Essay: COMMUNISM TODAY: A Refresher Course

• Share

UNDERGROUND and in open combat, by subversion, terrorism, blackmail, riot and rhetoric, faithful Communists the world over have for decades waged a holy war against the rest of humanity. The tempo and techniques vary from era to era, from continent to continent. And the nature of Communism changes. Whereas Moscow now shuns the perilous confrontations that so often brought the cold war to boiling point, Peking grows ever more militant. For both capitals of world Communism, the focal points of conflict have shifted from Europe to Africa, Latin America and—most notably—Southeast Asia, where the Johnson Administration last week solemnly committed the U.S. to what could be a prolonged and painful war.

Thus the Marxist dream of world domination is palpably no McCarthyist mirage. From Indonesia, where government-sanctioned mobs howled for the ouster of a newly arrived U.S. ambassador, to Cuba, where Fidel Castro proclaimed that "the imperialists" will not prevent Red regimes from taking over throughout the hemisphere, it was also becoming clear last week that the U.S. would have to stand increasingly alone against the free world's enemies.

Nonetheless, to a world grown weary of cold-war fulmination, the thunder out of Hanoi or Havana often has a curiously chimerical ring; the Iron Curtain itself seems less an instrument of terror and repression than a gigantic cobweb of cliche. Particularly to the generation that has reached voting (or at least debating) age since the early coups and crises of the postwar era, the sounds of struggle appear almost as irrelevant and unreal as fragments of a horror tale recollected from childhood. Many of their elders see Communism in the confused, self-doubting terms that have characterized the recent wave of academic protest over Viet Nam and Santo Domingo. "Is it up to us to say who is a Communist and who is not?" asks Anatol Rapoport, 54, of the University of Michigan, a leading organizer of teach-ins. Shrugging off the Red infiltrators in Santo Domingo, a Stanford professor of Latin American history allows: "You can find 58 Communists in New York, or San Francisco, or anywhere." Political Scientist Stanley Millet, 48, formerly of Briarcliff College, goes so far as to argue that "terror on our side accounts for all that has happened in Viet Nam."

Since the U.S.-Soviet detente that developed after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, more venerable and more qualified commentators also have begun to sound as if Communism had quietly buried itself. Not long ago, the Manchester Guardian pronounced: "The Russians and the Americans no longer have any reason to quarrel." And there is a widespread school of chop logic that maintains simultaneously: 1) Russia can no longer be seriously regarded as a threat to the West, and 2) by its firm stand in Southeast Asia, the U.S. is inviting Russian retaliation. Both premises are debatable at best; together, they are not an argument but a plea for passivity. The danger of such wishful thinking, as the State Department's Walt Rostow has warned, is that "out of a false sense that the cold war is coming to an end, out of boredom or domestic preoccupations, or a desire to get on with purely national objectives, we will open up new opportunities for the Communists to advance."

The Polycentric Era