What is "vision"? Vision implies penetrating insights into the meaning of life. True vision is closely allied with practicality and reality—with the possible. It is not illusion or hallucination. It is not impractical wishful thinking. True men of vision are not so much prophets and mere romantics. Rather are they fact-minded and fact-conscious thinkers who see things in their proper perspective and who have the moral courage to announce their truths to the world, regardless of prevailing fashions of thought.
A far-sighted man of the 18th Century, Walter Chalmers Smith, well defined "Vision" when he said: "All through life I see a cross—where Sons of God yield up their breath: there is no gain except by loss: there is no life except by death. There is no vision but by faith."
Certainly it was inspired vision, coupled with faith, which emboldened Dr. Sun Yat-sen, shortly after 1900, to launch a movement to overthrow the effete monarchy of the Manchus and, in 1912, to transform China into a modern republic, patterned upon the political institutions of the United States. And it was vision that strengthened his successor, President Chiang Kai-shek, to lead the Northern Expedition which wiped out the corrupt warlords and paved the way for the unification of China. And it was again vision which gave him the courage and the political realism to oppose the Chinese Communists whom he recognized, long before his contemporaries, as the future deadly menace to world peace.
Because his vision was balanced by a sense of the possible, he admitted the Chinese Communists into the national war effort against the Japanese aggressors in 1937 recognizing, that if he did not do so, they would ally themselves with the Japanese. Early among world statesmen he recognized the cynical opportunism of Communism and its willingness, to further Communist ends, to war upon its own people. He entered into the temporary cooperation with the Communists during the war with his eyes open.
It was vision, combined with faith, which persuaded President Chiang, at the end of the war, to resume the fight against the Chinese Communists after they had sabotaged the Marshall Mission effort to include them in a coalition national government. And in the end, when disaster came, it was vision which gave President Chiang the political wisdom to save a province of the Republic of China from Communism by moving the national government to the fortress island of Taiwan, from which Free Chinese can survive to fight again for the liberation of the submerged mainland.
There were similar instances of vision in the upbuilding of the great United States. Vision guided the explorers and the founding fathers who crossed the perilous ocean in the 17th Century to lay the foundations of a new nation in that hemisphere. Today, that same quality of vision is moving a strong America to give military and economic aid to the weaker and undeveloped countries which are now under acute threat from world Communism.
Such has been the role of vision in man's past history.
But as the democratic world faces the new problems of survival which are closing in upon it, one wonders if there are not signs of a dangerous weakening in its quality of vision for the future. There are signs that many of the free people are growing tired, midway in the struggle against Communism. Many of them, with vision weakening, are finding attraction in the idea of compromise and piece-meal surrender to their cruel enemy. They are ready to relax their efforts before the foeman has been defeated. Certainly, history's long story indicates that no wars were won by such failure of heart.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for courageous leaders to secure a hearing for their demands for a determined and unflinching stand against Communism by the Free World. Worse, outstanding spokesmen of the democratic world are beginning to engage in mutual recrimination. They are beginning to look for alibis, in the mistakes of other nations, for their own faults and weaknesses.
A year ago, it was Field Marshal Montgomery who declared that United States policy had worked "to destroy the influence of Britain, France and the Netherlands in Asia and Africa at a time when these countries might have been a stabilizing influence." And Sir Winston Churchill, in a press statement, warned that World War III could be avoided if the democratic countries maintain their unity, implying that there has been a failure of unity in the past.
It does not require a high order of vision to realize what is certainly going to happen if the democracies do not find a way to halt the present march toward catastrophe. Free people cannot say that they have not been warned. The enemy himself has spelt out the future for them. It was Khrushchev himself who blurted out, in a casual remark, that Communism will smash Democracy. And it was the Soviet theoretician, Dimitri Manuilsky, who, as long ago as 1930, clearly described Communist strategy for the present period.
"War is inevitable," Manuilsky declared. "Today, of course, we are not strong enough to attack. Our time will come in 20 or 30 years. In order to win, we shall need the element of surprise. The bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep, so we shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard-of concessions. The capitalistic countries—stupid and decadent—will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down, we shall smash them with our clenched fists."
The events of the last 29 years have been a horrifying fulfillment of this Manuilsky prognosis. Today, a total of one billion people are living under the yoke of Communism. A half billion more are living in the half way status of neutralism. The rest of the world lives an uneasy life of uncertainty and terror, fearful of sneak Soviet atomic attacks. With the familiar technique of the blackmailer, the Communist axis has terrorized the free world against taking any adequate measures of self-defense, under dread of provoking unannounced Soviet attack.
