It cannot be denied that all parties try to win over "great friends," but Communists have enormously extended this method of scattering by echoes on preadjusted reflectors, making it a new phenomenonnew not only in its size, but also in its secret character. There is no democratic party which, to attract prominent sympathizers, uses men who deny that they like that party. The CP alone works behind a mask. There is plentiful evidence from disillusioned Communists of how the CP, at the time of their early enthusiasm, asked them not to take out a membership card in order to serve Soviet propaganda the better by apparent independence. In view of the infinitely varied range of types and roles used by Communist propaganda, that counterfeit universe, it is difficult to find a single name to cover them all. For some the labels of "cryptoCommunist" or "fellow traveler" are too mild, for others too strong. In this paper the more neutral term "auxiliaries" 5 will be used, while specifying that it does not a priori involve any pejorative context at least on the moral plane-since some auxiliaries only deceive because they are themselves deceived. HOW SOVIET AUXILIARIES CAN BE RECOGNIZED The assertion that Soviet propaganda uses auxiliaries as various as they are concealed makes it essential to be able to recognize them despite their concealment and their multiformity. Two traits constitute their distinctive mark: on the one hand, the auxiliary always supports all the positions supported by the Soviets in international affairs and changes them the very moment the Soviets do; on the other hand, toward the Soviet and Western regimes he adopts an attitude which systematically tends to blacken the latter and whitewash the former. Here is a catalog of the auxiliary's positions in international politics, gathered at random and with no claim to exhaustiveness: Against building Europe and especially a European Army. Against NATO and SEATO. For the right of veto at the UN. For abandonment of Berlin and disengagement in Germany. Against the Federal Germany of Bonn and the "revenge monger" Adenauer. For recognition of the Hankow and Peiping governments. For cessation of nuclear tests and disarmament without further control arrangements. Against installing missile-launching platforms directed toward the U.S.S.R. in Western Europe, but not against launching platforms directed toward Europe in the U.S.S.R. Against the "feudal and corrupt dictators" Chiang Kai-shek, Ngo Din Diem and Syngman Rhee, but for the anti-American dictators of Latin America, Peron and Vargas. For surrendering Quemoy and Matsu to Peiping. Against the Franco-British action at Suez, but for the anti-Franco-British action at Baghdad. Against Israel and for Arab nationalism, against France and for the FLN, against Britain and for the Mau-Mau, but in Moslem Kashmir for India against Pakistan. For a summit conference at any price. For "cultural exchanges" but without demanding that book censorship and radio jamming stop in the U.S.S.R. For total independence of the peoples of Asia and Africa from the West, but for total dependence of Eastern European satellites on the U.S.S.R. The term is used hereafter to designate any person or group which follows the Communist line. Against free elections under international control in Germany, but for "elections" in Vietnam under the established governments, one of which is Communist. Against "Dollar imperialism" all over the world, but for "ruble aid" to underdeveloped countries. Against American bases in Europe and Asia, but for freedom of Soviet bases (Communist Parties) in every country. It is quite clear that an independent mind can very well come (rightly or wrongly) to the same conclusions as the Soviets on one or another of these points, but it is impossible to be in systematic and synchronized agreement with all the positions of the Kremlin. It is by this kind of agreement that the auxiliary can be recognized. INFILTRATION This generic term "infiltration" can cover the whole system of secret channels that makes it possible to inject views favorable to the Soviets into all the cells of the free world. This system has links with Communist spy networks which transmit information. However, we need not discuss these networks here, and we shall confine our remarks to political infiltration, accomplished with a view to spreading pro- or proto-Soviet views. The mechanism is always the same. One or more auxiliaries are put in the organization being infiltrated or [members are] won over. They remain in steady contact with outside auxiliaries, and the latter in turn are superintended by genuine crypto-Communist agents. Contact between these various auxiliaries is kept up in clubs, salons, cafes, church associations for young people, as the case may be. Crypto-Communist propaganda passing through these channels is adapted to suit them. There is hardly any social, political or religious doctrine into which elements favorable to the Kremlin's foreign policy cannot be slipped with the appropriate dialectical twist, the more so as there is no need to respect Communist ideology which has nothing to do with the undertaking. These methods will be dealt with more specifically in the chapters on psychological and logomachic means of propaganda. The principal infiltrated organs must now be reviewed. (a) The press There are in the world few organs of the press, even when "bourgeois," in which the Soviet apparatus has