Our Moral Disarmament

December 9, 1957

The main technical reason why the Russians are presumably ahead of us in long-range ballistic missiles, as Wernher von Braun has pointed out, is that “the United States had no ballistic-missile program worth mentioning between 1945 and 1951,” when the Russians secretly drove ahead.

But perhaps this technical lapse is symptomatic of a deeper weakness. The Oct. 26 issue of The New Yorker contained an article by Eugene Kinkead about the Army’s research into the factors which led (in the words of Assistant Secretary Hugh Milton of the Army’s Manpower and Reserve Forces) to “American troops turning renegade in such large numbers and apparently so casually” to Communist indoctrination. One out of every three American prisoners, according to the Army’s study, was guilty of some sort of collaboration with the enemy, and one out of every seven was guilty of “serious” collaboration. Practically none of this is attributed by Army doctors or psychiatrists to physical torture or to “brainwashing” in the commonly accepted sense, but to indoctrination which took the form of a blend of leniency and pressure by their Communist captors.

ANTICAPITALISM

The reasons for the ease with which so many of our prisoners went over to the enemy were complex. But surely one of them was that they had already been conditioned to an anti-capitalist ideology. In answers to American Army questioners, they frequently used the word Socialism (as Communist propaganda does) rather than Communism. They would say that “while Socialism might not work in the United States, where the people are for the most part well off to begin with, it was a good thing for China and other less advanced nations.” It did not occur to them that this country was not pretty well off “to begin with,” but got that way precisely because it followed the principles of free enterprise.

We face in the world today a supreme irony. Millions of people are fanatically devoted to the slave system called Communism and are willing to die for it. Yet few of us are zealously devoted to its opposite, the system of capitalism, or willing to die for it by that name. True, the name itself is a smear word invented by Marx and Engels in order to imply that economic freedom and private property constitute a system run by and for the capitalists. But few of us are willing to make sacrifices to preserve this system even when it bears a truer name, such as free enterprise. Many of us do profess to be devoted to “democracy,” but fail to understand that democracy with individual freedom is impossible except on a basis of private property and freedom of enterprise.

SICKNESS OF THE WEST

This paradox is discussed in the course of a brilliant new philosophical work by Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History (Yale University Press, $6). Mises points out that the slavery and debasement under Russian Communism, or any system of complete Socialism, are not accidental: “If an omnipotent authority has the power to assign to every individual the tasks he has to perform, nothing that can be called freedom and autonomy is left to him. He has only the choice between strict obedience and death by starvation.”

Yet leading writers and scientists of the West are contemptuous of economic freedom, the basis of all freedom, and speak with admiration of a system that eclipses all tyrannies of the past in pitiless persecution of dissenters: “It did not occur to the liberal philosophers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that a new ideology would arise which would resolutely reject all the principles of liberty and individualism and would proclaim the total subjection of the individual to the tutelage of a paternal authority as . . . the most noble end of history.”

This is the weakness and sickness of the West, which is abandoning, in favor of statism and Socialism, the very free-market capitalism which has brought it not only individual liberty but the unparalleled material progress of the last 200 years. “True,” grimly concludes Mises, “Western civilization is decadent. But its decadence consists precisely in the endorsement of the anticapitalistic creed.”