SEMANTICS AND STRUCTURE OF DISINFORMATION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88B00443R001500080034-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 14
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 24, 2007
• Sequence Number: 34
• Publication Date: June 8, 1984
• Content Type: MEMO

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8 June 1984
MEMORANDUM FOR: Deputy Director for Intelligence
FROM: Director of Central Intelligence
SUBJECT: Semantics and Structure of Disinformation
Here is material I talked to you about this morning on our
vulnerability to words, verbal formulations and concepts used as
weapons against our security interests. I am groping around for
a way to get some concentrated brain power, high level policy
attention and possible public attention paid to this subject
--
perhaps a small analytical group, perhaps a conference, perhaps a.
research program.
William J. Casey
Attachments:
Commentar
June 1984
y,
Copies of correspondence w
25X1
25X1
CONFIDENTIAL
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Commentary
Can the Democracies Survive?
Jean-Francois Revel
D EMOCRACY may, after all, turn out to
have been a historical accident, a
brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.
If so, in its modern sense of a form of society
reconciling governmental efficiency with legiti-
macy, authority with individual freedoms, democ-
racy will have lasted a little over two centuries, to
judge by the speed at which the forces bent on its
destruction are growing. And, really, only a tiny
minority of the human race will have experienced
it. In both time and space, democracy fills a very
small corner. The span of roughly two-hundred
years applies only to the few countries where it
first appeared, still very incomplete, at the end of
the 18th century. Most of the other countries in
which democracy exists adopted it under a century
ago, under half a century ago, in some cases less
than a decade ago.
Democracy probably could endure if it were the
only type of political organization in the world.
But it is not basically structured to defend itself
against outside enemies seeking its annihilation,
especially since the latest and the most dangerous
of these external enemies-Communism-parades
as democracy perfected when it is in fact the abso-
lute negation of democracy, the current and com-
plete model of totalitarianism.
Democracy is by its very nature turned inward.
Its vocation is the patient and realistic improve-
ment of life in a community. Communism, on the
other hand, necessarily looks outward because it
presides over a failed society and is incapable of
engendering a viable one. The nomenklatura, the
body of bureaucrat-dictators who govern the sys-
tem, has no choice, therefore, but to direct its
abilities toward expansion abroad. It is also more
skillful, more persevering than democracy in de-
fending itself. Democracy tends to ignore, even
deny, threats to its existence because it loathes
It sN-FRANc0Is REVEL, the distinguished French political
u,mtncntator, is the author of lVithout Marx or Jesus and
The Totalitarian Temptation, among other books. The
pre~cnt essay is drawn from his new book, a long and de-
railcYl analysis of the disadvantages from which democracies
cufer in their conflict with totalitarianism. Entitled How
1)ernocracies Perish, it will be published by Doubleday later
thi% %car. Copyright ? 1983 by jean-Francois Revel; transla-
t,u" copyright ? 1984 by William F. Byron.
doing what is needed to counter them. It awakens
only when the danger becomes deadly, imminent,
evident. By then, either there is too little time left
for it to save itself, or the price of survival has be-
come crushingly high.
In addition to its external enemy (once Nazi,
now Communist), whose intellectual energy and
economic power are primarily destructive, democ-
racy faces an internal enemy whose right to exist is
written into the law itself.
Totalitarianism liquidates its internal enemies
or smashes opposition as soon as it arises; it uses
methods that are simple and infallible because
they are undemocratic. But democracy can defend
itself from within only very feebly; its internal
enemy has an easy time of it because he exploits
the right to disagree that is inherent in democracy.
His aim of destroying democracy itself, of actively
seeking an absolute monopoly of power, is shrewd-
ly hidden behind the citizen's legitimate right to
oppose and criticize the system. Paradoxically,
democracy offers those seeking to abolish it a
unique opportunity to work against it legally.
They can even receive almost open support from
the external enemy without its being seen as a
truly serious violation of the social contract. The
frontier is vague, the transition easy between the
status of a loyal opponent wielding a privilege
built into democratic institutions, and that of an
adversary subverting those institutions. To totali-
tarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive;
democracy, for fear of betraying its principles,
treats subversives as mere opponents.
What we end up with in what is conventionally
called Western society is a topsy-turvy situation in
which those seeking to destroy democracy appear
to be fighting for legitimate aims, while the de-
fenders of democracy are pictured as repressive
reactionaries. Identification of democracy's in-
ternal-and external adversaries with the forces of
progress, legitimacy, even peace, discredits and
paralyzes the efforts of people who are only trying
to preserve their institutions.
Already besieged by this combination of hostile
forces and negative logic, the democracies are also
harassed by guilt-producing accusations and in-
timidation such as no other political system has
ever had to tolerate. Like the "industry of vice"
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0
that reform groups used to talk about, there is and foes with reasons why defending itself would
now an "industry of blame"; it promotes the now
universally accepted notion that everything bad
that happens in the Third World is the fault of
forces necessarily and exclusively located in the
"more advanced" or "rich" countries, meaning, in
almost every case-and for good reason-the
democracies.
The major shareholders in this industry of
blame are, first, the despots who oppress the peo-
ples of that unfortunate Third World with im-
punity. Next come the Communist countries, ex-
ploiting the underdevelopment abroad that they
cannot remedy at home and converting the poor
nations into totalitarian military fortresses.
Here too, in what are termed North-South rela-
tions, foreign and domestic enemies of democracy
are converging; their maneuvers are of no help at
all in improving the lot of the poor countries, but
they are marvelously effective in undermining the
democracies' confidence in their own legitimacy,
their own right to exist. The "progressive" support
some Westerners give to the worst of the Third
World regimes is merely a geographical relocation
of what for sixty years was "progressive" support
of the Soviet Union and, later, Mao Zedong's
China: complicity by a part of the Western Left
against the peoples of the less-developed countries
and with the tyrants who enslave, brutalize, starve,
and exterminate them.
