The Bending of Human Souls

Military thinking, according to an old principle, turns on an estimate of the enemy’s capabilities rather than his intentions. Political thinking, by contrast, gauges above all another power’s motives. We twice entered a European war in order to prevent control of the Atlantic seacoast by a hostile power; we did so primarily not because Germany was stronger than Britain but because we had reason to fear her intentions. Estimating the real intentions of the Soviet leaders is today the foremost problem in our national political deliberations. Two views contend with each other for influence on governmental decisions: one sees in Soviet policy above all a government’s concern for the security and welfare of a nation and its ruling class; the other perceives in Soviet conduct the irreconcilable struggle for revolutionary world conquest. While there is no disagreement over Communist ideology as such, including its goal of universal Communist power, the cleavage of opinion turns on the question whether the makers of Soviet policy do or do not “believe their own ideology.”

Frank S. Meyer’s The Moulding of Communists, though it sheds on this question the definitive light of “inside” information, has not been written to solve a national policy problem. It is a testimony offered from personal experience, a probing search into What went and goes on in the minds of people who, like the author, spent the formative years of their lives under Communist Party discipline. It is an analytical study as well as an understanding description of the type that goes under the name of Communist man. Both its understanding and its analysis presupposes an author who, once deeply and devotedly submerged in the Communist dreamworld, has not only emerged from it but also gained firm intellectual and spiritual ground from which to look back on his former experience without shuddering vertigo. He has succeeded in re-joining himself to reality so that he is able to achieve and communicate a profound and lucid explanation of what it is that moves and governs Communists.

GN

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Gerhart Niemeyer

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Military thinking, according to an old principle, turns on an estimate of the enemy’s capabilities rather than his intentions. Political thinking, by contrast, gauges above all another power’s motives. We twice entered a European war in order to prevent control of the Atlantic seacoast by a hostile power; we did so primarily not because Germany was stronger than Britain but because we had reason to fear her intentions. Estimating the real intentions of the Soviet leaders is today the foremost problem in our national political deliberations. Two views contend with each other for influence on governmental decisions: one sees in Soviet policy above all a government’s concern for the security and welfare of a nation and its ruling class; the other perceives in Soviet conduct the irreconcilable struggle for revolutionary world conquest. While there is no disagreement over Communist ideology as such, including its goal of universal Communist power, the cleavage of opinion turns on the question whether the makers of Soviet policy do or do not “believe their own ideology.”

Frank S. Meyer’s The Moulding of Communists, though it sheds on this question the definitive light of “inside” information, has not been written to solve a national policy problem. It is a testimony offered from personal experience, a probing search into What went and goes on in the minds of people who, like the author, spent the formative years of their lives under Communist Party discipline. It is an analytical study as well as an understanding description of the type that goes under the name of Communist man. Both its understanding and its analysis presupposes an author who, once deeply and devotedly submerged in the Communist dreamworld, has not only emerged from it but also gained firm intellectual and spiritual ground from which to look back on his former experience without shuddering vertigo. He has succeeded in re-joining himself to reality so that he is able to achieve and communicate a profound and lucid explanation of what it is that moves and governs Communists.