About seven and one-half years ago I had the privilege of positing to an assemblage of your confreres of the National Press Club the question of how to best the continuing challenge of Communism which we of the free world faced. I must say that my question was disputatious as well as quodlibetical but certainly not a quoddity since the problem is very real and the palliative solutions offered throughout the years have no lessened the tension nor deterred the Chinese Communists, whose avowed aim is to change the world into their own image, euphemistically called "world revolution" and "national liberation." I might also add, if my memory serves me aright, none at that meeting volunteered to give an answer. Today I shall again ask the question in the hopes that many of you knowledgeable and authoritative gentlemen who have the pulse of the world in your collective finger tips will be good enough to offer valid solutions to many of the contusive problems that face the world.
As I have said, the problems of the free world vis-a-vis the Communist world are still very much with us, and as you all know, very much alive. Even more so since what was for a time the monolith has cleft into two ideological and pragmatic entities each with its retinue of partisans and adherents, with one truculent entity doing its utmost to derogate and then tumble the other from the pinnacle of its international leadership.
A coup d'oeil will have shown any who cares to note that the original occupant of the pinnacle in struggling to maintain ideological and secular paramountcy has been steadily losing ground to the interloper. The uncouth obnoxious peasant brigand who feigns Communist intellectualism has shinnied up to the top of the Communist greasy pole, but whose manners and above all whose ruse de guerre are beneath Communist contempt; and that because of this country bumpkin, Russian primacy is very much on the wane. Granting that there are ups and downs as shown by events, those who see the outward manifestations of these phenomena have but a perfunctory picture of the Soviet position. To have a complete depiction of Russia's position we must go back in time and recollect that the focus of emphasis of Communism as envisioned by Marx was essentially microeconomics. In this I mean the thematic structure of his opus and theory were built on the effects of interaction of labor and wages generously laced with fire and brimstone, accusations of exploitations and injustices of the capitalist social system of the time, and rendered perhaps more excusable in its exaggerations and distortions by a man whose talent and genius were affected through personal misfortunes, ill health, physical pain, and what seemed to him to be interminable frustrations. To digress for a moment we must take note that microeconomics, be they of Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and Marx, treated specializations as distinct from macroeconomic; which encompasses all the myriad elements of production, price, profit, income, interest rate, and above all government policy that make up economics - in short, as we know economics in this day and age.
Built-in Limitations
Das Kapital by appropriating only the "Hegelian Triad" - thesis, antithesis and synthesis - which is part and parcel of the necessary progression of Hegelian schematic thought and applying it to the theme of social evils and injustices, whilst discarding the Hegelian schema of harmonizing Greek ontology with Kantian psychology and the concept of the "true Being," has built within Marxism the endemic limitations which can not permit its synthesis to continue sound and healthy ad infinitum.
I hope I have not bored you too much with a brief recitation of the nidus of Marxist dialectics, but I feel it is necessary to have a total recall of Hegelian thought in order to have a truer understanding than the usual half-veracious and hothouse ripened imagery of Hegelianism. I re-asseverate that Marxism is but a partial lifting from the whole scheme of Hegelian thought in a context of intellectual theoretical exercise, and that Marx, applying this ex parte to obtaining social, political, and economic phenomena, attributed to his theory Marxism as the eternal nostrum for the world's economic, social, and political maladies.
To go back to my main stream of thought, general Russian industry compared with the industrially advanced countries in the West has been and still is behind the times, except in the glamour field of space science. But it must be said that the Communist government of Russia in 1922 had inherited greater and broader industrial base and greater industrial capacity and potentiality than China at its zenith in the years just prior to the Sino-Japanese War. The several industrial five-year plans embarked upon by Russia and despite her wasteful inefficiencies and inexpert, un-integrated planning have increased her industry many fold. Over the years and in the process of a building, Russian leaders and bureaucrats have found the socio-economic precepts laid down by Marxism-Leninism to have become obsolete or rapidly obsolescent. They have also found that human motives, values, and behavior were complex long before historical and material dialectics, made them simple. And they have learned that goals of attainment in the final test must face inevitably realism and practicality, and that realism in Communist Russia is often starkly tragic in the dimensions of catastrophic failures. They have found, too, that idealism not based on the possible and the pragmatic as well as indiscriminate psitacism—the uncritical parroting of a pseudo-thesis or a thesis devoid of sound basis-inevitably immobilizes and stultifies doctrinal dynamism and action into stereotyped formulae with diminishing returns.