It seems, then, that the combination of forces-
at once psychological and material, political and
moral, economic and ideological-intent on the
extinction of democracy is more powerful than
those bent on keeping it alive. Democracy is not
given credit for its achievements and benefits, but
it pays an infinitely higher price for its failures,
its inadequacies, and its mistakes than its adver-
saries do.
I NDEED, democratic civilization is the
first in history to blame itself because
another power is working to destroy it. The dis-
tinguishing mark of our century is not so much
Communism's determination to erase democracy
from our planet, or its frequent success in pursu-
ing that end, as it is the humility with which de-
mocracy not only consents to its own obliteration,
but contrives to legitimize the victory of its dead-
liest enemy.
It is natural for Communism to try with all its
might to eliminate democracy, since the two sys-
tems are incompatible and Communism's survival
depends on the annihilation of democracy. That
the Communist offensive is more successful, more
skillful than democracy's resistance, will be seen
by history as just another example of one power
outmaneuvering another. But it is less natural and
more novel that the stricken civilization should
not only be deeply convinced that it deserves to
be defeated, but that it should regale its friends
be immoral and, in any event, superfluous, useless,
even dangerous.
Civilizations losing confidence in themselves:
an old story in history. They stop believing they
can survive, because of an internal crisis that is
both insoluble and intolerable, or under threat
from an external enemy so strong that the only
remaining choice is between servitude and sui-
cide. I do not believe democracy is in either pre-
dicament, but it acts as if it were in both. It
seems almost eager to believe in its own guilt and
in the inevitable result of that guilt. Democracy's
predecessors hid such beliefs as shameful even
when they thought, or knew, they were doomed.
But democracy is zealous in devising arguments
to prove the justice of its adversary's case and to
lengthen the already overwhelming list of its own
inadequacies.
Are these inadequacies real or imaginary? Some
are real, of course, just as there is real cause to
blame specific democracies or the democracies in
general for some of the injustice and misfortune
in the world. But many of these alleged inade-
quacies and much of the democracies' responsibility
for the world's ills are exaggerated or conjectural
or purely imaginary. And besides, are those real
faults serious enough to provide moral justifica-
tion for totalitarianism to exterminate the de-
mocracies? And why are the imaginary flaws so
widely credited in the democracies themselves,
which thus consent to their own calumniation?
If democracy does succumb, it will not be to
the sort of internal crisis, an essential lack of
viability, that nearly wrecked it between the two
world wars. From 1919 to 1939, the democracies
seemed to be eaten from within by an irresistible
malady that raised a rash of right-wing dictator-
ships. One after another, they capitulated to au-
thoritarian or totalitarian governments born of
their own inability to govern themselves. In Cen-
tral Europe, almost none of the parliamentary
regimes established after World War I were still
functioning ten years later. In Western Europe,
first Italy went fascist, then Portugal, Germany,
Spain. Of the great European powers, only Britain
and France remained faithful to democracy, and
in France democracy was so feeble, so incoherent,
and so beleaguered that there were grave fears for
its survival.
The situation now, as the century nears its end,
is nothing like that. For the first time since 1922,
when Mussolini took power in Rome, all of West-
ern Europe is democratic. The Greek colonels'
seven-year dictatorship (1967-74) ended with their
fall and a reinforcement of democracy there. In
Spain, the Putsch dreaded since 1975 was tried
and failed. The most dangerous, most unrelenting
attacks against democracy have come from the
revolutionary Left: red terrorism in Italy, Spain,
and West Germany, and a minority attempt in
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CAN THAMOCRACIES SURVIVE?/21
1975 to saddle Portugal with a Communist mili-
tary dictatorship.
Despite these trials, the old democracies have
held firm and the new ones have survived and
even developed. The laborious effort the Left peri-
odically makes to frighten people with the specter
of a neo-Nazi peril in Europe always collides with
the brute fact that none of the fascist movements
in Europe today has reached party status or has
managed to elect a member of any parliament. As
for the stupidly inflated notion of an "extra-par-
liamentary Left" that flourished in Italy and Ger-
many around 1970, it expressed nothing more than
the revolutionary Left's inability to seduce enough
voters into making it parliamentary.
Yet while democratic institutions are no longer
challenged politically from within, the societies,
civilization, and values democracy has created are
being increasingly questioned. Self-criticism is, of
course, one of the vital springs of democratic civili-
zation and one of the reasons for its superiority
over all other systems. But constant self-condemna-
tion, often with little or no foundation, is a source
of weakness and inferiority in dealing with an
imperial power that has dispensed with such scru-
ples. Believing one is always right, even when the
facts say otherwise, is as blinding and weakening
to a society as to an individual. But assuming one
is always wrong, whatever the truth may be, is
discouraging and paralyzing.
Not only do the democracies today blame them-
selves for sins they have not committed, they
have formed the habit of judging themselves by
ideals so inaccessible that the defendants are auto-
matically guilty. Clearly a civilization that feels
guilty for everything it is and does and thinks will
lack the energy and conviction to defend itself
when its existence is threatened. Drilling the idea
into a civilization that it deserves defending only
if it can incarnate absolute justice is tantamount
to urging that it let itself die or be enslaved.
T HE same problem has invariably
plagued the foreign policy of the de-
mocracies in the struggle against Communist im-
perialism. From the day President Truman de-
clared that "it must be the policy of the United
States to support free peoples who are resisting at-
tempted subjugation by armed minorities or by
outside pressure," the democracies were locked of
their own free will into an almost insurmountable
bind. For they laid down the condition that to
have the right to resist absorption into the Com-
munist empire, a country must be irreproachably
democratic. In so doing, the West condemned it-
self to failure or opprobrium. It became the pris-
oner of an insoluble, self-imposed dilenmma: either
it allowed most of the planet to sink under Com-
munist domination, or, too often, it would be
called on to protect countries that did not have
democratic governments.
