History as Seen from the Radical Right
NIEBUHR, REINHOLD
History as Seen from the Radical Right NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY By Frank J. Johnson Regnery. 230 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by REINHOLD NIEBUHR If the radical right did not exist, one could...
...The social and economic struggle with Communism is simply a battle between free enterprise and the hosts of evil...
...This revision of history is obviously too simple and frequently cock-eyed...
...Reviewed by REINHOLD NIEBUHR If the radical right did not exist, one could safely predict that it would, in time, be invented...
...This Johnson does by assuring us, after a cursory survey of the nuclear capacities of both sides, that "The military stalemate is a fraud...
...Some estimates suggest that the Formosan military is only a little more spry than was the U.S...
...He does not seriously examine the calculations of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, who rejected this policy on the ground that it would have brought the U.S...
...The United States, unused to frustration in the days of its weakness, naturally finds frustration in the day of its seeming omnipotence very trying...
...In every detail the political hazards of our contest are aggravated and the military hazards underestimated...
...Johnson is all for a rigorous naval blockade of Cuba and, inevitably, he also believes it would be wise to "unleash" and "support" Chiang Kai-shek's Formosan Army "for raids on the mainland...
...Johnson does not bother to give any current estimates of the effectiveness of Chiang's Army...
...Johnson shows considerable adeptness at the three procedures necessary to simplify the complex drama...
...Therefore the drama of modern history must not only be simplified but also partially obscured...
...And since we happily have more force at our disposal than the apostles of force, we can continue to be both innocent and victorious...
...Fortunately, European democracy made itself and much of Western civilization immune to Communism by triumphing over the injustices of early industrialism...
...So the simple plot of the historical drama, as revised by the radical right, is completed...
...The vexing political problems which rightist reductionism eliminates apparently need no longer bother Americans...
...The awful possibility of nuclear catastrophe thus disposed of, the next most important step is to reduce the struggle, which involves so many political and economic imponderables, to purely military dimensions—without, incidentally, measuring the danger of presenting an image of ourselves almost identical with the Communist caricature of "militarist imperialists...
...Why should we have devised the airlift when it would have been simple to make our own way on the ground through the Russian barriers...
...These are all serious questions, but they are not clarified by Johnson's wholesale condemnation of all past Western caution in the cold war...
...He thinks it might be wise to support a possible rebellion of Stalinist Albania against Russia...
...Yet inadvertantly it touches on one important problem in our contest with Communism: Democracy is handicapped in a game of brinkmanship with a dictatorship because a responsible government must be more cautious than one which answers only to its elite...
...into a larger war with China—in which, it is worth noting, Russia would not have been directly involved...
...Someone would be tempted to make the complex events of modern history more simple and thus more bearable...
...This is the only system which can be established voluntarily...
...And, perhaps more important, were we not unduly cautious at the time of the Hungarian Revolution...
...How will India counter the competition with China, since modem Communism has turned into a rather cruel engine for suppressing the wants of poor peasants in order to acquire capital for industrialization...
...If war came, we would win in any direct confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, the Soviet Union would back down unless the United States foolishly lets itself be bluffed into doing so first...
...The complexity of international politics, with its nuclear dilemma and its fateful contest with Communism, is certainly difficult to understand...
...Socialistic schemes, which American liberals and "internationalists" favor, can only be established by force and can only be uprooted by force...
...Grand Army of the Republic at the end of the last century...
...Should the West have been so cautious in the 1948 Berlin blockade...
...The belief that Communism cannot be halted by force is one of the greatest myths of our time," Johnson writes...
...It is a kind of adolescent daydream, allowing us to be both dashing soldiers without serious danger of battle and innocent, virtuous proponents of "freedom" against the apostles of "force...
...This cold war is kept from becoming hot by the "balance of terror," that is, by the equal capacity of each side to destroy the other through nuclear power...
...But its strategies involved modifications of the old free enterprise dogmas so dear to the old right as well as to the new, nostalgic "radical right...
...In fact, unless we are willing to use force, Communism cannot be halted at all.' The author believes the best way of insuring that the Communists will not ride the wave of the future is to take pieces of real estate away from them: "We should not hesitate to employ military power in limited actions to contract the boundaries of Communism...
...One of the more lucid and plausible efforts to cut contemporary history down to size and make it tolerable to tender imaginations is Frank J. Johnson's No Substitute for Victory...
...Overwhelming power continues to lie with the United States...
...The democratic nations are involved in a life-and-death struggle with the world Communist movement...
...The third step in reducing complex history to a simple dimension, comprehensible to retired admirals and retired millionaires, is implied in Johnson's emphasis on military power...
...It is even more difficult to live with, particularly for a nation which has suddenly been vaulted from Continental weakness and security to global omnipotence and global insecurity...
...The constitution established the United States as a federal Republic, based on a system of free enterprise," he blithely tells us...
...The first is to deny the reality of the nuclear dilemma...
...Naturally, too, Johnson is convinced General Douglas MacArthur, whose slogan furnishes him with the title for his book, should have been allowed to bomb the Communist Chinese bases of the North Korean Army...
...How are traditional or primitive cultures to accumulate capital for industrialization...
...But we do not have to bother about India, because Pakistan is our firm military ally and India is not...
...The struggle between democracy and Communism is further complicated by the fact that the Communist dogma of world redemption, designed for European industrialism, has been made irrelevant by European democracy (although it continues to fascinate the peoples of traditional or primitive cultures in Asia and Africa, who hope both for political independence and for the material abundance which technological advancement assures...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 8
