tortured in order to save the rest of his family...

...I find extremely disingenuous his present attempt to hide behind the program of multilateral controlled disarmament —which is my own position...

...Then he supplies his own answers, including the preposterous notion that we need have no fear of atomic devastation...

...This is not decisive, of course, because the Communists are far more intelligent than the fascists were and therefore Communism is an even more dangerous enemy of the free world than was fascism...

...And if we possessed nuclear weapons capable of deterring Hitler would Fromm have urged unilateral disarmament...

...And when I say that this hysteria is absent in the Soviet Union, I do not mean that the Russian people and the Soviet regime are unafraid of nuclear war...

...Strictly speaking, hysteria is a state of overemotional reaction whose physical consequences render the subject impotent to face problems that may objectively be quite fearful...

...When he writes about questions of disarmament, however, he explores the threats to freedom only as a consequence of our policy of defense...

...It should impel us to use all the arts of creative intelligence to avoid the narrow alternative of surrender to Communism or nuclear war, to which the pacifist programs of Fromm and his friends tend to limit us...

...H. Stuart Hughes, who holds a position similar to Fromm's, has straightforwardly acknowledged his indebtedness to Kahn without impugning either his humanity or sanity...

...Indeed, it was the fear of much smaller losses which fed the fires of appeasement and pacifism and which enabled Hitler to march from one triumph to another until he no longer believed that the West would attempt to stop him...

...If Hitler had possessed nuclear weapons would Fromm have urged surrender to fascism...

...I do not like the kind of hypothetical questions which seek to find an abstract equation between the number of casualties and the price of freedom...

...He asks "What does Hook mean when he speaks of [it...

...There is no pattern of hysterical thinking, but the pattern of paranoid thinking is easily distinguishable...

...I disagree with many things he has written, but of one thing I am convinced: He is as much concerned to preserve the peace of the world as is Fromm, and he is more concerned than Fromm to preserve freedom...

...I say ingratitude because Fromm is dependent to some extent upon Kahn's original, painstaking and imaginative research into the dire consequences of thermonuclear war...

...Our primary task is to make Khrushchev understand that so long as we propose to defend freedom, military attack against the West will produce nugatory results...

...The historical record," I concluded, "gives abundant reason for being concerned with the probabilities—not only the possibilities—of Communist aggression and duplicity...

...Intelligent fear, as distinct from hysterical fear, does not equate the practical certainty that Communism will take over the world if the free nations disarm unilaterally with the far lower probability that nuclear war will break out by chance or Soviet design, and with the still lower probability that if nuclear war does break out, this must necessarily mean the end of all civilization...

...He asserts that my article is typical of a defeatism which sees in Communism only a military challenge rather than a challenge to develop our own policies to change the world...

...There is no guarantee that the internal regime under Khrushchev or his successor will not worsen...

...Khrushchev is acting with Bolshevik realism...

...How many of the predictions made about the advent of fascism at home if we fought fascism abroad came true...

...But here, too, the need is not for hysteria but for reflective elaboration of the mechanisms and processes necessary to keep our culture free even in a crisis...

...To someone who is consistently troubled with both dangers, this should be an invitation to propose a better defense policy...

...To build democratic socialism, democracy must be preserved...

...If Fromm had the courage of his confusions, he would recognize that his position on defense makes the triumph of world Communism easier, and justify it as the lesser evil, as others of his persuasion have done—mistakenly, I believe, because there are other alternatives...

...Hysterical fear runs thoughtlessly from the jaws of one danger into the jaws of another...

...Without passing judgment on the second quotation from Kahn, it should at least be pointed out that it is a reporter's account whose meaning and accuracy cannot be judged out of context...

...The true cost is the difference between the incidence of normal peace casualties and those of war...

...Kahn is better with figures than with words, but his meaning in the first quotation cited by Fromm is obvious...

...By any genuine standard of sanity, it would be monumental stupidity and moral irresponsibility, not paranoia, to ignore it...

...I am not misrepresenting him...

...He seizes upon the phrase "the mounting hysteria of a nuclear holocaust...

...I cited evidence, which Fromm does not contest, that even in terms of his description of paranoid thinking, his questioning the sanity of those who disagree with a policy of unilateral disarmament is unfounded...

...They reveal both ingratitude and misunderstanding...

...It cost the world 40 million lives to get rid of Hitler...

...Intelligence, to be sure, is not everything...

...Despite all domestic variations, the foreign policy of the Soviet Union has not altered...

...What puzzles me is how anyone concerned with the danger that freedom may be a casualty of our defense policy should be so unconcerned with the danger that freedom will be totally destroyed under Communism...

...Of course we should...

...Instead of scaring the Soviet people into a blind hysterical fear, Khrushchev is very intelligently meeting the fear of war by trying to insure a Western capitulation to Communism by crying, like Hitler before him, that he is for peace and at the same time rattling thermonuclear rockets on almost every serious political occasion...

...The language Stalin used to foreign delegations and visitors about peaceful coexistence is hardly different from that of Khrushchev...

...Is this the first step toward the claim, already made by some who follow Fromm, that there is substantially little difference between the democratic and Communist worlds, so that it is six of one and half a dozen of the other what system we live under...

...This is as gratuitous a piece of illogic as the assumption that to differ with the position of SANE or with Fromm's wishful thinking about Khrushchev's intentions is to be guilty of paranoia...

...But Fromm's real position is unilateral disarmament by the United States...

...Meanwhile, spokesmen for the Kremlin boast that the entire Russian population is being thoroughly trained in techniques for civil defense against all types of warfare...

...He asserts that I am guilty of a tu quoque, of characterizing him as offensively as he has his critics...

...Indeed, he goes beyond most of the English unilateralists...

