An event such as the liberation of Indochina from Japanese military occupation in 1945, met competently and reasonably by the standards of an anticipated "world of 1946," which unfortunately never materialized, led to the frustrations, bloodshed, deceit, and warfare of the late 1940s, and by 1954 became partially intelligible as a facet of the free world's struggle against Communism.
New Interpretations of Policy and Propaganda.
What such polemics overlook is the terrifying probability that events may happen so rapidly that no one on either the Communist or anti-Communist side is capable of assimilating a new datum, such as the development of the hydrogen bomb, the death of Stalin, or the appearance of Israel among the nations, until well after the event has occurred. The occurrence of public events in all past civilizations has involved a considerable number of public agreements on the major hypotheses concerned; as pointed out earlier in this book, the antagonists in older wars usually, though not always, knew what the war was about. Today the spiritual, psychological, logical, and scientific inconsistencies and paradoxes within each system are so deep as to make the definition of long-range goals almost impossible. Any one goal, such as the establishment of peace, the appreciation of an international system of alliances against aggression, the maintenance of national sovereignty, the protection of a free-enterprise economy, the assurance of self-determination to non-self-governing peoples, or the like, may, if emphasized, contradict the concomitant goals which support it.
Communist and Anti-Communist Psychological Events.
In the next chapter, concerning strategic information operations of the United States Government in the foreign field, there will be further discussion of the psychological strengths of the free world; we will say at this point that in the light of the strategic and military contexts of the postwar period the free world has had the advantages of modesty, relaxation, and elasticity. Among Americans, even among intelligent Americans, it is frequent to find the assumption being made that the chief strength of the free world consists of its legal rights and its democratic political processes, rather than in its actual (not merely formal) toleration of many points of view and its actual relaxation of the populations under its control.
Since the free world is not committed to victory as much as is the Communist world, it can afford more defeats without a corresponding loss of morale. Since the free world has not promised a Utopian future, it can go from the reality of the 1950s to whatever realities the 1960s or the 1970s may bring without a sharp letdown in morale or widespread heartbreak among its most gifted advocates. In Cold War terms the free world is committed to fighting, but not to victory, while the Communists are committed to the actual though remote promise of triumph for their system throughout the world. The citizens of the United States can therefore contemplate the survival of the USSR or its annihilation and replacement by a democratic Russia with equanimity; their Soviet opposite numbers, group for group and class for class, cannot be as detached from the struggle.
Over all of us there hangs the entirely uncertain future raised by possible use of atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, and other novel weapons—a future about which former Governor Adlai Stevenson felt so gloomy that he said another war would end civilization. (The rejoinder can, of course, be made that if another war would end civilization anyhow, win, lose, or draw, the United States might as well disband its defense forces now and enjoy life for the few short years that remain.)