no intelligence. The main task of auxiliaries in the press is to manipulate the editor, or if that is not feasible, the reporters, without the editor's knowledge. General notions like "this paper is conservative" or "Catholic" are not at all sufficient any longer to recognize the policy it follows toward Moscow. Sometimes the managers themselves are unaware that their newspaper is "permeated." The most thoroughly infiltrated areas are international pages and book and film reviews. The propaganda role of reviewers is important because their opinion encourages many readers to read works supporting the Soviet line and ignore unfavorable ones. Another method used by the Soviets to manipulate the press in free countries is "letter brigades." Auxiliaries claiming to be "devoted readers" write dozens of outraged letters when the paper has printed something too anti-Communist and letters of approval when it has recommended some concession to Moscow. As nothing of the kind is organized the other way round, this fabricated correspondence exerts a far from negligible influence on the policy of newspapers that honestly believe they "must keep in tune with their readers." (b) News agencies Agencies form the subject of quite special efforts at infiltration. Their foreign correspondents represent an easier target for this purpose because they are cut off from their national environment and quite naturally seek contacts with diplomats, a third of whom belong to Communist countries and another third to "neutralist" ones, where Soviet propaganda and fallacies work havoc. It must also be confessed that the kind of life that can compensate for the castoff existence of some of these correspondents leaves them open to temptation. (c) Universities, primary and secondary schools Here, again, the proportion of auxiliaries of Moscow is considerably higher than that of Communists in a given country. Owing to the crucial importance of this field in shaping minds, it is worked on by all the instruments of Soviet propaganda from openly Communist to underground cells, through every gradation of embellishers, recruiters, lullaby-singers, and satellite organizations. In France, 20,000 school teachers hold a Communist Party card, more than 25 percent teach their classes following Communist directives they receive through innumerable channels: specialized magazines (L'Ecole et la Nation), bulletins, circulars, visits by party leaders. In Italy, the proportion is 40 percent. Sometimes these teachers go so far as to have their pupils sign crypto-Communist texts, such as the "Stockholm Appeal." When the French Government recalled teachers after an incident in Morocco, the French Communist Party ordered those under its control to stay at their posts and filled the vacancies that had been created with teachers loyal to it. In India, teachers who make propaganda for Moscow use textbooks specially printed by the Indian Communist Party. In England, as in most European countries, the university is the chief refuge of "fellow travelers." European universities are so contaminated that the Communist and para-Communist movements of Asia and Africa can be said to have been nurtured in them. (d) Churches Contrary to what might be expected, churches are also highly infiltrated. In France nearly 50 percent of the Catholic pressincluding Témoignage chrétian,' the weekly with the largest circulation have become relays of proto-Soviet views. It opposes the MRP, the political party with Catholic leanings, and in particular its policy of a European union. In the United States, the first great manifesto for recognition of the Communist Peiping government originated with a religious association, which includes 8,000 ministers and 30 million churchgoers and shelters numerous auxiliaries who have organized many a trip to Moscow and Peiping for their flocks. In 1955, a former member of the French Communist Party, Albert Vassart, revealed that in 1936 Moscow had sent out an order to have sure and carefully selected members of the Communist Youth enter seminaries and become priests. Others infiltrated the religious communities, particularly the Dominicans. See pts. 1-13 of Internal Security Subcommittee's hearings on Subversive Influence in the Educational Process. 1 Christian witness. In the Buriat-Mongolian Republic the Soviets have set up a seminary to train Buddhist lamas who spread throughout Asia and particularly in Tibet, where, being of the same race as the Tibetans, they are more welcome than lamas trained in Peiping. In Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma many Communists put on the yellow robe and became bonzes in order to indoctrinate the thousands of young people who frequent the bonze monasteries. Infiltration of all churches is one of the major tasks of the Soviet propaganda apparatus. (e) Other organs Infiltration is also considerable in publishing houses, particularly among readers of manuscripts; radio and television, a forum often decried as being subject to government censorship, but which is frequently much more pervaded by crypto-Communist propaganda; the cinema and the theater, which contribute to a very great extent in shaping sensibilities and are the subject of exceptional efforts at infiltration by the Kremlin; and finally, of course, ministries, especially ministries of foreign affairs, where certain internal reports inspired by proto-Soviet views have done great harm to the free world. Trade unions