by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
As summer unfolds, Americans divide their attention between leisurely vacations and mounting unease over the oil crisis. Meanwhile, another matter recedes from view: the Senate’s deliberations on ratifying the SALT II Treaty.
However, in my view, this treaty is among the most significant events of the postwar period.
“Post-war”? The term grows increasingly inadequate, even faintly anachronistic, and this will become clearer as the world recognizes that the decades after 1945 cannot rightly bear that name. The reason is simple: the Second World War did not end. It merely entered a new phase. In 1945, the Axis powers were removed from the battlefield, but the conflict persisted, now transposed into a struggle among the victorious Allies themselves. As it continued, its character shifted. Until Hiroshima, it had been a predominantly bloody war, punctuated on both sides by major propaganda offensives. After 1945, it became above all a war of public relations, intermittently marked by tragic military eruptions in one region or another. At the intersection of propaganda and armed action, terrorism emerged — at times as spectacle, at times as sheer murder. In this hybrid form, the conflict has continued to the present day.
Throughout this mainly propaganda war – the revolutionary psychological warfare – the Soviets managed to expand their poorly concealed territorial conquests to unimaginable proportions. They gradually succeeded, at least to a large extent, in isolating and diminishing anticommunist currents in various countries and in silencing their voices. A public opinion that was neither procommunist nor anticommunist was born as a spurious heir to anticommunism and spread throughout the West. In more general terms, this public opinion is neither pro nor anti anything.
Seeking popularity, Western governments adopted a posture neither pro nor anti any of the contenders. In the absence of a firm stance, Russia was able to act with impunity, engineering the subsequent collapses in the Free World that we all remember.
The SALT II Agreement stands as the most tragic and emblematic of all collapses — the synthesis and, in a sense, the apogee of them all (and in the vocabulary of decline, “apogee” means nothing less than total ruin). It was signed — horresco referens — in the charming and noble Austrian capital where the glory of the Holy Roman Empire once shone; where Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss fought with intelligence and died with dignity; and where Chancellor Kurt Alois Josef Johann Edler von Schuschnigg finally succumbed, honest and unafraid.
What, then, is still lacking once Russia, on the one hand, becomes virtually stronger than the United States in the military sphere and, on the other hand, wins the revolutionary psychological war by “doping” world opinion into an apathy that calmly accepts the prospective triumph of its adversary? As the supreme master of propaganda that anesthetizes the mind and the holder of almost unchallenged military primacy, what real barrier still separates Russia from universal domination?
Plainly stated, this is the question.
Humanly speaking, the fate of the world turns on a single question: can American anticommunists prevent the Senate from ratifying Munich II, the agreement Jimmy Carter has signed in the manner of a latter-day Chamberlain? If they succeed, the West may yet regain its course. If they fail…
However, in this regard, hopes are higher than the Brazilian public can gauge from current news. American anticommunists have launched a brilliant campaign against Munich II, and everything suggests they are using the summer break to strengthen and coordinate their efforts further.
I intend to publish a series of news items on this subject in my next article. As a preview, here are a few:
- At a press conference, Senator Gordon Humphrey and Representative Robert Bauman announced the launch of a national campaign against the SALT II Agreement. The two lead the broad coalition of conservative organizations and political action groups, the Coalition for Peace Through Strength, which includes roughly 200 members of Congress from both parties. The campaign opened with personal letters sent to every senator, signed by the 350 organizations that make up the coalition, declaring that their ten million members would work to defeat, in the next elections, any senator who voted in favor of SALT II.
Writer Howard Phillips, present at the press conference, explained that the campaign would include nationwide lectures by senior reserve officers; petitions; letters from voters to their senators; and a broad public awareness effort highlighting the agreement’s dangers. The coalition also began mailing approximately twenty million letters to voters nationwide, urging them to write to their state senators and demand a vote against the treaty (cf. The Review of the News, Belmont, Massachusetts, June 27, 1979).
- In a speech before the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Senator Henry Jackson said that SALT II was a capitulation to the Soviet Union comparable to Britain’s concessions to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. “To accept a treaty that favors the Russians as this one does, and to argue that the alternative would be worse, is capitulation in its purest form,” he declared (cf. The Review of the News, Belmont, Massachusetts, June 27, 1979).
- The Coalition for Peace Through Strength held a press conference in Washington featuring several retired generals and admirals opposed to SALT II. At the event, the coalition released a 78-page study analyzing the treaty and arguing that it was “a symbol of the loss of our determination to defend ourselves and the free world from Soviet expansion.” The study claimed the agreement would grant the Soviet Union a 2-to-1 advantage in strategic offensive weapons, a 47-to-1 advantage in strategic defensive systems, and a 6-to-1 advantage in missile megatonnage.
Present at the launch were prominent military and defense figures, including General Lyman Lemnitzer and Admiral Thomas Moorer, both former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; J. William Middendorf, former Secretary of the Navy; Thomas Reed, former Secretary of the Air Force; General Richard Stilwell, former commander-in-chief of UN forces in Korea; General John Singlaub, former commander of UN forces in Korea; General George Keegan, former chief of Air Force Intelligence; and General Daniel Graham, former director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (cf. Insider, Report of the Coalition for Peace Through Strength, no. 4, May 1979).