The Introduction to the World of Opinion – Making and Psycho – Political Warfare Series.

Pamphlet No. 1

Published By
Raymond Bamford
M. A. (Oxon.)
40 Swanston View
Edinburgh, 10, Midlothian.
February 1964

KNOW YOUR FNEMY

CONTENTS

A series of talks by Ivor Benson broadcast in the English Service of the South African Broadcasting Corporation during October/November 1963.

I. CAN COMMUNISM BE DEFINED?

S it possible to produce a short, simple definition of the term "Communist"?

Last year someone remarked in the House of Assembly that he had asked an officer of the Special Branch to define a Communist. The only answer he could get, he said, was that a Communist is a person who believes in one-man-one-vote. This he took as proof that even the police, whose job it is to track down Communists, don't know what they are looking for.

This is not as strange as it sounds. You all know what a chair is don't you? But have you ever tried to define the term "chair"? This term, too, cannot be reduced to a simple definition. The Oxford Dictionary explains that a chair is "a separate seat for one". That is rather like saying that a Communist is a person who believes in one-man-one-vote. It tells us something about the term to be defined but it is certainly not a complete definition.

Terms like "Communist" and "chair" defy definition for precisely the same reason. In each case, the word has a number of different meanings. One kind of chair you can see and sit upon. But we can think of things that fit this description but which no one would take for a chair. Then there is the chair that is entirely invisible, the abstraction, like the Chair of History or of Chemistry at a University.

In the same way, Communism is not one thing; it is several different things. Even when it presents itself as a single danger as in South Africa today, if we examine it closely, we find that it is a combination of different phenomena working towards the same end — the undermining of a lawfully established government and its overthrow by unconstitutional means.

Communism can mean different things to different people even when they are intentionally working together for a Communist cause — not to mention all those weak, confused and misguided elements in the population who lend themselves so willingly, and yet unwittingly, to a Communist cause — "innocents" as the hardened Communists called them.

How are we to explain the fact that in South Africa, as in most other countries, Communists can always find zealous defenders and protectors among people who are supposed to be helping in the fight against Communism?

Why all the anti-anti-Communism?

How are we to explain the fact that certain mass-circulation newspapers and radio and television networks in the United States and elsewhere — all supposed to be anti-Communist — attack South Africa far more viciously than they attack Red Russia or Red China?

Why do people who are supposed to be anti-Communist call for trade boycotts and sanctions against South Africa and never against countries behind the Iron Curtain?

Why is there never any talk about cutting off supplies of arms to Communist countries, no talk of expelling these countries from the United Nations and other international organisations?

Why have certain newspapers in our own country, the property of great mining and financial interest, always furiously opposed any legislation designed to curb the activities of Communists? Why are their columns almost totally devoid of any anti-Communist sentiment?

Why are they almost unanimously opposed to a national sentiment, the very thing Communists hate and fear most?

These are real questions for which we must try to find answers if we hope to understand what Communism is and how it works.

For an example nearer home, we have Patrick Duncan, a man who has openly identified himself with subversion and violence being received by Mr. Robert Kennedy, the Attorney-General brother of the President of the United States.

Obviously what we need is an insight into the true nature of Communism which will explain and remove all these painful contradictions from our thinking.

No one understands Communism who does not understand how it was possible for a notorious Communist like Alger Hiss to play a leading part in the shaping of United States foreign policy.

Hiss, who was finally convicted as a Communist traitor, was furiously defended to the last moment by an important section of the American press, radio and television.

This man played an important part in the setting up of the United Nations and — believe it or not — he was President Roosevelt's closest adviser at the Yalta Conference with Stalin when the fate of the large part of Europe was settled.

All I can hope to do in this series of talks is to try to throw some more light on the vast, complicated question of Communism and to lay down a few secure paths in this jungle of words and meanings that baffles and frightens so many people today.

What we need is an analysis that will separate out the different elements and provide us with a framework of ideas that will enable us, quickly and confidently, to interpret every new development

All the confusion arises from the fact that Communism is a highly complex phenomenon.

For how can Communism be simply defined when Communists, as individuals, are often activated by different motives? Then there are Communists who use people who are not Communists in any meaning of the word, innocents who allow themselves to become the instruments and agents of Communists.

All very confusing, isn't it? And yet we must get to the bottom of this mystery if we are to defend ourselves properly.

Communism has many faces, but in the end the police who have to fight it know it as one thing: a highly organised, lavishly financed conspiracy to overthrow by illegal means a government it cannot defeat legitimately.

That certainly does not mean that the whole fight can be left to the Police. For the battle cannot be won on that front unless our defences are strong on all the other fronts as well.

How are we to set about investigating and trying to understand a vast and complicated phenomenon like Communism?

The first step, I would say, is to divide the subject into smaller portions that can be more easily handled.

When we set out to explore the subject of mathematics, we don't treat it as a single subject but rather as a group of subjects, each of which can be tackled separately: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and so on.

What I propose to do in this talk, therefore, is to try to identify and discuss very briefly, one by one, some of the different phenomena which make up Communism as we encounter it and have to fight it.

Then, in subsequent talks, I shall take them one at a time and discuss some of them more fully.

First of all, there is Communism as most people in the Western world thing of it — Russian expansionism or imperialism. Many newspapers in the Western world help to propagate the idea that this, and this alone, is Communism. Hence in their cartoons, Communism is nearly always represented as a Bolshy-looking bewiskered individual, wearing a Russian peasant blouse with a belt about his middle, with or without a smoking bomb in his hand.

While it is true that Russian expansionist ambition plays a vitally important role in what we call Communism today, this image of Communism is quite inadequate. It leaves a great deal unexplained.

Secondly we have Chinese Communism. Until quite recently, this was regarded as only an extension of Russian Communism. like that to be found in the different countries behind the Iron Curtain. But now the Russians and the Chinese appear to be at loggerheads, so it is reasonable, I think, to treat Chinese Communism for the time being at any rate, as a separate thing.

Both are very busy in Africa today; both have a hand in subversive activity in South Africa; there is no difference in the propaganda they put out and no difference in the revolusionary techniques they employ.

Here I think it is time to sound a note of warning. Russia and China are always described as "Communist countries", and we can easily fall into the trap of regarding them as countries in which a Communist ordering of society, according to Marx and Lenin, prevails.

Let us clear our minds once and for all of any such illusion. They are countries in which Communism's techniques of revolution have succeeded. That is all. They are not Communist Utopias. They are not democratic. They are totalitarian.

So there we have two great Power blocks which are sometimes meant, separately or together, when people speak of Communism.

Now for the third on my list. This Communism must be imagined as an instrument of revolution, a whole science of revolution which is closely identified with Russia only because it was brought to a high degree of perfection by the Bolshevik revolusionaries. But it is something that can exist, and does exist, quite independently of the Russians. Communist-style revolutions have taken place without a single Russian being involved and have succeeded at times without any advantage whatever to the Soviet Union.

This is Communism the Science of Revolution, a sort of do-ityourself revolutionary kit which can be used against any government that cannot be defeated legitimately.

We are now ready to turn our attention to another phenomenon without which Communism in all its other forms could not exist for a single moment.

I refer to Communism as a faith, a personal philosophy, a substitute for religion, something that has filled the vacuum left by the undermining and destruction of traditional religious faiths, especially in the Western world.

It is something from which the believing Communist cannot be easily parted since it supplies him with a sense of purpose or sometimes even with a burning sense of mission.

This Communist faith or philosophy is something to which the

educated classes especially in the great cities, are particularly susceptible — for reasons which I shall try to explain in a later talk. And most susceptible of all are journalists, university teachers, scientists and ministers of religion, whose minds are often defenceless against the Communist ideology with its plausible, facile reasoning, its impressive programmes of social improvement, and its glowing utopian goals.

In a diluted form this faith is known as Liberalism. The genuine Liberal may have misgivings about Communism's precise blueprints, and about methods. But the faith and the feeling that salvation for all is through political change is common to both.

This explains why when a Communist goes underground, all he has to do is become a Liberal, and why Liberals are least of all allergic to Communism in all its forms.

Hence, Liberalism as we know it today, must be seen as something inseparable from Communism and something from which Communism draws a great proportion of its power and danger.

