Defense Will Not Win

December 15, 1958

During the second world war there appeared a book called Defense Will Not Win the War, by W.F. Kernan. Its chief importance lay in the title, which stated a self- evident truth. No war is ever won by defense alone.

This applies also to a so-called cold war. We are in the present cold war whether we want to be or not; it is being persistently and relentlessly waged against us. And if we lose it, through appeasement, retreat, or by trying to pretend that it is not going on, we shall surely lose the total war if it comes or be forced to surrender before the mere threat of such a war.

The present Berlin crisis is “new,” and yet depressingly familiar. We accepted an arrangement in 1945 that enables Russia to put the squeeze on Berlin at any time it sees an advantage in doing so. It did so in 1948. Why were we taken by surprise by the new threats? Why did we act as if we were improvising an answer to a totally unexpected move? Why, above all, was our answer (until recently) merely defensive, and in at least one statement by Secretary Dulles, even ambiguous?

If we had warned Russia immediately that we meant to stand by our obligation to defend and maintain the status of Berlin against any breach by threat or force; if we had replied at the very beginning that we would be willing to discuss a peaceful change in the status quo in Germany but proposed that this should consist in a free and unintimidated vote of the East Germans as to whether they wanted to reunite with West Germany, much needless anxiety might have been saved.

ANSWER EVERY LIE

We might even have used the occasion to suggest that Russia keep her treaty agreements to allow free and secret elections in Poland, Rumania, Hungary, and Bulgaria for governments of their own choice. If Russia were shown that her diplomatic and propaganda offensives might boomerang, she might be less quick to try them.

This need to take the offensive in the cold war, for our own ultimate peace and safety, was emphasized by George F. Kennan in a lecture last year. Speaking of the way in which we often dismiss Soviet lies as “just propaganda,” he said:

“I’m always startled at the phrase ‘just propaganda.’ Why just? Is not propaganda a serious and important force in world affairs? . . . A wise Western policy will insist ‘no single falsehood or distortion from the Soviet side should ever go unanswered.’ This will be tiresome. We do not like repetition. But we cannot afford to dispense with it. Truth does not win over error on its merits. It, too, has to be assiduously propagated.

“I have asserted that there is nothing that could be said to Soviet leaders in the space of a few days that would change their strangely corrupted mentality. But there are things which could be said every day over the course of years which would exert a useful discipline upon them, would make it harder for them to ignore the distinction between the real and the unreal, and would place limitations on their use of falsehood as a weapon of political policy.”

ABSURD OUTPUT CLAIMS

To apply this to the particular purview of this column, in recent months a flood of nonsense has been pouring almost unanswered through the American press and through scores of speeches in which increasingly absurd claims of Communist Russia and Communist China regarding not merely military, but overall civilian production, are solemnly accepted as fact. The effect of this nonsense is to condition people to assume that the terror, force, and regimentation of Communism can increase production and even living standards faster than the freedom in choice of jobs and the free consumer choice of capitalism. Many officials of our own government seem to accept these claims at face value. Their real duty is to check the evidence, or lack of evidence, for every such claim, whenever made, and constantly present the enormous counterevidence. It is important to determine the truth about Russian military production. It is no less important not to be taken in by the brazen propaganda about production miracles and soaring living standards in Russia or Communist China.