Warning to the West Read online

  The most frightening aspect of the world Communist system is its unity, its cohesion. Enrico Berlinguer said quite recently that the sun had set on the Comintern. Not at all. It hasn’t set. Its energy has been transformed into electricity, which is now pulsing through underground cables. The sun of the Comintern today spreads its energy everywhere in the form of high-voltage electricity. Quite recently there was an incident when Western Communists indignantly denied that Portugal was operating on instructions from Moscow. Of course, Moscow also denied this. And then it was discovered that those very orders had been openly published in the Soviet magazine Problems of Peace and Socialism. These were the very instructions that Ponomarev had given. All the apparent differences among the Communist Parties of the world are imaginary. All are united on one point: your social order must be destroyed.

  Why should we be surprised if the world does not understand this? Even the socialists, who are the closest to Communism, do not understand it. They cannot grasp the true nature of Communism. Recently, the leader of the Swedish socialists, Olof Palme, said that the only way that Communism can survive is by adopting the principles of democracy. That is the same thing as saying that the only way in which a wolf can survive is to stop eating meat and become a lamb. And yet Palme lives right next door, Sweden is quite close to the Soviet Union. I think that he, and Mitterrand, and the Italian socialists will live to the day when they will be in the position that Portugal’s Mario Soares is in today. Soares’s situation, by the way, is not yet at its worst. An even more terrible future awaits him and his party. Only the Russian socialists—the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries—could have told them of the fate that awaits them. But they cannot tell of it: they are all dead; they’ve all been killed. Read The Gulag Archipelago.

  Of course in the present situation the Communists have to use various disguises. Sometimes we hear words like the “popular front,” at other times “dialogue with Christianity.” For Communists a dialogue with Christianity! In the Soviet Union this dialogue was a simple matter: they used machine guns and revolvers. And today, in Portugal, unarmed Catholics are stoned by the Communists. This is dialogue … And when the French and the Italian Communists say that they are going to have a dialogue, let them only get into power and we shall see what this dialogue will look like.

  When I traveled to Italy this past April, I was amazed to see hammers and sickles painted on the doors of churches, insults to priests scrawled on the doors of their houses. In general, offensive Communist graffiti cover the walls of Italian cities. This is today, before they have attained power. This is today … When Italy’s leaders were in Moscow, Palmiro Togliatti agreed to all of Stalin’s executions. Just let them have power in Italy and we shall see what the dialogue will look like then.

  All of the Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.

  We Russians, with our historical experience, find it tragic to see what is going on in Portugal. We were always told, “Well, this happened to you Russians. It’s just that you couldn’t maintain democracy in your country. You had it for eight months and then it was stifled. That’s Eastern Europe for you.” But look at Portugal, at the very westernmost edge of Europe, and what do we see there? A kind of caricature, a slightly altered version of what happened in Russia. For us it sounds like a re-run. We recognize what’s going on and can make the proper substitutions, placing our socialists in Soares’s position.

  The same things were said in Russia. The Bolsheviks pursued power under the slogan “All Power to the Constituent Assembly.” But when the elections took place, they got 25 percent of the vote, and so they dispersed the Constituent Assembly. The Communists in Portugal got 12 percent of the vote. So they made their parliament entirely powerless. What irony: the socialists have won the elections. Soares is the leader of the victorious party. Yet he has been deprived of his own newspaper. Just imagine: the leader of a victorious party has been stripped of his own newspaper! And the fact that an assembly has been elected and will sit in session has no significance whatever. Yet the Western press writes seriously that the first free elections took place in Portugal. Lord save us from such free elections!

  Specific instances of duplicity, of trickery, can change of course from one set of circumstances to another. But we recognize the Communist character in the episode when the Portuguese military leaders, who are allegedly not Communists, decided to settle the dispute within the newspaper República in the following manner. “Come at twelve o’clock tomorrow,” they said, “we’ll open the doors for you and you settle it all as you see fit.” But they opened the doors at ten o’clock and for some reason only the Communists, not the socialists, knew of this. The Communists entered, burned all the incriminating documents, and then the socialists arrived. Ah yes, it was of course only an error. An accident, they didn’t check the time …

  These are the sort of tricks—and there are thousands—which make up the history of the Russian Revolution. There will be many more such incidents in Portugal. Take the following example: the current military leadership of Portugal, in order not to lose Western assistance (they have already ruined Portugal and there is nothing to eat, so they need help), have declared, “Yes, we will keep our multiparty system.” And the unfortunate Soares, the leader of the victorious party, now has to demonstrate that he is pleased with this declaration in favor of a multi-party system. But on the same day the same source declared that the construction of a classless society will begin immediately. Anyone who is the least bit familiar with Marxism knows that “classless society” implies that there will not be any parties. That is to say, on the very same day they said: There will be a multi-party system and we will suppress every party. But the former is heard and the latter is not. Everybody repeats only that there will be a multi-party system. This is a typical Communist method.

