The Fateful Triangle

...The limited Test-Ban Agreement represents a still higher order of accommodation to common experience in a dogmatic system...

...The difference between America and Russia-one the largest democratic nation, the other the most technically advanced Communist nation-is reflected in the history of European culture during the transition from agrarian feudalism to modern technology...

...Mao is no defeated candidate...

...Stalin's despotism was brought to an end, and Khrushchev was forced to remove the despot posthumously from the pantheon of Communist heroes and divinities, not because he sacrificed millions of peasant lives for his program but because he endangered the security of the "new class" of party oligarchs and functionaries...

...One can safely assume, therefore, that China will continue to be the chief international problem for both the U.S...

...Several of Marxism's adjustments to the necessities of common experience were highly ironical...

...Thus a comparison of closed and open societies-of dogmatic politics and uncorrected errors with a system that is able to challenge any doctrine refuted by experience-may well lead to the conclusion that we are dealing with darkness and light, and that fanatic anti-Communists are correct in thinking that the conflict between the two systems is as irreconcilable as both the Communists and their enemies avow...

...The burden of resisting Chinese apocalyptic politics is naturally not a purely Russian one, though our share is limited because the orthodox dogma has cast us as chief imperialistic enemy of the glorious new day...

...And this democratic achievement is largely the product of the businessmen and craftsmen whose technical competence, mobile and dynamic forms of property, or political maturity and enterprising ambition, eliminated the organic collectivism of an agrarian, feudal culture and monarchical absolutism as the guarantor of the unity of a nation...

...We are necessarily committed to the "two Chinas" policy, which means that we cannot sacrifice Nationalist China to the tender mercies of Red China...

...Our "open door" China policy of that century does not help us if the dogma now defines us as the chief imperialistic sinners...

...The Russian oligarchy may preserve its power for decades, provided it surmounts the great temptation to compete with the Chinese for orthodox Marxist hegemony over the Communist movements of Asia and Africa...

...The negotiations with Chou En-lai proved inconclusive, except for the cancellation of the Communist summit meeting Khrushchev had called for December in an effort to throw Moscow's recalcitrant ideological partner into the outer darkness of Communist heterodoxy...

...And now it appears that the meeting will shortly be held after all, with its objective unchanged...

...It is also obvious that such a step would not draw the fangs of Chinese fanaticism...

...It would merely belatedly prove that while open societies have their illusions-particularly in the realm of foreign policy, where indirect contact with the facts renders experience less powerful in dispelling illusions-open societies are capable of meeting the hazards of the real world...

...Their errors were even more monstrous than those of bourgeois individualism...

...Thus, a serious imbalance of social power was created which could only be corrected by the equal political power of universal suffrage, and subsequently by reluctantly allowing the labor unions to balance the organized power of management with the organized power of the workers...

...The Russians adjusted themselves to this new peril, while the Chinese dogmatists did not...

...But if solved at all, it will be solved by nations, oligarchical or democratic, which have no illusions either about themselves or their adversaries...

...Let us accept the fact that the ending of despotism was a real achievement, even though we recognize that it was not the suffering "masses" but the insecure oligarchs who prompted the change...

...For-instance, the rapid industrialization of a peasant culture rested upon Stalin's cruel collectivization program, which in effect pressed the capital for industrial equipment from the life blood of the poor peasants...

...To do this, the individualism of bourgeois culture, incapable of dealing with collective facts and forces of class and race had to be radically changed...

...On the other hand, the recent Goldwater movement can be succinctly described as a futile effort of the ignorant and class-biased elements of the U.S...

...Marx assumed that the economic motive of "greed," and not the more basic will to power, was responsible for disrupting the ideal social harmony of the primitive community...

...In the Stalin era, the dictatorship resulted in the rule of terror by one man who, as Party secretary, manipulated all the organs of the Party's monopoly of power...

...He is the reigning monarch of a China as unified and tightly controlled as it was under the Han emperors...

...at least they accepted his proposal for a limited Test-Ban Agreement that has perhaps reduced the peril of a nuclear conflict, and established the tacit Russo-American partnership to which the intransigent Chinese object...

...But life is too complex and the facts of reality are too various to allow for this simple separation of sheep and goats...