The trap was a boon to Communist propaganda,
which on this point was widely supported by the
liberal Left in the democracies. And honesty does
command that any democrat with consistent ideas
deplore the hypocrisy of defending human rights
and individual freedom while supporting authori-
tarian governments. The best of these may be no
more than relics or revivals of archaic power struc-
tures, the worst are violent, police-run fascist re-
gimes, or pseudo-democracies where elections are
held only spasmodically; rarely, if ever, are they
genuinely faithful to the ideal of the rule of law
on which the West claims to base the legitimacy
of its diplomacy and its defense.
From the outset, then, the game has been un-
fair. Strategic necessity is regarded as justification
enough for a Soviet presence in another country,
or a Soviet alliance with or aid to that country;
anyone calling for further excuses is requested,
even in the West itself, to mind his own business.
A democracy, on the other hand, is not granted
the right to defend the vital barricades of its own
security unless the democratic imperative is s'
obeyed. If it is not, the West's duty is evidently!
to cede the territory in question to the Commu-1
nists who are unhampered by this democratic
obligation.
Thus, defending the independence of South
Vietnam in the 1960's and 70's was tinged with
infamy because the South Vietnamese regime was
hardly one of exemplary purity. But the Hanoi
regime had no need to furnish guarantees of its
purity to win the right to defend itself or to at-
tack its neighbors. Progressive and even centrist
opinion throughout the world granted North Viet-
nam "popular" legitimacy on trust, which its his-
tory after 1975 did not support, but which its
totalitarian and aggressive behavior even before
1975 never seemed to diminish.
Better still: if Moscow's worldwide strategic in-
terests so require, the Soviet Union is allowed to
ally itself with traditional-style fascist regimes that
dispense with even a facade of progressivism. And
the Soviets can do so without bringing down on
their heads the vehement criticism that world
opinion levels at any democratic nation attempt-
ing the same expedient. The Soviet Union and
Cuba, for example, loudly took Argentina's side
against Britain in the 1982 Falkland Islands war
simply because it was obviously in the Kremlin's
interest to oppose the Western democracies; sud-
denly, no one in the Communist world minded
the evil international reputation of the "odious
and bloody fascist dictatorship" of the junta in
Buenos Aires.
The Soviet Union, then, is licensed by most
people to safeguard its economic interests and cap-
italize on its strategic advantages by realistic links
with any government notorious for its disregard
of human rights. But we hear only clamor and 1
vituperation when a Western country is cornered
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into collaboration with South Africa or the Shah's
Iran or Turkey.
This double standard gives the Soviet empire
an automatic advantage over the West: it not only
Ican defend itself and expand without having to
bother about the rules governing the foreign
policy of the democracies, but its satellites and
1 clients are also exempted. This is really a two-
pronged advantage: although it need not respect
human rights at home, the Soviet empire is free
to condemn violations, real or fictitious, anywhere
else, to exploit them and set its agents to exploit-
ing them. It can even provoke violations, using
terrorism to elicit repression in the Western coun-
tries or those associated with them.
The Soviet Union, then, enjoys the privilege of
being entitled not only to defend its empire, but
to enlarge it without being judged on the basis of
its subject states' standards of living, social justice,
political freedoms, or respect for human rights.
When subjugated peoples rise against Commu-
nism, the West usually refrains from helping them,
thus recognizing the legitimacy of Communist
domination in all circumstances. The Commu-
nists, on the other hand, recognize the legitimacy
of no government outside their empire, least of
all in the democratic countries.
Conversely, the democracies suffer the theoreti-
cal handicap in their struggle with the Soviet
Union of being responsible on all the above-
mentioned grounds both for their own behavior
and for that of their allies. For example, when
military governments took over in Greece in 1967,
and in Turkey ten years later, the question im-
mediately arose in the democracies of whether
these countries, which had broken faith with de-
mocracy, deserved to remain within the Western
defense system. But when Poland declared a state
of martial law to allow its army to shore up the
shaky Communist-party dictatorship, Westerners
immediately argued that no real liberalization is
possible in a country like Poland because it is a
vital strategic zone for the Soviet Union. Yet
Turkey is just as essential to the West as Poland
is to the Soviets. Driving it out of NATO, or even
suspending weapons shipments to the Turkish
army (which was done because of the Greco-Turk-
ish conflict over Cyprus' in 1974), means opening
a fatal breach in the Atlantic alliance's southern
flank.
D ETRACTORS of the United States and
the "free world"-the expression is
usually employed as a terrn7of derision, as though
there were not really a free world and a slave
world-have always maintained that we cannot
fight in the name of democracy by consorting with
non-democratic countries. And, of course, it would
be ideal if the democracies could survive by
defending only other democracies. In most cases,
however, this moral ideal runs up against local
?
traditions of government or de-facto situations
the West cannot easily alter. President Carter's
human-rights policy, under which he suspended
American aid to the dictatorships in Argen-
tina, Chile, and Bolivia, produced no political
improvement in those countries, but the Soviet
Union leaped into the breach to increase tradI
with them. In Iran, Carter hastened the fall o
what was certainly a detestably tyrannical regim
-which was succeeded by a much worse one.