I don't mean only the kind of Liberalist thinking that expressed itself in political terms. Liberalism in a broader sense stands for a cast of mind, a feeling about life in general, that is one of the unpleasant by-products of our scientific and technological civilisation.

2. A SUBSTITUTE FOR RELIGION

N my first talk I tried to show that Communism is a very complex phenomenon that cannot be defined in a few words. It can mean different things to different people; and people with different sets of motives are often to be found working together to promote a Communist cause.

I have also divided the subject into smaller portions — and it is with some of these smaller portions of the subject of Communism that I now propose to deal more fully, one by one.

I could hardly do better, I think, than start off with that aspect of Communism which, as I have already pointed out, forms the foundation for all the rest.

I refer to Communism as a faith, as a substitute for religion, as a personal philosophy.

Communist Russia is far away from us.

Communist China is even further.

What is close to us, what we have to contend with inside our own borders right now is a relentless psychological warfare.

And this kind of warfare is all the more effective because we have in our midst a number of people for whom Communism, either in its pure or diluted form, is a faith, or philosophy, or substitute for religion.

We cannot evade this challenge.

If we are to win our battle against Communism we must know why these people believe as they do, what is the real source of their faith and belief; and we must be able to put a finger right on its central error or heresy.

Most of those who preach Communism as a system of belief don't believe it at all. They use it cold-bloodedly as an instrument of psychological warfare. It is not with these people we are now concerned. So let us get our ideas clear. We are discussing the belief and the faith of the small but very important minority of Communists who sincerely believe what they say they believe.

I can think of no better examples of this kind of Communist than the two British diplomats Burgess and MacLean who, after systematically betraying British and American secrets to the Russians, fled across the Iron Curtain.

Burgess died in Moscow quite recently a bitterly disappointed man and out of favour with the Soviet authorities precisely because he was a sincere believer and continued to insist on seeing his beliefs put into effect. We are now ready to take another step forward in our enquiry. Now I want to show that a sincere belief in the Communist revolutionary ideal is not an isolated and self-contained kind of faith.

It is only an acute form of something else, something much more

common, more widespread

In precisely the same way, pneumonia is not an entirely separate disease. A dose of influenza or a common cold gets worse and worse and can, as they say, develop by secondary infection into pneumonia. The symptoms are now more severe, the danger so much greater, but it is still the same illness that was diagnosed in the first place as influenza.

What, then, is this faith, this set of ideas or attitude of mind which, growing worse and worse, is finally recognised as Communism?

Our language has not yet caught up with these developments and no name has yet been found which everyone knows and understands correctly.

It has been called "academic humanism" and that is the expression I prefer because it tells us something about the thing I have in mind.

And what is "academic humanism"?

It is the spiritual and intellectual foundation of what is commonly known as Leftism or Liberalism.

Hence, in exactly the same way that the fight against pneumonia is inseparable from a fight against colds and influenza, so is the fight against Communism inseparable from the fight against Liberalism.

Do I have to explain that point any further? Have we not, here in South Africa, seen many cases of Liberalism worsen gradually into Communism? Have we not seen the members of banned Communist organisations freely accepted as members of Leftist-Liberal organisations? Surely this is common knowledge!

Therefore, the thing we have to investigate is "academic humanism", a set of beliefs and ideas and feelings about life, which, harmless as it may seem, provides the spiritual and intellectual soil which nourishes the Communist conspiracy in all its other aspects.

Before we look more closely at the creed or faith itself, let us consider what caused it, how it came into existence.

First of all, we must recognise it as something which, over a large part of the Western world, has replaced a traditional religious faith that had served mankind for close on 2,000 years.

How has all this come about?

Religious faith as we have known it for so long, has been under-

mined and, for millions of individuals, destroyed, by an allconquering scientific spirit.

There had been a certain amount of antagonism between religion and science dating from the days of the Greek civilisation; and there have been martyrs for science as there have been martyrs for religion.

But there was never a blow struck at religious belief like the theory of evolution, fully and clearly enunciated for the first time by Charles Darwin and elaborated and endorsed by a host of other great scientists.

This theory of evolution didn't just challenge religion on different points of orthodoxy but put forward an entirely new theory of the creation of the universe with man's place in it — that is to say, a new cosmogony.

This new theory, this new world view, backed as it was by the immense prestige which science had already won for itself by its achievements in the conquest of nature, was only one of several that struck shattering blows at the hitherto secure religious faith of millions of people of the Western world.

And scientists were in a triumphant mood as they went on to destroy, one by one, ideas and beliefs which Christians had always regarded as inseparable from their religious faith, dismissing all the parables and myths of 2,000 years and more as mere fables and fairy stories.

It was only to be expected that millions of people, after a period of agony and uncertainty, would transfer their faith to what they now saw as an exciting new source of truth — science. They worshipped the new god not only for what it had already accomplished, but also for its dazzling promise.

The old faith had talked of a kingdom of heaven within and a kingdom of heaven hereafter, but here was a god that promised no less than a kingdom of heaven on earth.

If science, so they thought, could so easily overthrow the most strongly defended beliefs of the men of religion, then it must be a more powerful instrument of truth and a vastly superior source of light and guidance for mankind.

So they reasoned as they worshipped Reason!

The most powerful intellects joined eagerly in the work of destruction and the reconstruction of thought on a new foundation of ideas and faith.

Those were the years of unbounded optimism and unquestioning faith in the omnipotence and omniscience of science.

And now what do we find? Science has already lost much of

its arrogant, triumphant spirit. The greatest men of science today are often the humblest of men.

But the damage has been done!

No one has described this situation better than Bernard Shaw who, in his lifetime, was perhaps the most potent spokesman of an all-conquering technico-scientific spirit. Writing towards the end of his life, this is what he said:

"The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its tales were more foolish than all the miracles of the priests . . . What is spread was not an enlightenment but a malignant disease. Its counsels which should have established the millennium, have led directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once more wholeheartedly than any religious fanatic believed his superstitions; for in their name I helped to destroy the faith of the millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand creeds."

In those remarks from Bernard Shaw we can also find a message of hope.

Academic humanism, the faith in science as the redeemer of mankind, has lost its hold on the best intellects.

Faith in the humanist creed is today on the decline. Academic humanism is dying at its roots. All that can be said to be increasing is the power and ruthlessness of the forces which use it as an instrument of propaganda and a screen for their operations.

These power-wielders see in the world-wide demoralisation that has been produced by a scientific-technological attitude to life a dazzling opportunity to undermine and overthrow all local, indigenous government and to regiment and control mankind on a world-wide scale.

Now we are ready to take a closer look at the Leftist creed or faith and try to find out precisely how it affects the individual and his thinking.

Can we, perhaps, detect some fundamental difference between the faith which has formed the foundation of Western culture for nearly two-thousand years and the new faith, already in its decline, that animates Leftists thinking?

It is not enough to say that academic humanism is a false faith. What we want to know is precisely what it is that makes it false. Can we put a finger on the central heresy of it and challenge the Liberals and their friends to meet us in debate on that precise point?

The centre of gravity of religious faith as we have always known it is the heart and mind of the individual. Faith has always been a matter of personal salvation.

In the illumination of a genuine faith, the individual discovers —

or rather, rediscovers — his own true centre and organises himself and integrates himself around that centre.

And a nation that contains a large number of individuals integrated in this way is a nation to be reckoned with; it is a nation vividly alive on all planes of activity; it is a nation fully conscious of itself and its destiny, a nation that makes history — and does not merely provide the human raw material with which others make history. It is a nation "in form" — a healthy organism.

From the true centering of the heart and mind of the individual there flows a faith that moves mountains — the kind of faith that inspired our forefathers to deeds of courage and endurance that make nonsense of all calculation.

Now see the difference!

In academic humanism, the faith of what we call the Left, the centre of gravity is not in the individual but in society.

The answer to the individual's agonised cry is to be sought not inside himself, but outside — in a promised perfectability of society that will relieve life of its terrors and tensions.

Here we see the secret of Liberalism's power of attraction for the individual who has lost his spiritual and intellectual bearings! Here we see, stated in simple terms, the alluring promise of a false faith that has already delivered millions of people into political bondage.

When, therefore, we fight Communism — or Liberalism, which is a diluted form of the same thing — we fight for our own faith, a genuine faith, against a false faith.