...No one can he certain of his answers when issues of great complexity are at stake in a rapidly changing world...

...I find Fromm's references to Herman Kahn extremely distasteful...

...Before the event, most people would have shrunk at the prospect of sacrificing so many lives to prevent Nazi conquest...

...He explicitly stated in his speech of January 6 that he was relying on "the peace fronts" in the West to help achieve the victory of world Communism...

...First of all, by "hysteria" I do not mean blind and panicky reaction which prevents intelligent thinking about what we fear and the alternative ways of meeting it...

...In an article in the fall 1960 issue of Daedalus, "The Case for Unilateral Disarmament," he couples this position with an attack against its critics as paranoid skeptics...

...They are very much afraid of it...

...Multilateral disarmament is a sensible policy on the basis of intelligent fear of both a nuclear holocaust and a Communist takeover...

...But because no one can be certain, it does not follow that all answers are equally valid...

...To put one's faith in the mercies of Khrushchev and Communist China's Mao Tse-tung—provided they do not nuclear bomb one another after the West surrenders—is to run counter to everything we know about their beliefs and, above all, their deeds...

...Fromm has written a great deal about the love of man...

...Fromm keeps harping on the fact that Khrushchev's domestic regime is not as terroristic as Stalin's...

...In ordinary English usage, the technical and clinical connotations of hysteria do not carry over as much as the connotation of paranoia...

...Nor did I charge him or anyone else with hysterical thinking...

...The assertion that the defense of democracy is a sine qua non of social democracy, Fromm interprets as a surrender of socialism...

...One cannot refute a paranoid's construction by a reductio ad absurdum because, to modify one of Cicero's bon mots, there is no absurdity to which a deluded mind will not resort to defend another absurdity...

...Fromm's concluding word is an evasion of the issue and a substitution of another irrelevant and false charge...

...whereas when the internal regime is less terroristic, its foreign policy is more aggressive...

...This is what I mean by "hysteria of a nuclear holocaust," and not the ideas Fromm attributes to me...

...To someone arguing that the war against Hitler was not worth the number of crippled and diseased people who were left when the war was over, Kahn's words are comparable to saying that the situation is bad enough without assuming that all the crippled and diseased are war casualties...

...No one knows what the number of casualties will be because this depends upon what we do or leave undone...

...Some students of Soviet affairs have maintained that when the internal regime of the Kremlin is more terroristic, its foreign policy is pacific, because it fears the suppressed resentment of its subjects...

...I did not tax him with paranoid thinking, even though his disregard of probabilities for possibilities makes him vulnerable by his own criteria...

...But just as I argued that the elimination of London's slums would not of itself prevent Hitler from winning the world, so the establishment of a democratic socialist order would not of itself contain Communist aggression, whether in Czechoslovakia or West Berlin or anywhere else...

...In scores of articles and books, I have emphasized this note long before Fromm took it up...

...To divert attention from the fact that he was demonstrably wrong in taxing his opponents with paranoia, Fromm responds with irrelevant charges...

...Why does he lavish so much charity and sympathetic understanding on Khrushchev and deny it to Kahn...

...Should we fear the danger of a nuclear holocaust...

...Intelligent fear, as well as dedication to our moral values, should motivate us in a quest for a world of peace and freedom...

...But because they are intelligent about their fear, they are not running around scaring each other into witlessness with imaginary extrapolations of casualties amounting to hundreds of millions...

...Without Kahn's figures and hypothetical constructions—with some of which I disagree— Fromm would find himself, where technical questions are concerned, in a state of inarticulate stutter...

...Poison gas, also rightfully feared as a threat to the existence of civilization, was not loosed on the world even by that madman, Adolf Hitler...

...He cannot quote anything from what I have written, because all my life I have made clear that neither fascism nor Communism can be permanently contained until a democratic socialist world welfare society has come into existence...

...Let us grant that the pitch of terror has been reduced in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev just as it was increased under Stalin...

...I have met Herman Kahn...

...But there is still no substitute for it...

...which I used to explain Khrushchev's war of nerves...

...It was directed against the statistical fallacy of not considering commensurable things...

...Fromm has not pondered carefully the sentences he quotes...

...One difference with respect to the present issue is this: Intelligent fear is aware that not only is there a danger of a nuclear holocaust, there is also as great a danger of a Communist takeover and destruction of free society...

...It is endangered by Fromm's flight from political responsibility...

...Hysteria, on the other hand, is marked not by deluded thinking but by the absence of thinking altogether, induced by blind fear or terror...

...It is found where some obsession or hallucination is supported by an entire complex of mutually supporting logical possibilities immune to experiential test...

...But to advocate unilateral disarmament is to abandon the quest for an intelligent defense policy...

...I have never believed that men could survive in a dangerous world without fear...

...True, there are very real dangers that a defense against Communism will restrict our freedom...

...But what purpose is served by all his treacly rhetoric about love if he is unwilling to make the little effort necessary to understand a man before calling his good will into question...

...None...

...But on either hypothesis, Fromm's advocacy of a policy of unilateral disarmament is politically irresponsible, because it would create a power vacuum into which Communist power would naturally flow, independently of how many people were at the moment being deported, shot or brainwashed within the Soviet Union...

...Strictly speaking, it is unfair to Fromm to say that he is unconcerned with the fate of freedom...

...He does not quote a single line from me to justify this or the related accusation that I want to win the battle for men's minds "with bombs and invasions...

...Hysterical thinking, in its blindness, overlooks the likelihood that unilaterial disarmament may be a far weaker deterrent to war and to the victory of Communism than the announced readiness to defend freedom against Communist aggression...

...He is mistaken...

...all sorts of contingent factors are involved...