The Evening Star (March 15, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Goal of Communist principle is to win against all odds
By Dorothy Thompson
Let us not blame the Soviets for taking advantage of the opportunities which British and American agreements placed in their hands. One must admire, however fearfully, clarity of aim and consistency of intellectual process. Indignation is not a substitute for understanding, and profits us nothing. If the drama we are currently observing on the world stage climaxes to a tragic outcome for the civilizations of the west, the protagonists who contribute to that outcome cannot be absolved of collaborating for their own ruin. The essence of tragedy is that Oedipus, Hamlet and Lear encompass their own downfall.
We cannot, after all, blame the Soviets for betrayals of our democratic faith which never has been theirs. They had their way in Poland, but they did not betray their own aims or their Polish supporters. Neither did they betray their agent in Yugoslavia. It was we who betrayed our promises to Poland and Yugoslavia. The Soviet does not betray the anti-Nazi Germans who decisively cast their lot with the Soviet Union and did not quail even before the Russo-German pact. It is we who betray the German martyrs who staked and lost their lives for our avowed principles, and whom we have branded as a “little clique of defeatist generals” – a faithless lie.
No one will ever understand the Soviets who has not known Communists. It is not a breach of Communist principle to lie, cheat, deceive, forge, make fools of “rotten liberals,” betray friendships, make “united fronts” only to subvert them, or indulge in any means whatsoever to defeat non-Communist policies. Communist principle embraces mortal struggle. Its object is to win against all odds and by any means for the sake of an idea that has for them the force of a crusading religion bolstered by conviction of total millennial triumph.
In the eyes of a Communist believer the individual is nothing, and personal scruples but remnants of a “sickly,” “bourgeois” morality. Thus the Communist believer is ready to render not only his life, but his immortal soul, in sincere faith that the end of his way is the redemption of mankind.
If necessary, through blood and slime – the exploitation of every vice, the assassination of every opponent, the wily deception of the tolerant, the mobilization of every passion of envy, frustration and hatred; the exacerbation of every injustice; the promise of every utopia; the temporary flattering of the capitalist; the harsh disciplining of the worker; the debunking of the traditional heroes; the subversion of the law – through all these the Communist faithful press toward the great redemption, in a generation or in a century, but with unswerving conviction of the final unconditional surrender of their enemies, whether of the right or the left, for thus it is written in the infallible law of human societies as laid down by St. Marx, St. Lenin and St. Stalin. The personal life, fate and morality of every believer thus appear as but links in the chain leading to the enthronement of heaven on earth.
No one contemplating the phenomenon of the Communist believer can deny him a morality. His is the supreme other-morality. But Lucifer also was an angel, and Communist believers are governed in their practice of amoral methods by faith in a new morality through total victory. And their morale has supported thousands of them through unconscionable persecutions.
It is the morality of our own civilization which is in question; The morality that warns us that the means invariably determine the end; that as men are, and do, so is the outcome of their strivings; which asserts that good can never be promoted by evil; which demands that victory be, at every step, the overcoming of evil by good.
Where was Christian principle at Potsdam? Where is the promise of the Four Freedoms? For whom, among our statesmen, are the Ten Commandments, the 13th chapter of Corinthians, the declaration of Jefferson, the second in augural address of Lincoln – still living expressions and imperatives of our personal and social morality?
We are being undone, not by the triumph of Communist principles, but by the capitulation of our own.
The Soviets and their international supporters have led us, step by step, as John Foster Dulles confesses, because they know where they are going, and we do not. Having abandoned the guide posts of principle, we have followed blindly. We have produced no impregnable virtue to oppose to their virtues, which embrace all vices. On the contrary, we have rushed in to share in the viciousness, out of which we, unlike them, cannot possibly make a virtue. Thus it is we, and not they, who suffer from a moral crisis, divided characters and fear.
Their consciences are clear. For conscience, regarding means and methods, is no part of their morality at all.