The recent years have seen the Communist advance reaching and penetrating a new continent-Africa. Using the magnetic issue of anti-colonialism, Russia is prompting native leaders in Guinea, in Kenya, in the Congo, in the Gold Coast, in South Africa to engage in ambitious revolutionary projects. Khrushchev telegraphed this new strategy to free people when he declared at the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party recently: "The complete abolition of the infamous system of colonization has been put on the agenda as one of the most acute and pressing problems."
There is a perceptible trend, on the part of Western leaders, to disengage their countries from the military commitments which have been containing the Communists. Such outstanding leaders of American public opinion as Walter Lippmann and George Kennan are talking about American withdrawal from Germany. At one time Dr. Adenauer was rightly alarmed at the prospect in Germany. If a settlement on terms agreeable to the Communists is decided upon in West and East Germany, a pattern will have been created for disengagement in other countries. Such a prospect is truly alarming to the weaker nations which have been trusting, for their survival, to the anti-Communist commitments of the large Western nations. The viciousness of one act of appeasement is that it sets up a chain reaction of further appeasements which can unbalance the whole Western position.
The strength of the Russian position is that it has two weapons which it can use alternately against the Free World. One is the weapon of threatened atomic and missile attack. The other is the weapon of Russian economic warfare, working upon the weaker nations through trade, loans and credits. One of the democratic nations which today is in acute peril from this new Soviet economic strategy is Japan.
The Communist world is making striking progress with its economic offensive. The total Russian foreign trade with Communist and non-Communist nations in 1957 aggregated 32,200,000,000 rubles. This was an increase over the totals for 1956 of 15 per cent. Red China, with its widescale use of slave labor, is progressing rapidly in some categories. If it succeeds even partially in its ambitious plan of industrialization, it will be in an excellent position to capture the markets of Southeast Asia, at the expense of the Free World.
There is reason to believe that Soviet Russia is banking strongly upon its ability to bring the Free World to its knees by economic measures. But if this fails, Russia has the ultimate weapon of nuclear attack upon the United States. It will use this weapon if it needs to. If nuclear war comes, Russia, according to European experts, does not contemplate total destruction of America's cities. The Russians have hinted that they believe the destruction of half a dozen key cities would so stun America that there would be as quick a move to surrender as Japan did in 1945 after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As a preliminary step, Russia is endeavoring to soften up American and Free World public opinion by shrewd psychological warfare. Recently Mr. George V. Allen, director of the United States Information Agency, reported that the Soviet Union and its satellites spent in 1957 a grand total of between $500,000,000 and $750,000,000 on propaganda aimed at the Free World, an increase of 20 per cent over propaganda spendings in 1956.
This huge propaganda campaign is beginning to produce results. The neutralist and uncommitted countries to whom Russia is beaming its broadcasts are getting a picture of America as a decadent nation, peopled by luxury-loving weaklings, which is about to go the way of Imperial Rome. In this mythology, the Russians are represented as the modern prototypes of the Barbarians who swarmed down into Italy under Alaric and ended the Roman Empire.
In the face of these deep tides which are now threatening the Free World, there has been an alarming decay of faith and zeal in democratic values among the non-Communist public. The number of men and women who believe that free way of life is worth fighting for is sadly shrinking. In the intelligentsia, there is growing cynicism and self-doubt. The crusading spirit, which burns so hotly among fanatical Communists, is conspicuously lacking among most non-Communists. To use the familiar phrase from Revelations, the West is suffering from a creeping Laodiceanism. Lukewarmness, passivity and fatalism has gripped many of our intellectual leaders in the face of the greatest moral crisis which had ever confronted mankind.
Those who are close to the educational field give us their opinion that at least 10,000 teachers in higher institutions of learning in the United States are sympathetic, in more or less degree, to the principles of Marxism. In the American churches, the same malady of Laodiceanism is omnipresent. The names of several thousand Christian clergymen, who have signed pacifist or Communist defense petitions circulated by functionaries of the American Communist Party, have been compiled by Congressional investigating committees. Some of these names are those of bishops or other high officials of their denominations. A painful example of such willingness to identify the Christian church with causes promoted by the Communists was the unanimous vote of the 600 clergymen attending the November 21, 1958 meeting of the World Order Study Conference in Cleveland, called by the National Council of Churches, in favor of American recognition of Red China.
Undoubtedly the writings of Arnold J. Toynbee, the British historian, and author of "An Historian's Approach to Religion" published in 1956, have influenced the so-called "liberal" Protestant's thinking on Communism to a large degree. To Toynbee and his disciples, Communism is only a Western heresy, a Western criticism of the West's failure to live up to her own Christian principles in the economic and social life of a professedly Christian society.