It takes a profound ignorance of history to
blame American imperialism alone for the long
Latin American tradition of coups d'etat, military
dictatorships, civil wars, corruption, revolution,
bloody terror, and repression; all this goes back to
the very founding of independent states nearly
two centuries ago. On the African continent, it is
striking that one-man, one-party rule has tri-
umphed almost everywhere, in North Africa and
Black Africa, in the former French colonies as in
the former Belgian and British colonies, in "pro-
gressive" and "moderate" regimes alike. Even such
leaders as President-for-Life Kenneth Kaunda in
Zambia and Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Robert
Mugabe, after opting for multiparty systems when
their countries received independence, soon
changed their minds on the ground that one-party
systems are "more in tune with the African char-
acter." Some of the most barbarous examples of
internal genocide, like the slaughter in Burundi,
had nothing at all to do with Western "imperial-
ism"; neither have some of Africa's most mon-
strous tyrants, such as Uganda's Idi Amin. And for
the people of Uganda, the country's "liberation"
from Amin by troops from "progressive" Tan-
zania inaugurated an era of suffering and martyr-
dom that has been every bit as abominable as the
one that preceded it.
In any case, the free world's moral turpitude
and political inconsistency are recognized, pro-
claimed, and condemned whenever it collaborates
with largely or wholly undemocratic governments
that violate human rights, whether it merely ac-
cepts them passively or assists them actively. To
escape this contradiction and avoid condemnation
before the tribunal of free-world opinion, the
West must therefore deny itself the support, in its
struggle against Soviet expansionism, of any coun-
try that is undemocratic and disrespectful of
human rights. This principle means that the right
of the democracies to defend themselves must be
subordinated to the conversion of the whole
world to democracy. Clearly, this can only lead to
the disappearance of what subsists of democracy
in today's world.
In short, without always going so far as to ap-
prove, we nevertheless consider it natural for the
Soviet Union to defend its interests, increase its
power, install its henchmen through a craftily
spaced series of coups d'etat and purges. No one
asks these imperialists to make the people they
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CAN THE I OCRACIES SURVIVE?/23
capture happy; no one thinks the Communists can
be scolded into retreating. Nor does anyone in the
democratic camp recognize his own right-not
openly, at least-to fight Soviet imperialism with
its own weapons. Instead, the free world again
risks being accused of impure complicity with a
reactionary "feudal" regime when it defends Saudi
Arabia, say, against the undermining and subver-
sion that the Soviet Union and its agents, includ-
ing the Libyans, have been carrying on there for
years. The moral is that the Soviet Union must be
allowed to take over the Arabian peninsula unless
all the countries there mold themselves to Western
democratic ideals, an eventuality I would wish for
but scarcely expect, at least in the immediate
future, which is all that counts.
Also at stake in the immediate or very
near future is the fate of southern
Africa, especially that of the Republic of South
Africa, which has earned the rightful hostility of
all defenders of human rights for its official policy
of racial segregation. That it should be excluded
from all international sports events is not sur-
prising-until we remember that the Soviet
Union, the People's Republic of China, North
Korea, and Rumania, which have as many or more
human-rights blots on their records, do take part
in these events.
This is another example of the double standard.
But athletics is just a side issue here. What really
matters is whether the West should, as the most
enlightened and respectable voices of Western
public opinion recommend, refuse any political
and strategic cooperation with South Africa until
apartheid has been eliminated. Considering that,
at best, it would take a long time to end racial
segregation in South Africa, that the Soviet Union
is already strongly entrenched in the region, and
that the slow process of reform might be radically
accelerated by an uprising of South Africa's blacks,
the West might gain little from abandoning
South Africa and would certainly be seriously
weakened. For, as we know, the sea route around
the Cape of Good Hope is the main channel for
our supplies of oil from the Persian Gulf. More-
over, South Africa's soil holds most of the world's
deposits of rare minerals outside the Soviet Union,
supplying most of the metals needed by the in-
dustrialized countries.
In other words, if South Africa were to come
under Soviet influence, Moscow would control not
only its own vast mineral resources, but also
those of South Africa and Namibia, where the pro-
Communist SWAPO (Southwest African People's
Organization) is likely to take power. The Soviet
Union would then have a stranglehold on most
and, in some cases, all the minerals vital to our
industries. It could block oil shipments to us-if
it had not already shut them off at the source
along the Persian Gulf. That kind of economic
power would make the Soviet Union master of
the West without recourse to war, nuclear or
conventional, in Europe.
The Soviet Union's great strength lies in its
freedom to invade areas where history has left the
decaying remnants of archaic regimes that are
important to the West's security or are sources of
vital materials. Never mind that these regimes are
replaced, as they always are, by bloodier, more re-
pressive Communist police states and that the
change leaves the area's poor more starved than
they were before. The Soviets still come out ahead.
For local and world opinion perceive the relative
advantages of the old regime and the horrors of
Communist putrefaction only after the new re-
gime is in power and irreversible.
When the West tries to protect archaic regimes
or those of "modernistic authoritarians" like the
Shah of Iran from disintegration, or attempts to
restrain their abuses, it cannot help seeming to
defend the Right against the Left, the past against
the future, the billionaires against the poverty-
stricken masses. The fact that when the Commu-
nist Left overturns the Right it brings with it ram-
pant famine, the camps, and the boat people never
works as a preventive. If the West tries to pressure
an archaic regime into becoming more liberal,
either it is accused of "interference" by outraged
nationalists, or its well-meaning proselytizing
shoves the country into unforeseeable chaos, as
exemplified by the Islamic revolution in Iran. And
while the Ayatollah's bloody terror may now be
partly anti-Communist for essentially religious
reasons, the Kremlin knows very well that in the
long run, when the brink of anarchy is reached,
Iran may topple into the Soviet camp, but is un-
likely ever to tip back into the free world.
The Soviet Union's advantage over the free
world is that neither world opinion nor, of course,
its own muzzled public expects it to preach to its
allies before associating with them, or to hold on
to its satellites by any method but sheer force; it
is not even required to provide enough food for
the peoples it absorbs into its imperial system.
