Truth Must Be Repeated

February 28, 1955

In his attitude toward the Dixon-Yates contract, Mr. Eisenhower has been merely defensive. He has made no counterattack against the fanatic devotees of socialized electric power. In the world of party politics this is losing strategy.

Occasional and reluctant defensiveness is even less likely to succeed with relentless enemies like Communist Russia and its satellites. Hardly a day has passed in the last ten years in which the leaders of these countries and its official press have not vilified the United States and the whole “capitalist” world. Yet our official answers have been sporadic, often timid, and nearly always merely defensive.

True, we have the Voice of America. The United States Information Agency is spending $77 million this year and wants to spend $86 million next year. But it is impossible to believe, in the face of results, that this spending has been very effective. On its face it is not reasonable to expect too much, for example, even if we do reach a few isolated and helpless men and women behind the Iron Curtain through their short-wave sets.

What really needs to be done would not cost the taxpayers an extra cent. Yet, ironically, we are not doing it. We should make a full, daily, public reply to every Chinese or Russian Communist attack upon us. Our government would not need to put this on radio or television; it would broadcast itself. Its primary purpose should be, not to “penetrate the Iron Curtain,” or to convince a Khrushchev or a Chou Enlai of the error of his ways, but to convince and solidify the opinion that we can and do reach—that of the non-Communist world.

What the American Government needs to provide today is systematic propaganda on behalf of the true opposite of Communism, which is free enterprise—or (to use the smear word invented by Marx) capitalism. Our spokesmen occasionally do defend something that they vaguely call “democracy.” This makes little impression, because the Communists call our democracy “capitalism” and reserve for their own political system the name of “people’s democracy.” What we must defend in our system, if we ever hope to win the ideological war, is the element of freedom in it—particularly freedom of private competitive enterprise, because it is precisely this that is the contrary of Communism. When we do defend capitalism against the Communists or some of our socialist “allies” we usually apologize for it. Almost invariably we defend it on the ground that it is enormously more productive than socialism or Communism. This is true; but it is merely a derivative benefit. And it is precisely this kind of defense that tends still further to convince both socialists and Communists that capitalism is materialistic and soulless.

We forget, in making this materialistic defense, that the Communists are imbued with a quasi-religious zeal for their monstrous system. What makes so many of our own fellow travelers apparently incurable is their fixed belief that somehow, whatever its errors, Communism represents a higher moral ideal. So we must base our defense of capitalism not on its immensely superior production, but primarily on moral grounds—on its respect for the self-dependence, freedom, and dignity of the individual.

The next few years will be extremely difficult years for the Western world. If it is confused and internally divided in its ideology it stands in gravest danger of defeat. Its central economic doctrines must be clarified. Its social faith must be unified. A cold war with Communism, or even a shooting war with Communism, will still be half an ideological war, half a propaganda war. Unless our own philosophy is coherent we cannot sow doubt among our Communist enemies. The Communist world threatens to destroy civilization today, not because the majority of its active inhabitants are innately any more wicked than the rest of us, but because they believe in absurdities. It is this belief in economic absurdities that causes them to commit political crimes. Our chief hope is that we can shake their insane logic before it has plunged the world into an insane war.