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Communism is unregenerate; it will always present a mortal danger to mankind. It is like an infection in the world's organism: it may lie dormant, but it will inevitably attack with a crippling disease. There is no help to be found in the illusion that certain countries possess an immunity to Communism: any country that is free today can be reduced to prostration and complete submission.
Nevertheless, healers frequently turn up to pronounce the following reassuring diagnosis of the acute infection that is Communism: "This malady is not contagious; it is a hereditary Russian disorder." The cure they propose involves avoiding angering the Brezhnev regime at all costs. Instead, it must be supported and equipped. They insist that the enemy to be opposed is any manifestation of the Russian national consciousness, when, in reality, it is the only force that is realistically capable of weakening Soviet Communism from within. The case against the Russian national consciousness is systematically being argued by noted American academics and journalists, who are using irresponsible and tendentious data supplied by some recent emigres from the Soviet Union.
Such propaganda is sheer madness and serves only to disarm the West. After the forces of Russian nationalism were betrayed by the West in the Russian civil war and once again in World War II, here is an open call to repeat this betrayal yet a third time. This would have ruinous consequences for the Russian people and for the other peoples of the U.S.S.R. It would be just as ruinous for the West. Today the Communist leadership with its decrepit ideology once again dreams of saddling and bridling Russian nationalism in pursuit of its imperial goals. The West must not now equip a horseman intent on the West's destruction.
Communism is inimical and destructive of every national entity. The American antiwar movement long nurtured the hope that in North Viet Nam nationalism and Communism were in harmony, that Communism seeks the national self-determination of its beloved people. But the grim flotilla of boats escaping from Viet Nam—even if we count only those that did not sink—may have explained to some less ardent members of the movement where the national consciousness resides and always did reside. The bitter torment of millions of dying Cambodians (to which the world is already growing accustomed) demonstrates this even more vividly. Take Poland: the nation prayed for just a few days with the Pope; only the blind could still fail to distinguish the people from Communism. Consider the Hungarian freedom fighters, the East Germans who keep on dying as they try to cross the Wall, and the Chinese who plunge into shark-infested waters in the hope of reaching Hong Kong. China conceals its secrets best of all; the West hastens to believe that this, at least, its secrets best of all; the West hastens to believe that this, at least, is "good, peace-loving" Communism. Yet the same unbridgeable abyss, the same hatred separate the Chinese regime and the Chinese people.