Let me say it this way and see if this answers you:
This is the most delicate question that is before everyone on the subject, and I think that I would be unfaithful to myself if I were to give you a snap answer because a snap answer, I think, is inappropriate.
I think we have to get at the facts as they exist. And my own feeling and the thing that I was impressed with was, again, the teachings of Lenin wherein he proclaimed that never did any autocracy willingly yield up its power. Never did any tyranny willingly yield up its power, and that necessarily any group who sought to obtain political power under those circumstances would be confronted with solving a problem of force and violence. They would be met with force and they would have to answer it with force.
Mr. Velde. That substantiates the testimony that Barbara Hartle gave us here last June. I am satisfied.
Mr. Dennett. I think that is fundamental teaching of the Communist Party, and anyone who reads Lenin’s works very carefully will find that is there.
The point that is germane to us is: Does the United States come in the category that Lenin was speaking of?
Now the Communist Party went through a terrific amount of theoretical argument on this question, and some resolved the question as meaning, yes; the United States comes in that category.
Some questioned whether that were true, and I think that is why you will find a divergence of testimony from different Communists.
Mr. Velde. I take it then you feel that the methods used in the United States were different than the methods used by the Comintern in other parts of the world, in countries that are now Communist countries.
Mr. Dennett. I was referring in what I was discussing to the difference between the form of government in the United States and the form of government as exists in other countries, particularly comparing it with old Czarist Russia.