The Ideological War

June 20, 1949

In a recent speech General Clay warned the American people that the struggle between collectivism and democracy would continue “for years to come.” We can hope to win this struggle between collectivism and individualism, between socialism (and/or Communism) and capitalism, between totalitarianism and freedom, only if we frankly recognize its existence. The struggle will go on, in fact, until one system succumbs.

Our own befuddled “liberals” and wishful thinkers are loath to believe this. They are fond of saying that there is no reason why Communism and capitalism cannot live peaceably together in the same world. This is because they know nothing of the real nature of Communism and Communists. The Communists are committed to a war on capitalism until they have totally destroyed it everywhere.

This is the reason for the cold war that the masters of Russia have been relentlessly waging against us. And, with minor setbacks, they have been winning that war in the last five or six years because they knew it was being fought and we did not. That is why our leaders threw away at Yalta and Teheran and Potsdam the fruits of a military victory won at unparalleled cost of blood and treasure. That is why, through inaction, confusion, or actual cooperation, our leaders helped Stalin to dominate, subdue, and communize Poland, the Baltics, the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, and China and didn’t even secure for themselves a tenable foothold in Berlin.

What we still do not recognize is that even if the cold war should break out into a shooting war our main weapon, if we hoped not only to win but to have our victory mean anything for the happiness and peace of mankind, would not be the atom bomb but ideas. This ideological war would cost incomparably less in dollars than any military war. But it would have to be above all informed and intelligent. Who would fight it? Who knows how to fight it? Certainly not the present Administration. Whether Mr. Truman realizes it or not, he is today fighting at every turn, not for free enterprise, but for controlism, for statism, for socialism, for policies that must undermine, sabotage, and in the end destroy free enterprise. We can pay money for a Voice of America program. But can we get it to say the right things? Our officials pay lip service to free enterprise. But when they become specific, they praise above all such things as our social-security program, our farm subsidies, our housing subsidies, our TVA’s. All these are collectivist. Incidentally they are all dependent on free enterprise. They are supported by the taxes drawn from the profits and incomes created by free enterprise. They are all, in short, parasitic on free enterprise. But it is these parasitic devices that our officials praise, while they ignore or apologize for the private enterprise that supports them.

It is not surprising that the Russians are not converted to capitalism when our own propagandists praise the collectivist elements in our economy rather than the free-enterprise elements. The astounding idea has arisen in the Western world that the way to fight Communism is to embrace socialism—that is to say, to move at least halfway to Communism.

The Communists themselves have a clearer view. William Z. Foster, in recently laying down the latest line for the American Communist Party, declared: “What will its [American capitalism’s] power of resistance to socialism be when, as may be likely, the vast bulk of the rest of the world has ‘gone socialist’? . . . It may well turn out that it will be far easier for the American working class, in the midst of an overwhelmingly socialist world, to establish socialism in this country than now appears to be the case.”

In short, we cannot win the ideological war for free enterprise unless we have a genuine faith in free enterprise, unless we have a real understanding of how it works, and of why Marxist socialism and Communism are fallacious. To grope bewilderedly for a “middle road”—which is to assume that Communism must be at least half right—is to take the certain path to defeat and surrender.