◆ SpookStack

36 THE TECHNIQUES OF SOVIET PROPAGANDA fearful. Budapest furnishes ample evidence that they are overarmed because militarism is the necessary support and climate of every dictatorship. Also, they overarm because their intentions are essive, . . “ . it is past time for those who exploit the prestige of the “above the melee” attitude to rejoin the melee where their own fate is being decided, fully as much as that of their committed fellows. Have they alteady forgotten the wave of annexations, ions, and coups loosed by communism after World War II in Manchuria, Korea, China, the Baltic States, Iran, Czechoslovakia, and Berlin? Can anything comparable be honestly charged against the West? The crimes of Moscow aad the mistakes of Washington are in no sense commensurate, any more than the crimes of Hitler were commensurate with the mistukes of London and Paris, and to assign equal obloquy to them is neither noble nor courageous because it is untruc. That which is really noble and courageous, honoring the philosopher, does not consist in recognizing guilt even when it is of his own side. It consists in assigning guilt according to truth: to its own side if its own side is the truly guilty, and to the opposite side if it is culpable. FALLACY NO. 3: THE WEST RETREATS INTO A NEGATIVE ATTITUDE This propaganda motive capitalizes on the organic inclination of free men to criticize their governments. It serves the Soviets by cultivating a popular inferiority complex toward totalitarians, whom it portrays as impetuous youths, treated by the old fogies of the West only by rebuff. Yet if the concrete proposals made by each of the “two blocs” are reviewed for the last decade, it will be found that the constructive and imaginative proposals to promote understanding have consistently emanated from the est, while the Soviets have issued only hollow and venomous denunciations and a hundred vetos in the United Nations. The United States has never exercised a single veto in the United Nations. Who is negative? Even after the crime of Budapest, the West was inexhaustibly patient and tolerant with the Soviet rulers, replying in the negative only to the victims, not the murderers. Every day the Soviet press is replete with gross sianders of the United States; every day the United States answers with Olympian observations, or even with favors by making their television screens available to their calum- nietors. In the matter of free circulation of publications between the two blocs, who is negative and who positive; which opens ita newsstands and bookshops to the other, and which closes them? Who allows unrestricted listening to the radio broadcasts of the other, and who jams them? In only one area is the Kremlin positive: aggression. If the mere fact of Western resistance is negative, a positive attitude must consist in baring one’s throat to the knife. FALLACY NO. 4: ATOMIC ENERGY IS THE MODERN WORLD'S MOST BERIOUS PROBLEM This propaganda device exploits the inherent and very respectable love of peace; siso the dramatic character of nuclear developments which has promoted the hasty conclusion that its problems are the