  Portugal has, in effect, fallen out of NATO already. I don’t wish to be a prophet of doom but these events are irreversible. Very shortly Portugal will be considered a member of the Warsaw Pact. It is painful to look at this tragic and ironic repetition of Communist methods at opposite ends of Europe, sixty years apart. In just a few months we see the stifling of a democracy which had only begun to get on its feet.

  The question of war is also well elucidated in Communist and Marxist literature. Let me show you how Communism regards the question of war. I quote Lenin: “We cannot support the slogan ‘Peace’ since it is a totally muddled one and a hindrance to the revolutionary struggle.” (Letter to Alexandra Kollontai, July 1915.) “To reject war in principle is un-Marxist. Who objectively stands to gain from the slogan ‘Peace’? In any case, not the revolutionary proletariat.” (Letter to Alexander Shliapnikov, November 1914.) “There is no point in proposing a benign program of pious wishes for peace without at the same time placing at the forefront the call for illegal organization and the summons to civil war.” This is Communism’s view of war. War is necessary. War is an instrument for achieving a goal.

  But unfortunately for Communism, this policy ran up against the American atomic bomb in 1945. Then the Communists changed their tactics and suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost. They started to convoke peace congresses, to circulate petitions for peace; and the Western world fell for this deceit. But the goal, the ideology, remained the same: to destroy your system, to destroy the way of life known in the West.

  But they could not risk this in the face of your nuclear superiority. So they substituted one concept for another: what is not war, they said, is peace. That is, they opposed war to peace. But this is a mistake, only a part of the antithesis is opposed to the thesis. When an open war is impossible, oppression can continue quietly behind the scenes. Terrorism. Guerrilla warfare, violence, prisons, concentration camps. I ask you: Is this peace?

  The true antipode of peace is violence. And those who want peace in the world should remove not only war from the worl
d but also violence. If there is no open war but there is still violence, that is not peace.

  As long as in the Soviet Union, in China, and in other Communist countries there is no limit to the use of violence—and now we find India joining in (it appears that Indira Gandhi has learned much from her trip to Moscow; she has mastered these methods very well and is now adding another 400 million people to this continent of tyranny)—as long as there is no limit to this use of violence, as long as nothing restrains it over this tremendous land mass (more than half of humanity), how can you consider yourselves secure?

  America and Europe together are not yet an island in the ocean—I won’t go so far as to say that. But America together with Europe is now a minority, and the process is still continuing. Until the public in those Communist countries can keep a check on the government and can have an opinion on what the government does—now it doesn’t have the slightest idea what the government is up to—until that time comes, the West, and the world in general, has no guarantee at all.

  We have another proverb in Russia: “Catch on you will when you’re tumbling downhill.”

  I understand that you love freedom, but in our crowded world you have to pay a tax for freedom. You cannot love freedom for yourselves alone and quietly agree to a situation where the majority of humanity, spread over the greater part of the globe, is subjected to violence and oppression.

  The Communist ideology is to destroy your social order. This has been their aim for 125 years and it has never changed; only the methods have changed a little. When there is détente, peaceful co-existence, and trade, they will still insist: the ideological war must continue! And what is ideological war? It is a concentration of hatred, a continued repetition of the oath to destroy the Western world. Just as in the Roman senate a famous speaker ended every speech with the statement: “Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed,” so today, with every act—détente, trade, or whatever—the Communist press, as well as thousands of speakers at closed lectures, all repeat: “Furthermore, capitalism must be destroyed.”

  It is easy to understand, it’s only human that people living in prosperity doubt the necessity of taking steps—here and now in our state of prosperity—to defend themselves. For even in prosperity one must be on guard.

  If I were to enumerate all the treaties that have been violated by the Soviet Union, it would take me another whole speech. I understand that when your statesmen sign some treaty with the Soviet Union or China you want to believe that it will be carried out. But the Poles who signed a treaty with the Communists in Riga in 1921 also wanted to believe that the treaty would be carried out, and they were stabbed in the back. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which signed treaties of friendship with the Soviet Union, also wanted to believe that they would be carried out, but these countries were all swallowed.

  And the people who sign these treaties with you now—these very men and no others—simultaneously give orders for persons to be confined in mental hospitals and prisons. Why should they be different toward you? Surely not out of love for you? Why should they act honorably and nobly toward you when they crush their own people? The advocates of détente have yet to explain this.

  You want to believe and so you cut down on your armies and your research. There used to be an Institute for the Study of the Soviet Union—at least there was one such institute. You know so little about the Soviet Union. It seems dark over there. These searchlights don’t penetrate that far. Knowing nothing, you eliminated the last genuine institute which could actually study this Soviet society, because there wasn’t enough money to support it. But the Soviet Union is studying you. You are all wide open here, through the press and Congress. And they study you all the more, increasing the size of their staffs in the United States. They follow what’s going on in your institutions. They attend meetings and conferences; they even visit congressional committees. They study everything.

