In the battle of the probabilities the PsyWar of the Western powers has been weak, high-pitched, and uncertain, while the insistence of the Communist themes has been as monotonous and hypnotic as a jungle drum. For better or for worse, the Communists have broken a path through to what they think to be the future; we of other nations have not.
The chief element of anti-Communist victory—practical, sober expectation of a certain and final downfall of the Soviet system—has thus far been lacking on the anti-Communist side.
The Communists, on the contrary, have unreasonably, provocatively, and untruthfully raved, screamed, shrieked, and lied to bring about that better world which, curiously enough, their most effective cadres considered to be an inevitable world. Thus the UN prisoners held by the Communists during the Korean war were subjected to a constant bombardment of Communist propaganda concerning their personal responsibilities before history and the opportunities which they would have to serve peace and mankind, as these noble concepts are set forth on the Red side.
The End of the Cold War.
It does no good for an American propaganda radio to pledge battle to the death while the U.S. press services amiably discuss an accommodation with the Communists. Comparably, an official propaganda plan to make the people of France feel that the Americans love and admire them is not very realistic if, in terms of column-inches of French press material, unofficial American utterances are related to France to the effect that the French are washed up, their cause in Indochina hopeless, their economy unviable, and their political goals foolish. The years 1950-54, during which the Korea struggle took place and in which NATO and the European Defense Community (EDC) came to prominence, often showed a proclivity on the part of U.S. official propagandists to go far beyond that which their home public would support. Need it be said that the effects on foreign public opinion were possibly deflationary?
An imaginable end to the Cold War may lie in neither victory nor defeat, in neither accommodation nor reconciliation, but in the development of more, newer, and different quarrels. Hostility of Protestant and Catholic faded out in Europe when the hostility of French, Germans, Spaniards, and other nationalities came to be more important. It is a problem for the psychiatrist and sociologist to answer if they can. Is it possible that semantics of war-causing quarrels can be superseded by anything other than different quarrels? A tension-free civilization is imaginable; given the characteristics of most present-day cultures it is scarcely more than merely imaginable.[48]
If within the limits of practical possibility one were to list the hypothetical requirements for an end of the Cold War, the following might stand forth:
- (1) General war leading to destruction of either the Communist or non-Communist systems; or
- (2) Prolongation of the present Cold War atmosphere until new and more interesting quarrels arise which make the present ones obsolete; or
- (3) Reconciliation of the Communist and anti-Communist systems, by some process not now imaginable, along the general lines of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Grand Design;" or
- (4) Collapse of all major civilizations under impact of fissionable and thermonuclear weapons; or
- (5) Gradual erosion of the anti-Communist world and an eventual Communist victory by sustained Communist successes short of war—or the alternative of gradual erosion of the Communist world and the creation of a constitutionalist and libertarian probability of victory, also without the outbreak of general war.
It would be a brave and foolish man who would say which of these the world should expect, but it would be a stupid staff officer who did not anticipate at least one of them and who did not as a military officer or government official do his best to bring about "victory" in a form which his side could define, recognize, welcome, and achieve.[49]