The war against Communism is ultimately a religious war in which the very thing which makes life worth living is at stake and without which all the material welfare in the world is so much Dead Sea fruit.

History has put our little nation in a sheltered, much favoured situation where it has managed to escape the worst effects of the blight of the technico-scientific spirit, that spirit which Bernard Shaw tells us has led to the suicide of Europe.

History has made us one of the last defenders of a genuine faith securely centred in the heart and mind of the individual against a false faith that now desperately seeks salvation in a ruthless, scientific re-ordering of mankind that must of necessity destroy all freedom.

Will history one day record that here, at the southern tip of Africa, a battle that everywhere else had gone against the human spirit, was at last turned?

That is the challenge and that the opportunity that should make

us proud to be South Africans today.

3. THE SCIENCE OF REVOLUTION

O one needs to be told that there is such a thing as a Science of War. It is a science covering a great range of different activities, all of which form part of the conduct of warfare. Infantry, artillery, armour, logistics, engineering, political and psychological warfare — under these and many other headings a vast amount of theory and detailed instruction has been accumulated down the centuries and kept thoroughly up to date.

There is even a philosophy of war, in which some of the finest minds have distilled out of centuries of experience the basic principles and the kind of thinking that make for success in warlike operations.

Is there a soldier who has not heard of Von Clausewitz and his principles of war?

I remind you about the Science of War only because I want to convey an adequate impression of another science that has come into existence in the present century, a science of which millions of people are still totally unaware.

I refer to the Science of Revolution, something just as comprehensive, every bit as thoroughgoing as the older Science of War.

This Science of Revolution was brought to a high degree of usefulness by the Bolsheviks in Russia and was first used on a major scale against the Czarist regime and the regime that followed it.

Its development since then, we may be sure, has kept pace with developments in every other branch of science and technology, drawing into its service some of the most gifted minds of the twentieth century.

The question might well be asked; Is Communism perhaps, not only another branch of the Science of War?

As a kind of warfare, it is so different from war as we have always known it that I think it would be wiser to consider it as something quite apart.

The Communist Science of Revolution is something that does not belong to the spirit and culture of Western Europe. To us, it is something alien, almost incomprehensible. It is something against which we must learn to defend ourselves but which we could never find it in our hearts to use against others.

Therefore, I think, we must consider Communism not as a legitimate extension of the Science of War but rather as a new Science of Revolution, something that never existed before and has therefore caught large areas of the world wholly unprepared.

For Communism in this aspect is essentially a product of physical inferiority, replacing strength and courage as the deciding factor in any struggle with pure intelligence or cunning.

The Communist Science of Revolution makes war without declaring war, aiming always to conquer a nation without even giving it a chance to fight.

Revolutions there have always been, but nearly always they were spontaneous eruptions of discontent that could only succeed if they found immediate and overwhelming support. Indeed, it is almost a habit of mind with most of us to think of a revolution as something that breaks out suddenly and spontaneously — and not as something elaborately planned and conducted from without.

Those who planned and carried through the Russian Bolshevik revolution altered all that. From being a blind and almost mindless expression of internal revolt, they turned revolution into an instrument of war, partly directed and financed from without.

Nations which hitherto, could only be overthrown by other nations attacking from without, can now, unless they are wide awake to the danger, be overthrown from within.

Napoleon with his Grand Army could not conquer Russia. Hitler, with one of the greatest attacking forces ever assembled, also failed. But a highly disciplined group of a few thousand trained Communists, few of them Russians, were able to conquer Russia from within.

As Lenin said at the time, "If only one thousand people in St. Petersburg had known what we were about we could never have succeeded".

How then, can a nation defend itself against the Science of Revolution? There can be no defence that does not begin with a thorough insight into its philosophy and techniques.

The magic that defeats Communism is a knowledge that disables the enemy's cunning. All defence in the final analysis, is defence against deception.

And the first step towards such knowledge is to recognise the existence of a thorough-going Science of Revolution.

Only when we have clearly grasped that fact shall we have the necessary incentive to explore Communism in a systematic, scientific way producing in the end the perfect defence — a Science of Anti-Communism.

An immense quantity of Communist revolutionary literature has been seized by the security police in every country in which the Communist world conspiracy has been conducted — and that leaves out none that I know of.

There are hundreds of training manuals on every imaginable subject and Communists in non-Communist countries are taught the most ingenious ways of undermining the established order and of promoting the Communist cause of world domination.

Let us just dip into this Communist schoolwork for a sample of the kind of advice that is given to Communists outside Russia.

Here is a manual that was seized in the United States a couple of years ago, containing a great deal of carefully tabulated advice. It was prepared, so we are told on the inside cover, by Lavrenti Beria, the Head of the Soviet Secret Police, who finally got what he had so frequently prescribed for others — liquidation.

This 64-page manual comes under the heading of psychopolitical warfare, obviously one of the most important departments of the Science of Revolution.

And here is some advice given to Communist operators working in the U.S. as psychologists and psychiatrists:—

"With the institutions for the insane, you have in your country prisons which can hold a million persons and can hold them without civil rights or any hope of freedom. Upon these people can be practised shock and surgery so that never again will they draw sane breath."

Where the Science of Psychology has always been regarded by us as having to do with the healing of minds, the Communists have developed it also as an instrument of war, as a means of putting opponents out of action.

By exploring the stimulus-response mechanisms of the mind, they have been able to devise means of destroying the will of the individual, leaving him alive and apparently unharmed but reduced to helpless docility.

This solves a problem that has defied the criminal mind since the beginning of time, that of disposing of the body. The body is left alive — that which matters most, the will, is killed.

The people who appear in Russian courts from time to time on political charges must be seen as the victims of some of these techniques. For how else, are we to explain the fact that they invariably plead guilty and, in parrot fashion, make a long recital of their crimes?

Christian martyrs have continued to assert their beliefs even while being burned at the stake. There are records of men and women who continued to defy their tormentors and to proclaim their faith even after most of their limbs had been burned away. That was because the will, the noblest part of man, remained untouched.

The new psychology, one of the most effective instruments of the Communist Science of Revolution takes great care that rebels will never again figure as martyrs, as a light and an inspiration to others.

They do this by breaking the will, leaving the rest of the man intact — even when they mean to liquidate him in the end.

It is the broader strategy of the Communist Science of Revolution that calls more urgently for attention in South Africa.

Under his heading the most significant fact of all is that, with few exceptions, the Communist offensive is no longer being aimed at the masses.

Karl Marx always imagined that the poor, discontented working classes who were a familiar part of the scene in the early days of industrialisation, would always be the main instrument of revolt against the prevailing order.

He was wrong. Poverty has been virtually wiped out in the industrialised countries of the West. Workmen to use Mr. Harold Macmillan's favourite phrase, "never had it so good".

Communism has therefore had to amend its entire strategy.

Its main targets to-day are the rootless, spiritually disoriented, frustrated, bewildered, frightened educated classes — those who find themselves without a genuine religious faith.

Many of the people belonging to these classes have become a weak element in the population. Some of them are very clever and highly educated, in different ways — like the traitors Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorva — but they are all weak in instinct, weak in that shared faith and feeling that make for social and political cohesion, the organic unifying principle in mankind.

They are the victims of a process of spiritual and intellectual erosion and disintegration: they are people persecuted by a sense of the futility of existence.

Most frequently to be found in this group are journalists, scientists, teachers (especially in the realm of pure science and higher education) and ministers of religion. People from these categories occur in Communism's target area out of all proportion to their number in the community.

The purpose of this assault on the weakest elements in the population is not to destroy them, we may be sure, but to set them up as the most admirable, most respectable and most influential representatives of the community.

The aim is simple: to delude the masses by working on and intensifying the delusions of the spiritually sick educated minority,

making the whole nation sick by fostering and cultivating the sickness that is already there.

Meanwhile, dedicated Communists not necessarily of the sincere believing kind, work their way into organisations of every imaginable kind where their influence can produce the maximum effect.

All this is part and parcel of the Communist Science of Revolution.

In the theatre, in the press, in the trade union movement, even in legitimate political parties — wherever trained Communists find themselves they know what is expected of them. All they have to do is remember what they have been taught.

