The Right to Join.
The top levels of this problem are, of course, political. They must be solved in the light of a U.S. home public which eschews crusades and dreads adventures. At a lower level the problem becomes one for the military staffs of the future. How can the United States, the United Nations, or other anti-Communist forces recruit native leaders and native followers under circumstances of dignity and honor? How can we either learn to love the allies we have or to find allies whom we can love? Until then much of the spiritual and organizational advantage in Asia will fall to the Communists. We may have the better ideals, but if people who are determined to illuminate their own lives with the splendor of risky, heroic, or self-sacrificing action (and who insist on doing something desperate somewhere somehow, so as to relieve the ignominy, poverty, and monotony of their existences) cannot learn how to join us, they will perforce join the other side.
A slight or even a substantial increase in economic welfare in the Asian states seems to the author to favor a sharp increase in Communist strength. When people are desperately poor or sick they cannot worry about causes. When they become moderately well off—well enough off to know that they are despised, poor by our standards, ignorant by our standards—then the point of psychological frenzy comes in.
Propaganda Techniques in the Seven Wars.
Figure 74: Divisive Propaganda, Korean Model. In this leaflet an attempt is made to show the Asians-die-for-the-Kremlin theme.
The strategic PsyWar self-limitations imposed by the United States on the United States in the Korean war were also crippling. The United States did not desire anything which a professional soldier would recognize as victory. U.S. opinion was divided as to whether all of Korea should be liberated by UN forces. At the policy-making level—certainly among our allies—there was pretty general agreement to remain at peace with the supply dumps and high command of the Chinese Communist forces in Manchuria and China while fighting the forward echelons of those forces in Korea. The United States would not accept defeat nor would it seek a decisive victory because victory might have involved the risk of war.
Under these conditions it must be pointed out that General MacArthur had the first and only PsyWar establishment ready to operate the moment the Korean war began. Col. J. Woodall Greene ably managed the Tokyo headquarters for most of the period of the Korean war. The Department of the Army showed great good judgment in bringing back Brig. Gen. Robert McClure, who had been Eisenhower's PsyWar chief in Europe, to the new Department of the Army's PsyWar establishment which was created on 15 January 1951 in the Pentagon as a part of Special Staff, United States Army, with the title of Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare (OCPW). When General McClure departed for Teheran, he was succeeded at OCPW by Brig. Gen. William Bullock. The last period of the Korean war found Korean local PsyWar at the headquarters of Eighth U.S. Army in Korea (EUSAK) under the command of Col. Donald Hall, who had probably seen more continuous PsyWar service than any other officer in the U.S. Army.