USAv and USSRv are imaginable. USA1 and USSR1 for the day preceding the outbreak of war, or, alternatively, the day on which the war occurs, will be known elements. American science in many fields can help U.S. mass communications and therewith help our armed forces if we learn how to ascertain how the Soviet leadership changes, how Soviet élite groups change, and how the Soviet population changes during the course of the war. We must not only be able to guess what is happening to them physically, but must try to appreciate and to understand what is happening to them psychologically and semantically. This is an immense task. It is by no means certain that our research and development facilities can give us an adequate research program to handle the problem.
This much can be said: if the Americans understand the Russians before the war and during the war, it will be the first time that a nation has kept its enemy in wide-awake sight.
The usual process in the past has been the acceptance of a few exaggerated stereotypes of the national characteristics of the potential enemy, the ascription of every possible kind of infamy and inhuman characteristic to the enemy during the war, and the redefinition of the enemy as a friend after the war. It would be strange and wonderful if the U.S. Government and the U.S. propagandists (or conceivably as much as a large minority of the U.S. population) could learn how to fight the USSR in order to help the Russians escape from a tyranny which has already hurt them much more than it has hurt us.
The Germans suffered a tragic, overwhelming, and perhaps decisive psychological defeat in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic and in the Ukraine, when they carried with their field forces such naïve and tragic Nazi misconceptions of Russian and Ukrainian character as to defeat every opportunity they may have had for a serious anti-Communist alliance of Germany with the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. They destroyed themselves not through ignorance, but through what they thought they knew. If they had been more calm, less assured, more willing to learn from immediate experience, and less indoctrinated with their own preposterous misconceptions of Russian and Ukrainian character, they might have found Russian and Ukrainian allies who would have joined them in the final extermination of the Soviet system.
The world Communist movement has already suffered very serious setbacks because of its failure to project U.S. behavior successfully from the summer of 1950 onward. If the Russian and Chinese Communists had understood Americans well and had made a correct evaluation of the American response to the invasion of South Korea, they would not have driven the United States from lethargy to alertness, from weakness to military strength, from vulnerability toward Communist and crypto-Communist propaganda to sharp and angry recognition of Communist manipulation of symbols such as "progressives," "people's governments," and "liberation."
Communist Developments.
Sociologically it would seem that the Russian Communists attempted definite improvements of the techniques of Communist revolution and that these improvements have in large part failed in the European satellites. The governments of Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany have turned out to be poor governments—despite the fact that from the Soviet point of view it was a sharp innovation to leave them in pseudo-parliamentary form instead of creating outright Soviet facsimilies.
At the Chinese end of the Moscow-Peking axis the sociology of revolutionary propaganda and organization appears to have worked out much more successfully than at the Russian end. The Chinese Communists, perhaps because they were Chinese, perhaps because they were tougher and more experienced Communists than the Russians, got their country under rigid control and then undertook social and political experiments on a very audacious scale. They have managed not to be un-Chinese while creating in China the kind of pervasive dictatorship which Communist control appears to require.
In the manipulation of satellites and in particularization of propaganda, the North Korean Communist army, the Viet Minh army in Indochina, and the Malayan Races Liberation Army on the Malay peninsula, appear to have near-optimum localism and particularism without suffering serious deviation from the main Communist world-wide pattern. In North Korea, of course, Chinese intervention and Soviet support have sharply modified the position of the North Korean People's Army, but the Annamite and Malay Communist forces appear to be fighting with high morale and considerable success, despite the duality of control from Peking and Moscow, and despite the difficulties of reconciling Asian nationalism with Marxian-world doctrine.
Another Communist technique is now known through Edward Hunter's provocative pioneer book[62] by its correct name of "brain-washing." This involves the transformation of a human personality. The author has himself interrogated victims of brain-washing and can attest to the terrifying depth to which this process is carried. The victim of brain-washing is subject to very slight persuasion at the rational level. He is not even given much propaganda as U.S. propagandists of recent years might recognize the product. Instead, the process of brain-washing consists of a frontal attack on all levels of the personality, from the most conscious to the most hidden. The Communists seek through fatigue and sustained interrogation to create a condition similar to what is called "nervous breakdown" in popular parlance. Then they rebuild the personality, healing their victim into Communist normality.