But "international opinion"-the phrase de-
scribes part of the free world's public opinion plus
Soviet propaganda-will not accept violation of
the rules of democracy by the West's friends. Even
when such countries as Taiwan, South Korea,
Malaysia, and Singapore develop thriving econo-
mies that most other nations in the Third World
envy and that would bring cries of admiration
from the Western Left if they blossomed under
Soviet banners, they are not appreciated. For they
have curtailed their citizens' freedom. The social-
ist regimes, of course, have obliterated freedom
without even achieving comparable prosperity.
THIS inequality of duties that so favors
the Communists over the free world,
however, prevents no one from turning around
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and equating the two sides when argument re-
quires it. The technique for doing this seems fair
but is in fact discriminatory: it simply consists of
lumping the democracies and the Soviets together
in iniquity.
This technique represents a change of tactics.
Almost throughout the 20th century, the politic-
ally cross-eyed Left in the democracies has un-
sheathed its fury only against the crimes of the
capitalist world. Around 1970, the amnesia that
periodically rejected unsavory. disclosures about
the Communist world began to show cracks. Tell-
tale scars remained after each new cleansing abso-
lution. Soon the mass of facts grew too dense to
deny out of hand. At this point a new hoax was
devised.
It consisted of admitting the existence of Com-
munist crimes and failures provided these could
instantly be matched by equivalents in the capi-
talist world. Communism was now absolved not
because it never sins, but because the democracies
sin as grievously. In this new dialectical game,
everyone is free, without necessarily being dishon-
est, to retail the misdeeds and failings of totalitar-
ian Communism, but on condition that we hasten
to present their capitalist twins. Any deviation
from the rule is immediately vilified as "selective
indignation" and earns the severe censure of im-
partial players.
For example, a doctrinally pure French Social-
ist, Louis Mermaz, president of the National As-
sembly since 1981, replied to a reporter's question
about the gulags: "I am as horrified as you are by
the gulags, which are a perversion of Commu-
nism. But I ask that you also condemn that mon-
strosity of the capitalist system: hunger through-
out the world that kills 50 million people each
year, 30 million of them children." The retort,
remarkable for its speed, is less so for its objec-
tivity. For the parallel is only apparent: the gu-
lags are a "perversion" of Communism, but fam-
ine, according to the Socialist leader, is a product
of the basic nature of capitalism. And while the
magic of parallelism makes the Communist sin
almost venial, that of capitalism remains mortal.
Indeed, absolution is usually a one-way grant-to
forgive the horrors of Communism. It seems un-
likely that, if questioned on famine in the world,
Mermaz would have replied with a diatribe
against the gulags; he would have protested vio-
lently against the shocking malnutrition of some
of our fellow humans, and he would have been
right. That the gulags exist does not make Third
World poverty less morally intolerable. But by
what sorcery is the reverse true?
Besides, the magician was using phony statistics.
As demographers know, some 50 million people
die in the world every year. They can't all die of
starvation and three-fifths of them can't be chil-
dren. The fight against infant mortality in the
poor countries has reduced its incidence, which is
?
why their populations are increasing. Nutrition-
ists estimate the number of deaths annually due
to malnutrition at 10 percent of the total and this
includes the Communist countries, which slightly
weakens the indictment of capitalism. Death from
starvation in the Communist world may be better
hidden, but the victims are just as dead as any
others. Mao's successors have confirmed what
demographers had already determined from their
study of Chinese population patterns: that tens of
millions of Chinese died of starvation in 1960-70.
A final objection to the Mermaz comparison:
the gulags came into being by deliberate political
decisions of Communist governments, whereas
historically, capitalism has in fact rid Europe of
the periodic famines that plagued it until the
middle of the 18th century, as they now do the
less-developed countries. Capitalism has even, be-
gun to relieve starvation in some of the poorer
countries, India and Brazil for example, which
now export foodstuffs. Much, enormously much,
remains to be done everywhere before all man-
kind can enjoy the high nutritional standard that
not even the capitalist West reached until the
19th century. But this problem has nothing what-
ever to do with the question at issue: the delib-
erate creation by an organized political regime of
a repressive concentration-camp 'system that dou-
bles as a system of government.
I Am not going here into why industrial
capitalism, the first. and only system of
production that has wrested people from penury
and that could perform the same service for those
still experiencing penury, is the most decried. Nor
will I waste time arguing at length that since the
l8th century, the nations where industrial capital-
ism has developed also happen to be those where
modern democracy took root. This does not mean
that these countries have kept consistent faith
with democracy, or that democracy is found wher-
ever capitalism goes. But it does mean that two
centuries of history are witness to a general con-
comitance between capitalism and democracy. I
will only note that this monumental file of evi-
dence has been filched and that the democracies
themselves have adopted the Communists' image
of the world and their perspective on history.
The falsest and most pernicious characteristic
of this image and this perspective lies probably in
the antithesis between socialism and capitalism,
between totalitarianism and democracy. This func-
tions in most minds as an interpretive grid, even
for those opposed to socialism. Its imposition is
not the least of disinformation's victories, for this
disinformation no longer bears on events, but on
ideas; it is philosophical disinformation, a sort of
ideological mole that has burrowed into the under-
standing most of us have of these forces.
Adopting this grid means accepting the prin-
ciple that any regime that is less than perfectly
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democratic may be likened to totalitarianism and
so loses its right to defend itself against Commu-
nism. Since the world is full of governments that
are neither totalitarian nor democratic, their
futures are sealed. For one thing, because none
of the democracies, even those recognized as such,
is perfect, and since there are oppressive features
to any society, which regime can claim a genuine
right to defend itself against Communism? None.
