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THE TECHNIQUES OF SOVIET PROPAGANDA 39 The fact cannot be ignored that a billion of our contemporaries suffer under communism. They manifested their hatred for it with their blood at Vorkuta, Tiflis, Hast Berlin, Poznan, and Budapest; they manifested it vocally when 90 percent of the Korean prisoners of war chose freedom; they manifested it with their feet, fleeing by the millions through all the crevices of the Iron and Bamboo Curtains in Berlin, Trieste, the Burmese jungle, Macao, Hong Kong, the 17th parallel in Vietnam, and the 38th parallel in Korea; they manifest it with their silence, pointing to their censored press and their sham elections; they manifest it from all the concentration campa of Siberia and China. In fact, the most systematic of those “systematic anti-Communiste” whom so many naive Western idealists find it more expedient to condemn than the Soviet dictators, are the billion subjects of Com- munist tyranny. It is thanks to their indomitable hatred of dictator- ship, to the silent but fierce “nyet” the Kremlin rulers have never ceased to read on their muzzled lips, that the essiveness of the despots has been restrained, and the West still enjoys freedom. This billion people should, therefore, be invoked, not to rationalize our submission to their masters, but rather as our most valuable allies in the common defense against these tyrants. For while it is surely necessary to strengthen NATO, to conclude pacts and to make counterpropaganda, neither alliances nor preaching will assure final security so long as totalitarians control an empire of a billion serfs. There is only one hope for peace in our time: the end of the dictator- ships in Moscow and Peiping, and the best possibility of avoiding a catastrophic world conflict is the destruction of these dictatorships from within by their billion oppressed subjects. FALLACY NO. 6: COMMUNISM’S SUCCESS ARISES OUT OF SOCIAL INJUSTICH This propaganda cliche utilizes the Marxist propensity to seek the origin of any political disorder in an economic maladjustment; also the generous “liberal” tendency to seek a cure for the causes of an evil, rather than repress its consequences. This concept serves communism by leading the democratic govern- ments to a dangerous forbearance toward the Communist apparatus, comprehended and embellished as a reaction to poverty, when it is, in fact, only an appendage of dictatorship. The fallacy of this notion is apparent when communism’s areas of strength and weakness are scrutinized. Its solidest strongholds in the past have often been, and are increasingly today, the afftuent socisl strate: the French labor aristocracy, the Corman eimar Republicans, Benes’ Czechoslovakians, the Asian intellectuals, and the Japanese businessmen. Conversely, it has been strongly opposed by the indi- gent peoples of Spain, Northern Ireland, Chiang’s China, and South erica, We are told that the masses of Asia and Africe need freedom less urgently than bread, with the implication that this explains their affinity for Moscow. This idea is wrong on two counts: first, because © political freedom is historically the most effective route to a higher standard of living, and second, because an impoverished people's poorest chance ta get bread is acceptance of Communist dictatorship notorious for its systematic underconsumption. The real vehicle of