The qualification for becoming a recognized expert on Communist and Soviet affairs, competent to syndicate a column, write editorials for leading newspapers or guide governmental policy, is an unbroken record of error. It is not enough for a man to be wrong nine times out of ten: wrong, say, on Yalta, the Hitler-Stalin pact, Alger Hiss, Chinese agrarianism, Mikhailovitch-Tito, Korea, Soviet trade prospects, Castro and Guinea, but right on the San Marino elections. You’ve got to be wrong every time, or you can’t make the grade.
The 100 per cent statistic here, extreme as it sounds, is literal, and there is a rational explanation for this seeming unreason. The errors in analysis, estimate, expectation and proposal all derive from a single root fallacy shared by experts and public: from the failure, unwillingness or inability to recognize that the Communist enterprise as an entirety is unalterably and continuously directed to our destruction. With this bottom truth unseen, a man can be correct on a particular item only by accident, and he will always be wrong in general conclusions and basic attitude. Admitting this truth, we can still make plenty of mistakes about how it applies to this or that, but we have at least a compass to keep us pointed in the right quarter.
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