...It should be noted that the greater Russian capacity to adjust to the nuclear peril was prompted partly by a thorough knowledge of the terrible dimension of nuclear destruction, and partly by American policy...

...Yet the pale oligarchs who succeeded Khrushchev obviously have no solution for the vexing problem of hegemony within the Communist world...

...For this individualism was both the chief virtue of the founders of democracy and also the ideological weapon of bourgeois class interests...

...From all of these secondary errors, protected from exposure in a closed society and preserved by a dogma-controlled oligarchy, stem the chief errors: regarding the democratic state as merely the stooge of the owners, and positing the necessity of a revolutionary annulment of democracy by a messianic class, the proletariat-the new dictatorship of the workers which turned out to be the dictatorship of the Communist party, and finally the dictatorship of an oligarchy of Party bureaucrats...

...This triumph established the social validity of open societies, and incidentally made the whole of European culture immune to the virus of Communist rebellion...

...And China is also using Communist orthodoxy to wrest control of the Communist movements in Asia and Africa from the Russian "holy land...

...Those of us who are not wise or expert enough to suggest a relevant policy for defusing the Chinese menace may be pardoned for relying on the hope that ultimately the Russian oligarchs will be prevented, by both national and oligarchic impulses of survival, from risking their undoubted achievements in the effort to control a fanatic religio-political movement which seeks to achieve world redemption and in the process courts nuclear disaster...

...We must recognize both the capacity of a closed system to deal with new developments not anticipated by its dogmas, and the reluctance of some in an open society to accept either the old or the new...

...The ideology was curiously compounded of Adam Smith's classical economy, Spencer's social Darwinism, and Protestant pietistic individualism, in which religion became the servant of the Protestant industrial owners as they exploited the labor of both Jewish and Catholic immigrants...

...But what about the third member of the fateful triangle: China...

...The dogma promised a new heaven on earth, yet a nuclear encounter would annul all bourgeois and Communist dreams in a final catastrophe...

...No doubt this combination of courage and caution impressed the Russians...

...Perhaps the chief contribution would be to disavow the fantasy of regarding the regime of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek as the legitimate government of a great nation from which it fled...

...We might even postpone speculations about the question whether Russia is evolving toward an open society...

...Like Khrushchev, too, the new leaders have shown an undying devotion to the principle of "coexistence" -that is, to the nuclear Test-Ban Agreement, the Russo-American symbol of the tacit partnership of two nuclear powers who have, despite their differences, developed a sense of common responsibility for avoiding the dread nuclear holocaust...

...to return to the out-moded individualism and nativism of the 19th century...

...The second step was taken in the 19th century in democracy's encounter with modern industrialism, and revealed both the virtues and weaknesses of free nations...

...In a dangerous world we must be grateful for small favors...

...The first was the organization of free societies...

...The encounter gave rise to the new dogmatic culture of Communism, which distilled its apocalyptic versions of human history from the errors of bourgeois democracy as well as the monstrous consequent injustices of early European industrialism...

...However, Chinese ideological pressure on Russia, and the ideological advantage the Chinese enjoy among Asian nations because of their ostensibly greater anti-imperialistic orthodoxy, are bound to increase the hazards involved in avoiding a nuclear holocaust...

...The social changes were tortuous but the democratic process was finally vindicated-it proved to be not merely the stooge and handmaiden of the rising economic oligarchies, but the arbiter of justice...

...The Marxist dogma, which provided for "expropriating the expropriators," turned out to be a program of expropriating a peasant class which had for countless ages been the subject, not of capitalistic, but of political-feudal oppression...

...Communist and bourgeois dogmas alike took no account of the power of the managers of industry, so patent in both systems...

...The open societies of the West refuted the Communist dogmas based on a secular apocalyptic vision of Karl Marx, a vision prompted by the earlier failures, subsequently corrected, of bourgeois culture and social institutions...

...Soviet space achievements also proved there is no short-range incompatibility between a closed society and technical progress, particularly if the exertions of scientists and technicians advance the prestige of the oligarchy...

...Specialists on the curious politics of conspiracy in the Soviet system seem agreed that among the many causes of the fall of the man who put an end to Stalin's despotism and terror were his policies toward China, the ideological partner and political foe of Russia...