And, following the same line of reasoning, if all
that need be done to legitimize Communism is to
show that capitalism has its faults, its vices. and
crises, then let world power be turned over to the
Communists at once, on the principle that the best
way to correct a limp is to cut off both legs.
The real antithesis is not that of totalitarianism
to democracy or Communism to capitalism, but of
totalitarian Communism to all the rest. Commu-
nism is a necrosis of economics, totalitarianism a
necrosis of politics, of the body civic and of cul-
ture. As a dead society, totalitarianism can be con-
trasted with countless social forms now and in the
past that cannot be called democratic as the term
is understood in a few societies today, but which
were not and are not dead, either. Medieval Eu-
rope, Ming China, African, Polynesian, and Amer-
ican societies before their contact with Europeans,
the France of Louis XV and Napoleon III, Eliza-
bethan England, the Spain of Philip IV, India
under the Gupta dynasty and the Germany of
Kant's day were neither democratic nor totalita-
rian, but they were all living societies that, each
in its own way, created valuable civilizations.
The existence of injustice, persecution, oppres-
sion in a group is one thing; for a group to be a
negation of human nature in every aspect of its
structure and ideology is something else again.
This is the group to which totalitarianism be-
longs. True, today we believe that to fulfill them-
selves, all societies should aspire to democracy,
progress toward it, and finally achieve it. I cer--
tainly do. Nevertheless, thousands of social or-
ganizations down through history, while not com-
parable to modern democracies, were not nega-
tions of humanity and did contribute elements of
civilization to our present patchwork culture.
Unlike capitalism, Communism is not an eco-
nomic system, it is a political system that must
necessarily asphyxiate an economy. We should
therefore refuse to lump Communism in with
other authoritarian systems or them with it. Total-
itarianism endangers not democracy alone, but
life itself. Communism is not simply one despotic
political system among many, or one inefficient
and unjust economic system among others. In nor-
mal life, despotism and inefficiency are among the
rare qualities that can be corrected, as is shown
by all of history-except the history of Commu-
nism. To survive, Communism seeks to destroy not
just existing democracy, but every possibility of
democracy.
Any society of any type in the world today can
accede to democracy, with a single exception: Com-
munist society, which cannot go democratic with-
out destroying itself. Understandably, then, total-
itarian strategists try to reverse or block this ten-
dency in the still malleable world around them.
'What is less easy to understand is that they can
recruit some of their assiduous disciples from
among democracy's guides and thinkers.
B UT recruit then they do. Broad sectors
of public opinion and of the West's
political and cultural elite see the democracies as
more reactionary, more damaging to the Third
World, more aggressive militarily, especially as
regards nuclear warfare, than the Soviet Union
and its satellites. Westerners who favor an effec-
tive nuclear deterrent and a verifiable balance of
forces are still viewed as "conservatives," "right-
wingers," "warmongers," or, at best, as "cold
warriors." Those "liberals" advocating unilateral
disarmament or, at any rate, prior and increasingly
juicier concessions to the Soviet Union without
reciprocal guarantees are considered generous souls
who love peace.
In practice, what these "liberals" are really pro-
moting is an imbalance that would enable the
Soviet Union to force its economic and political
will on a growing number of countries without
going to war, thus enlarging an already spacious
orbit. For history teaches us that never, anywhere,
have concessions coaxed the Soviet Union into
making concessions. From this unhappy truth, for
which they are in no way responsible, the demo-
cracies do not conclude that they must change
their diplomatic approach, but that they must
concede still more.
Indeed, anyone with his ear to the political
ground might think the only danger to the West
is Western arms and Western diplomacy. For ex-
ample, the New York Times of April 2, 1983 an-
nounced that "An Adverse Impact Among Allies
Is Feared After Reagan Remark on-Soviet Superi-
ority." That is, the real danger to America's Euro-
pean allies is not seen as possible Soviet military
superiority but in America's plan to counter it by
reinforcing West European defenses. Any President
of the United States visiting Western Europe has
been treated to demonstrations so hostile that an
unsuspecting spectator would think he were the
worst enemy Europe ever had.
True, the people often show better judgment
than the elites and the activists. In 1982, a survey
revealed that all the peoples of Western Europe
except the Spanish thought the growth of the
Soviet military potential was more important in
explaining international tension than the growth
of America's military potential. (This had its
clownish side, however: by a margin of 45 percent
to 21 percent, the French people believed that
American interest rates and the dollar's role in
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international finance were much more serious causes
of tension than the USSR's bulging arsenal.)
Despite an improved and, by 1981, clearer per-
ception of Soviet power, or perhaps because of the
realism of that perception, most Europeans, and not
just militant pacifists, said that if their countries
were invaded, they would rather submit than re-
sist. Asked in another poll, "If the Soviet army
entered French territory, do you think the Presi-
dent of France should immediately open peace
talks with the Soviet Union?," 63 percent of the
French answered "yes," 7 percent favored the use
of nuclear weapons, and 31 percent thought France
should fight, but without using its nuclear missiles.
Now, one may very well prefer servitude to
death. But we can also avoid putting ourselves
in a situation in which that grim choice is all that
is open to its. Yet the will to avoid such a situa-
tion is precisely what the West seems to lack The
replied via Somalia or Eritrea or both. No reply.
We noted that and put it into our analyses.
Then we took Aden and set up a powerful
Soviet base there. Aden! On the Arabian penin-
sula! In the heart of your supply center! No re-
sponse. So we noted: we can take Aden.
THROUGHOUT the course of relations be-
tween the Communist and democratic
worlds, the question of which will destroy the
other has always been obscured in the democratic
camp by adventitious side issues. Communism's
leaders have never concealed their belief that this
is the only question that counts and that they are
determined to answer it with a total Communist
victory. No temporary compromise, they feel, can
alter the final judgment of history.