Neo-Communism
The independent, often robust and irritatingly contrary views and actions of Yugoslavia even before the demise of Stalin set the pace for neo-Communism. The parturient rumblings of Russia's satellites on her western marches and the bloody uprisings in Hungary impended upon the Kremlin the necessity of a re-evaluation. For these many varied and dangerously abrasive reasons a change to more efficacious forms in doctrinal, socio-political economic unguents must be used to lubricate and ensure the smooth working of her hegemony. Moreover, the repressions of the Stalin era, with the constant fear for life as a daily fare, even within the immediate circle of the Kremlin, broke out in full force, culminating in the cult of anti-personality with Khrushchev as its mouthpiece. De-Stalinization, long latent and in the wind, only needed the death of Stalin to burst open the flood gates of accumulated deep-seated frustration, abiding hate, and acerbic anger. With the debasement of the Godhead Stalin came widespread and quickened loss of faith in the infallibility of leadership not only in Russia herself but in every nook and cranny of Communism's far-flung empire and organizations around the world. The new leadership saw that in order to perpetuate its rule, new inspiration and new approach must be found, and they could only be found in re-interpreting Marxism-Leninism in travail.
What Russia discarded through the empiric, the Red Chinese picked up and embraced with great gusto and fervor. For here was a chance of a dialectical lifetime (if I may coin this phrase) that Mao had been sniffing around and atheistically praying for. Here was the opportunity to capture legitimacy and assume the purple mantle of Communist world leadership by claiming catholicity as well as orthodoxy. With the help of material inducements and outright purchase, Mao and his trenchers have succeeded to make revisionism a mortal sin and revisionists, beings beyond redemption, synonymous with treachery and deceit. Thus Mao in his inquisitorial role of preserving the true faith, the Torquemada of latter day Communism, has drummed out Mr. Khrushchev and now Messrs. Kosygin and Brezhnev from the orthodox Communist society and made them out to be pariahs and turncoats of the Communist dogmata.
Russia in persistence and through trial and error for some forty-seven years has found that the continued desolation and purification in political dogma must give way in the long run to the rugged infinite vastness and permutations of human aspirations which still live by such bourgeois extolled virtues as friendship, loyalty, decency, compassion, and charity whilst the diseased bourgeois people still look to insipid emotions of "our native land" and "Mother Russia" for inspiration and spiritual stability.
For the above contrapuntal reasons Russia is not only in the doghouse from the Chinese Reds' point of view, for good and ample reasons, but she is also in trouble with the hardnosed Marxists who have espoused and continue to espouse the fanatical narrow strait-laced interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. Yet Russia for reasons of her own national good is in that position of paradox of having to maintain and stay on her new course of revisionism and inevitably incurring greater dissension amongst her rank and file and suffering centrifuge in her international following, at the same time fighting hard to retain her position as the leader of the true believers. The untenability of Russia's position is compounded by the irony that those leftists who are still her adherents and proponents are doing her a real disservice by chorusing or working for a united Communist front. This build-up pressure forces Russia to keep up a rigid farce to greater lengths for the sake of unity and face, and to exonerate herself by fighting for the carping criticisms that have been and will surely continually be leveled upon her by friend, sympathizer and foe alike as having failed in leadership should she tergiversate too apparently by not supporting Red China's satellite. North Vietnam. Indeed Russia has gone even further in the past as to include Red China in her corner only to have her teeth kicked in for her trouble.