  Of course, peace treaties are very attractive to those who sign them. They strengthen one’s prestige with the electorate. But the time will come when the names of these public figures will be erased from history. Nobody will remember them any longer. But the Western peoples will have to pay heavily for these overtrusting agreements.

  Is it only a question of showing that détente is needed today, here and now? By no means. There are theoreticians who look very far into the future. The director of the Russian Institute of Columbia University, Marshall Shulman, at a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, depicted a radiant future, stating that détente would ultimately lead to cooperation between the United States and the U.S.S.R. in the establishment of a world order. But what sort of new order, in cooperation with insatiable totalitarianism, does this professor want to see established? It won’t be your kind in any case.

  The principal argument of the advocates of détente is well known: all of this must be done to avoid a nuclear war. But after all that has happened in recent years, I think I can set their minds at ease, and your minds at ease as well: there will not be any nuclear war. What for? Why should there be a nuclear war if for the last thirty years they have been breaking off as much of the West as they wanted—piece after piece, country after country, and the process keeps going on. In 1975 alone four countries were broken off. Four—three in Indochina plus India—and the process keeps going on, very rapidly too. One should be aware of how rapid the tempo is. But let us assume that finally the Western world will understand and say, “No, not one step further.” What will happen then?

  Let me direct your attention to the following fact: You have theoreticians who say; “The U.S. must stop the process of nuclear armament. We have enough already. Today America has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other half of the world. Why should we need more than that?” Let the American nuclear specialists reason this way if they want, but for some reason the nuclear specialists of the Soviet Union—and the leaders of the Soviet Union—think differently. Ask your specialists! Leave aside their superiority in tanks and airplanes—where they surpass you by a factor of four, five, or seven. Take the SALT talks alone: in these negotiations your opponent is continually deceiving you. Either he is testing radar in a way which is forbidden by the agreement, or he is violating the limitations on the dimensions of missiles, or he is violating the limitations on their destructive force, or else he is violating the conditions on multiple warheads.

  As the proverb says, “Look before you leap, or you will have bruises to keep.”

  At one time there was no comparison between the strength of the U.S.S.R. and your own. Then it became equal to yours. Now, as all recognize, it is becoming superior to yours. Perhaps today the ratio is just greater than equal, but soon it will be 2 to 1. Then 3 to 1. Finally it will be 5 to 1. I’m not a specialist in this area, and I suppose you’re not specialists either, but this can hardly be accidental. I think that if the armaments they had before were enough, they would not have driven things further. There must be some reason for it. With such nuclear superiority it will be possible to block the use of your weapons, and on some unlucky morning they will declare: “Attention. We’re sending our troops into Europe, and if you make a move, we will annihilate you.” And this ratio of 3 to 1 or 5 to 1 will have its effect: you will not make a move. Indeed, theoreticians will be found to say, “If only we could have that blessed silence …”

  To make a comparison with chess, this is like two players who are sitting at a chessboard, one of whom has a tremendously high opinion of himself and a rather low opinion of his opponent. Of course, he thinks he will outplay his opponent. He thinks he is so clever, so calculating, so inventive, that he will certainly win. He sits there, calculating his moves. With these two knights he will make four forks. He can hardly wait for his opponent to move. He’s squirming on his chair from happiness. He takes off his glasses, wipes them, and puts them back on again. He doesn’t even admit the possibility that his opponent may be more clever. He doesn’t even see that his pawns are being taken one after the
other and that his castle is under threat. It all seems to him, “Aha, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll set Moscow, Peking, Pyongyang, Hanoi one against the other.”

  But what a joke! No one will do any such thing! In the meantime, you’ve been outplayed in West Berlin, you’ve been very skillfully outplayed in Portugal. In the Near East you’re being outplayed. One shouldn’t have such a low opinion of one’s opponent.

  But even if this chess player is able to win the game on the board, he forgets to raise his eyes, carried away as he is by the game; he forgets to look at his opponent and doesn’t see that he has the eyes of a killer. And if this opponent cannot win the game on the board, he will take a club from behind his back and shatter the skull of our chess player, ending the game that way. Our very calculating chess player also forgets to raise his eyes to the barometer. It has fallen. He doesn’t see that it’s already dark outside, that clouds are gathering, that a hurricane is rising. That’s what it means to be too self-confident in chess.

  In addition to the grave political situation in the world today, we are also witnessing the emergence of a crisis of unknown nature, one completely new, and entirely non-political. We are approaching a major turning point in world history, in the history of civilization. It has already been noted by specialists in various areas. I could compare it only with the turning from the Middle Ages to the modern era, a shift in our civilization. It is a juncture at which settled concepts suddenly become hazy, lose their precise contours, at which our familiar and commonly used words lose their meaning, become empty shells, and methods which have been reliable for many centuries no longer work. It’s the sort of turning point where the hierarchy of values which we have venerated, and which we use to determine what is important to us and what causes our hearts to beat is starting to rock and may collapse.