One of the most effective of all is the Communist lawyer—the man trained to manipulate the law in such a way as to protect Communists and advance the Communist cause.

What the Communist lawyer needs before all else is a system of law geared to peace, in which subversives and saboteurs are treated as common offenders. Such a system, tunnelled through and through with legalistic loopholes through which Communists can pass with ease, he proudly calls the "Rule of law". What he fears and hates most, because it calls his bluff, is a system of law which invokes the code of war treating Communist conspirators not as common offenders but as dangerous enemies of the nation.

To defeat the Communists we must know them and know their ways — because, being always a tiny minority in any population, they are powerless when no longer hidden, when no longer able to deceive.

4. THE POWER SIDE OF

N my last two talks I discussed the abstract side of Communism
— Communism as a faith or personal philosophy and Communism as a well defined Science of Revolution.

The time has now come to look at the other side of the face of Communism. The power side. This time not Communism as a field of mental activity but as a field of action. The doing side of it

This time it is not the Communist idealists but the Communist realists who call for our attention.

The subject of Communism can be divided differently again, horizontally, this time, into two great portions.

One of them is Communism as a world of ideas and ideals.

The other is Communism as a world of action.

These are the "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" of Communism.

Many other subjects can be similarly divided: the theoretical and the practical. There is, for example, an ideas side of engineering and a practical side and the two are joined together as the engineer and the contractor do their work.

The dualism, or two-sidedness, of Communism looks like that — but there is a most important difference that we must be careful not to overlook.

In the finished product of the engineer — a bridge, for example — we see the results of a reconciliation of theory and practice.

The two are mutually supporting — and in the finished work of the engineer they are inseparable.

Communism, on the other hand, presents a misleading image of the unity of theory and practice. Behind that image, the two live in irreconcilable antagonism.

Communist achievement never is and never can be a fulfilment of Communist ideas and ideals

The recognition of this fatal split right through the centre of Communism is one of the most important keys we can have to the unlocking of its mysteries. It is also a fact of immense importance in the strategy of defence against Communism.

Communist idealist and Communist power-wielder often work together: but they live in different worlds, for all that.

The one clings to Communism as a faith and is desperately anxious to strengthen his own position by making converts and working for the fulfilment of his ideals.

The other, the power-wielder, merely uses Communist idealism as you or I would use a stick to reach an apple high up in a tree. When we have the apple in our hand we almost absent-mindedly throw the stick aside. We lose interest in it. So it is with the Communist powerwielder — when he has achieved his purpose, Communist idealism is of no further use to him. It is only a burden and an embarrassment.

The two worlds of Communism cannot finally live together.

The power men, the power realists, invariably finish up on top. The believers, the ideas men and idealists, are lucky if, after the success of the revolution, they are allowed to vanish into obscurity. Only too often they suffer a fate for which the Communists have coined a word of their own: they are liquidated.

The difference between the two kinds of Communism is subtle, but profoundly significant.

The power men can be said to think politically.

The idealists think about politics.

The two processes are quite different.

The power men are activated entirely by motives derived from a desire to promote a certain set of power interests.

The idealists live in a world of pure ideas from which a realistic insight into motives and interests is almost totally excluded. What motives they themselves have for what they say and do spring from a set of ideas which flatter their own secret longings and their weakness — and have no other validity in nature whatsoever.

We must learn to distinguish these different worlds of Communism and identify also the two kinds of people who inhabit them — otherwise we shall continue to labour under a great disadvantage in our efforts to understand Communism.

Doctors have the same difficulty sometimes in trying to distinguish different diseases which occur together, sharing in a confusing way, the same set of symptoms.

One again, I propose to call in the assistance of a couple of well-known Communist idealists to help me to reveal more clearly the ultimate antagonism of the ideal and the actual in Communism.

Guy Burgess, the British diplomat who defected to the East after having for several years betrayed British and American secrets to the Russians, is a perfect example of the Communist idealist, the sincere believer. Whatever he did, he did out of a sincere belief, however misguided, that he was helping to bring nearer the fulfilment of a Communist utopia for all mankind.

Quite recently he died in Moscow and the fact could no longer be concealed that he died a bitterly disappointed man. He could see perfectly clearly, to use his own quoted words, that the "Communist ship of state is run by a near-dictatorship". And what no doubt shocked him most of all was that the Soviet bosses showed no interest whatever in having it otherwise. For this disappointed idealist there must surely have been a grim symbolism in the work they gave him to do — to help in the preparation of reading matter for children.

The fate of the young Soviet poet, Yevtushenko, also demonstrates in a highly dramatic way the ultimate irreconcilability of Communist idealism and Communist actuality.

Yevtushenko enjoyed a great success with audiences of young people in Moscow a couple of years ago when his richly imaginative idealism was turned like a blast against Stalinism and all its works

That was something that suited both the poet and the authorities.

The poet was free at last to cry out against Russia's failure to translate Communist ideals into actuality — because he could put all the blame on Stalin. And Russia's new leaders were pleased because they themselves could not have made so good a job of the demolition of the once-revered Stalin image.

But after the de-Stalinisation operation had been completed, Yevtushenko continued crying out against those who had, as he expressed it, "betrayed the revolutionary ideal", blaming Stalinist elements that were still at work in Russia.

Now all the Communist power-wielders came under the lash of his condemnation; now he was attacking something that could never be changed — so they promptly silenced him. And he was lucky to escape, for the time being at any rate, with a grovelling public self-abasement and apology.

The liquidation of the believers follows a successful Communist revolution as inevitably as night follows day. And I don't think anyone has ever expressed this important truth about Communism so simply and effectively as George Orwell has done in his famous book "Animal Farm".

This brings us to another important question which we must try to answer if we are to fight Communism with any hope of success: who are the people on the power side? Who are the deadly realists who are energising and directing the Communist conspiracy all over the world?

Who are these people from whom the Communist faith or creed is only a stick with which to reach the political apples of their desire?

Communism is nearly always represented in newspaper cartoons as a bearded Bolshy in a Russian peasant smock.

In this way, Communism has been identified, almost exclusively,

with Russia, as an instrument of Russian foreign policy and expansionist ambition.

It is, of course, perfectly true that the Soviet Union has participated actively, and still does, in the promotion of Communist subversion and sabotage in South Africa. At the moment the Russians are training large numbers of so-called "political refugees" as agitators and saboteurs for future use in this country.

Nevertheless, an image of Communism as something essentially Russian can be dangerously misleading, for it leaves us mentally and morally unarmed against powerful Communist influences exerted from other sources.

A Communist cold war directed solely from Russia — or from China, for that matter, — would be easy to understand.

What is much harder to understand, and hence also harder to explain, is the campaign of hate and hostility from other parts of the world, from the centre of nations which we have always regarded as our friends and allies in the fight against Communism.

A chorus of hate and hostility that sides automatically with every manifestation of Communist subversion and sabotage in South Africa!

It is hard to see a bearded Bolshy with a bomb in his hand behind the television film "Sabotage in South Africa", prepared by the Columbia Broadcasting System, which justifies and glorifies the Communist agitators and saboteurs against whom South Africa is now fighting.

It is hard to see Russian influence behind the action of Mr. Robert Kennedy, brother of the President of the United States, in receiving a fugitive from South Africa like Patrick Duncan, or behind the hero-worshipping which Duncan has been getting from Press, Radio and Television in the United Kingdom and United States

Obviously, the picture of Communism as a bearded Bolshy in a Russian peasant smock is inadequate. We need to know more about the sources of power and action which make the Communist world conspiracy the threat it is today.

Much of this knowledge is now available and will be frankly discussed in subsequent talks.

5. THE WAR AGAINST

HAT we need is an insight into Communism that will clear up some of its many baffling contradictions.

And the most baffling of all these contradictions is the powerful anti-anti-Communism that we find in countries which are generally supposed to be fighting Communism in what is commonly known as "the cold war".

We have had a good deal of experience of this contradiction.

As glaring an example as any is the campaign of hostility being conducted against anti-Communist South Africa by the bulk of the United States Press, Radio and Television.

While we are locked in a struggle against Communist subversion and sabotage in which both Russia and China are active participants, we are viciously attacked in the United States, and all our internal enemies, without exception, are held up to admiration as "freedom fighters".