In his "Civilization on Trial" (1948) and his "The World and the West" (1953), Toynbee said this about Communism: "Communism is a weapon of Western .... and indictment of Western practice .... Communism—a Western heresy adopted by an ex-Orthodox Christian Russia-is just as much part and parcel of the Graeco-Judaic heritage as the Western way of life is ... (Therefore) even if one day the Communist dispensation were to fulfill the Russian Communists' hopes of spreading all over the face of the planet, a worldwide triumph of Communism over Capitalism would not mean the triumph of alien culture, since Communism, unlike Islam, is itself derived from a Western source, being a reaction from and a criticism of the Western Capitalism that it combats. The adoption of this exotic Western doctrine as the revolutionary creed of twentieth-century Russia, so far from signifying that Western culture is in jeopardy, really shows how potent its (the Western culture's) ascendancy has come to be."
There are indications that Toynbee's astounding thesis is widely shared by many of his fellow Protestants. That being so, is there any wonder that the Cleveland Conference took such a complacent attitude toward Communism! Along the same line, a Canadian journalist, Elmore Philpott, columnist for the Vancouver Sun, who visited the China mainland in 1958, likened the commune of the Chinese Communists to that described in Chapter II of the Acts in the New Testament.
Protestantism has grown tremendously in late years in America. According to the latest statistics, church membership in continental United States now totals 104,189,678, equal to 61 per cent of the estimated population. Of these, 59,808,707 are Protestants. How many of them are sharing the views of Toynbee about Communism? The Cleveland conference vote leads us to believe that a much larger number of them are Toynbeeites than it is comfortable to think.
In embracing the Toynbee thesis that Christianity can accept Communism as a part of its world, it is unthinkable that the church leaders truthfully reflect the attitude of the church membership, nor even of the rank and file of the Protestant clergy. In this connection there is the evidence of the poll of 8,752 Protestant preachers which was conducted by a committee headed by Dr. Daniel A. Poling after the Cleveland resolution was passed by the World Order Study Conference. Of the 8,752 questioned a total of 7,437 declared that they were opposed to American recognition of Red China. Obviously free people are witnessing the spectacle of church officials who are out of step with their own membership.
Many American Christians incline toward conciliatory attitudes toward Communism because they have never had close personal contacts with Communism in action. If they were forced to live with Communist rulers, as the persecuted Christians of the China mainland are now living, they would have quite a different picture of Communism in their minds. Only the other day, information about the present status of the Christian churches in Shanghai was available. On the eve of the Communist conquest of Shanghai, there were 200 functioning Protestant churches in Shanghai. Today, after ten years of Communism, the 200 have been reduced to 12, and the 12 continue to stay open only at the price of becoming political arms of the Communist police state. What has become of the pastors of these closed churches, it will be asked. They have been sent out as prisoners to the state farms where they are now working as slave laborers. Certainly, Communism takes on a different hue to those who know it in its hideous, terrorist reality instead of in the idealized masquerade which it presents in its books.
Where there is no vision, the people perish. The voices of appeasement and coexistence which are heard today are the voices of the visionless. The voices of neutrality, in the face of the Communist evil, are the voices of those who flinch before the hard moral decisions of today.
The tragedy of our times is that too many in high places, in Europe, in the Near East and in the Far East, are deluding themselves with the belief that free people can avoid the rigors of a showdown with the Communists because, if they only play for time, the Communist system will collapse from within, or else it will modify itself so that it is no longer a threat to the Free World. This is the most irresponsible sort of wishful thinking. It is an alibi for inaction. Actually, time is working, not for the Free World, but for the Communists. If it is too timid to meet the Communist challenge when the threat present itself, inevitably the control of events will pass from the hands of free men. Again, free people are showing themselves to be visionless in the face of destiny.
What many of these wishful thinkers fail to recognize is that, in so acting, they are falling into the trap which the Communists have deliberately set for them. The mentality which many free men assume is precisely the mentality which the Communists are trying to induce. Free men are becoming the victims of Communist psychological warfare. They are being deluded by Khrushchev's false plea that what he wants is "Peaceful competition" between the Communist and the non-Communist systems. As Manuilsky pointed out, Communism is first seeking to disarm the Free World mentally as a precedent step to the physical disarming which will bring it to catastrophe.
It is necessary to cherish and preserve vision, if the Free World is to survive. With vision, the Christian world is unconquerable. Without vision, its future is inscrutable. Sometimes, as in the words of Mr. Smith, there can be no life except by death. But mankind, if it is to be worthy of its heritage, must be prepared to face that great imperative.