and other parties Under this heading come organizations that are not infiltrated but totally colonized and which only duplicate Communist parties. As such, they will be handled in the following paragraph dealing with parallel organizations. Here we shall discuss only free parties and unions, in which Moscow plants numerous secret auxiliaries. The task of these undercover propagandists is to give the party or union policy a slant favorable to Moscow and to create internal opposition that will try to take over leadership or break it up. Many of these auxiliaries came out into the open when their countries fell into the Soviet orbit: the names of Fierlinger, Cyrankiewicz, Marosan have become sadly symbolic in this connection. It is unfortunately beyond doubt that in our most democratic parties and unions a number of Fierlingers continue to work alongside honest activists. This is the infiltration area aimed at by Bolshevism for the longest time, and concerning which Lenin, in the "Childhood Disease of Communism, wrote the following words, which can stand as an epigraph to all Soviet infiltration, and if the free world does not take heed, as an epitaph on its own tomb: "We must learn how to make use of all stratagems, of ruse, adopt illegal methods, keep silent at times, conceal the truth, with the sole aim of getting into the unions, staying there, and accomplishing the task of communism there in spite of everything" (p. 43). PARALLEL ORGANIZATIONS In the case of infiltration, auxiliaries act inside a group which as a whole is not under Communist control. In the case of parallel organizations, on the other hand, the whole group falls into the Communist wake, but without its being known. This practice is exclusive to Communist propaganda. In all spheres of life, whether political, cultural like the cinema, technical like biology, or neutral like sport or eugenics, organizations See testimony of Angus Cameron and Albert E. Kahn before Internal Security Subcommittee, pts. 6, 8, and 12, Strategy and Tactics of World Communism, and pt. 2, Communist Activity in Mass Commu nications. are set up or colonized so as to make citizens work for the Communist Party who would never have been its followers if openly canvassed by it. Everything is to be found in this gigantic counterfeit, from mass organizations whose domination by the Communist Party is hardly covered up, such as (to take only French examples) the CGT, the Fighters for Peace, People's Assistance, the Union of Frenchwomen, France-U.S.S.R., to small groups like the Unitarian Socialist Party, the Union for the Oder-Neisse Border, by way of organizations of long standing which few people suspect of being under Communist control, like the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, the Center of French Thought, the French University Union, the Association for Municipal Studies and Information, the Sport and Gymnic Federation of Labor, the Committee for the Development of International Trade, the Association of Scientific Workers, the National Union of Intellectuals, the French Democratic Youth Committee, the Friends of Nature, the National Union of Old Workers, the Federation of Rentpayers, the People's Musical Federation, etc.9 In France alone 140 such crypto-Communist organizations have been counted, each one with its offices, its staff, its publications. All countries, including the ones where Communist parties are insignificant, have comparable numbers of parallel organizations. The managing organs of these satellite organizations contain, roughly speaking, a quarter of avowed Communists, a quarter of "fellow travelers", whose allegiance is camouflaged, a quarter recruited in that well-known social category of "political half-virgins," more or less innocent but naive people whose complaisance is remunerated with appearances on platforms and luster, and a quarter of constitutionally incurable virgins, whom no experience of political fraud will ever be able to deflower. Thanks to this mixture, these committees are, on the outside, as in the song: "independent although with a few Communists-why not, since we are free," and on the inside as the composer wants them: under the strict control of Moscow. FACTIONAL WORK In these crypto-Communist organizations propaganda is made, and members (many of whom do not realize that they are made to serve the Soviets) are manipulated by means of factional work, a wellknown and formidable technique which has been specially worked out by the Soviets. Such members-open card-holding Communists and strictly obedient auxiliaries-form factions that meet separately, in secret, before the general assemblies, to assign each person his role. They settle how long they will speak, decide what will be said or not said, prepare the texts which are to be approved or rejected, polish the instructions, cook up the advice to whisper in ears, work up the agreements which will have to look spontaneous, weave a few slanders to cast at the psychological moment at someone they fear may prove unmanageable. If the person suspected of disagreement happens to be too highly esteemed to be affected by slander he will be sent off on the day of the vote on an opportune mission. They will call in easily influenced absentees (housewives, unemployed persons for whom they will get work); a few months before a vote on a burning question they ⚫ American examples are listed in the appendix to this document, printed at p. 33. |