In its television film, "Sabotage in South Africa", the Columbia Broadcasting System, commonly known as C.B.S., has gone far beyond the legitimate requirements of television reporting.

This film, in which sabotage and subversion are justified and encouraged, was not only presented over nationwide television networks in the United States and Europe, but smaller, cheaper 16 m.m. versions of it were produced in large numbers and distributed all over the world.

This is not just television reporting. This is psychological warfare. And the film "Sabotage in South Africa" must be seen as a major operation in the psychological warfare now being waged against our country, designed to stir up animosity against us and to prepare public opinion all over the world for possible armed intervention.

I have discussed C.B.S. in a previous talk in another series, but I must do so again because it provides so blatant an example of the kind of contradiction that today confuses the picture of Communism in the public mind.

Some people will say that it is a bad example, arguing that C.B.S. is merely attacking apartheid and that C.B.S. can hardly be blamed if the Communists also happen to be opposed to apartheid.

So let us look at C.B.S. at work in some other country where the whole question of apartheid is totally excluded,

Cuba.

The C.B.S., after conducting a virulent campaign against anti-Communist South Africa, found itself being investigated by the United States Senate Internal Security Sub-Committee for what the Chairman of that Committee called "a totally pro-Castro presentation" over its huge nationwide network.

Worse still, C.B.S. was shown to have used for this work one Robert Taber who had been closely associated with a pro-Castra organisation in the United States called "Friends of Cuba" — financed by Castro money.

The Senate Internal Security Sub-Committee also found that Taber had a long criminal record, including convictions for kidnapping, armed robbery and car-theft, to name only a few of them.

Meanwhile, as we all know, America was, and still is, fighting Communism on all fronts.

There is at this moment a sharp antagonism between the United States and Communist Cuba.

Only a short time ago the United States Navy was blockading Cuba.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, headed by J. Edgar Hoover, is locked in a never-ending struggle with Communist subversion inside the United States.

Let there be no misunderstanding. I do not say that it has been proved that C.B.S. is a Communist organisation. I merely hold up the C.B.S. performances in South Africa and Cuba as examples of something widespread in the United States and elsewhere — a powerfully moneyed anti-anti-Communism.

And I use these examples from the United States because it is so much easier to be objective about what goes on over on the other side of the world.

Many examples could be found much nearer home.

In the United States — as in South Africa — the political picture contains three important elements that must be identified:

Firstly: There is pure Communism which has again and again been identified with treason and other forms of lawlessness.

Secondly: There is an anti-Communism, essentially patriotic and religious in character, which does, it is true, sometimes express itself in strident language.

Thirdly: There is a powerful set of forces which, although scrupulously law-abiding, wages war unremittingly against anti-Communists and against every manifestation of a patriotic, national spirit.

When a few hardened Communists work their way into the

centre of anti-anti-Communist organisations — as Robert Taber penetrated C.B.S. — the situation is still further complicated and made harder to interpret correctly.

And it is hardly surprising if the tiny minority of genuine anti-Communists, the patriots, become somewhat over-excited.

The first two of these phenomena — the Communist and the anti-Communist are easier to understand, so let us turn our attention to the third one, the anti-anti-Communist, who figures so prominently these days in the cold war against South Africa.

Please remember too, that we are not now discussing Communism as a faith or philosophy or as a set of ideas which some people find attractive. We are exploring that other world of Communism, the world of pure power where men's actions are energised and directed, not by ideas and beliefs, but by motives and interests

What we want to investigate now is a powerful anti-anti-Communism and the first problem we have to solve is where and how to approach a very complex subject.

Doctors, when they want to study a certain disease look for what they would call a "classical" case of it, a case in which the clinical picture is not blurred and confused by a variety of other pathological conditions. In other words, they want to study the disease all by itself, free from complications.

I think we can do the same with the political and social disorder we call anti-anti-Communism.

We can go and study it in a part of the world where it can be more clearly identified and its workings more easily traced.

Let us take a close look at the same set of forces at work in a typical little Latin-American Republic.

That means a country that is almost always in a state of unrest, with revolutions and counter-revolutions following each other down the years in fairly regular succession.

It means a country whose economy is overwhelmingly in the hands of foreign investors — big enough and few enough to be able to come together and pursue a common set of purposes.

This is the situation nearly all over Latin America, so let one unnamed republic stand for all of them.

Over such a country there hangs a great question mark, like a black, ominous cloud.

Who is to run the politics?

That is the question.

The population? Or the few powerful people who, between them, control the economy?

Whose will is to finish up on top? Whose interests shall be paramount? Who will write the laws? The people? Or those whom the investors instal as their chosen representatives?

The endless struggle that goes on in our imaginary Latin-American state arises out of efforts to settle this issue.

What happens in most cases, most of the time, is that the investors contrive to stay on top. They form a consortium, a sort of combined purse, from which local politics can be financed. And even when, as sometimes happens, they don't own the local newspapers and other means of public communication, they are nearly alaways in a position to influence them, bringing prosperity to those they favour and ruin to the rest.

There is no point in moralising about the actions of the representatives of big investment capital in these circumstances. All we are concerned about is to know what happens, human nature being what it is — automatically, inevitably.

And automatically, inevitably, this kind of money-sponsored political activity results in an unstable political situation in which dangerous tensions build up, finding release from time to time in turmoil and revolution.

Little by little, the new bosses fall under the influence of the same set of forces and the stage is set for another revolution or coup d'etat.

Please remember this is just a highly simplified version of what goes on today in many parts of the world.

What it means is that economic power has become so great, and concentrated in so few hands, that invisibly it controls the politics. Or, to put it differently, politics as we understand it, has become more and more a mere function of economic activity and financial power.

A very subtle shift in the centre of gravity of power within the state, but one of tremendous consequence.

Now let us return to our little Latin-American Republic and see just how this highly concentrated economic power manipulates and controls the local politics.

It does so, we find, automatically and inevitably, by promoting the politics of the Left against the Right. Its arch-enemy is the Right or Nationalism, or Conservatism, which is a political expression of an organic and indigenous local identity and local will

All the resources of the Left are brought to bear incessantly against sources of local pride and patriotic sentiment, with a view to preventing a local, indigenous will from finding itself, organising itself and asserting itself politically.

Where does Communism fit into this picture of what goes on in our small Latin-American Republic?

All shades of the Left from the pale pink of the Liberal to the deep-red of the Communist, are to be found in the forces which money-power directs against a local patriotism that threatens its political power. Or, as in Cuba before Castro, against a conservative regime that has actually succeeded in gaining control.

Liberals and Leftists of all shades and their moneyed backers have a common enemy — the patriot and his politics.

The patriots, vividly aware of the danger represented by the Communist element in the moneyed forces, tend to concentrate their attention on this enemy. Hence a political patriotism expresses itself very often as an intense anti-Communism.

And a strong anti-Communism, because it provides a rallying point for all the forces of patriotism and conservatism, becomes a threat not only to the Communists but to all the moneyed politics of the Left.

Hence the anti-anti-Communism from people who always claim — but not too loudly — to be opposed to the Communists.

In Cuba we have seen the drama carried a stage further. There we see what happens — in fact, must happen in the end — when moneyed powers use all the politics of the Left, including Communism, against the only force that can finally defeat Communism — a politics rooted in local patriotism, a politics that expresses the collective instincts and values and longe-range interests of the population

In Cuba the moneyed powers found themselves with a government they did not like, headed by Batista. Branding him as a dictator, and Cuba as a police state, they waged war relentlessly on all fronts. They may have had some misgivings when they found the struggle against Batista being effectively spearheaded by Castro, but they did not interfere at a time when they could quite easily have wiped out Castro and prevented a complete Communist take-over.

I hold no brief for the Batista regime, but I doubt whether it was any worse than many of those now supported by the moneyed Left — in Ghana, Algeria, Ethiopia and Liberia, for example.

In the United States itself the anti-anti-Communists, like C.B.S. and the "New York Times", had no doubts whatever and they hailed Castro day in and day out as a saviour of his people and "a great agrarian reformer".

Meanwhile American conservatives were just as loudly denouncing Castro and warning the people of the United States against an imminent Communist take-over in Cuba, with all the danger this implied for their nation's defences in the cold war.

