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1 » _ 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, t 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 already forgotten the wave of annexations, ‘sgeressions, and coups loosed by communism after World War IJ 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 mistakes of London and Paris, and to assign equal obloquy to them is neither noble nor courageous because it is untrue. That which is really noble and courageous, honoring the philosopher, does not consist in recognizing guile even when it is of his own side. It consists in assigni 8 Built 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. 8: 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 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 West, 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 slanders of the United States; every dey the United States answers with Olympian observations, or even with favors by meking their television screens available to their calum- niators. In the matter of free circulation of publications between the two blocs, who is negative and who positive; which opens its 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. ¢: ATOMIC ENERGY I8 THE MODERN WORLD'S MOST BERIOUS PROBLEM This propaganda device exploits the inherent and very respectable love of peace; also the dramatic character of nuclear developments which has promoted the hasty conclusion that its problems are the