If people in the West find it hard to bear this
vision of merciless struggle between the two forms
relentless Soviet "peace offensive," therefore, has of society if they sometimes drive it out of their
every chance of succeeding, that is, of persuading minds, 'it is partly because the socialist cause was
the West and the rest of the world to accept per- forged within the democracies themselves in the
manent military inferiority b this as 19th century, was one of their offspring that then
Y Y Y portraying ~--- r ''?'
an absolute guarantee against war.
Any normal person naturally hates the idea of
war, and, of course, this feeling interferes with
proper public information about strategy, as
though the information itself were dangerous. But
a Soviet "peace" is synonymous with subjugation,
for which the West is already being psychological-
ly conditioned, and its continued pursuit will lead
by imperceptible stages to a state of undeclared
but total satellization. Even economic weapons,
not to mention military deterrence, have been for-
bidden to the West, or rather, the West has for-
bidden itself to use them. This refusal to apply
stern economic sanctions against the Soviet Union
must have vastly reassured the men in the Krem-
lin. And if the West can no longer resort to a
credible strategic deterrent or to economic weap-
ons, what is there to prevent the Soviet Union
from continuing to trample the sovereignty of oth-
er countries, other continents, the whole world?
The practical conclusion Communist leaders
draw from Western military and economic pas-
sivity is that they can go right on doing what
they have been doing. Jean-Francois Deniau, a
former cabinet minister under Giscard d'Estaing,
quoted a high Soviet official as having told him:
We took Angola and you did not protest. We
even saw that you could have beaten us in An-
gola-the government was on our side, but it
was within an ace of giving up-and that you
did nothing to win; on the contrary. And when,
to save ourselves, we sent in 30,000 Cuban sol-
diers, Ambassador Andrew Young, a member of
the American cabinet, said it was a positive step
and an element. of stability. All right, we noted
the fact and included it in our analyses. Then
we took Mozambique. Forget it, you don't even
know where it is. Then we took Ethiopia, a key
move. There again we noted that you could have
life. We have trouble understanding that this off-
spring's heir presumptive, 20th-century Commu-
nism, has assumed the historical mission of de-
stroying the democracy from which it issued. We
persist in viewing it as just another political per-
suasion that may have degenerated, but which can
mend its ways, calm down, participate someday in
a global concert. To think otherwise, we feel, sins
against tolerance. Unfortunately, the democracies
are not making the rules in this game. The Com-
munists in no way share their concern for toler-
ance and the coexistence of systems.
Communism considers itself permanently at
war with the rest of the world, even if it must
occasionally agree to an armistice. This is nothing
to be indignant about. We must simply recognize
it; unless we do, we obviously cannot begin taking
suitable political countermeasures. The Commu-
nists' war is fought in many ways. If necessary,
this includes military action, but to Commu-
nism's leaders, all forms of action are part of this
war, beginning with negotiation, at least their
very particular notion of negotiation.
In their minds, the aim of negotiation has
never been to reach a lasting agreement, but to
weaken their adversary and prepare him to make
further concessions while fostering his illusion
that the new concessions will be the last, the ones
that will bring him stability, security, tranquillity.
The Soviets' "peace" propaganda, which to them
means convincing others not to defend themselves,
always overlies a threat of war, of implicit intimi-
dation that exploits our very justifiable fear of
an atomic cataclysm. This belligerent demand for
peace merely summons the democracies to buy
their security with slavery; it is an elaborate way
to say "surrender or be wiped out." It has been
called "attack through pacifism."
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Because in its social system, as in its foreign
policy, Communism is meeting increasing disap-
proval, Communist leaders do not rely much any
more on honey to catch their future victims (ex-
cept, perhaps, in some badly informed Third
World countries). Having given up trying to se-
duce the unwary by pretending to represent leftist
ideals, they are stripping off their mask and using
pure force. Unlike the Western leadership, which
is tormented by remorse and a sense of guilt, the
Soviet leaders have perfectly clear consciences,
which allows them to use brute force with utter
serenity both to preserve their power at home and
to extend it abroad.
Many in the West take comfort from the in-
ternal weaknesses of Communism-especially its
economic inefficiency. But I for one am more
frightened than comforted by these weaknesses. A
system that has grown so strong despite so many
failings, that increasingly dominates the world
even when no one wants anything to do with it,
at least not the majority of the people in the
countries it seeks to penetrate, and that, where it
is in power, everyone except the nomenklatura
longs to be rid of-this system must nevertheless
embody a principle of action and a monopoliza-
tion of power more effective than any mankind
has ever known before. Communism and the
Soviet empire are unprecedented in history. None
of the classic concepts that make the past intelli-
gible explains Communist imperialism. The Soviet
empire does not follow the bell-shaped expansion-
ist curve of previous empires. Yet the democracies
persist in believing that it will decline of itself
and inevitably grow more moderate.
The truth is, however, that the longer Soviet
Communism lasts, the more expansionist it be-
comes and the more difficult it is to control. Other
Communist states, notably Cuba, Vietnam, and
North Korea, have shown similar propensities for
conquest. It does not follow that because Commu-
nism is showing signs of rot and suffers reverses,
it will turn to the path of peace. Except when
they were disintegrating, few other empires had
to deal with as many national and popular re-
bellions as the Soviet empire has had since 1953.
But it has withstood and quelled them without
going to pieces. And these difficulties have in no
way slowed its expansionist thrust.
