The Evening Star (February 7, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Value of the vent in diplomatic blow-ups
By Dorothy Thompson
The blow-up in the United Nations Security Council between the Soviet vice commissar for foreign affairs and the British foreign minister furnishes alarming headlines, but I am inclined to think that such candid and public attacks and counter-attacks, in highly undiplomatic language, will actually contribute more to peace than sweet but insincere protests of universal harmony.
Modern wars require the support of the masses – hence the immensely important role in them of “psychological warfare,” or propaganda.
The importance of psychology has been exploited in the modern mass-based tyrannical states in two ways. They attempt to shut off their own people from hearing both sides of the case, and they employ Trojan Horse tactics, planting their own propagandists in other countries, through nationals of those countries, under the protection of the other country’s civil laws, and in the network of an international movement. The technique of mass propaganda, thus disseminated, is the infinite repetition of slogans, implanting a bias in the mass mind, supporting the slogan with wholly one-sided circumstantial evidence, but depending far more on creating opinion by deeply engraving an unsupported idea in the mind.
The only way this technique can be dealt with is by open confrontation of propaganda statements and by exposure of the technique itself. One only needs to compare what apologists for a movement will say in print in their own publications, and what they dare say on a public platform in the presence of their opponents.
It is no secret that an unremitting stream of officially inspired attacks on Britain and British policy has been issuing from the Soviet Union, taken up and intensified by the Communist parties and their sympathizers in every country, while, on the other hand, criticism of Soviet policy and methods is increasingly vivid in the western world. This is, I think, inevitable, for what divides the western world from the Soviets is not only conflicts of power interest but a profoundly different concept of what constitutes a good, or even a tolerable society, and nothing is served by pretending this is not so.
This latter division was highlighted by the succession to Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eden of Mr. Attlee and Mr. Bevin. The original theory that the political change in England would alleviate possible tensions with the Soviets was extremely superficial. Mr. Churchill, an expert at power politics, recognized the world as one of power politics, and was prepared to play as keen a game as possible for the British Empire. But Mr. Bevin is a Socialist who sees the basic issue to be “what kind of socialism? What kind of worker’s society?” He is a real competitor, therefore, with the Soviet leaders.
Under pretenses, which are false, tensions accumulate without vent, while accusations and differences aired before the whole world are subject to appraisal as to their truth or falsehood, and the world reaction is a measure of diplomatic success or failure.
This bears on another cause of war: The erroneous speculation of one party to dispute concerning what it can get away with. One wonders, for instance, what would have been the effect if the Munich conference had been staged in public, or the conferences between Molotov and Ribbentrop, before and after the Russo-German pact, had occurred in the presence of the world press! Hitler might have found out that Mr. Chamberlain was not a very reliable representative of British public opinion, and the world might have found out that the Ribbentrop-Molotov negotiations were an attempted deal to partition far more than Poland.
When Mr. Bevin says in hardly less jarring words, “You big stiff, you can’t get away with that! Didn’t we invite you to the Greek elections? Didn’t you decline? And who are you, with your organized international cliques constantly attacking Britain, to be talking about peace,” one shudders, but then it is interesting to open the Daily Worker in New York and read an account of Vishinsky’s attack and find Bevin’s reply wholly, contained in the words “Red baiter!” So there is an international anti-British movement sponsored by the Comintern – and Vishinsky’s words were hardly spoken before a bunch of Communists, supposedly of Greek origin, were picketing the British consulate in New York.
But meanwhile the British know they must make the greatest effort to do a worthy job in Greece; and no doubt the Russian leaders know that their defense of their policy in Iran and the Balkans is pretty much of a dud. The people all over the world, except where the press is controlled, may not wholly agree with either Mr. Bevin or Mr. Vishinsky, but at least the claims and challenges of both have been publicly uttered in each other’s presence, and one can, to some extent, measure the truth in either.
Continual harmony is like those neo-democratic plebiscites which always bring in 90 to 99 percent majorities the surest proof that what is reigning is not harmony but open or suppressed fear another of the causes of war.