Russia's Interest
Here is a situation which is of much more crucial purport than any single national situation where Communist power is required to push through a politically sticky wicket. The present North Vietnamese situation is one where the true Russian interest not only converges with that of the United States, since given a Hanoi victory in any shape would mean an ultimate victory for the Chinese Communists which they now need so badly. For the irrefutable geographical contiguity as well as propinquity makes Hanoi the inevitable vassal of aggrandizing Peiping. Moreover, painfully enough, Soviet Russia shows up better in dealing with the free world than with the Chinese Communists for Russia knows how to make and can count on the free world collectively or individually to be her whipping boy whenever such a part is needed. Whereas in every bout with her mortal enemy Russia because of her rationality and her right-or-left position cannot but come out second best at every encounter with the out-and-out desperado tactics with a "nothing to lose but everything to gain" posture of the Chinese Reds
Words of Warning
In an address delivered in Miami Beach, Florida, on November 6, 1958, I said:
"True enough, Red China covertly aspires to lead. In saying openly that she will overtake England industrially in fifteen years, she inadvertently is confessing to two things: first, that she is resorting to slave labor since it took England well-nigh two centuries to build up her present industrial empire. And second, that she harbors the inordinate ambition of taking away the leadership from Russia at some future time. Meanwhile, Mao and his henchmen are profuse in their professions of loyalty to Russia, and vow that in the inevitable Armageddon to come the Chinese Reds will contribute the colossal Chinese manpower to the Communist cause.
"When that giant struggle comes, Mao will be the only man in the world who will have made good his grandiloquent words: 'We can lose three hundred million and still have three hundred million left.' Only by adhering to Russia can Red China acquire the leadership and domination of the Communist world by outlasting the Russians through sheer number, only by adhering to Russia can Red China influence her master to fight another world war. But when Red China takes the place of leadership vacated by Russia, the free world will be indeed even more badly off since it would mean that probably hundreds of millions of people of the West as well as of China will have perished by then."
Seven years have elapsed since I thus spoke. As a student of Communism of many years, and especially knowing 1he workings of the Chinese Communist mind, it came as no surprise to me when I read a February 1 UPI Moscow dispatch. I quote: "The Kremlin has accused China of trying to provoke a war between the United States and the Soviet Union, it was learned tonight.
"The accusation was made in a secret memorandum of the Communist Party's ruling central committee that is being circulated throughout the nation among party members.
"This is the first time the new Kremlin team has told the party frankly about Peking's war-mongering and the unabated Chinese hostility against the Soviet Union."
Should we further doubt that it was and still is the design of the Chinese Communists to embroil Russia in a general war so that the Red Chinese will come out the real victor?
Service to Russia
The proponents of the Russian interest, be they right or left, would indeed do Russia as well as the free world a constructive service if they would pave the way for Russia to withdraw with grace from her position taken in Vietnam or indeed with any other such position she might perforce feel she must take as the champion and protector of fraternal countries. For Russia knows full well if heretofore colored by feil hope that in any settlement favorable 'to Hanoi it can now only redound entirely to Peiping's benefit if for no other reason than Russia's own geographic remoteness from Southeast Asia. And those who sing the refrain that the notion of a decisive military superiority over the land powers of Asia is a "dangerous fantasy," in this specific relation is knowingly or inadvertently working to the detriment of Russia and to the best interest of Red China. For every Russian exertion and effort crowned with victory in that part of the world can only mean manna from Heaven for Mao and the top fifty men in line of succession who, incidentally, as Mr. Dennis J. Doolin of Stanford University's Hoover Institute researched and found, will take an even harder line than Mao and Chou. The immediate reaction is to ask why. This is not difficult to understand and the reason not far to seek. We all know the platitude that nothing succeeds like success, and in this case the inheritor must in every way prove more aggressive and more worthy to be deserving of the inheritance by out-Maoing Mao, especially with forty-nine other possible gloating watchfully in the wings to pounce on any sign of weakness and every Communist faux pas.