...The Russian challenge and possible superiority to us in missiles and rocketry has revealed that some nations can rise very rapidly from technical incompetence (as did Japan before Russia...

...We cannot deny that this is a perplexing situation...

...Perhaps it should be added that Lenin contributed a politically potent Marxist error in his volume, Imperialism, The Last Stage oj Capitalism...

...Of course, no one can pretend that a free society is free to forcibly open minds closed by inveterate ignorance or unacknowledged ideological prejudices...

...Middle-class democracy in all of Europe and America required the whole 19th century to correct the extravagant individualism of the founders of a free society...

...Our hopes may be vain...

...The English Soviet affairs specialist, Edward Crankshaw, may be wrong in his optimism on that question...

...It sought the support of a nation which had come to terms with the perils and opportunities of a technical civilization, had overcome its WASP nativism by electing the first Catholic President, and had accepted the civic virtue of many Jewish political leaders...

...but if they are not, we might be heretical in our thanks for the residual force of national loyalty and oligarchic self-interest, and the "bourgeois complacency" of the "new class" in Russia...

...The hard fact is that the peace of the world depends upon a nuclear partnership of the two most powerful nations, and that this partnership must be maintained despite the ideological contradiction between the two partners, and despite the ideological affinity between Russia and the recalcitrant China...

...The democracies of Western Europe are, in a sense, the final political achievements of Western culture...

...that will probably determine the peace of our world for decades, and even centuries, to come...

...Technical culture had its rise in the science of the 17th and 18th centuries, and took the path to technical competence in two steps...

...THINKING ALOUD The Fateful Triangle By Reinhold Niebuhr The conspiracy among the Russian Communist oligarchs which led to the political liquidation of the chief oligarch-the ebullient, imaginative and probably heedless Nikita Khrushchev-has served to bring into focus the fateful triangle formed by Russia, China and the U.S.A...

...He ascribed the domination impulse of all powerful nations to an economic institution, and made the abolition of the institution of property the guarantor of Communist virtue...

...In these free societies all dogmas are, in theory at least, subject to the test of experience, which dissolves and discredits the irrelevant and untrue...

...Though now irrelevant to industrial nations for which it was originally designed, this absurd dogma has made Communism very relevant to the undeveloped nations suffering from economic and technical frustration and recent foreign domination...

...We have to be content if such forces are defeated, as was the Goldwater type of return to the past...

...They offered Khrushchev's head on a platter to Mao, but this did not solve the problem...

...His despotism and Marxist dogmatism is dangerous to world peace because he is using Marxist ideology as the political weapon of a poor, desperate, colored nation in a world of white, technically efficient nations-as the weapon of a country still suffering from wounded pride because powerful imperial nations kicked China around in the 19th century...

...For a tough and imaginative young President, whom the whole nation still mourns, courageously risked war when the Russians mounted atomic weapons in Cuba -but also wisely allowed the Russians to pull out of Cuba and save face...

...But we might help in the process...

...and the Soviets...

...The Marxist dogmas derived from fantastic interpretations of a brief period of the failure of bourgeois democracy...

...In short, original errors in estimating human behavior produced a whole family of errors under the protection of an oligarchic monopoly of power guided by an "infallible truth...

...The Goldwater movement was bound to fall, as are all efforts to return to a simpler past...

...No one can deny that this poses a grave threat to all who live under the shadow of a nuclear apocalypse...

...He also assumed that the ownership of property was the chief instrument of this disruptive motive...

...Modern industry disrupted the original partnership between businessmen and craftsmen by transferring both the tools and skills of the craftsmen to the power machine...

...Adolf BerIe's Power Without Property (Harper and Row) gives an excellent account of the significance of the managers in large corporations, the "property" of which is subject to diffusion among millions of individual stockholders...

...We can therefore not be helpful in arranging for an acceptance of Red China in the community of nations...

...Thus there is historical evidence for the capacity of even a closed and dogmatic society to evolve by experience...

...Since I feel my own competence for speculating about the vicissitudes of internal Soviet politics is limited, I will limit myself to analyzing the three nations involved in this fateful triangle and attempt to assess the relative tension between political dogma and common experience in the so-called open societies of the West and in the closed societies of the Communist giants...