One of the important lessons for us is that the struggle to save South Africa is not an isolated one. It is only part of a worldwide struggle in which the same pattern of events, the same pattern of hostility and undermining and lawlessness, with minor variations, is repeated again and again.

The other lesson is this: basically, it is a power struggle in which the ideas and ideals of Liberal and Communist believers are not ends but only means.

And the concentration of hostility against South Africa tells us that South Africa, by putting up the toughest resistance, threatens the position of the same enemy everywhere.

6. RUSSIA WAS ONLY THE

BEFORE proceeding to our final analysis of the power element in Communism, let us quickly look back over the ground we have already covered.

In any country where money power, whether foreign or local, has become very great and highly concentrated, those who control this money will automatically want to rule the politics of the country, rather than be ruled.

Hence they will find themselves in opposition to a genuine national spirit whose politics naturally treats all money and its works, however powerful, as a subordinate function of the state.

This is the sort of situation, examples of which can be traced throughout history, which Communism is today exploiting all over the world.

Fighting on its own, Communism cannot possibly defeat political patriotism, which it sees as its arch-enemy.

So it joins forces with huge moneyed interests which for reasons of their own are also opposed to the politics of patriotism, putting teeth into the struggle against the only force which can finally halt Communist progress.

Cuba again provides a lesson that can be easily read.

The bulk of the wealth that was lost there when Castro nationalised all the big foreign-owned enterprises was just ordinary American investment capital — not Communist money.

Official figures are not available, but I don't think the total foreign investment in Cuba could have been much less than £2,000,000,000 or R4,000,000,000. Probably it was much more.

Now the significant fact is that while most Americans were furious about this gigantic act of brigandage on the part of Castro, there were some very powerful people in the United States who did not seem to mind at all.

Pro-Castro presentations of the Communist newsman, Robert Taber, were being purveyed to the American public over the huge C.B.S. network after the Communist take-over.

Taber was the only American cameraman permitted by the Castro government to operate in Cuba about that time. And with the co-operation of the Castro regime he went around filming different scenes, all purporting to show how happy and contended the Cubans were under their new Communist masters.

How are we to explain this strange phenomenon?

There can be only one explanation, supported by a mass of other evidence which has accumulated down the years.

Over and above the American wealth which suffered so severe a blow in Cuba, there is another, still greater, still more highly centralised financial power whose purposes were actually advanced by what happened in Cuba.

For want of a better, more precisely descriptive term, this has been called "International Finance".

The truth of the matter is that our language has yet to catch up with the realities of the power struggle which now goes on, hidden from the eyes and understanding of all but a handful of people, on the plane of giant finance. We lack words with a clearly delineated content of meaning capable of bringing clarity to a field of discussion which some men naturally prefer to keep hidden in darkness and smoke.

Hence, in order to discuss these matters at all, we have to fall back on a phrase like "international finance" whose dangerous ambiguity the Communist enemy and his unwitting allies are always ready to exploit to the full.

After all, American capital invested in Cuba or British capital invested in Bolivia or South Africa also falls within the general description of "international finance". But that is not the "International Finance" that is meant when we say that some centres of power in the United States were pleased about the Communist take-over in Cuba.

Hence, when the Communist element in finance is attacked, its spokesmen raise loud cries of protest in the hope of bringing all the forces of finance onto their side of the quarrel.

Very often, too, they succeed, and the daring critic is almost stunned by the abuse that is hurled at him from all quarters — Communist and non-Communist.

Would-be inquirers are warned off a bit of obviously dangerous territory.

Nevertheless, the truth must be told — and understood by a sufficient number of people — if the nation is to defend itself against Communism.

There is a very important element in international finance that has no genuine territorial identity whatsover. The instincts of the relatively small number of men who control it are predatory and chauvinistic. Their interest in money is not directly commercial. They are interested in money mainly as an instrument of power. They stand for a new imperialism of money, They are the power-wielders of Communism.

Money from this source seldom forms part of legitimate foreign investment whose ultimate aim, even when its meddles in politics, is its own profit and increase.

This is the ultimate reality of Communism. It must be visualised as a new imperialism on the plane of power finance.

Russia is not the fountain of world Communism. Russia was merely the first major victim.

Does all this sound startlingly new?

Winston Churchill knew it and said it in 1919 immediately after the Bolshevik take-over in Russia.

As Minister of War in the British Government at that time, and until 1921, he was intimately connected with, and had access to, the most reliable information about events in Russia.

Speaking as Secretary of State for War and Air in the House of Commons on November the Fifth, 1919, he said (and I quote) "The question which arises at the outset of any reflections on this subject of the policy which we should pursue towards Russia is: What is Russia? Certainly I dispute the title of the Bolsheviks to represent Russia. Indeed I think they would be the first to repudiate any claim to represent Russia. Their views are greater than the representation of a single country. Their position, if it means anything at all is an international position. They despise such a mere commonplace as nationality. Their ideal is a world-wide proletarian revolution".

Churchill went on: "How was Russia struck down? It is one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of Europe . . . Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy. No sooner did Lenin arrive than he began beckoning a finger here and a finger there to obscure persons in sheltered retreats in New York, Glasgow, in Berne and other countries, and he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world, of which he was the high priest and chief".

Churchill said of Russia in 1919: "Her sufferings are more fearful than modern records hold".

The British Secretary of State for War and Air was speaking about the real Communism, an international Communism powered by untold wealth — a Communism of which Russia was only the first major victim.

Another Communist conspirator to arrive in Russia in time for the Bolshevik take-over was Trotski, accompanied by 300 other revolutionaries, most of them from New York and very few of

Nor was it only revolutionaries that were injected into Russia. According to information supplied to the British Government by the American Government at the time, a leading New York banking house supplied Lenin with a large part of the initial funds for the revolution; and the head of that banking house in April 1917 made a public declaration that it was thanks to his financial assistance that the revolution had succeeded.

One of the most remarkable facts about this Communism, this new imperialism of money power, is that about 98 per cent of the money and energy employed in the furtherance of its aims is non-Communist.

For the secret of the immense power of Communism is that it harnesses powers other than its own.

In the realm of finance it exploits a natural desire on the part of all wielders of great money power to rule the local politics rather than be ruled. If only the politics rooted in patriotism can be overthrown, the Communists know that it is only a matter of time before they take over.

Communism also exploits every imaginable weakness to be found inside a nation — in culture, education and religion — and will back any trend calculated to lower the spiritual health and vigour of the nation.

Here, too, the Communists are helped by other non-Communist financial powers which see disadvantage for themselves in the fostering of a strong-willed national spirit.

7. COMMUNISM AND THE

O study of Communism would be complete without some reference to the struggle on the church front — that is to say, the front represented by organised religion.

It has been said that the largest single group supporting the Communist-front apparatus in the United States today is made up of Protestant clergymen who are following in the footsteps of the World Council of Churches and are preaching its so-called "social gospel".

The number of such clergymen in the United States alone has been estimated at 7,000. The figure is probably much greater today.

In a couple of earlier talks in this series I discussed the creed, or philosophy, or faith which sustains what I would call the sincere believers of the Left — including the Liberals and the Communists.

This creed, for want of a generally recognised name, I have called "academic humanism" reminding us that it is a product of the modern educated intelligence and that the feeling that permeates it is essentially one of sympathy or humanity — not to mention self-pity!

It is a faith or creed with which men have tried to fill the vacuum created by the almost total overthrow of traditional religion by science and the scientific way of thinking.

This new faith, with a creed or set of beliefs constructed in accordance with the grammer of science and technology, is essentially a secular religion-substitute, dispensing as it does with all the supernatural and poetic elements in traditional Christianity.

It is essentially a religion of cold reason and hard facts based on a new picture of nature and of man's place in nature, a new cosmogony, created out of the collective labours of biologists, anthropologists, physicists, astronomers and others.

These men of science were the authors of a new cosmic Creation. And academic humanism, the religion of reason, was the fruit of their combined endeavours.

It is the same science, and the same faith generated by science, that has turned millions of people into agnostics and atheists and has emptied the churches of the Western World.

These are the facts which must be clearly understood, and remembered, before we can hope to be able to make sense of the latest developments in the world of organised Christianity.