It must be remarked in fairness from our experience in China that it has often been the wont of the directing Communist apparat not to give early indication to the men in the field of a possible change of policy, and they therefore are kept in the dark till the very last. This is partly because of the esoteric secretive nature of the bureaucracy, which is reluctant to part with any directive until the very last moment, and partly because of a relishing of its prerogative and power to transmit even a complete volte face purposely and crassly, when so ordered, unmindful of the embarrassment it will cause the agents in the field to have to make excuses, accommodations, and lame apologias when the moment for change or action has come to be. For that is something which the agents have to live down, not the faceless bureaucracy who slaves over reports, tactics, directives, and strategy in burning the midnight oil and whose merit and work are all but buried by the scintillating results of the field men who get the accolades, rewards, and advancements. And lastly a stealthy furtive feeling of superiority over all field agents, no matter how important in stature, who are expendable if need be whereas it, the bureaucracy, is the master· mind and the indispensable. In actuality a little consideration and pre-planning for change would make the transition far easier all around in the present turmoil of championing the long-range Russian cause, especially since the Communist world as well as the free world knows that the Chinese Communists in their demented mania for world conquest have crossed the Rubicon and have deliberately chosen to go beyond the point of no return in their relationship with the Soviet Union.
Containment But...
It is said that coming out of the recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, a supposedly spanking new American policy towards the Chinese Reds has emerged — " ... most pregnant phrase to be uttered in Washington in a long time ... " This magic phrase is "containment but not isolation. "
Last Tuesday, March 15, the New York Times front-paged Red Chinese reaction to Vice President Humphrey's benign and well-intentioned remark as the "kiss of Judas" and his overtures of friendship "disgusting." I hope Mr. Humphrey is not too put out by the ravings of madmen hell-bent on world destruction although I must say that the insults are calculated to humiliate him as much as possible, and that he in personifying the alleged new American policy would aim to return for more of the same so that the Chinese Communists could heap more obloquy and more verbal refuse on his head for the world to see. Incidentally this coming back for more of the same is exactly what some have suggested very recently on a television program. Is it that pampering and molly-coddling of the violent insane will replace therapy and cure, or is it that the symptoms were correctly diagnosed and purposely fuddied-duddied to make the United States look ridiculous and tragi-comic?
Gentlemen of the Press, whatever your personal proclivities, whatever your inclinations and shade of suasion as provender of intelligence as well as of intellect, culture and mass communication, it has fallen upon your shoulders the responsibility to work in synergy with all who abhor nuclear and thermo-nuclear destruction of home and hearth, and to curb realistically, thoroughly, and fundamentally the running sore that spreads suppuration on the body politic of Russia and the free world with equipotent virulence.
Even as we are gathered here the dark and tendentious design of the Chinese Communists goes on without abatement and surcease, and gathers force and momentum with the greater numerical production of nuclear bombs and the completion of thermo-nuclear missiles with a system of delivery no matter how crude as compared to the better engineered system of the United States. This day and age will be a decisive epoch as to whether humanity will survive—survive with damaged genes or survive at all—and civilization per se as we know it shall or shall not perish from the earth. Here I wish to quote Mr. Stewart Alsop's article of January 15, 1966: "President Kennedy was tragically right to worry almost to the point of obsession, as he did before he died, about the prospect of the Chinese Communists in control of the nuclear weapon. For there is a clear element of irrationality, of craziness, of paranoia in Communist China's view of the world."
And, in the very words of President Kennedy himself, "appeasing our enemies, compromising our commitments, purchasing peace at any price, disavowing our aims, our friends and obligations are actions which lead down the pathway to surrender," and may I add, ignominy.
Editor's Note: This is the text of Madame Chiang Kai-shek's address to the National Press Club in Washington, D. C., March 18, 1966.