Frequently, part or all of a Soviet ruler's reign
is scarred by serious setbacks. This happened under
Stalin from 1925 to 1935, it happened during the
reign of Khrushchev, who for a while seemed to be
digging the empire's grave, and in the years imme-
diately following his fall: the break with China,
the loss of Albania, North Korean and Vietnamese
neutrality in the Moscow-Peking quarrel, insurrec-
tions in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia,
Rumania's new standoffishness, cracks in the mono-
lithic Communist International. Yet never did the
empire expand so much or so boost its military
CAN THEEMOCRACIES SURVIVE?/27
power as in the years that followed this critical
period.
The closer we get to the end of the century, the
more Communist imperialism becomes the chief
problem of our time. No other threat to world
freedom has endured as long. Other totalitarian
systems were defeated or simply crumbled with
age. In many other unhappy countries that have
been or still are ruled by dictators, democracy and
dictatorship-or, at least, adulterated forms of dic-
tatorship (arid democracy)-have swept in and out
like tides. Only Communist totalitarianism is both
durable and immutable.
To THE question of what should the non-
Communist countries do, I am tempted
to answer by turning to Demosthenes. "Some peo-
ple," he said, "think they can stump the man who
mounts the tribune by asking him what's to be
done. To those I will give what I believe is the
fairest and truest answer: don't do what you are
doing now."
This is not as summary an answer as it seems,
even to today's problems. What, indeed, can we
do? To go on as we have been doing would guar-
antee the continued advance of totalitarianism,
for, as experience has shown, it will not be stopped
by its own weaknesses and internal failures.
A second option is based on the hope that the
Soviet Union will change its ways voluntarily if we
acknowledge its place in the sun and show clearly
through concessions that we have no intention of
attacking it. Anchored to peaceful coexistence and
detente, this option has too adequately proved its
harmfulness to warrant further discussion. But
since we have yet to scrap it, I can only warn peo-
ple not to count on it to save us. It will keep us out
of war by ushering us into subordination or slavery.
A third choice proposed, reviving-horrorsl-
the "cold war," which we are so repeatedly admon-
ished not to do, really does not exist, since there
has never been a cold war. What is called the cold
war has simply been a toned-clown version of
detente that has certainly not attained its theoreti-
cal goal of "containment." The democracies selfish-
ly thought to use detente to guarantee their own
security by signing treaties finally and officially
confirming the subjugation of the peoples already
under Communist dictatorship. In this they have
failed. All we have succeeded in doing is abandon-
ing these enslaved peoples to their masters. As he
was being exchanged for a Chilean Communist, the
Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky found a cruel
symbol of this complicity: "The Chekist [secret
policeman] who took off my handcuffs, remarked
for my edification, 'These handcuffs, incidentally-
they're American.' And he showed me the stamp.
As though I had waited this long to learn that
since the Soviets took power, or just about, the
West has been supplying us with handcuffs, literal-
ly and figuratively."
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28/COMMENTARY JUNE 19'
Yet this complicity has not brought us the
security we expected from it. Never were the de-
mocracies more vulnerable, more baffled, more ex-
posed to the blows of Communist imperialism
than they were when the so-called detente period
ended. The years since 1981 have been especially
tragic, with confusion sown in the democratic
camp by the Polish ? and Afghan affairs, by the
democracies' gradual but irresistible acceptance of
Soviet military superiority despite the more and
more threatening, impudently biting, and brutal
way the Kremlin talks to them.
Some responsible thinkers are pessimistic enough
to believe that the West has become so docile that
it can no longer call a halt without risking war. I
have reached the opposite conclusion. I am con-
vinced that the Soviets are intent on maintaining
their nuclear superiority over Western Europe as
a way to increase their pressure on us without be-
ing dragged into a general war while gradually dis-
engaging-the United States from the continent of
Europe. Thus the Western nuclear deterrent re-
mains the principal guarantor of peace it has
proved to be for the past thirty-five years. The
noinenklatura doesn't want to die either.
Once this first point is well understood, and
?
acted upon, the second article of a worthy foreign
policy would be to reply to any Soviet encroach-
ment with immediate reprisals, mainly economic,
and to make no further concessions without mani-
fest, equivalent, and palpable counterconcessions.
The free world's revised foreign policy must and
can have a precise objective: to make the Soviets
understand once and for all that the irrevocable
prior condition for resumption of negotiations and
the granting of concessions of any kind is a defini-
tive halt to Communist imperialism everywhere in
the world.
Activating this new policy, which really would
be no more than a return to normal diplomacy,
presupposes an almost total Western intellectual
reconversion, sound understanding-at last-of
what Communism is and how it works, and a
hitherto unprecedented harmonization and coordi-
nation of policy among all the democracies. This
amounts to saying that while such a new diplo-
matic departure appears objectively possible, it
seems to me highly unlikely because of the intellec-
tual frivolity, indecisiveness, and discord of the
men called on to apply it. And that is why I fear
that democracy may not survive the closing years
of the 20th century.
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\\'IL.L1.o J. CASEY
21 May 1984
Dear Gene,
I had a very interesting talk with your wife at the
PFIAB reception a week or two ago. She put her finger on
something which has troubled me. Why are we so weak on
semantics and the structure of disinformation?
We talked about some people who had done work in
this area. She talked about a Glaswell in Chicago, I
think. I remember a fellow, a name like Lassiter, who
was at Columbia a decade or two ago.
?
I would like to get some ideas on how we could get
a small group of knowledgeable people interested and versed
in the art of science and semantics to study why we do so
poorly and how we might do better. I recall quite a lot
of work done on this with respect to Hitler in the late 30s.
Again, there was someone whose name I can't recall who gained
a lot of prominence in writing and speaking about the
semantics of propaganda. Not many of us left with memories
that go back that far.
If you or Mrs. Rostow have any ideas I would appreciate
getting them.
Yours,
William J. Casey
The Honorable Eugene V. Rostow
Yale Law School
Box 401A Yale Station
New Haven, Connecticut 06511
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