For, basically, what is happening now is that an academic humanism that helped to empty the churches of Christendom, has been incorporated by thousands of Western churchmen and turned into a new orthodoxy.

A rationalist doctrine that emptied the churches will, it is hoped, now full them again — if only it can be expressed in theological language!

So let us get this clear in our minds: The new "social gospel" these churchmen are preaching is only academic humanism, an essentially secular creed, presented in the language and idiom of traditional Christianity.

Its new imperatives, its furious antagonism to national and racial self-preservation, were drawn not from the Bible but from the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels.

As was only to be expected, this process has called for a wholesale re-interpretation of the Bible and the most strenuous efforts to give Biblical sanction to all the collectivist, egalitarian teachings of a Left which is frankly non-Christian and even anti-Christian.

In this way, an important section of organised religion in the Western world has allowed itself to become the means of advancing Leftist political causes and has become the most important single Communist "front", penetrated and used by atheistic Communists.

The subject is a difficult one to handle, for reasons that should

The great majority of these churchmen believe and act with perfect sincerity and they are motivated by the best intentions in the world

If some of them knowingly work with self-confessed Communists and knowingly promote the cause of a mechanistic, one-world, one-government, one-race ordering of mankind, they do so believing that they are promoting a good cause.

How much easier it is to attack and to expose men who knowingly do wrong! How hard to deal with men who do wrong profoundly convinced that they do good!

In many cases, it is precisely their best qualities, their fellow-feeling, their sympathy, their altruism, that make these men so effective in promoting Leftist and Communist causes and in undermining the last strongholds of a genuine Christian faith.

It is their virtues and their good intentions, too, that provide them with an armour which criticism cannot easily penetrate.

And how much harder to reach them with criticism when they confront the world holding aloft the shield of the Cross, claiming that they do what they do even in the name of the Saviour!

Whatever it is these churchmen believe, we may be sure of one thing: it has become for them a spiritual and intellectual lifeline which they dare not let go. Hence any efforts to separate them from their new social doctrine must be expected to produce an immediate reaction of fear and resentment.

Their critics are in much the same position. Seeing and understanding the danger into which mankind is being drawn by the preachers of this new social doctrine, vigorously sponsored as they are by forces that are essentially materialistic and atheistical, the defenders of traditional religion do not always find patience one of the easiest virtues.

And yet there can be no progress made against a church trend which everywhere has the backing of Communists except by those few individuals capable of projecting a superior faith that can distinguish between the real enemy, the anti-Christian, and all those others who are friends and brothers fallen into error.

To lump them all together because they are now working together in a common cause can only weaken the anti-Communist cause and strengthen the Communists.

The defender of traditional Christianity is baulked by another serious difficulty. The Communist front has virtually captured the modern ecumenical movement. And with it, has been captured all the habitual respect and goodwill that a genuine ecumenical movement has gathered down the years.

That means that an ecumenical movement which has always had as its aim the bringing together of all the churches of Christendom in a closer unity of faith has passed into the hands of men whose dominating motive is revolutionary political change, aimed at bringing all mankind under the sway of a single centre of power—in other words, world government.

And it is precisely because such a movement, inspired by such aims, must speak in the language of socialist collectivism, that atheistic Communism has blessed it and in many cases actively directs it.

Is it not significant that in London a man like Solly Sachs, a notorious Communist, has emerged as organiser of Christian Action?

In another talk we shall throw a beam of light on the world-wide organisation mainly responsible for the promotion of a new gospel which the Communists find so congenial. In the meantime let us look at some of the results already produced by this partnership of revised Christianity and worldly power.

Nowhere in all the world has the collectivist social doctrine with

its promised Utopia of universal peace and brotherhood conquered the minds of so many ministers of religion as in the United States,

And nowhere has the Communist influence and direction been more frequently or more blatantly betrayed.

The tree of a new kind of world-wide church unification we can look at later, Let us now look only at some of the fruit.

Did you know that in the United States today it is an offence on the part of a teacher to recite the Lord's Prayer on any government school premises?

Did you know that schoolteachers — except in private schools — commit an offence when they read from the Bible?

Did you know that those who continue to read from the Bible or recite the Lord's prayer in American schools do so in defiance of two separate rulings of the United States Supreme Court handed down in June last year and in June this year?

If you have ever seen an American banknote or coin you will have noticed, printed or inscribed on it, these words: "In God we trust".

Did you know that these words on America's money have now, by implication, been declared illegal? That Congress and Senate have no right to have chaplains of their own? That Congress has no right to vote money for the employment of chaplains in America's armed forces?

After 186 years, the United States constitution has been reinterpreted by the Supreme Court to make America officially a godless nation, forbidden to acknowledge, or invoke, divine guidance — in spite of the fact that such acknowledgement of divine guidance was written into the original American Declaration of Independence!

As if the Americans, from the moment they drafted their constitution and put it into effect, did not know what it meant, but had to wait 186 years to find out from a Bench of judges which included two declared atheists.

Here was an issue in which the Protestant clergy of the United States, organised as never before through the National Council of Churches, one of the founder organisations of the World Council of Churches, might have been expected to put up a fight or make a strong stand.

Nothing these churchmen ever said was loaded with more meaning or significance than their silence over this issue of the national status of Christianity.

The very forces which give their all-out backing and encouragement to the promotion of the new social Gospel in the churches were the same forces that secured a re-reading of the American constitution after 186 years.

These churchmen were in no position to intervene.

In precisely the same way that the U.S. Supreme Court had found it necessary to re-interpret the American constitution, so had these churchmen, under the pressure of the same collectivist faith, found it necessary to re-interpret portions of the Bible.

The Judges made an offence of something which for 186 years had been no offence.

The clergymen made a cardinal sin of something which for 2,000 years of church history was never a sin — the preservation by the different races of men of their racial, national and cultural identity.

Hence the churchmen's silence at a time when they might have been expected to speak up.

8. CHURCHMEN WHO AID

THERE is danger for South Africa to-day in the existence of a world-wide church movement which has adopted all the collectivist ideas and ideals of socialism and Communism and has translated these into the language and idiom of Christianity.

What it all means is that the kind of thinking, the intense rationalism, that undermined traditional Christianity, turning millions of Christians into agnostics and emptying the churches, is now supplying the foundations of a revised Christian teaching.

A new doctrine has taken possession of the minds of many churchmen which teaches that all men are born equal and good and that it is only their organisations that can make them unequal and bad

Hence the salvation of man can come only from a new ordering of mankind that will — so it is confidently expected — eliminate all the known causes of conflict and tension.

Many churchmen are today fascinated by the idea that a universal brotherhood of man, a kingdom of heaven on earth, can be achieved by mainly political means.

The danger, however, does not come directly from these wellmeaning, idealistic churchmen.

Also fascinated by this idea are the mighty powerwielders of Communism who see in this idea an excellent means of breaking down all those separate concentrations of political power, known as nations, and of bringing all mankind under the most highly centralised control — with themselves in control, of course.

Here we see one of the most astonishing contradictions in the history of the human race — an alliance of leaders of Christianity with Christianity's most deadly enemies, the Communists.

We see the minds of leading Christians captured by a rationalist utopian idealism whose anti-religious origins cannot for a moment be doubted.

What these wholly dissimilar sets of people now have in common, what keeps them harnessed to a common cause, is the new Social Doctrine that teaches that the salvation of man is by man and that the long-yearned for kingdom of heaven is in the final analysis, only a political ordering that will liberate all the inherent forces of benevolence in human nature.

The one set of people the churchmen and other idealists of the Left, visualise the result of their strivings as a world government, nay a world self-government — an ultimate fulfilment of universal benevolence.

The other set of men, the Communist power-wielders, see it only as a world conquest — the ultimate fulfilment of an imperialism of money and ideas that has already brought one third of the world under their sway.

The one set of men live in a world of ideas and ideals believing about the nature of man what they need to believe for their own peace of mind. Their attitude represents an attempt to escape from life's inescapable dynamic of tension.

The other set of people live in a world of power realities, fully geared to its harsh demands, and free from of any illusions about the nature of man — man, the most acquisitive of animals, the most eager of all for strife and domination.

An interesting example of this weird partnership of opposites was provided in South Africa recently when a well-known minister of religion was found guilty under the Suppression of Communism Act. That was a perfect example of innocence and blissful ignorance become the instrument of ruthless worldly forces.

What we saw in that case was only a particular instance, involving only one minister of religion, of something that is happening today on a vast scale in many parts of the world, and especially in the United States.

It is both interesting and significant that many ministers of religion have adopted the new Social Doctrine at a time when the power of organised religion in Europe and America to reach and to influence the ordinary individual is less than it has ever been.

No one has described this situation more frankly or more vividly than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Ramsey, who said recently: "Britain has become a pagan land. The time may come when we shall have to bring missionaries from Africa to preach in Darkest Britain."

For millions of people to-day, organised Christianity in Europe and America, and elsewhere, no longer has a personal message.

The reason for this is easily found. Many of those whose avowed duty it is to supply such a message and to give a lead are themselves undergoing a painful crisis of faith. People feel instinctively that they have nothing to learn from men who themselves betray anxiety and bewilderment over questions of religious belief.

Seldom has this bewilderment been more honestly expressed than in a book written by the Bishop of Woolwich, Dr. John Robinson. What the Bishop has done is to bring the scientific, analytical method to bear on articles of faith and forms of belief that had been, for many people, the last refuge of faith. And whatever it is he has found at the bottom of his analytical test-tube, it is certainly not an exciting, inspiring renewal of faith.

Another minister of religion has summed up his Bishop's book with the remark that Dr. Robinson has produced a theology so muddled and watered down that people have to ask what really is the difference between an agnostic and a Christian.

This background of demoralisation in the ranks of organised religion and the empty churches, help to explain the new trend away from religion as a faith for the individual towards religion as a blueprint for political change.

Now let us have a look at the main points of the teaching that to-day forms a dangerous bond of sympathy between certain churchmen and the Communists.

Both are working for a collectivised one-world in which all differences of race, nation and culture are to be finally dissolved as mere causes of trouble.

Hence everything that stand in the way of the accomplishment of such an ordering of mankind is seen by the one set of men, the churchmen, as an offence against Christianity and by the other set of men, the Communists, as a heresy against Marxism-Leninism and an obstacle to their ambitions.

And what is the greatest obstacle of all and for these churchmen the greatest sin?

It is the determination of men everywhere to preserve their different identities, to cleave to their different groups, to preserve at all costs their different races, nations, languages, cultures and traditions

The good man, according to the new theology and according also to the socialist creed, is like a building block, equal and interchangeable with other building blocks, a perfectly predictable unit that will stay where it is put. With such units of humanity it is hoped to erect a world-wide, totally stable, tension-free creation of political and social engineering.

Such are the requirements of the new Social Gospel which has made a cardinal sin of something not even mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount — the determination of each living organism to preserve its integrity and fulfil its unique destiny, both as an individual and as part of a group.

The Rev. Alan Walker, the Australian minister who recently toured South Africa was speaking for collectivist ministers every-

where when he said: "The worst evil in the world to-day is race discrimination."

He was speaking for Russian Communism, too, for Moscow Radio reported some of his statements with obvious approval. He was merely saying in the idiom of Christianity what Moscow Radio says every day in the idiom of Communist propaganda — when it is not reporting the persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union.

As was only to be expected, hardened Communists have everywhere infiltrated the new collectivist church movement.

The appearance of a man like Solly Sachs, a notorious Communist agitator, as organiser of Christian Action in London must be seen as symptomatic of what is going on — though not always so blatantly — all over the Western World.

A Leftist church movement in the hands of a number of dreamy, well-intentioned idealists is altogether too tame for the Communists. What it lacks is the element of energetic and ruthless action that brings quick results. This the Communists themselves try to supply by planting their own people in churches and other religious groups.

In this way, too, the Communists have helped to organise and energise and put teeth and claws into a world-wide Leftist interchurch movement that might otherwise have remained nothing more than a talking shop.

Nowhere has the intervention of Communists in organised religion been more frequently or more plainly exposed than in the United States.

The evidence is overwhelming.

One of the pioneers in the promotion of the new kind of Christianity was the Federal Council of Churches in the United States.

This was the body responsible for the launching in Amsterdam in 1948 of the World Council of Churches.

Since then the Federal Council of Churches has passed out of existence, to be replaced with a new organisation known as the National Council of Churches.

Why, it might be asked, did the Federal Council of Churches vanish from the scene? For one reason only: the participation of known Communists in its activities had been thoroughly exposed. In the vocabularly of the public relations practitioner its "public image" was no longer acceptable. It had become indelibly smudged with red

A new organisation was required which would start off with a shining new image. And so the National Council of Churches came into being. It was not long, however, before new smudges began to appear. A Communist eagerness to take a hand in the proceedings is something not easily hidden.

Besides, a number of the churchmen themselves, preachers of the new Social Doctrine, have made no secret of their faith in the Marxist doctrine. Like the former Dean of Canterbury they deserve some credit, at least, for being honest.

Thus we find that at the meeting at Amsterdam where the World Council of Churches came into existence, a resolution was adopted condemning capitalism as having failed to solve the problem of human needs.

This resolution was proposed by Dr. John C. Bennett, of the Union Theological Seminary, New York, whose views on Communism were further expanded in an article in "Christian Century" in 1952.

This is what he then wrote: "Communism wins power because it has much truth in its teachings, because it appeals to the loyalty and not primarily the cynical self-interests of man."

He went on: "As he (the Christian, that is) studies Communism he finds many things to approve in it. I refer to such things as the Communist criticism of many facets of capitalism and imperialism, the Communist practice in regard to racial discrimination the Communist goal of a classless society, the generous motives that inspire many people to give themselves to Communism with self-less commitments."

The Communists have always described religion as "the opium of the people". In these remarks from one of the most prominent churchnen in the World Council of Churches we see how a Marxist utopian idealism has become the opium of certain ministers of the Christian church.

They need it because they have lost hold on the central message of Christianity.

The World Council of Churches took another major step forward when at its meeting at Evanston in the United States in 1954, it passed a resolution condemning "all political, social and economic discrimination based on the grounds of race as being contrary to the Will of God". Also included in this resolution was the statement that "there can be no objection in principle to mixed marriages".

At this same Evanston meeting, the World Council of Churches rejected a proposal to write into one of its resolutions the following statement: "There is and can be no affinity between Christianity and atheistic Communism"

Does all this present a depressing picture for mankind?

I don't think so. What it all means I feel sure, is that the era of indifference in matters of religion has come to an end. People are everywhere ceasing to believe that they can get on very well without any sort of religious faith. Even those who to-day pursue a dangerous false faith subscribe to a world-wide confession that man cannot live by bread alone — not even with the addition of motorcars, washing machines, television sets and cinema shows twice a week.

More and more plainly the signs appear that the present anguish, with its confused pursuit of pleasure and false gods, is only the prelude, the necessary prelude, to a new awakening, a new religiousness in which men will once again find life exciting to contemplate — even life as it is — life unreformed.

There are signs too that it is the spirit of science, itself, with its relentless honesty, which in its final fulfilment will purge life of the very thing that undermined religious faith.

The last task of scentific scepticism is to demolish scepticism itself and so clear the way for a renewal of the kind of faith that liberates the stored energies of heart and mind.

Science, the great demolisher of religious myths, begins at last to realise that all its most precious theories, which once it took for ultimate truth, are of the same substance — myths, useful myths, but still only myths, inventions of the mind . . .

. . . And that all roads lead back in the end to mankind's point of departure and of ultimate arrival: humility and faith.

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Ivor Benson, whose talks on the subject "The Press and Public Opinion" are reproduced in this pamphlet, began his career more years ago than he cares to think about as a cadet reporter on the staff of "The Natal Mercury".

He has worked on many different newspapers in South Africa and Rhodesia, and also had a spell of three years in Fleet Street with "The Daily Express", "The Daily Telegraph" and "The Sunday Dispatch".

His former colleagues will probably remember him best as a somewhat controversial Chief Assistant Editor of "The Rand Daily Mail".

It is not only as a journalist that Ivor Benson expresses himself in these talks but as a student of the entire human situation and a relentless analyst of some of its more significant phenomena.

The effect of these talks has been to create an illuminated area of debate into which those not well armed with facts and faith venture at their peril.